The Unexpected Dolphin Discovery That May Hold the Key to Longevity | Dr. Stephanie Venn-Watson

What if the key to aging well had been hiding in plain sight—inside our cells, our food, and even… dolphins? That’s exactly what Stephanie Venn-Watson, DVM, a veterinary epidemiologist, discovered while studying dolphins in the U. S. Navy’s marine mammal program. She found that some dolphins were aging significantly slower than others, leading to the discovery of C15:0—a newly recognized essential fatty acid that supports cellular health, fights inflammation, and may even slow the aging process. In this episode of The Dr. Hyman Show, we dive into: How studying dolphins led to the discovery of C15:0 as the first essential fatty acid found in 90 years. Why a deficiency in this nutrient could be accelerating aging and chronic disease. How C15:0 strengthens cell membranes, reduces inflammation, and promotes longevity. The connection between diet, metabolic health, and optimal aging. What you can do to ensure you’re getting enough of this essential fatty acid. This groundbreaking discovery could change how we think about nutrition and longevity. View Show Notes From This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal This episode is brought to you by PaleoValley, Timeline Nutrition, LMNT, BON CHARGE, and Big Bold Health. Get nutrient-dense, whole foods. Head to paleovalley.com/hyman for 15% off your first purchase. Support essential mitochondrial health and save 10% on Mitopure. Visit timeline.com/drhyman to get 10% off today. Get a free LMNT Sample Pack with any order—just head to drinklmnt.com/hyman. Order BON CHARGE’s Max Red Light Therapy device today and get 15% off. Visit boncharge.com and use code DRMARK for 15% off. Try Big Bold Health’s HTB Rejuvenate and get 25% off by going to bigboldhealth.com and use code DRMARK25 at checkout.

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

• 0:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Numerous studies have consistently shown people with higher C15, just like we saw in the dolphins, lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes, of heart disease, specifically coronary heart disease, of developing fatty liver disease and certain types of cancers, specifically a lot of work on colorectal cancer. Dr. Nick Shorke, he was at ARDD, which is one of the world's leading anti-aging therapeutics meetings. He's like, "Listen, I've seen every longevity molecule under the sun, and I've not seen a molecule that has more supportive data of being a longevity-enhancing molecule than C15."

• 0:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone via my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. That's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab insights. And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, The Hyman Hive. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website at drhyman.com for a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products.

• 1:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Stephanie, it's great to have you back on the Dr. Hyman Show.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And your work continues to astound me and discoveries that I think are going to hopefully make us all live a little bit longer, feel a little bit better, prevent some of the disease of aging. And we're talking about today, the work you've done as a veterinary epidemiologist, working with the Navy SEALs, I mean, the Navy Dolphins.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  We're gonna help the Navy SEALs, too.

• 1:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I feel like a Navy SEAL right now. I'm like, I'm like trying to not shiver to death, and I'm not in freezing cold water, but I'm wearing a thick coat because we're in Austin, Texas, and it is freezing out with the wind chill.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  It is a cold day.

• 1:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's like minus 12 degrees or something. So I'd love to start by having you sort of describe the, sort of this incredible work you did with the Navy Dolphins, which are used for, kind of, what are they used for? And then, and then what, what did you find as, as sort of you looked at the natural lifespan of dolphins compared to the dolphins in captivity? And, and how did that start to get you thinking about the, the sort of longevity aspect of what might be in the dolphins that you could discover? And how did you begin to discover that?

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, boy, this is good. It's gonna be exciting talk. I love the TF. Uh, Dr. Hyman, it's great to be here. It's always always good to see you. Uh, so yes, as a veterinary epidemiologist, I was, you know, wanted to track diseases. That's I read Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague. When I was an undergraduate and said, I want to do that. And I thought it was going to be infectious diseases. And it ends up that, um, thanks to, uh, being recruited by the Navy, uh, to help lead their clinical research program with their dolphin population to help improve the lives of their dolphins, it it quickly pivoted to chronic diseases and chronic diseases of aging. So it's been a

• 3:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Dolphins get chronic disease of aging? This doesn't make any sense to me. They're not eating McDonald's and they're not not exercising and they're not doing their normal sleep routine and they don't, I mean, maybe they have more stress living in captivity, but uh.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  Right. Well, that was the key question, right? It really, you hit the nail on the head that, uh, moved over to to the Navy. Ended up spending 20 years there, you know, 10 full years working with the Navy's dolphins with the pure and goal of improving Navy dolphin health. So they live Navy dolphins. They live in San Diego Bay, go out into the open ocean every day, every day. They choose to come back. So it's, it's a pretty nice environment, um, with regard to quality of life.

• 3:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They just are free to go and then they come back?

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's pretty amazing, right? So they they live in the open ocean. That's their pod. Um, so they they choose to be there and it's it's it meant a lot to me as a veterinarian. I didn't know how I'd feel.

• 3:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, also listening probably go, whoa, wait a minute, what, why, why does the Navy have dolphins? Like they're not?

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. So so it it ends up that they're really good at being able to find underwater objects that we can't see very well. And so they've done humanitarian demining missions, uh, in the Mediterranean where they're able to find buried mines. Target it. They, um, they, you know, mark it and then humans come in and

• 4:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Things left over from World War II or whatever, right?

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. So they have now made entire areas of the world safe, uh, which is amazing. They can also find underwater swimmers, uh, enemy swimmers. And be able to interdict and put a leg cuff on those swimmers and they get reeled up by their human counterparts. So.

• 4:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Wait, you mean enemy scuba divers?

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. In case they were in nefarious areas, the Navy Dolphins are there to to help. So what they for them, their job is easy peasy, right? They have echolocation. They're able to do these things. And the program has been so successful being able to deploy the dolphins all over the world and have them stay, right? That that has allowed, you know, this program has been around for 60 years. They've had a sustained population of 100 bottlenose dolphins. So that has resulted in, you know, what we're talking about today with regard to this unprecedented patient population that gets older, like you mentioned, that in the wild dolphins live to

• 5:27Speaker 01

  about 20. At the Navy, they're living into their 50s and even up to 60 years old. So.

• 5:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Like two or three times as long.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 5:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  In captivity as they do in the wild. Is that because there's predators or just more it's more tough to get get along out there?

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Great healthcare system, good preventative healthcare system, access to fish, that, you know, you watch any kind of wild animal show these days and that the world isn't isn't so friendly anymore for animals, getting harder and harder for wildlife.

• 6:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Do you think you think the wild dolphins like a couple hundred years ago lived longer?

• 6:04Speaker 01

  That's a good question. I do think there are things, there are studies that have shown that there were times that dolphins might have lived slightly longer, like maybe a few years, but nothing on the average like what we're seeing at the Navy. So, so there I was, right? So taking care of this older geriatric dolphin population. And what we started seeing, Mark, was an increase in that some of the dolphins were developing aging associated diseases like chronic inflammation, high cholesterol, fatty liver disease, and even the full suite of changes consistent with Alzheimer's. And what was really important was that some of the dolphins were developing these

• 6:48Speaker 01

  conditions, which has now culminated in what we now understand as a syndrome, that some dolphins were developing this and others were not. So we were able to go in, use metabolomics, which is this advanced technology to study thousands of small molecules.

