Bioregulator Peptides and Longevity with Phil Micans Msc

Lisa: Well, hi everyone and welcome back to Pushing the Limits. Today's episode is going to be absolutely fascinating. I've been looking forward to having this gentleman on for quite a long time, studying his work. He's absolutely amazing. He's a luminary in this anti-aging longevity space and has been for decades. Author of the Aging Matters magazine, and you run your own shops. Phil Micans, welcome to the show. Fantastic to have you here today.

Phil Micans: Oh, what a great show to be on and be with you. We're probably at the exact opposites on planet Earth, but isn't it fantastic? I'm in England, you're in New Zealand, but it's fantastic to talk to you and I'm looking forward to it too.

Lisa: And you've got your blue light blocking glasses on because it's evening where you are. Very good, I approve. So can you just give people a bit of a background? You've been in the space for decades, but how did you get here? How did you get to be where you are now?

Phil Micans: Well, my personal story is not uncommon. There's two parts to it basically, for me, in terms of my original interest when I was still a teenager. One was I always thought I was aging faster than my friends, for various reasons, and I used to question why. Why is this happening to me and not happening to my mates? That was one side of it.

Phil Micans: And then a bit later on, I had to visit one of my uncles in the hospital and he was fully cognizant, but because of his age they put him in the geriatric ward. Now, just very quickly to point out to people, the correct meaning of the word geriatric just means one thing: it means a person who's 65 or older. It doesn't mean they're incapacitated in any way.

Lisa: Yeah.

Phil Micans: So he had to be in there. I can't remember what he had now — some sort of leg problem, I think. And so I used to spend quite a bit of time with him, chatting and playing chess and other things we did together while he was in the ward. But I noticed the other people, or some of the other people in the ward, and the state they were in, most of whom had regressed to when they were children. And it was an eye-opener for me as a young man to think, my goodness, is this the future we have?

Phil Micans: And on that point, I sometimes think that all schools should do two things to the children. One, take them at least one day to a prison, show them what life in a prison is like, the message there being you don't want to end up in one of these, do you? And the other one is take them to a geriatric ward with the same message: you don't want to end up in one of these, do you? So come on, help us fix this problem.

Phil Micans: So with that in mind, and a bit later on as I was going through school and then to college etc., my eldest brother started a nutritional company. He'd actually met the founders of the Life Extension Foundation in America, and I'm talking now in the very early 80s, and he really picked this up and ran with it. And so he started that in the UK, and out from that I ended up learning, I went off into that area.

Phil Micans: My first learnings in the early 80s were in food and vitamin technology, which is a degree we call nutrition, I think. And I've got a story there, I'll tell you later on. And then after that, over the course of some years, I ended up doing pharmacy and I ended up doing biochemistry. So it was over a span of like 10 years, so I was working and then going back to university and then working, and so on and so forth.

Phil Micans: But once this sort of came to the late 80s, early 90s, we realised that there needed to be access to a lot of these very exciting materials that we were learning about. And I'm now talking, for those younger folks watching, pre-internet. It wasn't so easy to find stuff. You really did have to go down the library to find stuff. And so very early on we recognised the need. Now I know every dog and every man and his dog's got one, but back in the 90s we were one of the first online, if you will, internet pharmacies. But we weren't doing regular run-of-the-mill — we weren't interested in statins, antidepressants. We were doing things that we felt were aimed at, or were in demand for, preventative and regenerative medicine.

Lisa: Wow.

Phil Micans: And so that's where IAS, as we call the group now, the IAS Group, which stands for International Anti-Aging Systems — that's where we focus our efforts, in numerous ways. So we try very hard to get the information out to people and also to help them get hold of certain materials if they require them.

Lisa: That's right, yeah. As tool makers. You're the tool makers, you're bringing the things that are at the cutting edge. And this is the thing, you're at the very cutting edge, you with your magazine. You get to interview the leading people in the world on the current, latest, what's happening in the research laboratories and what's going on. You've managed to get some of the greatest people interviewed there. How has that work been? You also run a summit, an anti-aging longevity summit. A Profound Summit, is it called, I think?

Phil Micans: Today it's referred to as the Profound Health Summit. That's going to be — the next one's taking place in May, in England, May next year. And anyone just type in profoundhealthsummit.com and you'll find it. So yeah, and over the years I've helped summits or conferences in different countries, including Monaco and Thailand and America.

Lisa: We need your help. I'm organising one. I need your help.

Phil Micans: Because it's all about networking, getting people together to share ideas and share resources etc. And in my past I've been extremely lucky. I mean, I had the honour, just as one example, of introducing to the stage, because I've done a lot of moderating in my time, the late great Professor Denham Harman. Well, Denham Harman was the originator of the free radical theory of aging, back in the 50s.

Lisa: Wow.

Phil Micans: So I have met some of the greats, and I do have my own heroes, various doctors and authors and researchers in the field, some of which I'm very pleased to say are still very much with us, and doing some wonderful work.

Lisa: Yes. And I definitely would like to get your insights on that, because it is a mission of mine too, late next year, to try to get a longevity conference going down here. And I've already got the speakers sort of lined up, or many of the speakers. We'd love you to come down, of course. You can ride your motorbike around the South Island while you're here, so that might be a draw card. But I think it's important — New Zealand needs to be thrown into this space in a bigger way. We're sort of lagging behind in awareness, and it's really about getting the awareness of the space, the longevity, biohacking, anti-aging, you-can-live-longer-better space, and the great things that are going on. So off air we might have a chat about that a bit further.

Phil Micans: There are obstacles, obviously, and to be honest with you, the biggest obstacle is regulation. Because most people agree there is great science, there are great professional people, there's great protocols, even great products available today, but where's the space that will let you do it all? It doesn't exist. Some countries let you do this, some countries let you do that. And so there's been a big challenge to find a space that will do that. And I'd love to think that New Zealand could do it, although my personal belief has always been it will be a smaller country. I was in the Bahamas earlier in the year and they've really moved, they're really motivated. Cyprus is really motivated. And so it might be a smaller country that will end up being first to do it, to open up these things.

Lisa: Yeah, and it is — already, without getting down into that rabbit hole, we've got issues and it's difficult for us to get access. One of the real missions that I've been on the last eight years, trying to get things for my mum, the things that I know are going to be beneficial to her — and we've done amazing, done miracles. I mean, the doctors are absolutely gobsmacked at what we've achieved. But I've been hamstrung often by the limitations of what I can actually get in, and I have other doctors who are prescribing stuff and we just can't get it in, and it's frustrating as hell living here. But we just keep working on it, we'll just keep on the positive side of working towards it.

Phil Micans: Dig into the laws, because the authorities will not tell you.

Lisa: And this is one of the challenges — and we'll get off the subject in a second — but that fact that they're still working out what to do with the internet, let alone what to do with peptides or bioregulators or some of the cutting edge stuff that's happening. It's very hard to keep up with legislation when you've got science going on.

Phil Micans: And it's going to get worse, because AI's now come and we're going to even be speeding up the process by which we can have an understanding of a lot more things.

Lisa: Let's go and talk bioregulators. Now this is a hot topic that I've been studying. I've been studying peptides, I'm in love with peptides, and I'm also starting to fall in love with bioregulators. Haven't got as much experience in the bioregulator space, but I've been studying what you've been talking about and many others in this area. And the cool thing about bioregulators is a lot of them are able to be taken orally, or nasal sprays, and they're a little bit more accessible in that sense of the word. Those supply chain issues we can get into later. But can you just give us a definition of what is a bioregulator peptide? Well, what is a peptide, and then what is a bioregulator peptide, and where does the science come from and how does it work?

Phil Micans: Yeah, okay. Well, all the things that we might talk about today, whether it be peptides or proteins or even hormones, they're all made up of amino acids, and there's not so many of those, but that's what they are. And when two amino acids join, that's the moment they become a peptide. So it's two or more amino acids. And then it starts to become, how long is this chain? So if it gets long enough, we might start calling them proteins, and even longer we might start calling them various hormones.

Phil Micans: Just to give one example, human growth hormone is made up of 191 amino acids.

Lisa: Wow, that's a lot.

Phil Micans: Now that lot, okay, that's a lot, and it means one fundamental thing: it means that if you want to get that into your body, you cannot take it orally, it has to be injected, because it's just too unstable. However, as that chain gets smaller, other possibilities present themselves.

Phil Micans: Now, bioregulators are by definition very small chains of amino acids. They are in fact two, three or four amino acids. Now, it doesn't mean to say that every single two, three, four amino acid chain is a bioregulator. There is another terminology to the word, and I'll get into that. And all of this work has been done, or principally has been done, by the Saint Petersburg Institute of Biogerontology under the direction of Vladimir Khavinson, and it's more than 40 years old, because the original work used to be a Soviet military secret.

Lisa: Anything military is interesting.

Phil Micans: It is indeed, very much.

Phil Micans: Very much so, because those guys — and that's true today as it was then — are always able to do things that in the public domain we cannot. And that's true whether it's the American military or the British military, and probably the New Zealand military as well. I'll give one quick example. I'm guessing a lot of people out there have heard of a drug called modafinil, or modafinil, prefer to call it that. Some people refer to it as a smart drug. It doesn't really matter what you want to call it, but what it does — it's revolutionised the treatment of narcolepsy, which is sleeping in the daytime, and cataplexy, which is sudden fatigue. We don't need to perhaps go into the details of it, but it has, and a lot of people are aware of it. That used to be a French military secret.

