Welcome to the Life Span podcast where we discuss the science of aging and how to be healthier at any stage of life.
I'm David Sinclair. I'm a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the pole of Glenn Center for biology of Aging research. This series of podcasts is about why we age and things we can do to slow stop and even reverse that process. Last episode. We talked about really cutting-edge science and procedures that people are currently doing with their doctors and what they might be doing in the coming years. But today, we're going to talk about what you can do to slow.
And even reverse the aging of your outside, the outside of your body. And I'm joined today by my lovely co-author and co-presenter
Co human co-ed. Now conspirator, co-conspirator
Matthew Laplante
welcome. Hey, all right, let's do this again. I'm I was not, you know this, I was not so excited about this episode. When you told me when Wonder Boy, Rob told us that it was going to be about cosmetic aging. I poo poo this.
Then we prepped for it. We've been having great conversations over the last few days. I'm actually really excited about this
conversation. That's true. Especially the parts about improving your sexual function. I thought you were excited about most
but not in this episode. We'll have an episode on that know today. We're talking about cosmetic aging and we're talking about the difference between interventions that are only aimed at appearance and interventions that might impact both appearance and
aging and we had a cover a number.
Of topics, including how to keep your hair skin and Nails looking young and even reversing aspects of that process
and we should see here. There's nothing wrong with things that are purely aesthetic. That only work to make ourselves look good because those things might not impact our biological aging, but they can affect us, socially emotionally, mentally take them and make our lives better. So we're not going to Poopoo. I've used the word poo poo. Now several time, so we're not going.
To denigrate interventions that are only aimed at appearances but we are going to talk more about and center of focus around interventions that might also have an anti-aging
effect. Exactly. And there are a cover-ups we can. We're going to talk a little bit about Botox and other creams but really I think what's most exciting and most powerful are the technologies that are available now and shortly that can boost the body's ability to fight aging and even reverse it we put them into
Couple of buckets. We've talked about this in previous episodes. There's the adversity memetics, which we love which is really slowing down aging and reversing it or the abundance of memetics that give you a short term gain. Make you look good, but long term may not work or even have deleterious effects.
This is usually the part in the podcast where I say, hey David, we have to thank our sponsors, but actually there's something else we need to do. Because there was something we neglected to talk about in our last episode and it was a what was it?
A glaring oversight on our
part. We focused a lot on testosterone which is used by men and women increasingly, but we neglected to talk about other hormones that are not found much in men, estrogen progesterone and this pertains to menopause. Hormonal therapy and overall hormone replacement replacement therapy for women. So let's talk about that.
Yeah, and one of the reasons why this is really both interesting and important is because
Menopause affects the first part of our body to really the first organ and in a woman's body to really experience the effects of biological aging,
right? Sometimes even in women's 20s, but late 30s, early 40s, this can occur to anybody
for is often before your heart starts to show damage your lungs. Start to show damaged front from aging, your brain, even.
Yeah, and there are ways of making sure that you go through that transition. If you're
A woman in a more natural way and so we actually called up a friend of mine, Cindy messed and who's a professor in Austin who has given us some some really good advice given that you and I are men. We typically don't know a lot about this
but em and should not lecture on it
now, we're not lecturing but we will talk about how it pertains to aging. What the current thought about HRT actually
is will get. Can you take us through? We had this conversation, several years ago and it stuck with me for a really long time. Can you talk about why it is that the female reproductive system?
Ages earlier than the rest of the body. You started to notice this in
mice. Yeah. In fact, that's one of the reasons we studied fertility in my speakers. We could get those experiments done more quickly and we discovered and will bring this up in a later episode that we can reverse female infertility with molecules that stimulate these sirtuins we work on. But today, we're going to talk about the late part of life, about how to replace those hormones. The reason you need to do that is that we've evolved as a species to have children up until the age of about 30.
And then we should stop. Why? Because having kids, as a woman is very dangerous. There was a time when I think there was a one in five chance you would die from
childbirth, which meant to be younger and more vigorous to just get through that process,
right? And then you have to put a lot of effort into raising those kids snot like an insect. We just let them Blow Away In The Wind. You have to spend at least a decade and these days, two decades, raising those kids. And if you keep doing that your whole life, it might take away from the energy that you put into the ones that you have.
So, for that reason, women have evolved to become infertile around the age of
40 and that process that they go through is menopause. And it's, it's for someone and it's brutal
for sure. There's the well-known things. There's mood swings vaginal dryness, loss of sex drive migraines, hot flashes. Of course, there's also really serious effects on health, including increased susceptibility to heart disease, so,
This is clearly something that needs to be addressed and there are increasingly better ways to be able to allow women to not just transition through menopause. But to continue having the right hormone levels to protect them against aging long-term.
And one of the things is menopausal hormone therapy, which is chiefly and has been traditionally, chiefly, estrogen replacement. Although increasingly other hormones are explored. And this is treatment that can offer people a lot of symptomatic relief there were
Concerns for a really long time that it had some pretty gnarly side effects itself and even some could do some long-term damage. We're learning more about that right now
though, would it estrogen used to be used primarily? And now what we're finding is that the Dual use of estrogen and progesterone in the right combination and ratio and timing is really important and it may be that some of these side effects that people have been worried about and studies that came out early and particularly in the early 2000s about increased risk of cancer are largely.
Due to I would say the misuse but the the lack of understanding of what the natural levels are for a woman. In fact, most women don't know what their Baseline levels are in their 30s and 40s. That's why Cindy actually a professor mestan recommended to us, that women should get their Baseline levels and measure During certain phases of the, their menstrual cycle. Particularly in the luteal phase, what the levels are of estrogen and progesterone in their 30s and 40s. So that when they reach their late 40s,
He's their physician can match those and continue the mind at those natural levels for them.
This continues a common theme that we've had in all I think, almost every discussion we've had so far in this series, which is unless you're monitoring, unless you're tracking, you, you have no way of knowing what your actual Health Data
is, right? And so, I've been using inside tracker one of our sponsors. You can use a doctor if you want, but that's true. Not just for estrogen and progesterone, but for testosterone men and women typically don't measure their levels. They
Should be. And there's, there's a sex hormone hormone-binding globulin. Cause it s called shbg, which is important for binding. All these proteins in the blood, these hormones. And if you don't measure that one as well, you're Flying Blind with your dashboard, so I would recommend measuring that as well. And if the levels of that become too high a shbg, it's called, then that can actually counteract these therapies.
Okay. And so again, at the risk of lecturing on things that like body parts that we don't have the suffice it to say, a lot of the things that
We've been hearing about menopausal hormone therapy for many years, the dangers of it shouldn't scare people off from having conversations with their Physicians about this potential
treatment, exactly, and and even increasingly. So as Physicians and and researchers like Cindy are figuring out the right ratio and timing of these hormones increasingly. It's looking like there's a real long-term protection. So not just during the years of menopause, but extending that
Hormone replacement therapy out for decades, seems to protect against the heart disease, problems and bone loss. But of course, there are some downsides, particularly. If you have a history of breast cancer, you don't want to be pumping yourself with estrogen. So, please do talk to your physician about that.
