Unknown Speaker 0:00
Welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast, the weekly podcast where dr. D gives you the tools you need to boost your health and live your healthiest life.
Unknown Speaker 0:13
Welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. Well, you probably know that I think pomegranates are one of my favorite snacks. Not only are they delicious, but they’re capable of supporting the body’s natural production of something called your life and a potent molecule that can support mitochondrial function, healthy aging, and a massive energy boost. But before you go scarfing, pomegranates or drinking pomegranate juice, there’s something you should know. Most people don’t have the right gut bacteria to benefit from this potent molecule. However, my guest today says there is a workaround, and that anyone can benefit from this molecule with the right knowledge. I’m joined by Dr. Armstrong Singh, the Chief Medical Officer of timeline nutrition, a biotech company focused on discovering and developing next generation natural compounds that target improvement in mitochondrial health. After a quick break, Dr. Singh and I will share your life and A’s connection between inflammation, aging and your mitochondria, and reveal why it’s one of the most exciting compounds in the health industry. And I mean that sincerely will also share with you how you can take advantage of this potent compound to upgrade your mitochondria and experience life changing health benefits. Doctor saying welcome to the program.
Unknown Speaker 1:52
Thank you for having me, Dr. Gundry. pleasures mine.
Unknown Speaker 1:55
So I’m quickly explain the importance to our listener of the mitochondria and its function. Sure.
Unknown Speaker 2:05
So mitochondria are you know, everybody’s heard that mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell. And that’s pretty much where all the knowledge stops. But mitochondria are sort of, you know, think of yourself, think of them as cell organelles, that power everything you do from moving to thinking to sort of recovering from exercise. So they produce what is called as ATP, which is sort of the currency, the energy currency in our bodies. And think of mitochondria as as the battery inside a Tesla car, for example, that you know, has a certain capacity to keep, you know, driving the car, but after a while, you need to sort of give it more sort of feedback, and you need to nurture it. And so that’s how these mitochondrial health is so key and mitochondrial function is so, so important to especially metabolic organs such as muscle, skeletal muscle, cardiac muscle and brain.
Unknown Speaker 2:58
Yeah, I am, as I have written about in most of my books, particularly the last two are, our mitochondria in general are on death’s door, they have taken a beating that is actually unimaginable from, from our Western diet, from our western lifestyle, from, from our environment, environmental toxins, you name it, we have not been good caretakers of our mitochondria,
Unknown Speaker 3:31
not at all and you absolutely spot on right there to actually two great ways to boost your mitochondrial health. And that’s regular exercise and calorie restriction. But as you mentioned, we both we have not been kind to our my own mitochondria, by not paying attention to what we eat and how we move around.
Unknown Speaker 3:51
Now something is probably not on everybody’s radar, even though I think most people remember high school biology and seeing this mitochondria in a cell and it’s the powerhouse of the cell. But there’s there’s an important relationship between our immune system and mitochondria. Can you can you elaborate on that? Yes, short,
Unknown Speaker 4:12
there’s a big number of years back this, the hallmarks of aging, but describe and these hallmarks of aging, really all are deeply connected biological pathways. So there’s, you know, sort of the, the DNA repair mechanisms slow down, you have the epigenetic alterations. And now, of course, the mitochondria are the central pillar to all these hallmarks and connect them and now you have this chronic inflammation. So as we age, or as we, you know, we have a more sedentary lifestyle, things like biomarkers like C reactive protein, which is a marker of inflammation go go up. And what we are seeing actually in a number of trials and older adults is that with declining mitochondrial health, there is this sort of both gut dysbiosis and have chronic inflammation and so the immune system and the immune cells have mitochondria that basically power off and shut off as we age. And that’s the link between immune cells and mitochondrial health.
Unknown Speaker 5:11
And I think one of the things that people, particularly during COVID is immune function might be very useful. Plus, particularly in terms of cancer, we know that one of the theories, which is widely accepted that the reason cancer become so prevalent, the older we get, is because our immune guardians against cancer cells, you’re right, or underpowered or not functioning the way they should be.
Unknown Speaker 5:44
Sure. And, you know, we recently recently published a fantastic paper, and it’s been one of the highest ranking immune journals called immunity. And we showed actually in this that in certain cancer models, by improving mitochondrial health via force the compound we’ll talk about your life today, you could actually lower the incidence in these models of cancer recurrence, and more importantly, what the thing we are seeing is, even once you treat the cancer, so once you do that chemo radio, sort of new adjuvant therapy, the immune system is basically zero, you know, in the recovery phase. And so how fast it comes back to sort of receive the immune system is the key determinant is mitochondrial health.
