How Dolphins Unlocked a Hidden Key to Longevity and Health | Dr. Stephanie Venn-Watson

Take Our Podcast Listener Survey http://goodlifeproject.com/survey! Have you ever wondered what the key to healthy aging might be? In this fascinating episode, we explore the groundbreaking discovery of C15:0 - the first new essential nutrient in over 90 years - with Dr. Stephanie Venn-Watson, author of "The Longevity Nutrient: The Unexpected Fat That Holds the Key to Healthy Aging https://amzn.to/4c092qu." Discover how this unique saturated fat may help combat inflammation, stabilize cells, prevent iron overload, and even support brain health. You can find Stephanie at: Website https://seraphinatherapeutics.com/member/stephanie-venn-watson/ | peer-reviewed C15:0 science https://www.discoverc15.com/# | LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanievennwatson/ | Episode Transcript https://www.goodlifeproject.com/podcast/how-dolphins-unlocked-a-hidden-key-to-longevity-and-health-dr-stephanie-venn-watson If you LOVED this episode, you’ll also love the conversations we had with Matthew Park, Ph. D. https://episodes.fm/647826736/episode/NjdiNzg2NzJiNmNhYjllZmM0YmUyODYx about how aging immune systems affect cancer risk. Check out our offerings & partners: Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel https://jonathanfields.substack.com/aboutVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes https://www.goodlifeproject.com/sponsors/Join journalist Danielle Elliot as she explores why ADHD diagnoses are surging among women in the limited-series investigative podcast, "Climbing the Walls https://lnk.to/climbingthewallsPS!goodlifeproject." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The studies of data to show that we cannot explain it away anymore. We have to be talking about this. It's becoming the number one cause of cancer in kids. Just that alone.

• 0:12Jonathan Fields?

  Dr. Stephanie Van Watson, author of "The Longevity Nutrient," is the world's leading expert on C15, a critical essential fatty acid discovered through groundbreaking research on Navy dolphins that just might hold the key to healthier aging in humans. With over 60 patents and 80-plus peer-reviewed publications, her revolutionary work is redefining our understanding of aging and wellness.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  The higher the C15 levels in people, the lower their risk of developing type 2 diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver disease. These little secrets that were so simple, Jonathan, that were right in front of us, but we didn't see until we changed our perspective.

• 0:54Jonathan Fields?

  That's so interesting.

• 0:55Speaker 00

  If we had done the study three years earlier, C15 wouldn't have been on the panel. We wouldn't have found this.

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• 1:39Jonathan Fields?

  Good Life Project is sponsored by Stihl. So I am not in the studio today. I'm actually out on the trail in the Rockies at about 6,000 feet above sea level in Boulder. The leaves are exploding with color and it's just stunning out. And yes, I'm wearing my favorite Stihl hat. And just last night, I was wearing one of my favorite Stihl jackets, which, if you know me, is not unusual. I wear that hat almost every day, and my Stihl jackets pretty much live on me all fall and winter. There's even a Stihl shop back in town, practically in my backyard. Here is why I love them. Stio is designed and tested in Jackson Hole at the base of the Tetons by locals who ski and bike and hike and climb and fish there pretty much every day. They have been at it since 2011, so they know warmth and they also know style. Everything I have from

• 2:24Jonathan Fields?

  them, it works great, it holds up in every condition and also looks awesome. And their hometown down is 800 filled down, but it feels more like just your favorite hoodie than a puffy. And ski season is almost here, so gear up now the way that the locals do. Go to stio.com/goodlife for 20% off your order. That's S-T-I-O dot com slash good life. stio.com/goodlife. Stio, designed and tested in Jackson Hole. Good Life Project is supported by Ernesta Rugs. So, a small confession, our front porch has been the most neglected corner of our homes since we moved in. It's the first thing anyone steps onto and it's been kind of greeting people with a sad too small mat. Ernesta sent me their samples and now they're making us a rug. And the

• 3:09Jonathan Fields?

  cool thing is for $10, you get five oversized 12 by 12 samples. So you see the colors at real scale in your own space before you even get it. So we lived with all five colors for a few days and cool morning light and golden afternoon light. And we're sure to be roused on the sky, but Caldwell just kind of kept quietly winning. The thing you're certain about isn't always the thing that fits. And because Ernesta rugs are custom size, cut to the ins, the one we ordered is made to our exact six and a half feet by nine feet space, not close enough. Visit ernesta.com and order five samples for only $10 and you'll get $50 toward any rug of your choice. That's E-R-N-E-S-T-A dot com.

• 3:51Jonathan Fields?

  Super excited to dive in with you. You're a veterinary epidemiologist, over 80 publications, 70 patents. And back in, I guess it was the early 2000s, you find yourself studying aging Navy dolphins and come upon this discovery, which is actually relevant for humans. Now, before we even get there, I've got to ask you, what exactly is a Navy dolphin?

• 4:15Speaker 00

  Good first question, Jonathan. Yeah. So a lot of people don't realize and don't know that the Navy has cared for this sustained population of about 100 bottlenose dolphins for over 60 years. And so they, you know, initially brought dolphins on, they thought they were going to study their structure to help make faster submarines back in the 1960s and just learn, watch dolphins swim and see what we could learn. And instead, what they found is they had this program called the Aquanaut Program, Jonathan, where there were aquanauts that were based deep in the ocean and they needed supplies routinely delivered to them. And they found that these dolphins, while it didn't really help with

• 4:59Speaker 00

  submarine shapes, that the dolphins willingly were with them in the open water and would actually deliver supply to the aquanauts. And that started the whole program where now the dolphins live in the San Diego Bay, go into the open ocean every day. It's a really incredible program where dolphins helped to find lost objects, enemy swimmers, and easy peasy for them and a good life where they live a lot longer.

• 5:24Jonathan Fields?

  So they're not, we're not talking about dolphins in captivity here. We're talking about dolphins that it sounds like live in the bay and sort of like keep returning to the same place voluntarily.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  It's incredible. Like, I didn't know how I would feel about dolphins in the Navy, you know, as a veterinarian, to be, to be honest. And when I went, I quickly saw again, they're living in San Diego Bay and they choose to be there, which is incredible. And, you know, they help reproduce, they, you know, they do all the things that healthy populations would do. So, and then the biggest, you know, indicator is that with good healthcare and protection from predators and things like that, you know, they live a long time, which was a big gift for the dolphins, but it ends up also for us, too.

• 6:09Jonathan Fields?