• 7:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  In your blood.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, in the blood. And we had this amazing archived inventory of dolphin serum. Look at those molecules in their blood and in their all-fish diet to find which small molecules predicted the healthiest aging dolphins. We expected omega-3s to be at the tip-top of the list. And instead, it was C15, which none of us even knew what C15 was, but pentadecanoic acid was the top predictor of healthy aging dolphins. So that was 10 years ago and what started the next 10 years of research, now over 100 papers on C15.

• 7:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's incredible. So basically, this is C15 is a, and the number 15 is really about where the carbons and the bonds are on the, on the chain of fatty acids. And it's a saturated fat, which in most people's minds think is bad, but it's actually not. It's actually, it turns out to be very powerful and have many effects on many of the longevity pathways. And, and there's a lot of molecules that are being studied for longevity, everything from rapamycin to metformin to NAD, and the list goes on. AX, you know, astaxanthin. I mean, there's a lot of interesting molecules that are being used. How, how does C15 stack up against some of these? What is the sort of, the research that's been done today to help to look at what it, what it does? How

• 8:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  does it actually facilitate longevity? And, and, because just a, it's just a fatty acid. So you wouldn't think, how is it doing all these things, right?

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Right, right. So the first

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Important discovery that we made, and this was alongside Dr. Ed Dennis, who's a leader in fatty acids. So he's the, was the editor in chief for the Journal for Lipid Research for 15 years. And when we first made the discovery of C15 association, right? Because in the dolphins, this was just association with better health. We went to Dr. Dennis, to Ed, and shared our hypothesis. And Ed was like, well, chances are this isn't going to pan out because we've known about C15 since the 1950s. And chances are that stuff, you know, no offense, that a dolphin veterinarian didn't discover something new about fatty acids. And he's like, but it's intriguing about the dolphins.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  So we spent the next three years doing eight studies to show that C15 not only has direct benefits and is a beneficial saturated fat, like you shared, but that it meets these rare criteria of being an essential fatty acid, the first essential fatty acid to be discovered in over 90 years.

• 9:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What makes something an essential fatty acid? Because we think of these things as essential for life. And if we don't have them, you're going to be in trouble. Like, there's essential amino acids, fatty acids. By the way, everybody, there's no such thing as essential carbohydrates.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Good point, good point. Dang it.

• 9:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But, you know, what, what, what makes it essential? And how, and how do we have to think differently about it?

• 10:03Speaker 01

  We did, yeah. So what we've learned is that our bodies require a certain amount of C15 in our bodies, including in our cell membrane. It's a sturdy saturated fat that is because it's an odd chain saturated fatty acid, has an odd number of carbons, it has anti-inflammatory properties. We'll talk about all the different mechanisms that C15 has. So it's really this Goldilocks healthy fatty acid that is essential to maintaining the stability of our cells. If we don't have enough C15, specifically, at least 0.2% of C15, of fatty acids, are C15 in our cell membrane, our cells be-

• 10:48Speaker 01

  become fragile and we develop a nutritional deficiency syndrome which we published last year in metabolites called cellular fragility syndrome. The first deficiency syndrome to be discovered in 75 years, which leads to, you know, we can talk about this whole new, new form of cell death called feroptosis. So it's been, you know, and accelerates.

• 11:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  If someone has fragile cells, what does that mean? What is it? What are the consequences? How do they feel?

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Right. So they, if you have fragile cells, your cells basically start falling apart, which is what happens when we age. So a lot of aging related breakdown that we feel are aching knees, our foggy brains, our slower metabolism, increased inflammation. All of those things come with more fragile cells, which leads to, if we nerd out a little bit, leads to lipid peroxidation. There's this abnormal iron sitting inside the cell. They combine and they cause this increase, like explosion of reactive oxygen species that take out the cell. So when that happens, our whole bodies get affected from our immunity to our metabolism.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  So it ends up that while this process, C15 deficiencies can accelerate our aging and everything that we feel with aging. We've now been able to work with the Navy and look at how can we optimize C15 to flip the, the story and how can we actually optimize our longevity through C15?

• 12:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So you, you talk also in the, you wrote a book, actually just quite good. It's called the longevity nutrient. And the full title is the unexpected fat that holds the key to age, healthy aging. So it's kind of a good title. It got my attention. I actually have been measuring fatty acids in my patients for decades and decades. And, you know, I'd always see C15, but I, it didn't, it didn't really register as something that was important to look at. And now I look at it every time and I'm surprised to see how many people are actually quite low.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  In C15, which comes from dairy products, right? And from fatty fish.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  That's right, that's right. And so now we're seeing that as many as one in three people are C15 deficient. And then there are some that are extremely C15 deficient, right? Which you'll see on your test. And it's exactly for that reason. We have taken C15 out of our diets globally. So our primary source, Mark, like you just shared, is dairy fat by far. And we're not saying, go back and eat a bunch of dairy fat. 1% of dairy fats is C15. Over 40% of the fatty acids in dairy fat are pro-inflammatory saturated fats. So we still need to work our way through that. But the Navy was interested enough

• 13:32Speaker 01

  to say, hey, can we find a way to use C15 and leverage it for longevity? Meanwhile, let's also talk about the need to prevent these, you know, deficiency syndrome that's showing up in our kids. And that might just be by helping to get milk fat back into kids' diets, including mom's milk fat.

• 13:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, breast milk for sure. Although conventional dairy has a lot of problems and is very inflammatory for a lot of people.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 14:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I wonder if it's high levels in goat or sheep, is it?

• 14:04Speaker 01

  It's a good question. So what the studies have learned is that C15 levels are driven by what the ruminant, so it could be a cow, a goat, sheep.

• 14:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Whatever you're eating.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  What they eat. Yeah. So if you feed a either cow, goat, or sheep, grass, it has twice as much C15 in its dairy fat than fed corn. If you feed it high-altitude grass, it has even higher C15. So, you know, we don't know when you go buy your dairy product, what that animal was eating. And so one thing that we're pushing for is to have the dairy industry report C15 levels in their, you know, in their foods and to help change industry practices to help maximize C15 levels.

• 14:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Interesting. Yeah. So it's not... You're not what you eat, you're whatever you're eating ate.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  That's right. You've got that, yeah.

• 14:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Now, let's get into some of the sort of, I mean, the discovery of it's fascinating. So you've had this like trove of blood from dolphins for decades. And they can go back and check like, okay, who are the dolphins that age fast? Who are the ones that age much more slowly? And then you kind of looked at all of them and then rose to the top were were C15. But you mentioned there's like 100 other molecules you're looking at that may have promising benefits too, that we haven't looked at. And that's the beauty of sort of modern science for those listening. We really have gotten the ability to look at not just, you know, 20 blood tests or a function we do 110. And there's now ways to do metabolomics, which looks at thousands and thousands of molecules that are floating around in your blood that have meaning and that do things,

• 15:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  but that often we've kind of neglected or ignored. And this is clearly one of them. And in terms of this seven sort of longevity enablers you talk about, Fatty 15, or which is the sort of brand of the product, C15, which you can now actually buy. And I personally take it every day is because the science was so compelling to me that I was like, okay, well, this is, you know, if it doesn't work, you know, okay. But if I'm missing something, it's going to be a big deal. So I want to take it. What are the sort of seven must haves of a longevity enabler that this molecule meets?

