Brian (0s):
This week I interviewed double board certified physician in Physical Medicine, rehab, and anti-aging and Regenerative Medicine, Dr. Elizabeth Yurth. Dr. Yurth has more than 30 years of clinical experience and continues to stay at the forefront of orthopedics, cellular, and regenerative medicine. We discussed the problem with modern day orthopedics, along with how to halt the progression of arthritis, the importance of balancing hormones, how Dr. Yurth Repurposes prescription drugs, her favorite supplement stack and her one tip to get your body back to what it wants for us. Really enjoyed my interview with Dr. Y. I know you will too. Thanks so much for listening and enjoy the show. All right.
Brian (40s):
Welcome to the Get Lean, Eat Clean podcast. My name is Brian Gryn, and welcome to the show, Dr. Elizabeth Yurth.
Elizabeth (46s):
Thank you Brian for inviting me.
Brian (48s):
Thanks for coming on. We met through Dylan Jamele, who was on the podcast a few months ago, and glad to connect. You're out in Boulder and we
Elizabeth (58s):
From Boulder, Colorado. Yeah,
Brian (59s):
Right. I think I'm heading out to Denver in a few months, so maybe, maybe I'll come out and check out. You have a longevity institute out there,
Elizabeth (1m 7s):
Right? Boulder Longevity Institute.
Brian (1m 9s):
And what year did you start that And what made you sort of, what was the reasoning behind that?
Elizabeth (1m 15s):
So we actually opened this clinic about 20 years ago now. So we are kind of in this game a long time before most people were, I actually was, my background's orthopedics, so I had a big orthopedics practice, you know, doing, doing well, busy orthopedics practice with a whole group of orthopedics surgeons. And really about 25 years ago, I started to get a little disillusioned where I was like, geez, you know, we kind of patch people together, but for some reason people never really get better, right? You would stick steroids in a knee stick, steroids in a knee, and then full, ultimately scope the knee and then ultimately replace the knee, and then you'd move on to the next joint. And, you know, people just kept falling apart. And so I started learning about how could I keep people from falling apart a little bit more in terms of looking at their nutritional health and their exercise health and their hormonal health.
Elizabeth (2m 7s):
And started, so went back and that point, this whole longevity business was not like it is now. So American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, a four M was one of the few places to kind of get fellowship training. So I went back and did fellowship training in more regenerative anti-aging medicine and went, did some fellowship training in epigenetic medicine. And then I incorporated that into my orthopedics practice, which didn't go so well. You know, it was like, you know, you, you have 50 minute appointments and you're trying to teach people about hormones and nutrition and exercise, and that doesn't work so well. And So we decided we would open Boulder Longevity Institute. So for a long time I just wore both hats. I would buy day, do orthopedics through a traditional, and then send people over to my longevity clinic where I'd say, let's, let's actually get you healthy here.
Elizabeth (2m 54s):
Hmm. So I would work all day at doing orthopedics and then change hats and go back and do longevity medicine in the evenings. And really, I did that for a lot of years. And, you know, it's hard to give up what you've trained in for your whole life. So really it was only about five years ago that we just brought all the orthopedics into our longevity clinic. And So we do a lot of regenerative orthopedics here. We do a lot of, you know, doing things to help joints regenerate, but have, have focused more on treating joints from a very different perspective. So five years ago left the orthopedics practice, the, the sort of the straw that broke the camel's back was one of my partners. You know, I was ordering some labs on a patient and going over the labs, and one of my partners, you know, was sort of upset that I was actually doing this.
Elizabeth (3m 40s):
He was like, you know, we actually don't do medicine here. We do orthopedics. You need to stick to orthopedics. I thought, Hmm, that doesn't really make sense. This obviously is not a good fit. So, you know, and it was funny because I could, for a long time our, our practice was smaller. It was when it grew with, you know, more young partners and things like that that people became a little bit more focused on, you know, it's all about money. It's all about how fast we can see patients, how many surgeries we can do. And that wasn't my focus. So leaving there and coming here full-time, And now we've grown this into a huge institute that, that does a whole lot of things from brain health to bone health, to, to just longevity medicine. And it's been amazing.
Brian (4m 19s):
Wow. Yeah. I, I give you credit. I mean, I think, you know, it's like old school meets new school a little bit, right? And sort of collided and, and you went the more of, I would say the new school route.
Elizabeth (4m 31s):
Right.
Brian (4m 32s):
What would, what would you say your approach to orthopedics is compared to what the like traditional old school approach is?
Elizabeth (4m 40s):
So, the problem with the way we look at joint disease and spine disease, so we'll look at degenerative disc disease. Degenerative joint disease is, it's always been sort of felt it's a wear and tear disease, right? That we basically just wear out our joints. And so time is not our ally. The more exercise you do, the more you beat yourself up, the more you're going to wear out your joint. And that's actually as much a fallacy as saying the more you think your brain is gonna degenerate or the more your he beats, the more it's gonna degenerate our joints actually should not degenerate. So what we've learned over time in this sort of more longevity field, not recognized in the orthopedics field, is that joint disease is not just wear and tear.
Elizabeth (5m 27s):
Certainly an injury can propagate inflammation, which can start you down this road, But it is an inflammatory disease process. So it's an injury where your body didn't heal it appropriately because you did not mount a normal inflammatory response. Just like what's happening in things like getting a virus like COVID, right? That if, you know, when we develop long COVID, it's a, it's a adverse immune reaction to this virus. Well, the same thing happens. If I have an injury and my body over attacks, it doesn't turn off the inflammation, then I will continue to degenerate.
Elizabeth (6m 9s):
And then, you know, we stick steroids in it. We do what arthroscopic surgery on it. We do, you know, joint replacement on it, but we don't really treat, the underlying problem was that your body was adversely treating the joint itself. So we now have learned when you look at degenerative joints and degenerative spines, that they, those people have very abnormal inflammatory markers, that they have something that's called interleukin one beta that's very high in the synovial fluid of these joints. You look at one beta is a very bad inflammatory cytokine. It's also associated with cardiac disease, which is why people who have joint disease have much higher instance of cardiac disease. We always believe that was just 'cause maybe they exercised less, it's not, we now know it's actually a direct link to this abnormal inflammatory process.
Elizabeth (6m 54s):
Now, some of that can be genetic, right? You may genetically have higher levels of these inflammatory markers and some of it's environmental. Sometimes things we're doing will elevate these. So very high levels of things like interleukin one beta. And so we've never really focused on treating that. And then also very high levels of these degradative enzymes. So these enzymes that are designed to come in. So you hurt yourself, the body's designed to mount an inflammatory response. Sure. So for a few days we want these white cells to come in, we want the body to try and heal things, and we bring in these enzymes and the enzymes are designed to sort of clean up the mess. So now I've, you know, I've got this debris, these dead white cells.
Elizabeth (7m 37s):
So we have these enzymes that are designed to clean up the mess. So think about these little sort of pacmen, they're coming in to chew it up all of the degradative products. What if those don't turn off? So if a three days later, what should happen is I switch off this inflammatory phase and I started going into a healing phase. What happens to progress to an arthritic worn out joint or worn out spine is that switch doesn't happen. So these degraded enzymes, now it's a little bit like I'm scrubbing a spot on my wall and I keep scrubbing and I keep scrubbing. Now there's no spot, but there's no wall either. Hmm. So we know these high levels of these decorative enzymes play a role. We know these high levels of these inflammatory cytokines play a role. You can't treat that with surgery.
Elizabeth (8m 19s):
In fact, what happens if I step a knee scope in, I'm actually going to create ongoing more inflammation. Which is why when you look at knee arthroscopy, which has been pretty much banned in every other country for doing things for like, you know, if somebody tears a meniscus, you don't go in and scope it like we do here in the US because the data shows that you actually markedly worsen the progression of Arthritis when you go in and scope a knee. So, you know, and yet it's a bread and butter surgery. Here we do it everybody. You hurt your knee. The doctor goes, oh, let's go in there. We'll clean it up. Which makes about as much sense as you going in with your demented mother. And the doc says, let's cut out those bad parts of her brain, she'll be fine. So that's where we have to switch over our thinking.