  So I guess this is sort of like where the story really starts to dive into. You looking at these Navy dolphins and saying, okay, it seems like they're living longer, I guess, and tell me if I'm getting this right. It seems like you notice that these dolphins are actually living longer than the typical. Dolphins who were just out in the wild and starting to explore what's going on here.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  So dolphins in the wild, just to provide some context, live on average into their twenties. Dolphins at the Navy are now routinely living into their forties and even fifties. I was brought in as a veterinary epidemiologist, as some people might know. I don't even know how to swim. So you're unlikely, right, dolphin veterinarian, but I can crunch numbers and, you know, see patterns. And so they had this, you know, half a century of data on these aging dolphins. And so they, you know, brought me on to be able to understand aging in dolphins. And that's where we started seeing over a 10 year period of diving into the records,

• 7:13Speaker 00

  of seeing that some dolphins, but not all, the older dolphins were developing things like high cholesterol and chronic inflammation and even the full suite of changes consistent with Alzheimer's. So it became fascinating where my job was then to reach out to the human health experts in these areas to say, hey, what have you learned to help people so that we can help dolphins? And that's what kicked off this whole wonderful One Health collaboration.

• 7:42Jonathan Fields?

  You're sort of like living in these two worlds then at the time. You're deep into the epidemiology side with aging dolphins, trying to figure out like what's happening here. And then saying, okay, I'm seeing things that we're also seeing in humans as they age. These are some of like many of the like the classic chronic conditions or quote age-related conditions in humans. So let me actually start to interface with people who are experts on that side of things. Take me deeper. What starts to emerge here?

• 8:11Speaker 00

  Right. So I had this amazing gift where I could reach out to anyone. Because, because we were talking about dolphins, so was really able to reach out to the world's experts in these different diseases. And what became rapidly clear is that on the human side, we don't know how to fix this either. So, but wait, are you learning something? Maybe there's something we can learn from dolphins that can help both sides. So. At the time, this was back in 2012, 2013, a new technology called metabolomics was emerging and, most importantly, readily accessible to humble folks like myself.

• 8:55Speaker 00

  And metabolomics is the method of studying thousands of small molecules that are present in the blood and in our diets to understand what are predictors of health and disease. So we had this amazing opportunity where we had really clean data from these dolphins, right, who don't smoke, they don't drink, they have the same socioeconomic status. And yet, we saw some dolphins developing aging-related diseases and others not. So we use this technology called metabolomics to look at these molecules and see which molecules predicted the healthiest aging dolphins. We thought it would be omega-3s because all they eat are fish.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  And instead, it was this quirky little molecule, C15 or pentadecanoacid, that predicted the healthiest aging dolphins. Most surprising, Jonathan, this is a saturated fat in which our primary source is butter. So we were like, what? What's happening here?

• 9:55Jonathan Fields?

  So when you discover this, I'm curious also, so you started with a whole bunch of different things that you're looking at. You think, maybe it's the omega-3s because everyone's been talking about how important they are and also, you know, the different, especially in human beings, right? You know, like, there's been so much conversation and research around omega-3s as a category and how they affect heart health and all sorts of other things. So you're thinking, maybe they eat tons of fish. We know there's tons of fish or omega-3s in fish. That's got to be it, right? And then you realize that's actually not it. There's this one other thing. Had you heard of this one other molecule before that?

• 10:29Speaker 00

  I had not. So it ends up, so then, of course, this pops up. And then we did, you know, we did a couple of studies. We then gave, this is all funded by Office of Naval Research, again, to help improve Navy dolphin health. We then did two studies, we repeated it, where we gave dolphins a higher C15 diet. So we found fish, some fish have C15 and some don't. So we gave dolphins a higher amount of C15 through their fish. And then we saw, within 12 weeks, they started getting better. These aging-related diseases started going away. Cholesterol went down, inflammation went down. So That was really encouraging. So then from then, we really said, okay, we need to pay

• 11:09Speaker 00

  attention to C15. And it ends up, it's this odd chain saturated fatty acid that's been known since the 1950s. But, you know, because it's a saturated fat, it's in butter, and it's present in really low levels, it just was kind of written off as not relevant to help until the dolphins, you know, helped reveal the secret for us.

• 11:31Jonathan Fields?

  So when you do this study and you see the first time, like, oh, wait, this is actually literally improving all of the symptoms of these conditions that the dolphins are facing, I'm guessing the bells are going off and saying, I wonder if the same thing happens in humans.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  Oh, how did you know that? So then, exactly. So then what happened, we started looking into the human literature. And it was there, like breadcrumbs were there, Jonathan, where you go back and you look at some early studies, and in which they looked at fatty acid panels in people. And they started showing repeatedly that the higher the C15 levels in people, the lower their risk of developing type 2 diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver disease. And but it had just, there wasn't, the studies were done to show that saturated fats were bad for us. And what we've learned is not all saturated fats are created equal.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  So there are these even chain saturated fats, like C16 and C18, that are present in high levels in dairy fat and bread meat, things like that. And those studies did show higher levels of these even chain fats, C16, C18, were associated with a higher risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease. So the studies really leaned in on, aha, we showed yet again, saturated fats are bad for you. But then they kind of had a PS in which they said, oh, and by the way, we happen to see that this C15 was associated with better health, but that's not the point of the study. So it's, it ended up being there. And so now since then, this discovery. You know, 10 years ago, we then, well, I guess I should say, at that point, we then

• 13:14Speaker 00

  took C15, pure C15 into the lab, brought in one of the world's experts on fatty acids, Dr. Ed Dennis, who was the editor of the Journal for Lipid Research for 15 years. And we worked with Ed to then do eight studies over three years to show that not only is C15 a beneficial saturated fat, but that it met these rare criteria of being the first essential fatty acid to be found in over 90 years. So that was yet another big aha moment of how important C15 has been. And now, since then, 10 years of research, over 100 peer-reviewed studies from teams throughout the world, all showing this little fat is one we've, you know, we've needed all along.

• 13:59Jonathan Fields?

  I don't want to leave behind this conversation around saturated fat, though, just as a category, because I've been having recent conversations with researchers who are sort of like exploring often different conditions. I sat down with Ben Bickman, who's been researching insulin resistance, right? And, you know, we had this conversation around saturated fat, how we've become so deeply phobic of it. I'm not the scientist, I'm not a researcher, so I can't make any claims myself, but I get to talk to researchers like you and Ben and so many others. And I remember him describing to me that actually a lot of the original research on saturated fat, there's a huge political angle to why it became adopted as policy. And also, as what you're saying, there are pieces of

• 14:41Jonathan Fields?

  the research that seem to have been just conveniently ignored.