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there are, we have established these seven must haves. And by we, I mean, the longevity scientific community. This was also put together in part with with Dr. Nicholas Shorke, who is the head of NIH's Longevity Consortium. And so Nick was really interested in the dolphin angle because he's like, wait, you've got a long-lived species that has clean data. So let's work through that to make these discoveries. And when we get to these longevity must haves, we're now able to, you know, a lot of longevity research is on short-lived species of how do we help mice and worms live longer?

• 17:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We're good at making worms live. To be like a thousand years old.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  And it doesn't really translate.

• 17:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And mice, you know, to be like 120.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  So, you know, Nick really, Nick and I really came in and we're like, oh my gosh, we have this incredible opportunity. Nature's already figured it out, right, Mark? I mean, nature's already figured out how a mammal can live 27, 30 times longer. Because humans and dolphins and elephants live a lot longer than a mouse. So why? So let's figure out what, how evolution has already enabled massive longevity enabling, tap into that and then make it even better. So.

• 17:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Bowhead whales have like 200 years.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Right. So it was just like, how, let's look at, let's focus on these species, not to dismiss the, the shortlist, right? The basic science, but it's an unlock, right? So, so the seven must haves of longevity, and this is assuming that longevity, the way we define it is, is as a gerol protector. So a molecule that slows our aging rate and therefore slows the onset of the chronic diseases that kill us.

• 18:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You may not actually live longer, but you'll live healthier.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  Healthier and then by default, be able to extend your own longevity. So, right? So that you can live longer. So of those, the 70, the seven longevity must haves are first, it needs to tap, this molecule needs to tap into the longevity regulating pathway. It's this complicated keg, it's called the keg pathway, and it's based upon a, of a hypocaloric diet. So caloric restriction and the whole pathway that's been built out on how caloric restriction extends longevity across multiple species. At the heart of it is activating AMPK and inhibiting mTOR,

• 18:43Speaker 01

  which, as you had mentioned, you met forman activates AMPK and rapamycin inhibits mTOR. C15 does both. So that was really exciting to see. It's really hitting at the heart as, as other longevity molecules.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  The second is that it needs to target-

• 19:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And just to back up on that for a minute-

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 19:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  If you might not understand that. So, APK sort of regulates a lot of things: inflammation, your blood sugar control, your mitochondrial function, and interacts with a lot of other longevity pathways. I call them longevity switches, like the four longevity switches that I wrote about sort of in my book, Young Forever, which is, you know, mTOR, which regulates protein synthesis, and also, when you inhibit it, causes autophagy, which is cellular cleanup, which is really important to healthy aging. Insulin signaling, which we can talk about. And that causes us to kind of overproduce insulin, and leads to obesity, and diabetes, and Alzheimer's, and cancer, and pretty much everything else. And then, and then there's the pathway called sirtuins,

• 19:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  which is very involved in regulating DNA repair and oxidative stress. And a lot of them have overlapping redundancies in terms of the key fundamental things of aging, which we talk about in the hallmarks of aging, whether it's mitochondrial dysfunction, whether it's autophagy, cellular cleanup, whether it's inflammation, oxidative stress, blood sugar regulation, protein synthesis. So, all those things are necessary. And they're fundamental to understand, because they're the things that underlie all disease. And, you know, what people don't realize is now we're discovering these new frameworks for understanding disease that are based on root causes. And so, the hallmarks of aging are really discoveries that have helped us map out, what are those things that tend to go wrong as we get older?

• 20:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And now, we can think about, how do we treat those? And if we treated those, we might extend life by a third, rather than just, you know, if we got rid of cancer and heart disease, we'd extend life by five to seven years. You know, we completely eradicated from the planet. So, that's not much of a life extension compared to 30 years, right?

• 20:57Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 20:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They're really important to understand, but there's also causes of dysfunction, which I think doesn't get addressed. Like, why do we have these dysfunctions? But C15 seems to work on some of these key pathways around the hallmarks of aging.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. Thank you for that. And, and your book, by the way, does a great job explaining all of those. So

• 21:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Hard to explain, trust me.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  If anyone wants to dive in more, please, yeah.

• 21:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Young forever.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Please read, please read, please read, uh, yeah, your book, Young Forever. So, um, and then, so then the second one exactly feeds into the hallmarks of aging. There's 12. It keeps getting, the list keeps getting longer. It feels like every couple of years.

• 21:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It was nine, it was 10, it was 13.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, um, uh, there's now, uh, multiple studies, uh, showing that, that C15 targets six of them. And that includes, um, helping C15 directly repairs mitochondrial function. Uh, it has a skip function where it's able to help restore broken mitochondria, um, by enable, enabling it to make energy, um, when normally it wouldn't be able to, which is, which is exciting.

• 22:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  Um, and important. Uh, it helps with poor cellular signaling. We know that it not only activates AMPK and inhibits mTOR, but it also activates PPAR, alpha, delta, and AKT, and it, it inhibits Jakstat and HDAK6. So that was a bunch of letters.

• 22:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What she's saying basically in English is that these are, these are other pathways that we all have that regulate inflammation, that regulate blood sugar, and that, that when we look at actually the things that drive aging, it's dysregulation of blood sugar and insulin and inflammation that is a consequence of that. And the downstream effects is it harms our mitochondria, it causes more oxidative stress. It, it has so many awful effects on inhibiting autophagy and causing stem cell exhaustion and shortening telomeres and all the things that I talk about in my book. So, you know, when you, when you kind of get to the kingpin of what's going on for most of us as we age, and what's so curious about these long-lived dolphins is that they, they have this protective

• 23:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Uh, molecule that they seem to accumulate. Now, what I don't understand is if all the dolphins were eating the same stuff and all of them had the same environment, like, why were some actually having high levels of C15 and others? It's some genetic component here that we don't understand, or there's some variability in how people, you know, keep or utilize it or absorb it? What was, what explains that?

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Right. So with the dolphins, it was pretty, uh, it ended up being pretty straightforward. So they have an option of five different fish types, um, and or they might be fed different fish types based upon what their job is at the Navy. So if they're doing a job in which they're going through, you know, training of learning how to find an object, for example, they might get a bunch of low-fat fish that they get kind of, you know, given throughout the whole day.

• 23:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  It ends up that those low-fat fish had no C15 in them.

• 23:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Hmm.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  And where, what we were able to get to remarkably, because the Navy's vigilant data collection, we were able to see that some dolphins were getting a higher C15 diet than other dolphins. And then even better, we did two Navy-funded studies in which we gave those dolphins with lower C15 a higher C15 fish diet.

• 24:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Hmm.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  And we saw that their aging-related conditions reverse.

• 24:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's amazing.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  So then, right? So then we were like, oh, okay.

• 24:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, that's how you test lipoth, right? You see, oh, well, it's associated with lung injury, but is it causal?

• 24:31Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 24:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  When you add the molecule into the diet through fatty fish, it actually reverses the things that you saw as, as consequence of aging.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  That's right. We saw complete reversal of anemia.

• 24:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  If you give the fish, if the dolphin herring, that's good, but if you give them, like, flounder, probably not so good, right?

