Longevity, Epigenetics, Microbiome Health & The Difference Between Eating for Long-Term Wellness Versus Performance

This episode is a geeky deep dive into the hardcore science behind everything from telomeres and the mechanisms behind aging and longevity to the primacy of maintaining microbiome health; oxidative stress and the relationship between inflammation and chronic disease; epigenetics and genetic disposition versus expression; and of course nutrition – divining truth from myth, the impact of micronutrient inadequacies, focused supplementation and the difference between eating for optimal wellness versus performance. Today's guide through this byzantine labyrinth of crucial biological processes is my brilliant friend Rhonda Patrick, Ph. D. A Ph. D in biomedical sciences, Dr. Patrick is an expert in nutrition, metabolism and aging. She has done considerable research in all of these fields, including research on cancer and the effects of mineral and vitamin supplementation on metabolism, inflammation and aging. She did her graduate research at St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital, where she focused on cancer, mitochondrial metabolism and apoptosis. In addition, she conducts clinical trials and has performed extensive aging research at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Beyond the fact that Rhonda is whip smart (and totally amazing), through her Found My Fitness blog,podcast and YouTube channel, she expertly translates the complexities of clinical research and physiological processes in understandable terms, adeptly communicates their implications and provides actionable real life practices and applications aimed at maximizing overall health and longevity. It's time to put on the propellor hat and get out your pen and paper, because you're going to want to take notes for this one. We cover a ton of material in this conversation. Specific topics include: * identifying the biomarkers of aging * the biological impact of oxidative stressors * acute inflammation vs. chronic inflammation * why we should forget about protein and focus on fiber * the importance of cultivating a healthy microbiome * the leading causes of chronic inflammation * the benefits of exercise-induced inflammation * the benefits of curcumin * stress adaptation and immune system response * why Omega-3 is important & how to get it * circadian rhythm and bright light exposure * stress reduction techniques * the benefits of meditation * DNA damage and telomerase * the importance of Vitamin D * Rhonda's recommended supplements * gene polymorphisms * nutrition/lifestyle & athletic performance vs. long-term wellness/longevity Rhonda fascinates me and this conversation is an absolute mind-blower. I sincerely hope you enjoy our exchange. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:04Speaker 01

  Like you said, there's lots of complications and nuances that go along with anything related to health. Anything that has to do with human physiology and the body is extremely complicated. And I think something that's very, very popular right now is this ketogenic diet and high-fat diet, which I just, I think, has been taken and blown sort of out of proportion. And I don't think people really understand. They just think it's sort of like this thing that's great. And there's actually a lot of things to consider.

• 1:40Rich Roll?

  That's Dr. Rhonda Patrick, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:59Rich Roll?

  Hey everybody, it's your friendly neighborhood Rich Roll back at you with another edition of the RRP, the Rich Roll Podcast, the show that bears my name. Thanks so much for tuning in today, everybody. I really appreciate it. Mad love for everybody who has shared the show with your friends and on social media. And of course, massive respect to everybody who has made a habit of clicking through the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. It seems like such a small little thing, just click this little thing before you buy something on Amazon, doesn't cost you anything extra, but it really does put a tremendous amount of wind in our sails. It allows me to continue doing what I do and is helping

• 2:41Rich Roll?

  me to improve upon the show so I can bring you the absolute best programming possible. What do we do here? Well, as you know, you guys know, right? Each week, I sit down with somebody who inspires me, somebody who I think that I can learn a tremendous amount from, the best and the brightest across all categories of everything from health and diet, nutrition, fitness, athleticism, entrepreneurship, creativity, spirituality and consciousness. And why do I do this? Well, I do this to help all of us optimize our lifestyle, to provide the tools and the resources that we all need and can use to help us self-actualize, to unlock and unleash

• 3:24Rich Roll?

  our best, most authentic selves. And I've got a great show for you guys today. I'm super excited to introduce the great Dr. Rhonda Patrick. We have an amazing amount of material that we cover in this podcast, so you're going to want to get out your pen and your paper, maybe put on your propeller hat. But before we get into the details of who she is and what we're going to talk about specifically, let's take care of a little business.

• 3:57Rich Roll?

  All right, today, we're going to cover a lot of ground geeking out on the hardcore science behind everything from longevity and anti-aging to the microbiome, to inflammation and its relationship to chronic disease, to gene expression and epigenetics, to telomeres, what they are, and why you need to know about them, and of course, nutrition, myths and truths, micronutrient inadequacies, supplementation, and the difference between eating for optimal wellness versus performance. And to explore all of this, I'm very, very excited to introduce my friend, Dr. Rhonda Patrick. Rhonda is a PhD in biomedical sciences.

• 4:39Rich Roll?

  She is an expert in nutrition, metabolism, and aging, having done extensive research on all of these, including research on cancer and the effects of mineral and vitamin supplementation on metabolism, inflammation, and aging. She conducts clinical trials. She has performed aging research at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and she did her graduate research at St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital, where she focused on cancer, mitochondrial metabolism, and apoptosis. apoptosis? I think I said that right. In any event, she is super duper smart, way smarter than me, and not only does she understand how to interpret research, she does it herself, and she's very, very effective at translating,

• 5:21Rich Roll?

  at communicating its import, the import of all of this research, by distilling the complexities of scientific research down to what's important to know in understandable terms. In addition, she's very good at helping us how to understand, how to apply all of this information into real-life practices. Rhonda's super awesome and amazing, so get out your pen and paper, maybe put on your propeller hat, because you're going to want to take notes for this one. So let's just jump in. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Rhonda Patrick.

• 6:02Rich Roll?

  Hey Rhonda.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Hey Rich.

• 6:03Rich Roll?

  How's it going?

• 6:05Speaker 01

  It's going pretty good.

• 6:06Rich Roll?

  Thanks for hosting me in your beachside home to do the podcast. I'm really excited to be here and talk to you today.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  My pleasure. No, after the last conversation we had, I was super pumped to be able to chat with you again.

• 6:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's great. For the listeners, you came up to my house, I did your podcast. Now I'm doing the opposite, coming down to you, so it's great. And the first question I have for you before we even get into anything, because I can't get it out of my mind. I parked like a block away from here, like on the bay side, and I saw this big sign that said jetpack rentals. Is that true? Can you really rent a jetpack?

• 6:41Speaker 01

  You can. I have yet to rent one.

• 6:43Rich Roll?

  How could you live here and not immediately go rent a jetpack?

• 6:46Speaker 01

  I told you, I've actually only lived here for like two and a half weeks out of the three months that I've been paying. So, yeah, you know, there's a lot of things that I want to try out, like stand-up paddle boarding. I've never done that. You know, I've grown up surfing.

• 7:00Rich Roll?

  Right. You're from San Diego, right?

• 7:02Speaker 01

  I'm from San Diego.

• 7:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but you surf?

• 7:05Speaker 01

  I surf. I used to teach surfing when I was in college at UCSD.

• 7:08Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  I would teach at an all-girls school, surf school in La Jolla called Surf Diva. And so I used to give surf lessons and then, you know, I'd do it like early in the morning before class or on weekends and then go to school and learn a bunch of biochemistry and chemistry stuff.

• 7:24Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, that's interesting. I can't imagine there's that many PhDs in your discipline that are avid surfers.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Not many, and there weren't many surfers that were PhDs, so.

• 7:35Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, you can navigate between both worlds. It's cool. Well, so many things that we can talk about. My only fear with this podcast really is that we could just go down a dark alley and never return. So we're gonna have to choose our topics of conversation, I think, here today. And we kind of talked a little bit before the podcast about a couple of things that would be good to focus on. But before we do that, why don't you kind of explain a little bit about your, I mean, your CV. We know your CV, but maybe kind of fill in the gaps on your background and your areas of expertise.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  So um I I as I mentioned, I went to UCSD for my undergraduate education. I was a chemist um initially, so that means I was I'm synthesizing a lot of organic molecules and peptides and and you know, putting together things, which was fun for a while. Uh got really bored with that, so I decided to um try biology out.

• 8:34Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  And um so I went to work at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla. And that

• 8:41Rich Roll?

  That's like the place, right?

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Oh, it is such a place is overlooking Black's Beach, which is like one of the best surf spots ever.

• 8:49Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  And uh it's also, you know, where the the hang glider port is, you can do like parasailing, paragliding and the golf course is right, Torrey Pines Golf Course is right next door. Um fantastic place, just so many, you know, wonderful researchers that work there. And so I was, you know, very young, um recent college graduate. And uh so I had joined a lab there that was working on aging of all things.

• 9:16Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  And

• 9:17Rich Roll?

  Did you just fall into that or were you kind of directing yourself?

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Well, in a way I fell into it because while I was still a student at UCSD, I was doing some research internships that were paid um at a very, very successful biotech company called Illumina, which now is like the top company that makes these gene chip arrays where people are doing all these microarray analysis. But so I worked there for two years, my junior and senior year in college, and I learned a lot of chemistry. Um but at I I you know, I just like I said, I decided that I wanted to try biology out. And so someone that I had worked under at Illumina had a connection in the lab that was hiring. And they're like, oh, well, you can, you know, this person, it's an aging lab, it's really cool, you know, we'll get you an interview.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  So I sort of just got my foot in the door by knowing someone

• 10:09Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  who had worked with me and gave me, you know, gave me a great recommendation. So sort of that's how I got in.

• 10:16Rich Roll?

  Right. And so you're working on aging, I mean, what does that mean specifically?

• 10:19Speaker 01

  I know, it's pretty big, right? Aging, I mean, first of all, as as a young college, you know, college grad graduate student, when I heard it was an aging research lab, I was like really fascinated. It's like, what is? You know, well, yeah, I'm interested in aging, you know, we're all aging, you know, every day I wake up, I'm older. So this specific lab was using a research model, C. elegans, which is a little nematode roundworm that has a lifespan of about fourteen to fifteen days. And what's interesting about these worms is that they have many of the same genes that humans have. In fact, like, like over ninety percent of their genes in some way or another are, you know, we, we have in humans.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  It's called conserved. So we have a lot of these genes that are conserved. So you can look at, you know, these genes in worms and manipulate them and sort of draw, you know, conclusions that may apply to humans since we have similar genes. And the worms are such a great research model because they only live fifteen days. And so you can do a lot of manipulations and see the effects, whereas humans have an average lifespan, depending on your male or female.

• 11:28Rich Roll?

  Right. So if they live one day longer, that's like an extreme result, right?

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Exactly. And what was really cool is that one of the big breakthroughs that was done by Cynthia Kenyon, back when she was a postdoc, who now has her own laboratory at UCSF. She found that by manipulating just one gene, she can increase their lifespan by a hundred percent. Meaning they live thirty days, you know, so go from fifteen to thirty days, and that's just huge. And we, we, humans happen to have this gene. In fact, humans that have a certain gene polymorphism, which means it's just a variation in the sequence of DNA, it changes the function, that makes that gene more active all the time. Those humans have a up to threefold chance of becoming a centenarian or learning to be a hundred. Super cool, right?

• 12:13Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Needless to say, I fell in love with biology. I'm like, this is great, this is cool. I was doing, at the time, I got, I got to, I was very fortunate to work with a postdoc on a project that was investigating the effects of

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Increased insulin signaling, too much insulin signaling on protein aggregation. And specifically, we were putting in a gene that is linked to the human form of Alzheimer's disease and looking at the effects of that. So I was able to co-author my first publication, which happens to be a really great publication. It was a science paper.

• 12:47Rich Roll?

  And that was shortly after college?

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Right after college.

• 12:50Rich Roll?

  Wow, that's amazing to be published like that quickly.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it was a, it was a great experience for me. And then I decided to, I became interested in pediatric cancer. So St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, which is in the mid-south, it's in Memphis, Tennessee. Quite a, quite a culture difference from my beach life in San Diego. But phenomenal institute.

• 13:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's an incredible institute.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely incredible. I mean, the work they've been doing is, you know, children there that get acute lymphobastic leukemia, about 98% of the children treated there at St. Jude, and the treatment was, you know, developed there at St. Jude, about 98% of those children go into remission, which means the cancer goes away, and 90% of those children actually end up being cured, which that being cured means you're in remission for at least 10 years. So it's just incredible. But aside from that, as a budding young scientist, what was so great about St. Jude was that because there is a, they, they do a phenomenal amount of fundraising and they get just, you know, a lot of donations, this, there is no shortage of funding to buy great scientific

• 14:02Speaker 01

  technologies and all the cutting edge technologies are there. So I was able to really learn big, big science there.

• 14:11Rich Roll?

  And be at the forefront of like where it's all heading.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. And as a graduate student, it's, it's kind of rare to have those opportunities, you know? Usually you're sort of, you know, pinching pennies and trying to, you know, get, do what you can with the money you have, or that was never an issue for me. And I just had access at, literally at my fingertips to just all the cutting edge technologies. And I was, you know, trained on how to use them. And so it was just a really good learning experience. And I had a lot of hands-on guidance from my graduate student advisor. So from, you know, while I was at St. Jude, I was looking at the effects of metabolism on cancer and, you know, mitochondrial metabolism specifically.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  From there, I sort of became very interested in nutrition and preventative medicine. So I was kind of like combining my aging background with everything I'd learned with metabolism and how that relates to cancer and aging and decided that I wanted to work with Bruce Ames, who's a world-renowned scientist.

• 15:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the guy's like a legend.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  He is a legend. He is the greatest guy ever. He is like one of my favorite people on the planet.

• 15:21Rich Roll?

  And he's, is he still alive?

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:23Rich Roll?

  Pretty old though, right?

• 15:24Speaker 01

  He just turned eighty-seven. Not only is he still alive, he still runs a lab.

• 15:27Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  And he works five and a half days a week, so he's...

• 15:32Rich Roll?

  And he was like, so he's basically your mentor?

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Yes, he was my postdoctoral mentor. So after I got my PhD in biomedical science, which took quite a long time, six years, I then went on to do postgraduate training with Bruce. And so the postgraduate training is often referred to as a postdoc, postdoctoral training. And so he, which, it was a very different experience compared to graduate school, where I was getting a lot of mentorship, a lot of hands-on training. Eventually, I became very independent. And then as I came to Bruce's lab, it was just everything. I was, you know, completely autonomous, where it's just me coming up with ideas

• 16:17Speaker 01

  and bouncing them off Bruce and then just leading, charging the way, like. And there, I've been doing a variety of different research projects. So I've been, I've got clinical research that I've been doing. And that's one of the reasons why I wanted to join Bruce's lab is because I went from chemistry, synthesizing, you know, peptides, to worms, to then mice. At St. Jude, I was working on mice, and then I kind of wanted to work with humans. So I was able to be involved in clinical trials, ongoing clinical trials. That was, you know, Bruce Ames was... Leading in his lab and

• 16:52Rich Roll?

  Right, because like the if the actual like sort of affiliation with the hospital allows you to to sort of work on practical solutions to these sort of scientific theoretical, you know, sort of things that you're grappling with, right?