Lisa: Uh-huh.

Phil Micans: Exactly. So they were given to their — like the French Foreign Legion. During the first Iraq war the French Foreign Legion were taking modafinil. They were behind enemy lines, they could stay alert and awake, et cetera, et cetera. So just to point out, the military are always playing with things, they're always ahead of the game.

Lisa: Yeah, exactly, I agree.

Phil Micans: So what we're talking about now has a long history. It has loads of published information, most of which is now in English as well as Russian, of course. And it's been on several markets — the Russian-speaking markets like Russia, like Kazakhstan and Ukraine — for quite a few years. And the oral versions are food supplements, so as a result they have been used by millions of people and they've seen no serious side effects.

Lisa: Okay, which is important.

Phil Micans: Very important. And I just want to point out that because they're so small, and because also they're nano-sized — the studies have been done — they are absorbed when taken orally.

Lisa: Which is amazing, because all these peptides need to be injected, or at the very least there's a nasal spray, or maybe sublingual if you're lucky.

Phil Micans: But no, these very short chains can be absorbed through the stomach. So there's a lot of positives to them.

Lisa: So why is a — I've had a couple of people on the podcast recently like Ryan Smith and Nathalie Niddam and Dr Elizabeth Yurth talking peptides and absolutely in love with peptides, but most — not all, but most — of the peptides have to be taken subcutaneous injection, which puts a lot of people off, makes it more difficult. How do I dose it, how do I do this? You have to be under the guidance of a medical professional — highly recommend that for everything, by the way — but this is a little bit more of a difficult thing to do, right? And so when I came across the bioregulators it's like, this is too good to be true. I can get some of those benefits. And in fact, the bioregulators, if I understand correctly, go straight into the actual nucleus, the DNA of the nucleus — is that correct? Whereas the peptides are sort of more in the mitochondria, or working on the mitochondria, or working at the cell level, but this is actually going right in.

Phil Micans: The Russians have incredible slides where you even have to put on 3D glasses to see the interaction with, if you will, the peptide key, the bioregulator key, and the specific DNA. Because that's what they are, they're highly specific gene switches. And here's the thing — they're in food, these peptides.

Lisa: Exactly, yeah.

Phil Micans: And so in fact a book has been written — here's a copy of it here — which is a scientific book, it's called Peptides in the Epigenetic Control of Ageing. And to me it was like a light bulb moment, because this is one of my little stories, forgive me. When I was doing that food and vitamin course in London many, many years ago, on the overhead projector — to give you an idea how long ago it was — the lecturer put up a pie chart and he said, "This is typically what you find in food." And there was X percentage of vitamins, X percentage of minerals, X percentage of oils — I prefer to call them oils than fats.

Lisa: Agree.

Phil Micans: But most of it was fibre, you see. And I remember on that very day having a thought, and my thought was, well, fibre must be pretty important because more than 50 per cent of food is fibre, and nature doesn't waste anything. And bear in mind, in 1981 nobody was really talking fibre then, right? So I had this thought: well, fibre could be a lot more important than we think it is. And my second thought was, or maybe they've missed something. So fast forward to about 2009, 2010, when I first heard Professor Khavinson lecture, which happened to be in Istanbul, and he talked about how these short chain peptides are in foods, how they act as very specific gene switches, and how they were a major part in the epigenetics of food. To me it was the light bulb moment. It took me back to the classroom where I asked the question, have they missed something? And I think the answer to that is yes, they had missed the fact that foods contain peptides and they act as gene switches.

Lisa: So you are what you eat. You can't get more than — it can activate a gene or it can silence a gene. This is really, really important. So a gene switch. I've studied genetics and epigenetics, and we inherit the genes from mum and dad, but really it's the epigenetic influences, everything in the environment, everything that's above the genetics that actually will write the story. Because the genetics loads the gun, but it's the environment that pulls the trigger, is the saying. And so these are those things that can turn these genes on and off like a switch. You said they can only be on or off. When we look at the Horvath clock and the DNA methylation biological aging clocks, don't they have — and I had Ryan Smith on a couple of weeks ago, so I don't have my head around the science — but do they not have varying degrees of on-ness or off-ness? Because with methylation...

Phil Micans: Well, it could be, in the sense of the process, because it doesn't happen instantaneously. So in fact there's a big call-out at the moment about how long does it take to move from one position to another position. So I think that that is feasible in that respect. But this is another thing that even I think Professor Khavinson can't quite explain at this stage: how can the same peptide know when to activate that gene and when to silence it?

Lisa: Modulating. This is the modulating part. It's a huge thing.

Phil Micans: So the example I always give is your thyroid gland. There's our thyroid gland in our neck. I think a lot of us know if you have too little thyroid, it's called hypothyroidism, and many adults have this problem.

Lisa: Many, many, many.

Phil Micans: Yeah, and it can cause all sorts of problems — your temperature control, your general state of metabolism, how you sleep, etc. And a handful of people — it's less common, but there are people who are hyperthyroid, and they tend to be the opposite. They have a lot of energy, they're too active. Some people refer to them as having the deer in the headlights, because their eyes pop out. Some people think the Mona Lisa was hyperthyroid, by looking at her. But they tend to have the opposite. And yet if you use the thyroid bioregulator, if you're hypothyroid it will activate those genes and you will endogenously start producing more thyroid hormones. But if you're hyperthyroid, it will silence them and you'll reduce it. It actually puts you within, how should we call it, a normalised range. And I think that helps to explain their safety. Because if one was to take a thyroid hormone, clearly you're putting that hormone into your blood and it will have an action. The peptides, through the genes, are instructing the thyroid to activate or to silence, but they're not forcing anything.

Lisa: If one is taking hormones, there's a definite need for monitoring, absolutely.

Phil Micans: Yes, or whatever, because if you keep up too high a level of many hormones you get what's called downregulation.

Lisa: Yes, where you could end up — your own thyroid in this case could end up stop making thyroid, because it says, oh, there's stuff everywhere, we've got too much of it.

Phil Micans: But that doesn't happen with the bioregulators.

Lisa: So that is, I think, one of the most fascinating parts of this technology, and this is where it's super exciting. Because today we've had all the pharmaceutical drugs that have come out, which have their place and their time, but they tend to be pushing on one pathway and they're having a lot of collateral damage, for the want of a better description — so things that are unwanted implications. And the example of blood pressure medication: if you give someone who has high blood pressure blood pressure medication, it will drop their blood pressure, but if you give someone whose blood pressure is normal blood pressure medication, it'll make it low. So it's forcing it in that downward direction. Whereas with the bioregulators you're just making the body — so it's going a step lower, is it, or a step higher in the hierarchy? Basically where the body's just given the permission or the ability to actually regulate itself: oh, he needs more, or he needs less of this, and therefore brings it back into balance. And that's a very exciting concept, because I'm very excited by hormones as well, bioidentical hormones and what they can do for people. I think they're very powerful, amazing things, but we do need to monitor, because we don't want to be pushing too hard one way or the other way. Not having hormones in the mix, whether you're just going to age a lot faster and have all the downsides of heart risk and brain risk and everything.

Phil Micans: There's no doubt that hormones, particularly bioidentical hormones, are incredibly powerful tools, but they're also very complicated. You only have to look to the work of somebody like Dr Thierry Hertoghe in Belgium, who is an incredible endocrinologist and he has an incredible knowledge, but I think there's handfuls of people like him, because it is very complicated. Once you introduce — just to come back to the thyroid again — there are four principal thyroid hormones, we'll use the T names: T1, T2, T3, T4. And yet some countries only use T4.

Lisa: I know. Some use T3.

Phil Micans: And virtually none of them use T1 and T2, unless you're taking a natural desiccated thyroid like Armour, which comes from pigs, and then you get T1, T2, T3, T4. But that's what the peptide's doing. It's instructing your own thyroid gland, so it's going to get the mix right. You're not forcing it in one direction or another.

Lisa: Yeah. If I look at, sorry, extracts like liver extract or adrenal extract that have actually come from the liver of a cow usually, or a pig or whatever — is that a crude form of bioregulator that's not been refined enough? Not saying it's good or bad, but...

Phil Micans: Yeah, I have been asked this question before. In the beginning of my career — and let's be honest, organ extracts were the first big thing. In the 1920s and 1930s organ extracts were the thing. And in my early career there was a lot of demand for organ extracts, and it moved on to different things, bioidentical hormones obviously in more recent years, and now I think peptides and other things, but I won't go into those. So yes, I think there is an argument that obviously if you — I'm going to forget your Weston Price — there was a man called Weston Price who many, many years ago went and studied native tribes, many of which don't exist anymore, and he

Phil Micans Msc: He discovered a number of things, and there was one in particular that I remember — I think it was a South African tribe, no, a South American tribe if I remember rightly — and they were eating the necks of animals and they were consuming the thyroid glands. He was basically saying how they had no thyroid issues. And if you think about our forebears, they ate every part of an animal. Nothing was wasted.

Lisa: Yeah, we're very fussy now. "Oh, I won't eat the black meat of a chicken," or whatever it is.