Unknown Speaker 6:29
Yeah, that, you know, it’s interesting as a as a, as a transplant surgeon. One of the things we learned early on was that the the older our patient was who he did a transplant in, the much less immunosuppression we had to use. And in a way, it was great, you know, you’re, you know, you’re 75 years old, this is going to be great, because we don’t have to give you a lot of immunosuppression because you’re already immunosuppressed. And in a way, that’s actually very scary. So this function of mitochondria in our immune system clearly needs to be given some attention. All right, so speaking of aging, what new pillars of aging have we learned about in the last couple of years?
Unknown Speaker 7:20
Well, I think if you look at the hallmarks of aging, there’s these nine hallmarks of aging that, you know, kind of link all the organelles of cell biology to the epigenetic alterations, as I was mentioning, in the last, let’s say, decade or so, a lot of emphasis has come on this gut microbiome dysbiosis, right with aging, the gut microbiome starts to alter and that leads to declining production of gut metabolites such as you know, post biotics etc. And, and, and what happens is then, because of this chronic inflammation, so the immune system we take the upon that and the mitochondrial health and the declining my toffee G now this is a term your listeners may or may not have heard, one of the new hallmarks of aging is declining. My toffee G. What that means is basically is that the mitochondria are working over time as we age to deliver us the energy, but then a lot of them get corrupted and they get faulty and the system that basically recycles this trash bin of poor mitochondria also slows down. And so how you can wrap up and get all these bad, faulty mitochondria packaged into garbage bin, then recycled so they can become healthy mitochondria is one of the new key pillars that is getting a lot of interest and excitement.
Unknown Speaker 8:41
All right. So as I mentioned before, in the introduction, we’ve known that pomegranates are pretty cool, and that pomegranates have some very interesting polythene hauls among you gallic acid. But it was it was really work on certain gut bacteria can transform these poly phenols into your length and a tell me all about that compound. Why is this shirt? Why is this such a miracle? sure what to do?
Unknown Speaker 9:20
Yeah, so Well, we’ve spent 15 years studying the pomegranate so we started with the whole fruit, you know, because much you know, I was trained in medical school where nutrition was not well taught but yet we all learned that okay, nutrition needs to you need to focus on certain superfoods. And so we started studying the pomegranate because there were all these in the literature, some exciting studies on cognitive function, vascular health, etc. And when we looked at we brought the biotech approach to basically deconstructing the pomegranate and so we looked around and there were all these great compounds as you were talking about there were these poly phenols such as peanut glass agents and the illogic acid. But what we realized One day, as we were sort of screening all these hundreds of compounds inside the pomegranate, we gave them to a famous professor just in the university campus, we are in here in this vicinity of technology. And he was running these sort of assays trying to see if certain worms and rodents would basically run faster and live longer. And one compound really attracted our attention and which is a molecule called Yerlan tunay, which is basically the the results of gut microbiome digesting these poly phenols and releasing this post biotic which is the Euro tunay. And so this professor, Professor objects came running to our, to our lab and he said, What is this compound because it’s boosting lifespan and worms by 50%. The older animals are running faster by 60%. And so that’s really the whole journey of the last 10 years for us, you know, we got more more interested into your lab today. And we started studying in different human populations, its producer status. So in terms of what is the percentage of population and people actually making the molecule we learned in the French, the French were doing better 30 to 40%. And I’m guessing because French are probably eating a lot of fermented food, etc. Then we looked in the American population and the Canadian population, it was much less or 10 to 15 20%, probably, again, a mix of diet and sort of physical activity contributing to it. And that’s led to, you know, kind of us synthesizing the molecule and starting to directly supplement in randomised trials in humans in older adults and overweight adults. And really seeing these remarkable effects on muscle health translate into humans with improved endurance and improved strength.
Unknown Speaker 11:41
So how exactly does it work? I mean, what, it’s great that I’m gonna have stronger muscles and I might live longer. What what is it doing at the at the mitochondrial level?