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. And that was what was so appealing to me. I was, you know, to be able to to, you know, do that was something that I'd wanted to do for a long time. And so there I've been looking at the effects of certain micronutrient, which are micronutrients are about thirty to forty essential vitamins, minerals, amino acids, essential fatty acids, and deficiencies in those, and how those can affect biomarkers of aging.

• 17:36Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  And I'm looking in people that are unhealthy, metabolically unhealthy, that are insulin resistant, that are obese, people that are metabolically healthy and lean, young, old. So I've been looking at a variety of different parameters. And so that's ongoing research. And then I've also been involved in other trials there. So another trial that I we just finished that I've been involved in is looking at aging-related biomarkers in blood cells. So I'm, you know, I'm getting blood cells from people. And in this trial, it was actually we were looking at the effects of freeze-dried blueberry powder

• 18:12Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  on biomarkers of aging. And so we're looking at, you know, those eating blueberries.

• 18:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah. What did you discover?

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Well, I can't really say that. I can't really tell you yet because it was a double-blind placebo-controlled trial. And what I'm looking at is a marker of aging called DNA damage, which is, you know, damage to the DNA inside your blood cells. And, you know, just normal metabolism, you know, every time we eat food, we metabolize, you know, to make energy. And that coupled in with the oxygen we breathe in can can lead to damage. And that damage can damage your DNA. Well, as we get older, we have more damage to our DNA.

• 18:53Rich Roll?

  Is this is this what's called oxidative stress?

• 18:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:56Rich Roll?

  Or is that something different?

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Oxidative stress is another way of oxidative stress can happen.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Before it damages the DNA, so oxidative stress happens and it can happen to your DNA, or it can happen to proteins inside of your cells, or it can happen to the cell membrane, lipids inside of your cells. So oxidative stress is sort of like more of a general term for damage, yeah. And DNA damage is one of those things that can occur.

• 19:24Rich Roll?

  It seems that at the root, and this is me being a complete layperson, my perspective or my perspective is that it seems that so many of these degenerative diseases or lifestyle diseases and perhaps even the acceleration of aging are related to inflammation. Is that true? And can we kind of camp out on this a little bit and explain exactly like what inflammation is? Because I feel like that term gets thrown around like very casually, but what does it actually mean?

• 19:55Speaker 01

  You nailed it, Rich. Yes, inflammation is the driver of the aging process itself. In fact, very recently, in the past six months or so, a Japanese study published, they published a study that involved elderly individuals that were like 80 years or older, centenarians, which were 100 years old, semi-supercentenarians, which are 105, and then supercentenarians, which are 110. And so they had all these different age populations and a variety of biomarkers were looked at, tons of different biomarkers.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  And they looked at telomere length, DNA damage, inflammatory markers, cellular senescence, which occurs when...

• 20:47Rich Roll?

  What does that mean?

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Cellular senescence occurs when, so here's like the temporal chain of events. Oxidative stress, DNA damage. DNA damage causes the telomeres to shorten because your telomeres take the hit. Your telomeres are what protect your DNA. And the reason they do that is because if your DNA gets damaged, it can potentially lead to cancer.

• 21:07Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  So your telomeres take the hit.

• 21:09Rich Roll?

  But before we go any further, and I don't want to take too much of a left turn, but I feel like we need to, like telomeres is a big thing that I wanted to talk to you about today.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 21:17Rich Roll?

  I thought we were going to talk about inflammation, but maybe we can talk about telomeres, at least in the, in, to the extent that we can like define it. So, um, we know what we're talking about.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. So basically it's a biomarker for aging because, um, as we age, they get shorter. So it's, it's.

• 21:32Rich Roll?

  But they're basically like the tail ends of your DNA strands.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  They're, they're, they're kind of like the, the caps on the end of your chromosomes, which contain your DNA. So yes, exactly. So these Japanese people looked at all these different biomarkers and they looked, you know, you know, they, what they found was that in every category of age, so elderly, centenarians, semi-supertens, centenarians and supercentenarians. The only thing that was positively associated with aging was the driver of aging was inflammation. That was the only thing. So inflammatory markers. So yes, you are right. Inflammation is, uh, is at the root of aging. And to answer your question, what is inflammation? Which is, um, you know, I completely agree with you. It's just kind of thrown around and,

• 22:20Speaker 01

  you know, I don't think a lot of people really do understand exactly what inflammation is. So, what inflammation is referring to is it's a consequence of your immune system being activated. And once your immune system is activated, they start firing off all these chemical weapons that are called inflammatory cytokines, cytokines. And these inflammatory cytokines are, um,

• 22:52Speaker 01

  Damage, damage cells inside your body, damage DNA inside your body, damage pretty much everything inside of your cells.

• 22:59Rich Roll?

  But what's confusing to me about this is that essentially inflammation is, is an immune system response to something wrong in your body, right? It's your body's way of saying, let's send the ambulance out to fix whatever's wrong, whether you cut your finger or you sprained your knee. Your immune system gets activated and mobilized to then kind of visit that either localized area or in general, if it's stress related or something like that, I suppose. But the idea behind it is to fix the problem, right? So on some level, doesn't it make sense that like some inflammation is good because it's your body reacting to a problem in order to fix it?

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely. You know, that, one of the, you know, major effects, downstream effects of having, you know, these inflammatory cytokines and molecules being produced is they recruit other repair factors. It, you know, allows, it increases genes in your body that then start to repair damage, fix things. So it's, it's an essential part of repair and recovery system. However, there is a difference between acute inflammation and chronic inflammation. Acute inflammation would be something like your four-hour marathon run, you know, or your two-hour training session when you're, you know, running and, you know, you're, you're

• 24:22Speaker 01

  causing inflammation. There, there's, you know, inflammation, you know, it occurs after intense exercise. But that's good because you, the inflammation signals to various, you know, genes in your body that turn on all these antioxidant genes. They turn on genes that repair muscle damage. They turn on all these good, so it's like a stress response sort of mechanism where you're turning on all the good stuff. But you need the bad stuff to turn them on. So it's kind of like, here, here's a little bit, little dose of this bad stuff to turn on the good stuff.

• 24:52Rich Roll?

  Right. So there's, there's sort of the, you know, exercise-induced oxidative stress that triggers the immune system response versus somebody who's just smoking cigarettes. All day long and that's causing some kind of internal damage in a number of ways. That's creating just a chronic immune system response that is literally just burning your engine out, right?

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. You know, the chronic smoking or in actually the major, major source of all inflammation in the body is actually the gut. So you're talking about people that are eating unhealthy, they're not getting enough fiber and we can talk more about that in a little bit. You know, they're, they're doing damage in the gut and that's causing a lot of immune cells to become active chronically every day, you know? The food you're eating, people eat, you know, three times a day or even more.

• 25:41Rich Roll?

  So in your experience, what are, what are the foods that create the worst sort of inflammatory response?

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's actually more a lack of foods.

• 25:54Rich Roll?

  Lack of the good foods.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Than eating bad foods. Because, so your gut is host the largest number of immune cells in the body. So that you're all, you, most of the immune cells in your body are found in your gut. You've got them in your spleen, your thymus and you're obviously in your blood, you know, stream. But the largest number of them are actually in your gut. The reason for that is because, you know, your gut is exposed to the external environment. You know, food you eat, your gut sees it and that can be pretty lethal if you get some bad nasty stuff.

• 26:28Rich Roll?

  Right, right.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  So your immune system has to be there and ready to react to that, right? To, to make sure that you stay alive along, you know, long enough to reproduce and pass on your genes. So in, in addition to immune cells being in your gut, you also have a lot of bacteria in your gut, tons and tons of bacteria. And I've, and there's people that sort of debate how many bacteria, you know, there's a hundred trillion I've seen references for and I haven't dug into like, is it accurate or not? It's a lot, it's a lot of fricking bacteria, okay?

• 26:59Rich Roll?

  Ten times more micro, microorganism than human.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:05Rich Roll?

  What gets thrown around.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  And, and people, you know, this, that just can't, it irks them to hear people say that and you know, I don't know, I've seen references that show that there are a hundred trillion bacteria cells in your, in your colon, in the, you know, distal part of your gut. And those bacteria play a very, very important role in, in regulating your immune system. So you have to feed those bacteria the right types of foods.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  In order for them, you can kind of think of them as little chemical producing factories, actually, because when you feed them the right type of food, which happens to be fiber, fiber gets digested by this bacteria in your gut, in your colon specifically, and it produces a bunch of different chemical products called short chain fatty acids, which are little signaling molecules that tell your immune cells in your gut to become a certain type of immune cell. So they'll tell them, okay, become this type of immune cell that is involved in preventing autoimmune diseases, making sure your immune system doesn't get so ramped up that it starts to just attack everything, including your own organs. That's very important.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  And the type of immune cell that does that is called T regulatory cells. And T regulatory cells become T regulatory cells based on this bacteria in your gut that are producing these little products that tell it to do it. So, you know, it's very important that your gut gets fiber. And I actually, a couple of my acquaintances at Stanford University, Justin and Erica Sonenberg, I recently interviewed them.

• 28:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, they-

• 28:42Rich Roll?

  They're on my list of people to go interview.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Highly recommend. They're extremely-

• 28:47Rich Roll?

  They run their own lab there, right?

• 28:48Speaker 01

  They do. Justin and Erica run their own lab at Stanford, and they've been researching gut microbiome, you know, for several years now. And they're leaders in the field. They wrote a book called The Good Gut. And when I was speaking with them a few months ago, they had told me that if you look at like hunter-gatherer societies like in Tanzania, they get around 200 grams of fiber a day. And compared to the typical American diet, which is like maybe 15 grams of fiber, that's a huge difference.

• 29:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's crazy. And it's funny, because in our culture, we're all obsessed with protein. You know, we're all walking around thinking that we might be suffering from a protein deficiency. The truth is, almost everyone is suffering from a fiber deficiency. And if we flip those words around, I think we'd all be better off. If people were like, did you get your fiber today? Did you get your fiber today? I mean, we would be in a different place.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  I am so with you on that, is my new motto. Did you get your fiber today? Because it is so incredibly important. And a good way to think about it, for some people that don't really have a, you know, grasp on why fiber is so important- When you eat protein, when you eat, you know, fat, when you're, when you're eating these other sources of energy, even carbohydrates that are not fiber, that, you know, like refined carbohydrates that don't have fiber, those things all get metabolized in the upper part of your intestine. They don't make it to the colon where all your bacteria are, probiotic bacteria, good bacteria, the commensal bacteria that are regulating the immune system like you just mentioned. So what happens is because you're getting protein and fat and refined

• 30:30Speaker 01

  carbs, those bacteria start to get hungry. Oh, what am I gonna eat? I don't get the protein. I don't get the fat. So they actually start to eat what's called mucin, which is what, it's essentially the gut barrier. The gut barrier is made up of something called mucin, and it's mucin because it's kind of mucousy, kind of slippery, and it separates the immune cells from the bacteria in your gut, separates the food, you know, from, from, you know, the internal part of your gut. So the gut barrier starts to get broken down by your own probiotic bacteria that are good for you because they're hungry, because you've been starving them of fiber.

• 31:09Rich Roll?

  Right. They're so far down the conveyor belt that they, they have, they're forced to basically cannibalize themselves.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 31:15Rich Roll?

  And is that what causes leaky gut?

• 31:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:18Rich Roll?

  And all these sorts of issues where people are having all these, you know, digestive disorders.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  Yes. It causes a plethora of disorders, you know, leaky gut, it affects your immune system because now your, your immune system's all out of whack, your gut barrier starts to break down, the immune cells start to see the bacteria. What do immune cells do when they see bacteria? They fire away. They're, they're gonna fire all that chemical warfare I was talking about, creates more inflammation, you start to release, you know, these things into your bloodstream, causes activation of, you know, immune cells in your bloodstream that can affect your cholesterol and all sorts of damage. It's just bad.

• 31:55Rich Roll?

  And these disorders are, have really become like an epidemic. You know, I feel like I meet people all the time who deal with problems in this, in this area, and it didn't seem like it used to be that way, right? So obviously, there's something going on, and it has to do with, it must have to do with the food that we're eating.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I haven't done-

• 32:16Rich Roll?

  And the antibiotics, of course.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Of course. I mean, antibiotics are also a really big one, and they say wipe out, you know, all the bacteria in your gut, but- You know, the, the lack of fiber, it's, it's kind of like, I think it's like this insidious kind of damage that people just, they don't realize that it's like, oh, they may notice they may be constipated a little, or, you know, it's just, but they don't realize to what magnitude this sort of effect can have when it starts to compound over the years. The, cause it's really changing your immune system, it's, it's causing inflammation, it's aging you, it's gonna accelerate the way you age on every level, um, and, you know, it can lead to these diseases, these autoimmune related diseases, these diseases of aging,

• 33:02Speaker 01

  you know, all sorts of problems start to happen. And I really think that you, you, you nailed it. When there's a simple solution, that simple solution is you need to focus on getting fiber. I mean, I actually, that is my main obsession. I, it's fiber, and then I supplement some protein and fat and all, all that with fiber.

• 33:21Rich Roll?

  Right. Fiber, fiber's at the top of the food pyramid.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Is the top.

• 33:24Rich Roll?

  That's so interesting.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  And it's all different types of fiber because you've, you've got, you know, seeds, legumes, you have oats, vegetables, fruits, you know, they all have different types of fiber. And what we're learning, by we, I mean, I, I, I say I'm learning this, I am a scientist, but I'm actually not doing microbiome research, you know, experimentally, but I read about it.

• 33:47Rich Roll?

  We, as, as, the royal we as being part of the scientific community.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly, yeah. What we are learning is that, um, there are different types of fiber that are having different effects, you know, so they're feeding different types of bacteria and they're producing, those bacteria are producing different types of chemical byproducts which then do X, Y, or Z. You know, so I mentioned the T regulatory cells, which are important for preventing autoimmune disease. They also, um, make something called natural T killer, uh, natural T killer cells, which are the most important type of immune cell that kills cancer cells in your body. And we're constantly getting little cancer cells that arise, and our immune system takes care of it.

• 34:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  It's when our, it's sort of like a levels number, you know, when, when we get more cancer cells than our immune system can handle, A, because our immune system's weak. Because we're not making enough natural tea killer cells or something like that. Then it starts to get to the point where the cancer cells start to survive.

• 34:47Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  They make it, you know, so.

• 34:49Rich Roll?

