136. Dr. Goodenowe: Plasmalogens and the Hidden Science of Longevity

Most people think brain aging is inevitable. What if the real future of longevity is protecting cellular health long before symptoms appear. In this episode of Extend, we sit down with Dr. Dayan Goodenowe, neuroscientist and biochemist, to explore the hidden role of plasmalogens in brain health, aging, and all-cause mortality. Dr. Goodenowe shares how his work in advanced metabolomics revealed that declining plasmalogen levels can predict dementia, cancer recurrence, and shortened lifespan years before disease is diagnosed, reframing aging as a loss of health rather than a disease itself. We explore how restoring cellular membrane integrity can reduce neuroinflammation, rebuild brain structure, and improve resilience, along with how advanced MRI and lipid-based blood testing now make it possible to measure, track, and optimize brain health in a proactive way. What We Discuss: (01:39) What plasmalogens are and why cell membranes matter (11:23) Predicting dementia and mortality years in advance (14:52) Why aging is about losing health, not getting disease (16:03) The concept of prodromes and early loss of resilience (19:13) Plasmalogens, cancer recurrence, and systemic aging (27:35) Advanced MRI, brain inflammation, and cortical thickness (36:40) Muscle, mobility, and restoring functional resilience (40:14) The three M's of longevity: mental acuity, mobility, mood (53:42) Measuring true brain health beyond standard biomarkers (59:05) Designing a life focused on function, purpose, and vitality Thank You to Our Sponsors: Vitaboom: For supplements you can trust and wellness solutions tailored to your health, visit https://vitaboom.com/ Learn more about Dr. Shah: Website: https://www.drshah.com/ Clinic: https://www.next-health.com/ Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/darshanshahmd/ Learn more about Dr. Goodenowe: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/drdayangoodenowe/ Website: https://boulderlongevity.comhttps://drgoodenowe.com/ Website: https://prodrome.com/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dayangoodenowe/ Keywords: Longevity Medicine, Plasmalogens, Brain Health, Cellular Membrane Health, Preventive Care, Health Optimization, Aging Mechanisms, Neuroinflammation, Biomarkers, Advanced MRI, Metabolomics, Personalized Medicine, Proactive Health Monitoring, Functional Longevity, Human Potential Optimization, Extend Podcast, Episode 137, Dr. Dayan Goodenowe

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Welcome to Extend with me, Dr. Darshan Shah, a podcast dedicated to cutting-edge science, research, tools, and protocols designed to help you extend your health span. Having become one of the youngest doctors in the country at the age of 21, and trained and board-certified at the Mayo Clinic, I've accumulated three decades of practice as a board-certified surgeon and longevity expert. Over that time, I've discovered that a mere 20% of health knowledge yields 80% of the results when it comes to your health span. We're living in a new era where we are creating a new healthcare system, no longer focused on disease management, but achieving optimal health and vitality. Join me as I interview world-renowned experts, offering you a step-by-step guide to proactively avoid disease, and most importantly, extend your health span.

• 0:50Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Today, we're joined by Dr. Dan Gudinell. He's a neuroscientist, biochemist, synthetic organic chemist, and one of the most influential researchers in modern cellular health. In 1999, he invented a groundbreaking mass spectrometry technology that allows scientists to analyze human biochemistry in unprecedented detail. After studying tens of thousands of people, he discovered something revolutionary. Every major disease has an early biochemical signature, a prodrome that appears years or even decades before symptoms. His work led to patents across more than 20 diseases and to one of the most important innovations in preventative medicine, plasmalogen precursor technology,

• 1:35Dr. Darshan Shah?

  designed to restore critical molecules that decline early in aging, cognitive decline, and chronic disease. Dr. Gudinell is a founder of ProDrome Science and the creator of the ProDrome Scan, a test that measures key biomarkers of vulnerability long before disease develops. His mission is simple but profound. Don't wait for disease. Measure health, maintain it, and restore the body's biochemical resilience before things break. In this episode, we get into plasmalogens, early brain deterioration, the future of diagnostics, and how MRI technology is evolving, the three M's of longevity, and why purpose and mood are biochemical necessities for long-term vitality. Here's Dr. Dan Gudinell.

• 2:24Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Dr. Goodenowe, it's such an incredible honor to have you here. As I was just telling you, very starstruck to have you here. You're one of those scientists that all of us longevity physicians or just physicians in general really look up to as really creating an entire new thought process around cellular health that we've never had before. So, thank you for joining.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  Well, thank you, Dr. Shroff. I'm so happy to be here.

• 2:46Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, so, you know, I think I'd love to start the conversation with there's an entire body of cellular health that most physicians don't have access to. And that is the integrity and the function of the cellular membrane, the membrane around the cell, right? And we call this membrane a lipid bilayer, right? Or a bilipid layer. And we don't really think about it a lot because we don't think there's any way to really affect it or there's nothing we can really do about it, right? Except we try to get drugs smashed through this lipid bilayer into the cell. And so that's the only reason we really study it. But you've dedicated your entire career to molecules that function in this bilayer

• 3:31Dr. Darshan Shah?

  and their precursors and et cetera, and really have seen massive improvement in many health conditions. And just to kind of frame the conversation, that's what we're going to be diving into today.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Awesome.

• 3:44Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I love it.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  Cellular biochemistry is my briar patch.

• 3:47Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I could tell. I could tell. So, I would love to hear just from, you know, big picture, how you discovered molecules that could function in this way and like your backstory in coming into this field.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Well, what's so exciting about doing all this work right now is because I'm a PhD research scientist in neurochemistry and synthetic organic chemist. I'm not a medical doctor, right? And so I come through my educational program looking at these basic science avenues.

• 4:16Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  And we do clinical, we do research, animal studies, cell culture studies, and we study science from that type of hypothesis-driven perspective, right? And the medical doctors in the world, they have a different type of training.

• 4:27Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  They deal with, you know, how do I, how do I use and apply tools? And technologies, whether it's a drug, whether it's a therapy, how do I diagnose a given condition? And they're working so intimately with the human condition.

• 4:40Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Right? And then that goes on and they become basically artists in working in with their patients. And so what's exciting about us working together is that I've had to come from the scientific background. And then most scientists don't ever see a human being, right? They're in laboratories or we we deal with large amounts of information, we publish papers, we go to hold the conferences that scientists go to, medical doctors don't go to.

• 5:06Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  And the conferences that medical doctors go to, scientists don't go to.

• 5:10Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Absolutely.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  And so there's two different worlds and they very rarely combine.

• 5:13Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  And what's so exciting about this advanced medical area is all these doctors are really getting excited about cellular chemistry and understanding, there's got to be more. And many of them have, you know, had personal experiences where they've used their training and say, you know what, something's missing. Like, you know, I've kind of exhausted the medical tools at my disposal, but I'm not giving up. So they start digging deeper and deeper into things. And that's kind of where we meet in the middle.

• 5:40Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Which is, which is really quite exciting. And then the other aspect of my background is in infrastructure, like logistics, like clinical trials, laboratories, manufacturing, you know, which is, you know, when you're going to this new advanced world of cellular biochemistry, you have all these products, but they're being used by specialty doctors and little pieces here, little pieces there.

• 6:05Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  And trying to organize and consolidate them. And so this has been just a wonderful experience for me. And I'm getting more and more addicted to working with all these doctors with every waking.

• 6:16Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It's like, it's like you're like vertically integrating everything in the process, right? Like you've gone from the cellular biochemistry to the manufacturing and the actual, the scientific tools that you use as well, all the way up to the patient care piece of it and bringing it the full journey, which is so exciting.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  We're all kind of kids in a new toy store. Basically, the medical doctors are coming in, oh, I had no idea. There's some cool toys in here I can play with.

• 6:40Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  And then I'm on the other side. Saying this is great. We actually have case studies. We can do case series. We can take here's complex patients.

• 6:47Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  That we can work together with. We can do advanced blood testing. We do advanced MRI. We can intervene with these biochemical intermediates like plasma agents. And so it's been really kind of my background is like a doctor's background, but in a different area. So I start from scratch from my first, you know, addiction to chemistry, understanding how the biochemistry of the world works. And so my background is in that biochemical perspective. And then back in the nineties, we were doing all these genomics, right? We're sequencing the human genome for the first time. And we're trying to understand gene expression analysis and scientists were developing these, um, what's called non-targeted methods.

• 7:27Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Science typically has always been hypothesis driven.

• 7:30Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  You could think of an idea and say, hey, vitamin C, I'm going to test vitamin C on something, right?