Phil Micans Msc: Whereas they were eating the organs, the glands and such like. And so there's no doubt they were consuming the hormones that were coming out of those glands, and probably the peptides as well and other aspects of it. So yes, I think if you eat glands or specific types, in this case, of meat, you will be receiving certain peptides. There's no question of that. It's just the old story that if you take the supplement, you are of course getting a much more condensed and measured dose, obviously.

Lisa: So if we go back to the bioregulator story and Professor Khavinson's work, tell us a little bit about his story, because it's a very interesting story, and some of the massive research studies that he did back in the day would be impossible to do now. So why is this compelling? And I know we've got the war between Russia and Ukraine and the Cold War and that, but let's put that aside for a second and just look at the science, because I always love to just talk about the science, not the politics. Let's not bring that into it. Let's just look at the story and tell us a little bit about that.

Phil Micans Msc: Somebody very famous said — and I really must go back and find out who it was — and I think no matter where you're from in the world, we can probably make this statement, and they said, "I'm proud of my country, I'm just ashamed of my government."

Lisa: Yes. There's a lot of good citizens in every country, yeah. There we go. Okay, with that one.

Phil Micans Msc: But Professor Khavinson back in the 80s was a colonel in the medical corps, and he received a call from the Kremlin. Because he was at the Institute, of course, in Saint Petersburg, and he received a call from the Kremlin, and they basically said that the Americans had developed new battlefield weapons. One was a laser that, if it was shone across the battlefield, anyone seeing it would go blind. They said, "Find something that would fix that." And also they noticed that their submariners, who were staying on the sea beds for months at a time, and those in missile silos, were ageing fast. Now perhaps that's not surprising when you consider they're maybe sitting ten feet away from a nuclear reactor — radiation. But nonetheless, they were concerned about them and they wanted to find something.

Phil Micans Msc: Now, they went down some blind alleys. They didn't go to the first thing they saw. But they had one advantage, actually, which I was only made aware of fairly recently. The famous Pavlov — I think everyone has heard the story of Pavlov and the dog salivating — well, he came from that same Institute many years ago, and he's actually the man that is recognised as discovering short chain peptides. So that Institute was aware of these short chain peptides, and I think that may have been an influence for them to go down that path.

Phil Micans Msc: So of course they did in vitro studies, and then they did animal studies, and then they ended up doing human studies. And as you rightly said, Lisa, they did some of the biggest human studies you've ever heard of. The biggest one being Gazprom workers — people in the oil and gas business — and there were over 11,000 of them who were monitored over 12 years. And there was one group of three thousand who took vitamin pills as a placebo, and then the other eight or nine thousand taking the various peptides, and then they saw the outcomes. And they even followed up on some of those people even longer. They even took over a thousand people and followed them up almost to the ends of their lives in some cases.

Lisa: Wow.

Phil Micans Msc: I suppose I should tell you that the outcome of those trials was that those who took the peptides had one third of the morbidity. So in other words, they had one third of the problems that the people in the placebo group had. And unbelievably, in later life, they had one third of the mortality.

Lisa: Insane. And these are people living in Siberia under stressful, difficult conditions as well. And they had these bioregulators for three years and then it was stopped, but that had a long-term consequence even 15 years later. What were the ones that they were on? Because they were on a combination of three, weren't they?

Phil Micans Msc: There was a few, but the three principal ones that kind of come up again and again were the pineal, the blood vessel and the thymus. Those three seem to be the most replicated. There were other tests. There were tractor workers in Kazan, which is very much central Russia. I think there were about 3,600 or 800 people in that trial — very similar results. There were studies in Kiev, again in the hundreds of people, similar results.

Phil Micans Msc: And what I'm pleased to also say, because everyone goes, "Yeah, yeah, but it was the Soviet Union and we don't trust them" and all the rest of it — well, there's an American doctor now by the name of Bill Lawrence. Bill's in Atlanta, and for more than four years, in fact probably five years now, he's been replicating the Russian protocol.

Lisa: Yeah.

Phil Micans Msc: And he got the same results, only he's been doing a lot more tests. He's been doing the Horvath test, the epigenetic test, and he's telling me —

Lisa: Yeah, yeah, because he's got more advanced technology now to measure things like —

Phil Micans Msc: Telling me, like, there's a —

Lisa: Actually, I had Dr Suzanne Turner on just a couple of days ago, and she's actually a part of his study. She's an incredible functional medicine doctor herself who uses bioregulators and peptides, and she's actually a part of his study. So I was very interested to learn about Dr Bill Lawrence, and I'd love to interview him. Gosh, it would be amazing.

Phil Micans Msc: Last time I spoke to Bill, which is a couple of months ago now, he said he's got over 120 people in the trial now, he's starting to bridge 130, and most of them are doctors.

Lisa: Amazing, amazing. And Dr Suzanne's one of them.

Phil Micans Msc: There we go. Yeah. And if we can replicate what Professor Khavinson was seeing, then we would have a validation in modern day times in America by an American doctor, that this has value.

Lisa: Because there is pushback in the community, and I've heard lots of people say, "Well, that's Russia and how do we trust them?" And then there's the translation problems and all the stuff that you've helped actually with Professor Khavinson too, to bring those translations so that we do have access.

Lisa: So let's go now into the bioregulators themselves. You've got, like, I think it's 21 bioregulators, and they basically match the organ systems. Now, the nomenclature is very, very confusing. I've still not got a grip on it. And there's different types, different brands and things like that. But if people are interested in doing this, what's the most accessible point for them to get these? I've been on Epitalon. I'm hoping to get the ovary one, but it's all out of stock at the moment, all the stuff that you have in your ranges.

Phil Micans Msc: Yeah, it's a temporary blip, a temporary blip in the supply chain.

Lisa: So we should be able to get this. I'm very, very interested in the thyroid. I work with a lot of people with thyroid issues and it's very tough. And I've got a mum actually at the moment who has a problem with the thyroid. We've got everything else looking pretty bloody good, but the thyroid — and we're putting in quite high doses of T3 and T4, but because she's got Hashimoto's and so on. Would Thyreogen, I believe is the name of the thyroid peptide —

Phil Micans Msc: Because they have different names whether they're from natural sources or synthetic sources, and then they've got different names whether they're sublingual or injectable, although there's not many of those available, or oral. So it does get rather confusing, I'm afraid. So that's why, when you hear me talk, invariably I say the thyroid, the pineal — talk about the organ system.

Lisa: Yeah, but it would be good to know, like when we're going to actually try these, to buy these supplements, because they are supplements, they're mostly oral, to know what ones we're looking at.

Phil Micans Msc: I don't have a glass of water. Do you mind if we just carry on?

Lisa: You go and get it, grab your water or grab a cup of tea, yeah, and just — what if I was doing that?

Lisa: Yes, so there were 21 bioregulators, and we're going to be talking about the organ systems that are involved with this. So there's bioregulators for the thyroid, for the adrenals, for the ovaries, for the prostate, for the lungs — what am I missing? For the blood vessel, one is something I'm very interested in. It seems to be part of all the basic peptide stacks that are in the mix. So I think it's going to be a very interesting conversation with the fella about how these work.

Lisa: Now, remembering these are only two to four amino acids long, and they can actually become gene switches when they can get through the gastric juices and they can get through into the system and get into the cells and get into the nucleus of the cells and actually influence the gene switches, so what's being turned on and what's being turned off. You'd have heard me talk about, you know, we're influencing our genes all day, every day, with everything that we do. So while we are inheriting our genes, we're actually also empowered, because we can actually turn things on and off. So if I hop in a sauna, I turn on a whole lot of genes. If I have a cup of coffee, I'll turn on and off a whole lot of other genes. If I go into a freezer, again. So we are able to turn our genes on and off. So this is where it becomes very, very fascinating in the bioregulators, and how we can actually use that gene on-and-offness to influence our health, to actually improve our health.

Lisa: So looking forward to continuing this conversation with Phil. I do hope that we can get the knowledge out. We've done quite a few episodes now with peptides, and obviously I'm a huge fan of those and like to see those more readily available and doctors training in these things. But it is a little bit more complicated and a little more difficult to do, being, you know, subcutaneous injections mostly, with a few variations there. But I think we'll leave it at that while we're just waiting for Phil to come back online.

Lisa: All right, so we're back again, and Phil's got a glass of water and we're ready for the second round. So we were talking about the 21 bioregulators that are available and the different organs that we relate to them, and how difficult the nomenclature is. So let's go through some of the actual organ systems. We were talking about thyroid in particular. So can you give me a little bit of — because it's one that I'm specifically looking for, to get for Mum, because of the modulatory side of it. Tell me a little bit about Thyreogen, I think it's called.

Phil Micans Msc: Yeah, you're absolutely right. So it's a gene switch for thyroid. As we've described, it's a bioregulator, so if folks are low in thyroid it will raise them up, but if they're too high in thyroid it will lower them down. But let's also bear in mind that if you're

Phil Micans Msc: in the normal zone, it'll do nothing for you. It's not going to cause the issue. Bodybuilders don't get very excited about these things, because in the example of testosterone, they want to have a supraphysiological level. Won't happen. But normal folks, and especially ageing folks, who want to say, "I want to maintain a good healthy level" — this is where they really come into their own, with this safety profile, where you are not saying that you become less careful in your attitude. And as you pointed out earlier, Lisa, you should always be working with a health professional, know something about what you're doing, but you don't have to be quite so scared about them as you would do if you were using injections, hardcore drugs and various hormones, of course. So that's the good news.