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. It was our, not like a common food that we eat, but it was like capelin, uh, and squid. Uh, squid had no C15 in it, but you're right. Herring was a great, and mackerel were, were, were great fish. So, so that's how, how it led to all of those. So then, you know, with the hallmarks of aging, uh, you know, it targets six of them. It helps with, we now understand from a clinical trial, it helps with gut dysbiosis.

• 25:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  How does it do that?

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Right? So C15 multiple ways. A lot of exciting research coming out on. C15 for gut health, not from us, from other teams around the world. They've shown, multiple studies have shown that in multiple mouse models of colitis of IBD with regard to leaky gut syndrome, that C15 specifically helps improve the gut lining and it stops the leakiness, so it decreases inflammation and it stops the leaking.

• 25:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Is it because it sort of embeds itself in cell membranes in the gut?

• 25:43Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 25:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  More stable and less fragile, is that the, is that the kind of hypothesis?

• 25:47Speaker 01

  That's, that's the hypothesis. We know that it gets in there, we know that it has this effect. And so, so it helps with that. In addition, really fascinating work on the microbiome that in a clinical trial that was done in Singapore with C15 supplementation showed that women who had a history of fatty liver disease, when they took C15, they saw an improvement in the growth of Bifidobacterium adolescentis, which is like a mama microbe that's really good at helping to regulate our metabolism. It's also been shown to extend longevity in worms, so we already talked about the limitation of that. But with an interesting side point.

• 26:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Worms have a microbiome.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. It lowered, in that clinical trial, it also lowered LDL cholesterol, which, which was great. So, and then there are other studies showing that, you know, that we know that fiber can help improve metabolism. And so there was a whole series of studies that was, that was done to figure out how fiber helps. It ends up that there's a molecule in fiber called inulin, not to be confused with insulin. And inulin is being fed to our gut microbes that then use inulin to make C15. And so it's because of the C15 that's being made by the microbes that helped explain the benefits of fiber. So it's just like.

• 27:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Interesting.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  It's essential.

• 27:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You don't have to eat fatty fish or dairy. If you have enough of the right fiber and prebiotics, you can grow the right bugs in your gut. And they'll produce C15 for you.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  It'll get you, it'll get you to, it's like an additive, it's kind of like how to order all the different tips and things we can do to maximize our C15. So that is one component. If none of the single things alone can do it, but additively.

• 27:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, it's interesting, we've been measuring like fatty acids on our patients at the Ultra Wellness Center, my practice in Lenox, Massachusetts for 20 years. And, and we, before that at Canyon Ranch, we also did for another 10 years. And, you know, it would be interesting to go back and see, okay, who, who has low levels of C15? Because it wasn't something I was really paying that much attention to.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And now I pay very close attention to it. And I'm like, oh, wow, this one's low. You're low, you're low, you're low, you're low. And I'm like, it's, it's an important biomarker for, for actually understanding how people are navigating their health journey and longevity and aging itself. So really quite amazing. So you, you know, we were kind of going through the seven longevity must haves. We went through.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  So we got the, through the first two, which were the biggest. So in addition to targeting the longevity pathway, human pathway, regulating pathway, it also targets key hallmarks of aging. It needs to show the thirds, it needs to show evidence of slowing the rate at which we age. And that's usually, we talk about Navy SEALs, right? So if this was a Navy SEAL course, this is where most longevity molecules would be, not make the cut and drop out of the competition. So we did, Nick, Shrock and I, we did a study showing dolphins on that, showing what hadn't yet been proven before, which is if you take individuals

• 29:06Speaker 01

  within the same population, that there will be some that, that age at different rates despite having a relatively controlled environment. And it was crystal clear in the dolphins that we had fast aging and slow aging dolphins. It ends up the aging rate biomarker for that was hemoglobin. And that had to do with, again, fragile cells in which they were increasingly losing. Red blood cell health over time. One measurement of that is called red blood cell distribution with our RDW.

• 29:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  Which has become, see, there you go, a really popular way of understanding aging rate is RDW. Um, so we saw that crystal clear in the dolphins.

• 29:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Actually, RDW is one of the biomarkers that's used to kind of calculate.

• 29:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Your biological age that we use at function health.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Which is based on epigenetic testing and correlating that with certain blood biomarkers. And that's how we come up with function health of a biomarker. So it'd be interesting to be able to start to test Fatty 15 as part of our function health panel. But it's, it's really, um, it seems like such an essential molecule. The, the fact that it's quote essential, you know, is, is, is that, is that something that's been established by the scientific community? Is that something they just sort of figured out or?

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Right. That's a pretty bold claim.

• 30:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  So, so it's, we put the stake.

• 30:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's like discovering a new vitamin that's essential for health.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's a big deal. And hasn't been a new one in like 70 or years or something, right?

• 30:38Speaker 01

  It's, it's been a long time. Exactly. So we put the stake at the ground, um, back in 2020. And we published that in Nature Scientific Reports. This last year has been really exciting, Mark, with, um, there have been now to date. Three other independent teams that have evaluated C15 as meeting the criteria of essentiality. All using different methods of gold standard methods of, um, looking at pregnant, um, mice and saying, hey, if you make the mom C15 deficient. Does her, does her neonate show evidence of a nutritional deficiency? And the answer was yes. And when you give it just C15, does a nutritional deficiency, is it fixed?

• 31:22Speaker 01

  And the answer was yes. So the.

• 31:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's like infant mice. What are the, what are the symptoms of nutritional deficiency?

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Poor growth, um, and poor neural development. It ends up that epidemiologically, we're seeing the same trend, uh, disturbingly in humans. That, um, if mom has lower C15 levels, her baby gets lower C15.

• 31:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  And lower C15 now it's been associated with poor body growth, poor brain development, even up to cognitive development of kids up to six years old. But the upside, right? The, the, what's.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  The hope in all of this is that nutritional deficiencies and essential fatty acids, right, these are fixable.

• 32:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  So, so now we have with regard to essentiality, another study showed with, again with worms, showed that if you deprived a baby worm of all nutrients, right, it goes into this, it doesn't die, it goes into this like slumber state. And they showed that if you give it just C15, it will regrow as if you were feeding it and a full nutritious diet.

• 32:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Wow.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  So, walking through, and then another group looked at all the wealth of human data today, and so all of these papers came out just this last year, again, re kind of revalidating that C15 meets the criteria of essential fatty acid, including, you know, the, the discovery of a nutritional deficiency, like

• 32:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Vitamin C in scurvy and vitamin D in rickets.

• 32:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So, so what has been the human data, I mean, we're talking about worms, talking about dolphins, talking about

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What was the human data on, on C15 and how does, how does it stack up against, for example, other longevity molecules? So the NIH has a program to study various compounds and looking at, you know, rapamycin or metformin or azazanthin or acrobos, which, most of these are drugs. And, and, you know, there's not a lot that actually show significant benefit. Rapamycin is probably the most promising, but it has significant side effects, and there's coming up with analogues that are without the side effects, it only affect one of the pathways of mTOR, but that's way too complicated

• 33:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  For me to understand, but, um, tell me, tell me, like, how does this sort of stack up in that, in that lineup?