• 7:35Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  But when we started sequencing the full genome of the human body, we didn't know anything about any of these genes.

• 7:41Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  So it became hypothesis creating. So we actually run the experiments first and then look at the data afterwards and say, hey, what was going on? And that changed that I don't think people truly realize how that period of time in the nineties upended 5,000 years of of philosophy.

• 8:01Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Wow.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  For the first time in our life, we could generate these large data sets.

• 8:04Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  And then after the fact, say, what's in here? And me as a biochemist, there was no tool to measure biochemistry comprehensively.

• 8:14Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  And so my first real invention was this ion cyclotron technology

• 8:18Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  that measured thousands and thousands of molecules simultaneously without knowing what they are at first.

• 8:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  And so then you apply this type of technology to different disease states. So we look at people with Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or colon cancer and pancreatic cancer. And we say, okay, if you have a group of people that are cancer free, for example, and you have a group of people with cancer, there's obviously difference, like there should be biochemical difference because our human body is a biochemical system.

• 8:44Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  And this advanced technology was able to identify the biochemical differences between people with different diseases. And in Alzheimer's and cognition, one of the molecules that showed up was these plasmalogens. And I had no idea what they were. And I'm a neurochemist, right? I've studied, my whole training is on the biochemistry of the brain.

• 9:04Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  And so I'm finding these molecules really low in all these people with cognitive impairment or dementia. And the more severe the depletion was, the more severe the dementia was. And we did multiple, multiple trials in this. And so the way the mass spectrometer works, it measures accurate mass. And you get the molecular formula.

• 9:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  And these molecules with this NPO7 structure was coming up.

• 9:30Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  And it's going, which is very strange for me.

• 9:32Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Normally eight oxygens. So I was really geeking out on you right now. But so I'm looking at these molecules and going, what are these things? And seriously, I back in, I was Googling, trying to figure out these structures. I found out they're called plasmalogens. And so I wasn't the person who invented or discovered plasmalogens for the very first time. Like those were discovered back in the twenties.

• 9:52Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Wow.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  And we've known the critical component of plasmalogens because we have certain rare diseases that are mutations, that are known, that if people have mutations in certain genes that make plasmalogens, you get children that have called, uh, one of the diseases called risomeallic chondysplasia pontata. There's others like leukodystrophies and things.

• 10:12Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  And these children are born with dwarfism. They're born with intellectual disabilities. They ultimately die within a short period of life. So we know plasmalogen, plasmalogens are critical.

• 10:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  And these are molecules that are part of this lipid bilayer that you're talking about. And so that's kind of where that all came from.

• 10:29Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That's where it all came from.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  And then, then you kind of, it's like pulling a, a thread of yarn and you kind of get, you get something and you get kind of curious about it and then you kind of keep on pulling the string. And then, you know. Twenty years later, you're still doing this.

• 10:43Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, you're still pulling this train. So just to kind of like paint the picture there, I mean, this is pretty incredible that there was a scientific revolution that happened with the sequencing of the genome. Because the first time, we could just create a massive data set and then be like, what does this data even mean? And so that kind of changed your thought process around just, just how to approach science. So you invented a machine that could then look at thousands of serum biomarkers, I assume in the serum, right? And you have now, you have thousands of markers and you don't know what they mean. So your idea then was to look at someone that had Alzheimer's and then one that didn't. And what was the difference in their, in that data, right? And so then you can extrapolate like this person with Alzheimer's has these molecules

• 11:28Dr. Darshan Shah?

  or a deficiency of these molecules that this person doesn't have.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 11:31Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And then you went down into that rabbit hole into what are those molecules? And you found out that they were actually discovered before, they're plasmalogens. And now you have a group of molecules that you know have some association with Alzheimer's disease. And but at this point, you probably don't know whether they, whether Alzheimer's or even like ALS or Parkinson's, if, if the problem was the deficiency of these, or maybe there's just an association, right? Is there a causation or an association between this? And so how do you kind of figure that question out? How do you?

• 12:03Speaker 01

  So those, that falls a different line of clinical trials. So in for the plasmalogens, the reason why it was determined to be causal is that we look at the longitudinal nature of individuals. So we do cross sectional analysis of individuals at different stages of disease.

• 12:17Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Got it.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  And then we did a large study with Rush University in Chicago, where they have a very large longitudinal trials, been going on for 20 some years. And we could, and the blood samples are stored. And so then we could take blood samples before people had dementia.

• 12:32Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  And we could predict who would get dementia in the future based upon blood levels. And so those people that had, that were not cognitively impaired, so they had normal cognition, but they had low blood plasmalogens, those individuals became demented in the near future. And so we just saw that this was linked to that, was one of the big aspects of it. Another area that we really did a lot of work with is in cancer.

• 12:57Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  And so the real genesis of

• 13:01Speaker 01

  Prodromes. Because when I first dealt with technology, I thought, well, this is like, great. It's a diagnostic, we can diagnose disease.

• 13:07Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, it's like a blood test, right.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  And we can do early detection of disease.

• 13:10Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  And cancer is a good example. We'd expect this tumor is doing something to the body, right?

• 13:16Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  And so cancers have these other deficiencies that are very commonly observed. These GTAs and fossil colons.

• 13:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  And we did this at the time, this is back in the early 2000s. We expected that the tumor must be consuming these molecules.

• 13:31Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Creating this deficiency.

• 13:33Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Got it.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  So we did this study in Osaka, Japan, where we looked at people with colon cancer before and after surgery. So we did blood testing. They went for surgery, they were called cancer-free. And we were expecting these biomarkers come back to normal.

• 13:45Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure, because they're not being consumed anymore.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Right, it didn't happen. Biomarkers were exactly the same.

• 13:49Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Hmm.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  No change in the biomarkers at all. And we said, wow, this was not what we expected. So we redid the entire project over again with a different university, this time in Chiba University outside of Tokyo, and got exactly the same results. And that's when the light bulb really came on in that we're actually measuring people that will get future disease.

• 14:09Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Hmm.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  We're not using, we're not measuring molecules afterwards. And so this is a concept of prodromes.

• 14:13Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  And so we're measuring ball tires that become flat.

• 14:17Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Hmm.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Okay, we're not actually measuring a puncture wound.

• 14:20Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  We're actually measuring a ball tire and saying, hey.

• 14:22Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  You're likely to get a flat tire in the future if you continue on. And this is where the plasmalogens had a very similar situation because they're also low in cancer patients, not just dementia patients, and they don't get, we did a big study with breast cancer. Um, this is with another project in Japan with Kyoto University. High diagnostic accuracy, like 93% diagnostic accuracy. And we looked at women, we did two separate studies out of Kyoto on breast cancer, looking at before and after proper surgery and chemo. And again, not only did the plasmalogens not come back to normal, the chemotherapy actually reduced the plasmalogens even further. Which leads to this whole concept of recurrence of disease.

• 15:01Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Right, so a lot of times when we think we're treating a disease like a cancer where we remove the tumor. But we all know that people who have a history of cancer have a higher probability of recurrence.

• 15:12Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Than someone who never had cancer in the first place.

• 15:14Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  And so we could actually explain that. We could actually explain why previous cancer made you more susceptible to future cancer.

• 15:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay, okay.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  And so this is, so we understand these prodromes now, so clearly there is this concept of deviation from health versus disease. So it's kind of the concept, because we think of disease like a pathology, right?

• 15:35Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  We think, oh, I get infection or get something.

• 15:37Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Like something happened.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Happened to me, right? And that's a normal process. But in reality, we lose health.

• 15:43Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  And this is what gets exciting about the whole longevity, immortality.

• 15:47Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Okay, concept of quantitative immortality, because you don't actually get disease. You lose health.

• 15:54Dr. Darshan Shah?

  You lose health, right?

• 15:55Speaker 01

  And you don't actually die, you lose life.

• 15:57Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  And as a scientist, we go back to physics, right? You know, and I'm a Canadian boy, so we talk about cold, right? People always cold. And well, technically, it's not cold. It's just less hot.

• 16:08Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Lack of heat.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Right? And so, which is hard, it's a hard argument to make sometimes when it's forty degrees below. But the point is, is that technically speaking, there's no such thing as cold.

• 16:17Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  There's either heat or lack of heat. And so technically, there's no such thing as death. There's either life or lack of life. Like you don't, you don't actually get death.

• 16:25Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Death, right, exactly.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  You don't actually get disease, other than the bacterial infection, for example.

