Dr. Steven Gundry – Alex, welcome to the show.
Alex Tarvana – Thanks for having me.
Dr. Steven Gundry – So I wanna start with a bit of your background. You got a mystery virus that left you absolutely miserable.
Alex Tarvana – Yeah.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Tell us about that first, and let’s get into hydrogen.
Alex Tarvana – This is about 10 years ago, and at the time I was the fittest and healthiest I’d ever been in my life. The business I was running, I was on the road about a week a month, and the other three weeks, I only had an hour or two of work to do at home a day. So I was training four to six hours a day between martial arts, CrossFit, just being generally active, and whatever hit me, it absolutely floored me. Overnight I had central nervous system fatigue, so I couldn’t jump an inch off the ground. I couldn’t do any explosive movements at all. I had sudden onset narcolepsy. So if I sat down in the chair like this and wasn’t animated talking for a minute or so, I’d just conk out, fall asleep. I was sleeping 16 to 18 hours a day.
Dr. Steven Gundry – You lucky devil.
Alex Tarvana – My C-reactive proteins were like 35 milligrams of deciliter.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Wow.
Alex Tarvana – So I was, you know, 100 times abnormal.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah.
Alex Tarvana – 70 to 100 times abnormal. And they just really couldn’t figure it out. At the same time, my best friend, they thought he had the same virus, but it was completely different with him. He kept on having to go to the hospital. He had pneumonia, had to miss work for a couple weeks. So something really hit us. Then when the dust settled and, you know, my inflammation dropped, not even to normal, but just down to like two milligrams of deciliters, I was left with osteoarthritis in 11 joints. Right. The worst of which is my left shoulder. It’s completely bone on bone now. The doctors I was dealing with told me that I can never work out again. You know, have to basically just protect my joints at all costs. I didn’t like that answer. So they had put me on 1,000 milligrams of naproxen a day and I was doing cortisone injections, and I just knew those weren’t long-term solutions, especially being 29 at the time. I can’t just be on high levels of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs for the rest of my life.
Dr. Steven Gundry – For those listening, that’s Aleve, super Aleve, how’s that?
Alex Tarvana – Yeah. Like five times what you take in Aleve. I spent all that time I’d been training, just scouring PubMed, reading every single article I could find on anything that could regulate the inflammatory response in the body. And I started a bunch of different protocols, one of which I’d found some research on hydrogen water and molecular hydrogen. There was a dearth of options to get hydrogen water at the time, but I bought a machine for four or $5,000 that was supposed to make it and I was back to exercising, but not like I had before. You know, maybe five times a week, an hour a day. And nine or so months later, I fainted a couple different times, like within a week or so at the gym. And it turns out I developed multiple ulcers from the super Aleve as you call it. And I had to abruptly stop, you know, taking the anti-inflammatory drugs. Well, within a couple of days of stopping, all of my joints seized, so I couldn’t put on a shirt, couldn’t put on socks, ’cause you know, I have bad arthritis in my hip too. And it just left me floored, and back to the drawing board because I realized other than the drugs, none of these protocols I was on was actually significantly helping me ’cause I’d seized up, including the hydrogen water that I’d spent like $5,000 on the machine. So I went back to PubMed and started diving back in, and there were more newer articles showing hydrogen water had these effects and it perturbed me, but I decided to buy the full studies to read the materials and methods and realized that none of the studies were using a machine like what I’d bought.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Ah-ha!
Alex Tarvana – Right. And then I just thought to myself, how do I even know that this machine is making hydrogen water? Because I was just going off what the salesman told me. Right?
Dr. Steven Gundry – Makes sense.
Alex Tarvana – So I found a chemical reagent to test for hydrogen and do the titration, and it was undetectable. When I tripled the input, I was able to reduce one drop indicating that there was only 0.03 parts per million of hydrogen coming out of this machine.
Dr. Steven Gundry – And that’s nothing. Right?
Alex Tarvana – It’s nothing.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Okay. All right.
Alex Tarvana – It is 1/16th, 1/17th of the lowest concentration that has ever shown to have any physiological effect. And of course, hydrogen’s like any other molecule, there’s a dose dependent effect. And so far to date, there’s no instance where getting a higher concentration in dose is less effective than a lower dose. Right?
Dr. Steven Gundry – Okay.