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Yep, so, um, so we'll start with human cell systems, um, that, cause it's, you know, it's hard to do the long-term studies to show, hey, if you take this molecule, will you live longer? And to your

• 33:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's like a randomized control trial for 50 years to see what happens.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and, and those are underway, which is good, but they just take time and they get really complicated. So, um, again, working with, um, Dr. Shor

• 34:07Speaker 01

  One way we looked at that was to say, okay, we use this panel called biomap and that they're human cell systems, 12 different human cell systems that are mimicking various disease states. And it has a bunch, 148 different biomarkers. And what you do is you treat these different cell systems, disease systems with different doses, like ascending doses of C15, of rapamycin, metformin, acarbose. And what we showed was that C15 had the most cellular clinically relevant benefits that are longevity enhancing compared to rapamycin, metformin, and acarbose.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  It was really close to, it was most close to rapamycin, which is exciting for the longevity consortium, right? They really leaned into that.

• 34:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It doesn't have all the side effects.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  Without the side effects. I mean, this is a molecule that every mammal gets at birth.

• 34:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  So, and then when you look, you step back a little bit and you look at the activities, the, the things we care about. C15 is anti-inflammatory, it's, it has an antioxidant, it has anti-cancer functions, it has antimicrobial, it even stops the growth of pathogenic bacteria and fungi. And you look at that kind of wonky list of benefits and that's what rapamycin does.

• 35:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  So it just means that maybe we didn't have to go to Easter Island to discover rapamycin.

• 35:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  To San Diego to the Navy Dolphin Program.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Dolphins. And it's like, mom's milk, you know, it's like, thank you, mom, you know.

• 35:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  How do you get breast milk, though? You can't get that easily.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  We don't want to, and, and no other mammal continues to eat dairy after the initial like growth. So it's again, it's like, how do we leverage this molecule in our later years?

• 35:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's a good point. How do, how do, you know, other mammals, you know, who are not eating fish, right? Like, you know, you've got bears who eat fish, you've got, you know, certain, you know, other mammals that might eat fish. Um, like otters or seals, whatever, but, but you know, most land living mammals like elk or deer don't eat fish.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  How do they get C fifteen?

• 36:18Speaker 01

  And they're not eating dairy, no ice cream, no cheese, anything like that. So, uh, that is, there are plant-based forms and there haven't been a lot of studies yet to understand what are the different C fifteen sources. Cause now that we understand C fifteen's essentiality really expands to the animal kingdom as far as we know it, um, of how different animals get it. But it could be part of micro, like cows make it, right? So they eat grass and their, their rumen is able to, they're bacteria, you know, to produce. So it may be a combination based upon the species, how well their microbes are able to make it from the food versus how much they get from their food, the food directly.

• 37:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So if you're like regeneratively raised cows, they're going to be eating more variety of wild grasses and plants, they might have more.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 37:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  If you're eating sheep or goat, they typically don't, you know, feed them corn and soy.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 37:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So they may have more and it's often better tolerated because they have a different form of casein, which is the protein in milk that tends to cause problems. And most cows are bred to have A1 casein, which is really problematic and inflammatory for most people. So there are A2 cows, like Jersey cows and Guernsey cows, and there are A2 cows, heirloom cows. But, um, you know, I think what I'm curious about is how, how this molecule also can be a therapeutic molecule, not just sort of a preventive molecule that, that deals with some of these basic mechanisms, but how, how could it affect, you know, your treatment of diabetes or heart disease or fatty liver disease?

• 37:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and that's where it gets to, uh, conveniently, like longevity molecule must have never, what are we on four? Uh, you know, clinically relevant benefits within months. If, if a molecule says, hey, we target these mechanisms of longevity, but you're not really going to see anything, but you'll live longer. That, that doesn't for, for Nick and I, that just. Is not what we were looking for. We're looking for to say can C15 actually have meaningful benefits specifically with people with diseases. So again, caveatting that as a supplement, supplements aren't intended to treat or prevent or to treat diseases. But we're talking about the studies that have been done to date and what we're seeing.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  That, you know, we need C15 and putting C15 back into our system and optimizing those levels, we are seeing disease treating effects. And this is both in people. So let's take, for example, clinical trial with Dr. Jeff Schwimmer, fatty liver disease, right? So that didn't exist, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease are now mazzled.

• 38:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They changed the name because you only see this fatty liver issues in alcoholics.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 39:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And now the most prevalent form is those with metabolic dysfunction, meaning diabetes, prediabetes, and they call it metabolic associated fatty liver disease.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  I, maybe us docs and scientists should be involved in branding a disease name.

• 39:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Naffal D.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  So there you go. So, so I'll call it fatty liver disease, not associated with, with, with alcohol. So, you know, that did, wasn't known until Mayo Clinic published a paper in 1980 for the first 20 cases. And then, so since then, we move, fast forward to today, the latest paper showed 38% of people globally have fatty liver disease. So this has been a alarming rise in people with fatty liver disease, a percentage of which are progressed to steatohepatitis, inflammation, cirrhosis, becoming one of the leading causes of liver transplants and liver cancer.

• 40:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, it's important. What you said was really important because, you know, about one in 10 or less, the one in nine now keeps getting worse in America have diabetes, type 2 diabetes. But what you're saying is four in 10, almost four in 10 have fatty liver disease, even if you don't have diabetes, it still increases your risk of heart attacks, cancer, stroke, rapid aging and death.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  That's right. Now, none of the, we don't want any.

• 40:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Even if you don't have diabetes.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right.

• 40:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So it's important and it's often not diagnosed. It's often missed. There are now really great blood tests you can do to find out if you have it, not just your regular liver function test. And we, we offer these as part of Function Health's testing. So you can go to functionhealth.com/mark and actually get these tests as add-on tests to the basic function panel that look at fibrosis in the liver and are really helpful to kind of pick up people who have this because you don't want to continue to have this if you have it. I mean, you can diagnose it through a, you know, an MRI or, you know, various kinds of, of fancy testing, but through a simple blood test, you can also kind of get a pretty good idea. And it's important to understand because this is this unsilent epidemic that nobody ever heard of. And, you know, it doesn't really have a ton of symptoms

• 41:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  other than, you know, maybe you're overweight and maybe you've got a big belly or maybe, you know, like, but, but it's just, it's, it's quite important. And so what you're saying is that C15 has the potential to impact fatty liver disease.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so when Jeff Schwimmer is a leader in pediatric fatty liver disease, and he opened the first clinic for fatty liver disease for kids. And so Jeff, back in 2012, I had published a paper on fatty liver disease in dolphins. And he wrote me, he sent me an email and he's like, ah, it's probably not what we're seeing in people. Like, it's probably not the same disease, but send me some liver slides that you have, you know, and let me get back to you. So I said, no.

• 41:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  These were dolphins who died and then you found it.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  Exactly. Dolphins who, yeah, exactly. And then afterward, we had found.

• 42:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You're not like sacrificing dolphins to get tissue specimens.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  No, no, no. Yeah. Thank you for that clarification. Yeah, we're actually able to go back and look at pathophysiology reports of dolphins that had passed. So we had this, that was another amazing archive, right, of, of information. So we were able to send those slides to Jeff and then a couple of weeks later, Mark, I got an email and the title was, "We Are All Go." He's like, "This is the exact same presentation of fatty liver disease that you're seeing in dolphins that I'm seeing in my kids." And he's like, "You're blowing my mind because dolphins don't eat sugar. They're not eating trans fats. It's not ultra-processed foods."