We mentioned a list of effects that happened during menopause earlier. One of the ones that we didn't mention the relates to the theme of this episode is epidermal thinning--,
right? This is what happens to your skin as you get older and its accelerated rapidly during
Ring and especially after
menopause. And we're going to talk about that more in a moment. But first, let's do think our
sponsors. We definitely need to do that because they make this episode and all the others freely available. Our first sponsor is athletic greens. Athletic greens is an all-in-one daily green string that supports Better Health and Peak Performance. It's developed from a complex blend of 75 vitamins, minerals, and Whole Food, sourced ingredients. It's filled with adaptogens for recovery.
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Two levels, dot link, sliced Sinclair and claim the special offer that's levels dot link. / Sinclair. Today's podcast is also brought To Us by inside tracker inside tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and your DNA to help you better understand your body and reach your health goals. I've been using inside tracker for over a decade and I'm the chair of their scientific Advisory Board. The reason I have long used inside tracker is because they provide the best blood and DNA analysis.
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website. Okay, let's get into this. Our a lot of people I think know this this fact, but it's still I think surprises some people. The largest organ in the human body is
Is the skin and it's sizable?
Well, it's 1/6 of your total body weight, which is massive and it's the barrier to the world and the health of your skin is super important for the health of the rest of your body and vice
versa and monitoring the health of your scan can give you a lot of insight into the health of your body. We were talking before I like this to going to the grocery store and looking at a piece of
fruit, right? If you see some bruises and some
Some damage on there. You can assume that it wasn't handled handle very well, but also it might be old, so you give it a squeeze, you see how it is and we can we'll talk about ways to do that with our own bodies to really have a quick test and even some molecular tests that determine determine how molecular Lee old. We actually
are. There's one, you've been doing all morning this morning. Do you want to do it now?
The skin pinch test? Yeah sure. Well, so what you do is you rest your hand on a table, so it'd be relaxed normally and then you grab the back of your skin.
Pinch it up, and it should, if you're young pop, straight down in less than two seconds, someone in their 30s and 40s. You'll pop, straight down. Once you get into your 50s. It's going to take many seconds
and the chart that you found, and I don't know what the, you know, with the scientific basis for this is the chart that you found said, like, when you get into your like 80s and 90s, it can take what, like, 20 30 seconds, something like
that. Oh, even worse. So for people like us were in our forties and fifties, it should be less than 10 seconds.
The time you're 60, it typically takes 10 to 15 seconds to come down over 70 between half and a whole minute to go down.
Okay, and your 15 years went down right away. So that's that's
good. Well, I've been doing the right stuff for a number of years, but that's pretty good for someone. My age looks like yours that you're it also helps. If you tell ya, it's Debbie,
we don't probably even need to say this but like it's just obvious like I am aging faster than you are aging, but I'm
Still I'm doing okay on the the skin pop-up
test you are there were there are other ones we can talk about later like nail growth.
Let's take on skin for a minute here though, because one of the things we talked about right before the sponsorship break was epidermal thinning. This is a problem for women who are suffering from menopause. It's also a problem for men. It's a problem for people as they age and I think a lot of people don't understand or don't really think about, at least I didn't think about why this is
Such a pernicious problem. Why is it bad? If we have really thin skin, in addition to the fact that we can't take
insults. Well, right. Well, yeah, we tend to forget that our skin is the major organ in our body that protect us from from Death. We've seen with with covid-19. Well, what happens is, once you get a pathogen in there it'll run rampant and so our skin is the main barrier and as we get older it can be damaged much more easily. You see an elderly people, the bruising, The Ripping the tearing. It's becoming paper thin.
And so we need to protect it. So not it's not just about looking good in your 40s 50s 60s, but in your 70s 80s and 90s, it's super important. It's life and death as to how young your skin still. Is
this really hit home for me when I met David Armstrong.
Yeah, so he's us, the u.s. Is top surgeon for ulcers wounds in the foot and he spends his whole life trying to figure out ways to reduce the number of ulcers, which it's about.
13% of the US has a foot ulcer right now. That's like that right now, 40 million Americans have foot ulcers. And we don't talk about it because these are people who typically are older and don't have a voice in society, typically, but he is on a mission to advocate for the Cure of these things. And also, he spends his life trying to cure people of these ulcers, but it's very difficult. The reason is these ulcers because the, the skin is old. It doesn't heal very well in typically, it'll
be open a weeping wound and crusty around the outside. It looks like you've got a and you've quarter sized hole in the bottom of your foot. That has just a Rises just by tripping on a on something or stepping on a something
sharp, which is a couple wearing a diabetes, which leads to a loss of sensation of feeling in the foot. This can be incredibly dangerous and lead to among other things a tation but infection which leads back to this whole like reason why we're talking about why it's so important to keep our
Skin as thick and healthy as possible,
and keep the feeling in our skin, remember our nerves, or all in our skin, and as you get older, you lose that feeling. And there's a story that we wrote about in our book life span, where one of David Armstrong's patients, had stepped on it. On a thumb, tack a little nail and it was in his foot. He didn't notice. And he only noticed days later because he could hear a tapping sound as he was
walking. Absolutely terrible. Every time, I hear that story. I just
cringe, well, it's a really big problem, because often, you can't make these heel and then the, the
David does is and all these other surgeons is to cut around that scabby site and it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and eventually just got this open wound. Next thing you have to do is cut the foot off and then you keep cutting and cutting and there's a, I think it after about five years of getting one of these, big ol sirs. You are almost certainly going to die. It's worse than getting a cancer
diagnosis. And there's a lot of people probably listening right now and go. Oh no, this is never going to happen. To me. I don't have to worry about that. I'm super healthy. I'm not going to get diabetes. I'm like, but we're all aging.
And I think most people can picture their Elder self and when they do they see their skin. It's a little more wrinkly. It's a little more saggy. It's a little thinner. And this actually means something more than just appearances and we know this from this 2012 study, where researchers took the photos of about 300 elderly people and they gave them to another cohort of people to rate they rated for the Aged.
Is that the Lothian Birth Cohort neighbor? Yeah, right. Well that so they looked at people from 1921 onwards and it was, it was fascinating, though. They raided them for a bunch of things, their age, their health, attractiveness facial
symmetry. This is just based on the appearance on the photograph, but I was like, no, you're not meeting these people. You're not taking any tests, were, just looking at their photos and saying, are they healthy or not? Are they old or
not? So, what did they find?
They found that if you follow those?