Alex Tarvana – And a lot of the research, like on my technology, we’re getting in half a liter over 12 parts per million. So hundreds of times higher than what this machine was spinning. That actually gave me a bit of hope ’cause I realized I hadn’t actually tried hydrogen yet. So I started doing some home chemistry and making some concoctions. I’d gotten sources on the magnesium I need to make this and was buying some organic acids. And I was testing my home concoctions at about three ppm. You know, and I was drinking a few liters a day of this. And within about a week, my joints started loosening. I was thinking, wow, this is really working. And, but I did have a sober second thought, and I thought to myself, I’m a quick learner and I understand the basic chemistry, but I don’t wanna win a Darwin award. I’m dealing with elemental magnesium and hydrogen gas in my kitchen. I don’t wanna blow myself up in my house and have a disaster.
Dr. Steven Gundry – You don’t want to be the Hindenburg.
Alex Tarvana – Exactly. So I found my founding partner, he’s a PhD in organic chemistries in the pharmaceutical industry. He develops molecules for drug research. At first, he told me it was the worst pseudoscience he’d ever heard in his life. And he gave me this list of all the reasons why you can’t dissolve hydrogen and water. Even if you could, it’s not gonna have a physiological effect, it’s inert. By that time, I’d read enough papers that I was able to rebut him with peer reviewed research in every area. And he gave it a read and he said, “I’m stunned, but it appears there’s something here. Sure. I’ll take a look at what you’re doing.” And as he was reviewing my chemistry and what I’d been doing with this, I just kept on sending him a new paper every day. And he called me up and asked me for lunch. And serendipitously I’d sent him a paper. It was a human double blind placebo controlled trial on a model that he was the lead chemist developing small molecules to target.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Hmm.
Alex Tarvana – And he said, “The other research you’ve sent, I’m not an a subject matter expert. Right/ So I just have to go off the conclusions. But unless this paper is fraudulent, this stuff works. Are you sure you just want this as a do it yourself project or are you looking for a partner? Do you want to go into commercialization?” We talked about it a lot. Decided to give it a try and refining my chemistry didn’t take that long. It was only a couple weeks, but we quickly realized it was a massive difference between making 20 of them in a mortar and pestle and pressing by hand, and having the reaction work the same way, making millions at high speed. And so that took us about a year, a few thousand iterative adjustments to our formulation, and 15 failed scale up attempts. But finally we got our first production ready tablet out. We stopped counting, but at least 5,000 more iterative adjustments to continuously improve the product.
Dr. Steven Gundry – So let’s back up because your investor or your partner says, you know, “Oh, come on, this is pseudoscience and you know, I’m glad it’s having a placebo effect on you.” You go, “Well, wait a minute. There’s like a thousand papers written about this primarily in Japan and China.” So why would hydrogen have any effect on what you’re saying it it does?
Alex Tarvana – Yeah. Absolutely. And this is something that evaded researchers and why is hydrogen having this physiological effect, like we’re seeing it replicated over and over again in many, many different models. Right? But why? Right? What’s the evolutionary basis? And as research on hydrogen expanded and more experts from other fields started looking, the story started coming together more. For instance, hydrogen has been with us since the dawn of evolution. So our mitochondria evolved from eukaryotes, and eukaryotes expelled hydrogen gas as a waste product. Eukaryotes formed from a symbiotic relationship between two organal, one of which consumed hydrogen, right? As a fuel source.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Right.
Alex Tarvana – So hydrogen has been with our mitochondria since before it was mitochondria. And we know that hydrogen is having an impact primarily on the mitochondria. It’s being called a mitohormetic effector. So hormesis for the mitochondria, or like exercise like stress for the mitochondria. It’s improving the mitochondria’s function, their number through mitochondrial biogenesis, repairing damaged mitochondria. So it’s having these profound effects on our mitochondria. We know that there has been more hydrogen in our atmosphere at various times throughout evolution. In fact, the oldest waters we found on the planet, two billion years old, deep beneath the Canadian Shield, still has dissolved hydrogen gas in those sources. But more importantly, we now know why supplementing with exogenous hydrogen, external hydrogen is gonna be impactful because we produce it endogenously. So why do we need more of it?
Dr. Steven Gundry – Let me stop you there.
Alex Tarvana – Yeah, sure.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Well, wait a minute. We produce it, who’s making it for us?
Alex Tarvana – The bacteria in our stomach, except for people who have impaired microbiomes, which is a shocking amount. So research is showing that once you hit middle age, especially people with impaired metabolisms or who are overweight, they stop producing hydrogen gas. They’re producing methane instead in rates of 60 to 80%, you know, of middle aged people are producing methane instead of H2. In addition to that, the way we’re producing hydrogen with our bacteria is by fermenting non-nutritive carbohydrates or fibers.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Right.