  Interesting. Yeah, I interviewed this doctor, Dr. Robin Shetkan, who is an expert in the microbiome. She wrote a book called The Microbiome Solution, and she was just full of fascinating information on the subject matter. But one thing, one practical thing that she said that I think is really interesting and important, and I'm interested in your feedback on this, was that she was, we were talking about, you know, how to kind of maintain a healthy gut, and we were talking about probiotics. And her perspective was, you know, probiotics are great, but most of them aren't as effective as you think. And you actually need so much, even though it says billions and billions of cultures or whatever, you actually need so much more of that. And instead of focusing on taking in probiotics, you should be focusing on prebiotics,

• 35:34Rich Roll?

  which are essentially the types of foods that the healthy gut flora feed on, which is essentially fiber, right? So fiber being like the ultimate prebiotic, which then seeds your gut with the type of kind of gut flora that is desirable for optimizing your health.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  I agree with the fact that fiber is first and foremost the most important thing for growing healthy flora, you know, growing healthy gut bacteria. You, you know, you'd be amazed with, with, even if you have just a few hundred of a certain type of probiotic in your gut, which you would never be able to see on a, for example, a fecal sample test where they measure different types of bacteria, you know, based on your feces. But if you continue to feed those bacteria the right types of fiber, you know, over the next year or so, you'll start to see those bacteria cropping in because they'll flourish.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  They'll grow and flourish. Now, with that said, I will say that you obviously need to have. A population, even if it's a very small, small population of bacteria, you need it to be present.

• 36:49Rich Roll?

  You have to create the colony.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  You have to like create the colony and as you mentioned, you know, antibiotics are so widespread. I mean, we're actually on the verge of like serious antibiotic resistance, like cropping up. And that is scary. It's actually terrifying. I don't want to get into that post-apocalyptic world.

• 37:09Rich Roll?

  We can go there if you want, but that might be a different podcast.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Totally would be a different podcast. Um, so there, you know, a lot of the probiotics out there are most, the biggest problem is that they're not a large enough quantity.

• 37:23Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. And sometimes they, don't they perish by the time you drink them? Like, there's a big issue with that with kombucha, right? Like, I never know, like, are these probiotic cultures actually, is this, is this true? Like, I don't know.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  Is it live?

• 37:36Rich Roll?

  Is it, is it marketing or is it real?

• 37:39Speaker 01

  Yes. So I have done a lot of reading and I, when I was at Children's Hospital in Oakland, one of my colleagues is a gut expert and he's just a brilliant guy and does a lot of research on the gut, gut bacteria, gut health. And so I was talking with him one day and he turned me on to a certain type of probiotic called BSL number three. I've probably mentioned it to you before because I talk about it a lot. And the reason I talk about it a lot is because I've read, I've read over 25 published studies that have used BSL number three, both clinically.

• 38:16Rich Roll?

  BSL number.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  V as in Victor, SL number three.

• 38:19Rich Roll?

  Is that like the clinical word for it?

• 38:21Speaker 01

  I'll show you some.

• 38:21Rich Roll?

  You can actually buy that?

• 38:23Speaker 01

  So, no, you can buy it. So it comes, you can buy it in a sachet form, which is like a little packet. And it has 450 billion.

• 38:32Rich Roll?

  Like in a man pouch that you can.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  Well, actually, it's shipped to you on ice because they have to stay cold.

• 38:40Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  So they ship it to you on all these ice packs and it's like two day shipping. It has 450 billion probiotics in each packet, which is over 90 times what anything else out there has. So, and even that is a drop in the pool when it gets to your colon. So even that, but it's still, it has been shown to, you know, there's so many studies that have shown. Just recently, a new study came out where people were fed a really high sugar and high fat diet. And they were given either VSL number three or placebo and the VSL number three prevented weight gain. Again, because it had to do with the inflammation, making sure you're getting the right types of bacteria. But I've used it and I've done some self experimentation where I measured the different types of bacteria

• 39:25Speaker 01

  using a company called Ubiome where you can look and measure different types of bacteria in your colon. And then I took VSL number three for 30 days and it was pretty interesting how I was able to increase. In fact, new strains were cropping up that aren't even in. So this type of a probiotic only has about six strains in it. But I was getting, I was having strains crop up that were like not there before, before I did the test and that are not in the probiotic itself. So again, you're just.

• 39:53Rich Roll?

  That's super.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's super interesting. So.

• 39:56Rich Roll?

  Did it change how you, were there any outward manifestations of it? Did it change your like emotions or how you felt or how you look? You know what I mean? Cause it's, it's so influential on so many things.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I didn't notice any change. There've been studies with VSL number three where it did affect people's mood.

• 40:13Rich Roll?

  Right, cravings and things like that.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I personally, because I, I'm pretty healthy and I'm very fiber obsessed. I mean, I eat tons and tons of vegetables and I'm not like scared of oats. So I eat oats and mucily it's called, which has like seeds and raisins. I love that stuff. And. Beans, so I eat a lot of fiber, but I did, I, I, there was a point that I was having an inflammatory gut issue, uh, kinda like an inflammatory bowel problem. And, um, I had taken care, I, just through diet, I mostly had it manage, you know, it was managed, manageable. But, uh, after the VSL number three, it was completely gone, one hundred percent gone. And I've gotten tons of emails from people that have heard me talk about it

• 40:59Speaker 01

  and had colitis and just said that it changed their life, so.

• 41:02Rich Roll?

  That's amazing. So is it like an eyedropper? You put it in like a so, a wa- a liquid solution or how does it work?

• 41:08Speaker 01

  No, it's, um, it's a little packet and if only I could take this mic with me to the fridge, I could show it to you.

• 41:15Rich Roll?

  We'll do it after the podcast.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it comes in a little packet and it's a little powder and I put it in my yogurt, put it in water. My husband Dan will like take a shot, he'll like put it on his tongue and just like take a shot of it, just to like do it quickly.

• 41:27Rich Roll?

  How do they create it? Like what is it made from?

• 41:30Speaker 01

  Um.

• 41:31Rich Roll?

  Like it's in a Petri dish culture?

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Actually, how it's made, I don't know how they make it. Um, it's, it's, it's called a medical food and on the box it says, take it under medical supervision. You know, which, so, you know, if you're out there and you have, you know, some sort of clinical condition, talk to your doctor. But you can order it, uh, Amazon has it or you can order it from the company, um, directly, which is what I do. Sigma Tau, I think they're called, is the company.

• 41:58Rich Roll?

  Well, I'll find out. I'll make sure there's a link in the show.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, um, you know, and, and to get it, you can, don't, you can buy the pills, but the pills, you have to take eight of them to get the equivalent of one pouch. So, you know, it's kind of.

• 42:11Rich Roll?

  Gotcha. All right, good. So let's get back to inflammation in general. So we kind of have a working understanding of inflammation now and, and what in your opinion are the leading kind of causes of inflammation and what are the ways that we can, you know, avoid these? Like what are some daily habits that we can kind of undercut this chronic immune response that is making us sick?

• 42:36Speaker 01

  So as I mentioned, I, I think one of the major drivers of inflammation is gut health and lack of fiber. That's, that's really one of the major things. So making sure you're eating enough vegetables, you know, getting, getting enough, you know, nuts, seeds, plants, legumes, like, I think that's, I think that's very, very important for, for controlling inflammation. And that's been, I mean, it's, it's been shown that the gut is the major regulator, regulator of inflammation. So that's number one, that's easy, you know? Increase your intake of vegetables. The other easy actionable for controlling inflammation is, believe it or not, actually causing acute inflammation through exercise.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  Because it is a hormetic, it's called a hormetic type of stress, where you're inducing stress, you're then activating all these anti-inflammatory genes. And this has been shown, like, about an hour after exercise, you, you have a really high elevation of these pro-inflammatory mediators. And then immediately after that, like, a couple hours later, is a very strong anti-inflammatory response. So, exercise is a really good way to boost the anti-inflammatory processes, the natural ones in your body.

• 43:58Rich Roll?

  Right, so it's like push-ups for your immune system, as well as for your muscles?

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Exactly, it really is, it really is. And the other one that I've really been obsessed with recently is curcumin. And curcumin is one of the cucuminoids that is found in turmeric.

• 44:15Rich Roll?

  Right, it's a root.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  It's a root.

• 44:17Rich Roll?

  What is the difference between that and turmeric?

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Well, turmeric has many different curcuminoids in them, including curcumin. I like to get, now, I mentioned the curcumin specifically because the curcumin is a very, very potent anti-inflammatory, but it doesn't work the way people may be thinking NSAIDs or, you know, anti-inflammatory drugs. It works very differently, because it's actually, kind of like, exercise, it's a hormetic stress, it's, it's actually slightly toxic to us. And because it's slightly toxic to us, it turns on all these really potent anti-inflammatory genes, and it inhibits the, the pro-inflammatory ones as well. So, curcumin...

• 45:06Speaker 01

  Uh, is really, really good at doing that.

• 45:09Rich Roll?

  And how do you take that?

• 45:11Speaker 01

  So, I just, um, so that's a really good question. But before I get to that, I wanted to differentiate the difference between curcumin and turmeric.

• 45:19Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  Turmeric is also very good because it's the source of curcumin. Curcumin's not as concentrated if you're taking the full turmeric. Um, which you can buy, you know, you can buy the root and have it fresh, or you can buy powder and cook with it, you know, curries and stuff, or often have turmeric in it. Um, or you can make tea, you can do lots of things with it. But what's really cool about turmeric is that in addition to curcumin, it has something in it called aromatic turmeric, which is another curcuminoid that has a completely different function than curcumin. The aromatic turmeric has been shown in studies to actually, in the brain, increase neural stem cells. So stem cells

• 46:03Rich Roll?

  Right, wow.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  in the brain to make more neurons. So it actually increases neural stem cells to what's called differentiate, which just means these stem cells become neurons.

• 46:13Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  So it increased, dramatically increased the number of neurons in, in little mice brains.

• 46:19Rich Roll?

  Is that with like massive quantities or over how long of a period of time or?

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, really good questions. Um, so with the aromatic turmeric study, I, it was, I think it was like a hundred milligrams per kilogram of body weight, which would be a lot of, it would be like eight grams a day for a hundred and eighty pound male.

• 46:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  It's a lot.

• 46:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that would be a lot.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  And we don't really know what, if there are any long-term effects of taking such a high dose of turmeric. So, um, these curcuminoids are actually fat soluble. And, uh, other studies have shown that if you, if they are, um, in like a liposome, or like if they're with a lipid sort of, uh, phospholipid type of thing, like phosphatidylcholine, it can increase the bioavailability dramatically. And so, uh, and there have been studies, you know, recently showing that, um, In fact, you can, people that are given this formulation of the curcumin, for example, with the phosphatidylcholine, people taking two grams of that a day, which is about 400 milligrams of it would actually be the curcumin.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  And then the other, so it's like 20% curcumin and 40% of the lipphosphatidylcholine complex. They experience pain relief equivalent to taking an entire gram of acetaminophen or 800 milligrams of ibuprofen.

• 47:41Rich Roll?

  So this is like the champion of all antioxidants?

• 47:45Speaker 01

  It really is because it works very differently than supplemental antioxidants do. Because if you take a supplemental antioxidant like vitamin E, for example, the way it is an antioxidant is it binds and it sequesters this oxidative stress that you were talking about. It binds these little, you can think of them as like little radicals, little free radicals like bumping around, doing damage. Well, it binds and sequesters them, so it can't do them. Now, that can have good, that has good effects, but it can also have bad effects. You know, the bad effects can be if you take your vitamin E and you're exercising, well, those little free radicals that are produced acutely, like we mentioned,

• 48:28Speaker 01

  actually serve as signaling molecules to make, to activate all the anti-inflammatory and antioxidant genes.

• 48:34Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right, interesting.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  So you don't do, you don't get that, and that's not really a good thing.

• 48:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that brings up kind of an interesting subject that I've read a little bit about and I've heard, and I don't know that much about, but this idea of, you know, look, as an athlete, it's all about like, how do you recover more quickly? Like, the more quickly you can recover in between workouts, the harder you can train. So you want to take in all kinds of antioxidants and, you know, make sure that you're repairing your body as quickly as possible. But there's this sort of counter-argument or, you know, counterintuitive theory that if you dispense with all that and actually forget about the antioxidants and allow your body to kind of, you know, suffer through that recovery process, that that actually strengthens the body's ability to recover because you're not, you're not like giving it this crutch to do that.

• 49:22Rich Roll?

  It actually has to perform it itself. Is that?

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's partly true.

• 49:27Rich Roll?

  Is there any truth in that?

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, there is truth in that. There's truth in that. It's a little more complicated, but... So it has been shown that if you are, you know, exercising, it really depends on the dose of exercise in some regards, but if you exercise and you're taking a supplemental antioxidant, it can actually negate some of the benefits. For example, if you're doing like resistance training, and this has been shown, if you take supplemental vitamin E, then it can actually negate some of the hypertrophy that is, that you get from, you know, resistance training because the oxidative stress that you're generating while you're, you know,

• 50:12Speaker 01

  lifting weights or doing leg presses, excuse me, that usually, sir, it actually, that oxidative stress will cause your mitochondria, which are the little energy producing organelles inside of your cells, to make more of them. So, and that's a very important thing to gain more muscle mass. And if you get rid of those, that oxidative stress that you generate when you're exercising, that doesn't happen. So you're negating some of that. It's like a signaling.

• 50:39Rich Roll?

  It's like you did this training for nothing.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, essentially. And that's also been shown with insulin, the benefits of exercise on insulin sensitivity, that if supplemental antioxidants are taking, and I focus more on vitamin E than vitamin C, because vitamin C is a unique antioxidant in that it also becomes a pro-oxidant when you're taking it. And it goes between these two states of antioxidant, pro-oxidant, depending on the dose. So I don't even want to go there.

• 51:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's gonna get too confusing.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:08Rich Roll?

  I'm trying to keep this as relatable as possible.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 51:12Rich Roll?

  Because I know you could like, we can propellerhead it all the way, you know, into the stratosphere.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  We could, we could.

• 51:17Rich Roll?

  Try to keep it grounded.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  And, and so the reason I said it's kind of complicated is because then you have these professional types of athletes, or, or, you know, these, like yourself, where you're endurance athletes, that you're running marathons, and you're doing triathlons, and all these just competitive type of athletes, that really push their workout to the next level. It's not your average, go to the gym, do leg presses, do some squats, and, you know, Olympic lifts kind of workout. And I'm not saying that's not a good, great workout. I'm just saying it's not the same as being a competitive athlete, where you're training to compete, or you're a professional athlete, which are also, you know, competitive athletes.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  Competitive athletes, because the dose of exercise is so incredibly robust and potent, they are very subject to a very hyperactive immune response. Where their immune system is so activated, it sort of can spiral out of control and start to break down muscle and cause, you know, muscle damage because their workout or their training was so intense.

• 52:26Rich Roll?

  Is that, is that like an issue of overtraining? Or are you talking about like just a particular workout of just pushing so hard? Or just the day in, day out grind?

• 52:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know if it's, I guess it all depends on what you define as overtraining.

• 52:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I think, you know, because I'm thinking like, if you're a Tour de France cyclist, you can go out and ride your bike fairly hard for five or six hours with nothing but a bottle of water and feel like you went for a walk. You know what I mean? Because you're so adapted, you become so efficient at that exercise. Whereas, you know, for the average layperson, that would be, you know, a very, very difficult thing to do. Right? So there's a, there's an adaptation that takes place there. So how does that relate to kind of stress adaptation and the kind of immune system response and, you know, the free radical damage and all of that? I mean, because if someone can go out and do that and it doesn't feel like they did

• 53:25Rich Roll?

  anything, then I would presume that there really isn't that kind of free radical damage because they've adjusted to it.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that is, that's absolutely true. Athletes that are, you know, adapted, many of the, you know, adaptive responses that occur are happening because their body, for example, is, they're elevating their core body temperature, they're increasing the production of something called heat shock proteins, which activate all these genes that help you deal with stress. And so, you're right, the, the damage does get negated to a certain extent when they're, they're adapted because their, their body's already doing all this counter stuff.

