Dr. Ellsworth on Our New Longevity Pak

0:47: …we should look at aging as a disease that is treatable…

1:25: What's exciting is that we now have a better grip of what's behind the aging process. And a lot of those steps, you can do something about.

3:32: As we have more NAD, we see lifespan go up. When there's less NAD, we see lifespan go down, and more health problems increase.

3:41: In fact, we're able to see that as maybe one of the most fundamental drivers of the aging process may be a decline in NAD…and there's ways you can build it up indirectly, which we have in our Longevity Pack.  

3:59: NMN is one of those supplements that you can take. And that, combined with resveratrol, allows the body to make more NAD. It's an immediate precursor of it.

4:31: NAD helps with energy, helps with mental clarity, helps your ability to have stamina. People with good NAD levels just generally age slower.

7:15: We now know that one of the master regulators of the aging process has to do with mTOR, and one way, without taking something without a prescription medication that you can get mTOR in the right place, is to incorporate limiting the hours you eat into your lifestyle. People usually call that intermittent fasting.

8:44: We've noticed that caloric restriction, when there's less food involved, that has a positive effect on animals living longer. And we now know that's activating some of these same processes and specifically it's helping with this mTOR process. 

9:11: …there's a supplement called fisetin, which helps mimic caloric restriction, and that has some of the similar benefits to that.

10:46: But these so-called senescent cells, they put out things that make the rest of the body age faster. And it's been noted that a small amount of senescent cells, if you take them and inject them into a young mouse, it'll start aging rapidly. 

11:14: We can add some supplements which help our body clear these abnormal cells.

12:04: This is a lot of information, but one of the key aspects is that we now have the tools that you have in your hand to be able to do something about the major cause of disease, aging, and I've formulated a pack that we're calling the Longevity Pack.

14:13: While the ideal time to start some of these things would be, perhaps in your thirties, we are definitely including those in their fifties, sixties, seventies in this program, because we want them to benefit from these interventions.

14:42: But the supplement line, by helping optimize these cellular processes, the sooner it's started, the better, because as time goes on, the body has a harder time reversing than it does maintaining.

15:49: But as you get into your thirties and forties and fifties and beyond, you're going to want to support your body more. And the Longevity Pack was designed to be a tool to help you with that.

Thank you for joining us today. I'm Dr. Don Ellsworth. We're going to be talking today about one of my new favorite topics. It's a topic that I wouldn't have even addressed a couple years ago, and it has to do with the most common reason people come to see us. It's the most common reason for health problems. It's the most common reason most of us will eventually stop living. And that has to do with aging.

And it's interesting that the work of Dr. David Sinclair has changed my thinking in this area. One of his paradigms is that we should look at aging as a disease that is treatable, and that's a rather striking new way of processing what we've normally considered to be just a normal event. As a year goes by, we add another candle to our birthday cake, figuratively. And with that, we expect things to change.

What's interesting is, more and more research that he and others have done, have shown that you can make a radical difference in the way animals behave, and a lot of these studies are extrapolating from animal models. But we're seeing it born out in many people already. What's exciting is that we now have a better grip of what's behind the aging process. And a lot of those steps, you can do something about.

What I find fascinating is that a lot of it is genetic. There are several genes that really have a lot to do with determining how fast we age. Whereas if you read something that was written not long ago, and it talks about what causes aging, you would see a lot about free radicals and the need for antioxidants. All those things are issues, but it turns out that's not the main driver.

We now know that things like...words that you would've never heard about until very recently, things like NAD and increasing sit-ins, AMPK, mTOR, autophagy, senescence. When we address these issues, it has a profound effect on how our bodies behave. And I want to go into that a little bit and talk about some things you can do. We are excited that we have a new product line in our vitamin department that's available to all.

The Longevity Pack will be along the lines of activating these very pathways. We have prescription products, of course, that we're using amongst our guests. And those would be, maybe, a step stronger at achieving some of the same results, but we do want to make this available to all. And I want to share a little bit about what we're trying to do.

Specifically, NAD is one of the topics that got me pulled into the whole concept of aging, because I was interested in this particular molecule Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide that we've seen is one of the most abundant molecules in the body. It's tremendous. There's three grams of it in our body. What it does, it makes ATP, it's involved in a lot of steps, but it activates a lot of genes that have to do with longevity. Some of those include the sirtuins, and we know that as NAD goes, longevity goes. As we have more NAD, we see lifespan go up. When there's less NAD, we see lifespan go down, and more health problems increase.