Phil Micans Msc: One thing to point out: if you haven't got the gland or the tissue, it ain't going to work. So if you've had the thyroid removed, folks who've had their thyroids removed, they're going to have to go on the thyroid hormone. There's no choice for those folks. And the other thing to bear in mind is, if you are taking hormones or drugs to support your thyroid in this case, and then you go on to the peptide as well, then monitor yourself extra closely. Because obviously, if you're still putting those hormones in at the same level all the time, almost certainly you're going to have to bring them down, or even come off them. I have seen that in some cases. So just be aware of that.

Phil Micans Msc: Now, just a nice little thing your listeners, I hope, might like to know. I like to look at the old-fashioned ways of measuring things. Before there were blood tests, the thyroid was very simply measured, and we can all do this. And that is, you get up in the morning, take your temperature straight away and write that down. And over about two weeks, have a look at that list and see which number appears most often. You will be gobsmacked at how close those numbers are. So I'm going to talk in Celsius — anyone glad to get there, you know, we're in Celsius over here. But a good thyroid in an adult is between 36.3 and 36.7. If you're over 36.7 rising-from-bed morning temperature, you're likely to be hyperthyroid. If you're under 36.3, you're likely to be hypothyroid. And believe me, many people are, for various reasons.

Phil Micans Msc: Now, the late great Doctor Broda Barnes wrote a book, and that book was called something — I might get this slightly wrong — but "Hypothyroidism: The Unsuspected Illness", the undiagnosed epidemic. And in that book, which he probably wrote, I think, in the 80s or early 90s, he suggested that 50% or more of the adult population was hypothyroid.

Lisa: Wow. Okay.

Phil Micans Msc: Now, his pupil is a lovely gentleman by the name of Rick Wilkinson, Dr Rick Wilkinson, and Rick's still very much alive and kicking and practises medicine in Washington State. And I interviewed him some time ago and I asked him that same question. I said, "You know, you're a pupil of Broda Barnes. Broda Barnes said that more than 50% of the adult population was hypothyroid. Is it better today?" And he went, "No, it's worse." And he said, "It's over 60%." So there's a lot of people out there suffering with a weak thyroid and they don't properly realise that if you just get it back up to normal parameters, many good things happen.

Lisa: Yeah, and it's underdiagnosed, because mostly the doctors will just look at the TSH, and if you're really lucky, a T4, occasionally a T3, but they're not looking at the whole picture. And then you've got the Hashimoto's. So when it comes to Hashimoto's, where the body's attacking its own thyroid tissue, would the bioregulator help there — the thyroid bioregulator help there?

Phil Micans Msc: They do, although you've got to be more cautious. That's the one possible area, autoimmune diseases, where you've got to be more cautious in your approach. In other words, you don't rush on to a high dose. You would take it more cautiously. And by the way, just as a side point here, because I work with, or I have worked with, Dr Walter Pierpaoli from Italy — some people's thyroid problems aren't thyroid problems, they're pituitary problems. Because the pituitary gland needs to release thyrotropin-releasing hormone, which releases TSH, which releases the thyroid hormones. So it can actually be not a thyroid, but a pituitary problem. And that's a whole story for another day, about TRH.

Lisa: I think we could actually — I'm just scraping the top of the iceberg there in studying Dr Walter Pierpaoli's work and the TRH, and I haven't got a full grip on it whatsoever, but I would be very interested to talk to you maybe on a separate podcast about the pituitary, the TRH and the melatonin research that's coming out. Because I work with quite a lot of people with brain concussions and TBIs and things, and I think one of the underestimated problems with post-concussive syndromes and things is that the pituitary is offline. It's not doing what it should be doing, and that's not being picked up in the initial diagnosis. So hormones, of course, testosterone levels dropping, women their hormones not doing what they should be doing, and that's an undiagnosed thing often as well, I think. Especially here, we don't have SPECT scans or anything, so people are just told to rest, basically, and it's one of my pet peeves over head injuries.

Phil Micans Msc: There's so much about Walter, because he's one of the most brilliant men I've ever met in my life. And he's in his 80s now, but of course he's famous for his work on melatonin, but he's less known for his work on TRH and the hypothalamus as well as the pituitary. So yeah, he's got something there, he really has. Because of his age, he doesn't do as much as he used to do, you know, just the way it is. But there are some stories about melatonin that are gobsmackers.

Lisa: Yeah, and maybe we do a whole podcast if you've got time at some point, Phil, in the next month or two, and we actually go deep dive TRH, Dr Walter Pierpaoli, because I think that —

Phil Micans Msc: Yeah, be happy to. I consider him a close family friend as well. But I think, just to bring it back to bioregulators —

Lisa: Yeah, about the pineal, because melatonin is produced in the pineal, so there is a link to it.

Phil Micans Msc: There's a connection. And why is the pineal possibly the most important to date of the bioregulators? Well, I feel it is the one that is most likely to be lengthening telomeres. So I think everyone out there is familiar with that — you have longer telomeres, the more protective. For anyone who doesn't know, they're like the aglets on the end of our shoelaces. They're a little bit of plastic, but in this case they're on the end of chromosomes, and so the longer they are, the more protective they are. Because if we didn't have aglets on our shoelaces, what would they look like? It'd be a mess, right? Something similar it is between telomeres and chromosomes. So there is a very strong thinking that the longer the telomeres, the more protective they are, and a lot of people focus on that.

Phil Micans Msc: And Dr Lawrence's work, and also the Russian work — the Russians showed it, not in large numbers of people, because bear in mind in the 90s and 2000s it's pretty difficult to get hold of. But they showed it extended, particularly in mice. But Dr Lawrence now, in more recent years, has shown it with his actual patients. These are not young people, these are older people. So the pineal, I think, is really important. And of course, by using the pineal peptide, you're also increasing your own endogenous production of melatonin. Now I can't speak for New Zealand. In America, of course, we all know you can go down to Walmart and buy melatonin without prescription, easy. Here in the UK, you need a prescription.

Lisa: We can't, yeah.

Phil Micans Msc: But the peptide can help your own pineal gland produce more melatonin. And just very, very quickly about the role of melatonin, one quote from Walter which I love — Walter once said to me, in his fantastic Italian accent which sounds like music to our ear, right, I won't do it, don't worry, I won't try and do it — he said, "Phil, think of the pineal gland." Which is, if we draw a line from the top of our ears and the middle of our forehead, you know, the bindu, the Hindu spot, that's the third eye, that represents the pineal. But if you draw a line there and you draw a line there, you find the centre of your brain — that's where the pineal gland is. It's about the size of a pea. Pretty small. One of the things it produces, of course, is melatonin. And melatonin is produced in response to darkness. Okay, why? Because all the other glands in our body producing whatever hormones need to know if it's day or night.

Lisa: Exactly.

Phil Micans Msc: It's very simple. And most hormones — not all, but most hormones — are produced first thing in the morning. So that's the impetus to get up and get on with the day. Of course, with some hormones there are pulsatile increases through the day, but normally the big bang is in the morning. That's all because of melatonin. So when melatonin is high in blood because of darkness, other hormones, if you will, are at a supreme moment. The light comes up and this drops down, everything else comes into action. So once you've got this healthy circadian rhythmicity, you've got hormonal cyclicity, you've got a strong immune system.

Lisa: And that's why a lot of the people we see are people working on jet aircraft, and especially the ladies, because their periods are all over the place or they're having trouble with their fertility, because their bodies — one minute they're in Australia, the next —

Phil Micans Msc: Yeah, they're in time zones. It's just horrific for the body.

Lisa: Exactly, yeah.

Phil Micans Msc: But sorry, I'll end with this one, then we'll carry on, because there's other things. But I read once that the body naturally needs to recover from one hour time difference —

Lisa: I was just going to say that one —

Phil Micans Msc: — in one day. So if you and I are travelling between London and Auckland, you know — without using melatonin. You can shorten it by using melatonin. But of course, in the old days when we all went on a ship, that wasn't a problem.

Lisa: No, but we were changing time zones, and I'm seeing lots of people that have mucked up their hormone cyclicities. It was all mucked up because of the way that we — you know, our ancient DNA, we used to be in caves and huts, and when it went dark we had a fire, and that was red light. And that's why you're wearing blue light blocking glasses, because you don't want blue light at night, because that's not the way the world operates. We have blue light during the day, and then cortisol.

Phil Micans Msc: I hate to mention it, but this is also Russian research. There are crystals within the pineal gland that react to lunar light and starlight. Of course, it doesn't impede the production of melatonin. And when you think about it, that makes sense, because our forebears, nice warm nights sleeping under the tree — you can't have all that starlight and moonlight disrupting your sleep. So it doesn't. It's only the sunlight.

Lisa: Wow, I didn't know that, because I thought moonlight did as well, and you needed to be in a fully blacked-out room to get the benefits.

Phil Micans Msc: No, not moonlight. But there's something else going on there. There's a reaction with these crystals, there's something else going on there. But you're absolutely right, Lisa, one of the worst ones is blue light.

Lisa: Yeah, and in our bedrooms now there's a blinking light on the fire alarm, and a blinking light on, I don't know, the alarm clock or whatever it is, controls — that all your

Lisa: ...blinds are too thin and they're letting the light in, or your partner is reading or watching something, in which case you've got to get a blindfold, right?

Phil Micans Msc: So you've got to get yourself in a dark space. Very important. Very, very important.

