Kind: captions
Language: en
We used to think, well, as you get
older, the brain is going to decline. If
you damage the brain, whether by trauma
or by a stroke or even by cancer, it's
not going to regenerate. Wrong. All
cancers is something that every cancer
patient should ask for. Has been shown
to lower hemoglobin A1C, improve glucose
regulation, insulin sensitivity. Newer
research shows it actually helps your
body release its own GLP-1. Well, that
might actually be helpful for weight
loss. term has been shown to smooth out
and slow down the progression of
Parkinson's disease. The people who
responded to imunotherapy to cancer
life-saving where the people who the
people who didn't respond were missing.
It's not a nice to have. It's a mustave.
It's not makes you a little bit
healthier. It could be the difference
between life and death.
>> [music]
>> So, acromancia is has been termed a
keystone bacteria, meaning it's a really
fundamental bacteria for health and it
does a lot of things. Acromancy has been
shown to um lower hemoglobin A1C,
improve glucose regulation, insulin
sensitivity. That's really great. It's
not a great weight loss bacteria, but it
can actually help your metabolism kind
of like sharpen up a little bit. Uh,
newer research shows it actually helps
your body release its own GLP1.
So, you know, rather than paying
hundreds of dollars for something you
have to jab into your belly or your
thigh, you know, um, take a bacteria
that's going to also help your body
release GLP1. Now, why is that why could
that be important? Okay. Well, that
might actually be helpful for weight
loss or weight management, let's call
it. It's probably a better goal to
actually have. But JLP1, and this is
kind of emerging research, is not just
for um uh body mass, lowering body mass.
GLP-1 is present uh receptor is present
on every single blood vessel in your
body, blood vessel cell. So 60,000 miles
worth of blood vessels 400 miles of
which are in your brain blood vessels
they all contain receptors for GLP-1. So
now if you think about again this theme
that we've been talking about gut brain
longevity health span brain health um
think about that. So acromancin not only
helps your whole body improve its
glucose metabolism but also can help to
trigger blood vessels to be healthier
potentially in all throughout your body
including your brain in terms of the
circulation of your brain. The most
jaw-dropping data on acromancy that I've
seen doesn't have anything to do with
metabolism has to do with immune system
and it has to do with response to cancer
treatment. And in 2017, myself and a
group of colleagues in uh across Europe
convened a a meeting in in France uh
called rethinking cancer. And this was
intended to bring worldleading cancer
researchers to the table to talk about
their work with one ground rule and that
ground rule is you cannot talk about
chemotherapy or drugs.
Okay. So what do what's in a cancer
research conference where you can't talk
about cancer drugs or cancer therapies,
right? Well, you got to talk about uh
stress, sleep, diet, exercise, social
wellness, all the important things that
cancer patients ask about, right? Well,
the star presentation of that conference
was uh a woman named Lauron Zogal in
Paris who was presenting work that she
had done just then on 200 patients with
different types of cancer and they were
receiving imunotherapy which is not
chemo. It actually activates your body's
own natural immune cells to tackle
cancer. and she was explaining her
discovery that only about 20% of people
respond positively, meaning they benefit
from having their own immune system
woken up. Well, that really sucks if
you're a cancer patient to know that um
immune treatment that could be life-
saving only works in 20%. So she set out
to look at the differences between
responders
where their immune system is woken up
and supercharged and then goes after the
cancer whittleles it down some cases to
zero stage four to stage zero. Okay, I'm
quite amazing versus people whose immune
system are like duds. They just they
don't they don't they don't do very much
to the cancer. What's the difference? So
she looked at gender, she looked at age,
she looked at coorbidity, she looked at
medications, nothing. You look at
genetics, nothing. The only thing that
she found that was a difference between
responders and non-responders was in the
gut, the gut bacteria. And it was one
bacteria. And it was acromancia.
The people who responded to imunotherapy
to cancer, life-saving, were the people
who had acromancia. The people who
didn't respond were missing acromancia.