• 54:03Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  So yeah, I guess it probably does have to do more with the overtraining than the people that aren't adapted. And that's probably, that's probably a really good distinction to make.

• 54:12Rich Roll?

  All right. So back to inflammation. So here we have increase your fiber. We have exercise, we have curcumin.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:21Rich Roll?

  What else should we be doing?

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Fish oil.

• 54:23Rich Roll?

  Fish oil.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  Or eat your fish.

• 54:24Rich Roll?

  I'm a vegan.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  I know, you are a vegan. Um, yeah.

• 54:29Rich Roll?

  Lots of vegan listeners too. So is that because of the, the DHA or the DHEA or the omega threes? Like what is it? The EPA?

• 54:38Speaker 01

  Well, the anti-inflammatory.

• 54:39Rich Roll?

  Environmental Protection Agency?

• 54:41Speaker 01

  Icosapentaenoic acid.

• 54:43Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  Um.

• 54:44Rich Roll?

  How else can I get that?

• 54:45Speaker 01

  So the, there, the two marine omega three fatty acids are Icosapentaenoic acid, also known as EPA, or docosa hexaenoic acid, also known as DHA, um, which are found really in fatty fish, um, microalgae, you know, phytoplankton. Um, I don't know if vegetarians do the phytoplankton.

• 55:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, basically for these kinds of things, there's always some kind of algal, uh, you know, varietal of that because essentially the fish just store this in their fat tissue, right? So they're like sieves for all of this stuff. So it's really just a matter of kind of going to the source of it.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. So microalgae oil would be the source for the, of the EPA and DHA. And then the third omega three is alpha-linoleic acid, ALA, which is found in nuts, um, plant, uh, flax seeds. So that's, that's more of the plant, but that type of omega three is, um, does not, is not as anti-inflammatory as the EPA and, and the DHA as well to some extent, but the EPA is really, really robust at anti-inflammatory.

• 55:48Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  And some, it's very important for, uh, reducing something called E2 series prostaglandins, which are like all these signaling molecules that cause inflammation. They cross over to the blood-brain barrier, get into the brain, wreak havoc. They also can deplete serotonin and lead to depression. This has all been shown. In fact, it's been shown if you inject people with an inflammatory cytokine. It can cause depressive symptoms, but if you inject them with the inflammatory cytokine and they take fish oil, it negates the depressive symptoms. So, you know, microalgae is a good source, fish oil, eating fish for the non vegans and vegetarians.

• 56:27Rich Roll?

  How dare you.

• 56:28Speaker 01

  Like myself, I eat a lot of fish. It's very important. Fish is very important, or microalgae is very important.

• 56:37Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  Getting a microalgae.

• 56:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, okay, so, and then beyond that, let's talk about sleep and other stress reduction techniques like meditation and the impact of that on reducing chronic inflammation.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  Yes, I was just going there.

• 56:52Rich Roll?

  Oh, you were?

• 56:53Speaker 01

  You read my mind.

• 56:54Rich Roll?

  Sorry about that.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Well, I've become sort of obsessed recently with circadian rhythm or your biological clock, which is related to sleep. You know, we're on, humans are on a, you know, a 24 hour light or day, night, dark cycle. Where we're, in the day, when it's light out, we're active, you know, we're working, we're exercising, we're thinking, we're, you know, metabolically active. And at night, when it's dark, typically we're, you know, resting, sleeping, it's when we're repairing a lot of damage, things like that. But what is so interesting is that bright light exposure, early bright light exposure is so incredibly important for setting your biological clock.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  It's like an anchor to set it so that it knows, okay, this is day, this is when day starts. And so, you know, this whole, this internal clock that you have regulates 20, like 20% to 15, 20% of your entire genome. Many of those genes are involved in metabolism, inflammation.

• 57:55Rich Roll?

  Wow, that's a trip.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  Tons, and I mean, it's completely regulated on just when, you know, the amount of light you're exposed to, when you're exposed to it, and when it's dark. It's like this clock. And so,

• 58:10Speaker 01

  Recently, I came across a study that showed when humans were exposed to really, really bright light, uh, it was 10,000 lux, which is like the sun, um, when they're exposed to it, starting early for about seven hours, you know, that was able to reduce cortisol levels, which is a stress hormone cortisol, by up to 25% during the next day during its peak phase.

• 58:39Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  25%, so cortisol.

• 58:41Rich Roll?

  So translation, you need to be outside and exposed to the sun?

• 58:44Speaker 01

  You need to be exposed to light.

• 58:46Rich Roll?

  Sitting in your cubicle?

• 58:47Speaker 01

  Yes, that's the translation and, you know, just cortisol is, I mean, it causes massive inflammation. It's one of those stress hormones that activates almost every gene in the body that increases your, your immune cells to go fire, fire, fire. Cortisol does that. I mean, there's a reason it does that. It's a stress response, but if you're not being exposed to bright light because you live, you know, you li- you, you live somewhere and it's dark all, you know, dark in your house or your apartment, or you work a job where, you know, you're just not able to be exposed to the light, it really can have detrimental effects on health. Um, and, you know, we're talking about inflammation here. That's at the, at the molecular level, that's what's going on, but it, you know, it has

• 59:31Speaker 01

  a lot of effects on your ability to lose weight, to gain muscle mass, your mood, brain function, memory, learning, you know, all these things. I mean, tons and tons of studies have shown, you know, cortisol, you know, decreases muscle mass. It actually causes your muscle, muscles to atrophy, causes your brain to atrophy. This has all been shown experimentally.

• 59:51Rich Roll?

  Wow, that's amazing. So for the average person though, there are not, most people are not able to be out in direct sunlight for seven hours a day, right? So is there like a, a manageable solution for the average person?

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  Well, I do know that in terms of just setting the biological clock.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  That's so being exposed to seven hours a day, that specifically was referring to the twenty five percent reduction in cornzol.

• 1:00:15Rich Roll?

  I got you.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  But but just being exposed to bright light for like one to two hours is is enough to set your biological clock correctly.

• 1:00:25Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  So that, you know, you're you're metabolizing, your metabolism's going the way it's supposed to, your inflammation's going the way it's designed, you know, you're you're able to break down fat, you're able to build muscle mass, you're able to, you know, repair damage. All these things are being regulated by that biological clock. So that one to two hours is is a key for that, which is like sort of like the minimal effect.

• 1:00:49Rich Roll?

  Right, right. It's such a crazy thing that the circadian rhythm is like even exists. I mean, we walk around thinking that we've mastered nature, you know, and we forget that we're just primal creatures, you know, living in this, basically in the wild and that we're still, you know, we still have to, you know, fall prey to these things beyond our control.

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  And it's so well conserved, Rich. It's like they find they find that little frickin' diatoms in the ocean have a circadian rhythm.

• 1:01:22Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  I mean, what? It's so insane.

• 1:01:25Rich Roll?

  Ah.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  And one thing I've noticed since I've moved, I previously lived in a place that was blocked by like buildings on like every window had a building blocking the light. So like if I was inside, I really just literally, it was like being in a coffin. And my circadian rhythm was completely out of whack. I mean, I I've always sort of been gravitate towards staying up later and and sleeping in since I've moved, you know, here and I get so much light, bright light exposure like early in the morning, my clock completely reset where I'm now waking up at seven thirty, eight in the morning. That was not me.

• 1:02:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  That was not me. And it was purely and and my husband Dan in the same way. And he is even worse than me.

• 1:02:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  And so now we're both, you know, it's no alarms, no trying, none of that. It just happened. It just happened.

• 1:02:17Rich Roll?

  People make fun of like seasonal affect disorder, but I know that I'm super sensitive to that and I really struggle in December and January and early February when there's, when there isn't as much light. Like honestly, like I really like, I keep thinking like, I just want to go to Australia or South America for the winter. Like I just want somewhere, I just need that light. Like it, it has a profound effect on my mood and overall disposition and my level of attention and my efficiency and my energy levels and my cognitive ability. Like everything is impacted by it. Like it's December, like I just want to hide, you know? Like it really affects my, my mood.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  It absolutely, I mean, I, I feel the same way and we're both in California, so.

• 1:03:00Rich Roll?

  I know, we're lucky. It's like, I'm not complaining. Actually, the, the sun's shining. I'm gonna have to move in a second. Cause the sun, my cortisol levels, I can feel them going down. Cause the sun is shining right on my face.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:10Rich Roll?

  I mean, we're so lucky. It's the middle of January and it's like 70 degrees out right now.

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, but in, in, in everything you just said, it has been shown. I mean, seasonal affect disorder exists. It's been shown to be ameliorated to some degree with bright light exposure. You know, you can buy those lights, 10,000 lux lights that people can actually buy and just like expose themselves to it, you know? And to me, that sounds a little depressing, but it apparently works, you know? And that's, that's been published in multiple studies. And I've actually spoken to people that live in like the UK and do that where it's like dark a lot during the winter, you know?

• 1:03:45Rich Roll?

  I could never do it.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so the bright light exposure, I mentioned that because it really is the key for setting your sleep cycle and.

• 1:03:53Rich Roll?

  I am gonna move.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  Sorry about that.

• 1:03:57Rich Roll?

  No, go ahead. Keep going.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  You know, sleeping, you know, is also very important for repairing damage, you know? And also, I mean, that's just, it's, it's critical to get enough sleep, but really the key to setting your whole circadian rhythm, your whole clock is it's bright light exposure. I, I am becoming increasingly convinced that the more I've, I've experienced it myself.

• 1:04:22Rich Roll?

  You're just a crazy, like beach dwelling, Southern Californian now, right?

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  But it's really important. I mean, when I was reading that study about, you know, the cortisol reduction, like, and this is just, it really, it reduced the cortisol reduction, cortisol reserve is up to 25% in the what's called rising phase, which is your cortisol is highest. So cortisol is regulated by the clock, internal clock, and it's highest when you're sleeping and right when you're waking until about an hour after you wake up, peaks. And then throughout the day cortisol levels just gradually decline. And that's called the, you know, decreasing phase. That was also decreased by 15%, up to 15%. So, full stop, cortisol was reduced. And if you think about it, it's kind of cool. If your cortisol, you're still, you're, you know, these people were still making cortisol during their rising phase. It just wasn't

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  as robust. And, you know, so you think about your resting heart rate when you first wake up. That's when it's really going. Lots of heart attacks occur in the early hours in the morning when cortisol is highest because it regulates your heart rate. So, that's kind of dissociation I, my brain is making is like, oh, wow, that would be really cool to like, not wake up, you know, with a quick, you know, fast heart rate. I've woken up in the middle of the night before my heart has been racing.

• 1:05:38Rich Roll?

  Really?

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  It scared me. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's definitely happened to me on a few occasions. Where it's just racing like, like I'm running from a friggin' lion or something, you know, like, like my body is responding that way.

• 1:05:52Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  It's stress, it's cortisol.

• 1:05:54Rich Roll?

  Interesting.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:56Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:05:57Rich Roll?

  All right. So, sunlight?

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  Sunlight exposure, and, and that's linked to sleep. So, these are, these go hand in hand. They really do. Very important for reducing inflammation. And then, you mentioned meditation, and I think that is, it's a really good way to negate a lot of the negative effects of stress, which, when you do, when you're stressed out, when you're stressed out about something, you know, there's good stress and there's bad stress, like, you know, if you're, if you're like me and you're someone who's constantly pushing yourself or like you, I mean, you're an endurance athlete, I mean, that's pretty. Hardcore.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  You're always, you know, you're thinking about your next project you have to do. I mean, you're running a top health podcast and you're constantly having to have new guests on and think about what you're going to discuss. I mean, that's, you know, that's a stress, it's a type of stress.

• 1:06:52Rich Roll?

  Super stressful.

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  And I, it becomes unhealthy, you know, to a certain degree, it's healthy. It's good to have that proactive kind of stress where you're motivated, where you're pushing yourself to learn new things and uh, go beyond your boundaries, go beyond what's comfortable. But when you start to ruminate about it and rumination, meaning you're just constantly thinking about it before it happens or after it happened, you just, it just keep, it's just on your mind all the time. That's when it begins to become unhealthy. The rumination and um, the, the rumination, you know, that's been shown to lead to increased cortisol, increased corticotropin, corticotropin releasing hormone, which is another stress hormone,

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  which pokes holes in the gut, essentially activates immune system, leads to inflammation and all these little mechanisms that are happening, but ultimately inflammation. You know, so that all occurs. And it has been shown that one of the best ways to negate rumination and bad stress is meditation. So now I think everyone met, has their, their own type of meditation. Um, I was recently, I interviewed um, someone in, that I met in Amsterdam. He's a professor at Meritas where he um, he used to do work on the immune system. And decided, you know, after he was going to retire, that he was just

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  going to go into meditation, like he's like super into meditation and affects meditation on the brain, on the body. And he was, you know, telling me about some of the really profound effects that like over a hundred genes can change within minutes of meditating, starting meditation.

• 1:08:36Rich Roll?

  That's crazy.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  It totally is crazy. A hundred different genes are changing.

• 1:08:40Rich Roll?

  The genes are actually changing or the expression of them is getting turned on and off?

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  Exactly. The expression, so some of them are becoming more active and the ones that are becoming more active are the anti-inflammatory genes and this has been shown in blood cells from humans. Meditation can increase the expression of anti-inflammatory genes, at least in blood cells, and it decreases the expression of pro-inflammatory genes. So it's like just the right profile that you want to counter stress, right? So it makes sense on the molecular level why meditation does that.

• 1:09:11Rich Roll?

  Do you have to be a good meditator in order to have that happen?

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, and this is the thing I was talking-

• 1:09:16Rich Roll?

  You get points for the trying?

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  You know, I was talking to Pierre about this because I was like, you know, I've never been the kind of person that like, because I'm just so go, go, go. I'm all, I'm really, that's something that I personally battle is that sort of, I guess people call it high strung where you're just constantly, you always have to be doing something, just all the time. And so it's been hard for me to like, sit down and just quiet.

• 1:09:46Rich Roll?

  Terrifying.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. But I can do things like go out, paddle on my board and sit on my surfboard and chill out looking at the horizon on a day when the waves aren't too big. And that's pretty quiet out there. Or when I'm, you know, sometimes I can do like a ballet exercise or yoga exercise where I'm, I'm really just enjoying that moment. I can do that and I feel calm.

• 1:10:14Rich Roll?

  But you can't sit still.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  I don't, it's not that I can't, it's just that I can't.