People out seven years from the time that that photo was taken. There was a really high degree of predictability that the people who were rated as older-looking, whether or not they were actually older chronologically or not. If they were older looking, they were more likely to
die. Well, that totally fits with what I hear from my friend near browser lie down in New York. He's at the Albert, Einstein College of Medicine and he studies centenarians. These are families people's that tend to live over, 100, not to be confused with centurions.
Which were Roman soldiers. Sometimes that's mixed up, but he sends me sometimes, a photos of his centenarians, the father, and the son and both. Those guys that, you know, now imagining in my head, look really young, not just the guy that's 100 who probably looks 70, but the 70 year old son looks 40. And so this is fitting with the idea that you are really as old as you look.
When I read about the 2012 study. I immediately thought
You know, it would be really interesting is, if now we could take those photos and then test those people's biological ages with a DNA methylation clock Horvath Horvath clock, which we talked about in Prior episodes and lo and behold somebody at already thought of this, this often happens, by the way, you and I are talking about research and would like, oh, we should check this out and then somebody else has done it. But another team of researchers did do it. And it turns out that it didn't correlate. There wasn't correlation between these people's appearance is
Even though that was predictive and their biological clock but there's a distinction that needs to be
made. Well, they were measuring the blood clock in that case. And so what we've learned since is that their various tissues have different clocks and it helps to have specific clock for that particular tissue so that others have since gone on to make skin clocks and they seem to work better for measuring the age of the
skin and Mariana Baroni, who's a friend and colleague of yours.
From Brazil. She led a study that was published in 2020 showing that when you do this when you build this epigenetic clock based on methylation of skin cells, it does predict biological age quite. Well
it does and there's a good reason why skin is going to age probably faster than the rest of the body though. It's still a good indicator. And that is that it's exposed to the elements. We know that if you grow up in Australia, like I did that, the UV light is going to create DNA damage that
Celebrates the epigenetic changes that lead to aging so someone like me is going to have probably older skin than someone my identical twin. If they had moved to
Norway and like a third of Australians suffer from some sort of is it skin cancer
skin it skin cancer, you know, it doesn't have to necessarily be lethal, but the third of Australians have something removed from their skin, that could be a tumor. Now, what's been done since I was a kid, is that beaches? Give away all beaches?
Have free sunscreen, which is great not in my day.
We're like when you should some day the beach. There's like a
little. Yeah. Yeah. The prize pack like instead instead of having ketchup in the u.s. They have sunscreen.
Well, now we have the hand sanitizer but it's the same thing, right? Is don't use that, that's at the beaches. They don't have to bring your own
son's. Not enough. That would save so much money because I think it's expensive. Billions of dollars in health care costs in the country for just a few dollars of sunscreen.
That's a really great investment.
Actually. Yeah. I'm sometimes a strategy does things really well, but the
Um, though is that for those of us who grew up without the sunscreen, we have this damage that we're probably stuck with though increasingly. We're learning you might be able to reverse that damage as
well. And that was part of this study by Mariani brownie as well. They looked at the application of sin elute drugs to the skin cells and the measured the
results they did. So let's talk about skin aging from a really modern perspective.
Is that skin is full of senescent cells? These are zombie-like cells that reach a point where their epigenome is. So dysregulated that they check out of the system. They start dividing reducing, right? They don't divide and we can stain them blue with a dye called beta galactosidase and the pretty common in an older person. The problem is that they secrete these inflammatory factors. And also what are called mitogens stimulate cancer. So they're not good things and in Mouse and increasingly in a few human studies, we know that.
If you delete these cells kill them off, you get Rejuvenation of the body. It includes internal organs. You can treat diabetes with it, but the skin becomes rejuvenated. And in this study what they did was they took out skin biopsies from people and grew them in tissue culture dishes. So it's ex Vivo and they could then treat them with sin oolitic drugs. They used a couple, a pretty common ones ones called ABT 263, which is from Abbott's. Also known as Nevada clacks.
And they also use rapamycin, which we've talked about before, as a way of mimicking starvation in the body or fasting, at least. And what they found was that those skin explains as they're called grew thicker, which is what you want. If you're reversing aging, they also could measure the clock, their status special skin clock, that they had built themselves out of measuring the DNA methylation chemical patterns during aging of skin and there they did find that this analytic treatment reverse the age of those little pieces.
Is of skin,
the implications of what you're talking about in regards to the senescent cells are really interesting. Because again, what we're talking about is the body's largest organ and it's not a system unto itself and interacts with all these other systems. So if we have senescent cells secreting, these, the cytokines all over the place, they're not just staying in the skin. They're going to move other places too. So if you can lower the age of the skin, you can save the rest of the
body. That's
Right. And Jim Kirkland, from the Mayo Clinic has found that. If you just put what we call it, what he called, a dab of senescent cells under the skin in a mouse. It causes the whole Mouse to get older. So lowering the overall burden of senescent cells is a good thing. And where are the most senescent cells in the body because of the damage from UV light, you get them mostly in the skin.
Okay. So one of the ways to do this potentially to fix. This problem potentially is retroactively, we can address it with some kind of settle lytx.
We can also do it proactively by just simply avoiding all that UV light, wearing sunscreen. Let's, let's talk for a little bit about what's actually happening. How does UV light actually like make ourselves? Go go
Bonkers, right? Well, the first thing to appreciate is a little bit of sunlight isn't going to hurt you. In fact, you need it or you vitamin. It's not bad for you, but you can overwhelm the system. So if you actually get sunburned, you get red, there's inflammation.
Welling of the skin tenderness then, you know, you've overdone it. And so what I tend to do is I go out a little bit each day, maybe for 1020 minutes, get a bit of sun, but not to the extent where I'm going to get burnt, and I always wear sunscreen out there if I'm going to be out for longer than that. So what's happening actually is that the sunlight is hitting the DNA molecule itself, and causing two letters in the DNA to chemicals. The t's? Remember, there's a CT G, four of them. The teas that are next to each other will link chemically. It's called a
The thymine, thymine dimer, and now the cell, if the thumb fuses them, the sunlight. Yeah, Photon will hit them. They'll become fused like that. And so, if you've got a zipper, you can imagine what happened to his zipper. That's fused along. How do you possibly open up that zippers? You need to open up DNA to read it and to copy it and now you got these these stuck
together, so you can't it can be
opened up at it. Well, it's a big bulge in the enzymes that read DNA have trouble getting over it. So you have to remove them. Usually what happens is that?
The cell Cuts them out and puts new ones back in.
Okay, and when you do, when you can use those, do you know what happens?
You live long and prosper that also helps. Let's see if I can do that. There we go. So, what what's actually happening though? Is not what you might think. The old idea was that these thymine dimers are actually mutagenic and cause mutations. Okay, but what we now know, from studies from my lab and others, is that the act of repairing that DNA damages, the problem, and it's the reorganization.
Ization of the proteins in the cell that ultimately lead to the cell. Losing its identity.