• 16:28Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes, yes.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  And so this whole concept now says, well, that also changes your whole mindset, because now you say, hmm, if the loss of health is what gives me disease, or the loss of life is what gives me less longevity or death, then what is health?

• 16:43Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  What is life biochemically? And can we then measure that? Because we can predict mortality.

• 16:50Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  And this is the issue with the Rush University project, because we're doing it with prediction of dementia.

• 16:56Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  But of course, this is elderly population.

• 16:58Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  And they eventually die. And so we also, completely serendipitously, we say, oh, wow, you know what? Let's look at all-cause mortality.

• 17:06Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  And turned out that the plasmalogens predicted all-cause mortality. More than dementia. It was a thirty year difference in lifespan. Based upon someone's plasma levels.

• 17:17Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Wow.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  It was a crazy, crazy number.

• 17:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That is crazy.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  But this changes the whole world.

• 17:21Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Because now it's opened up a whole new idea. That we can say, you know what? Let's stop chasing disease.

• 17:29Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Let's create health.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Let's create health.

• 17:30Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  And so, but then we have to measure just the deviation from health.

• 17:33Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Now, it's the concept of the dipstick in your car, right? I don't wait for engine failure. If the level is supposed to be a certain level, because below that level, I top it off. Right? And so that's the concept of here's healthy oil levels.

• 17:46Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  And we know that. And I always make this joke, you know? If you're old enough, you had old cars that used to burn oil all the time. And so I used to have a car, like I.

• 17:55Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Same.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Every time I got gas, I had to check the oil. Right? And so, just to make sure.

• 18:00Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  But now my new car, I hardly ever check the oil. I check the oil every, you know, two, three thousand miles when the oil change, right? So this is the, this is the whole concept of preventative maintenance.

• 18:10Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, right, right.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  And the concept of now, if we can understand our health. And we can understand the, the timeframe for certain deviations.

• 18:20Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  We can start reducing some of our anxiety. We don't have to be so obsessive on everything.

• 18:25Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Because that's one of the challenges of health, which.

• 18:28Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  No one really knows what's going to happen to them next, right? So we're always a little bit worried.

• 18:31Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, right.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Walk down the street, you're going to get hit by lightning, or am I going to get some disease?

• 18:36Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  And you have no knowledge. And so that's kind of where we're working together more on now is understanding what health is.

• 18:42Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  So that we can measure the deviation from health.

• 18:44Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  And then once we measure deviation from health, we say, well, let's restore it.

• 18:48Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Restore it, right.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  And then we want to have fun, we want to push it even further.

• 18:51Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly, then we can push it even further. So, um, and that's the concept also of being resilience, right? Because when you push it further, you can be resilient to anything that, that occurs.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:00Dr. Darshan Shah?

  But just to take it back a little bit, um, so plasma antigen molecules, um, what you found was a deficiency of these molecules led to not just Alzheimer's, but all cause mortality, meaning cardiovascular disease, uh, cancers, everything. And so, and a deficiency also led to recurrence of tumors. So, the, the situation. Is one in which if you know your plasmalogens are low, you need to get them back up to a normal level.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 19:27Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And that is kind of one aspect of creating health. And when you have health, that is the absence of disease.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 19:34Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I always say, you know, splashing on our walls here is that true health is not simply the absence of disease is the abundance of being having vitality, right?

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 19:44Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And so I think plasmalogens is one of those molecules is not often talked about as being a component to that vitality.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Well, and once you dig into these plasmalogen molecules, you you really get almost angry because why have you not been told? We're talking molecules that 20, 30% of your entire brain. Children development, the myelination of the brain.

• 20:03Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Okay, children are born slightly plasmalgian development. The there's plasmalgian precursors in breast milk that link to increased white matter development. But we're talking about molecules that make up, you know, a huge percentage of the myelin sheet that the protective protein in your axons. In your synapses, the gray matter, like 85% of the of these ethanol means are plasmalogens. 50% of the total lipid component composition of your heart are plasmalogens. High levels in your kidneys. They they are they are critical drivers of your reverse cholesterol transport system. So we're talking about HDL levels that drive HDL control.

• 20:39Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  People think about Alzheimer's disease and the A P E four genotype.

• 20:42Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  And plasmalogens are related to the amyloid processing system in the brain.

• 20:47Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  And so we're not dealing with some trace level molecule.

• 20:50Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Like not even like if you talk about like

• 20:52Dr. Darshan Shah?

  There's a lot of these.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Like a serotonin neurotransmitter or we lost it. Like we're talking a core structural molecule. It's on the same playing ground as cholesterol, if you will, and phosphocolin. It's at that level of bulk.

• 21:05Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  And

• 21:06Dr. Darshan Shah?

  There's pounds and pounds of plasmalogens in our body.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Right, and it's interesting because the body is so dependent upon it.

• 21:13Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  It basically says, I'm not going to trust you to get it from your diet. I'm going to make it on myself. Cholesterol is another one, right?

• 21:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Your body, we get very little cholesterol from our diet.

• 21:22Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  Our body needs cholesterol so badly that it will make all of its cholesterol from scratch. Plasmalogen is the same thing.

• 21:30Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  And for most of your life, you're fine.

• 21:32Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yep.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  And it peaks in our blood levels and our brain in our 40s and 50s.

• 21:36Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  And then it starts going down dramatically.

• 21:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  So it actually peaks in the 40s and 50s.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:41Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Ah, interesting. Okay.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Assuming you're healthy.

• 21:43Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Obviously, there'll be people with low levels earlier on.

• 21:45Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  That have other consequences.

• 21:46Dr. Darshan Shah?

  But your body makes it from precursors, so it does need specific nutrients to make these plasmalogens, right?

• 21:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, so actually, the the normal biosynthesis makes it from simple acetylcholine. It makes it from the simplest of simplest molecules.

• 22:01Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  Very, very basic. But you can't, the question, the challenge that came up in the early 2000s is when I discovered these plasmalogens. Now, we had to do these testing. So you talk about causation, right?

• 22:12Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  And so in order for us to test the causation, we need to be able to manipulate the plasmalogen levels. So how do I increase plasmalogen levels? How do I decrease plasmalogen levels in animal studies? So the first thing was how do we restore plasmalogens? Well, it wasn't as easy as you think. Because we're dealing, in 2006 is when I first invented the first plasmalogen precursor that could actually restore plasmalogen levels.

• 22:34Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Oh.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Now, you think, well, that's 80 years after plasmalogens were discovered.

• 22:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure, sure.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  And we've known these children are dying from plasmalogen deficiencies. So this, the inability to restore plasmalogens was a big, big problem that no one had solved. So I was able to solve that.

• 22:48Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I'm so sorry to interrupt you, but these children are dying from plasmalogen deficiencies because they have a genetic condition that doesn't allow them to

• 22:54Speaker 01

  Make it.

• 22:54Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Synthesize plasmalogen. That's why we know it's a critical molecule. Because if you have a genetic deficiency, it's like a Mendelian study, right?

• 23:02Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 23:03Dr. Darshan Shah?

  You know that these kids are gonna die, so it's a critical molecule. And so then that, from that, we can infer that our body makes this for a critical reason.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:12Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Because without it, you will die, right? And so, okay, so then

• 23:15Speaker 01

  And there've been other good scientists that have looked at this in early childhood development and other areas. So plasmalogen had been studied, but nobody could actually manipulate plasmalogen levels appropriately. And so in 2006, I invented these plasmalogen precursors.

• 23:27Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  That could, they would come into the body's biochemical system just before you make the plasmalogen. So we could actually make whatever plasmalogen we want using these precursors.

• 23:35Dr. Darshan Shah?

  So it's bypassing part of the synthesis system. Um, presumably if you're a child that's deficient in one path, one part of the pathway and you take a precursor, you bypass that system. And now you bypass that deficiency.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  And all and for the rest of us who just as we gradually get older, that one system is called your paroxysm. So it's one of your organelles in your cells.

• 23:58Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  That make your plasmalogens called paroxysms.

• 24:01Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And this is in every cell in the body?

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Every cell of the body, yeah. And typically that decreases in function as we get older.

• 24:07Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Got it.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  And so we stop making enough plasmalogens. So we can replace them. So we all, as we get older, we become more and more like RCDP, basically. Aging. So but but back to your original question was, okay, what's the the association versus causation?

• 24:21Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes, please.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  So now we could get these plasma agent precursors. We can now do animal studies, we could do cell culture studies. And we're able to show very clearly that they regulate HDL, like cholesterol transport. And then we can do these trials for really severe neurodegeneration studies.