So when I saw that, I'm I'm sure people
sitting next to me um heard my jaw drop
and hit the floor. Like that was just
such a bombshell to recognize this is
another important dimension of of our
gut health. It's not a nice to have.
It's a must-have. It's not makes you a
little bit healthier. It's a it could be
the difference between life and death,
you know, in for a cancer patient. So
for me it it sort of changed the way
that I approached cancer as a disease as
a medical doctor advising patients and
you know helping to guide patients and
and so these are these are just examples
of the profound discoveries that are
being made with gut health, brain
health, gut health, immune health. This
is an area that if you want to have
health span like you got to survive
cancer, you got to avoid dodge heart
disease, you got to dodge dementia, you
got to you know dodge all these other
conditions. How do you do that? And I
think it starts with the gut. um your
circulation uh our our our circulation
is vital because we have the 60,000
miles of channels, highways and byways
uh to bring oxygen and nutrients and uh
and and and blood cells uh to and any
medications you take to every single
cell in the body and they also may be
kind of a transit they might actually be
public transportation in our body for
our healthy bacteria as well. All
cancers imunotherapy
is something that every cancer patient
should ask for, should have a
conversation with their oncologists
about. And the reason is this is the
first time in history, modern history,
where a cancer treatment has the
potential of completely reversing your
disease. And if you can reverse your
disease, the impossible becomes
possible. And I've seen it now time and
time and time and again in people
receiving imunotherapy.
Of course, if you're going to get
imunotherapy, you want it to work. And
now we're beginning to realize that what
is in your gut like acromancy can make
that difference. So for example, should
someone we know be recommended to
imunotherapy? Um they should also think
very carefully about their gut health
because we know uh organisms healthy
bacteria like acromancia can play a
critical role. Acromancia is not really
present in food. So that's one of the
reasons why taking it as a probiotic can
be very helpful beneficial but foods
that you eat can actually grow
acromancia. So again let's let's let's
go into the let's use the the Amazon
example again of digging in there,
right? So, um, here we have discovered
this new bacteria. It's only about 30
years old or so that we've even
recognized it. And we have to observe
what it does. You know, just like any
new animal you discover, you know, in
the Amazon jungle, what does it eat?
Where does it live? What makes it
thrive? And all that kind of stuff.
Well, it turns out acromancia lives in
the colon, the lower part of our the
large intestines. Um, it tends to live
in a area called the seeum. It's kind of
like just the first part of your large
intestines um coming out of the small
intestines. It's a kind of sack. Most of
the bacteria, healthy gut bacteria live
there. Incidentally, that same area, the
seeum is where the appendix lives. We
used to think about the appendix as a
vestigial organ. Get rid of it. No,
doesn't do any good. I don't know
sometime when we were crawling out of
the swamp as humans, you know, like we
developed a appendix and we need it
anymore. We're rethinking that we now
are starting to believe that the
appendix and the intestines in the seeum
which is located right where the gut
bacteria are which are so important for
our health might actually be a storage
area for replenishing healthy gut
bacteria right so it's really quite
amazing to think about it and also maybe
immune reservoir as well okay so
agramman lives there and what does it
Okay, it eats mucus that's normally
found in our gut. People might say that
sounds really disgusting, but actually
our gut is filled with mucus naturally.
We know this like if you ever had
diarrhea, you know, like a lot of mucus
comes out. But even for normal stool,
your regular
healthy mucus is part of our gut. Okay?
Just like and it starts in our mouth, we
have mucus all throughout we've got uh
mucus. Acromancia is called acromancia
mucinapilla.
It is it likes mucin. It eats mucus. It
actually eats it all up. So the more
mucus you have, the more acromancy you
can grow because you got more food for
it to eat. So how do you grow get mucin?
All right.
>> Fiber.