Okay, so I have not been as good as you have been about wearing sunscreen. So I have to probably address this retroactively. Can I just like rub some rapamycin and ABT 263? All my skin and it's all
good. It probably would work. You have to be careful cause rapamycin suppresses the immune system remember and right now, those drugs are not available. As far as I know for.
Call treatment but actually Baroni dr. Baroni then took that finding and then use that little skin explant beta-gal stain, which is blue to look for peptides small little proteins that we talked about in the last episode. Which one of those 700 something peptides, if any had age reversal effects, got rid of that, blue senescence teen and reverse the clock and out of those seven hundred and something peptides. She found a few there about 20, the
look good. And one of them, she's actually put into a product that she sent me to try the other day. It's called one skin and I'm not an advisor to this group or anything, but it did seem to work it. Look just as good as Retin-A, which is the leading product that is used to reduce fine lines and wrinkles to. But I know she's developing additional peptides to put into her cream. Not just this one that is starting to show some efficacy in human, clinical
trials. The thought process be had behind, having a peptide in a cream is, is
what so we don't know exactly how.
Peptide makes the skin younger, but one of the downstream effects, one of the benefits certainly is involving the coal. A one gene that makes the protein collagen which we've known for over 50 years, to be an important component of a younger skin, making it more flexible and
thicker collagen, of course, is really super popular supplement to put in beauty products right now to protein, but it starts to attenuate after our
mid-20s, right? Well, it's when your, When We're Young is the most abundant.
Giant protein in the body, it holds together, our bones. And our
skin is why I like babies are all chubby and beautiful and plump,
right? Yeah. It's a wonderful protein, but we don't make enough of it as we get older. And that's why beauty products in particular want to boost that production, but you can also smear it on put in powders. Put it in drinks. Take it as a pill energy drinks. Have it in it. The question though is is it useful is eating college and going to be good. Well, one thing I can say for sure is that halogens, made up of a lot of
Amino acids, you need to get the right ratio of color of collagen, amino acids from those products, whether or not the collagen itself, makes it into your bloodstream after being degraded in your stomach and no, not yet. So that there's a big debate about whether these products are working by being broken down and rebuilt or actually make it into the body as an intact peptide of string of amino acids, and I would say the jury's well, and truly still out on those
things. It is fair to say that. If you as long as you pick a safe collagen products,
There's likely not a lot of harm
that can come from, not at all. There's no, there's no harm in taking collagen and probably what it's making sure is that you don't have any deficiencies in the amino acids. You need to make this most abundant protein in the body.
What we know right now is that there's probably more benefit from retinol or vitamin C in terms of protecting your
skin. Well, yeah, vitamin C is good for overall body's Health. It's essential for it's an antioxidant Retin-A, though is
One of the most important aspects for preventing and reversing fine, lines, and wrinkles in the
skin and these substances actually create collagen down the line.
Right? Right. These retinoids have been shown for many years to boost the production of collagen that that's clear. They also do other things, they increase the growth of the epidermis and the stratum corneum, which is important parts of the the skin make it thicker. They also can actually lower skin pigmentation by about 60% lot of people want.
To have even colored skin. They make fiberglass, grow basically stimulating cell growth, which is really important. They lower the lipid. So that's why it's often used as a defense against acne. And in fact, you were telling me earlier that you've used that before
when I was a kid. Yeah, fried out my skin something awful, though. I mean, it makes you like super susceptible to sunlight. So you have to wear, you have to wear
sunscreen. Well, that's true today. If you put it on your skin as an adult, you have to be careful from the Sun, but mostly you end up with dry skin.
Make sure your moisturizing while you use the retinol products. And there's another thing that's important about these are what are called mmps. This Metallo protease has that break down the skin and you want to inhibit those as well, which is what retinol is do. Actually, what they do is they go inside the cell and there's a receptor inside the cell that binds to the chemical that you're adding, and then they go in and turn on certain genes that provide all of this extra cell growth and other benefits to the skin, but you have to be careful because if you overdo it,
Get really dry skin. And if you get it in two places, like your eye, it can be really unpleasant. Oh God, that sounds awful. Yeah, don't do that.
Um, they also have an advantage of creating keratin or promoting keratin,
right? So the keratinocytes are lower down in the skin. And so keratin is a super abundant molecule as well. That's important like collagen for the flexibility. It's important component of not just your skin, but your hair and your nails as well. And yeah, Retin-A can promote the growth of the keratinocytes that make
Let's take a little aside here and talk about Nails because this is sort of like, you know, skin hair nails. And a lot of people forget that this is a pretty good or like a lot of people might not know that this is a pretty good indicator of your state of
Aging. Yeah. It's a pretty fun one. I learned this a number of years ago. When I was at MIT that the rate of your nail growth, is a really good indicator of how your aging or not aging. And so, every time I have to cut my nails, I'm thinking, how long ago did I cut my nails?
It's all born from a study from 1979 where they glued on these little measuring tapes on to people's nails and measured them over years. In fact, and there was one individual. Mr. Bean, actually who measured his nails for most of his life. He might have been doctor, being a professor being. I'm not sure what. But we have that graph and actually looking at thousands of people. We now know for sure that the rate of nail growth decreases about half a percent per year. And if you measure that, it's a really good indicator.
Of how old you are biologically. And so I don't do that. But I do pay attention to whether my nails are slowing down in the growth or
not. I don't because I bite my nails which I know is a terrible habit, but I like to say now that I'm just engaging in a toffee G which is, you know, good for my life span
right? Taking that carrot and and putting it back in your stomach.
Right? Exactly. But a top is you actually is a function also of retinol, a result also of Retin-A
it is, there's Anna, Maria Cuervo down.
Albert, Einstein College of Medicine is a world leader. Probably the world leader in understanding autophagy, the recycling of old proteins in the cell. There's shallow or topology. When you skip meals there's deep cleansing. What's called chaperone mediated or topology, which is after three days of fasting. These retinoic acid, 's control that pathway of autophagy through a protein called Lamp to a what's exciting about. Anna Maria's work is just this year. She published that. If you upregulate that mechanism, this chaperone mediated autophagy.
Live a lot longer 30-40 percent longer. So it's an truly of longevity mechanism that we can control with these
retinoids. But there's something a little bit counterintuitive here because Retin-A actually turns out to maybe not engage its connection with the topology isn't necessarily positive for Life Span. Like, we think another cases
right as we keep saying in these episodes. There's a balance between hunkering down during adversity and mimicking that and going helpful.
Leather burning the candle at both ends with these abundance when Medics. And it looks like retinoids Retin-A are the second type that they stimulate the body to grow because the body thinks it's a time of abundance, but it might be the at the expense of long-term skin health because what it's also doing is toning down. Shutting down, this CMAs chaperone, mediated rock or topology. That is shown at least in animals to extend their lifespan.