Unknown Speaker 11:53
Yeah, sure. Yeah. So one of the again, the first studies we did was we were looking at older adults. And we took about 7075 year olds who had been running half marathons and training for half marathons all their adult life, for example, and we took little chunks of their muscles. So this procedure called is a muscle biopsy, where you can take small chunk and look into how the mitochondria are behaving in the muscle tissue. And then we went in, we took h max 7075 year olds, who were really what we call us frail, and they were Sudan tree. So they didn’t have good functionality. They didn’t have very good levels of physical activity, and they have lower muscle strength, for sure. And we looked in the same way into their skeletal muscle tissue, we saw that both my toffee, G and mitochondrial health was was super compromised in the frail people. And so we took the same people, the Sudan tree, frail people, and we started supplementing them with your luck today, as a first randomized trial. And we saw, when we took four weeks after, again, these muscle biopsies, we saw a big signature of improved mitochondrial health that was mimicking basically, months and years of exercise. So basically, it’s hitting the same pathways of improved mitochondrial health and, and enhanced my toffee G that for example, a six month aerobic exercise regimen would give you so this basically, by logically hitting the same pathways.
Unknown Speaker 13:20
Oh my gosh, you mean exercise in a jar?
Unknown Speaker 13:23
I don’t think I can put that claim. But scientifically and biologically speaking, yes, the pathways are pretty much similar to trials done in humans with aerobic and resistance exercise and with calorie restriction. So they they all sort of point towards improved like toffee G and improve mitochondrial health.
Unknown Speaker 13:48
And is that the only human trial that’s been done? Or are there are multiple,
Unknown Speaker 13:55
multiple so this is what I described to you as the first one where we only supplemented for a short period of four weeks just to see the biological effects. And then from there, we have done multiple randomized trials that are now published in journals like Jama and Sal reports, really the top of the top journals. In these randomized trials, we supplemented all the way for four months of much longer to see improvements in muscle function. And so what we see in older adults, and by the way, the oldest participants we’ve had is an 89 year old, very spiky, robust lady who, you know, it was a blinded trial, but she was convinced she was taking the active and she kept coming to me. So like, you have to tell me if I’m right, if I took the right product and not there was not a placebo. And when we unblinded she wasn’t the active so she actually felt more energy she felt resistance to fatigue. So what we are seeing actually an older adults is improved endurance and more energy. And these people can do exercise longer in little younger populations like the 50 and the mid 50 year olds who are also incidental We, we have done another trial where we see improvements and things like vo two Max, this is a marker of kind of defect, a marker of improved mitochondrial health. We also see improvement in a test that a lot of clinician use called a six minute walk test, which is basically measures how much of a distance you can walk in six minutes. So we see about a 10% increase there. And then of course, the muscle strength is a standout improvement we see in these trials.
Unknown Speaker 15:26
So and you mentioned this, the cancer trial. And, again, that you you find is because of the improved mitochondrial function in the immune cells. Yeah, so
Unknown Speaker 15:42
this is a this is a pre clinical trial that was published, we are now translating the these findings into two trials. So the effect is primarily even in the immune cells is because of improved my toffee, G now what happens in the immune system, there’s a very specialized cell called a memory T cell. And this is a cell that basically has an imprint or sort of memory of how cancer cells look like or how viruses look like, et cetera. So what we see basically is that my toffee G is compromised in cancer patients and cancer models in this particular memory T cell. And by supplementing with post the post biotic era today, we are activated reactivating my toffee G in this memory T cell and that contributes to better immune function that contributes to clearer and better sort of recovery from from the cancer. And so that comes from the immune system. I want
Unknown Speaker 16:39
to backtrack for a second, because you’re using the term post biotic Yes, something that I’ve written about in my last two books extensively. But most people know probiotics, friendly bacteria, they know hopefully prebiotics, what friendly bacteria like to eat. But this concept of post biotics is for most people, they either haven’t heard of it or what the heck is that? So you go in to find it all add if if I want to more housing no
Unknown Speaker 17:13
I read your your your writing good books, and you sort of speeches on the three P’s, the prebiotics, probiotics and the post biotic. So the way I see them as that prebiotic is basically food for for these healthy gut bacteria that coexist, you know, with us in our, in their millions of them and billions probably. And, and that’s sort of, you know, by using probiotics, you’re trying to modulate this gut ecosystem that exists. So it’s all good for them and all good for for their ecosystem. But then as a sort of benefit to the host, which is us as humans, they take our food and nutrients from our food, and they process them to release what are called as post biotics that are beneficial to us as humans. So that’s a field that is coming up post biotics there are a lot of them like short chain fatty acids, typically butyrate and acetate and and then they are from poly phenols derived metabolites such as your name, which is the first biotic, but I let you add to it.