Alex Tarvana – Right? And historically, humans would’ve consumed 100 to 150 grams of dietary fiber a day.
Dr. Steven Gundry – True.
Alex Tarvana – Today the average person on a Western diet, or in the Western world rather consumes like less than 15 grams. But someone on a standard American diet eating a lot of fast food might consume only one or two or three grams of dietary fiber a day. So what is likely happening is because we’re not actually consuming the fuel source for the bacteria that makes the hydrogen, we’re losing those bacteria.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Right. They got nothing to eat.
Alex Tarvana – Exactly.
Dr. Steven Gundry – And they leave.
Alex Tarvana – Exactly. So even if you start eating fiber now, if you lack that bacteria, you’re not gonna just start producing hydrogen all of a sudden.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Right.
Alex Tarvana – So a lifetime of killing off those bacteria by a lack of fiber means that a significant percentage of the population is now deficient and incapable of making hydrogen.
Dr. Steven Gundry – One of the things that got me interested about hydrogen water years ago was a Japanese study looking at people with early Parkinson’s, a neurodegenerative disease, which there’s an epidemic of like Alzheimer’s. And they found that the people with early Parkinson’s did not have bacteria in their gut that produced hydrogen gas.
Alex Tarvana – Yeah.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Whereas the control group that didn’t have Parkinson’s, lo and behold had bacteria that made hydrogen gas. And correct me if I’m wrong, but they gave these individuals hydrogen water, which is what we’re talking about today. Hydrogen gas dissolved in water, and lo and behold their symptoms improved.
Alex Tarvana – This has been true in a few studies in rodents and humans. There are studies that have shown no effect in hydrogen water in PD, but a lot more research is needed.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Right.
Alex Tarvana – Right, on the subject. And even the one that showed no effect, there was a massive error in the study and a percentage of the placebo group were actually getting hydrogen water. It’s a tough area. We had a trial that was supposed to be ongoing in a major university in the US here, but they canceled it during the pandemic ’cause they weren’t able to recruit anyone. So that, it’s something I’d love to see more research on.
Dr. Steven Gundry – I think you’re right. There’s a husband and wife microbiome research team at Stanford, the Sonnenburgs, who would absolutely confirm what you’re saying is unfortunately primarily because of our diet, but also in the things I talk about, the antibiotics that we take, the antibiotics that we feed our animals that we eat, we’re a desert wasteland of a microbiome now compared to some hunter gatherer in Africa.
Alex Tarvana – Oh yeah, and I’m sure you’re aware too, like a lot of people think you can just take, you know, a probiotic and fix everything. But some of the bacteria that we lose, we can get back within weeks. Some might take years. And we’ve, as you mentioned, the hunter gatherers, there’s bacteria in hunter gatherer populations that we believe took generations to lose. Right?
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah.
Alex Tarvana – So it’s not just a simple fix.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Well, and again, I tell people that, you know, we live in California and we’re used to forest fires now, unfortunately. And when that forest, which is a amazing ecosystem, burns to the ground, we think that we can put some little seedlings in and instantly have a forest, but it’ll take 20 or 30 years to get that complex ecosystem back. And yet we assume that when we take a round of antibiotics for a cold, which of course it doesn’t work on, anyhow, we can take a probiotic and presto change-o we’ll get the ecosystem back. I wish it was that simple.
Alex Tarvana – Even if it was, that would still require people to scale back up to eating the 100 to 150 grams of dietary fiber a day that we evolved to anticipate which that would cause most people severe distress. Right? Even me as I started diving into this and I slowly scaled up my dietary fiber to 60 to 80 grams a day. And that was months of agony in feeling sick before my body became accustomed.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Now describe feeling sick. What do you mean bloating?
Alex Tarvana – Like bloated, stabbing pains in, you know, your stomach. Exactly. You know, now I’m adjusted to it, but it took months. Most people are not gonna go through that, and I’m not even at the levels that we evolved to anticipate.