So retin a long-term bad for the Aging of our skin.
Jury's out
unclear unclear. So, what I would say as a scientist might work though. It needs to be tested is use retinols. If you want to reduce wrinkles and lines, but not every day. Give your body a rest, perhaps when you're fasting, don't use it. And so you get that cleansing in between the growth periods.
Okay. So let's talk about one more thing that everybody associated with cleansing antioxidants, but I know you're like, at least in terms of like, like oral Dante oxidants. You're not a big
Fan, you don't believe that they work. The same way. That people think they work. What about when they're in skin, creams? Because you see that all the time, every skin creams, got money, and it's loaded with antioxidants,
right? So you said what, I believe, will often. I don't use that term believe because I'm a scientist and I like to report, what's in the literature, and what's in the literature on, antioxidants is kind of depressing for longevity over the last 30 years. A lot of different antioxidants have been tried ingesting them injecting them genetically, modifying mice putting it on skin very few results. If any
There is one antioxidants that seems to work pretty well for longevity. And that's Resveratrol. But as, you know, I don't believe Resveratrol is working primarily for its antioxidant activity. Instead. It's activating our body's defenses and mimicking
adversity. But there are topical creams that have Resveratrol in them.
Now. There are an increasing number of Cosmetics that have Resveratrol in them. But Resveratrol is probably not working, primarily through its antioxidant activity. It's pretty weak as an antioxidant. What's likely happening? Is that Resveratrol?
Turning on the sore to an activity which then turns on antioxidant enzymes but a lot of other good things, revving up, metabolism increasing, blood flow getting oxygenation into the tissue as well. So I think that was virtuals, a really great component of cosmetic but not for the reasons that you might
think. Are there other energy? Boosting molecules that are in creams right now.
Well, I'm actually working on a way to boost NAD in the skin that products not ready for prime time yet, but already people have figured out that if you Boost energy levels, it's good for the
In often you find nicotinamide or nicotinic acid, or molecules related to those in, in cosmetics, and they've been shown to actually have quite beneficial effects on the skin thickening. For example, mostly people think it's because of the B vitamin vitamin B3, but actually probably what's going on is it's turning on again, the sort of, to, in defenses of the
skin. There's one more molecule we should talk about. As we're talking about topographic cream tea for move on to other remedies. That's hyaluronic acids.
These are really, really popular right now.
Well, yeah, that really important for the plumpness of the skin and the ability of it to flex. So when you do that, this is college and it's also it's ha involved and it's not just in the skin, ha is found throughout the body. And what super interesting about ha is that it's found in, in abundance, in long-lived organisms. It seems to be involved in protecting animals. In particular from cancer. One organism. We've talked about before is the naked mole rat actually are
Up one of our children. Our Alex is handling and helping to raise naked mole rats up at the University of Rochester. So I get photos of these naked mole rats. They have beautiful skin, by the way, nice and smooth. I think we call them a, a condom filled with
walnuts. In an earlier episode. We did refer to them as a condom filled with walnuts, which does not at least invoke in my mind, a beautiful animal but it's very smooth. Beauty is subjective but moving right
along that what these what's found in?
Is if you take out these cells from the naked mole rat and this is V. Rugova Nova's work, where Alex works in the lab those cells. They were found to produce this jelly like substance in the dish and which he looked at what it was, it was hyaluronic acid. And then she found out that if you take away that hyaluronic acid, the cells will divide and become more tumorigenic, or cancerous conversely, what she's doing now is making a mouse that has heaps of hyaluronic acid in its body with the expectation and hope that it will be
Isten to cancer long way of saying that these products aren't just for beauty. There might actually be preventing cancer in the skin, as well,
your colleagues at Harvard Medical School. Christina, Lou and Janelle Nassim have said, the topical ha does work really well as a moisturizer. But they've suggested that if the goal is to improve volume loss and laxity of the skin that you might want to consider injectable. Ha, does that make sense to you?
Well, it does. Because aha
Is it typically a big chain of chemicals? It's sugars. Put together and they don't get into the skin unless they're really small. So one way of doing it is injecting it into the actual skin, but even then it's hard for the cells to take it up. So, one other way that's in some Cosmetics is to have small chains of ha all the gamers. They're called to let them get into the skin and then let the skin synthesize those chains inside the cell where they belong and also outside that can be done naturally. But also what we discovered and patented in my
Is that Resveratrol boost the hmas to Gene, which makes the enzyme that makes those strands of
ha David. A lot of things we've discussed so far. At first blush, they seemed purely cosmetic. But then we've dive a little deeper. We realize there's some anti-aging implications. So I did didn't want to move on from skincare until we talk to about what is probably the most popular intervention for wrinkles for aging skin. And
Talk about whether or not there are any anti-aging implications in
Botox, right? Well, besides retinol, but Botox is the most popular treatment and just, let's talk about what Botox is. I think most people know, but let's just remind everybody. It's a toxin that's comes from a bacterium, clostridium, botulinum. It's found in Foods. If you eat it, a lot of it. You don't want to lose them. NG will kill you fact, if you have what, is it a gram or kill a million people. And two killers can kill all of
Humanity. It's that toxic
and we inject this into our faces,
we do. And it's very effective at getting rid of wrinkles and no question. And the way it works is it inhibits neurotransmission and neurons are telling the muscles in. Let's take my forehead, for example, a pinching off the muscles there tighten and you get the wrinkles. So when if you get BOTOX in there, the muscles will relax and then the wrinkles will go away for six to nine months. You have to keep repeating it though and keep getting injected in those
spots, but
This is not a clearing out of cellular senescence or a react differentiation of cells. This is just numbing the
nerves. All right, it's purely cosmetic. As far as we know, it's not MediCal. It's not creating headaches, which it can be used for, but that's okay. If you look good, you're going to feel better. You're going to have a better social life. All of that is good for longevity. So it's still worth talking about.
Okay. Well, let's talk about skin peels now. Same thing. No real, but I'm just make your
Skin, look nice and shiny and clean but no real
benefit. I think so. This would be an area of just getting things smoother. Not really changing the age of the skin itself, but there are some treatments that probably caused enough havoc and damage to the skin to induce minor stress adversity, hormesis as we've called it, and that would be micro-needling. So I do. I've never had micro-needling done of
you. I mean I've had tattoos, is that the same thing
probably with
A bit of ink. But my I mean, it sounds not too pleasant. But this is a machine that's putting thousands of holes in your skin. What's probably happening happening is that there's a hormetic effect. There's there's this release of all sorts of repair factors and could have long-term benefits on the age of the skin as well. But that certainly hasn't been proven
yet. Almost everything we've talked about today, has some cost involved and there are plenty of questions till to be resolved on a lot of these things, but there's some stuff.