Lisa: And wear your blue light blocking glasses, like Phil is so fashionably modelling for us today. And I'm sitting under a daylight lamp because I'm inside in the daytime, so I'm getting what I can when I'm working, and then I'll get outside when I can. We need, I think, two hours a day of exposure to being outdoors. We don't want to over-expose our skin, but we want to get more sunlight in the day, and you make more melatonin at night.

Phil Micans Msc: Exactly. And this is why people who work outside...

Lisa: My dad was a classic. He was always outdoors, in the garden all day every day, working in the house or the garden. And he was a smoker, terrible smoker, like two packets a day, and eventually he got arteriosclerosis, arterial stiffness, and he died from an arterial aneurysm.

Phil Micans Msc: My father died of emphysema, and thankfully, and possibly partly because of that, I've never smoked.

Lisa: No, me neither.

Phil Micans Msc: I think that, going back to the children, seeing what can happen is a great way to set your life on the right path.

Lisa: But with Dad, the fact that, despite his bad lifestyle of smoking and eating pies and fish and chips way too often, and cakes because he loved his food, he was healthy up until the day when he went down with it. And I think it's because he spent all day outdoors. He was strong, powerful, functionally fit, and his downward pull was the smoking, living against nature. We're not in a battle against nature.

Phil Micans Msc: I mean, he was probably grounding himself as well, standing on grass or whatever, and outdoors all the time. Plenty of sunlight, plenty of vitamin D production, etc, etc, having good sleep at night time. It all goes hand in glove, all this stuff.

Lisa: Yeah, and he was 81 when he died, and he would have lived another 20 years if he didn't have that, because he had smoked two packs a day for 50-something years and he still didn't have any lung issues or anything. He was so lucky in his unluck. But just to show the importance, I think, of being outdoors. We are made to be outdoors, working outside, and unfortunately our days don't allow us that when we're working on computers and things a lot. So I supplement with a bit of extra daylight and then I get outside and get my two hours' exposure a day if I can.

Phil Micans Msc: If you ever want to, Lisa — I'm not going to suggest it today — but if you want to ever talk about the work of a guy called Professor Paul Clayton from the Royal College of Medicine in London, and his studies of what we would call the mid-Victorians. This is people that were around from sort of 1820, 1830 to 1850, just pre-industrialisation. Everybody's shocked to learn they lived as long as we did.

Lisa: Wow.

Phil Micans Msc: And that's taken from the data at the London libraries. Because everyone assumes, oh, everything's going up. And it's not anymore, okay, it's not now. But actually there's a blip in those mid-1800s, and that's not accounted for in the generalities. If you want to know why, I'll go into it, because he's come up with all the data as to what. And part of it was that these guys were hard-working, physical, hard-working outside all the time. Nobody had a car, nobody had — you were a rich man if you had a horse. So there was no gym membership in 1830. You just worked all day outside.

Lisa: And it's functional fitness. It's getting down on the floor, it's pulling, it's pushing, it's doing all these functional movements, and we replicate them by going to the gym. But actually, if we were to be doing hard manual labour all our lives — and you look at the people in places like Nepal, where they're still living like that, they have other problems because often they don't have the best medical care when they do get something. But if you look at how healthy they are, how strong they are, how powerful they are, and if you gave them the same medical treatments that we can get hold of, man, they would probably live for a lot longer, I think.

Phil Micans Msc: Yeah, there's something to be said. The comment I made about getting past childhood diseases — a lot of people, once they got into adulthood, I should have pointed that out, they lived as long as we did.

Lisa: I gotcha, yeah. And that brings the statistics down, because a lot of people argue, oh well, back in the caveman days they only lived to their 30s. Yeah, that's true, because they didn't survive the first year of life usually, a lot of people died, so it brought the average down. But if we take that out, once you were an adult...

And I do want to go back to the bioregulators, but I did want to mention one thing, because before we recorded we were talking about the dangers of excessive aerobic exercise once you hit your 40s and beyond — 35 to 40 and onwards. I heard you talk about that on another podcast and I was like, wow, okay, that's my experience. You said that oxygen and aerobic training is a double-edged sword. Tell me in your own words, why can over-exercising and cardiovascular exercise actually be detrimental for you?

Phil Micans Msc: There is one other side story to this. There's a thing called hormesis, proposed by Professor Suresh Rattan from Denmark, and basically it's mild stress, and he basically says this is good for you, this is good for us. And when you think about it, your average exercise is exactly that. You're doing damage to your muscles in order for them to regrow, we get stronger, whatever, right? But not in an extreme way.

Now, just as an interesting side note — and I'll be happy to get into that story we discussed earlier — the Russians have used these peptide bioregulators in their Olympic teams, and they use them after the event. They also use them in their cosmonauts to induce protein synthesis, to get recovery back as fast as possible. Now, there's a lovely picture of the young girls, 18, 19, 20 years old, of the Russian gymnastic team who won the gold medal in London at the last London Olympics. When they came back to Russia, they took the girls' blood, and they were horrified to find their telomeres had dramatically shortened and were equivalent to a 40-year-old. So you looked at this 20-year-old girl, super fit, just won a gold medal in gymnastics, you can imagine, and she had terrible telomeres. And the only reasoning is the extreme exercise leading up to the event, at the event, and then trying to recover afterwards. They did put them on the peptide bioregulators, and I'm very happy to say that within just a few weeks they saw a complete recovery. And they do a similar thing with the cosmonauts, who put themselves, in their case, in an extreme environment, being in space for a year or whatever it is.

So there's a guy called Dr Rich Lippman — lovely guy, Rich — and he's a free radical expert. In fact, he's been nominated for the Nobel Prize for it. A Swedish gentleman. And he's written a book which can be found in the usual places called Stay 40. I find it a very interesting book, because he approaches a number of problems that occur with ageing, and he offers three solutions. His three solutions are based on: if you haven't got a lot of time and money, do this, because it will help you; if you've got a bit of time and money, do that, because it's better; and if you really want to do the gold standard, do this. So it's like a one, two, three.

Lisa: Awesome. I like that. Really good.

Phil Micans Msc: And so there's a section in that book where Rich, of course, describes how our bodies have three natural defence lines for free radicals in our body, and how our bodies naturally make free radicals. Now, you might be thinking, oh yeah, if I was near Chernobyl I'd have a hell of a problem. Yes, there's always outside influences, of course there are, but just in our day-to-day living, and of course as we get older...

So the mitochondria are the organelles that produce the energy in every cell of our body, the ultimate energy being ATP, adenosine triphosphate. All the glucose is transformed to ATP. But as we get older, the mitochondria become larger and less efficient. If you've got, let's say, poorly performing mitochondria in your liver, it can't go and borrow ATP from perhaps your kidneys, which are performing well. It doesn't work like that. So it's very dependent upon the tissue and the organ they happen to be residing in.

So what Rich describes in that book, Stay 40, is how, as we age, some of these defence mechanisms break down, and that if we don't support them with the right nutrition, they just get worse and worse. And the mitochondria, by using copious amounts of oxygen — at one level it produces a lot of energy, on another level it's very damaging, and it can end up producing some of the worst free radicals that we naturally produce, which are the superoxide radical and the hydroxyl radical. So what most people don't know is that, because of this cascade, you have to take a kind of plethora of antioxidants. You've got good ones like glutathione, right, and it's a good one, but it ain't gonna do it all. What you're basically doing is you're kind of forcing it down to the next level. So you might be neutralising the worst free radicals, but if you don't have it in the next level, you'll just create more in the next level.

Lisa: Wow. So is this what the whole antioxidant... We used to think 20 years ago, oh, we've got too much oxidative damage and free radicals running around, we'll just put antioxidants in the mix and Bob's your uncle, we're going to be healthy forever. That was the theory.

Phil Micans Msc: Yeah, it doesn't work like that. He came up with that free radical theory of ageing. He was actually a chemist, and he saw it happening in oils and stuff, and then he said, oh, is this what's happening in the body? I think it's more complicated than that. But there's no question that free radicals are damaging if they get out of control.

So in Rich's book there's a very interesting section where he has a bunch of people, about 20 people, middle-aged people, men and women, and they're standing there in their underwear. You see them and they're all a bit flabby and this and that and the other, and they all decided to go, over about a year, 18 months, onto an aerobic exercise programme. And as far as I'm aware, they didn't do much in the way of anything else — no, they really just did aerobics. And what happens is, you go through and you read on, and suddenly you get to a page and you see these same people again standing in their underwear, and they all look better, to a person. They've lost weight, they look trimmer, and you say, oh well, there you go, that proves it. But what he doesn't do is, he doesn't show you their heads, you see. And I didn't notice that the first time.

Lisa: I looked at it, and then you turn over another page and now you have the heads before and the heads now. And after a year, 18 months, I would say most of them look 10 years older. The hair is grey, the skin is sagging, wrinkles have appeared. It very much shows in the face.

Phil Micans: So Richard's argument was, these are older people, they went onto really quite tough aerobic exercise and they didn't protect themselves from the free radical damage.

Lisa: Exactly, exactly. But yeah, I think, as an ultra endurance athlete, I watched some of my colleagues who are now in their 50s and 60s, and they're still doing the same thing, because we can. Our endurance doesn't drop, our speed drops. A 19-year-old and a 64-year-old are at the same level of aerobic, VO2 max. So with ultramarathons, you peak at about 48, and women are almost as good as the men on the really long stuff — that's another story.