• 14:46Speaker 00

  That's right. And, you know, there's a whole fascinating story of, you know, back in 1977, when Congress, right, released dietary recommendations for all Americans to drastically decrease our intake of whole fat milk and butter. And if we think about it, it's like Congress released recommendations. And when you dive even further into that fascinating story, it was a group of about five senators who were in this committee. There was an absolute high prevalence, scary high prevalence of heart disease and heart attacks, especially among men in the 1950s and 1960s.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  In response to that, you know, it took 10 years, they then developed these guidelines. The problem is that these guidelines were built for all Americans, not just men, older men who are susceptible to heart disease, but for children and for women. When they released the first round of dietary recommendations of decreasing saturated fat, they had thousands of people reach out, experts reach out and say, no, no, no, no, this is wrong. We can't jump the gun. We're not ready for it. So much so, that three out of five of the senators said, we're getting a little nervous about this and we actually don't back these recommendations anymore. And so a second version came out that started with that letter of saying, hey, we actually

• 16:09Speaker 00

  don't agree with these anymore. But there were two senators who still believed in it and it went forward. And so we've, you know, really gone through this 50-year experiment of removing all saturated fats, good and bad, from our diets. And now we're, you know, seeing the consequences. The promise is we get a chance to, you know, to fix it.

• 16:26Jonathan Fields?

  And I guess nearly part of the conversation here is also that it sounds like what happened is we lost nuance too. We just sort of said, okay, there's this one category of fats, we're going to call them saturated fat, and they're all evil. Rather than saying, okay, so there is this one broad category, but within that category, and tell me if I'm getting this right, there are a whole bunch of distinct fats and different types that fall under it. And yes, maybe some we should take a closer look at because maybe they are inflammatory or cause, maybe they're related to the cause of things that we don't want, but maybe there's another subset here that actually is really beneficial. Is that kind of right?

• 17:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, that is absolutely right. And what's fascinating is your history tends to repeat itself. And so if you go back to 1929 to 1931, Dr. George Burr and his wife Mildred, they had, Dr. George Burr had just discovered that vitamin E, had just discovered vitamin E, right, as essential. So he was doing studies and he discovered, along with his wife, that fats had benefits. And in fact, two of them were essential. That's when the first two essential fatty acids were discovered. This was heresy at the time because not only were, was, were, were they talking, like today we're talking about saturated fats.

• 17:42Speaker 00

  Back then, it was wholly believed that fats provided no benefit outside of calories, and they certainly had no health benefits. So we're just a hundred years later, and now we understand there are good and bad fats. We're just at that next evolution and phase, exactly like you're saying, where we're understanding that even among saturated fats, there are good and bad. The nuance, exactly what you are talking about.

• 18:08Jonathan Fields?

  So when you then discover, oh, there's this other thing called C15, it falls under the umbrella of a saturated fat. But when we increase the amount that dolphins are taking, it's having all these incredible effects on them. And then when we start to run actual, you know, like, human trials, we're seeing a similar effect here. I want to go a lot deeper into that. But I'm also really curious, does this then make you start to question the claims that have been made around omega-3s? Because it sounds like this kind of comes paired, at least in the early research, with eating a lot of fish, eating a lot of fish, or like, has a lot of omega-3s in it. So is it the type of thing where, like, that was the obvious one, and that was the kind of, quote, "okay" fat to point to? So

• 18:53Jonathan Fields?

  let's see if we can attribute the benefits to that. Whereas maybe it was actually C15 that was driving some of the benefits?

• 19:00Speaker 00

  We're learning. We're stepping carefully, right? If you could imagine, I mean, we've been 10 years of research before we were really ready to bring this up. Because you could imagine a dolphin veterinarian saying, "A saturated fat is good. We better have the science and credibility to back that up." The dolphins did provide a clue to us, which was like, exactly like you're saying. So fish are good for us. There's no question. It is very clear and clean that, in general, people who eat more fish are healthier. We still have to be careful about some pregnant women and, like, high mercury load fish. But aside from that group, eating fish is good for us. So the dolphins helped to tell us

• 19:41Speaker 00

  which part of fish was the most essential. And when we start looking at humans now, there have been, you know, tens of thousands of studies on omega-3s. And we're not saying that omega-3 and omega-6, which are the categories of the other two essential fatty acids, are not essential. It's almost like, we discovered vitamin E, we wouldn't say, "Don't take vitamin A." Right, that they all work together. But we're coming more and more to understand that omega-3 fatty acids are have limitations once they get outside of the fish. They have this chemical structure that involves having double bonds in it. And every time you have a double bond, it's allows it to be flexible,

• 20:26Speaker 00

  which is why it's an oil at room temperature, but it is also susceptible to attack by oxygen. And so it's this process called lipid peroxidation, what most of us know as rancidity. So it's a fragile molecule that once you take it outside the fish, it's harder for it to do its job in supplements, which is why omega-3 supplement studies are really mixed. I think it's really more down to the quality of how much that molecule is oxidized and that omega-3s absolutely still have a role in our health. It's just about how can we get it in a way that, you know, that's most beneficial and balancing it, right? Omega-3s, while they help with flexibility, C15 is the sturdy fat with no double bonds,

• 21:10Speaker 00

  super resistant to lipid peroxidation and anti-inflammatory. So they serve as like a yin and yang in our cell membrane. You need one for flexibility and the other for resilience and stability. So we're still, you know, watching the research and seeing how it moves along. But omega-3 is not the only story we're learning and the Dolphins helped with that.

• 21:33Jonathan Fields?

  And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Good Life Project is sponsored by Talkiiatry. So you know that moment when you finally say, okay, I need some help? That takes courage and then you start calling psychiatrists. And here, we're not taking new patients or our next opening is months away. Talkiiatry exists to change that. Unlike therapy-only platforms, Talkiiatry is psychiatry. It's a 100% online practice where a medical provider can diagnose conditions like anxiety, ADHD, depression, and more. And prescribe medication when it's appropriate. All 800 plus clinicians are in network with major insurers. Take a short assessment, get matched and have your first visit in days, not months.

• 22:16Jonathan Fields?

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• 23:00Jonathan Fields?

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• 23:45Jonathan Fields?

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• 24:30Jonathan Fields?

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• 24:47Jonathan Fields?

  So when you start to drill down into C15 as this new fatty acid that's being discovered, I guess it sounds like when you went back into the research, it wasn't that this was brand new, like this showed up in data like decades ago, but people just kind of ignored it, which makes me wonder, have we been testing for this for decades or not really?

• 25:11Speaker 00

  This is a great question because it gets to two important points. The first is a lot of fatty acid panels up until the late 1990s and even the early 2000s used C15 as the ruler for all the other fatty acids. So by default, C15 wasn't included as a fatty acid to see if it had a benefit or not. It was the dime that's next to let you know the size of everything else. It was the reference fatty acid. So as soon as the reference fatty acid, it automatically got excluded from studies. Then, again, this is just, you know, so much of a good discoveries and big discoveries include some luck.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  We were lucky in which the fatty acid panels had just started, that we used, had just started including C15 as something that you're measuring and assessing. And it was only because of that, if we had done the study three years earlier, C15 wouldn't have been on the panel. We wouldn't have found this, made this discovery in dolphins. So that's the first. And the second is, you know, really being able to understand that C15 has been measured in studies for a long time, but it's been used as a biomarker of how much dairy fat we eat. So the assumption was never that C15 was beneficial. It was just that it was a biomarker of whether or not dairy fat is beneficial.