Of the, like I called the no does stuff. That really obvious stuff, but we should probably say it. Anyway, you mentioned earlier sun damage, staying out of the sun. Really important smoking is really bad for your
skin. That's probably the fastest way to accelerate Aging in your body and it shows up on your skin. There's no question. You can either even see the difference in
people. A lot of people don't know this but alcohol also shown in research to be pretty bad for our skin. So if you don't
need right, I didn't know that. I only recently gave up alcohol.
All and having seen that study
and sort of like along those. Same lines smoking alcohol, bad food, eating processed foods, eating foods that are like rich in fats and chemicals and all that gross
stuff. Yeah. It's amazing how much your food can affect the Aging of your body and your skin. And you can see the big difference if you've ever had a pet and you change the diet of the dog, for example, we see this in our mice, we feed them good food and their skin and their hair changes,
radically and there, that's the important transition point there. The hair also changes as well.
It's good for your skin. Generally is good for your are too. Let's talk about hair loss. We're also going to talk about hair graying. But look, I went, I started going bald. When I was in my mid-20s. I was told to blame my mother's side of the family. Is there any truth to that Genetically speaking?
Well, there's a little bit of Truth to that. There are over. 600 genes are involved in hair loss. And only about 20 of them are found on the X.
Chromosome, which is what you get from you, your mother, which accounts for about eleven percent of male pattern baldness is what we're talking about here if you're a female.
It's 50/50 whether it comes from your father, or your mother because it's carried. These genes are carried on the X chromosome. So, yeah, I mean a little bit as you can blame your mother side, but most of it is fairly random with your parents, but it does old strong genetic component. No question. It can be slightly slowed with these treatments and modifications to your aging rate. But ultimately in this case, it's genetically determined that said no one's ever died from hair loss or hair graying. So it's not such a big issue.
And actually, it can be dangerous to have long hair in some instances.
Well, yeah, even in my lab, if you have really long hair and you look into a centrifuge, it can be quite a mess
afterwards. Also, for people who like do a lot of work with pyrotechnics, long hair, bad
idea, right? Says the guy who lost his here a while ago.
Yes, I'm safe from that. But am I aging faster than other people? Because I mean, is that an indicator? I mean, like again, like I started losing my hair. Really, really early. Is that an indicator that I was a genius?
Aging early, not in this case. We've evolved as primates as descendants of these Apes. Six million years ago to show off our age. As particularly as men because as we get gray, we lose our hair, we become more dominant. We seem to the rest of the tribe. We used to that we were wiser and we had more influence these
days stronger. We made it through the other Apes. That's why we look
old. Yeah. Well think of the Silverback Gorilla. That's the dominant one.
I'd same with humans. This was a sign that you should be given, respect not so much. These days in our society. It's more about staying younger. But in in previous times, even just going back a few hundred years being gray and distinguished was a real bonus.
Okay, so why aren't just a fundamental level does hair loss occur. I mean, I understand what kind of like the evolutionary drivers, but at a cellular level, what's going
on? Well,
it really goes back to stem cells. These are the cells that keep dividing asymmetrically, giving rise to other cell types and that they reside in the Bulge of the hair follicle. And there are, there are a variety of types. There are some that are just there to produce the Keratin in the hair. There are others that are there, melanocytes reduce the color. There's a new type of stem cell. It's called the hab. The hair follicle Associated pluripotent stem cell that people have found, you can now isolate and turn into bone and muscle. We don't know what roles they exactly play.
But what happens what we think happens during aging and was only recently, discovered less than a few months ago is that this important stem cells for hair. Regrowth, get kicked out of the hair, follicle. They get spat out, which was unexpected. We thought that they died, but they actually get expelled.
Do you feel like shout out like a little? Can
it? Right? Right. And there's a video of this that I tweeted about at the time and so what that means is that you want to prevent that from being a them, getting expelled. But also you want to maintain their function as well, which is all about.
Preserving their epigenome, their ability to remember the type of cell that they are more externally. What we've known for since the 1960s is that the hair follicle shrinks and get small caused in part by dihydrotestosterone. And when that happens, the hair becomes thinner and thinner until it stops going through, What's called the anagen phase, which is the hair growth phase as opposed to the other three phases which are called cottage intelligent and
exigent. And this is really what like a lot of the
Are aimed at preventing. Let's talk about some of those. There's topical treatments. There's pills. There's some other stuff. A little, let's start with topical treatments. These are creams that you rub on your head. It seems work.
They undoubtedly worked. This is monoxide. All also known as Rogaine. It was, first discovered in the 1960s from a group that was trying to lower blood pressure. So what it does is it stimulates nitric oxide production nitric oxide is important in Viagra.
It opens up the blood vessels and they put it into patients and they found that they got extra hair growth
and it is these were patients who were dealing with with high blood pressure and their doctors, prescribe them, their stuff in there. Like they came back the next week and they're like, what did you do to
me? Well, a few months later. Yeah, some of them got new hair and then in the 1980s, it was formulated with an oily substance called DMSO to get it through the skin layer in the scalp and found that it actually does slow down hair loss. Mostly at the back of the head, but also are here, even though it's not recommended, here. It does work. If you
Applied across the whole top like
that. Retin-A also works for promoting
antigen. Yeah, that's a little known fact. If you have some retinol cream point five percent. You can rub it on your on your skin to reduce wrinkles, but you can also rub it on the plot parts of your hair that are thinning out or you don't want to lose hair and especially in combination with Rogaine or minoxidil. It works quite effectively to slow that aging
process. Yeah. There was a study that showed after a year, if you combine Trenton on.
Which, which is Retin-A with a little bit of minoxidil, it resulted in regrowth and 66% of the people after you that's a that's a good result. That I mean, if you're trying to regrow hair that's a really good result. Yeah, it is. And the problem with this stuff is you've got to apply it several times a day. A lot of people don't like the way it feels on their
scalps. Yeah. It's an oily substance. It doesn't look good. Doesn't feel good. So most people stop doing that regularly, but there's an alternative that doctors are recommending which is taking a pill.
Propecia also known as
finasteride finasteride. Propecia. This is a once-a-day pill that inhibits
testosterone. Well, more specifically, dihydrotestosterone, teaches convert, right? DHT is converted by it. 5-alpha reductase and enzyme that's found throughout the body. Now, five dihydrotestosterone is important in the body. It reduces fat is good for the heart, good for the mind. It has some other. Downsides, actually helps your prostate grow as you get older and you need to go to the bathroom. So the
Real question is what are the best levels for optimal longevity? And actually there was a study on that there was a study of 3690 men that found that the levels of that hormone were optimal if they were relatively low but within an in Middle range of 9.8 to 15.8 nanomoles per liter, and those were the men that lived the
longest which is interesting that you're saying there's an optimal level because there have been some studies. Also looking at, for instance, eunuchs who don't have really hardly any to Sauce.
On it all is not any that's being produced by their testes and they tend to live a really, really long time. So UI, it's on the face of it. You might think like, the less the better.