Unknown Speaker 18:16
No, I think my book I’m writing right now just does an incredibly deep dive into this incredibly complex ecosystem that, you know, we’re just now beginning to understand because it’s, you know, the amount. If you actually look at, you know, PubMed searches about the gut microbiome in like 2006 There’s, there’s maybe, you know, 1000 searches, and now, you know, there’s 30,000 and it goes on and on. So what I think is fascinating is that these are communication systems that now we now know exists between the gut microbiome and their host us. And we are actually dependent on these messages, these post biotic signaling molecules. And what’s I think exciting, particularly for Euro athenee is Yeah, pomegranates got lots of really cool barley phenols. And we, you know, there’s, there’s history of how important pomegranates are in various, you know, brain health, heart health. But what you mentioned before is particularly here in the West America, in Canada, we’re screwed because we don’t have the pro biotics that are able to take the prebiotics in pomegranates, and make the active post biotic compound that’s going to do all this good stuff. Yeah, yeah. And we’re not You’re right. We’re not the French Uh, well, I you know, Switzer actually very close
Unknown Speaker 20:04
story I tell him, it’s my personal experience. I can personally, you know, I grew up in India, where there’s rampant use of antibiotics. So for everything that I was probably a kid with a little fluid here and there, everything was antibiotics, right? So my microbiome just never recovered, just never recovered. And I can drink six glasses, and I’ve done this challenge with myself. I’ve had six glasses of pure pomegranate juice. And then I’ve led myself at different times to see if my body would make your Latinate Guess how much it makes zero? Because, well, maybe there is hope. If I eat a lot of fiber, maybe I figure out and we have spent years trying to figure out what’s the right mix of probiotics that will basically do the conversion? And the answer is it’s very complex, the ecosystem is so complex, we have gone in and taken people, these lucky 1020 30% People who are producers, we have really taken the their stool samples, and we have really done a high throughput, gut microbiome sequencing. We don’t know, what we do see is that they have a very rich and diverse microbiome, which is rich and things like necromancy which now is also you heard so much. But you know, to get there, you need to somehow, yeah, you need to give your system a eat better exercise. And then probably third pillars would be talking is supplementation for cellular health and post biotics.
Unknown Speaker 21:36
All right. So that’s why timeline and might appear exists. The work around you guys have synthesized? Yeah. So what is Mitro? Pure? How does it work?
Unknown Speaker 21:50
So myopia is the trade name for our proprietary erlotinib, which we synthesize with a patent protected methodology. And it’s 99.9% identical to the natural molecules. So the workaround is essentially, an and we have actually even in the works of developing a small health kit, where people can actually measure themselves in in, in a lab or in a clinic, if their body is actually you know, your you can, so what we do is we send you the pomegranate juice, you take the challenge, just take a few drops of blood from your fingertip, put it on a card, and we can tell you if your body is already conducive to making your lift today or not. And then you take the the direct supplementation, so you take a dose of 500 milligrams of myopia, and then you see the change in bioavailability. And I can tell you that the average is about six fold higher in even people who can make it so for people who don’t make anything well, we go from zero to 400 levels of your life today pretty fast, and about six hours of peep. So that’s, you know, what we have done, we’ve basically short circuited the whole natural process of getting it from a diet or relying on the microbiome to to produce it.
Unknown Speaker 23:08
So everybody’s gonna want to know, is it a pill? Is it a liquid? Is it a powder? How can I take it?
Unknown Speaker 23:17
Yeah, so we started out all our randomized trials at the start where with the pills, so you know, very calibrated dose of 250 milligram and each pill. So the doses we are seeing that have the best effect in clinical studies are 500 milligram and then the gram gives even a much better response and a much quicker response. But most people do take 500 milligrams, it’s basically two pills. And since then, we have also gone in and because good science and good nutrition should come with good taste as well. So we have developed a lot of food products. So there’s a you know, these Berry and ginger flavored powders now that come that you can mix in your smoothies and your high protein shakes. And there’s even a product with 20 grams of whey protein Sep sort of hitting on muscle mass and muscle energy at the same time. So this is the whole breadth of our product portfolio, that whatever lens with your lifestyle,
Unknown Speaker 24:13
and how long as might appear been been available.
Unknown Speaker 24:18
Yeah, so after a good 13 years of research, we launched it in 2020 in the you know, in launching a new product in the middle of COVID crisis is not always easy. And so we only started the ramping up sales in 21 and 22 and started selling it we got what is called as a grass designation from FDA. So we showed all the high level of safety data from human studies and and from different safety. Sort of Dozier the FDA requests for what is called as a generally regarded as safe designation. So we got that in 2018, but only now since the last couple of years. Have you started selling it in the US and now we have 1000s of customers who are taking it and swear by it, you know?