In fact, we're able to see that as maybe one of the most fundamental drivers of the aging process may be a decline in NAD…and there's ways you can build it up indirectly, which we have in our Longevity Pack. NMN is one of those supplements that you can take. And that, combined with resveratrol, allows the body to make more NAD. It's an immediate precursor of it.

And the NMN is available from the vitamin department and it needs to be taken on a regular basis, because you constantly are making NAD. When you take the precursors, you typically don't see as profound a change, but over time, you're supporting this very, very important molecule.

NAD helps with energy, helps with mental clarity, helps your ability to have stamina. People with good NAD levels just generally age slower. In the animal models, you can correlate NAD levels with aging very nicely, as well as disease development. People are looking at NAD and the risk of things like COVID. It looks like one of the reasons why there's an age connection with their susceptibility to complications from something like COVID has to do with the drop in NAD.

So, I'm excited about supporting NAD levels within MMN, as well as resveratrol. And that combination will help people keep their levels up… 

We have some things that also we're adding just to support the NMN. Trimethylglycine, also known as Betaine, we add because you need to support the process of methylation when you're using this particular product, because you use more methyl groups when you make the NAD. So, that's really a very, very powerful tool.

There's another enzyme, though, called AMPK. That is an important aspect of the whole aging process. And some studies have been done to activate AMPK with medications like Metformin. In fact, there's a lot of publications on Metformin being used as an antiaging drug. Well, it turns out there's other ways to activate AMPK, and one of those is Berberine. And we're going to be using berberine in our longevity pack to activate...and there's some overlap between some of the other supplements that also are AMPK activators, but just to keep it simple, Berberine will be the main one. And Berberine has been used for a lot of different reasons, but it's been found to be virtually as effective as Metformin in some areas, so we're excited that there is a non-prescription option out there for you.

The issue of mTOR is very interesting. We've talked about rapamycin or sirolimus in some other podcasts. We now know that one of the master regulators of the aging process has to do with mTOR, and one way, without taking something without a prescription medication that you can get mTOR in the right place, is to incorporate limiting the hours you eat into your lifestyle.

People usually call that intermittent fasting. I think the term time-restricted eating is a little more accurate, because you're actually eating every day. You're just limiting your hours. And typically, people who do this are eating within a...well, if you're really trying to be intense and do it, it might be a one hour window. In other words, one meal a day. And that's what a lot of us do, at least on some days. And some people might eat within a four hour window, a six hour window, an eight hour window, and not eat for the remaining 16 hours.

What's interesting is the cells of our body respond best when they're challenged. And it's been well said that “what doesn't kill us makes us stronger.” And there's a lot of wisdom to that observation that the things that we go through that are challenges in life, do make us stronger as a person. And at the cell level, that actually happens when you are exposed to challenges of not eating for a bit.

That tends to have a positive effect on longevity of the cells. When you have times when you are cold exposed, that actually has a positive effect. We've noticed that caloric restriction, when there's less food involved, that has a positive effect on animals living longer. And we now know that's activating some of these same processes and specifically it's helping with this mTOR process. mTOR actually, like needs to go down in many cases. And when we restrict calories, that has that effect.

Well, interestingly, we can actually have some similar...there's a supplement called Fisetin, which helps mimic caloric restriction, and that has some of the similar benefits to that. And we've incorporated that and spermidine, which is another interesting supplement which can help with autophagy. And autophagy, we didn't even know about until fairly recently. A Nobel prize was given for the research on autophagy.

But what it involves with, is the process of cells cleaning up their debris within the cell. This would be all the misfolded proteins. Well, it turns out that there's some supplements, like spermidine, that can be taken which help with that process. Oh, and Quercetin, I should mention as well. Quercetin is another of the supplements that helps with the clearance of some of the cells that we need to clear, but quercetin actually has a little bit of a different spin on things. Quercetin, as well as the Fisetin, help with senescence. And senescent cells are very important to address, because our body builds up these cells that are still alive, but they no longer function normally.

And there's something called The Hayflick Limit of divisions that cells can typically undergo before they stop functioning normally. And in some cases, they die. But in other cases, these cells are still alive, but they start putting out a lot of inflammatory markers and they actually look different under the microscope and you can actually differentiate them from regular cells. But these so-called senescent cells, they put out things that make the rest of the body age faster.