• 42:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, that's, that's what I'm wondering.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  Right? And it's just like, what? And so that started our 10-year journey in which we have worked together, but independently.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  That Jeff then did a study in which he looked at 237 kids and he did, at the time, they didn't have your wonderful test, which everybody should get the test that Mark just mentioned to assess your liver regardless of your, who you are and your age.

• 43:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Everybody should get this test. So, um, Mark, uh, that, uh, Jeff did this study and he looked at these kids and he showed that the higher their C15 was correlated with a lower liver fat. Um, and this was a linear correlation. So the higher the C15, the lower the fat in the liver. So he's like, okay, well, that's interesting. So then that resulted in him doing a randomized placebo-controlled clinical trial with fatty 15, with C15 supplementation among young adults who were graduates of, who had a history of fatty liver disease.

• 43:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Wow.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  And what he found, there were really key important things that happened that he found. The first is he found that two out of three of the people, of the people in his study had the definition of a C15 deficiency. Two thirds. So if you have fatty liver disease, yet you had an even higher risk of what we were saying the general population has.

• 44:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  One in three, two in three.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And then for the people who took a C15 supplementation and got their blood levels above that threshold of deficiency, they had lower liver enzymes, lower ALT, lower AST, and improved red blood cell health within 12 weeks.

• 44:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  So now the leading hypothesis and what we have found in, um, the dolphins is that nutritional C15 deficiencies may actually be the cause, or at least one cause of a substantial phenotype of fatty liver. Cause why did it show up? Why? Like, why did this show up all of a sudden and affect so many? So that is obviously raises the urgency.

• 44:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Sugar and starch is a massive part of our diet. And, and I think it's probably might be a combination of the increase in sugar and starch plus the C15 deficiency, right?

• 45:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, our, for us, you know, we kept going back to the dolphins and for the dolphin, we call this the dolphin phenotype of fatty liver disease. The only change they had, they had moved to, um, there was, they were eating a high fish, high fat fish called Yulicon, uh, which is called a candlefish. It has so much fat in it that you can stick a wick in it. You could dry it, stick a wick in it and be a candle. That fishery died out, um, in the 1990s.

• 45:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  And so that's when they moved to this lower fat capelin. And so at the same time that humans, we were moving away from whole fat, um, dairy and our C15 sources. The dolphins were moving, going on a low C15 diet.

• 45:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  And fatty liver disease pops up.

• 45:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You know, the Native Americans, you might not know this story, but the Native Americans used to trade in these really highly fatty little tiny fish as part of their trade. So if you were a, you know, Pacific Northwest Native American, you would trade with inland tribes and use the fish as your currency. So instead of dollars, you'd send, give them fish and they'd give you beads or whatever else they wanted. So that's fascinating because it was such a valuable commodity back then.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And little, now we understand even more so, like how valuable that that was. So that kind of, as far as, we also know that.

• 46:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, that's a human trial. It's, it seemed to be.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah. And so that was published last year.

• 46:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Directionally showed what's possible. Like it didn't cure their fatty liver disease, but it seems to sort of create a downward trend in the effects. And you still have to cut out the sugar and starch.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. We need to look at the whole picture of lifestyles and how we're changing things. What's interesting is it really goes against the whole, like, idea of, um, all saturated fats like are bad. And that we have one that's essential. So it's like, how do we get it back into our diet? Um, so there's, you know, a lot of, uh, you could feel, right, the urgency around this movement. Um, the reason for the book, um, is really to help increase education and let's have the conversations around. See, we can't explain it away anymore. So, you know.

• 47:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And, and what kind of, uh, studies have been, have been in humans around diabetes, type 2 diabetes and heart disease? Is any, anything?

• 47:14Speaker 01

  So, um, with regard to, um, there was a second study in Singapore, and that's the one I had mentioned. That was also fatty liver disease. Women with fatty liver disease and it showed that it lowered LDL cholesterol and then increased the improved gut microbiome. That was an interesting study because that what they did in this for this clinical trial and this was also a controlled clinical trial that they had the control group was one that went on a hypocaloric diet. So they had between they had an average. Low calorie diet. Yeah, exactly like 1,000 calories per day. That'd be tough to sustain. That was the first group. The second group was a low calorie plus Mediterranean guidelines, which both of those

• 47:58Speaker 01

  have been shown to help with fatty liver disease metabolism and various. Ketogenic diet works best. Even better, even better. You're spot on. And then the third was low calorie Mediterranean plus C15 supplementation. So it was a big lift to ask of C15. In those groups, not only did the third group, the C15 supplementation result lower LDL cholesterol and improved gut microbiome, but it also had the lowest, it had the greatest loss of liver fat, the greatest loss of body fat, the greatest glucose improvements, but it was trending. It was not statistically significant. You just kind of saw this stuff. But again, it was 12 weeks. Yeah.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  And so the question is dosing, timing, things like that. In numerous studies of studies of so these meta analyses, right, studies of studies that prospectively follow thousands of people over decades, numerous studies have consistently shown people with higher C15, just like we saw in the dolphins, lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes, of heart disease, specifically coronary heart disease, of developing fatty liver disease and certain types of cancers, specifically a lot of work on colorectal cancer. This is why with all these different aspects of the data from epidemiological data, clinical trials, mechanisms of action, in vivo efficacy studies, this is why Nick, Dr.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Nick Shorke, he was at ARDD, which is one of the world's leading anti-aging therapeutics meetings. He was in Copenhagen last year and he presented C15. He's like, listen, I've seen every longevity molecule under the sun and I've not seen a molecule that has more supportive data of being a longevity enhancing molecule than C15.

• 49:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But most people I've never heard of it and don't know about it.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  Right. And it's like, what? So then, until now.

• 49:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. Why you wrote the book and why we're having this podcast so people can understand this sort of emerging science around this, which is kind of cool because it's not very often you come up with a new discovery like this. And it's pretty cool. There's a few questions I have around, around the, the foods to help people understand what foods they should be eating. We kind of touched on a little bit. But what are the foods that are highest in C15?

• 50:14Speaker 01

  So probably not the groups that you're most excited about. Dairy fat, you know, by far is our primary source.

• 50:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But depending on what the cows are eating.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Depending upon what the cows are eating.

• 50:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Or what the shever goat are eating.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. And so C15, you know, for a long time has actually been used as a biomarker of how much dairy fat people ate. They didn't know that it had any meaning. So it was used as a reliable marker of how much. So that's how much, you know, dairy fat, and again, dependent upon what that animal was eating, really drives our C15 levels. It's a big reason why we, you know, the Navy funded, again, our development of the C15 supplement because it's a pure pre fatty acid supplement that's bioavailable. Just importantly, it's vegan and it, you know, it is not having to compete with all of these pro inflammatory fatty acids.

• 51:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So with the good comes a lot of the bad in dairy and that's what you want to avoid.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah, yeah. Otherwise, we would have just.