• 26:36Jonathan Fields?

  That's so interesting. So it's almost like we've had the data for a while, but we haven't really understood why it matters.

• 26:42Speaker 00

  Right. It's just kind of like, yeah, we were missing the, missing that what was, you know, right in front of us when you look back.

• 26:51Jonathan Fields?

  Right. Oh, that's amazing. So is C15, is it now sort of like a normal part of testing or still not really in terms of like giving actual reference numbers? Like if I go to get my physical this year and I get my, you know, like my CBC, my standard blood counts, I have it, is that generally included or not? Would you have to ask for that?

• 27:08Speaker 00

  You have to ask for it, but a lot of progress is being made because of the wealth of studies that have been coming out about C15. So you have to ask for it and then you ask your doctor, usually it's through a fatty acid panel, and then your doctor just needs to make sure that C15 is included in that fatty acid panel because even today, there are a lot of times that C15 is still the reference fatty acid and not being measured. But you can get levels, we now know, we need about 0.2% of our cell membrane of fatty acids. 0.2% needs to be C15 to keep it stable. Otherwise, our cells become fragile and

• 27:49Speaker 00

  it's what we published last year of a nutritional C15 deficiency syndrome called cellular fragility syndrome that we now think are present in as many as one in three people globally. And it's the absolute clear and clean picture we saw in the dolphins that was fixable.

• 28:06Jonathan Fields?

  So take me more into cellular fragility syndrome and how's it show up?

• 28:10Speaker 00

  What we found in the dolphins, the good thing is it was a super clean phenotype. And what's the process of a disease is called pathophysiology. And it's when you truly understand from the cellular level all the way up to what doctors see in blood tests and what you feel. It's that whole pathway of explaining it from the beginning to the end. And we were able to do this thanks to the dolphins and then subsequent studies. So what happens is we need a certain amount of C15 in our cells to keep them stable. Aging is driven by cellular instability. As we age, our cells become more unstable. They start falling apart. We start feeling all the aches and pains of aging.

• 28:53Speaker 00

  Joints and all the things, mood, like me, just not being able to think of the right word right now. So all of these things happen as we get older. It's all driven by changes of aging at the cellular level. So we now know that C15 stabilizes our cells. As we take, and it's completely dependent on how much C15 we get in our diet. So our bodies don't make enough C15, which is why it meets this definition of essentiality. The dolphins, Navy Dolphins, for a long time had been fed this fish called Ulycon. And they're super fatty fish that are so fatty that you could dry them, stick a wick in it. And they were called candlefish.

• 29:35Jonathan Fields?

  Oh, my God.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  So they were chock full of great C15. The problem was, is that in the 1990s, the fisheries dried up. And so the dolphins stopped getting this rich C15 source. And they changed to a variety of different fish types. One of them was called Kablein, which has no C15 in it. So there was an accidental introduction of a C15 deficient diet in dolphins. That concurrently was happening in humans when we were taking C15 away because we were drastically decreasing our intake of dairy fat. So we had dual experiments happening in long-lived, large-brained mammals. And what we were able to see in the dolphins is we started to see the emergence of fatty liver disease.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  And which is a condition that showed up in people in the 1980s. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. It got a rebrand. It's now called Masold, but I won't go into detail about that. But initially identified in people in 1980, now present in more than one in three people globally. We saw that same phenomenon happening in the dolphins. And the dolphins developed this condition. What we now have come to understand is red blood cells become fragile because they don't have enough C15. Those red blood cells get engulfed by the liver, who helps just try to clean up any messy red blood cells in the system. Excess deposition of red blood cells over time led to iron overload in the liver,

• 31:02Speaker 00

  which then led to all the downstream effects of of poor liver function. And in fact, a whole new form of cell death called ferreptosis, which was discovered by a scientist at Columbia University back in 2012, the same year we identified the syndrome in dolphins. And it's an entirely new way that our cells are dying, Jonathan, which is a huge discovery. 10,000 papers on this new form of cell death that accelerates our aging, accelerates heart disease, type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, cognitive decline. But nobody has known why ferreptosis showed up in the first place, until the dolphin showed us very cleanly, C15 deficiencies caused this form of cell death that translates all the way down to all these downstream things.

• 31:47Speaker 00

  So as humans, what we're showing and what we talk about in the book is that as we've decreased our intake of C15 and deficiencies have increased, it's explaining the accelerated aging, especially among younger people, and the rise in type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and now the emergence of entirely new disease called, you know, with this fatty, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease or Masold.

• 32:12Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, so this is really wild. It's like we've got these two concurrent experiments being run with dolphins and human beings at the same time. Where effectively, we're reducing the C15 intake. With humans not intentionally trying to do it. This is just, you know, guidelines come out, dietary guidelines come out. All of a sudden, the primary source of this for people, which is, as you described, dairy, full fat dairy. All of a sudden, people become superphobic of it, not realizing we're reducing this thing because nobody really is focusing on it all. Same time dolphins are having this like shift over in their diet, which is reducing it. But what's fascinating to me about this also. Is that if you study the same types of things that you're talking about in dolphins

• 32:57Jonathan Fields?

  and humans simultaneously, with humans, it must be so much more confusing to try and figure out what's going on because there are bazillion confounding variables, lifestyles, smoking, inactivity, stress, all this stuff, right? It's just like, who knows what's actually causing this? But then you look at dolphins, you're like fundamentally the same lifestyle choices.

• 33:16Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly.

• 33:18Jonathan Fields?

  So it's like you remove all these confounding variables. So it's almost like you can see what's actually going on by looking at dolphins so much more readily and then translate that back to humans. Am I getting this right?

• 33:32Speaker 00

  That is 100% correct. I mean, it is, you know, when we talk about luck and fortune, it's just the foresight of the Navy to actually want to bring in a veterinary epidemiologist, not to help humans, to help the dolphins. You know, just for me, it leaves me with excitement and some angst with regard to how many other things we could be learning by helping other species, applying these advanced technologies we have, you know, focused on for humans, especially in the pharmaceutical world, that we could apply to help improving the lives of giraffes and elephants and, and how we could help their lives. But these little secrets that were so simple, Jonathan, that were right, you know, right

• 34:17Speaker 00

  in front of us, but we didn't see until we changed our perspective. And now has resulted in a discovery that could truly improve global health. It's just, thank you dolphins.

• 34:28Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. You use this phrase earlier in our conversation, one health. Is this kind of what we're talking about or is that a different context?