• 1:10:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, this is something that I've struggled with as well, and I go through phases. Like right now, I'm very committed to my meditation practice and I've been really good lately. I'm doing it every morning and like a good student and

• 1:10:35Rich Roll?

  And, you know, I feel different, you know, it's definitely had, you know, a positive impact on me. And I also like to make that argument, like if I'm out on an easy trail run, that's like my mindfulness exercise, or if I just go for, you know, there are other things that are quote unquote meditative, but I think there is a qualitative difference between a meditative act and the formal act of meditation where you really are like, you know, just whatever technique you're pursuing, but you are in that like seated position and just doing that one dedicated thing. I think there's a, there is a distinction there.

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I would really like to begin, I say yeah, I like that, that's not a great way to start a sentence, but what I meant was, I tend to agree with you based on the couple of times that I have put music on and just sort of try to sit and chill out. Where, and, and this has been shown, you know, there are neuroscientists that have been looking at Buddhist monks that are meditating and the changes in their brain activity, I mean, that's all been shown. There are definitely changes immediately occurring and not only in your blood cells, but in your brain.

• 1:11:50Rich Roll?

  Right. It's just so funny that the hardest thing to do is to do nothing.

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  It is really funny, you know, at least for me, it's one of the hardest things to do. And I think you and I, last time we were chatting, you mentioned Headspace, which I have now, I have it on my phone and all, or my laptop, I have it somewhere, I downloaded it, but I haven't used it yet.

• 1:12:14Rich Roll?

  Oh, come on. All right, well, I'm gonna call you next week. You need a little accountability partner.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  If you text me and remind me, that would be great.

• 1:12:21Rich Roll?

  All right, I will, I can make a commitment to that.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  They should actually, do they have that feature? They really should.

• 1:12:25Rich Roll?

  I don't know, maybe they do, I think they do have a way to like, you have buddies or whatever, so you know when someone else has done it, or, I think so, I don't know. But I'm happy to text you and hold your hand in the fire.

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I should probably just go walk out to the beach and just sit there and listen to the waves.

• 1:12:40Rich Roll?

  Just like, yeah, every morning, when you're up so early now, right? With the sun?

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:12:51Rich Roll?

  It's a funny thing, though, when you were talking about kind of stress and being go-go-go and the cortisol levels and all of that, because when you're somebody who is kind of acclimated to that kind of lifestyle, you don't realize that you're in this state of chronic stress all the time, because it's your baseline.

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:11Rich Roll?

  So it's not until you actually stop and weather the discomfort that comes with sitting still and not being used to that, that you start to get perspective on that.

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and Dan always gives me a...he points it out, you know, because there's times when he's just, you know, just even wanting to cuddle, and I'm like, "I gotta do something, I gotta do something."

• 1:13:33Rich Roll?

  I'm not being productive, right? I need to be more productive than cuddling right now, don't you understand? That's so funny.

• 1:13:39Speaker 01

  It's...I think it's a...there's gotta be some kind of genetic basis.

• 1:13:44Rich Roll?

  Well, here I can sell you on this line, which is, there's a weird, there's a weird kind of like bizarre, universal, spiritual equation that takes place when you invest the time in the meditation, you actually save time later. Like, you become much more efficient and proficient in how you navigate through your day, and I find myself not procrastinating, or being able to kind of switch from one discipline to the next without kind of whatever dithering that I usually do. Like, it just seems a little bit more effortless. So I end up being...like, the time invested in that pays off like five to tenfold throughout the course of the day.

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  So you're not checking Twitter as much?

• 1:14:23Rich Roll?

  So you actually could be more productive.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  I mean, because that would be great.

• 1:14:26Rich Roll?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely not as much.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  So how long is your morning meditation?

• 1:14:32Rich Roll?

  Twenty minutes.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  It's really not that long.

• 1:14:34Rich Roll?

  But with Headspace, you can start off with five minutes or 10 minutes. It's no big deal.

• 1:14:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:40Rich Roll?

  Go sit on the beach.

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  I'm just gonna go out on the beach, yeah.

• 1:14:42Rich Roll?

  I know. Think about all the inflammation reduction.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  So you really feel like you're...

• 1:14:46Rich Roll?

  That's your productivity assignment, I'm reducing my inflammation.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  But I need more than that because I feel like so many other things I'm doing are reducing my inflammation. I would like the, what you just mentioned that you're, that you're more efficient. Like to me, that's like.

• 1:14:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, it's like anything else. You're not going to realize it day one, but like if you start to develop some consistency with it, I just find that I'm able to kind of go through the day and do that. And then I take care of that. And then I don't, and I don't get like tired and have to take a break and then waste time and then go on my phone. Like I'm, I actually am much more kind of like on point and focused.

• 1:15:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's, that's very interesting to me. And that's something I've wondered because there are studies showing that you can take a person that's never meditated before and subject them to some meditation program where they're meditating for like eight weeks and their, their hippocampal part of their brain, which is involved in learning, memory, it changes, becomes more active. The amygdala, which is the part of the brain that's the emotional center, fear, that sort of primal reptilian brain, that's like, uh, that becomes less active and a bunch of other parts of the brain change, change after eight weeks of, of meditating and these people have never meditated before.

• 1:15:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, just imagine being in a stressful situation where you have to make a decision or somebody, you're in a conflict with somebody and the ability to just kind of like dispassionately respond in a way that's going to place you in the position that you want to be in as opposed to reacting and getting kind of like, you know, all your emotions out of whack and then saying something you wish you didn't say or sending the email that you regret. You know, all, think of how much time gets wasted on that, right?

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  You're so right. Absolutely. Exactly. Yeah, no, it's, and I know, you know, I know meditation is one of those, it's just, it should be my 2016 goal. It's like one of those, I even did a podcast on it where I like started talking about it to motivate myself. I'm like, gotta do this, you know, uh, because I really, really want to incorporate it in my lifestyle. I mean, I know that it's going to, it's going to help me live longer.

• 1:16:51Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:16:52Rich Roll?

  Well, get on it.

• 1:16:53Speaker 01

  And perform better.

• 1:16:53Rich Roll?

  There is no want. There is only do or do not. Right? All right. Well, I want to switch gears a little bit and, and talk, uh, bring it back to telomeres because I think this is super fascinating. And I feel like, I kind of feel like, um, this field is where microbiome research was maybe.

• 1:17:14Rich Roll?

  Five or eight years ago, where there was a lot of interesting things happening in it, but it hadn't quite caught on in terms of mainstream fascination and awareness. Like now, it's all about the microbiome. You know what I mean? Like, everyone's talking about it. And, you know, just average people on the street are like, you know, how's your gut health? You know, it's like, this is not things we were talking about that many years ago. And I feel like research and kind of the things that are going on with telomerase, right, and anti-aging is gonna be kind of the next thing.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:48Rich Roll?

  What do you think?

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  Well, I agree with you that telomerase, and in fact, since we were just talking about meditation, there was a fantastic study done in collaboration with Elizabeth Blackburn, who is the scientist who was involved in discovering the enzyme telomerase, which telomerase is able to take a telomere and add DNA nucleotides onto it so that it becomes longer. So it can actually build and replenish and replace and repair a damaged telomere.

• 1:18:21Rich Roll?

  Right, alright, so let's just like, put a pin in this for a second and just back up. And let's just like, kind of define what we're talking about. So telomeres are these caps on the end of chromosomes, right? And what is their relationship to aging? As they get, as they shorten, that leads to what?

• 1:18:41Speaker 01

  Okay, so telomeres are tiny caps on the end of your chromosomes. And we have 46 chromosomes in every cell in our body. And those chromosomes contain all of our DNA. You know, so we've got, you know, each gene we have is in a certain place and a certain position on a chromosome. And so that, you know, DNA is doing a very important thing because it's making a gene that's gonna make a protein that's gonna do all the function, whether that function is allowing your liver cells to, you know, make cholesterol, or it's allowing your heart to pump blood to get to your brain or your neurons to function, whatever it is. It's important because it's keeping you alive. And so you wanna make sure your DNA is protected.

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  And so telomeres are a system that is conserved, many animals have telomeres on their chromosomes, to protect that DNA from getting damaged. So...

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

  Every time there's an inflammatory burst from an immune cell busting out some hydrogen peroxide because it's trying to kill a piece of bacteria, hydrogen peroxide can damage the DNA. Well, your telomere instead takes the hit and gets that hydrogen peroxide. So it protects the DNA. So it's like, no, I don't want that DNA to get damaged. That's, you know, that's bad.

• 1:19:57Rich Roll?

  It's like a first line of defense, like a shield on your.

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  It's like a shield, exactly. And so your telomere will take that. But when that telomere gets damaged, um, it becomes shorter. And the thing with telomeres are is that even if there was no damage occurring, every, okay, so we're, we talked about all the chromosomes, 46 chromosomes inside of your cell. And the chromosomes have the telomeres caps on them. Every time your cell divides, so you have a cell in your liver and the liver cell's done its thing for a while. Well, now it's time to make a new liver cell to replace that old liver cell. So you have to, you have to replicate all the DNA and all 46 of those chromosomes so that you can make a new cell that has all the same DNA.

• 1:20:41Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  Well, your telomere DNA has to get replicated also. And there's a, a defect in the telomere structure. So you kind of can think of it as the structure, the very end, the little tiny end of the telomere DNA. Um, it, it has a little overhang that makes it so that the machinery that usually comes in and, and copies it to make the exact replica can't get there. It can't access it. And so this little tiny, tiny little end of telomere DNA at the very tip of the telomere never get replicated. So the next cell generation that is now there, the liver cell, for example, now has a telomere that's just a little bit shorter because it couldn't get copied. And that goes on and on and on for decades.

• 1:21:26Rich Roll?

  It's like Xerox against Xerox.

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:21:29Rich Roll?

  Xerox until it's illegible.

• 1:21:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so eventually.

• 1:21:33Rich Roll?

  And then at that point, it just can't replicate and it dies.

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  At the point when it becomes so critically short, a couple of things happen. One thing that happens is that the, the cell will die. And in the case of, if this is a stem cell, that's bad because you're going to deplete your stem cell pools, which leads to aging. Uh, it's a good thing if the cell was damaged and it could, could lead to cancer if it, if it dies. Um, the other thing that happens is that the cell will, when the telomere becomes critically short, it kind of goes into a crisis. And it doesn't know what to do, and so it just, it calls, it doesn't die, but it's not really alive. And that's called senescence.

• 1:22:13Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:22:14Speaker 01

  So when the cell is senescent.

• 1:22:15Rich Roll?

  Confused.

• 1:22:16Speaker 01

  It's really confused, and it's actually really bad because a senescent cell, it's not alive, it's not dead, but what it is doing is secreting pro-inflammatory cytokines that damage nearby cells. So the more senescent cells you have accumulated in your bloodstream, in your liver, in your kidneys, in your muscle, you know, in your, fill in the blank, organ, the more senescent cells you have, the more pro-inflammatory cytokines that are being dumped out, the more damaging of the nearby cells, the quicker it's going to accelerate those cells to become senescent. Because not only do your telomeres get shorter every year, every, you know,

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

  every time your cell divides, based on that little, that problem I just mentioned, but what accelerates the damage is inflammation, oxidative stress, you know, those things accelerate it, so.

• 1:23:10Rich Roll?

  Right, because once you have this problem and you have this senescent cell and it's making all the cells around it unhealthy and miserable, then that just, you're just accelerating that process.

• 1:23:20Speaker 01

  Exactly, you're accelerating that process. So that's kind of like telomere, okay, let me, so that's part of telomere biology. So the other part.

• 1:23:29Rich Roll?

  Telomere for elementary school students.

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, telomere 101, so that was fundamental, the fundamentals of telomeres. Now, the other part of this equation is, well, what's this thing called telomerase that can rebuild the telomere that's short? There is an enzyme, it's called telomerase, and Elizabeth Blackburn at UCSF was in, she won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 2009, I believe, for discovering it. And it's able to take and. Add little DNA nucleotides to the end of the telomere so that it is, it can lengthen it essentially, make a shorter telomere longer. The problem is, this is the caveat, most of our cells in our body, with the exception

• 1:24:14Speaker 01

  of our stem cells or our germ cells, so like sperm cells, ovaries, egg cells. They do not, they have a gene for telomerase, but the gene is silenced. So it's like, the gene is not there. And so your blood cells, you know, you're, you're basically not rebuilding your shortened telomeres in your liver or your, your, your blood cells because telomerase is not active.

• 1:24:45Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  And there's a reason it's not active. The reason telomerase is not active is because if a cell is damaged, so if you've dumped, if you've just, you know, you've treated yourself poorly, your body poorly, you haven't eaten the right things, and you have a lot of inflammation, a lot of reactive oxygen species chronically produced, you could damage your DNA in, in a region that could lead to cancer. And if you have a damaged cell, one of the things it does is it activates telomerase because when you activate telomerase, it can allow a cell to become immortal. It can allow a cell to survive indefinitely. And cancer cells have one thing in their mind, and that is immortal until they kill the host.

• 1:25:26Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:25:27Speaker 01

  So, telomerase.

• 1:25:28Rich Roll?

  Right, so, so that's problematic because you don't want proliferation of diseased cells.

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  Exactly, and that's, it's one of the reasons why the anti-aging field and potential therapeutic strategies to activate telomerase, the enzyme, can be dangerous.

• 1:25:51Rich Roll?

  Right, you could just literally turn on cancer and, and, you know, kill somebody with it, basically.

• 1:25:57Speaker 01

  Potentially, you could.

• 1:25:58Rich Roll?

  So, so then the science or the research has to be.

• 1:26:03Rich Roll?

  Attempting to determine a means of activating telomerase in healthy cells, like being able to distinguish between cancerous or disease cells versus healthy cells, right?

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that would be, that would be one.

• 1:26:17Rich Roll?

  And this is, this is real, like the, this whole notion of turning on the expression of genes and turning them off, that's epigenetics, right?

• 1:26:26Speaker 01

  It is, that's called epigenetics. Yes, that's called epigenetics. And with the telomerase, there are, you know, there are some compounds that are actually available even, you know, today. One of them's called TA65, which, what it's, you know, made of, for the most part, I think it's, they've got some sort of proprietary blend, but it's made of something called astragalus. Astragalus root.

• 1:26:55Rich Roll?

  Astragalus root.

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. And what's been shown by a really pretty well-respected telomere researcher that I've known of for several years, Maria Belasco is her name. She's been doing a lot of research using TA65, both at the clinical level and also looking at animal models to look at mechanism. And she's published a couple of studies that I have read and have been, I've been impressed with, showing that TA65 can, it can increase telomere length in people, in their blood cells, over baseline. And this happened in about 40% of the people. And it was pretty significant increase in telomere length.

• 1:27:36Speaker 01

  In animals, so mice were fed TA65 and there was a variety of doses they were fed. And it was shown to reverse signs of aging in their, in their aged organs. So it was kind of like delaying the aging process. And they also gave it to older mice that had already been aged and it was reversing aging. And the question is, you know, well, can it lead to cancer? And that's, you know, that's something that's being investigated.

• 1:28:03Rich Roll?