• 24:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  So for example, Parkinson's, there's an animal model for Parkinson's called MPTP, very reproducibly destroys dopamine neurons in the brain. And it's actually interesting, it was discovered by these kids in California in the, I think it was late eighties. They were trying to make designer heroin. And exactly, so there's about, I can't remember how many, there's there's three or four of them that that showed up in the hospital in Riverside with full blown Parkinson's. Looked like in their twenties, like full blown Parkinson's. And they were going, what's going on with these people? They were totally frozen. And so they did the research and they found out that there was a a toxic byproduct of their heroin manufacturing in their house. That was called called MPTP. So ever since then,

• 25:20Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  we could in animals create Parkinson's on demand by giving this toxin.

• 25:25Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Oh, I see, got it.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  So now we had this plasma agent precursor.

• 25:28Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  We say, okay, let's, let's, let's give animals a toxin. But let's give them plasmalogens. If we give them the plasmalogens, the toxin doesn't cause any Parkinson's. We can completely prevent Parkinson's.

• 25:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Wow.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  And so it can, so we can restore the membrane, the structure that this toxin was destroying.

• 25:45Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That's incredible.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  And then, and we, we know that plasma agent is associated with Parkinson's is a risk factor. And we. And for white matter disease, there's another toxin that we use is called Cooperzone. It's a molecule that chelates copper, but it reproducibly creates multiple sclerosis. It depletes myelination. If you give animals plasmalgem precursors, the Cooperzone causes no demyelination. Like it'll prevent the, it'll, it'll maintain myelination in the presence of these toxic mediators.

• 26:13Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Wow.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  So clearly tells us that deficient plasmalgens or insufficient plasmalgens lead, you know, um, are a critical component of these diseases. So if you have high levels or if you supplement them, and which is why now we have all these clinical case studies with our patients with multiple sclerosis, you may have seen one of mine with Lisa Grillo who had, was blind for 30 years.

• 26:34Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  She can see for the first time.

• 26:36Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Amazing.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  And we can restore that with plasmalgem precursors.

• 26:39Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Wow.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  So that's kind of this causation. So now we know.

• 26:41Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Unambiguously that they're not, you know, bystanders of an accident. Like they're not some, some, some, you know, serendipitous, you know.

• 26:51Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, right. It's not like just a biomarker of the disease. It's actually a part of the disease process.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 26:58Dr. Darshan Shah?

  With, um, I mean, that's incredible that with Parkinson's, they, there's this drug that was discovered by heroin makers in California that can create Parkinson's in animals. And if you give a plasmalgem, you can actually prevent the Parkinson's from happening with this drug. And the same holds true with MS, you said, with the, with the other drug that can create MS in animals as well. We can bypass the, the drug. And so this could be a potential molecule for people that are suffering from Parkinson's or MS to utilize in their overall treatment algorithm.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Exactly. And this is, this is whole restorative health model. And how we can actually, and the resilience of the human body, the adaptability of the human body and the human brain is quite remarkable. People, and you know, I spend a lot of time on the neurological side of these.

• 27:47Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Equation because it seems to be a preponderance. But the myocarditis, like a lot of the myocarditis that children were getting with COVID, um, a lot of our pediatricians use plasmalgem very effectively at restoring heart structure and function in these children. But for brain, um, we use advanced MRI. So we can actually now study the regrowth of the brain.

• 28:05Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  So for Lisa Grillo, for MS or other patients with Parkinson's, we can now study how the brain responds with aging and how we can reverse the aging of the brain and restore the health and function of the brain. Because. You know, one of the things we use with the advanced MRI technology is we can measure cortical thickness with accuracy.

• 28:24Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  And so we measure like six hundred regions of the brain and it's certain areas get thin. And I'm a good case study of that myself because I thought I'd be, you know, a control animal, if you will. I'm high functioning, I'm fine.

• 28:36Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  So I got my, my advanced brain scan done like three years ago now, almost four years ago. And unfortunately, I had some areas, I had a concussion when I was eight years old. So it's actually had post-concussive industry from eight years to my, and certain areas of my occipital cortex, which relates to my vision, were quite thin. And I've been able to restore those completely. So I've been able to reverse the aging of my, my brain back into its forties now.

• 29:02Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Wow.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Over the course of these several years and we can now track that.

• 29:05Dr. Darshan Shah?

  With the MRI.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  With the MRI scan. And what's important about us is that the brain is kind of like a muscle. Like if you, if you wake, you work out with weights, you're going to build muscle.

• 29:15Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  If your brain can restore its function, it actually restores the thickness of those, that, that, that layer. And so that's kind of what we're doing with all of our clients now. We, we can actually get their baseline brain scans, put them on an advanced protocol, plasma agent is a critical component of it. Obviously, while we have their attention, we, you know, give them a few more things. And then we can monitor their brain restoration now in a quantitative way.

• 29:40Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Got it.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  This is where this whole, you know, quantitative immortality comes in where we can actually say, hmm, can we actually get to a point where we can have a high degree of predictability that you're not going to die?

• 29:52Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  And which is kind of another weird flip on the script because we're normally trying to predict when you die. We're trying to predict when you'll get a disease.

• 30:01Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  But if we, if we reverse the, the, um, the statistics and we say, okay, what's the probability, you know? So really immortality is the probability that you're going to die in the next two years to be zero.

• 30:13Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  And then two years from now, I want to redo that. And if it's still zero, and I just want every year to be zero.

• 30:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Zero. Exactly. I'm for sure. I mean, so the, the way these, um, these molecules work is, it sounds like there, there's one group. Of them that can help you re myelinate or help you cover the the axons of your neurons.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:35Dr. Darshan Shah?

  For people that don't know, you know, your neurons are your brain cells. Axons are the big, long connections between neurons. And they need to have like a covering around them.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 30:44Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Just like an electrical wire, right?

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 30:45Dr. Darshan Shah?

  If an electric wire doesn't have a covering, it'll short circuit. It won't work correctly. And so these molecules cover the neuron so they can connect better. And this actually shows up in the MRI as kind of thickening of your brain tissue. Right. You're when you say cortical thinning, it's the brain tissue's thinning. And then if you can thicken them up again, that's a sign of of a young brain, of a healthy brain. Right. And so you see that in the special MRI that you do.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:11Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And can anyone get this MRI? Like if I'm 53 now, I want to get an MRI to see where my brain age is based on the thickness of my brain. Can I do that?

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 31:20Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, just give us a call, we'll we'll schedule a visit.

• 31:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I love it.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  And we'll go through it. And we, you know, we look at the cortical thickness, we look at blood flow, we look at we have some advanced called neurite imaging that looks at the fiber densities. And so for people that don't, you know, study the brain all day long.

• 31:36Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  People think of the brain sometimes like a computer.

• 31:39Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  It's so shocking to me when we're looking at health and vitality. We want to look at our body fat, muscle density and all these things. We kind of forget what's going on behind our skull because we can't really see it.

• 31:48Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Well, it's kind of a black box because there's no good way to really evaluate it until now, until MRI technology.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 31:54Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And I think for people to know too, is you can't just get an MRI anywhere. MRI is a piece of hardware. It's the software that really is the, I mean, you need a good piece of hardware, but then you need some really cool software to take advantage of the data you're getting from the MRI.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Well, and that's the real frustrating part for for a medical doctor.

• 32:11Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Because you're only you only, you know, you send someone in for an MRI. It's like whatever the MRI tech has, right? It's a T one or, you know. And what I found so frustrating, because when I come into this space, I come in as a researcher. And I research all the literature papers. And so people have been doing advanced MRI for years.

• 32:29Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  Right. But no doctor has access to this.

• 32:31Dr. Darshan Shah?

  No.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Like it's like, so it's not like, and this is a whole frustrating thing about some of the biochemistry that I teach people. It's not like I invented all this technology. A lot of the stuff, there's been really massively intelligent people doing amazing work. But we don't have the implementation. We don't have access to it. Right? Like, we use the ion cyclotrons in our lab for for measuring thousands of molecules. And we're the only place in the world that you can get a commercially available blood test for plasma levels and single myelins and a whole bunch of other things that are important. But it's not like I invented those molecules. There's papers for the last 20 years. In specialty labs, looking at this stuff. And same thing with MRI. And so what we've really done is saying, how do we commercialize this? How do we, how do we create tools and education?

• 33:15Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  So any doctor can get, like, so we use this neurite orientation dispersion density index called NODI.

• 33:21Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  And it gives you white matter microstructure analysis.

• 33:25Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  And I didn't invent the technology. We tweak it a little bit. But there's no MRI facility that can do it. When we first ran it, it took us seven days. So it's five minutes in the scanner, and it was seven days of computer processing time.