• 34:36Speaker 00

  It is. And one health has been used in, in different ways, but for the most part, that the point of it is, is that by caring for one species, we can care for all. And that a dolphin, initially people were saying, well, what you're doing in dolphins is how is that even relevant to people? And that's when we share, well, a lot of studies to understand drug development or diseases are being done in mice and labs. And these are like short-lived, small-breeded mammals that are being induced to have these diseases. Certainly dolphins are going to have better insights because they're just

• 35:18Speaker 00

  so much more like us. So it's, yeah, it's this idea of one health is that we have something to learn by taking care of animals. It doesn't have to be binary. We don't have to do research on animals for the benefits of humans, or as humans sacrifice lots of things for the sake of preserving, you know, helping animal health. We can have one. If we take care of our earth, if we take care of our animals, it comes back so quickly to helping to improve all of us. And how wonderful that is, that happens so quickly. We discovered 200 molecules in this work. C15 was just the first. So there's just, I really think this is just the beginning of understanding how veterinarians and physicians and biologists and chemists,

• 36:02Speaker 00

  we can all be working together, not in our silos, to help solve problems and look at things in new ways.

• 36:08Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, that's amazing. And again, by studying animals in a natural environment, in a natural habitat, without all these other things, you may well get cleaner data that then you can translate back to human beings, or a clearer path to being able to point to, like, oh, this is a causal connection. That's just so much harder to try and make in humans, because there's so much other stuff going on. You mentioned also, so you talked about this phenomenon, pharoctosis. Am I saying that right?

• 36:36Speaker 00

  You did, yeah.

• 36:37Jonathan Fields?

  Okay, okay. So I'm like breaking it down to the root, pharaoh, iron, right? Like, po-poosis, death, like, so it's almost like iron-related death. So, but then you also made this jump, and you mentioned offhandedly, like, connections to heart disease, potentially type 2 diabetes, cancer. Bridges this gap a little bit more for me. Like, take me from where you are to, like, these other types of conditions, where these are all so often age-related, stress-related, lifestyle-related conditions in humans.

• 37:07Speaker 00

  Iron became a critical part of the picture for us with the dolphin work. That we were seeing dolphins, again, some dolphins getting these aging-related diseases, including insulin resistance and then elevations in liver enzymes, which are indicative of angry liver. But they go up and they go back down and go back. You know, so it was kind of a phasic condition. The dolphins didn't look sick, right? It's just we were picking it up on the routine blood samples that the Navy takes to assess their health. So we went into the archives. So we looked at archive tissues and old histopathology reports. So pathologists that had looked at dolphins' livers, after dolphins have died, they get a full workup and histopath report.

• 37:52Speaker 00

  And we went back into those and literally piles of paper, you know, sitting in a room, finding where pathologists had described the livers of, you know, about 125 dolphins. And we started seeing this trend, Jonathan, where as we started getting into the 1990s and beyond, where the pathologist would say, "Well, interestingly, there was what's called hemocytosis. There's iron deposition in the liver." And then it became almost normal. It became so that 1 in 3 dolphins had hemocytosis, iron in their liver. And that became a really big clue for us, again, of this pathophysiology.

• 38:35Speaker 00

  Once you have iron in your liver overload, plus fragile fatty acids in your cell membrane, because you don't have enough C15, that are susceptible to lipid proxidation, that lipid proxidation combines with this free iron, and it creates massive reactive oxygen species within the cell, and it basically kills the cell. It takes out the mitochondria, and the cell doesn't work anymore. And so that was the definition of faryptosis at the time, and still today. What we now know is that iron overload, if you look at Public peer reviewed publications on iron overload in humans.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  It goes from a handful per year. And then, once the 1990s hit, you just see this dramatic increase in papers on iron overload. And now, the highest number of papers, 1,024 peer reviewed papers on iron overload, the highest year ever, was last year in 2024. And what they're looking at, Jonathan, is that they are now finding iron overload that's coming with reuptosis. So, once the liver has iron overload, the iron spills over into the blood and that seeds our heart, our brain, our pancreas, you know, our different tissues. And as different silos, because you have people who don't work on the whole body,

• 40:00Speaker 00

  they're working on the brain, the heart, the pancreas, that all of those groups started looking in and they started finding iron overload in all these tissues. And so, now, there's an understanding that it's all connected. It's called dysmetabolic iron overload syndrome, or DIOS, that helps explain how all of these diseases are worsening exponentially and facilitating and speeding up aging. So, consider iron as like a major accelerator of the aging process. So, and when we roll it all back to the dolphins, and then now, the studies that have been done since then,

• 40:40Speaker 00

  we know that putting C15 back into our system stabilizes the cells. The red blood cells don't get eaten up by the liver. The iron stops getting deposited and all the downstream effects slowly heal over time. So, it's really fascinating, again, the parallels of what were happening and being discovered in humans and dolphins at the same time.

• 41:02Jonathan Fields?

  I've heard of, and I think probably a lot of people have heard at some point, of iron deficiency. Like, you get your testing, you're like, oh, iron is low. And I think that's probably the more common thing that shows up on testing and the more common thing that is, quote, "treated," often through supplementation or like other means. And it's often what people feel more immediately, like fatigue or things like this. Sometimes it has an effect on your brain function. So, we sort of like say, okay, so like, I can point to this number, it's deficient. I don't think I've ever heard of sort of the flip side of this iron overload. And what you're saying is this is maybe a much bigger issue.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  Right, and in fact, they're linked. So what we're finding is that as the red blood cells get fragile and they get engulfed by the liver, it actually causes iron deficiency in the blood, iron overload in the tissues. And so you can imagine what happens if a person... So basically, the measurement of iron overload is an indicator biomarker called ferritin. And every doctor I talk to, Jonathan, when I just, when I say hyper ferritinemia, they all go, "What? You have an explanation for the hyper ferritinemia I am seeing everywhere?" So I was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." So this, and that's you. So it's, and again, just to

• 42:21Speaker 00

  be super careful with your listeners, this does not mean stop taking iron. This does not mean changing any of your regimen. It just means that we're learning that there is a subs, an iron deficiency anemia is very real. And like you said, it's a, remains a big problem globally. What we need to ferret out now is, do you have iron deficiency anemia because your red blood cells, because it's part of this whole syndrome? And if that's the case, then you probably wouldn't supplement with iron because it just continues to feed the problem. You've got to fix the problem on the front end, get those red blood cells stable again, so that the iron can stay in the blood and not go into the organs. So

• 43:04Speaker 00

  we're just right on this cutting edge of it. But yeah, but it ends up being all linked.

• 43:08Jonathan Fields?

  So you could literally show with labs that have you deficient in iron as measured, you know, like in your blood, but also high in ferritin.

• 43:18Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 43:19Jonathan Fields?

  I mean, iron is being deposited in your tissue, and which kind of makes you like, how can this happen? But maybe this is actually, and maybe this isn't the one and only explanation, but maybe this is something we've been missing for a while.