Elizabeth (9m 1s):
And number one, treat acute injuries very differently where we allow inflammation to occur, not just blunt it as immediately. So what do people do when you hurt yourself? You ice, you take a bunch of anti-inflammatories, right? And you stop moving. Those are sort of the very worst things you could do in those first days of injury. Hmm. It's been well documented in the mouse model that when you do those things, you actually don't amount the necessary inflammatory response to start the healing process. Right? So the first three days, you don't wanna be taking a lot of anti-inflammatories. You don't wanna be icy, and you just want to let some of the inflammation occur. Obviously, if you need something for pain, sometimes you have to do things with that. And you wanna move as much as you can.
Elizabeth (9m 42s):
It might not be that joint, but you wanna move everything else. Every time I've had an injury, I'm back in the gym the next day. If I can't lock, I'll use my arms. Right? But you want to keep moving because motion actually pre brings in some of these healing inflamm or these healing cytokines proteins that help you heal. So for the first three days, we wanna actually let inflammation go, and then we wanna work on turning it off. So then you can begin more of an anti-inflammatory protocol. The very best thing is actually low dose aspirin. So low dose aspirin actually can be utilized because it turns something called a pro resolving mediator. And so an aspirin mediated pro resolving mediator pathway.
Elizabeth (10m 23s):
So basically we have these pro resolving mediator. So at three days we wanna bring these guys in. They're the key to turning everything off. Pro resolving means let's resolve the inflammation. So aspirin actually promotes that pathway. So, so when you looked at a mouse model, when they gave a mouse simply a low dose of aspirin three days after an injury, they did not go on to develop chronic degeneration or chronic pain. So we have to rethink the acute injuries. So number one, let's treat those differently so that we actually don't start this cascade of events. And then in people like, like me, I've had four ACL tears, I've had rotator cuff tears. I, you know, I've, I've have horrible knees, but no pain.
Elizabeth (11m 7s):
And that's because what you need to do next is look at people like me who obviously have a propensity out of a dad who had horrible Arthritis, who have propensity to degenerative joint disease and say, okay, what's wrong with her? And then we work on stopping those things that are wrong. So blocking interleukin one beta blocking these inflammatory degradated enzymes has to be top of the list of treating bad joints. So when you have somebody who comes in with an injury to their joint, first thing I'm gonna do is help them treat that injury appropriately. And then I'm gonna actually help look at their overall things. This is now the, you know, the, the fourth joint that's been painful to them. Then we actually start them on things that work on these inflammatory processes.
Elizabeth (11m 49s):
And our sort of favorite go-to there is a drug that's not it, it got approved in Australia in 2019, it's called xylitol. Hmm. And it's in phase three trials here in the us, but not yet available. But the drug itself is something called pentin polys sulfate. Pentin polys sulfate is available just in oral form. So it's been around since 1985 in an oral form to treat bladder inflammation. So it's a widely tested, widely used drug. So it's already been safety trusted. It's an FDA approved drug. The difference is xlo, all which works for joints is needs to be done in an injectable form.
Elizabeth (12m 33s):
So we have to do a little subcutaneous injection, not into the joint, just a little subcutaneous injection. We're trying to work system systemically on people. So what we've done is we worked with pharmacists that can take the drug, it's available, turn it into an injectable form on it, which we can use very tiny, tiny doses of, and stop this process. What pein does is it turns off interleukin one beta, it blocks these bad decorative enzymes. And the studies that have done been done now out of Australia Paradigm Pharmaceuticals makes this product show that when you have somebody on this drug after a year's period of time, they had 30% improvement in the joint space, almost 30% improvement. But the other group who was not on it, showed degradation of the joint, which is what we usually see, right?
Elizabeth (13m 14s):
A year later, the joint's a little worse a year later, a little worse than that. So we're halting and reversing the progression of Arthritis with this drug. It's, it's probably going to be a potential cure, maybe not complete cure for osteoarthritis. And yet it's gonna take a long time for it to get here to the us. Hmm. It'll ha it'll, it will, it will get approval and then we'll see what insurance does with it and things like that. But, But it will get approval. So we know that when you treat the inflammatory process, this, this disrupted process, that's the answer. Not scoping the knee. Scoping the knee, replacing the knee. So, 'cause every time you do that, what have I done? My body is still systemically doing the same thing.
Elizabeth (13m 56s):
It's producing high levels of these bad things. And my other joint goes. So if you look at somebody who had a knee replacement and the next year, the next, the next knee goes, and the next year the hip goes, and the next year, the, so how many people do you know, have had both their hips replaced and both their knees replaced? Right. So we, you know, we, we are so looking at this the wrong way, but it's a hard industry to change. Mm. The total joint industry is financially great. There's a lot of money in it. There's, you know, and, and I won't say that, you know, if I have somebody who has horrendous joint disease or bone on bone, they have horrendous pain. Joint replacement is a wonderful thing for them. My hope is we stop letting people get to that point.
Brian (14m 35s):
Right. Yeah, I was gonna say it's, I don't know how much of millions of billions of dollars are made with joint replacements, but especially now, you know, we have these baby boomers are getting to 75, 80, you know, like my parents' age, my dad got his knee done, and I know a lot of people who have gotten these joint replacements. And I will say from the people I talk to, it's a lot of mixed results. Right,
Elizabeth (14m 58s):
Right. Some people do great. Yeah. Some people not so well, nobody will tell ya I feel the same as I did before. Right? Yeah. You know, so hips are a little bit better. We've done a little bit better job with hips. Yeah. But it, this to me is a little bit like if we took everybody with heart disease, right? And instead of actually screening for atherosclerosis And, you know, and early heart disease, we just waited till everybody needed stents. Right. We just didn't even, we're like, you know, let's just keep an eye on you. Let's do nothing. Let's do nothing. Let's do nothing. We'll just put a stent in when, when you need it. And that's exactly what we're doing with joints, right. We're really not doing anything to keep that progression.
Elizabeth (15m 39s):
We just go, well, this is just gonna keep going and then we'll replace it when you get old enough. And now we're seeing people get replacements in their fifties, right? We're seeing it at Oh yeah. Younger and younger ages. So we have to start looking back to what are we doing wrong from square one, which is treating the acute injuries or looking at people who have kind of multi-joint problems as this is a disease. So those of, you know, there are people who hurt their knee and get better in our fine. I, I have professional football players in my practice who, you know, we, we were treating for concussions, but they have, you know, fine joints and you have these, you know, these, you know, people who really were sedentary most of their life and have worn out every joint. So it's not a disease that's related to your activity level.
Brian (16m 21s):
Hmm. I was gonna ask you if you work with, like football players and, and athletes at your practice?
Elizabeth (16m 27s):
Yeah, yeah. We definitely do. So we work with a lot of, you know, both recreational athletes, college athletes, high level athletes. It's funny because like, we had a football player who came to us where he found out about pein himself because he had, you know, horrible hip Arthritis and he was young and he had no answers. I mean, basically the answer was, we will scope your hip, you know, which they did. They did twice. And, And, you know, and, and he, he was 26 years old Wow. And he already had hip Arthritis, and he basically was looking at the end of his career, right. At 26. Yeah. And he self researched and found out about Pentin, and he is like, oh my God, why can't we get this?
Elizabeth (17m 9s):
Why can't we use this? And they found out that we, you know, that, that we do do this. And so he came to us. So, you know, but he was saying, I, he goes, the trainers don't know about this, the, you know, he goes, I, I keep telling my friends about it, but why don't more people know about this? And, you know, partly it's, yeah, it's not widely available here yet. And so, you know, but, but partly it's a little bit of changing this paradigm and this is an entire field that I'm trying to disrupt that doesn't go so well. Right, right. Just like in my practice, it didn't want me disrupting the status quo. Yeah. They're doing very well. Right. There is a huge, you know, there's orthopedics. Surgeons do quite well.