• 33:41Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Wow.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Okay. And so then we, and so then we took the seven days, so which is why it's only done in some academic center, right? And then it got down to 48 hours and, and now we've got it down to, it's a reason, like, we've put supercomputer behind it. And so, but so now people can go and get this advanced brain scan and it measures the, the, the white matter microstructure.

• 34:00Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And what does that tell you?

• 34:01Speaker 01

  It shows, so it's, so we talk about this, so the brain, again, people think of it as a computer, but it's not. It's like a wiring diagram.

• 34:07Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  It's areas of gray matter connected by these wires, right, white matter. And as we get older, the, the wiring kind of, the coating kind of gets dissipated or like old wires in your wall, if you will, right? And so this measures the structure of that versus just the volume. So you actually measure how the wires are working inside there. And that's actually quite responsive to treatment. So when we restore that, and it's also the association with age is very strong. So there's certain things that are more accurate determiners of The function of the brain.

• 34:40Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  And those, those are the things that are responsive to the adaptability. So we've been able to restore that, which is exciting. So the last thing in the world you want to have is a blood test or some test that says it sucks to be you.

• 34:51Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? You're gonna die. Great. No, so this, what's cool about biochemistry and this MRI neurology is that these are all intervenable programs.

• 35:04Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Absolutely.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  You actually measure this stuff, not just to be morbid, but you actually measure it and say, okay, I can work on that. I can actually, okay, if I, if I do these things and I come back and I can test it again and I can build a trajectory back. And I can build a program that I can reproducibly, you know, rinse and repeat, if you will.

• 35:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  No.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  And go.

• 35:24Dr. Darshan Shah?

  What's really frustrating for me as a physician is, you know, when I was taught about Alzheimer's disease, for example, in medical school. I always thought you wait for symptoms. The ones, the symptoms get really bad, you have to confirm Alzheimer's by getting a PET scan. And the PET scan lights up with amyloid. And by then we all know it's just way too late to do anything significant, right? You're just making a diagnosis to basically tell someone it sucks to be you, right? And what's frustrating for me is that there's this incredible technology out there, like the advanced MRI, where you take so much data and you crunch it using a supercomputer.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 36:00Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Finally go that from seven days to one day and you get a score for how well your neurons are connected. And then once you have that score, you can do something about it through various interventions, including plasmalogens.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 36:13Dr. Darshan Shah?

  To see the score improve, right? And you can track this longitudinally over time with a five-minute MRI scan.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 36:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That's, is that what you're saying?

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Well, ours is a little longer than that.

• 36:22Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  It's about 45 minutes.

• 36:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Forty-five minutes, okay.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Cause we do about, do about eight or nine different sequences.

• 36:27Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Got it, got it. But, but is that kind of what we're saying here?

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 36:29Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That we can actually test, score the functionality of your brain. So we're not just talking disease here. We're talking, like, you're a highly functioning individual. And you found out that you had remnants of CTE.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:41Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And you were able to improve that.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:43Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And now you're, are you more high functioning now?

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Very much so. Multitasking is so much better.

• 36:49Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Amazing.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  My vision, so for example, my vision is back to when I was seventeen.

• 36:53Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Wow.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  So I have, I don't have, get headaches anymore. And so I just got my prescription. My nearsightedness has changed my whole score. It was like, it used to be minus one point seven five and now it's point seven five.

• 37:03Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Like seriously, quantitative improvement in vision.

• 37:06Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That's incredible.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  And so, yes, it's highly, you feel it in your own regular life. Same thing with muscle mass. I can work on. We now have tools, we can very clearly build muscle in an individual at seventy at the same rate as we can build it at thirty. And I'm, I'm physically stronger than I was in my twenties and thirties.

• 37:24Dr. Darshan Shah?

  What are the tools for building muscle mass that you're working on?

• 37:27Speaker 01

  So we create, um, so one of the things that people deal with when, when they're, you, you go through these cycles of fasting. And fed states every single day of your life.

• 37:37Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  And your body consumes energy from your fat cells.

• 37:41Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  But it also takes, uh, energy from your muscle cells.

• 37:44Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  And so there's specific biochemical systems that we can restore that prevent muscle wasting. And we, and this actually came in our work with ALS a lot and Parkinson's. And people that we were restoring neurological function, but we're still having a hard time getting their, maintaining their weight and building their muscle structure. And so we've developed biochemical pathways that can restore muscle and build muscle mass at a much higher rate, which is kind of cool.

• 38:08Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Using plasmalogens?

• 38:09Speaker 01

  Plasmalogens are a critical component of it, but these are, um, your leucine amino acids, certain, certain amino acids that your muscles deplete overnight time.

• 38:18Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, right, right.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  And so we make a kind of a, we call it a muscle water that people take at night and in the morning.

• 38:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  What, what's in it? Leucine I know is critical for muscle.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Much, leucine, alanine, uh, it's got myoinositol, it's got, uh, ketone esters.

• 38:31Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  Tryptophan, tri, you know, it's a bunch of stuff in there.

• 38:34Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Oh, and the name of this product is called?

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Well, it's called, we call it muscle water.

• 38:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Muscle water. I love that. Okay.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  It's my, it's my two O.

• 38:41Dr. Darshan Shah?

  My two O. Okay. I need to try this.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  I shouldn't, uh, well, it's not really commercially available. It is, it's part of our program, but it's.

• 38:47Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Hopefully convince you to give me some.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. It's quite addictive. Actually, my own personal, because I always test everything on myself.

• 38:52Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  I didn't change anything in my, my, my daily routine. Started using this and over, I think it was four to six weeks. I gained eight pounds of muscle using the in-body and, uh, Lost five pounds of fat. It was a crazy thing. It was like, oh, this is weird. And so clearly there's something there and many people get benefits from it.

• 39:13Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Incredible.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  But the point is, the body is resilient, first of all, and it's adaptable. And if we can restore the adaptability of the human body, and then put that body in an environment, a stimulating environment, whether it's a mentally stimulating environment or physically stimulating environment, then we can, it can grow younger. So it's not about reversing your age. It's about getting older, but as you get older, you get better. Okay, because you want to retain everything that you've learned and you want to maintain your function.

• 39:45Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  And so, you know, we talk about, you know, we often we use numbers. People like to look at their age, but it's really about function. The heart's supposed to function, the brain's supposed to function, kidneys are supposed to function, right? And if we can measure those functionalities carefully, then if you maintain function indefinitely, that is the longevity model.

• 40:05Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, I mean, right now, we equate chronological age to a corresponding loss of function. And that's, that's what you're saying. We need to break that model because you can age chronologically, but you can actually maintain function and reverse poor function as well. In your brain, in your muscles as well.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  Exactly. Well, function is, function is the only thing that matters.

• 40:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  You can have a car, a nineteen twenties car, and if it's running, you don't, you don't, you, you, the real goal is to forget your age.

• 40:34Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  Okay, I can't remember. How old are you? I don't remember. I lost count.

• 40:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Doesn't matter.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  It doesn't matter. Like, you know, it's, it's, can I do the things I need to do? And I, you know, to me, it's, there's a three M's of a life worth living. It's mental acuity, you want to think, right, you know, be able to interact with your world. Mobility, you need to be able to move, you know, and your mood. Like, you have to want to get up in the morning. You have to have a purpose. You have to, and so if you have a, if, if you can maintain a good mood and purpose in life, and that's how I tell people, never retire, right? Retirement is basically putting a timestamp on your death. You're basically, okay, I'm going to just coast to death from here. So you should be, when you're eighty-five, you should be thinking about your next career. You should be thinking, okay, what's, what's my next challenge?

• 41:16Dr. Darshan Shah?

  What do I do next, right?

• 41:17Speaker 01

  Right? And that's, that's the mindset you have, because.

• 41:20Dr. Darshan Shah?

  The three Ms is a beautiful way to simplify it down.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  You know, if I my my mental acuity, my my mood, my mobility, if I can have those three things, I'm okay.

• 41:29Dr. Darshan Shah?

  You're gonna be fine.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  I'm gonna be fine. And, um, you know, just focus on the things. But one of the biggest things we deal with, and Dr. Yurth is really good at this one, actually. If you've interviewed her, is on purposefulness.

• 41:39Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Understanding purpose.