Dr. Steven Gundry – And anyone who looks at a gorilla who’s got a huge amount of muscle mass or sees that massively giant stomach, and that’s not fat, that’s his fermentation vat. And we unfortunately, once upon a time, we’re able to tolerate that sort of fermentation vat. But you’re right, it’s getting dietary fiber in and becoming tolerant to it is an interesting process that I have to talk my patients through. And you’re right, hydrogen is is fascinating to mitochondria because if you’ve read “My Energy Paradox” book or “Unlocking the Keto Code”, you know that in the mitochondria what they’re basically doing is energizing electrons and moving protons to make ATP. And lo and behold, hydrogen just happens to have one electron to donate and happens to have a proton. So it’s a fabulous donor for making energy. And you’re right, probably the original life forms were down in the bottom of ocean vents where hydrogen was very available.
Alex Tarvana – One of the interesting things that we’re seeing about hydrogen and how it affects, say energy is with ATP and this is actually true for almost everything we’re looking at with hydrogen. It is, it has no effect when everything is fine and healthy and perfect. It’s only as soon as there’s a stress that hydrogen seems to be like this master supervisor within the cell that wraps up ATP and energy production and starts correcting everything that’s going wrong. So for instance, hydrogen won’t say drive up ATP when you’re feeling great, but if you have a TBI or a stress, all of a sudden it, it ramps up to repair that damage. We’ve seen the same thing on research with the tablets where hydrogen is not a stimulant. So if you take it and you’re, you know, already full of energy, you don’t feel a kick in energy. But after acute sleep deprivation, we’re seeing like significant increases in brain metabolism and more robust when compared against caffeine, right?
Dr. Steven Gundry – Hmm.
Alex Tarvana – In head-to-head research. And that’s not a stimulant effect, that’s just repairing the decrease in, you know, choline to creatine ratios in the brain that happen from the, you know, sleep deprivation stress.
Dr. Steven Gundry – So what you’re saying is, I can stay up all night and have a couple hydrogen tablets in my water and just keep going, man.
Alex Tarvana – You’ll feel better for a couple hours, right? Like it doesn’t last forever. But we have improved things like the attention network test after 24 hours sleep deprivation.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah.
Alex Tarvana – And actually hydrogen specifically affected orienting, whereas stimulants like caffeine affect alerting. That’s what makes you jittery and looking around and can cause anxiety in some people, but hydrogen anecdotally, it doesn’t feel like a stimulant. It feels like you’re returning to normal. Right? Like, you just feel okay. And and that’s actually what in the research where it shows that we’re improving orienting, that ties into the experiential feeling.
Dr. Steven Gundry – All right, so how about exercise tolerance? Where does hydrogen fit in there?
Alex Tarvana – So hydrogen has, you know, one systematic review on meta-analysis showing that there’s a significant anti-fatigue effect. Right? Now we have some research that is about to publish two actually separate trials showing that we significantly protect against the rise in like creatine kinase and damages like, you know, other damages like myoglobin, right? So this is basically protecting against muscle damage post-exercise, but there’s even cooler research done in rodents that shows exactly how hydrogen can potentiate the stress responsive of exercise while helping you recover faster. So for instance, in in rats that were put on a forced swim test-
Dr. Steven Gundry – Actually, lemme stop you there.
Alex Tarvana – Sure.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Exercise is good for you because it’s actually bad for you.
Alex Tarvana – Exactly, yes.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Okay. And that’s a hormetic effect.
Alex Tarvana – Exactly.
Dr. Steven Gundry – That which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.
Alex Tarvana – Exactly. It so long as it’s not too big of a stress.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Exactly. That which doesn’t kill me.
Alex Tarvana – And that’s what hydrogen is, right? It’s an adapted stress, something we evolved to anticipate. So our body expects that and it helps with cell signaling and restoring a lot of our functions, right?
Dr. Steven Gundry – Okay, back to the rat study.
Alex Tarvana – So the control rats, you know, you’d see as expected, you know, a rise in oxidative stress and inflammation while they’re exercising, right? In the hydrogen group, what it was really counterintuitive at first until we started understanding hydrogen better, is hydrogen actually acutely increased the oxidative stress in inflammation during exercise, which people from exercise science know that this is potentially a good thing because you don’t wanna take antioxidants and anti-inflammatories in conjunction with exercise that blunts hypertrophy gains.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Right.
Alex Tarvana – Right? The H2 potentiated the stress response, but they rebounded to homeostasis faster, right? So the inflammation oxidative stress came down to homeostatic levels quicker than the exercise alone group. This indicates that hydrogen increased the exercise stress, but decreased the recovery time. You know, meaning it’s like you worked out harder and recovered quicker,
Dr. Steven Gundry – Which sounds like a good idea.