Brian (17m 47s):
Yeah. I mean, I get, I gotta imagine trying to interrupt that sort of old school approach to some degree, right? There's a time and a need for it, but Right. It's probably not so easy. Right. But I think what you're doing is just helping people who are, you know, wanna look beyond just that instant, you know, let's just say that answer that most people are gonna give you and create your institute. And that's, yeah. That's great. And I would, I would say that, like what would you say to someone that's, you know, I like for my, for myself for example, I mean, I'm in my forties, but big golfer, you know, repetitive sports, right? For long time. What are the sort of best preventative ways to, you know, not have to, you know, go to and get surgery or, you know, do things like that.
Elizabeth (18m 35s):
So number one obviously is, you know, like when you look at golfers or you look at people who are very specific to their sports, right? I, I, you know, if you're a cyclist, you cycle, if you're a runner, you run is there's, there has to be a strength training program that is working on everything, right? Because we tend to get, and especially some of these very focused high level athletes, right? Are very focused on sport specific training. And that is not so great. We really need the entire body to be very balanced from the feet to your head, right? So all the postural mechanics, everything has to really be balanced. So there has to be a, a lot of attention paid to ongoing strength training.
Elizabeth (19m 16s):
And one of the things you find is as people get busy, like you look at you, right? It's hard enough to just find time to do things. Like, I wanna get out and practice my golf. I wanna, you know, And, you know, or my runners are going to run. That's what they do. They run. And, and you have to sort of say, listen, that's great you love running, but you've gotta change your, your focus a little bit to spend a little bit more time in the gym doing more weight training, doing more sport, not even sports specific training, but really just all over body training. So that's, that's kind of the first thing. 'cause I, I do think as, as time gets more limited, we get more limited. And, and so if we're trying to really, you know, run marathons, we're gonna focus on running a marathon. And the problem with that is it doesn't bode well for your overall health when you're doing that.
Elizabeth (19m 59s):
So number two is, you know, when we look at these age related diseases, right? Arthritis is still an age related disease. So you're like, well, why, if it's an inflammatory disease process, why are we seeing it? You know, as people get older and it's because, oh, sorry. And it's because a, a large part of these inflammatory things going awry has to do when we start getting disruptions in hormones, right? So when you look, and we're seeing that, unfortunately, younger and younger, there's all these endocrine disruptors in the world. We are seeing testosterone levels in our 20 year olds that we used to see in our 80 year olds. We're seeing very few men now in their fifties who have normal testosterone at all.
Elizabeth (20m 42s):
When you, when you start losing hormones, testosterone for men and women, but also remember that men have all three hormones, just like women do. And estrogen and progesterone are hugely joint protective. So progesterone, for instance, there's receptors on the joints. So one of the reasons you start to get stiffer as you get older is because there's less lubrication to the joints. And that's, that's largely because its drop in progesterone levels. And men, it's a forgotten hormone than men. Men have progesterone levels, just like women do much lower amounts, but just like women do. And estrogen, estrogen keeps our joints more pliable, keeps our ligaments more pliable, it makes us more stretchy.
Elizabeth (21m 25s):
So basically, it's one of the reasons women tend to be more flexible than men, right? Is that we just have this hormone that makes our tissues a little bit more pliable so that we can have babies, our pelvis can expand. Well, men, when testosterone level drops, when, when, for you guys, estrogen comes from testosterone, it's converted from testosterone, and there's an enzyme that converts it to estrogen. And it's equally important to have estrogen as testosterone. So the first thing the body does when your testosterone levels start to drop is it starts to forego converting it to estrogen. It would rather you have testosterone and it worries a little bit less about estrogen for you. So what happens is you start to see testosterone levels decline just a little bit.
Elizabeth (22m 7s):
So you might not be noticing things like, you know, like your libido's still fine, you're still making muscle fine. But if you look at labs, you'll see the estrogen levels are like less than 10. They're really low. When that happens, one of the things that happens is our joints become less pliable, our tissues become less pliable, our brain becomes more dysfunctional, or heart becomes more dysfunctional because estrogen is one of the main protections of heart and brain and muscle. So basically hormones need to be looked at early and they need to be followed and they need to be optimized. I mean, even somebody like using in your forties, you're like, I'm fine. My hormones are gonna be fine. Dunno, right? I will tell ya, a lot of guys in their forties don't have normal hormones. And you really want to be proactive that we keep those at a good normal level, starting from when they start to decline, not wait until they're down here Sure.
Elizabeth (22m 55s):
And then start treating, which is what we do, right? Because that's when all that destruction is occurring. So we're having all this loss and then we're finally treating, you know, and both women and men, our hormones are starting to drop in our thirties, I hate to say it, but in our thirties. And so, so keeping an eye on that and when they start to get more critical levels, then actually giving some replacements of hormones is really important. It's critical to joint health. I will tell ya. A small dose of progesterone, just using a little, I use a little, a little sort of a lozenge that people suck on before they go to bed, bed at night. And for men, helps the prostate, helps hair, helps sleep, helps anxiety, helps joints. So things like that can be really proactive to keeping the joints from going away.
Elizabeth (23m 37s):
And right now we're not doing that. Nobody would ever come in and think about, you know, when their joints hurt, looking at hormone levels. And I always do because that's, that's one of the things that could play a huge role in such a simple fix. So that's one of, you know, so, so aside from keeping your really well-rounded training focus, right? Also making sure that the hormones stay high and obviously nutrition, you know, protein deficiencies still is huge. People don't eat enough protein. Even with all the stuff people are hearing about protein, I mean, you really need a gram of protein for every pound of lean body mass. And that's hard to do. I mean, I'm skinny, you know, so I weigh about 130 pounds, so it's, you know, 130 grams of protein.
Elizabeth (24m 17s):
And even for me, that's hard to do. But if I look at my, you know, 24-year-old son who's, you know, 190 pounds of muscle, he needs like 200 grams of protein. And, and so, so, and that's not easy. You have to really focus on protein centric eating to be able to do that. But protein is so important for both muscle and joint health. So we have to make sure that people are getting enough protein, particularly as they get older, right? One of the things you see, p as people get older, they get less and they eat less and less protein and they actually need more protein. Especially women. I mean, women are really bad, right? You know, but, but, but if you look at both men and women as they start to get older, they're just, they're not gonna eat as ma as much.
Elizabeth (24m 59s):
Whether it's 'cause you're concerned about weight or whatever, they're not gonna eat as much, but, you know, or, or appetite decreases. So you really have to push that on people.
Brian (25m 7s):
And, And what, going back to like the training correctly, 'cause I do train clients on my house and a lot of 'em are golfers, but like I see this with myself and a lot of golfers is they start losing thoracic mobility. Yeah. You know, like, that's huge,
Elizabeth (25m 23s):
Right?
Brian (25m 24s):
Yeah. Yeah. Because then
Elizabeth (25m 25s):
That's when, when people have shoulder injuries, people forget it probably started with the loss of spine motion. Right? And now the shoulder goes And now the elbow goes And, you know, yeah.
Brian (25m 33s):
So they, they lead one thing leads to the next that and like hips, like the making sure that you have mobility within those two.
Elizabeth (25m 41s):
Agree. And we don't work on mobility or flexibility training a lot. Right. You know, people aren't doing that much. But watch, watch older men walk, they almost always walk with a little bit of flexion at their hips. You know, if you, if you watch a 60 old walk, they will always walk a little bit more tilted forward and lot of that's 'cause they lose some of the extension ability of their hips. Hmm. And if you're not doing, you know, really focused work on mobility training, Sean McCain, who does a lot of talking, he's a ex gymnast, does talks about this a lot. He, he basically says, you know, that you, you need to be focused in that as part of your regime. That basically that's got to be part of your, your training.
Elizabeth (26m 22s):
You know, be it yoga or if you hate yoga, but you've gotta be doing flexibility and training. 'cause you're right when you lose that motion in your hips, when you lose that motion in your spine, which is going to happen if you're not training it, then you're going to start getting more of these injuries. Yeah. So I love that you mentioned that.
Brian (26m 37s):
Yeah. Yeah. I would try to say if I have a client that's probably 50% of the things that we work on, the other 50% of strength. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. Training hormones, obvi obviously adequate protein. Yeah. I would say that like, you know, general practitioner is gonna take basic, like I, I go, I have a, a, a doctor that I go to just to go to. But like, I think it's important for people to have someone like yourself who has like some functional background regarding just like regenerative or Aging medicine, but also just knows that like what's going on in the mainstream isn't telling you the complete picture of your health.