Well, yeah, the testes at doing more than putting out testosterone obviously, and cutting off testicles. Probably or is affecting a lot of things, including the brain. There's a depression as
well. And also, by the way, a longevity strategy that we
advise. No, we don't recommend that talk to your doctor first, but we also, what's amazing about eunuchs is that they live
live on average, 14 to 19 years longer than regular men, that have a better than Deacon to them.
That's better than exercise that. I mean, like of all of the intervention, like, when we wrote this book, you told me that the number one thing that you learned about living longer was eating less, but I've to change that. Those numbers suggest there is actually something else people could do,
right? Cut off your balls if you're a man, but don't do that, don't do that, but but
It's interesting that Unix tend to live a really long time as do smaller people so that the excess of testosterone and growth hormone in general, seems to be promoting a an abundance mimetic. Okay, but what's really cool about these eunuchs is that I looked up the numbers out of those out of a bunch of Unix, 80 12 in total, three of them became centenarians live to 100 which is unheard of in the normal population. Normally the chance in the u.s. Of reaching 100 is only one.
In 4400
people, one of The 4400 and in the Unix it was like one in third greater than
130. Yeah, exactly. That's 130 times greater than the background rate than normal rate. So clearly it works. It's just not something you'd want to live with on a daily
basis. It might extend your life. But like many things it'll make your life longer but not
better. Well, and if it doesn't work, it'll just feel longer.
This really relates to one of the problems with inhibited testosterone, which is that it lowers sex drive. That's a potential side effect to
Propecia. Yeah, there's a bunch including mood swings. Well, you can be get depressed and breast tenderness as well. Yeah. So, I mean, you
really have to just hate the idea of being bald to, to go through, or to subject yourself to a lot of
this. But I disagree because that these are side effects that are in a low number of people, so you could try it if you want.
See how to fix you and if it's fine then good to go. But make sure you tell your doctor. If there's something else going
on. There's another intervention that has as far as we can tell. Almost no side effects whatsoever. It sounds super cheesy and futuristic frickin laser beams.
Yeah, laser beams. I didn't think this was real. It sounds crazy. You shine light on your head and your hair will grow again. Come on, but I looked into it and it's actually been approved by the FDA as a
treatment. There are Combs that have red laser light and caps that you can wear. These are typically treatments for 10-15 minutes a day or every other day and they literally have been proven clinical trials to slow down hair loss, as well as regrow some aspects of hair in, not everybody, but in the majority of
people and this is called, llt,
Low, laser light
therapy therapy, I think that's right. And the we're not quite sure how this were we know it works. We're not quite
Sure, how there's a leading theory about
mitochondria. Yeah. Well, they some people think it's due to heat. I think that that's a bunch of BS. What probably is happening? That makes sense to me. Is, we've heard about nitric oxide earlier about opening up the arteries and the blood vessels nitric oxide also controls mitochondrial function, and that lay a laser light has been shown to dissociate. This nitric oxide enzyme from what we talked about earlier in another episode. The electron.
Transport chain, there are proteins that make the energy, they're called the electron transport chain. There are five of those and they're made up of multiple proteins. And number five gets disrupted by laser light. In fact, this nitric oxide synthase, which is a protein that we mentioned earlier for blood vessels. Also plays a role here and the laser light takes away that protein, that nitric oxide synthase moves away. And now, what you get is a bunch of free radicals in the mitochondrion, which results in what we call my toe. Hormesis. A little bit of what doesn't
Mitochondria makes them stronger and multiply and probably that increase in energy is what allows those stem cells to stay young and
rejuvenate, rejuvenating stem cells, which means that of all of these strategies for addressing balding, the creams, the pills. The one that's actually having potentially seems that be having an actual anti-aging effect? Is the frickin laser beams.
It is funny the world we live in.
But it's beyond here now that it looks like shining red laser light which can penetrate deeply into the skin, even into the sub layers, can be beneficial on the entire body. And this is why we're seeing a huge increase in the sales of saunas that have red infrared, laser light as well.
Let's talk about platelet-rich plasma injections and other thing that's gaining popularity for a variety of conditions, a lot of athletes use these to recuperate after Sports.
Juries, but people are increasingly using these for hair loss as
well. They are its platelet-rich plasma PRP and what you get done as you go into a clinic, they'll take out your blood, they'll spin out the cells, take the platelet-rich plasma and inject it either into your veins for longevity or in most cases. Put it into your scalp in many different places with with a needle. They need to ties it so that you don't cry too much. And what is probably happening. Is that this
This plasma is filled with a bunch of goodies exosomes. We've talked about before hormones little peptides probably what are called wiesel's very small embryonic like cells were going to talk get to that in another episode. This mixture of things probably helps the the stem cells in the follicle get rejuvenated, maybe even turn back the clock on those but exactly what component in there that's working. We really have no idea
no to put point of frustration and irony, which is that like blood banks and
All systems are trying to get people to donate platelets, you know, for life-saving research and therapies, but one good way to get people to get their plates with out of their bodies to tell them that they can regrow their
hair. Yeah, it's true. There are a lot of people who don't just care about feeling good and living longer. Also how good they look and are willing to spend a lot of money on
that. Is there an anti-aging pathway involved in the pr PD think? I mean, you, noted, these are there, like the exes, ohms and the peptides. These are all things we talked about last episode. It sounds
Like potentially,
well it undoubtedly, we know that when you fuse, the blood systems that circulatory systems of an old mouse and a young Mouse, the young Mouse makes the old mouse rejuvenated and younger, we don't know all the components in there are there are some of them, there's one called gdf 15, for example, but then we don't know what's in this mixture that promotes hair growth. When it's found, they'll be purified and probably be given as a cream or an injectable. But until then, it's this messy PRP treatment
before
Move on from balding to graying. There's this sort of like hair thing that a lot of people are familiar with when they age and that is it stops growing on your head. It starts growing other places. You get in your nose, your eyebrow hair. Start to get long. You get in your ears. What's going on here?
We don't really know why hair starts growing in the wrong places. As annoying as it is. Probably, I think what's happening is that we have this evolutionary program where we used to be a lot hairier 6 to 10.
Million years ago, and those stem cells are still ready to grow thick hair in our ears on our nose, wherever it. You don't want it to grow. And that the changes in the structure of the of the DNA, the what we call the epigenome is changing over time and that those regions that are normally silent in the ears. We don't get big, hairy, ears are. Unraveling as part of the aging process.
These are parts of ancient genetic code that have been that have been allowed to escape from that from the
Owns and now the readable by the
cells, right? And we become our ancestors, unfortunately, so shave or pluck that out for now, but that what that means is, we would predict that if we can slow down aging, using the methods that we've talked about in this and other episodes. We should also prevent that process from happening or at least delay it till much later in
life. Would that be the case with graying hair, too?