And it's been noted that a small amount of senescent cells, if you take them and inject them into a young mouse, it'll start aging rapidly. Well, think about what that's doing to us. The senescent cells in our body are causing us to age more rapidly. Wouldn't it be nice if we could remove some of those? And it turns out that we actually can. We can add some supplements, which help our body clear these abnormal cells. And by the way, this is a hot topic of research. When I've looked recently at the number of studies that are undergoing to look at what works with senescence, senolytics for clearing senescent cells, that's one of the hottest topics of research.

And what excites me about that is a lot of what we have thought of as a disease, where we don't know what the cause is, it's just old age. We don't really have a good treatment for it. Well, it turns out it's because these cells are building up in our body and we haven't known to do something about them or how to do something about them. So, one of the great things about living at this time is we now know some key tools for getting rid of these senescent cells.

This is a lot of information, but one of the key aspects is that we now have the tools that you have in your hand to be able to do something about the major cause of disease, aging. I've formulated a pack that we're calling the Longevity Pack. It's a great tool with just seven things in it that you can take on a daily basis to support your health. And this is something that our guests that are getting some of the treatments that are prescription can also use. But I wanted this to be available to everybody, so that they can start getting the same benefits.

One thing I should always say is, I don't expect by saying Longevity Pack, that people are going to live forever. In fact, the human studies are really just starting on a lot of these things and we may not see the results of the human studies we'd all like to see until the end of our own lives, simply because these type of studies typically take a long time if you're studying longevity.

And one of the principles that we have in this area is when you have enough important information, where you can see from the molecular mechanisms, the animal models, and the safety studies that have been already done...most of these things, by the way, are derived from food. We know that they're safe, so this is the time to act. If you're waiting until you're further down the road in your life, you're losing an opportunity to modify your cellular response to help with the aging process.

And if you're in your thirties, this is not too early to start. The more you start when your body is starting to change, and we peak around 20 in many areas…so most of us don't think of ourselves as being old at 25 or 28. But when we get into our thirties, that's really a good time to start trying to modify some of these steps, along with the healthy lifestyle.

And these things can be taken daily. They're simple. And you can benefit from the fact that we're doing the research for you. And as time goes on, I'm actually expecting us to make some modifications to this, because this is a hot area of research. While the ideal time to start some of these things would be, perhaps in your thirties, we are definitely including those in their fifties, sixties, seventies in this program, because we want them to benefit from these interventions.

We do know that some of the pharmaceutical interventions like rapamycin and NAD can have the stronger effect, and if you're in those age groups and you're having some issues, that would be something I'd strongly encourage you to consider. But the supplement line, by helping optimize these cellular processes, the sooner it's started, the better, because as time goes on, the body has a harder time reversing than it does maintaining.

But I am excited that we do know you can reverse some of these processes. It's rather striking in some cases where they've shown in, usually animal models, the improvement. But I know that from what we're, feedback wise, that we're already getting, I'm very encouraged that we're seeing people responding very positively to the interventions that we're doing.

Everyone we see in our practice, no matter their age, is on a journey and their body is aging. Fortunately, when you're in your teens and twenties, your body has ability to repair itself and optimize much more readily. So, a really healthy lifestyle is all you need at that point, because you can eat the right foods at the right time, get the exercise, the sleep, the high intensity interval training, cold exposure helps, even heat exposure.

But as you get into your thirties and forties and fifties and beyond, you're going to want to support your body more. And the Longevity Pack was designed to be a tool to help you with that. And of course we have prescription items that we use in our practice that can be very useful as well. But the Longevity Pack is available to all. And it's simple. And it's based on the current research that we have that helps optimize these processes, the NAD the AMPK, which helps the process of mTOR regulation and autophagy clearance and senescence, by basically upregulating the right things.

And in the case of mTOR, downregulating it, clearing out the abnormal debris, which is autophagy, clearing out the abnormal cells, senescence, our body can do things that we really didn't know were possible before. We really didn't know that they could actually recover and start looking healthier. And if you look at some of the research that David Sinclair has done, where they actually show some of the mice acting younger, looking younger, having coats that start looking younger, it's rather eye-opening to realize that some of the things that you would've thought of as being something that's impossible to reverse, you can actually intervene on if you know exactly which tools to use.

Thank you for joining us today. I'm Dr. Donald Ellsworth.

At Physicians Preference Vitamins, we are here for you. If you have questions about our Longevity Pak or supplements for any other health concerns, please call our Certified Holistic Nutritionists and Vitamin Consultants today at 281-646-1659. It will be our privilege to serve you!