Alex Tarvana – Yeah, definitely. Which is why a lot of high level athletes are now using hydrogen in their protocols.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Ah-ha. And it’s legal.
Alex Tarvana – Yeah, of course. I mean, it’s something endogenous in our body. You can get it from your diet. There’s nothing in the water rules or anything like that about hydrogen being a performance enhancer.
Dr. Steven Gundry – We’ve talked about, most of us, our gut microbiome stinks and we’re starving it to death and we’re killing it. So does hydrogen water or hydrogen gas have any effect on improving the gut microbiome?
Alex Tarvana – Yes, so there’s quite a number of studies and actually this is one area that is really showing the difference between say drinking hydrogen water and inhaling hydrogen gas, right? So that was actually one of the first big, you know, skepticisms on hydrogen water is why wouldn’t you just inhale the gas? Right?
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah.
Alex Tarvana – But we’re showing it in say pharmacokinetic research that even at hundreds of times higher levels, hydrogen water is having the same or even greater rise in cellular concentrations as inhaling, but it’s also getting to certain areas far better than inhalation does. Like for instance, it’s having a much more robust effect on the microbiome and it’s getting to our liver better. Right? And actually we’re seeing that hydrogen is a driver of liver homeostasis as well. And that’s a whole separate topic because a percentage of the hydrogen that goes into the liver is actually metabolized in an unknown way, right? And it’s showing like, you know, things like liver health are needing like 10 times the dosage of hydrogen to see an effect as compared to like exercise performance. So that’s a different subject. But with the microbiome, specifically with hydrogen water, it’s getting and it’s interacting with our microbiome. And on a number of studies, 15 or 20 now in humans and in multiple animal models, we’ve seen significant improvements in the microbiome after administering hydrogen water. In addition to that, in one of our recent studies on the tablets, we saw some other, you know, parameters in gut health that improved. We significantly decreased calprotectin and we improved short chain fatty acids.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Ooh.
Alex Tarvana – Most prominently propionic acid and butyric acid.
Dr. Steven Gundry – So calprotectin, for those of you who are curious is one of the measurements we can make to actually look at leaky gut, at damage to the wall of the gut. And so that’s a big deal if you see that being modified coming down from your intervention. And if you’ve read any of my last three books, including “Gut Check”, you know that short chain fatty acids are kind of the holy grail, not only of gut health, but also of mitochondrial health, of brain health. And if particularly if you’ve read “Gut Check”, you know that a lot of our bacteria that make butyrate actually have to have precursors for butyrate of other short chain fatty acids like acetate, like propionic. And so what he’s saying in in science speak is, this is good stuff. So sorry.
Alex Tarvana – Yeah, no problem. There is also some other gut related benefits, and we’ve seen this in the research before this, but it was the first time we saw it in humans that hydrogen actually regulated ghrelin, right? And in this case-
Dr. Steven Gundry – That’s the hunger hormone.
Alex Tarvana – Yeah. But you know, and to jump in like, it hasn’t some really cool other roles in our body too. Like ghrelin is neuroprotective. It regulates our glucose metabolism, it regulates our insulin response. And a lot of people get confused on ghrelin because this is a hormone that you actually want to peak and drop, right? But in obese people, it just stays not even elevated. Like in healthy people with a healthy metabolism it peaks much higher than in obese people. Obese people, it never peaks and it never drops. So this was a overweight population we did this in. And it showed that the hydrogen drove peaks in ghrelin so it started functioning-
Dr. Steven Gundry – Normally.
Alex Tarvana – Normally.
Dr. Steven Gundry – And does it have any effect on leptin or leptin resistance or leptin sensitivity or has that been looked at?
Alex Tarvana – I’m not aware of that.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Okay. Now, off camera, you were telling me some interesting studies about hydrogen water and potentiating the desirable effects of certain drugs and maybe blocking some of the undesirable effects of certain drugs. Can you elaborate on that? I think this is interesting.
Alex Tarvana – Yeah, this is actually like I’m an author in a lot of these papers that have been coming out.
Dr. Steven Gundry multiple preclinical studies to potentiate different approved pharmaceutical agents, not just myself and the researchers I work for, but other teams as well. A paper at Stony Brook saw a synergy between hydrogen and minocycline for post-stroke recovery in rats. We have seen hydrogen potentiate the effects of sulfasalazine on ulcerative colitis, right? So hydrogen was roughly as effective as sulfasalazine for UC, but the combination were more effective.