  Right. But the underlying premise behind all of this is that if you can solve this issue, if you can figure out how to continually be able to lengthen telomeres by, via telomerase and do it with healthy cells, that you will then allow healthy cells to continue to divide. And in so doing, you are preventing the aging process from occurring.

• 1:28:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that would be the ultimate goal and that's, you know, researchers are trying to figure out a way to selectively be able to do that, at least in terms of a therapeutic treatment for aging. But in terms of what people can do now, I think, I think the real gold is in, in the prevention of the acceleration of telomere shortening, which is a big problem. I mean, there have been many, many studies that have been done on identical twins that have shown twins that, for example, that are in the highest quartile of vitamin D have telomeres that look five years biologically younger than the twins in the lowest quartile

• 1:29:08Speaker 01

  of vitamin D, but, but blood levels of vitamin D, or exercise has also been shown, so twins that, that are the most active have telomeres that look 10 years younger than twins that are the most sedentary. You know, so these are things that, you know, vitamin D decreases.

• 1:29:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, what I was gonna say, what is the relationship with, I mean, vitamin D is like a big thing with you, right? So let's, maybe we could talk about that a little bit.

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  Well, vitamin D is, gets converted into a steroid hormone in the body and that, that steroid hormone regulates about 5% of the human genome. So it turns on and turns off about 5% of genes. And, I mean, you can imagine like not having estrogen or not having testosterone, there's gonna be some pretty profound effects if you're deficient, you know, when you're supposed to make it when you're younger. So it, it has a very important role in many, many, many biological processes from everything from immune function to inflammation, to repairing damage, to muscle growth, to brain function. I mean, just, it's just 5% of the genome, it's a lot.

• 1:30:14Rich Roll?

  Right. And, and what percentage of people are vitamin D deficient?

• 1:30:20Speaker 01

  Well, according, if you look at, if you, if you consider vitamin D deficiency at levels below 20 nanograms per milliliter, which is what the Endocrine Society defines it as, and you just, and you define vitamin D inadequacy as levels below 30 nanograms per milliliter, then 70% of the US population

• 1:30:43Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:30:44Speaker 01

  has inadequate levels.

• 1:30:44Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:30:45Speaker 01

  And there have been meta-analyses on studies from 1968 all the way up until 2013. There's about 60 or so studies that were all looked at. These are studies that looked at vitamin D, blood levels of vitamin D, and all-cause mortality, so people that die from anything that's non-accidental, so cardiovascular-related diseases, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, respiratory diseases, frailty, things like that. People with vitamin D blood levels between 40 and 60 nanograms per milliliter had the lowest all-cause mortality.

• 1:31:27Speaker 01

  And that's important because people think, well, you need vitamin D, and so they like, they have this tendency to go out and just mega-dose.

• 1:31:36Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:31:36Speaker 01

  You need that, you need, it's good for you, I need a lot of it.

• 1:31:39Rich Roll?

  Well, more is better, Rhonda.

• 1:31:41Speaker 01

  It's not necessarily better, yeah, especially when it comes to vitamins, you have to, you know, be, it's tricky. So, too much vitamin D can, can potentially be dangerous.

• 1:31:52Rich Roll?

  And, and me being out in the sun for an hour or two for a run or something like that, is that sufficient in Southern California? Or, because I remember when we did, when I did your podcast, you asked me, you know, if I supplemented, and I said, no, and, and I, I got the feeling that you were sort of like, really? Like, you were a little surprised, like, you were coming from a place of like, I think you really should look into that. So, yeah, I just was presuming, because we live in a place where there's a lot of sunlight, and I'm outdoors quite a bit, that, that, that sort of my body was taking care of it.

• 1:32:24Speaker 01

  And, and, you know, I think that's a fair assumption to make. However, there are, there are many factors that affect the ability of your body to Make vitamin D and to convert it into the hormone. So I think that everyone should get a blood test done. It's just you can go to your doctor and get it done for very, very, very cheap. And so if you're talking about someone living in Southern California, they have a higher chance of making enough vitamin D because it is sunny most of the year and because where we are latitude wise, you know, we're below the 30 degree parallel,

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  it's called, which is what you have to be below that in order to have UVB rays hit the atmosphere. So in certain parts of the United States that are that are more northern, that are above that 30 degree parallel during six months out of the year, five or six months out of the year, UVB rays can actually hit the atmosphere and UVB is what has to hit your skin.

• 1:33:27Rich Roll?

  I got you.

• 1:33:28Speaker 01

  To convert something called 70 hydrocholesterol into vitamin D3. But in addition to that, you know, latitude, which is what you're thinking of, age regulates that. So if you look at a 70 year old male, 70 year old male makes about four times less vitamin D from the sun than their 20 year old former former self.

• 1:33:52Rich Roll?

  Interesting.

• 1:33:53Speaker 01

  Melanin, which is the the dark pigment that protects people from the burning rays of the sun, also blocks UVB, anything that blocks UVB. So sunscreen, melanin.

• 1:34:03Rich Roll?

  So if you're super tan or you're very dark complected, then you're not, you're not able to actually get the vitamin D that you need.

• 1:34:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you have to stay out in the sun and incredibly, yeah, in some, in some cases, an incredible amount of time to actually get enough vitamin D, which is not the case if you're living, you know, close to the equator or in sub Saharan Africa, you know, where, where people that have dark, more melanin, the reason they have the melanin is because they're so close to the UVB rays that they have to protect from the burning.

• 1:34:33Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:34:33Speaker 01

  So that's an adaptation.

• 1:34:36Speaker 01

  But the other thing is also body fat, which you don't have to worry about, but because vitamin D is a fat soluble vitamin, gets stored in fat, and the more fat that person has, the less bioavailable vitamin D3 is to be released into the bloodstream, where then gets activated to the hormone. But in addition to all these things, there's also some very common gene polymorphisms in the gene that converts vitamin D3 into the steroid hormone. In fact, I've already seen three people, you know, four people's DNA out of, you know, twenty or twenty-five or so that have had, that have this polymorphism, which makes them less efficient at converting vitamin D3 into, into twenty-five hydroxy vitamin

• 1:35:21Speaker 01

  D3, which then gets converted into the hormone. So, a blood test usually measures twenty-five hydroxy vitamin D, and that'll tell you, like, if you're supplementing with, you know, two thousand IUs of vitamin D a day, and you go get a blood test, and your, your levels are like below twenty nanograms per milli, or something's up.

• 1:35:39Rich Roll?

  Right, that's interesting.

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  Something's up. So, and the only way you're gonna know that is if you get a blood test. So, I would encourage you to get your, your vitamin D levels measured.

• 1:35:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I had a blood test maybe nine or ten months ago, and it was fine, I don't remember what it was, it was fine, but I'm due to have another one, so.

• 1:35:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:56Rich Roll?

  Maybe I'll send you my, my blood test results, you can tell me what I need to do.

• 1:36:00Speaker 01

  Forty to sixty is, is the sweet spot, nanograms per mil.

• 1:36:03Rich Roll?

  What are the other, while we're on the subject, I didn't mean to interrupt you if you had another thought on this, but just while we're on the subject of supplementation, I mean, I'm interested in your overall kind of, you know, view and, and, and take on supplementation in general, and beyond that, what other things we should be looking at in terms of supplementation, just for basic, you know, optimal health?

• 1:36:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, actually, I get this question a lot, and I've gotten the question so much that I've now started writing a solo podcast that I'm gonna explain it all, because I've gotten, I've gotten asked it so many times. I think in terms of supplementation, I mean, the word itself is supplement. I think the most important thing is to try to get all these vitamins and minerals and micronutrients, essential fatty acids, amino acids from food. And so the way I do that is by eating a very broad spectrum of vegetables and fruits and, um, again, the fiber stuff, but so I really try to get, you know, like I drink a large smoothie almost every single day that has kale, charred spinach, celery, carrots, I mean, tomatoes, uh, blueberries, apple.

• 1:37:10Rich Roll?

  You have a YouTube video where you make the whole thing.

• 1:37:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I've got a variety of variations. That's just one, one of the variations I do.

• 1:37:16Rich Roll?

  But it always starts with darkly, dark leafy greens being like kind of the core base of everything.

• 1:37:21Speaker 01

  Exactly. Dark, dark leafy greens are the core of everything. And then I also eat a salad. I eat salads, you know, lunch and dinner and steamed vegetables. So I, I'm getting a lot of that. Uh, but in addition to that, I think there are a few really important supplements and I take them. One is vitamin D. Uh, I take the vitamin D because I actually wear sunscreen when I'm out in the sun. I'm a little more concerned about skin aging. I think it's the female, the being female, you know, females are a little more preoccupied with skin aging. But, um, so I wear sunscreen and, um, so I don't really, I'm not, I'm blocking the UVB when I'm out there. So I have to take a vitamin D supplement.

• 1:38:03Speaker 01

  The other supplement I think is very important is I take, you know, the, the getting the omega-3 fatty acids, whether that's from your microalgae oil or your fish oil. Um, I think that's very, very important. I've seen, you know, studies have shown that supplementing with the omega-3 fatty acids, um, is also associated with lower all-cause mortality. It's been shown to, you know, increase muscle mass, decreases inflammation, brain function, you know, you know, it increases, you know, hippocampal volume, just all sorts of, I've just been convinced. It's one of my, it's one of the really important ones that I take, but the source is very important. You want to make sure that you're getting a good source. In the case of microalgae, um, it's a lot, it's probably, uh, a lot safer in terms of not being exposed to so much oxidation

• 1:38:47Speaker 01

  because fish oil usually is, um, molecularly distilled.

• 1:38:53Speaker 01

  And so it gets exposed to oxygen and you have to be really careful.

• 1:38:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, there's also like, you have to be concerned about mercury with the fish oil too, I think, right? You have to be careful, you have to be really careful that it's toxin free.

• 1:39:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:06Rich Roll?

  There's like that garbage truck out there, like dumping like, banging like this huge thing right outside the window. It's alright, go ahead.

• 1:39:14Speaker 01

  I think he's actually doing the recycle today. Sorry about that.

• 1:39:18Rich Roll?

  That's alright.

• 1:39:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so mercury typically, when you are part of the, it's like, I can feel it in my bones. The mercury is molecularly distilled typically from, from most fish oil brands, but yeah, you do need to be careful of that. And the oxidations, one of the really, one of the things that's critical with omega-3 fatty acids, they're very, very prone to oxidation. So, taking in rancid fat can actually do a lot of damage. So it's really important to get it from a good source. Nordic Naturals, I like, they have good microalgae oil, they have, they're just a really good company. They, they do all of their isolation under nitrogen conditions, so it's not exposed to oxygen at all, which is a good thing. So I really like Nordic Naturals. And I have no affiliation, by the way, with Nordic Naturals.

• 1:40:03Speaker 01

  I have no affiliation with VSL number three either. I just, I like to talk about things that I believe in, things that I've researched. So, that's the other thing that I really, those are the two really main supplements. Then I also take an activated vitamin B complex. And what I mean by activated is that it has an active form of folate called methylfolate, which is important for getting around a common, in fact, like almost 50% of the population has one form of another of a gene polymorphism in a gene that makes it more difficult for people to convert folate, which is found in dark green, leafy vegetables, into methylfolate,

• 1:40:43Speaker 01

  which is a very important precursor for epigenetics and changing gene expression, turning genes on, off, and also very important for Reducing homocysteine in blood vessels. So I take B complex with that. So I got a polymorphism that makes me a little bit less.

• 1:41:00Rich Roll?

  And you, how are you able to determine that? Is that through like 23andMe and doing your mapping and figuring that out?

• 1:41:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was through 23andMe. I did, I did figure that out through using the company called 23andMe, which I really, really like them. Their, their, their test for a variety of thousands and thousands of very common gene polymorphisms. Do it from, you know, they isolate DNA from saliva. And you can get, you can really learn a lot from, from the, the results that you get back. They're doing health reports now, which are not really that informative, but another company that I really like called Prometheus does it. It gives you a health report.

• 1:41:41Rich Roll?

  Well, they had to be like, didn't they have, they had, well, they had that thing where they had to like, because of regulatory reasons, they had to stop what they were doing. And then they've been reintroduced, but they're, they don't really, it seems, explain this how, there, there are certain things they can't say about like how to use this information, right? So you could still get the information, but they can't make predictions about what this means.

• 1:42:04Speaker 01

  So a couple of years ago, the FDA put the lid on their ability to interpret any of the genetic data. So it used to be a few years ago, they would give you a health report. It was a health report that would explain what these gene polymorphisms that you have meant, which is kind of important because most people doing 23andMe aren't scientists.

• 1:42:27Rich Roll?

  Right, like when you get this information back, what are you supposed to do with it?

• 1:42:31Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 1:42:32Rich Roll?

  No context or ability to understand what it means.

• 1:42:41Speaker 01

  Well, so the FDA decided that people were, they were taking the information.

• 1:42:48Speaker 01

  A little too seriously, like it was just, you know, one hundred percent.

• 1:42:52Rich Roll?

  Like some predetermined.

• 1:42:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, like if it says you have an increased risk of pro- prostate cancer, like, oh my, I'm gonna get prostate cancer, which isn't necessarily the case, because there's a very complex interaction between your lifestyle, your diet, you know, everything that you're doing, your lifestyle and your genes, so. And there is some component of chance as well, but lifestyle is very important. So they used, they used to tell you kind of what it meant. FDA decided that people were taking extreme measures based on that information they were getting. And through all sorts of bureaucratic stuff that I don't quite understand, um, they shut them, shut that part of them down. So twenty-three and me for a, for a few year, a couple of years after that, still tested for those polymorphisms,

• 1:43:35Speaker 01

  still give, gives people the raw data, just people don't know what to do with it. It's like, what does this mean? There's an A here instead of a G, okay, what does that mean?

• 1:43:44Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:43:44Speaker 01

  Um, but because other companies that don't actually directly do the genetic testing, but can tell you what that mean, tell you what the data means, based off of, you know, what's in the scientific literature, FDA couldn't shut those companies down because they're not the ones doing the DNA testing. They're just saying, oh.

• 1:44:04Rich Roll?

  That's amazing, so it's not, it's not the analysis itself that's illegal, it's just the fact that it's the same entity doing it.

• 1:44:11Speaker 01

  The same entity doing the, the DNA testing and giving the health reports.

• 1:44:15Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  So, uh, the twenty-three and me kind of, um, you know, they've been negotiating with FDA for a couple of years and, um, found a way to now have some health reports that are, that are able to tell you, I think there's about thirty-six or so they do, and I, and I recently used, used their health report service and I, it really wasn't that informative to me, uh, but I'm looking for. Genes that I find, think are interesting, like genes that regulate the way my body metabolizes fat, you know, genes that regulate the way my body metabolizes folate, or, you know, things that I think there are some, there's a direct actionable thing that a person can do to like bypass a defect they may have.

• 1:44:59Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:44:59Speaker 01

  Or to make the outcome better.

• 1:45:01Rich Roll?

  And is this the thing that you're currently working on right now?