>> Fiber is helpful. Uh and acromancer will
eat fiber. But it turns out that
elagitanins,
which are polyphenols found in certain
foods, can help your gut secrete mucin,
which then is the natural food for the
acromancia. You can actually grow more
acromancia with food. Can't eat it. You
can't eat acromancia from your food, but
you can actually get it by you can grow
more of it, nurture it by putting more
fertilizer, more food in for the
acromancia. So, the foods that actually
grow acromancia, pomegranate and
pomegranate juice, uh cranberries. I say
dried cranberries cuz not cranberry
juice cuz cranberry juice is so sour
that you would almost have to put a ton
of sugar to make it palatable. Don't do
that. Just have dried cranberries. It's
a wonderful little snack to give you
those polyphenols. Um conquered grape
juice. If you ever had grape candies
when you were a kid, um that flavor of
grape candy is exactly how real
conquered grapes taste. That's the model
and what what they were. But other
things as well, it turns out Chinese
black vinegar. Uh if you've ever had um
soup dumplings, um uh there's they have
a little canister of black vinegar next
to it. You put it in your spoon to have
the soup dumplings with. That grows
acromancia. uh hot chili peppers like
dried chili flakes actually also grow
acromancy as well. Peach juice has been
shown to grow acromancia. So again, this
is another one of those areas of
research where we're beginning to
discover more and more foods that can
actually help your body grow the
acromancia. Most of them actually work
by helping your gut secrete more mucus
that the acromancia thrives on, so it's
got food to eat. So more of it will
actually grow there. I think it's um
important to recognize that those
polyphenols that come in and the dietary
fiber that come in the foods that are
healthy for us, you know, and you call
it plant-based foods, they actually help
us sustain our systems overall. Ketosis
is sort of this reductionist way. Let's
look at ketones. Let's focus on one
thing and it work. I mean listen if
you're It turns out that ketosis
actually um can be a powerful has been
shown to be a powerful way clinically to
intercept epilepsy in children.
>> It's also been surprisingly useful to
intercept brain can certain brain
cancers to change the speed of growth of
brain cancers. So it you know there
clearly has profound effects. The
question is, and I think this is the one
that really needs to be asked. Anytime
anybody thinks about any kind of diet
that's kind of extreme,
is it going to be good for you in a long
run, it might be actually very useful
for you in the short run. It's kind of
like when you're trying to train for a
marathon, you want to be disciplined or
an actor, you know, training for a film
role or a model, you know, needing to be
prepared in a certain way. These are not
necessarily healthy habits or I would
say in general not healthy habits that
you don't you cannot sustain them for a
long period of time. Here we are talking
about living well and health span. You
want to actually find that sweet spot
where you get to do the things that you
enjoy where the things that you enjoy
also do something good for your body and
your brain uh and allow you to take your
entire journey in kind of like a
satisfying way. The overwhelming
evidence shows that to live a long and
vibrant life, you have to have social
connection. Surprisingly, this isn't
about the food or the supplements or the
injections, infusions, not even about
exercise. Um, and it's not necessarily
about
having a family necessarily either. It's
really being surrounded by people and
engaging with them. And I think that
speaks to a dimension of humanity
that we are able to confront now that
we're going beyond the old argument of
how many years you got in to live. The
other thing I want to bring up that I
think will be interesting for your
audience just to think about is that
when you hear the word aging, you know,
you're thinking
50, 60, 70 and on and and older, right?