Brian (27m 21s):
Right.
Elizabeth (27m 22s):
Right. Like your doc is going to look at, you know, basic lip level C-B-C-C-M-P, thyroid, a very basic thyroid.
Brian (27m 29s):
Not even, even, I was gonna say, I don't even think he ran a thyroid on me. I asked him actually. I'm like, you know, 'cause he knows that I'm into like alternative health, not
Elizabeth (27m 36s):
Yeah.
Brian (27m 37s):
Yeah. I'm like, you know, how about testosterone? He's like, well, you know, you have a lot of muscle mass. I'm like,
Elizabeth (27m 42s):
Right, you. Yeah. You know, and what's funny is I, I do a lot of like, like I'm lecturing at the upcoming Mr. Olympia. So I do a lot of lecturing in kinda the bodybuilder world. We have this thing called Olympia University that occurs any of you guys who get into the bodybuilding world, if you go to Mr. Olympia, which we try and host this Olympia universe. And it was kind of designed Oh, that's cool. By a guy named Michael, er that, that, that he, his goal was to say, okay, you know, bodybuilders are sort of the original biohackers. They're great at it, but they don't always do it to, in a safe level. So he brought together a lot of experts And you know, the power lifting, strength training fields and basically, you know, does this sort of Olympia University and it's, when
Brian (28m 20s):
Is that? Yeah, when is
Elizabeth (28m 21s):
That? So, so Olympia is like October 18th. Okay. Which is really, if you've never been Brian, you should go because it's just like, even if you don't go to the competition, which is pricey, but, but just going and walking around the exhibit at hall is no num number one enormously educated, but also entertaining as heck. There's everything under the sun there. Yeah, I'm sure. And every person under the sun there. But we, but, but the, the, So we do kinda the mornings we do this Olympia University and has, and it just brings together these panels of experts in hormones. And and is
Brian (28m 56s):
That where you met Dylan? And is that where you met Dylan? I
Elizabeth (28m 59s):
Think that's where I met Dylan, yeah. Okay. Yeah. With Olympia. Yeah. I think that's where Dylan and I first met was was at at Olympia University. Yeah. I think that's where we first met. So, so it's a really, it's a really Yeah. For those of you guys who you, who you know, are kind of into that world at all, you know, I, I take my whole family and it's just, it's, it's really kinda a fun event. Yeah.
Brian (29m 18s):
So where's it located? Where's it located? It's
Elizabeth (29m 21s):
In Las Vegas.
Brian (29m 22s):
Oh, okay. That's not in, in October. Not the worst place. October.
Elizabeth (29m 26s):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it is, you know, in the exhibit halls, I mean, you know, if you wanna learn about nutrition and things like that, but I I, we don't get enough people at Olympia University. It'd be nice if it was a little bit more widely publicized, but it's, it is really, I think one of the best, you know, I, I lecture a lot, I do a lot of lecturing, a lot of different conferences. But it's kind of the best group of just practical knowledge people putting together these, I mean this, there's this one strength training coach who has basically trained all of the, the strong, the strong men who have won, you know, strong men competitions are very Oh yeah. You have to like, yeah. I mean, these guys have to be like, timing perfectly to when their carbs kick in when they're, you know. Yeah. 'cause they're lifting one big, heavy, hugely heavy thing.
Elizabeth (30m 7s):
Right. But he is trained all the main strong men and he's, he's brilliantly smart. You know, it's just like you get this knowledge base that you don't really get in my medical field so much, you know, that puts together this practical and medical knowledge base together. So it's, it's, it's an interesting,
Brian (30m 21s):
Oh, I'll, I'll definitely check that out if you'd like it. Yeah.
Elizabeth (30m 25s):
But yeah, I think that that that your, your, your push on not just strengthening flexibility. I love that because I, I think I forget to mention it and I even forget to talk to my patients about that, that mobility training is equally important. I, I, my husband is really stiff. Mm. I tell him all that. You, we've gotta get you, you know, more flexible. We have to get your hips back.
Brian (30m 43s):
I mean, I would say every night I do something like I have a little gym in my basement. I do something with like, you know, just, you know, my tissues fascial, stretching or, you know, whatever it is. And just a little bit adds up over time. Even if you do it 10 minutes a day. Right. It's like, makes, makes a big difference. Yeah. Because
Elizabeth (31m 1s):
We, I mean, we spend so much more time sitting here in a flex position, right? Sure. Just sitting at our computers, at our desks in this 90 degree flex position where
Brian (31m 8s):
It's funny, it's funny you say, it's funny you say that I'm actually kneeling.
Elizabeth (31m 12s):
Yeah. Great. I, I
Brian (31m 14s):
An extension. Yeah.
Elizabeth (31m 15s):
Yeah. So I have a, I have a leaning chair, a treadmill under my desk. I've got a, a leaning chair, a treadmill, and a regular seat. And I just transfer from one position to another. Right. You know, and, and actually Neely is one of my more comfortable positions too. It's like, you know, just easier on my back.
Brian (31m 30s):
Hey everyone, quick interruption here. If you are looking to gain energy, lose inches around your waist and build strength, well look no further than my book. The Step Ladder System, six Steps to Lifelong Health and Vitality. What you get with the book is my full step-by-step plan and blueprint that I've worked with all my clients with packed in two one book with part one. You're gonna lay the foundation, tackle any common challenges that might come in your way. Part two is my six pillar blueprint, how to set you yourself up with a solid plan and know exactly what to do when life throws any curve balls. And lastly, step three are learning to implementation.
Brian (32m 10s):
A plan for getting results over the next weeks and beyond. So there you have it. I'll leave a link in the show notes for my stepladder system book. Now, back to the podcast, you know, I've gone through a lot of pads. I have a new pad that I'm trying to kneel on, which has been a lot better than some of my other ones. 'cause you know, you just wear through 'em if I'm on my knees all
Elizabeth (32m 31s):
Day. So do you, is that what you have? Is it most of your time, do you do on your knees?
Brian (32m 34s):
Yeah, like I have.
Elizabeth (32m 37s):
Wow. Yeah. That's great. I'll have to do that more.
Brian (32m 40s):
Well, yeah, I have this desk and obviously I can't stand, it's not high enough. And so I could maybe down the road do a standing desk. But the kneeling with,
Elizabeth (32m 47s):
I have one the desk that goes up and down, so I go up and down. All all, yeah. All the different positions, right?
Brian (32m 54s):
Yeah. So it, it works for me now. It's been working for, actually for the last few years. But you're right, like the positions that were in the sedentary, I mean like sedentary positions or just like in sitting, you know, rounded shoulders. I always say like with golf, you know why there's so many injuries. Well, I don't know. You're sitting in a golf cart, then you're getting up and swing in swinging a club at a, you know, whatever, a hundred miles per hour.
Elizabeth (33m 18s):
Can I get back in your golf
Brian (33m 19s):
Club getting back? And don't get me wrong, there's a time and a place for a golf cart. 'cause I, I use them from time to time, but I just feel like if you can walk, you should walk. Like Yeah. It's, it'll be,
Elizabeth (33m 29s):
It makes a lot of sense. Right. Keep moving so you don't stiffen up.
Brian (33m 32s):
Exactly. Yes, yes. Gosh, we can go so many ways here. Why don't we touch a little bit on, you know, I heard you talk about this in another interview, like the alternative sort of ways to use, like you even mentioned like Cialis or Viagra where the, you know, there's different purposes for some of these compounds that are maybe, you know, used for certain things, But it actually can help in other ways.
Elizabeth (33m 57s):
Yeah. So I'm a big, I do a, I do a lot of studying and researching on repurposing of drugs. And the reason that's so valuable is because there's this whole, you know, people are anti pharm, but pharmaceuticals have a lot of value in our world. They really do. Right Now are they overused? Are they sometimes misused? Yes. But they have a lot of value. And so if I have a drug, it's, you know, it takes a lot to get FDA approval for a drug, right? So if I have a drug that's already been through all that, it's, it's gone through all the testing. It's been around for a while. So its safety profile is well established, right. People have been taking it now for, you know, 20 years.