Unknown Speaker 25:06
Yeah, the Now you mentioned early that obviously my toffee G is a good thing. Read basically recycling our damaged mitochondria. And I’ve written about kind of the last thing you really want to do is have these mitochondria simplistically explode and throw their pieces out into the cytosol. Because the membrane of mitochondria, mitochondria are actually in golf, bacteria, ancient. And our immune system actually views mitochondria, at least the wall mitochondria as an evil bacteria, and it can actually produce inflammation as these mitochondria die inappropriately. So you’re right, recycling these guys is a is, is a really beneficial in lots of ways. Yeah. You mentioned that fasting does this and as you know, I’m a big fan of time restricted eating about intermittent fasting. Is it the same mechanism that might appear hits?
Unknown Speaker 26:24
Yeah, so fasting induces autophagy at the high level. So autophagy is basically recycling of the whole cellular machinery, right, and a focus of Tophet G is what is called the calling, it’s just focused in the mitochondria recycling that’s what we call is my toffee G so both yarlington A and fasting are known to use a toffee G. Now what we see very specificly when you’re living in a in different trials and different models is this unique activate ability to activate my toffee G specificly. Right. So we have compared the different markers and different experimental systems comparing caloric restriction to supplementation with your lemonade, and it’s pretty much similar in terms of a toffee geven. So it’s both a combination with toffee G and Mike Duffy.
Unknown Speaker 27:14
And getting back to the kind of the earlier studies, particularly in Worms, worms are actually a really good model for lifespan. And actually, believe it or not gut health. And so worms with this compound, were literally living 50% longer. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 27:36
one of the reasons why a lot of aging research is done in Worms is they live about 20 to 25 days, Max tops. And so one of the most potent compounds that are known to extend lifespan, do about 20 25% things like resveratrol, and NAD boosters. One of the reasons we got so excited was Euro today, in these initial experiments that we published in Nature Medicine was doing it by like 45%. And that’s kind of Yeah, unheard off. And that’s what got us excited.
Unknown Speaker 28:09
And obviously, you can’t make any qualifications that my taking this product now for a year and a half has already extended my lifespan by 20 years.
Unknown Speaker 28:24
That’s not where we are about I think the goal is healthspan right, we hear exactly today, the whole longevity space has been split into two one says, Oh, we want to live 220 130 years, which is really increasing lifespan. And I think you can achieve that realistically, if you focus on healthspan. extension. So
Unknown Speaker 28:43
all right, but get back to your old athenee Is there a time to take it? If I’m a 20 year old athlete, is that going to improve my performance? Or I’m a 50 year old and noticing that I’m losing muscle mass every year no matter what I do. When should I start this stuff?
Unknown Speaker 29:08
Yeah, so Well, most of our early studies focus on older adults and overweight middle aged adults because that’s where we knew the mitochondria were impaired and mitochondria would be compromised anything we could see it we could detect signals to show the efficacy. But when we launched it to our surprise we thought this would be mostly it’d be is advanced nutritional product that a lot of older adults would be taking taking. But to our surprise now a lot of our consumers are are very active they are these weekend warriors sort of profile that wants to focus on health wants to preventively address their health issues in their 40s and early 50s. Rather than wait for you know the symptoms to happen like more medicine would wait for frailty and sarcopenia to manifest before starting to think about it. And a lot of athletes a lot of have different cycling teams are are on it. And a lot of top NBA players are taking it. And that actually made us think why are these players so much believe in the in New Orleans Navy and this sort of the science is still emerging on that aspect. And so we actually, that motivated us to launch a big study in Australia with one of the most revered sports nutrition researchers, lady called Professor Louise Burke, and the Australian Catholic University. And she has been studying elite athletes for a good part of three decades. And she said, well, a lot, a lot of times overtraining and perish mitochondria. And that’s what I think where your compound is actually acting is that some of these players are playing Five NBA games, or riding a bike for 50 kilometers to 60 kilometers uphill, downhill for, you know, months and, and the body just doesn’t have the time to recover. And so now we have just finished this study. And the results hopefully will come out mid year is that we think that by by using the post biotic and even elite athletes, we can blunt the muscle damage and accelerate the muscle recovery. So that’s one stream of research that is happening. The other is in sort of the hospitalized patient settings. Now, each day you spent in the hospital that you put it very well and you start losing muscle mass at a very accelerated phase. And so we think by supplementing that kind of hospitalized immobilized setting, we can also accelerate the recovery of these people. So, you know, the research is just building up and many more people are starting to study this.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