It could be because graying is part of not just a genetic program, but can be accelerated by things that are also known to.
Eight aging itself, such as psychological
stress. And we, this is really interesting because we know from some fairly recent research that stress plays a key. I mean, it's always been sort of, no. No, you're going to make me go gray, right? My grandmother. You're gonna make me go gray in a Buick Grandma. You're already great, but we've long known that gray hair is associated with stress. What's coming out now? Is that it doesn't have to be
permanent. It's been known for, probably centuries that you can have these binary coloured hairs where they at, the
Tip of the hair. It's dark. And then it's gray in the middle and then dark again at the bottom and people have wondered what the heck is going on. And just recently, in 2021 a group of researchers, had a look at what was happening in people's lives during that gray hair growth period and they found that they were remarkably stressful periods of those people. Lives were where they, they didn't stop working. They didn't, they didn't sleep. They didn't go on a vacation. And so I think it's very clear that stress can induce gray hair or loss of color from the hair, but what's also remarkable but about
At finding, is that it proves that great hair is
reversible. Which means that what we're talking about here is an epigenetic
effect. Sure. I mean anything that is genetic is essentially irreversible. So this is an epigenetic effect. What I would imagine is that after you've been gray for many, many years. It's going to be very difficult to reverse that. But in the early phases, when you getting this patterning of grey and color green color, you are able to get those those packages DNA back to where they were, when you
Young using some of the methods that were talking about today, and we've talked about in other
episodes and this has to do with those term cells that produce pigment their melanocytes. Yep, these sit right next to our hair shafts,
they do and they inject the color as the Keratin is being put together into that that hair shaft and the prevailing Theory, as to why we get gray is that these melanocytes die through a process called apoptosis. Hopefully that isn't true. I think it's true for very late in life. But what we're seeing in this new study is that they become dysfunctional.
Functional before they die. And that's a period that we have a chance to recover their function and prevent them from dying. And there are a number of ways that I could think of at least two reverse that and prevent them from dying. One way, though would be to use some of these adversity, memetics to get that epigenome to
reset. That's what some researchers have done in mice, at least in a fairly recent study. Actually this year using a combination compound including cyclosporine a
Minoxidil which is the cream that we talked about earlier and then another pigment promoting drug, we dug into this little today and got really excited by what we
found. Yeah, because the paper tries to obscure what this actual chemical is this age. Reversing and pigment promoting drug turns out is called tacrolimus, which is a very similar molecule to rapamycin or also known as sirolimus which we've mentioned in earlier. Episodes is one of the main drugs that can extend lifespan and inhibit this complex.
Sir, proteins called mtor that responds to
fasting and like cyclosporine. It's an immunosuppressant, which means it's an adversity memetics. It's showing yourselves, the times are not all that great right
now, right? Is making your stem cells freaked out, that things are going to be rough and maybe we should be rejuvenated and start growing a little better. I just want to mention this cyclosporine a it's really interesting. You said it's an immunosuppressant. It's used to prevent organ rejection in my lab. We found it. Also rejuvenates mitochondria.
Through actually, making sure that What's called the mitochondrial permeability, transition, poor or mptp is preserved. Long story short, I think this combination of cyclosporine a from mitochondrial activity minoxidil, which we talk about is blood flow, improves blood flow and this pigment promoting promoting drug, which is basically an analog of rapamycin, which simulate a fasting response is the triple combo for hair
repigmentation. This is not yet ready for humans.
Use undoubtably is probably somebody trying this out in Hollywood. But as of right now this is still sometimes
future. I think so, you know people are already trying rapamycin as a drug ten milligrams every week or so. This isn't this is only being done by a few people under a doctor's supervision, but I could imagine that there will be products are made available to the general public one day. That would definitely restore hair color. It's not a miracle that this happens. It's just science and we're going to figure it
out and you're just like another
Those cases where when we address an aging pathway, we're addressing things that are Downstream of that aging pathway. And this really relates. I think really well to a general theme of what we've been talking about over the past few episodes, which is probably the individual problems that come with aging that we talked about right now. We're not the things that need to be addressed if we can hit aging somewhere Upstream of those
problems. Yeah, and another important point. Is that when we learn how to reverse,
Aging in the skin and rejuvenate the hair and get it to produce more color. Those lessons can be applied can be applied across the body because all cells have a fundamental root cause of aging and the same defense Pathways against that process. So for instance, rapamycin, cyclosporine minoxidil, these could be used perhaps in really low Doses and under clinical conditions. Tested to see if they have rejuvenating effects in other organs as well.
So maybe right now we're trying to figure out how to help.
People keep their hair more colorful, try to keep it in their scalp rather than on the floor, but, sometime down the road, we could be addressing things that are far, far greater importance to far more people,
right? And, and we foresee a day in my life, where you can take a pill, maybe three pills and you'll not just get younger, but your hair will regrow and become dark again, if you want it
to. So, we've covered a lot today. As always, if people want to go back, they could use the show notes which are
Time-stamped to find the thing that they want to talk about. Just give me a big picture here, though, of everything that we've talked about. And what are the, what's the big takeaway today?
Well, the big takeaway is that we're on the verge of being able to reverse aging in the body internally, but also externally and that will be a world where people not just live longer, but feel better about themselves as well. We've talked about injectibles Edibles, smear herbals. It's a lot of ways of getting these molecules into the body, not just ingesting them, but putting
On the surface and getting them into the layers where they needed to slow down reverse aging. There's a lot to talk about about the future of all of this development and what we're going to be seeing in the next five to ten years as well, which we'll cover in a later
episode at the top of the show. I mentioned that I come into this topic a little bit reluctantly. I didn't think we really need to be spending our time,
helping people thought it was a superficial topic. I
did. I thought it was a superficial topic and I can admit when I'm
wrong really. But yeah, right
once in a while.
While this isn't just about looking good. This is part of the progression of the things that we've been talking about throughout the course of this series. None of this negates also the importance of doing the exercise and eating, well, and engaging, you like the circuits in your body that respond to adversity.
Getting enough sleep, don't stress. All of that stuff. We all that stuff is
important, but then the outcome of that.
Is it can be that you look better. That's it. That's okay.
Right. So the moral of this episode is, if you can keep yourself looking good by doing the right things, you'll probably end up living longer to, if you're enjoying this podcast and you'd like to support us, please subscribe on YouTube, Apple podcast and Spotify on Apple. You have the opportunity to leave us up to a five star review. Also, check out the sponsors that we mentioned at the start of the episode. That's probably the best way to support.
The show these sponsors not only make it possible for us to get this show to you at no cost. But they offer products and services that we truly believe in and we think you'll benefit from trying. We also have a patreon account. It's at patreon.com slash David Sinclair. There you can support the show at any level. You'd like. Thanks again for joining us on this episode of the lifespan podcast.