• 1:45:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:05Rich Roll?

  So you're writing on to help people interpret all of this information?

• 1:45:07Speaker 01

  I am, yeah. So, um, like I said, I, I do like another company called Prometheus, which, um, is five dollars and it's like a tool that will take your 23andMe data and match it to about 55,000 published, um, polymorphisms in literature and kind of spits out this report that's like very overwhelming. But it does a pretty good job, just like you can scroll down the list and it'll say, oh, increased risk for prostate cancer, or, uh, increased obesity risk, or, you know, things like that. So I really like them. Uh, but in addition to Prometheus, I've been working, um, on a genetic tool that is going to, first, the

• 1:45:48Speaker 01

  beta version that's, I'm gonna, I'm trying to release this month, um, is going to, uh, it, it, it interprets what some of these genes that I've sort of handpicked as the first sort of report that I find, um, very interesting, that have a very, what I think, um, important effect on someone's, um, the way their lifestyle will, it can direct the kind of lifestyle they have.

• 1:46:11Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:46:12Speaker 01

  Based on knowing this information. For example, there's a gene polymorphism that, um, when you cook meat, when meat, doesn't matter if it's fish, or chicken, or red meat, when it's cooked at a high temperature, so frying or grilling, when you grill, something is produced called aromatic, um, aromatic, uh, hydrocarbons that are carcinogenic. And these things get detoxified in our bodies, so our body inactivates them by, sorry, aromatic heterocyclic amines, hydrocarbons or something else. The heterocyclic, um, amines, they become carcinogenic, but our body, using a certain gene, can deactivate them to not

• 1:46:57Speaker 01

  be carcinogenic. Well, there are a lot of people out there that that gene is very, very, very slow.

• 1:47:02Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:47:03Speaker 01

  And so if they have that gene, that's the slow version, and I've seen quite a few people that have it. That means that they probably should avoid frying their meat, grilling all the time and probably should bake it. Or as Rich says, not eat. Um, but you get the point. So the point is, is that I've been, I've been designing this tool that sort of, you know, and there's lots of examples like this where it's dietary related and then, and a way around it.

• 1:47:26Rich Roll?

  I have to like move again.

• 1:47:27Speaker 01

  The sun is like chasing you.

• 1:47:30Rich Roll?

  Sorry, keep going.

• 1:47:31Speaker 01

  So there's a way around it and, and that tool is going to be free. Um, and I'm just going to basically nag people to, to help crowdfund.

• 1:47:39Rich Roll?

  That's cool. So is it, it's going to be like a technology based tool though? It's not like a written document.

• 1:47:44Speaker 01

  It's going to be, uh, it's going to be a technology based web tool. So you'll go to, to my website, foundmyfitness.com and you'll, um, enter in your name and then you'll like create a password. And then you'll be able to export your 23andme data after signing all the disclaimers.

• 1:48:03Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:48:03Speaker 01

  Like this is not medical advice. This is Rhonda's opinion, blah, blah, blah, blah. You'll sign all that and then your 23andme data. So we've, we've set up an API with 23andme where we can now take their data.

• 1:48:14Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:48:14Speaker 01

  And then it'll, you know, I've been working with some, um, very skilled programmers. One of them is my husband and then one's a good friend, um, that have been helping me, uh, basically de- design this tool.

• 1:48:26Rich Roll?

  That's really cool.

• 1:48:27Speaker 01

  They've been doing all the programming stuff and I've been doing all the science stuff.

• 1:48:29Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right. Wow, that's cool.

• 1:48:30Speaker 01

  So it's been a lot of work and the first report that I'm going to put out is, is the beta version and I'm really hoping this solicits feedback. Um, and it will be probably around 30 to 40 genes that I've chosen first to do.

• 1:48:44Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:48:45Speaker 01

  Just to see, see how it works. But I'm really excited about it and like I said, it's free. Um, so I'm, I'm a big proponent of the, of the 23andme. Unfortunately, they just raised their price by a hundred percent. So it was $99 and once they came out with this new health report, uh, which is about 36 different genes, they tell you, um, they raised the price to $199.

• 1:49:06Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:49:07Speaker 01

  But I still think it's very worth it.

• 1:49:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's super interesting. I've been like. Admit like sort of I'm sort of embarrassed to admit, but like kind of too scared to do it like I'm worried like I don't know that I want to know, even though I know what you were saying like it's these are just sort of baseline predispositions that are influenced by so many other things and knowledge is power and knowing these things can allow you to make better decisions to avoid these, you know, outcomes, right? But there's still something inside of me that's like preventing me from doing it.

• 1:49:39Speaker 01

  I think I think that's that's very human, very human feeling. I mean, my father-in-law is the same way.

• 1:49:46Rich Roll?

  I'm not like a Luddite, you know, it's like I don't I'm not somebody who's afraid to go to the doctor and you know what I mean like I want I kind of want to know and yet I could I know I feel this tug like, yeah, but do you really want to know that much?

• 1:49:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and genes are kind of scary, but I've known so many people that have learned so much that I mean that they have from knowing their 23andMe data have made lifestyle changes that have dropped their cholesterol 100 points, their LDL cholesterol that have, you know, dropped their blood pressure from like, like really hypertensive to like finally a normal range, just by learning some some gene polymorphisms that they had. Vitamin D was another one. I had a friend that was just had this polymorphism where they didn't convert vitamin D3, even though they were supplementing with 4,000 IU a day, and they couldn't get their levels up. And it wasn't until I was able to see their genes and go, this is the cause of it, you know, and they had to take much, much higher dose

• 1:50:42Speaker 01

  than what a normal person would take. And finally, we're able to get their vitamin D levels up, and they started to lose weight and just all these good things started to happen. So, but I understand the fear. I understand the fear.

• 1:50:52Rich Roll?

  Well, if you start meditating, then I'll order my kit from 23andMe.

• 1:50:57Speaker 01

  Seriously?

• 1:50:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:59Speaker 01

  We have a deal.

• 1:51:00Rich Roll?

  That's the deal we're gonna make.

• 1:51:01Speaker 01

  I will do it.

• 1:51:02Rich Roll?

  All right, cool.

• 1:51:03Speaker 01

  I mean, it's so easy for me.

• 1:51:04Rich Roll?

  Well, it's easy for me, too. I just click a couple buttons on the computer, right?

• 1:51:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would love to get your feedback, too, on the tool.

• 1:51:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, for sure. Yeah, cool. Well, there's one more thing I want to talk about before I'm gonna let you get back to your life. And it's a broad subject, but maybe we can kind of crystallize it a little bit. And it's the it's this dividing line between

• 1:51:26Rich Roll?

  Nutrition and lifestyle oriented around performance, athletic performance versus overall long-term wellness and longevity. And I feel like these two things are somewhat at odds, like it's a Venn diagram where there's certainly overlapping aspects of them.

• 1:51:45Rich Roll?

  But they're not exactly always compatible. And as I get older, I'm 49 now, and I'm somebody who's very interested in athletic performance, and I want to continue to be able to perform at the highest level that I can, but not at the cost of my ultimate long-term wellness and longevity. And I feel like in the kind of health space online, whether it's podcasts, or YouTube, or whatever, there's so much emphasis on performance nutrition. You know, like, how can I get that extra, you know, whether it's like, you know, building muscles faster, stronger, recovering faster, and all these sorts of things. And I feel like, for the most part, the audience for these, for all of this, are people that are really weekend warriors.

• 1:52:30Rich Roll?

  Like, it's, it's not the elite Olympic athletes that are sort of the audience for all of this content that's out there. It's people that really should be, in my opinion, my subjective opinion, should be thinking more about kind of long-term optimal wellness than trying to get that 1% performance-enhancing aspect that, you know, maybe some kind of nutritional protocol will afford them. I didn't say that very articulately, but you get where I'm coming from?

• 1:52:57Speaker 01

  No, you're incredibly articulate, and I think, you know, I agree with you that, you know, there is often a trade-off with performance and longevity, whether it's athletic performance or cognitive performance. I mean, there's, there are, you know, tons of people out there taking nootropics, and they probably are experiencing some, you know, some benefits, mental and performance, you know, benefits, but I'm not, I'm not sure that it doesn't come at a trade-off. Or, or athletic performance, where, where, you know, people... People will go to extremes where they'll, you know, even as to take hormones to get

• 1:53:40Speaker 01

  that, that performance boost, to get that muscle mass.

• 1:53:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, or maybe something else, too.

• 1:53:47Speaker 01

  Maybe something else.

• 1:53:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and in those cases, I think it's pretty clear to me that there is a trade off when, when you're, when you're doing something as extreme as, as taking like super physiological levels of, of different hormones, steroids.

• 1:54:03Rich Roll?

  Right, but beyond like kind of performance enhancing drugs and that whole world, just like daily kind of, you know, nutritional habits, I suppose, maybe we could just focus on that.

• 1:54:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's kind of funny now that you bring that up because in my mind, I've recently been a little, I've been focusing on the overlap between performance and, and longevity, and finding some, some supplements, finding some nutritional components that are increasing muscle mass, decreasing inflammation, decreasing muscle atrophy, all these things are also associated with living longer. So that's obviously an overlap. But I've also seen, and I'm not really familiar with, you know, I've seen out there in the, in the blogosphere, people talking about gains and like eating Pop-Tarts and like, like just eating like

• 1:54:56Speaker 01

  crap and then like just working out like, and you know, it's, it's anabolic or, you know, because of like the sugar and the insulin and, you know, it's going, it's, and I'm like, I just don't think on any level that eating Pop-Tarts is good for you. Like, I don't care how much you're working out.

• 1:55:12Rich Roll?

  Does anybody?

• 1:55:13Speaker 01

  Yes, they do. There are people.

• 1:55:14Rich Roll?

  I'd like to see this blog.

• 1:55:16Speaker 01

  In fact, there was some like cyclist that was like cycling around the United States.

• 1:55:23Speaker 01

  And one of my relatives shared it.

• 1:55:25Rich Roll?

  Oh, it was this guy who was eating McDonald's, like, or he was eating all his food was fast food.

• 1:55:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Fast food and like Pop-Tarts and stuff. And so anyways, I'm just, you know, that, that sort of stuff is really, it irritates me where I'm.

• 1:55:37Rich Roll?

  Well, there's still this idea that you can train your way out of a poor diet. And it's, it's easier to believe that when you're 19, you know, and you're, you can just eat whatever you want and you go work out and you feel great and you get stronger and you don't put on any weight. As you get older, you realize that that's a straw man argument. Um, that I think that you have to start paying attention to those sorts of things. But, but I think there's a, you know, there are certainly, um, a way of eating that's oriented around short-term performance goals, um, that is at odds with, you know, kind of how you want to live your life in general.

• 1:56:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I do think that, um, along the same lines of, you know, people eating these refined carbs, which I find just extremely, it's just confusing how anyone could think that's good for you. Um, I think a lot of people are really focused on taking, taking a lot of protein. And, you know, protein, we don't really need that much protein. I mean, obviously if you're, if you're really wanting to gain muscle mass, um, and you, you need to take in more protein because you won't, you won't gain a lot of muscle mass if you're not getting, you know, a certain amount of protein. Uh, but.

• 1:56:49Rich Roll?

  But the idea that the average human being who, you know, goes, goes to the gym for 45 minutes, three days a week and, you know, tosses a football on the weekend or something like that, needs to be drinking protein drinks all the, all the time.

• 1:57:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:02Rich Roll?

  And eating massive amounts of, you know, steak all the time is insane.

• 1:57:06Speaker 01

  It is insane. And I, and I, and I think if you look at some of those guys, they, they don't look like they're really in, in the best of shape, in, in my opinion. Um, you know, I.

• 1:57:17Rich Roll?

  So where does this like protein obsession come from, do you think?

• 1:57:21Speaker 01

  Probably because they want to, they want to gain more muscle. You know, they want to be that, that muscle man. You know, that, that like muscle man looking kind of person. Um, but, you know, protein, protein intake.

• 1:57:37Speaker 01

  Especially in the context of someone that's also eating refined carbohydrates and not getting their greens, not getting their fiber. So if you have someone that's just sort of eating a bunch of meat and, you know, bread and crackers and their cake,

• 1:57:55Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:57:56Speaker 01

  Um, can be a really, really dangerous thing because, because of what we were talking about early in the podcast, because of the inflammation, the oxidative stress that leads to the damage of the DNA, the damage of a cell. Um, when you, when you have that in the context of a high protein diet, what happens is protein activates this whole pathway in the cell, um, the IGF-1 pathway, that allows a damaged cell to override the, the mechanisms in the body that sense the cell is damaged and go, "Oh, the cell is damaged. If I don't kill it, it could potentially become cancer."

• 1:58:37Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:58:37Speaker 01

  And when there's a lot of IGF-1 around, insulin-like growth factor.

• 1:58:42Rich Roll?

  That's like kerosene for cancer cells.

• 1:58:44Speaker 01

  It's like kerosene. It's a, it, it, it, it says, "Oh no, you don't want to die. Grow, grow, grow." And so it overrides that whole protective mechanism. And that protective mechanism is there for a reason. It's a very important mechanism to get rid of a, a cell that, that has, um, that has basically escaped the immune system. There, you know, our body has, has a lot of different ways to make sure we don't get cancer. One of them is the immune system, which we talked about. And the other one is this, this pathway, a genetic pathway, many different genetic pathways that get activated that will, um, as soon as a, a cell gets damaged, the cell senses it, turns on the expression of one or many different genes

• 1:59:27Speaker 01

  that then kill it, um, program cell death. It's called apoptosis. So IGF-1, which is activated by protein intake, uh, specifically from essential amino acids, um, like leucine, um, it activates IGF-1 very robustly. And so protein intake in the context of someone that has a lot of inflammation, that has a lot of damaged cells, the average American that's just going out and getting their burger and fries and, you know, they're not, they're not the kind of person that's really, um... Health or fitness oriented or obsessed, it can be very, very dangerous. And that's, that's been shown, it's been shown mechanistically in animal studies. It's been shown in epidemiological studies that protein intake, you know, is correlated

• 2:00:12Speaker 01

  with, you know, cancer incidence. Now, of course, that's also, like I said, it's in the context of, you know, people that are unhealthy and have damaged cells around.

• 2:00:20Rich Roll?

  Right. And, and when you're taking in excessive amounts of protein, I mean, you're not even metabolizing all of that into your muscle, right? Like, what happens to all of that protein? Like, how do you metabolize it? Where does it go?

• 2:00:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. The branched-chain amino acids get taken up into your muscle cells to build, to build muscle. But the protein gets broken down into amino acids and the amino acids are, are used to make new proteins inside all your different cells. And so it serves a very important role because just like I mentioned, when we were talking about telomeres, every time your cell replicates, it has to replicate all the DNA. Well, guess what? All that DNA is, is the template to make, eventually to make proteins and proteins are made of amino acids. And so your cell needs building blocks to make those proteins out of the genes. So you need amino acids. You need them to do everything. But-

• 2:01:11Rich Roll?