But actually, we're aging the moment
we're born. I mean, there are these
milestones where aging, in fact, is
something very exciting. You don't start
losing muscle mass until you're about
40. You don't actually start changing
your metabolism till you're actually 60
if you're otherwise healthy. You sort of
don't really um your brain actually
doesn't really change until um you're in
your 40s or 50s as well. So there's, and
I'm only bringing this up because we
need to tease apart what society
teaches us to think about aging versus
what our biology tells us or tells us
what to do or makes us feel. And this is
where the mind and the body come
together. And this is what I'm trying to
say is that um aging is the most natural
process uh that we all experience from
the time we're born to our very last
breath. And so that it raises this whole
issue. This whole idea of social
connection is really really more
important than we thought. And if you
wanted to start thinking about one thing
that can help to bulletproof you against
many of the declines that we experience
in aging, biologically, medically,
clinically, the time to start thinking
about um finessing your friend group and
your social group and your family
connections is probably like when you're
40. Well, the other thing about how our
metabolism changes is, you know, these
amazing realizations that the hard
wiring in our body of how our body uses
energy and generates energy, which on
one hand is glucose metabolism, storage
of our energy, then burning of our
energy ths
in our lives. It's like when you're
born, your metabolism is set at zero. In
the first year, it goes skyhigh about
50% higher by when you're one year old
than when you're in your when you're in
your 20s. And then it comes down between
one year old and 20-year-old. It
actually declines to to cruising
altitude. So, you overshoot in the
beginning and then you hit your 20s and
it actually is designed to stay stable
throughout your adult life from 20 to
60. And then only after 60 it declines a
little bit about 17% until you're about
90. Four phases of human metabolism. Now
we of course know that everyone when
they hit their 40s and 50s things do
happen to their body their bones do get
their hormones change their their weight
does change. So what actually is
happening? Well, I can tell you there
it's not the biology that's changing.
It's that other forces surrounding us
are are putting pressure in our biology
so that it's harder to hold up the lift
of the metabolism that we're supposed to
have that we should be able to have. And
this is an important point in terms of
healthy aging and health span which is
that the things that you know you can't
change your hormone your hormones that
much as you know as women who are going
through menopause but you can actually
counter in other ways with stress
mitigation with exercise with diet all
of those things matter and managing any
chronic diseases. Now, an interesting a
super interesting area that I've been
looking at recently is the impact of the
Vegas nerve. Okay? So, I can I'll give
you like a very personal view of the
Vegas nerve.
>> Okay.
>> All right. Not my Vegas nerve, but when
I was a medical student, I was
dissecting uh you know, you're in the
anatomy lab in your first year. Okay.
And you can track this gigantic nerve
coming from underneath the skull down
through the neck
into the chest cavity. But now we know
something really remarkable about this
nerve that runs from the brain down to
the gut. And that is that 80 to 90% of
the signals actually don't go from the
brain to the gut. They go they run
upwards. It is really the
telecommunication system from our whole
body especially our gut up to the brain.
And so let's talk about aging. And like
the one of the most prized
human qualities of being vibrant and
thriving and and what most people I
think would say is a uh non-negotiable
when it comes to having good health span
is having health, brain health, good
cognition, right? Like okay, where's my
where do I leave my keys? That's okay.
But you can't recognize people. You
can't communicate well. you, you know, I
think those are the things that people
fear the most. Well, here is a new
science that shows that whatever is
happening in our gut, which is another
area to talk about with healthy aging,
is being communicated upstairs to our
brain. And so this idea of gut
microbiome, gut health is not just for
um people who are in the middle of their
lives worrying about uh irritable bowel,
but but actually it's something that
older people as we go through our
decades really need to be thinking about
having good brain health starts in the
gut. We count on doctors to be up on
things. And I can tell you that we were
taught certain things that we to believe
as truth. And the nature of science is
that things change as we learn more. And
what we're learning more about the human
body. Just when we thought we knew
pretty much everything there was to know
about the body, we're discovering new
new nerve cells in the brain, new types
of heart tissue, new kinds of stem
cells. I mean, it's really mind-boggling
what we're learning about the body. Um I
will tell you the um again when I was in
medical school I had to in the first
year memorize bacteria and along with
the mantra that came along with
memorizing bacteria was must kill
bacteria. Then you had to memorize
antibiotics must use prescribed drugs to
kill bacteria because bacteria are bad
and they cause disease. Well actually as
it turns out most of the bacteria that
we meet in our lives are not bad
bacteria. Occasionally we meet some bad
bad guys. Most of the time we are
surrounded by and we are uh inhabited by
beneficial bacteria that are good for
us. We're surrounded by good guys and
occasionally have a bad guy that needs
to be, you know, put put to rest. Now,
we were also told in medical school that
certain parts of the brain were sterile,
guaranteed sterile. For example,
mother's milk, completely sterile.