• 43:30Speaker 00

  It's really important. You know, with the dolphins, they had one phenotype, Jonathan, and like you said, and it was one problem that we were able to fix. Humans, there's a subset, we think a large number of people who fit into this, but it's not the, oh, this is it. This explains all the problems we've had and it's going to fix it. Like you said, we're very complicated as humans and our lives. And so, but it's, it's the way that we explain when we go over a hundred different papers and where we're at is you just can't explain it away anymore. And if we have the opportunity to fix something in a relatively simple way, like vitamin C deficiency in scurvy and vitamin D deficiency in rickets, like if we have a chance to help restore some health, especially to what we're

• 44:15Speaker 00

  seeing in the kids, in kids and young adults, gosh, it's time to have that conversation.

• 44:20Jonathan Fields?

  No, that makes so much sense. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.

• 44:27Jonathan Fields?

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• 45:11Jonathan Fields?

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• 45:54Jonathan Fields?

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• 46:37Jonathan Fields?

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• 47:21Jonathan Fields?

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• 47:26Jonathan Fields?

  So we've drawn a line between potential C15 deficiency, frapptosis, sort of like how the blood then potentially, the levels of iron and cellular fragility potentially affects things like, you know, like all the, the quote, "diseases of aging." What I'm curious about now also, this is again, something that you write about, is a linkage between this and mental health. You know, like for sure, we have seen over the last few decades, just a stunning and horrifying increase in the incidence of depression, anxiety. And, you know, we can point to a whole bunch of things in modern life that might be a part of it. And in fact, they may well be a real exacerbation. But I'm

• 48:10Jonathan Fields?

  wondering if you see a role of, for C15 in this as well?

• 48:16Speaker 00

  We are. It's the early days, you know, just to be transparent. But there are a couple things that emerged, that have emerged over the last 10 years, that have fed that same question, Jonathan, which is like, oh, this rise that we're seeing in mental health problems. And could C15 deficiencies be playing a role? And so the clues that we have to date, we took pure C15 and we ran it against this, we used a third party who develops what's called a cell-based phenotypic profile. And so what they do is they expose 12 different human cell systems that mimic various disease states. They then treat these

• 48:54Speaker 00

  disease systems with the agent, in this case, C15, and they measure 148 different biomarkers and see if they go up or down. And so you get this profile, and then it's math, fancier math than what I can do. But then they're able to compare the profile of C15 with all those different measurements with, they compared it with 4,500 other molecules.

• 49:18Speaker 00

  And what they showed is that at lower concentrations, C15's cell-based phenotypic profile matched that of bupropion, which is one of the leading antidepressant drugs. And it's considered this odd stepchild of antidepressants because it behaves in a very different way than other antidepressant drugs. And so that was an interesting finding. At the same time as we were getting C15 out to the world as a supplement, we started getting people reporting to us that they had a calmer mood, they were sleeping deeper, and their joint pain was gone.

• 50:03Speaker 00

  And we thought, that's great, but that's called the placebo effect. Because we're like, this is within two weeks. It's just not what C15 does. It stores your cells and your liver and your... But then I started experiencing that myself. And then we had a second study come out where we showed, and again, going back to the Dolphin data, showing that our body uses C15 to make a second molecule, which is called a metabolite, and it's called PDC. And PDC is the second ever discovered full-acting endocannabinoid. So I mean, like, make that make sense. But, you know, we have these receptors in our bodies and brain that respond to cannabis,

• 50:48Speaker 00

  which is responsible for its effects of calmer mood, deeper sleep, less pain. But we didn't have these receptors for cannabis. I mean, dogs and pigs have these receptors, and they don't have edibles. So that's not what the receptors are there for. They're there for something else. And so now we know that C15 makes the second ever discovered molecule that does target both CB1 and CB2 receptors, which helped immediately for me explain how people could be getting those benefits.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  So quickly. So it's about half. So then that leads to if we have nutritional deficiencies in C15, not only does that affect our cellular fragility and stability, but now we're not making the second molecule that was meant to activate the receptors that keep us calm and sleep well and have less pain. So it's fitting in the story. But again, we're, you know, we're watching that one carefully.

• 51:49Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah. Is there ongoing research on this question right now?

• 51:53Speaker 00

  We just finished a study and I should mention, all of our studies have been funded by the Department of Defense. So it's, you know, this is peer reviewed, not only in being published, but in the ability to do the study and, and to come up with the design. So we were funded by the Navy because dolphins can develop histologic changes that are consistent with Alzheimer's to understand C15's potential role with regard to brain health. So we were able to find some really compelling mechanisms that can help explain cognitive health. The paper's close to being published. So we'll be able to talk about that in more detail

• 52:37Speaker 00

  when it comes out, but just stay tuned on that front.

• 52:40Jonathan Fields?

  So the research is happening and it's, it's not just like affect, but actual cognitive health, potentially sort of like the things that we see in Alzheimer's or dementia. But because we're having this conversation at a time where you can't actually speak in specifics to that research is what I'm reading, what I'm hearing, basically.

• 52:58Speaker 00

  That is correct. But there are a couple, again, interesting studies. One was published looking at people with major depressive disorder, MDD, and showing that, and major depressive disorder actually has multiple subtypes. And these subtypes are so different. There is an argument that This is not one disease. This is three different diseases caused by three different entities. And so one of the phenotypes is called anxiety-related depressive disorder within major depressive disorder. And it was that phenotype specifically showed that people with higher C15 levels were less likely to have anxiety, to have this phenotype

• 53:41Speaker 00

  of MDD. So that is suggestive, but again, it's correlative. And then there was another study showing that people who have higher C15 have better cognitive function as older people. And perhaps most importantly, there's a bunch of studies that have come out in children showing that the more C15 mom has, the more C15 baby gets. And the more C15 baby gets, the better their body growth, their brain development, cognitive development, and even their language skills, all the way up until six years old. So there's urgency around the ability to say like, gosh, if C15 is not in most infant formulas, most moms

• 54:24Speaker 00

  these days are probably C15 deficient. So, you know, again, we need to get this conversation going to help, you know, the generations that are that are coming into this world.

• 54:34Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah. I mean, as you're describing that also, it makes me wonder, there's been some really interesting work going on now with ketosis and mental health. And functionally, for like a person to like be in a ketosis state, there's kind of no way around eating a very high fat diet. And often it's saturated fats that become a part of it. They get reintroduced as part of that diet. It's almost making me wonder if part of the effect might actually be a reintroduction of C15 as part of that, just, you know, without really thinking that's what's happening. Like, maybe that's a meaningful contributor. But I guess, do we learn more of that, like in the upcoming research?

• 55:11Speaker 00

  That's right. And what's good is that there are so many people paying attention to this and now studying it. So probably every two weeks, there's a new paper coming out on C15 from different, you know, teams throughout the world. It's a very exciting time.