Elizabeth (34m 38s):
You know, so I have a drug that's like that. Now I, if I can think about that drug's mechanism and say, where else could I apply this? Right? So if you look at, for instance, Ali, you think it's thought of it's erection quality. Well why? Well, because what it does is it brings blood flow to an area. That's a pretty good thing. Right? Right. Right. If I have more blood flow to my brain, if I have more blood flow to my extremities, I'm going to be healthier. The brain particularly. Sure. So if you take a low dose every day, all you're doing is you're improving your vascular function. You're improving the, actually the way the lining of your blood vessels, it's healthier.
Elizabeth (35m 22s):
You pump blood better and at low dose you don't walk around with an erection all day, anything like that. All it does is make you have better vascular quality. And that's really important. 'cause one of the things that happens, you know, with age or with viruses, COVID was a big culprit here is we get damage to the vascular lining. We get damage to what's was called the endothelial lining, the very inside of our blood vessels. So that gets damaged and that's one of the first steps to impeding blood flow. It's why, you know, when we get older, you know, we just don't have as good circulation. But it's, what they found is the guys who took ALIS for, for having, you know, better erections, actually had much less dementia.
Elizabeth (36m 2s):
So that sort of started this road of, wow, well there's more going on here. So we started really investigating it for cognitive decline and things like that. So we do a lot of using it, I would say in both men and women that we use it a lot just for vascular function. I think it's a great, these are what are called phosphodiesterase five inhibitors. And if you start looking at phosphodiester five inhibitors, they even are showing huge benefit in cancer prevention. So these PD five is pathway, the same pathway that's affecting erection quality. And vascular has a lot of other mechanisms. So that's what you have to do, is you have to look at what does a drug do? Okay, it inhibits phosphotase five, what else does Phosphotase five do? And if I inhibit what value I'm getting.
Elizabeth (36m 44s):
So this is a, a drug that can help prevent cancer, help prevent cognitive decline, help prevent cardiac dysfunction, five milligrams a day, no side effects. And it's, it's huge. And yet, you know, when you, you prescribe it to a woman, they go try and fill it to the pharmacy. The pharmacist's like what? So, so, you know, and there's other drugs like that. Tomos Sartan for instance. Tomos sartan is a blood pressure drug. So, but what's called angiotensive or receptor blocker. And, and when you look at its mechanism, it has huge longevity benefits. So it actually is a drug that's working on some pathways that are very longevity. So when they looked at people on thm Sartan, they actually had less cancer.
Elizabeth (37m 26s):
They lived longer. But the other big thing about it's, it's an, it's, it's a drug that helps endurance. So it's what's called A-P-P-A-R gamma agonist. So it's used and it's, it's actually banned in WA of sports because so is fil 'cause these are exercise performance enhancing drugs. Right. Well, something that's an exercise performance enhancing drug probably has benefit for most of us for life because life is really, you know, if I sustained long haul exercise, then I, that's what I need to, to survive too. Sure. So you look at mosis sartan, you know, it's, it's a Band WA drug, it's a band WA of drug because it does influence something called PPAR gamma, which is something that when it stimulated, we have better VO two max, we have better endurance, we actually utilize oxygen better.
Elizabeth (38m 11s):
So low dose will not affect blood pressure, but will give you these benefits for, for vascular function and for helping performance endurance. So it's, it's, it's a really nice drug to add on to some people too. So, you know, a 20 milligram dose, which is not gonna cause blood pressure changes can be really beneficial. And then of patients who have high blood pressure, you can go a little higher on it and they're gonna get, gonna get the benefits as well as the blood pressure benefits. So, so there's another drug that, you know, a repurposed drug pentin another drug, right? We just spent all that time talking about pentin, well it's a drug for bladder inflammation, but what does it do? All those same things it's doing for bladder inflammation are beneficial for joint inflammation. So, so this is where it's kind of fun to be in the world where you start looking at, once you understand cellular pathways, so I understand what's going awry in a pathway promoting a disease, I can now start looking for drugs that work on that pathway.
Elizabeth (39m 5s):
And AI is huge here, right? Sure. 'cause you can run AI and go, okay, I need you to find every compound for me that works specifically in this place on this pathway right now with chat GT five, which, you know, I dunno if you've used yet came out yesterday, it's hugely impressive. You, you can do so much of just saying find me every compound. It'll give you a list, you know, a massive list. But then you can start wheeling through and saying, okay, this one's not available, this is not available. Now I want you to give me the, the ones that I can either buy at a drugstore or have a doctor prescribed, you know, that, that are easy. So, so we're gonna see, I think more and more of this. But what it entails is a doctor who loves studying pathways. Right.
Elizabeth (39m 46s):
'cause better understand the pathways to be able to do this. But the whole repurposing of drugs is amazing. And for those of you guys who, you know, just want a simple regimen to protect heart function, brain function, Aging fil is a huge, you know, I would say interesting. I would say 90% of my patients are on it.
Brian (40m 4s):
That's, that's really interesting. And when, when you, when you first start talking about this, I heard you on another podcast. One thing came to mind. I was methylene blue and had, the name is escaping me, but I've, I've had the C-C-E-O-C-O of TR transcriptions. Yeah.
Elizabeth (40m 21s):
Scott share. Yeah, yeah.
Brian (40m 22s):
Scott share. Yeah. And I've always thought that was an interesting compound that used to be used, you know, as a synthetic D right. It's, it's crazy. And now it's coming back And, you know, maybe might support mitochondrial health and energy and things like that. Right,
Elizabeth (40m 37s):
Right. So yeah, methylene blue will actually work on the, in the inside the mitochondria to actually sort of skip one of the steps to make a TPI think you have to be cognizant of how to use methylene blue. It's not something you wanna be using continuously because it can disturb nitric oxide pathways, But it can be a super useful drug to help boost mitochondrial function. You know, when you have like, you're gonna go out hiking in the mountains or you know, or doing some exercise
Brian (41m 4s):
Or traveling or you've
Elizabeth (41m 5s):
Traveling, you know, traveling or things like that. It's, it can be hugely beneficial.
Brian (41m 7s):
Yeah. Yeah. I've been using it from time I be, I get, I get it from him and I've been using it from time to time and just, you know, low dosage and Right, right. Other than the only thing to get used to is, you know, just peeing blue. Peeing
Elizabeth (41m 19s):
Blue. Yeah. I know. A little bit of shock the first time you pee and you're like, yeah.
Brian (41m 22s):
Yeah. It's still sometimes now I'll be like, oh yeah, okay. That's why Yeah. Look like. Oh, other than that, yeah. It's, that's, that's what came to my mind also like aspirin of the, I dunno if you're familiar with Dr. I, he's said Dr. But Georgie dink off. Are you familiar with Georgie Dink off? Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Dink Okay. Yeah. I've had, yeah, go ahead. I've had him out a few times and, And you know, I know what the Dr. Ray Pete talked about the uses of aspirin, how it can be of benefit in many different ways.
Elizabeth (41m 55s):
Right. And we just talked about one Yeah. This aspirin media ProResolv, this, this specialized ProResolv medias are very cool. They come from all of our omegas. So it's one of the reasons omegas are so important. So your DPAs, your DHAs, and your EPAs, one of the things they get trans turned into are specialized pro resolving mediators. And these are things called resolving. And, and, and I forgot a lot of names, but the, the, that's one of the conversion pathways. That's why omega threes are aren't anti-inflammatory. But that pathway is hugely mediated by aspirin, interestingly enough. Mm. And so it's another place where aspirin is really beneficial is in inflammation. You know, not just as a sort of weak blood thinner, which is beneficial, but for inflammation because of that specialized ProResolv mediator pathway.
Elizabeth (42m 41s):
If you guys look up specialized proso mediators, you can buy them, you can spend a lot of money and buy specialized ProResolv mediators. Or you can just simply take your own by take aspirin nagas and taking a little low dose aspirin at night, a little baby aspirin at night. And I know aspirin's got a little bit of a, of a bad rap through the years on, you know, people with bleeding, things like that. So, so, you know, but at a very low dose safety profile is really quite good. And I, I think that the, the overall health benefits can be quite beneficial.