There's no bacteria in mother's milk
because well you mother nature said you
can't infect the baby so it's sterile.
Totally wrong. The mother's milk the
first suckle is filled with not only
nutrients that we didn't appreciate
before but also bacteria that populate
the the baby's gut. So mom transfers
back healthy bacteria into the baby just
with the first suckle. Number one.
Number two, we were told that urine was
also sterile and if you had bacteria in
your urine, you had a bladder infection.
That's still kind of the the the wisdom
that prevailing wisdom that's out there,
but actually the bladder has its own
microbiome, okay? And it's healthy
bacteria. So when you have a bladder
infection, it's a disbiosis. It's a
disturbance of what's natural. other
sterile uh uh uh parts of the body.
Human semen was always thought to be
sterile. It's doesn't have bacteria. You
can't have testicles loaded with
bacteria. Wrong. We do actually have
normal healthy bacteria that live in the
testicles as well. Interesting, right?
So, let's go to the brain. Of all the
places that you do not want to have an
infection, it's your brain, right?
Menitis is the lining of the brain
getting infected. you have like a a
brain infection
when I was training to be a doctor was,
you know, synonymous with a
life-threatening infection that you
might not be able to cure. All right,
with whatever antibiotics. Well, turns
out now because we're looking for
healthy bacteria, the brain has its own
healthy microbiome.
It has its own bacteria, which to me is
like a it's a it's a jaw-dropping thing
to think about healthy bacteria living
inside our brain. Number one, how does
it get there? How do they get there?
Number two, what are they doing in
there? Right? And we do know that
bacteria and nerves communicate like
through the vag nerve. And gez, do we
think that the bacteria in our gut
hitched a ride up in up the Vegas nerve
and like taking an Uber and got dropped
off in our brain? Maybe. So,
>> I love this analogy. Just imagine.
[laughter] It's a it's a it's a
remarkable
area of research and I think it causes
those of us who um
medical researchers like me get really
excited by these discoveries because it
means you know there's there's so much
more for us to learn that can provide
hope to people for good health span for
example or overcoming disease. I also
think that it forces us to um assume a
kind of humility
in the medical community that even
though we thought we knew a lot and
we're we have some tools that we can
actually use, how little we actually
know about how to heal and this is why
we need to respect mother nature, why we
need to listen to our bodies because
your doctor can't x-ray everything,
blood test everything. This is why
biohacking is a useful tool to monitor
um uh thing. I mean doctors biohack all
the time. We take all kinds of tests but
we can't know every we can't measure
what we don't appreciate yet. And so I
think this is why I always tell people
the first thing you need to do is to
think about connect reconnect with how
your body feels. listen to your body
because it's be it will be sending
signals to you, communicating with you
in ways that a doctor's tests may not
actually reveal. Has its own healthy
microbiome. Well, that actually um
unlocks kind of a box that allows us to
peer in to say, well, what else could we
be doing to make healthier brains maybe
with healthier bacteria? And the clues
are starting to emerge. Again, you know,
we're at the beginning of a new era of
discovering how to achieve brain health.
Um, you know, we used to think, well, as
you get older, the brain is going to
decline. Not necessarily. That if you
damage the brain or the brain gets
damaged, whether by trauma or by a
stroke or even by cancer, it's not going
to regenerate. Wrong. It will actually
regenerate. and that you know pretty
much uh if you lose certain functions
like whether it's smell or whether it's
even vision that you've lo once it's
gone it's gone. Not necessarily true.