Alex Tarvana – All right.
Dr. Steven Gundry – And then we saw hydrogen potentially the effects of fluorouracil or 5-FU for colorectal cancer in mice. And this was a very, very interesting paper because hydrogen and 5-FU had similar effects on reducing tumor size, tumor weight, and collagen content within the tumor. As expected, fluorouracil, the chemotherapeutic, it increased oxidative stress and blunted the antioxidant response. As expected in the hydrogen alone group, it activated our antioxidant response and reduced oxidative stress. Now this is where it gets really interesting about hydrogen in its regulatory rule, because 19 times out of 20 hydrogen shows in the research to have potent antioxidant like effects, anti-inflammatory like effects and such. But one in 20 times, like such as the exercise research I talked about, hydrogen has potentiated stress responses like increased oxidative stress for beneficial outcomes or increased inflammation for beneficial outcomes. So in this study, hydrogen actually increased within the cancer cells, increased the oxidative stress and blunted the, you know, antioxidant response in conjunction by a few-
Alex Tarvana – The repair.
Dr. Steven Gundry – More than the 5-FU alone. So it basically obliterated the cancer. So it completely nerfed the tumor size and weight. And the collagen content in the hydrogen group and in the 5-FU group were like 23, 24%, it dropped to 6% in the combo group. We have some other interesting research that we’re just writing up the manuscript right now on hydrogen and statin where we’re seeing some other really interesting stuff going on. I can’t go into it too much ’cause we haven’t published, but no, we’re seeing this over and over again.
Alex Tarvana – And I think you mentioned, and maybe it’s not published yet, not that I really care, but does hydrogen lower cholesterol or change cholesterol synthesis?
Dr. Steven Gundry – There is a systematic review in meta-analysis showing that hydrogen has cholesterol improving results. But again, this is only when they’re abnormal, right? So, and this is what’s really cool about hydrogen when you have a healthy population that there’s nothing wrong with the marker, even if hydrogen changes that marker 19 outta 20 times, it seems to have no effect when the markers are in a healthy range because it’s just driving homeostasis, right? And this is what it’s doing with say our oxidative stress. It’s not an antioxidant, it’s driving something called redox homeostasis, which is like the yin yang relationship between our beneficial antioxidants and our beneficial stressors, right? People think of all free radicals and stress as bad. That’s not a good thing. A lot of them have very critical cell signaling roles in our body.
Alex Tarvana – Yep.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Nitric oxides are free radical, right, for instance. So hydrogen, rather than being a direct antioxidant, it is regulating our production of antioxidants in our body via the nerve two pathway, but also regulating things like nitric oxide and H2O2.
Alex Tarvana – Wait a minute. So this stuff is so good for us. Shouldn’t we be drinking hydrogen water all day long every day, maybe get up in the middle of the night and have another shot?
Dr. Steven Gundry – That’s actually what a lot of companies say, but they don’t understand the science and they don’t read the science. Because what we know about hydrogen, just like if we’re looking at hydrogen like a hormetic stress like exercise, more isn’t always better.
Alex Tarvana – This is true.
Dr. Steven Gundry – You need a peak in stress to get the adaptation and then a recovery.
Alex Tarvana – Right.
Dr. Steven Gundry – In research on say rodents, when we put a a continuous flow of hydrogen 24/7, we actually see no improvements. It’s only when we pulse and they might get hydrogen in their cage for one or two hours a day. That’s when we see it. In addition, when rodents are drinking hydrogen water, they have, mice and rats have much different feeding and drinking schedules than humans do.
Alex Tarvana – True.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Right?
Alex Tarvana – They drink their water and they drink like 12 times more water than than a human does, right? Per body weight.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah.
Alex Tarvana – And they drink it all within a few hours, right? So it’s like they get that peak stress and then the adaptation for recovery. So you absolutely do not want be sipping hydrogen water all day long. You wanna drink it once or twice, at most three times a day in a very short time period so that you can get it into your cells, peak your Cmax, get your cellular concentration as high as you can, and then let it drop and recover.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Hear that everybody? All right. So here we go.
Alex Tarvana – The tablets are a little bit exothermic, right?
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yes.
Alex Tarvana – So they release heat is what that means. So you don’t want to chew it, you don’t wanna swallow it either. You wanna drop it in the water.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Okay.
Alex Tarvana – And basically what hydrogen water is, all that it is, is the water is a delivery method to get the hydrogen gas into your internal organs.