Brian (43m 9s):
Yeah. He wrote a paper, I'm actually just looking, Ray Pete wrote a paper a while back about aspirin, brain and cancer. And it's an interesting sort of read. It's long and it's in depth about it. But yeah, I, I've learned a little bit more about, 'cause I've had some pro metabolic individuals come into and talk on my podcast. What would you say, like, do you have like a ideal, I know everyone's different, but like an ideal supplement stack that for people or, or, you know, I know it's hard to put like a general generalizations on all this stuff, right?
Elizabeth (43m 44s):
Some. So number one, I think one of the things we need to be careful of is overs, supplementation. Yeah. I think that we're getting a little bit, everybody hears the latest and greatest podcasts pushing something and I have people come and I, I kid you not probably outta 120 supplements. Right. We have to particularly be careful with people who love their antioxidants. Yeah. Because antioxidants, you know, where it's like, okay, antioxidants are so good for us. Well they're good and they're bad because we need oxidative stress. So if you take, if you go work out and then you go, you run home and you take a bunch of your antioxidants, you're taking your vitamin C and your vitamin, you've just actually undone all the benefits of your workout. Sure. Because what forms more muscle is oxidative stress.
Elizabeth (44m 25s):
But that's true in, in our overall metabolic health in general, is it's this very, very critical balance between reductive stress and oxidative stress. And we need oxidative stress to stimulate mitochondrial function, to stimulate health. Not too much. But if you articulate a bunch of antioxidants, you push it the other way. And now we don't heal and we don't recover and we're in this reductive stress state, which actually can lead to cancers and other diseases. So I'm not a big fan of taking, you know, multiple antioxidants. And if you guys are taking your antioxidants, then cycle them. Don't do them continuously cycle on and off them. So you give your body a little bit of time to recover. But our cells are really super, super smart and we have to kind of support them in a more minimalistic fashion.
Elizabeth (45m 7s):
I think it's a little bit like raising kids, right? You gotta kind of guide them but not push them or everything falls apart. And so when I look at my basic stack, it's pretty simplistic, right? It's D three with K two. You need both of those together. You need, almost everybody needs magnesium. I think everybody needs a omegas. Everybody needs probably a good B complex vitamin. And you know, and, and those sort of simple things go a long way. Now do I take a whole lot more than that? Yes. But I cycle on off of things, right? So, you know, I will do things that are, you know, I'll, I'll do sperming for a six week course.
Elizabeth (45m 49s):
So sperming is an agent that, it's a polyphenol that really promotes autophagy. It really kills off our damaged cells. So you do a little higher dose of it for about a six week course. It's like cleaning house. So I'm gonna do that for a six week course, clean everything out, right? And then you've gotta look at mitochondrial function. We just talked about mitochondria as sort of the, the keys of everything. 'cause they're will control that whole reductive oxidative stress. So what I'm gonna do for mitochondrial function, almost everybody could benefit from a little bit of like coq 10 or pqq something that supports this mitochondrial electron change chain. You talked about methylene blue, but really the baselines are having enough iron, having some co enough coq 10, those are really important.
Elizabeth (46m 31s):
Alpha ketoglutarate important in that chain. Uli a is another one that can be really helpful for mitochondrial function. But again, these are things that can be cycled so you don't get overwhelmed with, you know, with taking 50 supplements. Right, right. When, when I talk to like my staff of 30 year olds, or even my patients, you know, one of the biggest complaints is I can't keep up with this regimen, right? So we have to simplify down these regimens. So what I do is I have a baseline stack of like six things I'm having people do I make sure their hormones are optimized and then we'll cycle them in and out of some of these other things. And that's where this becomes a little bit of an art. Mm. Because there is a lot of great stuff out there. And what I would encourage people is use it, but use it judiciously and spaced out and cycle between other things.
Brian (47m 15s):
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. I've actually have, I've probably cut back my supplements quite a bit through the years, I think. Yeah. If you just focus on like the, the, the principles of like lifestyle, like, you know, like we've talked already about strength training, right? You know, adequate pro, like those will take care of 80 to 90% of that things
Elizabeth (47m 36s):
90%. Right? Right. And add to that, the, the, you know, with the number one predictor, even higher than smoking of your longevity is your socialization. It's having people around you, people who you do things with and purpose. So, you know, the, if you look at the, I'm actually giving a lecture next week on purpose at, at this, this lecture, at this conference. And, and, and it's very interesting when you look at people when they retire their likelihood of dying for every year, retirement goes up substantially. And you know, and I get people are all excited to retire. But the key is when you've lost some purpose, then there's something that goes on in our body that sort of says, Hmm, you're kind of done.
Elizabeth (48m 16s):
Right. So our, our brain and our body connection. So you really have to have a a a social group of people and you have to continue to have purpose because those actually go above everything we just talked about in terms of longevity. And you know, it's, it's why when you look at these other countries who, you know, everybody talks about these other countries like Sian places who have longevity. One of the big things is they all have sort of community and they keep working. I mean, whether it's on the farms, whether it's in a store, whether they keep working well into their nineties, I mean, they, they don't stop working. So if you hate your job and you wanna retire, I'm all for that. But find a new job, find something else to do, or raise your grandkids or, you know, do something. But it has to be be purpose. It has to be purpose outside yourself. Like my, my people who said I'm just going to drive around in my rv.
Elizabeth (48m 57s):
It's what I've always wanted to do. That's great, But it's actually doesn't have purpose. And so you need to also add something in there with purpose.
Brian (49m 4s):
No, I love that you bring that up. I mean, I think like social isolation was one of like, right. Yeah. Like the, it was the whole COVID thing that I think drove a lot of people. That's what
Elizabeth (49m 13s):
We did to old people, right? Yeah. I mean my parents were lucky. They lived in their nineties, but they, you know, they lived independently. They raised my kids. They, my kids were always over there 'cause they knew them from the time they were babies and they were raised And, you know, So they, they were interacting not just with, you know, they'd go to the gym and be around older people there, but, but they, you know, they were around us. They were around my kids. They got all these different ages, you know, and, and that, that was huge and probably made a big role of why they lived into their nineties, right? But what we do with a lot of older people is they've left the workforce, they're alone. They, they don't get out and socialize very much. And, and that's a big problem. We need to, you know, we need to put, we need to, the, the woman who works at my front desk is 80 years old and she's amazing.
Elizabeth (49m 58s):
You know, took her a while to catch her up on all the computer stuff, but she got it right. And she's probably my best employee because she loves working. She's so great with people. And why are we not utilizing this workforce? It's, it's sad.
Brian (50m 10s):
Yeah, no, that's so true. Doesn't get talked about enough.
Elizabeth (50m 13s):
Right.
Brian (50m 14s):
That's for sure. Why don't we touch on peptides a little bit. I know they're the hot, the hot craze. Are there certain ones that are like, you know, your favorites and people that should look out for, for them or, and there was other ones maybe that aren't as, as, you know, favorited, but,
Elizabeth (50m 31s):
So I kinda like to think about peptides the same way I do hormones. So think about what does your body make when you're younger and you lose as you get older, okay? Because we forget that our body makes peptides. So we have what are called endogenous peptides, peptides that our body makes. And they're designed to do very specific things. So for those guys who don't know a lot, pep, a lot about peptides, they're just small chains of amino acids, right? Protein is more than 50 amino acids. A peptide is less than 50 amino acids. And they do very specific things. So insulin is a peptide. You eat glucose, insulin appears, it goes, tells glucose to go into the cells. But we have other peptides, for instance, BPC 1 57, body protective compound 1 57.
Elizabeth (51m 15s):
It's a peptide that's made by our gut. So it's a gastric peptide that's made in response to doing things like healing, not just our gut. So if we have irritation in the gut, it's designed to heal the gut, but also when it says, oh my God, he hurt himself, that's gonna appear to go help heal that injury. When we're younger, we have very high levels of BPC 1 57. When we're older, we have much lower levels. If you've gut problems, you have much lower levels. If you have chronic ulcer disease, you have much lower levels. So replacing BPC 1 57, just like you're replacing your, your hormones, right? If it's dropping, get it back up to where it was. And so we can use BPC 1 57, either post injuries, where it's most used is if I have an injury to use it, but I will use it just ongoing off and on to try and keep levels a little bit higher.