• 55:27Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, one of the other things that so many people experience and has become, I think, a lot more prevalent in the last few generations, is the broad basket of autoimmune conditions. Is there a tie in here as well?

• 55:41Speaker 00

  It's so hard to keep saying yes, Jonathan.

• 55:45Speaker 00

  It's like, this is too good to be true. I think, so before I get into that, I think, you know, what's important is essential fatty acids and vitamins, things that are, that we must get from our diet to sustain our health. Nature has made all of these to do a lot of heavy lifting, to do a lot of things. So it actually should not be surprising, given that C15 is an essential fatty acid, that it's doing a lot of things. So if we go back to that cell-based phenotypic profile, in addition to allowing you to compare with other compounds and drugs, it also tells you what it does in these different disease systems. And several of these disease systems in a dish, like diseases in a dish, mimicked autoimmune diseases and allergies.

• 56:30Speaker 00

  And what it showed was that C15 had a remarkable ability of being able to lower multiple pro-inflammatory cytokines across a bunch of these systems. We now understand that a big reason for that is it's called a JAKstat inhibitor. So when we talk about targets, it does a bunch of, there's a lot of different targets. It activates AMPK and it inhibits mTOR and blah, blah, blah, blah. But specific to autoimmune diseases and allergies, it decrease inhibits what's called the JAKstat pathway, which explains how it lowers these pro-inflammatory cytokines. So a lot of those commercials you see where it's like the person's now able to expose their skin because the autoimmune skin condition is gone.

• 57:14Speaker 00

  And a lot of those are JAKstat inhibitors. For me, I have been cursed with atopic dermatitis my whole life. It got worse as I got older. I became allergic to all raw fruits, vegetables and nuts. So like, anything healthy, I can't eat. Like, it's terrible. And it got to the point where it was just, it was affecting my face, my hair, my, like, it was very severe. And so I have seen for myself that it doesn't fix a disease, it is not a drug. But I think it was more like maybe my lack of C15 that was making me more susceptible. And once I was able to bring it back into my life in a concentrated way, it's been able to just kind of calm things down.

• 57:57Speaker 00

  But clinical trials are needed in that specific area. There have not been done any autoimmune or allergies, but it may help explain why we're seeing an increase in some of these autoimmune diseases. Again, just little pieces and hints of ways that we can take the edge off of this kind of worsening global health problem.

• 58:18Jonathan Fields?

  So let's talk about the big lingering question that's going to be on anyone's mind after diving into this conversation with us, which is, okay, assuming that you're not a dolphin, but you're a natural human being, how do we, and maybe, you know, you're kind of curious, am I deficient? I think you sort of shared, okay, we can actually just add this to the panel of testing that we get next time we get bloods done, and that'll start to give us a hint for like, are numbers actually where they need to be? Let's say we realize we are deficient. How do we as people, like, what are the different ways that we can reintroduce more C15 into our diets if it makes sense for us?

• 58:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, and this is the whole movement, right? Is this how, what are the different ways that we can introduce C15 back into our lives that makes sense? With regard to children, you know, in the 1990s, the rules or the guidance of avoiding whole dairy fat doubled down in the 1990s. And the guidance that's coming out from pediatricians was that if your baby has a family history of type 2 diabetes or fatty liver disease or obesity, it should never get whole fat milk at all. Our first step is not just dramatically, okay, start giving all children whole fat milk again, but we need these regulatory bodies to look at the data, take a hard look

• 59:39Speaker 00

  at the data, and be able to revisit about what we believe is that it's likely that getting whole dairy fat back into children's diets.

• 59:50Speaker 00

  Fits what all other again from a comparative one health perspective, all mammals drink milk at birth and for development. It is nature's perfect food for development. We shouldn't take that away. So for kids who can have whole dairy fat. So that would be step number one. Step number two is our industry changes that if a cow is fed grass, it has twice as much C15 in its dairy fat than a cow that is fed corn. So let's get diets back into the cows that maximize the amount of C15 in their food. And one thing we're calling for is for dairy food products to share how much C15 is in their product. Because if I was a consumer

• 1:00:34Speaker 00

  and I was looking at different types of butter, different types of milk, I'd pick the one that has the highest C15 in it. Because you can't predict what it has unless you know what that cow has eaten. So that would be number two way to get that when we do eat dairy fat. Cheese can be a good source of C15. Sardinians who live to 100 and beyond, it's where the oldest men in the world live. They're less likely, they live longer because they're less likely to die of heart disease. And they have C15 levels that are two to three times higher than the rest of the world. They're at 0.4, 0.6%. They have local sheep and goats that graze on grass and make their cheese, which is pecorino. And pecorino has

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  twice as much C15 as other cheeses. Those are good ways to get back in.

• 1:01:24Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, I mean, and maybe you were just about to address this, but my curiosity is like, if somebody's listening to this and saying like, but dairy doesn't like, I don't do well with dairy.

• 1:01:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, and this exactly. And the other big elephant in the room is that there have been, just like with omega threes, there have been thousands, tens of thousands of studies on eating dairy. And it's a mess. Like it's some are good, some are bad, some are neutral. And it might be because of all of this variation we just talked about. But in the end, there's a group that actually got together in Denmark in 2017, and they were scratching their heads about this problem and saying, wait, we're seeing remarkable studies coming out about individual ingredients within milk that are really beneficial. But as soon as you put it back into the whole food matrix of dairy fat, you don't see that benefit in the studies.

• 1:02:16Speaker 00

  And so what they concluded is, you know, there are over 400 fatty acids in dairy fat. Only 1% is C15. Over 40% are pro-inflammatory saturated fats. So it just doesn't, it doesn't get a chance to win.

• 1:02:30Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, it's not clean.

• 1:02:32Speaker 00

  It's not clean. So just like mammals, there are no other mammals that continue to eat dairy beyond infancy. So we should also maybe follow that guidance and be able to be, and which is why the Navy invested 10 years of research so that we could develop a pure C15 ingredient that doesn't have to, that is vegan, you know, that's not an animal product. So people who are lactose intolerant, people who don't want dairy fat or don't want the pro-inflammatory fats. The Navy truly understood the problem for, beyond children, and they invested 10 years to be able to provide a solution, which is such a testament to, to the military.

• 1:03:13Jonathan Fields?

  So basically, this is now available in supplement form in, in just pure C15. And we should also probably disclose that for you, you're a researcher, you're independent, you're really trying to understand conflict of interest disclosure.