Lisa: So I have got colleagues that are in their 60s and 70s even that are still doing massive amounts of ultra endurance, and they have very good cardiovascular. They're fit, they're strong, they're lean. What they usually look like is old boots: dried out, dehydrated, often they look older in the face. And I think partly that's to do with, you lose fat in your face, and of course fat in your face makes you look younger. So I wouldn't want to put it all down to the free radical theory there, but I do think that — and I know of myself personally, 70% of my training is now weight training, it's resistance work, it's building muscle and mobility.

Phil Micans: Right, and it's not prolonged.

Lisa: No. Short aerobic, so now a 5K run is my sort of go-to, not a 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70K run.

Phil Micans: I have a friend who I hadn't seen for a number of years, and then I met him. At first I didn't want to say anything, because he was much thinner, rather drawn. I honestly thought he'd had cancer. I looked at him and thought, oh my God, you've got cancer. And he went, what do you think then, I've been doing marathons. And I couldn't say anything to him, but honestly, he didn't look healthy to me.

Phil Micans: We discussed a little earlier off screen, didn't we, Lisa, that we used to measure arterial stiffness in people. And I noticed that I could start telling — look at these people who are in their 30s, 40s, 50s who were doing Ironmans and all those sorts of things, extreme aerobics and really pushing themselves, whether it's cycling or running or whatever the case may be. And you looked at them and you thought, well, you're fit, there's no question you're fit, but you don't look quite right. Like you said, you look older, you're quite drawn. But when we tested their arterial stiffness, they were always bad.

Lisa: That's scary.

Phil Micans: And the reason is this — it's a hand in glove kind of situation. They're generating a lot of free radicals, and as they're getting older, they're not doing the right thing, the right foods, the right antioxidants to negate these things. And on top of that, they're accelerating their glycation. And glycation is where proteins cross-link with oxygen and glucose. This is a big problem for diabetics. This is where diabetics do not live as long, and a measurement for diabetes is to measure how many glycated proteins there are in the individual. Well, you get this in extreme sports people as well.

Lisa: Wow.

Phil Micans: Now, I'm aware that these athletes in the studies I've read don't live as long as the average person. And I think it's just tipping the balance. Everything in life that I'm seeing is on a curve, and the curve sometimes is inverted, and you want to be in the middle. So take a stupid one: drinking water. If you drink too much water, it's dangerous. If you drink too little water, it's dangerous. You want to be in the middle, right?

Lisa: Yeah.

Phil Micans: And that's true of everything we do. You want to be in the middle, you don't want to go to the extremes.

Phil Micans: And I just want to mention, if I may, the work of a cardiologist — the late cardiologist, unfortunately, some time ago, an American cardiologist. His name was Kenneth Kensey, and he wrote a book which can be found on Amazon for peanuts now, called The Blood Thinner Cure. It's a pretty good, pretty interesting book. So what he did is he went out and he analysed all the usual cardiovascular markers — cholesterol, HbA1c, homocysteine, triglycerides, all the things that we've come across. And he evaluated them all and he said, there are two markers that are head and shoulders more important than any other marker, and those were blood viscosity and arterial stiffness. Blood viscosity, in other words, keep your blood a bit thin, you don't want it too thick, and you want to keep your arteries soft and pliable, within reason of course.

Phil Micans: Now at the time, he didn't know what to recommend to keep arteries softer, and that's actually where I reached out to him with Dr Ward Dean, and we had a conversation and we were able to share some data with him. And he had some pretty simple advice in the book, like take aspirin, drink water, stop smoking, don't drink too much alcohol, that sort of thing.

Lisa: Give blood.

Phil Micans: Exactly, give blood. Now if I may — I don't know if you've already told the story to your folks, I'll shut up.

Lisa: No, no.

Phil Micans: But I got this from the great Jonathan Wright, Dr Jonathan Wright, a man I have extreme respect for. He's written many books on many subjects, and he told me this story many years ago. So a man to the age of about 50 has twice the risk of a heart attack or stroke of a woman up to the age of about 50. But past the age of 50, women catch us up and even can overtake us. So what on earth is going on around the age of 50 for a woman that makes her change her condition? Well, principally it's menopause, of course. Now yes, we can argue that the loss of oestrogen in the woman — it is protective and therefore that she is at risk by lowering her oestrogens, I will accept that. But she also does something else. She stops giving blood, she stops having periods.

Phil Micans: So how is there any other evidence? Well yes, there is. A man up to the age of 50, at least, who donates a pint of blood every six months at the blood bank halves his risk of a heart attack or stroke. Everybody listen about that carefully, right?

Lisa: Oh yeah.

Phil Micans: Now what I don't know — people have often said to me, what happens if a woman does that? I haven't seen the data. I'm going to presume that even hers goes lower. Now why would that be? I think two reasons. Firstly, you are getting rid of some toxins. Go back to the old days, there was bloodletting, and a certain amount of bloodletting seemed to have a beneficial effect. Of course they went too far, took too much blood out of the patient. So a lady every month is getting rid of some toxins. The man can't do that. But secondly, we're forcing our bodies, our bone marrow, to produce more blood, and in the manufacture of that new blood, the blood is thinned, the blood becomes less viscous.

Lisa: I just had Dr Christian Drapeau on, and he's a stem cell scientist. My brain just went, hmm, when you're producing more blood, are you also producing more stem cells? I don't know, I'm just hypothesising a connection there.

Phil Micans: Funny enough, funny enough — I've got to add this in. Sorry, Lisa, to add this in. With the bioregulators, we're beginning to see evidence that the folks who are using the bone marrow peptide — there is a bone marrow peptide — are seeing greater activity of their own stem cells.

Lisa: Brilliant. Okay, and that would follow with what you were just saying. Yeah. So Dr Christian, go and check his work out. He has a product that I'm now selling, Stemregen, and it mobilises more stem cells out of the bone marrow. So it's using things like sea buckthorn berries and Aphanizomenon flos-aquae and fucus something or other, a few different things that he studied to mobilise more stem cells. So maybe this bioregulator combined with that would be better, wouldn't it? More stem cells, better.

Phil Micans: I've also heard that lithium orotate—

Lisa: Oh yeah.

Phil Micans: —which is good for depression, can have all sorts of other benefits.

Lisa: Yeah, we all know about lithium orotate. So it's nice to have, but that's what it's all about. It's getting the facts and having those choices and then acting upon them. I just love connecting the dots. When you start to talk to people — and this is the beauty of what you and I do, we get to talk to different people. We were talking off air about, when you're a professor and you're deep in the one thing, you're an expert in the one thing, and the beauty of what we do is that we get to interview everybody about all of the things.

Phil Micans: Keep an open mind. You might not understand it, you might not believe it, but rather than pooh-pooh it, park it somewhere. And one day you might draw it out and say, oh hang on, that goes with what I heard. And I didn't believe it when I first heard Professor Khavinson lecture in Istanbul. I remember the one time it happened to me, his lecture was followed by a coffee break and everybody left the auditorium, but I didn't. I sat on my seat because I was trying to compute what I'd just heard, and I was literally saying to myself, well, either this is the biggest load of BS I've ever heard, or this is one of the most fantastic things I've ever come across. And it took me the best part of a year or two, having met him again, having started to read some of his papers and talking to other people, when I finally went, Jesus, I think there's really something here. So all of us take time to change. It's just the nature of things.

Lisa: Yeah.

Phil Micans: But somebody once said, to put a joke into it, never pooh-pooh a pooh-pooh. But it is a privilege of the sort of work that we do — and you much more deeply and at a higher level than I do — but you get to meet, and you get to be across a lot of the science, to a not-so-deep degree, but you've got an understanding, and sometimes you can make connections because you're going, hmm, that plus that could be very interesting. And maybe I'll connect those two people, they might be interested. When that happens, that's our programme that you made, actually.

Lisa: Yeah, I think it's beautiful when those sorts of things happen. And that's why I think it doesn't matter so much that I don't have a medical background per se, as in the traditional sense.

Phil Micans: You're also not confined by that one way of learning. I did three degrees, and what I know today — 95% of what I know today had nothing to do with any of them.

Lisa: Yeah, because you learnt certain ways of doing things, but outside of that, this field is changing so fast that if you don't watch the videos, read the books, go to the conferences, you're going to get left behind.

Lisa: Now, let's come back just briefly to the bioregulators, because we still haven't done them justice on what they do. And let's just go through some of the systems. So we've talked about the thyroid.

Lisa: Tell me about the thymus one — no, let's go for the pineal gland, because that is the one that's uppermost, most important, should be in most of the protocols.

Phil Micans: Absolutely. What we're seeing — I think I alluded to it earlier — we're seeing people increase their own endogenous production of melatonin, with its consequential benefits, and we're also seeing increases in telomere length. I think that's primarily down to the pineal gland. Now, Bill Lawrence is currently writing and putting together a new PowerPoint where he's going to talk about how these different peptide bioregulators are causing organ regeneration, which I think is going to be big. I can't say any more about that yet, because I haven't even seen it myself yet. But it's very specific. You can say, well, you've got 21 things here — glands, some tissues, some organs — and they're having an impact on those materials, but they're quite specific.