  And we should just be calling them amino acids, right? Like, why do we even use the word protein? Like, I had Ray Kornice on the podcast and he's like, "I don't want to talk about protein. Never use that word."

• 2:01:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I actually interviewed him too and he's a, he's a friend of mine. But yeah, he's, he wants to like rethink that whole, "Don't use carbohydrates or proteins."

• 2:01:33Rich Roll?

  Right. Just eradicate these, these words that we've applied to macronutrients because it just gets people caught up in these, you know, like sort of mental funnels that screw us up.

• 2:01:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, the thing with the, the amino acids, you know, like people, and the thing that is also very confusing when we say protein is that- Protein, when someone hears the word protein, they think of meat, they think of eating meat, right? But proteins, when I say proteins, inside the cells, I'm talking about something that was made into a protein from a gene in your body. So amino acids were assembled together to make your, you know, protein to do a certain function inside of your cell. Right. So, so the dietary protein that people are eating, there are amino acids that people are taking in and then get used to make proteins inside of your cells. But the thing is, is that there's no other cell that loves proteins or amino acids more

• 2:02:28Speaker 01

  than a cancer cell, because cancer cells are growing at a much faster rate than any other cell in the body. So they need amino acids, they need those building blocks to make more cancer cells. And so that's another thing that, that amino acids or a high dietary protein intake can, can do is fuel the growth of cancer cells, not only through IGF-1 and overriding those cell death protective mechanisms and saying grow, grow, grow, but it also gives them the building blocks to make new cancer cells, to make more of them. And, and so that's another very important thing to keep in mind. However, I will mention that, you know, as we're aging, as we get older, you know, and

• 2:03:12Speaker 01

  starting at about middle age, humans begin to lose between 0.5 and 1% of muscle mass each year, and it becomes more and more difficult to keep muscle mass. You know, and so at that point, and, and this has been shown in, in a very well-done study by Walter Long at UCLA, who showed that the dietary protein intake in people that were, I think it was younger than 65 years, once it got to 65, no, 55 years of age, once they got to 55 years of age, then protein intake, low protein intake was actually correlated with a higher all-cause mortality, not cancer, but, but all-cause mortality.

• 2:03:57Speaker 01

  And I think that has a lot to do with the fact that as you do get older, Muscle mass becomes very, very important because the stronger you are, the more muscle mass that you have, the less likely you're gonna fall and break a hip.

• 2:04:09Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:04:10Speaker 01

  That stuff can take you out.

• 2:04:11Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:04:12Speaker 01

  You fall and break a hip and you get a staph infection and die.

• 2:04:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you're done.

• 2:04:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. So frailty is another major, you know, cause of aging or major concern for an aging person. So I do think there is a balance between maintaining your muscle mass and focusing more on protein intake as you become sixty, sixty-five years old. And you've escaped, I mean, once you're reaching seventy, seventy to eighty, and once you hit eighty, you're likely not gonna get cancer. I mean, maybe prostate, most men, prostate cancer is a very slow growing cancer, so I guess that's always a possibility, but generally speaking, if you make it to eighty, you're likely not gonna get cancer.

• 2:04:54Rich Roll?

  You're gonna be past that part.

• 2:04:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:56Rich Roll?

  When you look around the internet, I mean, certainly we're in a time where people are more interested in health and fitness and nutrition than they ever have been. And if you poke around the internet, the blogosphere, YouTube, podcasts, whatever, there's no shortage of, you know, information, quote unquote, information. But as somebody who, you know, really is immersed in the scientific literature and has, you know, conducted the research and really understands the mechanisms that are at play here and the complexities, when you kind of poke around and see what people are saying, I mean, how does that make you feel? Do you get just like, because it's gotta make you crazy, right? When you see stuff that isn't correct?

• 2:05:38Speaker 01

  Oh, it frustrates the hell out of me.

• 2:05:40Rich Roll?

  Do you, like, do you have to avoid going online? Or how do you approach all of that?

• 2:05:46Speaker 01

  Oh, I have to calm myself down and focus on the big picture and the things that I think are more important because I could spend my entire life just going on and just talking about all the stuff that I read that is bullshit and BS. Sorry.

• 2:06:04Rich Roll?

  What do you think is the biggest kind of misconception that's being propagated right now? Like of the, you know, maybe like the top things that people are walking around believing that you think are, you know, you would like to disabuse people of?

• 2:06:15Speaker 01

  Um, I think that probably...

• 2:06:22Speaker 01

  So this is a really, um, like you said, you know, there's lots of complications and nuances, you know, that that go along with anything related to health, you know, anything that is has to do with human physiology in the body is extremely complicated. And I think something that's very, very popular right now is this ketogenic diet and, you know, high fat diet, which, um, I just, I think has been taken and blown sort of out of proportion. And I don't think people really understand. They, they just think it's sort of like this thing that's great for everything. And it's just like cure all, prevent all.

• 2:07:01Rich Roll?

  Right. It's gonna cure disease, you're gonna lose weight and like all this stuff.

• 2:07:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there's actually a lot of things to consider, uh, the types of fats you're getting, you know, the types of proteins you're getting along with the fat, the micronutrients you're getting, all sorts of complexities. I mean, there are, you know, for example, there's polyunsaturated, monounsaturated, saturated fat. And, you know, everyone's on this sort of saturated fat is good kick.

• 2:07:29Rich Roll?

  Suddenly saturated fat is your best friend. Even, none of the studies say that, by the way.

• 2:07:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I think it's a response. I think that a response to, um, to some of the, the mis, the, the, the bad data that was put out there and also, um, the, the fact that, you know, cholesterol, the complexities of cholesterol and what cholesterol is doing in the body and types of cholesterol. Just there's been so many things that have come out to then stated one thing and then, oh, we find out, no, it's sort of this other thing. And, but really, when we look at it in detail, what was out there the first time was true. It just was, it was generalized. And so, you know, it's a lot more complex than we had first, you know, realized. And that's kind of how things get thrown out

• 2:08:19Speaker 01

  of proportion and all these like misconceptions occur and all that stuff, just from the over generalizations.

• 2:08:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, now, and now more than ever, when there's pressure for page views and so headlines have to be clickbaity.

• 2:08:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:08:32Rich Roll?

  You know, so the, the sort of, um, you know, opportunity for propagating misinformation becomes more tempting and proliferate.

• 2:08:41Speaker 01

  It does, it does. And, you know, I've seen it many, many times. And back, you know, but back to the fat part, it's, as I've been digging more into the gene polymorphisms and genetics and, you know, looking at all these different genes that are regulating the way we metabolize fat, the way we transport it, the way we process it, the way we use it, utilize it, catabolize it, et cetera, et cetera. I'm finding how incredibly polymorphic humans are, meaning, we have, you and I are different, you know, we're different than the guy out there across in the street. We all have different variations of these genes that have to do with the way we metabolize and utilize and catabolize and transport fat in our bodies. And many, many

• 2:09:24Speaker 01

  people actually can take in saturated fat and it cause insulin resistance, based on a certain gene polymorphism they have. If they don't have enough polyunsaturated fat, but they have too much saturated fat, it all depends on the ratio, because the polyunsaturated fat's important for activating this certain gene that, you know, that takes the fat up into adipocytes, or that allows fat to be used by, you know, by your liver cells.

• 2:09:52Rich Roll?

  It's complicated.

• 2:09:53Speaker 01

  It's complicated, right. And so, and so when I just see this diet where it's like, oh, just eat your butter every day, I'm like, well, you know, fat's good, but you know, some people, it may be that you need to be eating more fat from nuts and from fish, or from avocados, from plants, olive oil, you know, things that have, you know, polyunsaturated fat, monounsaturated fat versus saturated. It's very, very complicated. And so when I, when I see that, just eating, eat your butter, eat your butter, eat your butter, I'm like, well, I'm not entirely sure that's healthy for everyone.

• 2:10:30Rich Roll?

  Well, it's gonna be interesting to see how that kind of. Protocol plays out over the next five years and people that are really on board with it to see where they're at and what they're doing a couple of years from now.

• 2:10:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, you know, I'm gonna, I plan on doing some videos and talking about it a little more in depth. I am personally extremely interested and I'm doing some comprehensive reading on it because I want to know for myself, I don't really have, you know, a horse in this race, I don't really care, I just want to know what's the healthiest, you know, way I can live and what I should be eating. And so, you know, and I do think there are benefits-

• 2:11:08Rich Roll?

  You don't want to get into like knock down, drag out arguments on YouTube with people?

• 2:11:11Speaker 01

  No, not, I'm not really-

• 2:11:12Rich Roll?

  People get so crazy emotional.

• 2:11:15Speaker 01

  They do. They're emotionally attached to it and, you know, that's human nature. I mean, especially when you're, you're putting something out there and it's like your whole health, you know, pyramids relies on that fact that it's good. And, and there are benefits for ketosis and, you know, ketosis is when you're burning fat and you're making these ketone bodies, like beta hydroxybutyrate, that can have a lot of very positive benefits in the brain and the body, lots of good things going on. And that is, and that's irrefutable and I absolutely believe that. But-

• 2:11:45Rich Roll?

  But it's, it's like a crisis state for the body though, right? This, is this, is this something that you could, you know, forge as a long-term lifestyle? Like, what are the implications of being in that state, you know, all of the time or a large percentage of the time?

• 2:12:01Speaker 01

  We don't really know. We, we don't really know, especially in humans, what, what those long-term, you know, effects are or would be, you know, but we, we do know that the signaling molecules themselves, the ketone bodies like beta hydroxybutyrate, have been shown to change the expression of genes in a good way.

• 2:12:20Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:12:21Speaker 01

  They have been shown to, to improve, you know, cognitive function in the brain. They're a very easily utilizable source of energy. So that's also good because, for a lot of different reasons. And, you know, I don't want to get into that, it's a whole other podcast. But, you know, I think there are ways to, to make ketone bodies, like, you know, from, from eating, you know, certain types of medium-chain triglycerides that could be therapeutic potentially, without getting-

• 2:12:53Speaker 01

  Eating all the butter and you know, having all the fat and micronutrient deficiencies and things like that. Um, but I'm not sure. I'm really not sure. And I, and it's something that I'm looking into and I wanna, I wanna understand. And I think it's, I think that people that think they understand it, um, most, most people that really don't understand it, like me, I mean, I don't, I'm learning about it and I wanna understand, but it's so incredibly complicated. And the more I learn, the more I realize it's even more complicated than I thought.

• 2:13:23Rich Roll?

  But it's so refreshing to hear you say that because there's so many people on the internet who claim to have it all wired and know exactly what it is and what it isn't.

• 2:13:31Speaker 01

  And I get suspicious.

• 2:13:32Rich Roll?

  And they, and they are, they don't have nearly the level of, you know, uh, of education or expertise that you do.

• 2:13:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, understanding. But so, yeah, that's, that's probably one of the, one of the things. And there's, there's quite a few out there. There's quite a few out there.

• 2:13:47Rich Roll?

  When are you gonna write a book?

• 2:13:48Speaker 01

  I'm, that's something that I'd like to do. Um, I'm sort of, as I'm, as I make videos and as I, you know, put information, I, I have a newsletter where I write articles and stuff. Um, I am compiling my thoughts for a book, trying to think of what exactly I want the book to be on. Um, and so that is something that I, I'm, I haven't started yet. I haven't made an outline, but I'm thinking of doing that, you know, soon.

• 2:14:18Rich Roll?

  You should definitely write a book.

• 2:14:19Speaker 01

  I really want to. Yeah. I really want to. I wanna, but I wanna write a good book and, and I wanna do all the research and I just, I wanna, you know, I wanna, I wanted people to understand the message too. So it's all.

• 2:14:32Rich Roll?

  I hear you. Good. Well, I think that's a good place to close it down for today, but I'd love to have a round two with you at some point because there's so many other things. Like I had my notes, we even stuff we told, we talked about that we were going to talk about, we didn't even get to. But that's podcasting, right?

• 2:14:48Speaker 01

  So much to talk about.

• 2:14:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Anyway, super fun and, uh, really informative and just incredibly illuminating. So thank you so much for your time.

• 2:14:56Speaker 01

  Thanks, Rich. I really like talking to you.

• 2:14:59Rich Roll?

  So if you want to check out Rhonda, she's pretty easy to find on the internet. Definitely check out her podcast, Found My Fitness, which you can find on iTunes or her website, foundmyfitness.com. And that's also your Found My Fitness on Twitter and Facebook and all that stuff, right?

• 2:15:15Speaker 01

  Yep, all social media, Facebook, Instagram.

• 2:15:17Rich Roll?

  And I'll put a bunch of links in the show notes to this episode that relate to all kinds of stuff that we talked about today. Cool?

• 2:15:25Speaker 01

  Awesome. Thanks, Rich. Really enjoyed the talk.

• 2:15:27Rich Roll?

  Thank you so much. Peace. Plants.

• 2:15:35Rich Roll?

  All right, you guys, I hope you enjoyed that. Please make a point of visiting the show notes for this episode at richroll.com. This week, they are absolutely bursting at the seams with incredible information to take your learning and your edification from Rhonda to the next level. So you can find that all at richroll.com, episode 209. It's easy to find. While you're at it, make a point of subscribing to my newsletter. I send out weekly podcast updates, video updates, my musings, never any spam, just good stuff. If you want access to the entire RRP catalog beyond the most recent 50 episodes that you can find on iTunes, I've got an app for that, and it's free. Just search Rich Roll in the App Store. It'll pop right up, free download. You can have the entire catalog in the palm

• 2:16:20Rich Roll?

  of your hands. I know there are some bugs in the current iteration of the app. I actually have a couple of guys working on it right now. We're going to be releasing, releasing, I can talk, releasing a new version of that soon. So stick with it, and all of those issues will soon be solved. In case you missed last week's episode, I talked a lot about my commitment in 2016 to video. I'm going to be posting a new video every week on my YouTube channel, so please subscribe there. It's youtube.com/richroll. I'm also posting daily stories on Snapchat, a lot about my morning routines, nutrition, daily habits, random musings, behind the scenes of the podcast. So if you're into that kind of thing,

• 2:17:05Rich Roll?

  you can find me every single day on Snapchat. My username there is I am Rich Roll. I A M Rich Roll. For all your plant power and RRP schwag and merch, visit richroll.com. We've got tons of cool products there to take your health and your vitality and your plant-powered experience to the next level. Keep sending in your questions for future Q and A podcasts to [email protected]. And if you're into online courses, I've got two of those at mindbodygreen.com, The Art of Living with Purpose, which is all about setting intentions and setting goals and achieving them, and also The Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition. Both are multiple hours of streaming video content. It's really great. They're very affordably priced. Soon to be a third course. Julie and I are getting

• 2:17:49Rich Roll?

  ready to shoot a course on relationships, and that will soon be up at mindbodygreen.com as well, probably some point this spring. In any event, thanks for all the love, you guys. I appreciate you listening, for telling your friends, for sharing it on social media, for always using the Amazon banner at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. I love you guys. See you next week. Peace. Plants.