Elizabeth (52m 0s):
We know that if you have BPC 1 57 on board and you are hurt, you are less likely to have a problem with it. We know it's really protected to the brain. So if you have a, you know, if, if you're a athlete who is in a sport that you're likely gonna get hit in the head, then taking BPC 1 57 before that event is going to make the brain much more protected. So BTC 1 57 is a peptide that drops. Let's keep it up a little bit. So what, and it can be taken orally. It's, well, a few peptides that actually works orally. So it makes it simpler to take. Mm. So basically you can even buy it as a supplement. My gut, OHP Health has it, it's gonna A BPC as a supplement and, and it's gonna help the gut. If you guys, any of you guys who have chronic ulcer disease, things like that, those are all things that BPC can be really helpful for the gut.
Elizabeth (52m 44s):
But think about it also for chronic joint pains, but also just think about preventatively. So that goes down. What else goes down? Growth hormone. So growth hormone drops as we age. Invariably just like all of your other hormones, it peaks around your twenties and then it starts dropping. And growth hormone is responsible for us being able to regenerate. So one of the reasons that, like your doc may look at you and say, oh, you're really muscular, but you could still have low testosterone is because your growth hormone in your forties is still, it's not dropped. You know, it's dropping, But it's not. So, so you'll see people have nice high IGF levels, growth hormone levels, and they look really muscular even though their testosterone levels are low. I have a friend in the bodybuilding world who is huge. I mean, he's massive and he, he, he was like, I I I feel like I have low testosterone.
Elizabeth (53m 28s):
Which, you know, and anybody who looked at, there's no way you have low testosterone, right? You're massive. But it was 'cause his IGF levels, which is a measure of growth hormone were so high that it massed his testosterone of 200, right? He was still able to put on muscle despite this low testosterone, which was affecting his brain and his libido and everything else. So, but growth hormone levels do drop as we age. And growth hormone is really important for regeneration, it's really important for sleep. So what we do is growth hormone itself has a problem in that it's gives you a super physiologic dose of, of, of growth hormone. So the way growth hormone works is it converts into IGF and insulin like growth factor IGF has, has these receptors on immune cells, on brain cells, on muscle cells.
Elizabeth (54m 8s):
And so, so we can measure IGF levels. If they're low, we can give peptides that will make your own production increase. So instead of just giving you growth hormone, which is gonna be like, you know, giving you too much and then it'll drop down, you basically give peptides. And usually we use things called either CJC and iin or tein iin. We use a combination of peptides that tells your own pituitary to both make and release a little more growth hormone. So now we're gonna get really physiologic levels of growth hormone, but bring it up kind of where your body wants it to be as opposed to hitting it really hard. 'cause if you look at, remember the old bodybuilders, how you look at the, those kind of turtle bellies, their turtle, their bellies that sort of stick out like this.
Elizabeth (54m 53s):
You could see the muscle but their bellies would stick out. The reason that would be is 'cause their organs grew from taking so much growth hormone. So they actually got their spleens and livers grew from taking so much growth hormone. So we don't want that. So you have to be careful with growth hormone. There's places for it, but you have to be careful with it. But the growth hormone, secret creed dogs can be utilized either on and off like three months on cycles or just five outta seven days of the week continuously to keep my growth hormone levels up. Just like I'm keeping my estrogen up at my testosterone up, put my progesterone levels up, right? So, so again, and then what other peptides drop as we age? So the other big peptides are art thymic peptides. So when we're babies, we have this giant gland in our chest, this this huge gland sar thymus gland. It's why when we're little and it, and that thymus gland keeps getting bigger until puberty and that starts shrinking.
Elizabeth (55m 37s):
When you're old like me, it's nothing. It's a little fatty nub. It's not doing anything. So the thymus gland early on is designed to be our immune gland. It's telling the body attack that it's bad, don't attack that, it's good. So when it starts to decline, our immune system starts to get screwed up. It starts to not recognize bad from good. It starts attacking itself more, attacking viruses less. So if we can keep the thymic peptides a little higher, So we can't give you a new thymus gland yet. Maybe we eventually we will. People like in France that eat sweet breads, which is sinus gland, maybe that works a little bit, I don't know. But we can give the things that dimus gland does. So it makes two peptides. One called dimus and alpha one and one called thymus and beta four that you can utilize sort of on and off again to try and keep my thymus levels where they would've been when I was young.
Elizabeth (56m 27s):
Hmm. So again, BPC, growth hormone, crego, thymic peptides, those are kind of your baseline sort of. Okay. Those are gonna, and and then the last, And this is again a little more intricate, is in all of us as we age, our mitochondrial function declines. It's why we have less energy. It's like why you look at a five-year-old running around going, oh my god, I wish I had that energy. Right? Because they have massive mitochondrial function going on and that declines as we age. It declines because of bad things like COVID and, and viruses and stress. So the less our mitochondrial working, the less energy I have. Any of you guys who have poor energy, who have brain fog, that's mitochondrial dysfunction.
Elizabeth (57m 10s):
So the way the mitochondria respond to being stressed is they make their own peptides. So they have their own little peptides, something called MOD SC S 31 human and they make their own little peptides, right? Did you
Brian (57m 23s):
Say MA mod? Mod?
Elizabeth (57m 24s):
Yeah. It's mo sc MOTS dash C. So mo sc SS 31, these are peptides that the mitochondria makes. So again, these are not some foreign thing to our, So they people figure out peptides is some foreign thing, you know, these are things that our body makes. So if my mitochondria are suffering and I don't have enough mitochondria anymore, and they're, they're, they're, they're designed to send out this stress signal to send out this mod c to send out SS 31 and say, Hey, let's make our, our mitochondria better and stronger. But as that function declines too much, they can't, right? They just can't respond. So we can give back some of the mitochondrial peptides periodically, particularly modest C, which helps, helps metabolic function.
Elizabeth (58m 7s):
It's gonna be revving up the mitochondrial, they're just gonna make a TP faster. So we can do things like that on and off. Or if you have a specific problem, like you, you're having horrible brain fog or you're gain over COVID and you feel like you can't get your energy back, then you can actually hit with modest C. So those are kind of my top peptides in my sort of longevity realm. Right.
Brian (58m 25s):
Do you, do you, I'm sorry to interrupt you. Do you, do you, like if you have a client, do you test them or do you sort of, or how do you go about,
Elizabeth (58m 34s):
So mitochondrial function is hard to test, right? I was gonna say, we can look at things like lactate, pyruvate ratios. We actually do what's called a prodrome scan. It's designed, it's a scan designed by Dr. Dane. Good Now that looks at ratios of cell membrane components that you can sort of give some, some hint about mitochondrial and proximal function. So there are tests that help, but we don't really have a great test to say, oh, this is exactly how your mitochondria function. So I think you have to kind of go on, if you have low energy and you have brain fog, that's probably, and you fixed everything else, the hormones look good, everything else looks good, then you have to focus on the mitochondria.
Brian (59m 9s):
And with peptides, do you, like, let's just say someone wants to look into, I dunno, the BPC 1 57. Are there there certain places that you know that are better to get 'em from than others? Or,
Elizabeth (59m 21s):
Well, so BPC is a little different story. 'cause again, it's, it's sort of been moved into almost a supplement category because it's so incredibly safe. Like you can't really ever take too much BPC. So it's now available, like if you look, you know, on a, a lot of places it's available as an oral supplement. Now most peptides are injectable. They need to be done confidently. And what, what is the proper dosing? What is the proper timing? So I do think you need to work with somebody who knows peptides. What's happening in the peptide world is that pe it's becoming, you know, huge and everybody's jumping on the peptide bandwagon. So you can got, you can buy peptides online from any research chemical site. The problem with that is you don't honestly know what's in them.