And so a lot of these um
uh previously longheld tenants about
brain health are now you know just
starting to be reconsidered when we
looked at bacteria healthy bacteria. So
we do know that certain bacteria pl can
actually influence the brain. I'll we'll
talk about two of them. First is
lactobacillus plantarum. So
lactobacillus is a whole class of
bacteria that are really really
important for health. There's hundreds
of them different types of lactobacillus
um bacilli and lactobacillus plantarum
is one of them. Now each type of genus
and species each type of each flavor of
bacteria has lots of subflavors you know
it's kind of like uh I don't know you
look at get coffee you know look look at
all the different types of coffee you
could have a pourover you could have an
espresso and bacteria the same way so
one of the interesting things is
lactobacus plantantum has been shown
when delivered as a probiotic to smooth
out and slow down the progression of
Parkinson's disease these are um early
clinical studies, but the fact that a
single bacteria could actually have some
measurable discernable clinical effect
when in people whose Parkinson's were
not able to be well controlled. Now,
this is early Parkinson's and looking at
progression. So, you can slow down that
inevitable decline with uh with
bacteria. I had a really really good
friend of mine who passed away from ALS
and uh which is Luger's disease. That's
a horrible
neurodeenerative condition. We were
lifelong friends and I just watched him
decline. In his last years, we were
looking for I was looking for bacteria
that could actually help improve the uh
the brain and and that's how I first
started to look at Lactopus plantarum.
Now he passed away from his condition
but the but the work has continued to go
on in lactois plantarum. So it's called
PS128
um uh more studies are going on on that
but it just shows us just the power of
the bacteria and the brain. The other
thing that we know is that Alzheimer's
and other types of dementia seem to be
linked to bacteria that are harmful in
our mouth. gum disease, gingivitis,
inflammation of the gums due to bad
bacteria growing in there, dispiosis in
our gut like irritable bowel. Think
about irritable mouth syndrome, right?
So like except that we don't we don't
see it, we don't feel it the same way.
You're not running to the bathroom all
the time. You're just going about your
way, but these unhealthy bacteria may be
sending signals to upset the brain
microbiome as well. So, it kind of makes
sense as we're discovering this and
wondering
could it be that simple things that
improve our mouth microbiome or a lower
gut microbiome could actually
reshape our trajectory of brain health.
One of the bacteria that actually
lactobacillus that actually helps um the
brain is lactobacillus rutery. That's r
e u t e r i rutery. This is an amazing
bacteria. Um it is it used to be present
frequently in the human gut and over the
last century especially with the advent
of antibiotics it was be it became less
and less predictable but we find it in
foods. Lactobacos rye um is very
important. Let me let's first talk about
the body. So, it turns out that this is
a bacteria that in pregnant moms hitches
a ride on blood cells around 8 months in
pregnancy and then circulates in your
bloodstream and like catching an Uber,
it gets dropped off in the nipple so
that when the baby takes the first
suckle a month later, it squirts some
lactobacillus down the baby's mouth into
their gut. pretty amazing that a mom's
colon bacteria could make its way into
the mom's blood, get dropped off into
her nipple, and then be delivered to the
baby. So, this is the kind of mapping,
you know, kind of like the the the how
does this even occur, you know, and are
there and do do bacteria like have their
own ways where they can actually find
their way to different organs? We don't
know that. But we do know that
lactobacos rutery actually does impact
the brain. And it impacts the brain by
causing our brains to release oxytocin.
Oxytocin being the social hormone is a
hormone that floods us when we see
somebody at the airport that we haven't
seen in a long time that you like and
you go to the arrival gate and you give
them a big hug, you feel great. That's
oxytocin. When you get a kiss, not just
a peck on the cheek, but a deep French
kiss, oxytocin. Have an orgasm, that's
massive amounts of oxytocin coming out.
And this is a bacteria that actually
helps our brain dribble out oxytocin.
Um, and so again, the brain is not just
a collection of neurons to solve math
problems, but also helps us be that
social organism that we talked about
that's so important for healthy aging.
Hey, if you like that video, then you're
going to love this one. Check it out.