Phil Micans: It is easier to explain the glandular ones, because for example there is an adrenal bioregulator. Now, the adrenal glands produce a lot of hormones. You have your DHEA and your cortisol and your aldosterone, and lots and lots of different ones, so you do get quite a cross-balancing when you take the adrenal. And I mention the adrenal because, of all the bioregulators I either personally used or I know of people who have used them, that one is one where people talk to me very quickly and say, "Wow, that made a difference." Within a month they're saying, "Ah, this is a real difference here." And of course I've got people who do their before and after tests — they take their testosterone before and they take their testosterone after — and we've seen improvements across the board in the majority of people.

Phil Micans: So it's difficult. When it comes to anti-aging, people say, "What's the best single thing you can do?" Health is like a pyramid. I always think of a health pyramid: you've got to do the basics, you've got to have a base to the pyramid. You've got to be eating decently, you've got to be exercising, you've got to be de-stressing. If you're not doing those things, what's the point in trying to put any more material on top?

Lisa: None of this is an excuse to eat McDonald's every day and have 14 pints of beer.

Phil Micans: Exactly, it doesn't fix that. I'm not saying you can't have a little bit of excess here and there, but you've got to be doing the basics. So once you've got your house in order, as it were — the base — now you start building on it, and you could really start seeing some spectacular results. What we don't know yet, of course, is by how much human longevity will be increased. We can't test it yet, we don't really know. But I think most people would agree it may not matter how long we live, providing that all the years we have are vital and we remain independent, lucid and agile.

Lisa: Love that. Because if you've got those things, you've got everything. And as someone who's lived with disability for the last seven, eight years with Mum, it's really, really tough on the loved ones and on the person when you are not completely fully independent. She's pretty bloody good, but still, high needs. And nobody wants that. If I could have prevented that for her, God, that'd be wonderful. Nobody wants that slow decline and being a pain and not being independent. It's a mentality we have to shift, because when you say to people, "What are you doing?" "Oh, I'm really into longevity medicine," they kind of go, "You're crazy," because they're automatically assuming the older you are, the more decrepit you are.

Phil Micans: Yes, we're stopping the decrepitness.

Lisa: Exactly. I don't want another six years in a care home.

Phil Micans: No, that's not the point.

Lisa: Exactly. We want to prevent you either having to be in a place like that, because you'll still be driving a car at 100 and still be out in the garden. And then maybe you're coming in from the garden one day, sit down and drop dead. That would be the ideal, wouldn't it, rather than the slow deterioration?

Phil Micans: Do you mind me being controversial?

Lisa: No, go for it.

Phil Micans: Sometimes it upsets people, but this is a generality, and therefore, as all generalities, it's not true for everybody. In my career, when I talk about older people, men and women are different on one level. In the main, men want to keep their performance. They feel threatened by younger men, whether that's in the workplace or in the bedroom, and they want to keep a good standard of performance. Women want to look good. I think a lot of men would sacrifice — I'm not saying they don't want to look good, but they don't care too much if they lose their hair, providing they maintain their performance. So as a generality, I find that's true.

Lisa: Yep.

Phil Micans: I'm not saying there's pros and cons against both. Both lead to an anti-aging regime, because if you look older on the outside — your skin's sagging, you're greying — all of those things are signs of things that are going on on the inside, and therefore they are a true reflection of your internal biology.

Lisa: Biological age measures.

Phil Micans: I've got to tell you a true story. It was a long time ago now. I had a couple of my girls go down to the big health show in London at Olympia, and people were coming off the Underground station, and as they were going into the show there was some kind of quiz or competition, win a prize — I can't remember now. And they asked them two questions. This was some time ago; I hope it's not as bad now. Perhaps actually we ought to do it again to see if it's changed. So they asked different people, "Excuse me, if I told you about anti-aging medicine, do you think you'd want it?" And the answers were, "No, because I'm too old for it," and, "No, because I'm too young for it."

Lisa: Brilliant.

Phil Micans: Which was really funny, because it made us wonder, what's the right age? You have to be 48.6, maybe, I don't know. We just found it really weird that these people either thought they were too young or too old to benefit.

Lisa: And neither is true. Aging starts — like in that Dunedin Pace study, they can already tell from the three-year-olds who's aging faster.

Phil Micans: That's amazing. Very controversial point about when does aging start. If a baby's born — because some people say, "I wish we'd classify aging as a disease" — and a baby's born, you can't say it's got a disease. I don't know, the Catholic Church says it's full of sin, sorry, that's a bit controversial. But there is one thing. The late great pharmacologist by the name of Joseph Knoll from Hungary — brilliant, brilliant man, who died well into his 90s, I'm pleased to say, and I could tell you many things about Joseph — but he, I think, put it very succinctly, because I ended up asking him, "When does aging start?" And he said at puberty. And the reason for that is, the moment we turn around sort of 13, the first gland that atrophies is the thymus. So it's almost like Mother Nature's saying, "You're ready to procreate, so therefore we start winding you down." So some people say it starts at puberty. I personally think that's probably pretty accurate.

Lisa: Yeah, and when our hormones change is when we start to notice it. So often in our 30s to 40s we start going, "Oh, we're not recovering as well, we're not doing this as well. What the hell's happening to me?" And there's a whole raft of things that we've been talking about. But that's when you need to be doubling down on this stuff. And the earlier you start... I think we do need to be teaching our kids to eat better. If I think about the amount of sugar I ate as a kid, I'm horrified now looking back. My parents didn't know any better. Horrified. And that's probably not done me too well. That's probably why I don't have asthma now — I had asthma when I was younger — and things like that. Not just the sugar, but other things.

Lisa: But coming back to the bioregulators, so we've gone through the pineal, the adrenal, the thymus. The ovary one — tell me about the ovary one, as someone who's in the middle of menopause. Yeah, slow things down.

Phil Micans: Yeah. First of all, back to what we said earlier, it doesn't do anything for men, because they haven't got the ovaries. And in the same way, the testes one doesn't work for women, because they haven't got any testes, so just be aware of them. The prostate is the only other one that is not going to work in the ladies, obviously. But the ovary one appears to have a balancing factor on both estrogens and progesterone. And I think the progesterone side of it is really important. This is the work of Dr Jonathan Wright, who wrote a brilliant book that was originally titled Don't Let Your Doctor Give You Horse Urine.

Lisa: Bioidentical, right? It's natural in a horse, but it's not natural in a human. I had a doctor last week tell my client there is no such thing as bioidentical — until the pharmaceutical rep comes in and says, "Oh, by the way, we've got this." There are at least three studies that show that giving bioidentical progesterone in women with breast cancer is very effective, yet most oncologists will recoil in horror if you were to suggest it, because of course the synthetic drug does exactly the opposite, and they're the ones that they are familiar with.

Phil Micans: Yeah, very, very different. So the good thing about the bioregulator ovary is you're going to get a rebalancing of estrogens and a rebalancing of progesterone. And I just emphasise progesterone because during menopause... estrogens — there's three principal ones, I know there's breakdowns of that — you've got estriol, which is the weakest one. Dr Jonathan Wright records the average — if that's the right term to use — woman produces 90% estriol, which is the anti-carcinogenic mild estrogen. Then you've got estradiol, which is about 7% of the average woman's production, and then you've got estrone, which is 3%. Those go into decline, and you can often see a lady the other end of menopause perhaps producing 60 or 70% less of those hormones. But with progesterone, they often go 90%.

Lisa: Wow.

Phil Micans: Yet many doctors, even those who believe in HRT or NHRT, natural hormone replacement therapy — I would say they do, but the ones that do regular HRT often ignore progesterone. And you must be on progesterone if you're going to be on estrogen. If the ladies want to get into this out there, get the books of Dr John Lee. He had two books, What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Menopause, they were both called. So that is a really good insight into this.

Lisa: Absolutely. And I'm seeing progesterone levels dropping in 20-something-year-olds and 30-something-year-olds now, which is unusual. It seems to be dropping off a cliff earlier. And of course, your anxiety and all that sort of stuff goes up when your progesterone drops.

Phil Micans: I think we've got a couple of issues at play here. We've got what the UN referred to as endocrine disruptors.

Lisa: Exactly.

Phil Micans: You've got plastics and pseudo-estrogens in the water supply, in the food.

Lisa: What isn't in plastic? The water's wrapped in plastic, the sandwiches are wrapped in plastic.

Phil Micans: Right. There are big problems there. Plastics in the sea, etc., etc., etc. That's a big

Phil Micans: There's also a problem in that if you're drinking the tap water, or for our American friends, the faucet water, then you are drinking the drugs that your neighbours are using, because the local sewage plants do not have the facilities to remove mainstream medicines from the water. And even though you might say, "Yes, but the level of Viagra or Prozac or statins is in the millions and billions," and that is true, but how much water do you drink every day? How often do you drink water? What happens in five years? What happens in 10? What about children? What about pregnant women?

Lisa: Right, it goes on and on, doesn't it?

Phil Micans: The Germans, some years ago, went randomly to their states and they tested their tap water, and they found traces of all the major prescription drugs in it.

Lisa: Wow. And what is the number one prescription drug? Contraceptives.

Phil Micans: Exactly. Estrogens.

Lisa: Exactly. And everybody's getting it. And what happens to the young? Look at the young boys. You've got a lot more estrogen-dominant phenotypes. You're seeing that more.

Phil Micans: We could be very controversial and say, is it an accident that we hear more about transgenderism today than we ever have?