• 51:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Some of the studies, you know, looking at, and these were epidemiological studies, we're looking at, you know, people who eat more dairy seem to have less diabetes, right? So that's interesting. Is it the dairy fat? Is it something else? Is it the saturated fats that protect them? I don't know, but it's, it's just sort of makes me wonder.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, you know, it's, it's the dairy studies are.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  Super messy. And so there are absolutely studies showing this benefit. There was a recent study that looked at this to say, hey, why do some studies show that people who eat more dairy have a lower risk of a given disease and other dairy studies don't show it? And so what they were able to narrow down to and they concluded was that C15, higher levels of C15 were one of the main predictors of having a benefit. Higher levels of C18 was a predictor of having it being harmful. So again, it's not-

• 52:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And that's another fatty acid that's saturated in dairy fat.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  That's right. So it's, you know, it's, and that's not going to be the simplistic answer.

• 52:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  But I think it's, the more we can understand how to maximize C15, you know, and maybe having a ratio like we have omega six to omega three ratios, maybe it's an even chain saturated fats, which are these pro-inflammatory fats to C15.

• 52:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I mean, that's the thing people don't understand. People always say saturated fat's bad, saturated fat's good. I mean, there is no such thing as saturated fat. There are saturated fats.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And each one has different properties and different benefits and different risks. And so uniformly, they're not the same.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Spot on.

• 52:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And they don't affect your lipids the same way, your health the same way. I wrote a lot about this in my book, Eat Fat, Get Thin, because people were super confused about it. I think that, you know, just to kind of sort of sum up, what I'm hearing is that this is like a newly discovered molecule that is an essential nutrient that one in three of us are missing, that has profound effects on many of the longevity pathways that have to do with aging, mitochondrial health, blood sugar health, microbiome health, affect your liver health, you know, cholesterol. I mean, it's quite, it's almost good, too good to be true, right?

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, we hear that, we hear that. That's, it's a, and I think we get down to, it's essential.

• 53:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  You know, it's, it's, it's just one of those rare molecules where we need it.

• 53:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And what's beautiful about these molecules, they're not needing huge amounts, right? So, so when you think about a vitamin like vitamin C and scurvy, you know, it only takes like 60 milligrams of vitamin C to cure scurvy, which is a, you know, deadly disease if you don't have enough vitamin C. And by the way, 10% of Americans don't have enough vitamin C to prevent scurvy.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Which is mind blowing, right?

• 54:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Which is because they're eating ultra-processed food and they don't get any green vegetables and they don't get any, you know, fruit. And, and so, yeah, it's, it's a, it's a big problem. But, but what I find interesting about vitamins is that they have very, very powerful effects or essential nutrients at very low levels. And without them, our whole metabolic and biochemical machinery doesn't work the way it was designed to work. And so, things go wrong. And the things that go wrong are the things that we don't want to go wrong, like, you know, damaging our ability to keep healthy cells, right? The cell fragility syndrome where your cells don't function properly and the membranes aren't right. And, and fats make up your

• 54:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  cell membranes. So, they have to be healthy and this is a key component of that. We have to regulate our mitochondria properly, our immune system properly, free radicals and oxidative stress properly, our microbiome. So, it's interesting that it sort of seems to work in so many different ways. And I, I think, you know, there's a word that probably people heard me talk about that, that is pleiotropic, meaning it has many different effects. So, drugs usually have a single effect. They might have a few other side effects, but, but they're designed to be a single drug for a single biochemical targeted with a single receptor or the single outcome, working on a single pathway. And what, what nutrients

• 55:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  do, like, for example, magnesium activates over 300 different enzymes in the body. So, it's, it's, so does zinc or maybe 200 different enzymes. So, these are, these are highly, I think, vitamin D controls, you know, hundreds and hundreds of gene expressions throughout your genome. And, and these are multifunctional molecules that go beyond what we would normally think of as a pharmaceutical intervention. So, these are the things that, that create health as opposed to simply treat disease. And I always say, when you create health, disease goes away as a side effect.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 55:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And, and that's kind of what you're talking about here. This is a component of our biology that we've neglected, that we haven't known about, that has recently discovered, thanks to the dolphins and you.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  Well, thank the dolphins. This was truly good.

• 56:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And, um, just, you know, having an observation that, wow, you know, like, jeez, these dolphins aren't living very long. These are living longer. Like, what's up with that? And just asking the right questions, you were able to come up with, with this discovery. And I think it's, it's really groundbreaking. I think, uh, you know, people need to eat fatty fish. I think small fatty fish is, is key. If you're not gonna eat dairy, like herring, mackerel, sardines, anchovies, all this stuff that people don't like. You know.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  Right. You gotta get it like the head and skin.

• 56:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I'm Jewish, so I like all those things. I grew up on those things. I didn't know at the time.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're already like dosing yourself well with C15.

• 56:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, tons of cans of mackerel in my cupboard and sardines. In terms of the dosing, like what kind of doses do people need of this?

• 56:50Speaker 01

  To your point, and that was a remarkable summary. The, we need about two, 100 to 200 milligrams per day. So if you compare that to like omega threes, right, then you're talking more about grams.

• 57:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Thousand, two thousand milligrams, yeah.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  That's right. So this is, to your point, it's very low dose of C15. It's 100% bioavailable in the free fatty acid form. So we only need a small amount. And again, in order to help fortify our cell membranes and keep them strong, it, we need greater than 0.2% of that cell membrane needs to be C15. So we don't need a lot.

• 57:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Basically a fifth of a percent.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Of the fats in your cells have to be this fat in order for it not to become fragile and break down.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  You know, we only need these low amounts to achieve these levels in our cell membranes. We also know, it's been remarkable, is that all these studies about all these different mechanisms, like, you know, activating AMPK, inhibiting mTOR, they're all showing the same concentrations. It's all the same amount that we need in our blood to have all of these many, you know, pleiotropic benefits. So it's very, because the story just is so consistent on what we're intended to have to stay healthy. Now what we're saying is, hey, can we increase it and push it further so it's like 0.4 to 0.6%? Can that help us be even healthier and live longer?

• 58:25Speaker 01

  And there's a big study that was done by a group at Harvard and a bunch of other teams. And they did a large study and they showed that people who had these higher levels of, instead of 0.2%, 0.4 to 0.55%, that they were less.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  Likely to develop heart disease over time. Um, and then, you know, the longevity zones are going through, uh, you know, an evolution. But in Sardinia, uh, the people there who have, they live longer in part because they have a lower risk of developing heart disease and specifically men live longer, longest in Sardinia than anywhere else in the world.

• 59:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I've been there.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  Right? Oh, I'm jealous. Okay, so they, they have, um, a mean C15 level of point six. And they have, and, and they've replaced their.

• 59:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's fascinating.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Right? And they've replaced their meat, for the most part, with cheese.

• 59:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  They're using local, uh, cheese from local goats and sheep.

• 59:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, yeah, no, this all makes sense.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Heating grass, high altitude.

• 59:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, it was really fascinating was when I, when I spent quite a bit of time in Sardinia. Uh, I got to meet with a lot of these very old men and old women. And I mean, one couple, I think was a hundred, two hundred and ten years old together.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  Oh, my goodness.