Elizabeth (1h 0m 4s):
So when a compounding pharmacy makes a peptide, so this is an FDA approved compounding pharmacy that has to go through rigorous testing. They have to prove a lot of things about the facility, about the products they're making and keep a very close eye on it. So if, if I decide to go just buy my peptide from a research chemical site who has not had to do any of that, number one, if there's a complication, they have nothing to stand on. They, they're not, they didn't even tell ya to use it. It's a research chemical, right? Right. We've had research chemical peptides tested. Some have what they say in them, some don't, some have a lot of contaminants in including arsenic, some don't. So you kind of don't know what you're getting.
Elizabeth (1h 0m 44s):
Mm. So that's where the problem is. World of cancer was just a big thing that happened at Rad Fest. Some of you guys may have read about this, you know, rad Fest is a big longevity conference and there was a a, a doc there doing peptide injections in the exhibit hall with a research grade peptide. 30 patients got people who got this injection, got really sick, ended up in the hospital, two of 'em on ventilators. Right. Wow. And, and he can't really even go back 'cause he doesn't have a pharmacy to stand by to say, oh, okay, let's look back at that lot. Let's, let's make sure it was okay. He doesn't even have that to stand by. So we can't even look back and say what was in that peptide that they were given, you know, because it came from who knows where. And we don't have any lot numbers. So honestly, I I I, I know that this is controversial, but you should be getting your peptides from a compounding pharmacy, you know, and from somebody who really knows exactly how to use them appropriately and, and has been trained in them.
Elizabeth (1h 1m 36s):
I, you know, and, and, and I know it's controversial because now everybody's like, you don't need a doctor. It's much more expensive to do that. You, you can read about this online. You can get 'em from your research facility and, And you know, this is not guys just because I'm trying to promote that the doctors should be making money, But it, it really is. I've seen a lot of bad things happen. I saw a guy end up in the ICU from taking, you know, multiple research peptides. I've, I've seen bad things happen. You just have to be really careful. For me, I would never take a research peptide because I honestly, I, if something bad happens, who do I go to? At least nasa. If one of my patients gets sick from a peptide I gave them, I'm gonna go back to that pharmacist and I go, Hey, you need to look at that. What was in that peptide was it was there, you know, and they can backtrack and retest batches and say, oh, we found a contaminant, we found something.
Elizabeth (1h 2m 21s):
This happened in the drug world too, right? Think of the number of drugs that get recalled. Oh sure. Because somebody got sick And now they went back and looked at it, but they, you know, they recalled the drug. Well, we need to be able to do that. Right. Need to be able to backtrack. So that's, that, that's my bias. Get them from compounding pharmacies from people who know what they're doing.
Brian (1h 2m 37s):
Yeah. No, that's great advice. I, I would agree. I mean, the, the supplement, I know these, you know, the, with the peptides, it could be the wild, wild west, a little bit out there right now. Right, right. People's people selling 'em, that shouldn't be. Well, this was great. I, we'll finish with this one question that I like to ask most of my guests that come on. What's like one thing that you've changed your mind on?
Elizabeth (1h 3m 2s):
Boy, this, there's, there's a lot that I've changed my mind on. Sure. But probably where I'm kind of getting a little bit more questioning is, is, is rapamycin. So I used to put everybody on rapamycin. Rapamycin for those guys who don't know is probably, you know, one of the, the big compounds that we're saying this could be really the answer for longevity. Right? And, and I, I still think it might be, but what I'm finding is maybe we don't know enough. I'm seeing people who I've had on it, who have lipid problems, who have glucose problems. And I, I still would say it's a good drug, except I think we have better longevity agents now. For instance, the GLP one, agonist, the semaglutide and tirzepatide, those drugs are so huge for longevity.
Elizabeth (1h 3m 48s):
They're affecting the same pathways that you're doing with apm except doing it in a much safer way. So I think we've had drugs that now have surpassed rapamycin and become better choices, safer choices until we know more. With the exception I'll use rapamycin in my younger women who are trying to delay having kids like, like they're 35 and they haven't met a guy yet because we do know what protects ovarian function. So I'll put them on rapamycin, low dose or rapamycin because it will protect ovarian function in that group. But otherwise, I'm not putting every one of my patients on it anymore. I'm using other things. So I really, you know, and, and, and, and rapamycin is still huge in the longevity world. And I'm not going to say it's, it's, it's, it's bad. It's just, it think we don't know yet.
Elizabeth (1h 4m 28s):
And now, and I'm okay with not being sure, but now we have better options potentially to use.
Brian (1h 4m 36s):
Okay. Yeah. That's the first time that answer's been given. Well, this was great, Dr. U, the Boulder Longevity Institute. Best place for people to find you is your website.
Elizabeth (1h 4m 49s):
Yep. Just bo longevity.com. Follow me at, at dr u We have for you guys who want, we have an, a teaching academy called Human Optimization Academy because one of my beliefs is it's hard to find doctors who know enough. So you've gotta know a lot. So, you know, people like you, Brian out there teaching is great, but this is a site where you can go, how do I read labs? How do I, you know, understand hormones? How do I, so it's designed for lay people to sort of get doctor training, hopefully better than your doctor. And so, so you can sign for him. If you go go to BLI Academy, you can look at that. We have these monthly q and as that people ask incredible questions that, you know, blow my mind sometimes. So, and there's doctors in that too, but there's just a lot of lay people who are just interested in their own health So they can learn.
Elizabeth (1h 5m 30s):
And there's courses on, you know, understanding peptides and understanding hormones And you know, that you can go and just learn more. You just have to be empowered on your own because it is hard to find good doctors. And the more you knowledge base you have, the better off you are. I mean, ai, and I know doctors hate ai, but AI is huge, right? I mean, you can do so much with putting your symptoms in AI and then you need somebody, you know, and they all can spit out all these, you know, 15,000 things you need to do and then you need somebody to maybe help bring it in. So I encourage people to use ai, fine AI is very smart at a lot of things. And, and so you can put your holes in hematology and it will say these things. You may still need somebody to help refine that a little bit more.
Elizabeth (1h 6m 12s):
You still need to be able to, to, to kind of look at your hormones in a little different way than, than AI might. So I, I think that use ai, but go really empower yourself to learn.
Brian (1h 6m 23s):
Yeah. No, I love that you have an institute. Is that, did Dr. Share Scott Cher, did he go to, is that same institute that he has?
Elizabeth (1h 6m 30s):
No, they have a different, they have a different thing called Home Hope. That's right. It's a little different. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I think it's a little bit more health, health coach designed. Gotcha. And not just quite so much Lay People design.
Brian (1h 6m 42s):
Okay. Human Optimization Institute. Yeah,
Elizabeth (1h 6m 45s):
Academy. Academy.
Brian (1h 6m 46s):
H-O-A-H-O-A. Okay.
Elizabeth (1h 6m 49s):
So yeah, Bly Academy is the site to go for that. Okay. And then, and then Boulder longevity institute.com just for looking at our things. And we treat, we're in Boulder, but we, I'm licensed in every state, So we treat people all over.
Brian (1h 7m 2s):
Oh, okay. So you do like telehealth? We
Elizabeth (1h 7m 4s):
Do telehealth, yeah. And orthopedics stuff like too, we can do a whole lot, even from a telehealth perspective, if you send us your imaging, talking about your symptoms, obviously if you need procedures, we'd have to have you come out. But there's a lot we can do online for people too.
Brian (1h 7m 15s):
Hmm, that's great. Like
Elizabeth (1h 7m 16s):
Penton.
Brian (1h 7m 18s):
Yeah. Okay. All right Dr. U, I appreciate you coming on. This was great.
Elizabeth (1h 7m 23s):
I appreciate you letting me come on. So nice.
Brian (1h 7m 26s):
Have a great rest of the day and thank you. Thank
Elizabeth (1h 7m 28s):
You.
Brian (1h 7m 29s):
Thanks for listening to the show. I know there's thousands of podcasts out there and you chose to listen to mine. I will put a link in the show notes if you want to connect with my guest. And if you are looking for one-on-one consulting with me, I will put a free 15 minute link so you can set up a call to see if you're fit for my six month health breakthrough program. So thanks again, feel free to rate and subscribe. I would love that to help support the podcast. And till next time, have a great rest of the day and I will see you on my next podcast. Thanks so much.