Lisa: I know there are other pressures and social pressures, but there's an endocrine pressure as well, is what you're saying.

Phil Micans: And by the same token, women, their hormones and our fertility rates and things are going down. These are facts. We're not being political here at all.

Lisa: But I think it's just understanding these influences, that we're living in this toxic soup, and so we need to be supporting our bodies as best we can, which I've talked about a number of times on the show.

Phil Micans: A non-medical friend approached me the other day and said if he was to invest in anything in medicine, what would I invest in? And I didn't mean to sound facetious when I said it, but I said I'd probably look into fertility clinics. I think we're going to see an explosion in them. Men and women are going to struggle to have children.

Lisa: Yep, yep. As someone who's been through a long, long fertility journey, I wonder how much my problems were related to, one, being on the oral contraceptives since the age of 13 because I had problems with the period.

Phil Micans: And what were those problems?

Lisa: Where it turns out I had endometriosis and adenomyosis and fibroids later on. And now I understand all that. And then you add on an extreme sports career on top of that, and I couldn't have kids. And I waited a little bit too long, I think. But this is unfortunate. How many people are doing themselves a disservice? And we're seeing that drop off a cliff.

Lisa: So is there any other bioregulator... Oh, I did want to talk to you about spermidine, because spermidine is one of my favourite topics, and I'm actually hopefully bringing out a spermidine supplement shortly. What's your take on spermidine, and do you think that should be part of a good regime?

Phil Micans: Yeah, I mean, everybody's regime is different. At the end of the day, I'm not talking about the basics, drinking clean water and eating well, we should all take that for granted. But in terms of the next level of the pyramid, the additional level, shall we say, it depends what you want to do. Everything in life comes down to cost and convenience, doesn't it? How inconvenient, how costly? You make the choice. But spermidine is getting a lot of people excited, principally, I think, although I've heard the ladies say better skin, better hair, better nails, I think principally because its action is to improve autophagy, which is the natural cleaning of cells.

Phil Micans: I'm a big fan of Bill Faloon. Bill Faloon is the founder of the Life Extension Foundation in America. Bill also runs the Age Reversal Network, you can go and find it online, of course. And he's trying to get people together to go into these clinical trials where, for the first time, multiple things will be used, not necessarily drugs, could be supplements. And I'm going to feature it in our Aging Matters magazine, maybe the next one, but fairly soon, hopefully this year anyway, where he's got a thing called the stair step approach to biological age control. So he's got several steps, and the steps have a different terminology. To do a couple of the early ones, you've got "activate AMPK". You've got a second step which would be "improve autophagy". You have a third step which would be mTOR. They have another step which would be "reduce senescent cells", actually removing dead cells from the body. So what I would suggest is that spermidine has a very prominent place on one of those biological steps. And NAD is one of his steps, improve your energy.

Lisa: Yep, yep. We do a lot of that, NMN and so on.

Phil Micans: Yeah, there are things as well, of course. So I think spermidine is on one of those steps as a very prominent supplement.

Lisa: Yeah. And so autophagy is the getting rid of... it's a recycling sort of process of getting rid of damaged cells and stuff, and this is so, so, so critical. And it actually hits so many of the hallmarks of ageing. So I'm really excited about it, everything from immunity to cardiovascular to skin, hair and all of that sort of thing. Plus getting rid of these...

Phil Micans: Look at it like pruning. If you don't deadhead your roses, they're not going to grow as well, are they?

Lisa: Yeah, exactly. And the removal of senescent cells is kind of like our pruning. Yep, exactly. And then there's things like rapamycin, which is also very exciting, but it's a drug and you have to have that prescribed. It's got very interesting benefits in the senolytic side of things, getting rid of those damaged cells. So all of this is just absolutely great.

Phil Micans: To get into rapamycin, very good new book out by Dr Ross Pelton, available on Kindle as well, so that's very cheap. I've forgotten exactly what he calls it, but it's got rapamycin in the title.

Lisa: I'll have a look at that too, get hold of one. I've got a lot of reading after this interview.

Phil Micans: No, no.

Lisa: This is just fabulous because you're up on everything. Literally, you're all over the place.

Phil Micans: I have my moments of procrastination, don't worry. That top shelf behind me has books I haven't read yet.

Lisa: Yeah, you're like me. I've got all these amazing things that I've got to get through. And I find it easier to digest podcasts and some things because you can do it on the go when you're running or you're driving or anything.

Phil Micans: For me, that's what holidays are for.

Lisa: Yes. Well, gosh, when was the last time? Look, I could talk to you for hours. I definitely want to have you back on, if you'll do me the honour of coming back on, because I do want to dive into Walter Pierpaoli's work and maybe some of this rapamycin stuff. And I also wanted to talk to you about ACF228. What's that? We just briefly touched on ACF228, sorry, the ultimate formula for free radical control. Is that available, is that a thing that's available?

Phil Micans: Yes, yes, it is. Yes, it's a nutritional thing, but it's got lots of good stuff in it.

Lisa: Okay. Where do you get that? Because that was new to my radar.

Phil Micans: Profound Health will have it.

Lisa: So Profound Health. Okay. And we're going to put links. Now, your team has helped me set up some stuff, and you've got... explain your complicated web presence, because we need to explain it to people so that they can understand where they go to get the science and where they go to buy the stuff.

Phil Micans: Yeah, sure, absolutely, no problem. So what we have is, the master site is anti-aging-systems.com, and you can spell it with an "e" or without an "e", so that's not a problem. My eldest brother, being very British, likes to wind me up when I see him, saying, "Are you still doing the anti-aggy?" So that's the master, that has been up the longest, that website has been up since the early 90s or mid 90s. We have literally hundreds of articles, interviews, videos, all that sort of good stuff, with references.

Lisa: With references, yes, I know. And sometimes there's a good match there.

Phil Micans: But you can look up what you want, and if you want to, it will take you to stores where you can buy those products, but that is an information site, it is not a selling site. And then you can go to profoundhealth.com, which is a nutrition site, and a lot of the peptides are there, not all of them, but a lot, the ones we've spoken about, the bioregulators are there. There's also profoundsupplements.com, which is the American site, so if you want to buy those products that you can buy freely in America, like DHEA and melatonin, things like that, that's where they are. And then we have a hardcore site called the Antiaging Store, where you will find certain medicines and what I would refer to as grey products, you know, they're not one foot in one camp and one foot in another. That's there. But the go-to site... oh, and by the way, there's a magazine site, agingmatters.com, folks, register, download digital copies for free, or pay 10 bucks and have one sent to you if that's what you prefer, to have a physical one. But the go-to site is anti-aging-systems.com, because you'll find all the information there, and if you find something you like, it will offer you a link saying "buy from an approved store" and it will take you to the store.

Lisa: Excellent. So that explains, because I've been confused as hell for the last few weeks.

Phil Micans: It's complicated because what we do is truly international, and to put all these things in one place is just not possible. So today we're operating from the UK, we're operating from Hong Kong, we're operating from Taipei, and we've just started in Dubai. So each place is doing different products, different jurisdictions, different things that are allowed, and therefore this complicatedness.

Lisa: Without saying that, that's fabulous that we're having access to these things. And then you'll have to check whether it's allowed in your country that you're listening in, and that's up to you then. And always, this is education only, please do work with your medical professionals. I have to keep reinforcing that. Unfortunately, there's not enough medical professionals often to find, so that's always a struggle, and we're trying to change things there and get more people educated on these things. And this is just fabulous, it's absolutely amazing.

Lisa: Is there anything that you'd like to add, or that you're super excited about, something we don't know about that's coming down the line, anything that you just want to add before we go?

Phil Micans: Well, I'm following this stair step approach to biological age control closely, because it's maybe one of the first times that multiple things have been brought together in individuals to see what happens to these people, healthy people, healthy ageing people, over time. I'm still learning about the peptide bioregulators. I think there's still more to come. Others will undoubtedly come to the fore. They may need Professor Khavinson's blessing to be signed off as bioregulators, but I think there's still a lot more to learn. And peptides in general are a very exciting field, providing the authorities don't slap us down and break it. The trouble is, you alluded earlier that a lot of the peptides, the long chain peptides, need to be injected or perhaps used intranasally. Unfortunately, even if that was vitamin C, if you go down that route, you make it a drug.

Lisa: Yeah, right. It becomes a drug.

Phil Micans: Right. So that's one of the things. So the fact that the bioregulators do work orally, are in foods, is hopefully a strong indicator that they will remain as food supplements. It's very, very important. In the UK, the MHRA, who control the medicines, actually have in their edict a statement where it says that any chemical that has a biochemical change within the body, they consider to be a drug. Well, that is sunlight, that is water, that is food, that is exercise. It's a ridiculous statement, but they can grab back to that if they want to be a pain in the butt with the regulations.

Lisa: And you know that laughter is the best medicine, so I think we'll need a prescription for that soon, it'll be illegal. This is where overreach in these things is scary and damaging. And hopefully there'll be good regulation. We need good regulation, not bad regulation, in so many spaces. And yeah, hopefully the regulators will do a good job. I'm not holding my breath. So thank you so much for your time today. It's been an honour to meet you. You're a bit of a star in this space, so a little bit of fangirling going around, but just absolutely wonderful. So thank you very much.

Phil Micans: Thank you, Lisa. And hope to get down there to lovely New Zealand again one of these days.