• 41:41Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  And that's the other part of chronological age. Because we forget, and people think, oh, stress is so bad. But stress is critical. We think, okay, when I get, you know, you're going through high school, it's stressful. Right? You're you're dating, you're trying to find, you know, what's gonna make you attractive to whatever partner you want. And then you you get a job because, you know, you can have a relationship. And so it's stressful to get a job, and then you have kids, and then there's the kids have those relationships with them. And then so you have these milestones in life.

• 42:07Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  That you that you work towards.

• 42:10Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  And those milestones create purpose.

• 42:12Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  The reason for you to get up in the morning, the reason for you to work hard, strive hard. Right? And then people say, okay, now I'm fifty or sixty, and I can quit.

• 42:20Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I'm done with purpose.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Well, then you've lost your purpose.

• 42:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Absolutely.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  Right? And it's and it's really hard because people stop, it's um, it's not easy because our our average life kind of creates purpose for us.

• 42:33Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Like, we kind of have to have a purpose.

• 42:35Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  And then later on in life, you kind of have to make your purpose up.

• 42:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  Like, if you don't have one, make one up. Like, you know, and that's the biggest challenge as we get older. You know, your purpose in life just can't, you know, unless you want to be a professional golfer, but you can't be just, you know, you have to find something.

• 42:50Dr. Darshan Shah?

  To keep you going.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Right. And and challenge yourself as you go forward on it. And those are the things that, you know, we do all these epidemiological trials where, you know, social connectivity and people getting out. And they think, well, you know, if you're gonna go out for coffee and bridge with your friends, well, you gotta get dressed, then you're gonna have a decent meal, and you're gonna have a conversation. And so all those things that surround those type of interactions are health promoting.

• 43:15Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Absolutely.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  And that's kind of what, so we kind of work on the biochemistry side.

• 43:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  Measurement side on the MRI.

• 43:21Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  And then. On a community level, like, you know, get involved, enjoy your life.

• 43:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  Get engaged with people.

• 43:29Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  And then, you know, because it's, you know, we still are social animals. We have to have a.

• 43:33Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It's such a huge part of longevity, right? Because even if you're biochemically very sound.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:39Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And you are, you're taking care of your, your biomarkers, what have you, all of that. If you lose that sense of purpose in the community, you will still decline, right? Because then you're going to get in a situation where you have loneliness and you're not learning anything. And there's, and you've lost your purpose. And all that adds up to a loss of the will to live, which then degrades your biology too, right? So it's, it's definitely bidirectional.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's circular.

• 44:07Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Circular, yes.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  For dementia patients, for example, if you start losing function and then people don't want to, like, they lose their hearing or they're not following conversations.

• 44:15Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  And they become more withdrawn. And so when we, what we find when we're working with people with dementia, and we bring people into our center in Canada, for example, and we start restoring their cognitive skills, they want to engage more.

• 44:27Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Absolutely, right.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  And then that becomes self-perpetuating. And, and one of the things that deals with restoring health, you know, plasmology, what, probably the most rewarding thing about plasmology is if I have to say one thing at all, it's with children with autism. There's nothing more exciting because these children are kind of locked up. They're inside themselves, right?

• 44:45Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  And we do a lot of work with children with rare diseases. But these children, when they start interacting with their parents.

• 44:53Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  And they start, they start receiving things and their, their sense of humor starts coming out.

• 44:59Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  And they, they no longer, they, they no longer become isolated because the world becomes fun for them. And we can learn something from that because part of interacting, you and I interacting is like, it's kind of fun. Like, what are you going to ask me next?

• 45:11Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, right.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Back and forth, right? And so even if you're a kid and you're teasing your sister, so, okay, if I say this, will she, you know, how do I, how do I interact with someone, right? And so all this playfulness that we do in this world has to do with our learning capability.

• 45:25Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  And so, building on these biochemical systems, they really do play a critical role.

• 45:30Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Absolutely.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  And we're just doing a big launch in, in children with autism. We do.

• 45:35Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Oh, wow.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  We, we do free programs with children and so on and so forth. But it's kind of. You can learn from different spectrums, right?

• 45:43Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  You can look at these children and you say, well, some are things happen with old people or people with diseases, they get withdrawn.

• 45:50Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  And their health, their lack of health, the lack of vitality withdraws them from society. And so, like you said, it's bidirectional.

• 46:00Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  It's a circular, you know, and I'm always fairly agnostic. It's like, you know, I don't really care what it takes to get people healthy. If it works.

• 46:08Dr. Darshan Shah?

  If it works, let's do it. Right. I mean, to your point, you know, loss of hearing is highly correlated to dementia and is because of, I do think is because you have less input. And so, less input, both from learning, from being able to enjoy talking to other individuals and just being in social situations, that leads to further and faster degradation of the, of your brain, right?

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 46:31Dr. Darshan Shah?

  You know, and then you don't move around as much because you have nowhere to go. So then you become immobile and sedentary more, which is very circular, right?

• 46:40Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 46:46Dr. Darshan Shah?

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• 47:29Dr. Darshan Shah?

  every day that I'm taking my vitamins and supplements. Go to vitaboom.com and check it out.

• 47:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  You know, I wanted to make sure I asked you about, before I forgot, glia, right? So, we didn't cover that yet, and I think it's incredibly important piece of the story that I don't want my audience to miss out on. What are the microglia? And how are plasmalogies important when you talk about these structures in your brain?

• 47:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so yeah, so we talked about lots of things. So, from the practical perspective, so there's two things. So, there's two different types of plasmalogin precursors, first of all. Earlier on, you talked about the omega-9s for the myelination and the white matter. And these are kind of protective, they're calming, they reduce inflammation. People with ADHD, they basically say it's like putting reading glasses on my brain. They can read sentences again, they can feel good. And then the neuro is more of the volume. It pumps you up, like you get better physical activity, better cognition. It's kind of a, it's a stimulating plasmalogin.

• 48:34Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Is that omega?

• 48:35Speaker 01

  That's the omega-3.

• 48:35Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Omega-3, right.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  With the DHA in it.

• 48:37Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Got it.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  And so, microglia, which is, so we call it protomeglia because it works on white matter. But, and all the glenocerops are other types of glial cells.

• 48:48Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Got it.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  But microglia, people mostly talk about microglia, they're talking about inflammation of the brain.

• 48:53Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Ah, okay.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Okay, and that is calm, so virtually every single neurological disease. Whenever the brain is sick, it's going to be inflamed. And whenever it's inflamed, you're going to have activated microglia. Because that's the brain's healing mechanism. Basically, it's trying to solve a problem. And, but this activated microglia is quite damaging to the brain. Chronic neural inflammation of the brain, which is what causes, which is in autism, which is multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, dementia, doesn't matter. And so, one of the challenges now is the brain is kind of like a castle with a moat around it. It really has to fix itself from the inside. And concussions are a good example. You get a concussion, the brain gets inflamed, and the blood supply is trying to help.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  But there's a limit to what the blood supply can actually deliver to the brain, and how much the brain will let go of it. And so you get this chronic inflammation of the brain long term and it consumes plasmalogens, it consumes other molecules and it depletes the body. And so a lot of work has been done trying to reduce the inflammation of the brain as inflammation suppressants.

• 49:55Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  And we've kind of look at the microglia separately. It's, we have to ask the question, what is stimulating these microglia? Like, why are they becoming activated?

• 50:05Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  And they normally become activated because of these membranes you were talking about.

• 50:08Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Get oxidized, just like rusty metal or peeling paint on the walls that gets oxidized. And the microglia kind of get attracted to those things. And we find that when we provide the plasmalogen precursors, it dramatically reduces the inflammation because we fix these cells from the inside out and the inflammation goes down. Um, and so that's kind of the key component. Mitochondrial health, mitochondrial support, plasmalogens. And then, um, we can now measure with this advanced MRI, the inflammation of the brain.

• 50:37Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Oh, you can measure that too?

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Yes. So this NODI technology that I was telling you about, it measures three types of water in the brain.

• 50:43Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  A little geeky here on you, but so water that's inside the copper wire.

• 50:48Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  Is one type is called neurite water.

• 50:50Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  And then there's cell water that's in cell bodies.

• 50:53Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  And then there's free water.

• 50:55Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  And so the neurite water is your axon density, which is what you want.

• 50:59Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Interesting.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  And cell water is inflammation water.

• 51:02Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Ah.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  Okay, so when you have especially white matter, you'll see, when we do our brain analysis, you'll see people with inflamed brain have a whole bunch of this cell bodies, which is microglia.

• 51:12Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yep.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  And we find, we now measure those going down. And so for example, my brain had these high levels of inflamed space and that inflammation went way down. Um, once we've been able to restore the inflammation of the brain. And then once, the, once the inflammation of the brain goes down, the brain can start, um, healing itself.