Dr. Steven Gundry – So wait a minute. So that fizz, what are we seeing?
Alex Tarvana – So we’re seeing H2. So when you put like traditional, you know, fizzy tablet in the water it’s releasing CO2, right?
Dr. Steven Gundry – Right, right.
Alex Tarvana – So a lot of people get confused on what hydrogen water is and they think it’s a completely new compound, right? That’s not what we’re doing. This is a solution, right? Of gas dissolved in water, just like sparkling water, which is just water with CO2.
Dr. Steven Gundry – CO2.
Alex Tarvana – This is just water with H2, and the water part, the H2O part isn’t particularly important except it’s delivering the H2 gas to our internal organs so it can get to our liver and so it can react with our microbiome.
Dr. Steven Gundry – So why doesn’t the hydrogen combine with the oxygen and make more water?
Alex Tarvana – In a nutshell to go to maybe a bit too chemistry for most people, but molecular hydrogen has a full outer shell. So it’s very resistant to reaction. Right? But what is happening is we’re using elemental magnesium to break apart the water, right? So basically we’re getting some of the water molecules and the H2 is splitting off and the oxygen is combining with magnesium to make magnesium hydroxide. So we’re getting hydrogen gas plus magnesium hydroxide, but hydroxide is a function of pH, and we’re using organic acids like malic acid, which is also part of the Krebs cycle and can help contribute to ATP.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Right.
Alex Tarvana – To help catalyze its reaction and also reduce the hydroxide, which just leaves the H2 gas in the water and MG 2+ or free magnesium ions.
Dr. Steven Gundry – And don’t get me started with how good magnesium is for us.
Alex Tarvana – 100%. I mean, what is it 80 or 90% of people are deficient?
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yes.
Alex Tarvana – In magnesium. And one of the reasons why it can be hard to raise your magnesium levels is a lot of magnesium supplements aren’t particularly bioavailable.
Dr. Steven Gundry – True.
Alex Tarvana – And the reason for this is magnesium forms strong compounds typically, and a lot of these magnesium like salts that we take as supplements, they’re too strong for our stomach acid to break apart, especially in older people who need them the most. So they just pass through us, you know, and act as a laxative.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Exactly.
Alex Tarvana – But this reaction is leading the magnesium in the free ion form, which is exactly what we need to utilize in our body. So your stomach doesn’t have to do any work to liberate this magnesium.
Dr. Steven Gundry – We’re getting a one-two punch out of this.
Alex Tarvana – Yeah.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah. And I can tell you as a heart surgeon that most people are so severely depleted in magnesium that after heart surgery we had to put people on magnesium drips for 48 hours to get their magnesium levels up to where they wouldn’t have atrial fibrillation and or ventricular tachycardia. And if those sound bad, you’re right. So you’re right, most of us are really profoundly deficient in magnesium. And even if your doctor tells you that your magnesium level is fine, most people don’t realize that we will keep our blood magnesium level in a normal range, even though we’ve completely depleted our cellular magnesium where it really needs to be. So don’t be fooled when your doctor says, “Oh, your magnesium is fine. It’s not folks, I guarantee it. So this has been bubbling for what, a couple minutes?
Alex Tarvana – A couple minutes, yeah.
Dr. Steven Gundry – And-
Alex Tarvana – Looks like mine’s risen to the surface now, or about to rise to the surface.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah, I see mine up on the top.
Alex Tarvana – What I say to people is, you wanna drink this as fast as possible, so prepare it in the volume of water that you can most easily chug. So like I chug mine like this.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Wow. That’s pretty good. So I don’t wanna sip it and enjoy the savory, you know, flavor and smell. It’s actually really tasty, folks.
Alex Tarvana – So this is one of the reasons why we use different volumes of water in the research depending on the subject population.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah.
Alex Tarvana – For instance, with athletes, we will always use half a liter of water or about 17 ounces.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Okay.
Alex Tarvana – For middle aged, you know, people will say things like metabolic syndrome.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah.
Alex Tarvana – We’re often using about 12 ounces of water instead of 17 because they tend to be able to drink that quickly.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah.
Alex Tarvana – But in the one study we did on a 70 plus population, the average age was 77, we used eight ounces of water.
Dr. Steven Gundry – And?