• 1:03:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. And so that's where, you know, it's important to note that we then were, you know, were funded by the Navy to, to do all this work. Specifically even, we were funded by the Navy to make the supplement. We then, we being myself, a Navy veterinarian, and my husband, a Navy physician. Uh, we then, uh, left the Navy to be able to start a small business to be able to use those funds and develop the supplement and commercialize it because that's not what the government does. So for us, it is, it does need to be completely transparent as far as conflict of interest. For us, Jonathan, it's like, this is what the military does, right? I mean, Eric deployed to three wars, you know, it's just like, you find a problem,

• 1:04:13Speaker 00

  figure out how to fix it, and then you fix it. You don't do 50 years of research and publish papers and not translate it. So for us, it was a very natural process of saying, we found a problem in dolphins, we figured out how to fix it in dolphins and be able to have a spin out benefit to human health too. And then the Navy said, well, then go do it. Go make this, you know, molecule accessible to all. So we started with the supplement and, um, which is, you know, fatty 15, but now it's really the goal and the movement is accessibility. And so we're now advancing it as an ingredient that can then fortify foods, infant formulas,

• 1:04:55Speaker 00

  in addition to all those other things I talked about, like, how do we change industry practices? How do we change dietary guidelines, especially for children? So it's part of the solution, which, you know, we're really proud of, of being able to, to have this ability to, to have a positive effect.

• 1:05:11Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah. So we talked about potential for dairy, we talked about direct supplementation. Are there other fishes that we can eat? Are there other whole foods that we can eat that would give us any meaningful level or not really?

• 1:05:24Speaker 00

  I so wanted there to be, so for it really, the studies to date support that now, like by far dairy, again, it used to be a biomarker for how much dairy fat we ate. But there are some ways that we can plus up our C15, right? And two of those are, um, one is, so fish can have C15 in it, but in the most part, it's in fatty fish and it's in the skin and the head.

• 1:05:49Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, we don't eat that. Or you can make soup out of it, right?

• 1:05:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Like, and, and I'm half Chinese and, and, you know, it used to be that the person of honor at the table, we get the head of the fish. I'm like, ah, they, they didn't know back then, but they were giving C15. Two other things we could do, a study showed that pregnant women who exercised had higher C15 levels in their blood. And hypothesis is that the C15 that you store, if you have enough C15, it gets stored in our tissues. And by exercising, you're releasing it into your blood.

• 1:06:19Jonathan Fields?

  Ah, that's interesting.

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  Right, to kind of re-release C15. So exercising is good for many reasons. I just gave you another. And then the third is there's clear, we now know that microbes in our gut can make some levels of C15, which is why nobody has zero C15 in their blood. It just isn't enough to get up and over that deficiency level. So if specifically by eating fiber, fiber has inulin in it, which feeds specific types of bacteria. Those bacteria then use inulin to make C15. And a really cool study showed, explained that's how fiber is beneficial to liver and metabolic health.

• 1:07:01Jonathan Fields?

  Ah, that's so interesting.

• 1:07:03Speaker 00

  So fiber.

• 1:07:04Jonathan Fields?

  Right, which, and how many times have we all heard, add more fiber?

• 1:07:08Speaker 00

  I know, sorry, that sounds boring, but exercise and fiber, good for many reasons, including helping to kind of get those C15 edge, edge up.

• 1:07:17Jonathan Fields?

  As we start to, like, as we have this conversation and you're sort of like looking forward at the next maybe five, 10 years, what are you looking at, like, moving forward? What's the vision in terms of like, where's the research going? Where's accessibility going?

• 1:07:30Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. So, you know, we've, when this all started, we've had three goals. And the first was credibility, which is why 10 years of studies, and the studies continue. And now others have taken the torch, which is great. There are three other teams that have critically evaluated that stake we put in the ground of saying it's an essential fatty acid. Right, that's a very big claim. So now we have three other independent teams have looked at it on their own, and they have all concluded that C15 meets the criteria of essentiality. So those studies need to continue happening. So credibility, one, that continues. Two was the ability to be able to increase awareness. Jonathan, thank you. So we need to get, that's why we wrote the book,

• 1:08:15Speaker 00

  The Longevity Nutrient. Simon and Schuster approached us, which, like, that doesn't happen to them. They said, listen, we've been following your story for a year. And this is a book and would you be willing to put it out there? And the book is serving as a really helpful form, especially at this time, that there's this level of research, voluminous research to support it. And so the book goes into much of everything that we talked about, but really helping to lay out the studies and data to show that we cannot explain it away anymore. We have to be talking about this. So that's the awareness piece, which again, we'll continue. The last is accessibility.

• 1:08:55Speaker 00

  So we need to increase access to not just through the fatty 15 supplement, but again, through ingredient, through agricultural changes. So that's the next five years, Jonathan, I see the world, including ourselves, but more importantly, lots of scientists really leaning into C15 to understand what we need, understanding like we talked about its role in as a neuroprotectant in cognitive health and understanding the breadth of how quickly we could fix something. If we could cure fatty liver disease, especially showing up, this would, this is just, it would mean everything, you know, I just, it's becoming the number one cause of cancer

• 1:09:39Speaker 00

  in kids and liver transplants globally. And just that alone, oh, so the hope is there will be a lot of leaning in on specific, the most important components that C15 can help reverse meaningfully. And so I see that the liver disease component being, being a big focus area.

• 1:10:00Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, I mean, super powerful and exciting to, you know, be in a, in a moment where it seems like it's just really tipping more into the mainstream. A lot of people are paying attention, a lot of academics and researchers and scientists are paying attention and hopefully there's more to come in this story. We're in the beginning stages, feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So I always wrap with the same question, which is in this container of Good Life Project. If I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

• 1:10:26Speaker 00

  Oh gosh, fill it with purpose. Allow the moments to happen in your life where a purpose sometimes lands in your lap and be ready and you'll know when it happens. And just be ready to, as I talked about in the beginning of Teddy Roosevelt's quote about being in the arena. That, you know, it's about being in there and fighting the good fight. And it is hard and it is difficult. But if you, you know, for us in science, you follow the data and the data continues to support what you're trying to achieve. You fight like hell to be able to do something meaningful, impactful to the, to the world. And so for me, it's made it an incredibly good life.

• 1:11:11Jonathan Fields?

  Hmm, thank you.

• 1:11:13Speaker 00

  You're welcome. It's been great being here, Jonathan.

• 1:11:16Jonathan Fields?

  If you loved this episode, safe bet, you'll also love the conversation we had with Matthew Park about how aging immune systems affect cancer risk. You'll find a link to that episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez and Troy Young. Christopher Carter crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Del Bliss for her research on this episode. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did, because you're still listening here, do me a personal favor, a second, second favor, share it with just one person.

• 1:12:00Jonathan Fields?

  I mean, if you want to share it with more, that's awesome too, but just one person even, then invite them to talk with you about what you've both discovered, to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter, because that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

• 1:12:21Jonathan Fields?

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• 1:13:05Jonathan Fields?

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• 1:13:27Speaker 03

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• 1:14:38Speaker 05

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the Headline Hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.