• 51:28Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Got it, got it.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  It's like a, it's like being, having the flu.

• 51:32Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yep.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  Right, like, you know, when you get the flu, you're tired because your body's fighting an infection.

• 51:37Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  And it only has so much energy to go around. And so, anyone who's done this before and you get the flu and say, oh, I'm gonna work myself through it and say, I'm gonna go work out. Well, you just made your flu worse, right?

• 51:47Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  You can't, you know, you can't power your way through a flu typically.

• 51:52Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  So give yourself some time to heal.

• 51:54Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Otherwise, you're gonna make it worse.

• 51:56Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  And that's kind of what goes on with the brain.

• 51:57Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That's exactly what goes on with the brain. And so, this proteome glia, it's called, can help with that process as well.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 52:04Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And help the inflammation.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  It's really focused on the oligodermocytes and the white matter. Because that's really where the inflammation of the brain is.

• 52:10Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  Inflammation is really a white matter.

• 52:12Dr. Darshan Shah?

  In the white matter.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:13Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I see. This MRI sounds incredible. I can't wait to have one done, so I'm gonna hit you up for that for sure.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 52:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Because I love to see kind of my NODI score and the amount of inflammation that's there. And I think that, you know, with, I think a lot of my patients, for example, they come in and we can test biomarkers for a lot of different things now, right? Blood tests are becoming better and better, more and more ubiquitous, but the brain still remains a black box, unfortunately. Because there are not a lot of biomarkers of brain health that we have. And so, recently now, we are doing some more biomarkers such as PTOW 217 and, you know, amyloid ratios and GFAP. But these are all, I think, also disease markers that come kind of late in the stage.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:58Dr. Darshan Shah?

  There's no real great biomarkers for the amount of brain health you have, right? And so, it sounds like this advanced MRI could really be helpful in that.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  And there is good, like, those markers are great.

• 53:08Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  Because they measure GFAP and neurofilament light change or axonal damages. So those are good markers to measure. They are kind of downstream, but still, they're useful.

• 53:17Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  And we can talk more about the, you know, methyltransfer system in the brain and so on and so forth. But there are very clear biochemical markers of brain health.

• 53:25Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  So the plasmalgene levels in the brain, we published this years ago, we could predict cortical thinning based upon plasmalgene deficiencies.

• 53:33Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Got it.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  In the blood. Your HDL levels are important for brain health. Keeping triglyceride levels low are important for brain health. Phosphatocollin levels in the blood are critical for brain health. And so we, so there's certain molecules that are definitely important to measure in the blood that are related to the, the fatty composition of the brain. Cause your brain is basically a bunch of, it's quite fatty.

• 53:57Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  And also peripheral markers of mitochondrial function are good markers of brain inflammation as well. And so there are, like, so we do, you know, there are more advanced.

• 54:08Dr. Darshan Shah?

  So you can do blood tests for phosph- for phosphatocollin levels.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:12Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yep. And do you do that in your laboratory? So can you tell me the name of the biomarker test that you do in your laboratory?

• 54:18Speaker 01

  So it's called the BioScan.

• 54:20Dr. Darshan Shah?

  BioScan, okay.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  We measure choline plasmalogens, ethanol mean plasmalogens, phosphatocollins. We, and we measure the speciations of them. So we measure, we make a nines, I make a three plus in the choline pool, phosphatocollin pool. We measure spingomylins and ceramides, which is an indicator of cellular breakdown. Really powerful is the lysophosphatocollins.

• 54:41Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  And for cardiovascular health. So it's actually a very powerful measurement of the turnover, breakdown of certain phosphatids. So we can measure these things. And so the biochemical health that we look at, core function, we look at mitochondrial function, peroxisomal function, your methyltransferase system, people may look at homocysteine levels, but it's important to look at your creatinine levels in context of that. And so, and your, your phosphatocollin levels to your ethanol mean levels. So the biochemical health can really powerfully tell you like non-alcoholic fatty liver disease issues. We can look at my, um, you know, inflammatory mark, like oxidative stress markers. Like we measure malendyldehyde and superoxidase mutase and a few things.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  And we organize that into such a fashion that we get a clear understanding of an individual's health state.

• 55:28Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  And clear action. Okay. So you can take a look at, you know, the BioScan, you know, measures a lot of things. But in the end, it, it identifies core components. And sometimes it's simple things that people, you know, sometimes we forget about the old biomarkers, which are really, really important.

• 55:45Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Like keeping your triglyceride level. Under a hundred.

• 55:49Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  You know, I can spend hours talking about cholesterol.

• 55:52Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  And our obsession with low cholesterol, which is not good for people.

• 55:56Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  You know, and these type of things. So yeah, we've kind of organized it all so that it's kind of an inescapable blood test.

• 56:01Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Got it.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  And so it's not about, you know, we kind of repurposed the diagnostic test.

• 56:06Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Creatinine is a good one.

• 56:08Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  People measure creatinine because they want for kidney.

• 56:10Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Kidney health, right?

• 56:11Speaker 01

  But actually, low creatinine is a much, much more dangerous situation.

• 56:14Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Really?

• 56:14Speaker 01

  Low creatinine means you have muscle wasting.

• 56:16Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Hmm, that's true.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  Elderly, so it's a measure of muscle mass.

• 56:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  And so people, you know, don't take enough creatine or phosphocolin in their diet. And so we can measure these things and change them. So that's what the bioscan does.

• 56:27Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I see.

• 56:28Speaker 01

  These complex lipids, which is, you know, and then we add other core biochemical systems on top of that.

• 56:35Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Bioscan, and this is something that, um, do you have to give a full blood sample for? Is it a finger stick?

• 56:40Speaker 01

  A phlebotomy.

• 56:41Dr. Darshan Shah?

  A phlebotomy.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  And we bio bank everyone's blood samples forever.

• 56:43Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Oh, amazing. Okay. So how can someone get a bioscan?

• 56:47Speaker 01

  You can give us a call.

• 56:48Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  Or you can, um, our, our doctor network, we have about 3,000 doctors in our network.

• 56:52Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Got it.

• 56:53Speaker 01

  Get access to it. So there's elite practitioners that have access to this.

• 56:56Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  Um, the, the full blown bioscan is, there's a training program for our doctors to go through, but, um, yeah. So the bioscan.

• 57:03Dr. Darshan Shah?

  On your website, we can find a doctor that can do a bioscan.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:07Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And then they can submit a blood sample to your lab and you'll give all these results. And then that will tell us kind of our disease, disease risk and state of health, actually, for liver, cardiovascular, brain, et cetera.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  Exactly. And then you get a pathway. So, you know, people, a lot of people in medicine, they use blood tests as, um, you, you, you take a blood test and based upon the blood test, I treat to the blood test.

• 57:30Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh. Yeah.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  And we kind of do it the other way around.

• 57:32Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  Okay. We say, we want to actually, we, we're going to restore biochemical function.

• 57:36Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  And we use the blood test as a, as a gold star. You're doing a good job. So, you know, if we're doing these things, we should see your homocysteine levels normalized. We should see these things going. And so, so cause some, sometimes people, you're, you're going to want the symptomatic feeling that you're getting better, but you also want to be able to measure quantitatively.

• 57:54Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure.

• 57:55Speaker 01

  Okay. The, the work that you're putting into it, the person's going to follow a protocol, do the things. And then you say, okay, I told you this is what's going to happen. This is what happened.

• 58:03Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  Okay. You're on the right track. And then, then once you get yourself to a biochemically healthy state. Then you say, okay, stick to, you got a program that works, stick to your program.

• 58:12Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  Okay, and it's long term, longevity, right? And so it's not, and people say, people often question me all the time, well, how long do I gotta take these supplements? And I go, well, well, how long do you drink water? Like, how long do you?

• 58:22Dr. Darshan Shah?

  How long you wanna be healthy?

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Right, so it's kind of, you know, maintaining this, this healthy state. So, yeah, so, so, you know, the Dr. Good No Perpetual Health Group, that is where, you know, we have the MRIs, we have BioScan, large protocols for, you know, and do a lot of handholding with navigation teams and so on and so forth. And then ProDrom is where we have our doctor networks, and you can buy supplements à la carte at prodrome.com, like, you know, you can biohack yourself, you know, and get education, there's that, you know, videos and so on and so forth. So it depends on the person's need, you know, some people need a lot of help.

• 58:58Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  And the people that need a lot of help, we're there to give them a lot of help. Those who want to do it themselves, they can do it themselves. And then, of course, we have these amazing network of doctors that have their own specialties.