Alex Tarvana – And well, we saw some remarkable benefits in that population. So this was six months long double blind placebo controlled. And we, I think, raised telomeres by, I think it was 14%, we lengthened them where they went down in the placebo group, of course, as you’d expect. We improved DNA methylation, we improved brain metabolism in the elderly. We doubled this protein in the blood called TET2, T-E-T-2. Now for anyone now watching who has seen the headlines on the vampire research where they take the blood of a young mouse-
Dr. Steven Gundry – Ooh yeah.
Alex Tarvana – And they put it into the older mouse and it improves their brain function and also their skeletal tissue, this is linked to TET2. So TET2 actually has very critical roles in muscle regeneration.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Now we’re not talking about getting a tattoo.
Alex Tarvana – No, no, no. T-E-T-2. So TET2. In addition to this, we saw some real functional benefits that affect people’s everyday life. So in the hydrogen group, it tended to improve sleep, it improved quality of life scores by reducing pain scores. But very importantly, and this could be linked to the TET2 rise, we improved some parameters of the senior fitness test. So for instance, the sit chair stand.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Oh yeah.
Alex Tarvana – So elderly people, they could sit and stand more times before they got tired. And this was actually kind of shocking because with the average age of 77 over six months, you don’t expect that to improve.
Dr. Steven Gundry – True.
Alex Tarvana – And in addition to that, this was recruited in early 2020 during the lockdowns of the pandemic.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Wow.
Alex Tarvana – So these people weren’t going to the gym, they weren’t out walking or anything, they were stuck in their homes and yet the hydrogen group still got more fit.
Dr. Steven Gundry – All right, so this is patented. Yes?
Alex Tarvana – Yes, sir.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Okay. Why don’t I go to the grocery store and buy a hydrogen water in a plastic container, which I’ve seen? What do you think?
Alex Tarvana – The hydrogen water, like ready to drinks, right? That like cans you open, one plastic is only gonna keep hydrogen in it for a couple hours, right? So hydrogen, as you said at the start of the interview, it’s the smallest molecule in the universe, right? Does not get smaller so it can pass through any container, right? Even the ones in aluminum pouches, most of them can’t actually be certified by the IHSA, International Hydrogen Standards Association, as being called hydrogen water.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Wow.
Alex Tarvana – Because they’re below the lowest concentration that’s ever seen any physiological effect on the body.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Darn!
Alex Tarvana – And often, even in these aluminum pouches because the aluminum pouches, they have plastic caps on them.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Good point.
Alex Tarvana – What’s the point in that? And like they might get packaged at like one milligram a liter or one ppm of H2, but by the time they get over here from Japan or Korea or China, they’re down to .3, .4, and then you’re getting a super low dose as well because they’re usually in 200 milliliter pouches.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah.
Alex Tarvana – So the concentration’s low and then the volume of water is low.
Dr. Steven Gundry – So what did we just have?
Alex Tarvana – That was about 500 milliliters. Because we put two tablets in there. Our gas chromatography shows that a single tablet in 500 milliliters or 17 ounces is over 12 ppm, right?
Dr. Steven Gundry – Oh.
Alex Tarvana – But because we put two, it’s not going to be a doubling effect. It’s gonna be about time and a half. So we would’ve gotten 17 or 18 ppm in half a liter. So we were getting close to nine milligrams of H2. Whereas if you’re even at .5 ppm, which those pouches don’t get, in 200 milliliters of water, that’s only .1 milligram of H2. So we’re getting 90 times more in that glass we just drank than one of the pouches that you’re gonna buy for four or $5 at the grocery store.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Cool. Now the other thing, maybe maybe people don’t realize, people drink a fizzy beverage or a carbonated beverage and a great number of people then belch.
Alex Tarvana – Yeah.
Dr. Steven Gundry – This stuff hydrogen, like you mentioned, is the smallest molecule in the world and it literally goes right through the wall of our gut into our bloodstream, yes?
Alex Tarvana – Some of it does.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah. Some of it. Some of it-
Alex Tarvana – Feeds our microbiome.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah, exactly. So some will start just like, you know, diffusing straight through the wall of our stomach into our body. Whereas a good chunk we’re actually discovering is going through the typical chain through our intestines and then through our liver and then passing through to our heart, right? So we know we are getting a good percentage that’s going through that way, but hydrogen will go throughout all of our body by transferring from being in the water to dissolving in our blood. Our blood just carries it everywhere.
– Right. Well, congratulations on this. If you found this video helpful, I think you’re gonna love this one. The more you introduce your kids to this style of eating early on, you’re gonna set ’em up for a much healthier lifespan to come.