• 59:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And, and, uh, they were fit and they were vibrant. This guy Pietro was like ninety-five, was just, you know, kind of retired from, you know, herding his sheep five miles a day up the rocky terrain. And what was really fascinating was, was they understood that, that, you know, one of these guys, Alinto, said, you know, we flavor our meat before we kill the animal. And I'm like, what do you mean? He says, well, we, well, whatever you feed it determines the quality of, of the meat and the taste. So whether they feed a carob or acorns or whatever, like the black-footed pigs in, in Spain from the Iberican ham, very different fatty acid profile because all they do is live in oak forests and eat acorns. And in Sardinia, they, they, they know that if they take the sheep or the goat and they,

• 1:00:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  they kind of graze them on different plants at different times of the year, it'll taste better. They're not doing it because it has high C15 levels or they're like looking for better phytochemicals or whatever. They just want it to taste better. The reason it tastes better is that phytochemicals create the taste in food. So flavor always follows the phytochemical richness or density of the food. And, and they just kind of knew this intuitively by, by how they raised these animals. And so these animals were eating all these wild plants all the time. That's what they fed them. And so that that makes a lot of sense.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That makes a lot of sense to me, just given sort of being there and seeing what they were eating and what they were eating, ate and what the cheese was made from. It was really fascinating. Yeah.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  That is really cool. Yeah, they, they, they're, one of their cheeses, right, which you might have seen, there was Pecorino. And Pecorino has in particular, has higher C15 than most other cheeses. So, yeah, it kind of feeds into this all, kind of neat how that all comes together.

• 1:01:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's really fascinating. I mean, I, I, I think what I would love to sort of know from you is, where is all this going? Like, what's next? And are we, what are we going to see next in terms of the research that's underway, the things that are promising?

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, this, this is the next step. So we've, you know, we spent 10 years on credibility. You know, that was really important before we even thought of bringing a supplement and all the research right out is really building the credibility. You could imagine a dolphin veterinarian saying, you need to take a saturated fat. You better be able to back that up with really good data. So we went above and beyond with regard to the science. And then now the world has picked it up. So again, you can go to discoverc15.com and that's where all the peer reviewed papers, again, over 100 from people throughout the world. So that's a fun place to go.

• 1:02:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And it's the letter C and the number 15.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you.

• 1:02:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, so discoverc15.com, we'll put in the show notes, but that, it's a, it's a treasure trove of, of the current and ongoing kind of research.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and now probably once every two weeks, there's a new paper coming out. So it's really exciting.

• 1:02:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So it's not just you anymore. There's people all around the world have taken up the research around this.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  That is right. That is right. Which is really exciting. Now, the movement, right?

• 1:02:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, I mean, that's how science works, right? Somebody discovers something and then other scientists try to validate it and or discredit it.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  Right. Yep, that's right. So that's been great to see. So then now we're moving toward exciting new avenues, obviously getting the conversations going. How can we change nutritional guidelines? How can we get C15 into our, for our kids, into infants with all the new studies that are coming out around the importance of Infant health as well as supporting our aging as we get older. And then we have some exciting new research coming out around brain health. So stay tuned for that.

• 1:03:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Cognitive development.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  Cognitive development.

• 1:03:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  From both spectrums, right? From young cognitive development and also brain aging and all kinds.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah. So a lot of exciting work coming out around that. And then, you know, for us, it's like we really have really taken a step back and said, why? Obviously, there's urgency to fix, you know, global crisis that's happening. And if there is a chance that restoring C15 can help with that.

• 1:03:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The global crisis of what?

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  Of just metabolic diseases.

• 1:03:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Metabolic diseases.

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  The increase we're seeing.

• 1:03:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And yeah.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, the kids that were born into basically this height of the C15 deficiency world, which is in 1990s. They're now in their 30s. And so is this why people in their 30s are developing certain types of cancers? Or the rise in coronary heart disease, the rise in type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease showing up? And how much is the C15 deficiency part of that? So let's stop accelerated aging. There are kids that are developing diseases of their grandparents before their parents.

• 1:04:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  So we've got to fix that. And then how to then, again, leaning in, how do we optimize C15? Through supplementation, through various practices to be able to extend our longevity. So that's exciting. And then what is it all for? I mean, longevity, so we can live healthy for as long as possible and enjoy life. And I have a question for you, which is, you know, it's to give us more time.

• 1:04:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  And so if you were given two extra hours of every day, and those two extra hours, whatever you did was guilt free. You didn't feel guilty about it because you weren't working on something else because you're so busy. What would you do with those two hours?

• 1:04:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Two hours a day. That's a great question. I probably would exercise more.

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  It's more time to be able to do things because it makes you feel good, right? And then it makes you healthier and feeds all those things. And so for us, it's the, the ability to say, everybody has the right to longevity, to live a long life, to have a meaningful life. I, the book is about the purpose that fell in my lap through the dolphins. And let's give us all more time to be able to fulfill our purpose.

• 1:05:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I'm excited to see what's next. This is very exciting. You can read about this in great detail in Stephanie's new book, The Longevity Nutrient, The Unexpected Fat That Holds a Key to Healthy Aging. It's out now, so you definitely should check it out. Also, if you're interested in learning more, go to discover c15.com. And you can actually buy C15 as a supplement and it's called Fatty 15, which I love and I take, I just take two capsules a day and that's it. And it's pretty straightforward. It's a low friction way to get it. If you don't like sardines and herring and mackerel, hopefully I'm not overdosing because I do eat those.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  No overdosing.

• 1:06:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I, I think, you know, we're, we're kind of in this moment where, you know, we, we, we are discovering a lot about aging longevity, but we can't miss the forest for the trees, which, which is the fact that we're eating a diet that's killing us. And the amount of sugar and starch is driving our metabolic crisis, is causing a lot of the things that are going on. I think C15 can be helpful in mitigating that, but without actually also changing your diet, exercising, getting on the sleeve, managing stress, having connections and relationships, it's not enough, right?

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  That's right. It's part, part of the solution. But boy, all those things are so, so important.

• 1:06:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, exactly. So don't, you don't want to eat your C15 supplement and

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  Not exercise.

• 1:06:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Have, you know, three cans of soda a day.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  Please don't do that.

• 1:06:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So thanks for coming on the podcast again. This is really great. Everybody can find out more and we'll put it on the show notes for the links that we talked about and keep up the good work. And we'll stay tuned for what's next on the horizon.

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  Great. It was great to be here, Dr. Heinemann. Thank you.

• 1:07:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic, and Function Health, where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical

• 1:07:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center, at ultrawellnesscenter.com, and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public. So I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening. When it comes to supplements, you only want the best for your body, the kind with

• 1:08:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  the highest quality, cleanest, and most potent ingredients you can get. That's exactly what you'll find at my supplement store, where I've hand-selected each and every product to meet the most rigorous standards for safety, purity, and effectiveness. These are the only supplements I recommend to my patients, and they're also what I use myself. Whether you want to optimize longevity or reduce your disease risk, or you're looking to improve your sleep, blood sugar, metabolism, gut health, you name it, drhyman.com has the world's best selection of top-quality, premium supplements, all backed by science and expertly vetted by me, Dr. Mark Hyman. So check out drhyman.com, because when it comes to your health, nothing less than the very best will do. That's drhyman.com, D-R-H-Y-M-A-N dot com.