• 59:09Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  Okay, they're not, you know, they, they'll have peptides and exosomes and stem cells, and they'll do other things for people. And so, we kind of wanna make sure that the clients have access to the technology that they feel best suits their needs.

• 59:25Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  And then the doctors in our network have the tools. And so we plug our tools into their system, and, you know, there's more than one way to get healthy.

• 59:35Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Incredible, right, exactly.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  And so, we're, we're here working as a community. We plug in these advanced, you know, so for us, you know, these plasma health supplements, advanced blood testing, advanced MRI, and then you kind of plug in other modalities

• 59:48Dr. Darshan Shah?

  as, you know, as appropriate for your, your, your patient or client, as that may be. Yeah, so, and that's, going back to what I said at the beginning, you've totally vertically integrated the solution here too. The testing, the supplements and the, and the molecules, but also you have, you said you had inpatient centers as well, if you really need to go for a higher level of care. So you have an entire solution for people that are struggling, and also people can DIY it if they wanna optimize as well.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, so my goal as an industrialist and as a clinical trial expert and all that kind of stuff is to kind of create this consolidated centralization system. So all of our doctors, 3,000, and we get blood samples, their samples are still in the freezer. So when we get a new tool, we can go back to an old blood sample and rerun it. Okay, so we said, why throw your blood samples away? Let's bio back the blood sample. Yeah. And then let's also look at building structure so we can, we consolidate the blood sampling, like so we can do other blood tests for people as well. And then the, you know, tracking of individuals' health and, you know, like these MRI tools, those aren't available, so we're going to standardize it, make it available. And then what's important is that we, everything we make available to doctors, we use ourselves. Yes.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Like, it's not like, oh, here's a cool idea, let's just market this thing. No, we only, we only do the things that we ourselves Right. run in our own centers and clinics. And so then our clinical trial infrastructure, so we'll be starting running our Temecula program, we'll be having between 1 and 2,000 patients in our trials at one point in time. So we can really properly validate this at full scale. And so all of our doctors get advantages of that. So they can be part of that, their, their, their patients can be part of trials if they want to be, like just on the side, like just like, you can kind of look over the shoulders, okay, what do you guys, okay, we'll do that. Okay, and as we're running the formal trials, they can run informal trials in their centers and, and track it available.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  So my job is just make things available, try to simplify the process and enable us to kind of, you know, continue to develop. Because as we, the more doctors I train with and the stories that come in and the different, different situations, we're just getting better and better at it and trying to consolidate that information. So especially the new doctors, right? We're getting about 100 new doctors a month coming into our system, right? And so they're brand new, like just like this conversation, they don't know what plasma medicines are, they don't know what the blood testing are. And so they want protocols, they want examples, case studies, and they say, okay, I got a patient like this, you know, is there, who else has, is there, is there a similar patient story that I can work from? Because they're, the people are hungry.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  These these tools now they they've they've got their formal training as a medical doctor or wherever system they're in. And they know their world. Okay. And they're getting certain levels of success doing what they're doing. Okay. And then, but it's overwhelming. It's a lot of technology, a lot of things. So they need. And so our job is to kind of, you know, get a step by step process and build a community, people.

• 1:02:46Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  That can help each other.

• 1:02:48Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure.

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  Through this.

• 1:02:48Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, I I think also that, you know, going through standard medical school and training, whether it be neurology or, you know, gastroenterology, liver disease, whatever have you. The the number of tools you have work for a lot of things, but you're always hitting a wall. And so to have additional tools that you've provided is incredible for treating patients. But also, there's a whole new world of optimizing your health so that we don't get disease in the first place. And we just create the situation like you were saying in the beginning of this podcast where potentially you just live in a state of health.

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:03:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Indefinitely, right? And so just to know that this is a big piece of that. You know, we have hormones, we have peptides, we have stem cells, we have a lot of things, but. Plasmalogen is another big piece of that puzzle.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:36Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And just to know that information is incredibly empowering, I think, and also adds adds that whole puzzle that people are trying to put together right now. So.

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's it's crazy because like, there's a lot of things that we intellectually know, like, you know. You take antiseptic, because you know it restores your glutathione levels. But you don't feel it.

• 1:03:53Dr. Darshan Shah?

  No.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  Right? You take these plasmalogens, you take the gli, and you go to bed at night and you sleep through the night. Like, you just feel like you fall through your bed, right? Or you start taking the neuro and you feel sharper, right? Your your your physical response time on your muscles are better. Your, you know, bright lights get brighter. Like, so it's not, there's a, you know, as a academic and kind of a little bit of a geek myself. Like, I can still intellectually say, oh, yes, I need my B vitamins, like thiamine is important, riboflavin, but you don't feel it.

• 1:04:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, exactly.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  And so plasmalogens are one of those molecules that you actually feel it. It's a, it's a very interesting, which is nice because then people start. Oh, that works. Okay, now I'm gonna listen a little more while you fix a few more things.

• 1:04:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly, right.

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  And see, because you want to get that first little, it's like when you work out at the gym, if you go start working out and you work out for three months and you see nothing happen on your body, like you're not gonna keep working out. Like you gotta get to that first level level, so, oh, I'm seeing some muscle growth here.

• 1:04:53Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, exactly. Yeah, no, you need a win.

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  You need, yeah, you need to be able to, you need to show, and it can't just be a theoretical win, right? They have to kind of feel a win, right?

• 1:05:01Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, right.

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  And then once you have that, and you kind of have them, and then you can, and then, you know, you can kind of continue to build the health.

• 1:05:09Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly. Well, this is, this is so educational for me. Thank you so much. And I'm sure the listeners learned so much from this episode of the podcast with you. And, you know, there's a lot more to learn. So how can people find more information from you?

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  So at drgoodenowe.com is where there's a bunch of educational processes there. You know, talk about our programs, and there's the, from there you'll see Perpetual Health Group. Our prodrome.com is where our doctor network is, or supplements are available. There's information about the plasmalogens on any of those aspects of it. And then I do, you know, if you're, if you have a specific disease, like multiple sclerosis or Parkinson's, I do detailed lectures of dealing with biochemical basis of each of those diseases. And so you get an understanding, I kind of teach people about their diseases in a way that is not normally presented. We'll talk about the underlying biochemistry and pathophysiology and where these things come from. And look at this, how do you restore health from these circumstances?

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  So, so yeah, drgoodenowe.com is the place to go, and then, and prodrome.com would be the two places to start.

• 1:06:11Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Well, thank you so much for this time you spent with me, and I can't wait to learn more from you. Thank you so much for being here.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  Thank you, Dr. Shaw.

• 1:06:21Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Dr. Goodenowe is such an incredible scientist and wealth of information. Here are my top five takeaways from that incredible episode with Dr. Goodenowe. Number one, you don't just get a disease, you lose health. Every condition begins with measurable biochemical changes long before symptoms develop. Disease is the late stage of long detectable decline with specific

• 1:06:44Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Biomarkers. Number two, plasmalogens are core molecules that protect the brain, heart, and immunity. They peak in midlife, then they decline. Low plasmalogens predict dementia, cancer vulnerability, and all-cause mortality. And precursors may restore levels and even prevent disease onset. Number three, the brain can be repaired and tracked. New MRI software can quantify brain tissue thickness and function, allowing doctors to monitor cognitive restoration using plasmalogen therapy along with many other interventions. Number four, longevity depends on the three Ms: mental, mood, and mobility. Biochemistry matters, but without cognitive stimulation, emotional purpose, and physical movement,

• 1:07:27Dr. Darshan Shah?

  decline accelerates regardless of your molecular health. And finally, number five, chronic brain inflammation is a silent driver of aging. Microglial activation, low omega-3 to omega-9 plasmalogens, and loss of sensory input, like hearing loss, for example, contributes to deterioration of the brain. But these markers should be measured so we can improve them. If you found this episode helpful, please forward it along to a friend or family member that needs to learn more about their brain and how to keep it healthy. Thanks for joining again for the Extend Podcast.

• 1:08:03Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Thank you so much for listening to the podcast today. Please remember to subscribe if you liked this episode and give us a good review and share a link with your friends. It really helps to support all of our efforts. I also want to remind you that the information shared on this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not intended to replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please consult with your healthcare provider or physician before making any decisions or taking any action based on what you hear today, especially if you have any underlying health conditions or on any medications. Your doctor knows your personal health situation the best, and it's always important to seek their guidance.