The Art and Science of Your Personal Longevity Protocol

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If you would like to leave me a voice message with a question for a guest or a guest idea for a show, you can do that directly from the site and I will be notified. With that, there are scientists, and then there are scientists who can't leave well enough along. Dr. Sandra Kaufman is a second kind. She began in cellular biology, earning her medical degree at the University of Maryland, completed her residency and fellowship at Johns Hopkins, and became a practicing anesthesiologist, which for most people would be more than enough, not Sandra, because somewhere along the way she started asking a question nobody had organized a proper answer to. Why do we age?

And what can we actually do about it? What followed was the research to longevity, built on seven tenets of cellular aging, and a one-of-a-kind rating system that helps you build your own protocol, your own recipe, for a longer, better life. She's the author of two books, The Kaufman Protocol, Why We Age and How to Stop It, and the newly expanded The Kaufman Protocol Aging Solutions. Welcome, Dr. Sandra.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

TalkToMeGuy: It is really, that was the thing about the book. The book is, I can't, I don't have a better word than intense, because it's so much great information, but it is a little overwhelming if you don't have the language behind you to roll into it. And I don't mean that as a negative, it's just an observation of like, wow, that's a lot of information, but that's the great thing. It's a lot of information, really well organized.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: So I think that that was the best and the worst explanation of my book I've ever heard, because I tried to simplify it so much, and yes, you can't. So then I tried to put lots of bad jokes in it, which I did. Yeah, what you did. It's aimed to be understandable for someone that wants to know.

TalkToMeGuy: That's like my shows. If you want to know, we're great together because of that. It might be complicated, but there's a lot of really good information in here, and we get to talk about that. And I mean your book and the shows in general. There's a lot of like people go away scratching their heads, but it makes them curious.

And I think once you've got curious, that's the hook to people wanting to know more. And I have to start with, you started in cellular biology, studied plant cell physiology in the tropics, ethnobotany, how plants defend themselves against their own struggles. Then Johns Hopkins, then anesthesiology, what kept telling you further, and what leans you into plant ethnobotany?

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Good question. My father was a physician, and in our family, you're either a scientist physician or you're a musician. Those are the choices. And no one actually lays down the law. It's just genetic. For example, I have two daughters.

One's in the sciences, one's a musician. Same with my sister, same with everyone. That's what you get. So having very little musical skill, I got the science gene. In college, I went to University of Miami, and I had the coolest professor there who was an ethnobotanist. And he loved the idea of trumping through jungles and meeting populations that inhabited those areas, and how did they deal with illness and challenges?

And I became enamored with this as well. And plants are just amazing because they don't have brains, but there are challenges. And so over millions of years, plants either figure it out or they die off. And as a consequence, we humans get to utilize that information for the benefit of ourselves.

And I think that that is just insanely cool. The problem, however, as my father pointed out, is that I needed to make money to live. So I went to med school. But ultimately, these ideas sort of pop back into one's head. And the idea of morbidity and mortality just sounds miserable and horrible. So it dawned on me when I was about 45, like, maybe I can figure this out.

And it has been pointed out that it's a little Don Coyote chasing the windmill-esque, right? So I'm either brilliant or an idiot, hard to say. But I did unpack all of my cellular biology tools and knowledge and started to try to untangle the concepts of cellular failure and then use other knowledge, like ethnobotany type knowledge, to figure out how to treat it.

TalkToMeGuy: Hmm. I have to slightly step aside here and ask, in your plant cell work, let me preface this by saying, in somewhere around in the 70s, there was a company called Shaman Pharmaceuticals that that time, I believe, was based out of San Francisco Bay Area. Now they're in Missouri. And they went into the jungles and they followed around what would be called Shaman in that time, or Medicine Man or Medicine Women, or people who went in the jungles and talked to the plants. And they followed them around and watched what they picked and had translators with them to talk with the person, with the herbalist or the Medicine Man woman about what they picked and why they were picking it and what they were going to do with it.

And they would get that information and then they would watch them process it. Because sometimes you need alcohol, sometimes you need to boil it. They are mostly boiling and doing that kind of stuff. But they built a whole company based on learning from the Shaman in the jungles. When you were studying plants, were you working with any indigenous peoples to help you find plants that they thought would be interesting for you?

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: I personally was not. My college professor was. But by the time I got to be a true researcher, it was more about how did the plants themselves respond to challenging stimulus?

So the answer is not really. But the bug was put in me at an early age. So I understood that concept. I wanted to get there. I just never made it that far. But what's interesting now is you can go backwards and see where a lot of things came from.

Right? So I think what's really interesting is so depending on where the plant came from, a jungle, a high altitude, some places that has low oxygen or high UV radiation or whatever physiologic stress, you can sort of mooch off of their mechanisms. And one of my favorite ones, and I talk about it a lot, is something called astaxanthin. And if you look at like a birdbath and you look at the slime in there, those are, it's algae. And algae is generally green because it's photosynthesizing. But if you physiologically stress it, meaning increase in salinity, high temperature, too much light, it creates this wonderful orange pinkish goo called astaxanthin.

And it protects its own DNA from these stresses. And this is so common now in the marine environment that anything that you see that is pink has eaten astaxanthin. So salmon are pink, flamingos are pink, like the eyes of quail are pink, and it's all astaxanthin based. And as a consequence, if we eat astaxanthin, our DNA is protected, our sun doesn't burn in the skin, our vision is better, we are less likely to get cardiovascular disease. So we have just stolen millennia of plant evolution for our own benefit. And I think that's really cool.

TalkToMeGuy: When I had the herb store, one of the things that I collected was old pharmacopias, which were the books. They were basically the recipe books or formula books that pharmacists back in the day when they were compounding, meaning they actually took stuff, they actually took coca leaf and they smashed it and put it in an alcohol and produced a tincture and gave it somebody for a cough or something like that. And so I would read those books. For me, they were recipe books, because I wanted to see not only what they were using, what they were using it for, but how they processed it. And it gave me a broader scope of, as an herbalist, because herbalists are somewhat limited, it's either put it in a capsule, make a tea, and I know you have issue with tea.

That's a separate subject. So you do that, or you make a tincture, you make a salve, you make a poultice, or the Chinese would take it and make a decoction, which during my many years, for probably 10 years, I drink decoctions every day, which are intense, boiled down, concentrated herbs. And that's the way the Chinese drink it is medicine.

And so they're limited. So I enjoyed reading those as recipe books because it gave me more information on ideas and really developed my thing about in the herbal world, we would call cayenne or ginger a stimulant, but not a stimulant as in caffeine, a stimulant as in carry, it helps carry the rest of the herbs into the system. And so to learn those kinds of things and see those, how they were utilized in pharmacopias was always amazing to me. I don't really have, I'm sorry, I don't have a question there. Because it was just super cool.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: And so honestly, I do exactly the same thing, but I do it a different way. So I do, I collect ancient manuscripts, books, I even bought the Egyptian papyrus of healing. And I scour through them, looking for things that people have used in the past. But what I do then is you can look up the chemical composition of whatever that was, right? And figure out what the active ingredient usually, you know, plants have what hundreds of different chemicals on them, right? Someone somewhere, in some corner of the world has taken some plant that you are interested in, and feared out exactly what's in it, and what exactly what the the the active ingredients are.

And then as a consequence, you can take that chemical ingredient and sort of magnify it or concentrate it and get a ton of extra benefit, you know, via other mechanisms, like you can use it in a nano mycel, you can just, you know, you can package it such that the bioavailability is significantly higher than the original plants. And I think that's kind of fun, right? It's just borrowing from the past. And I was very disappointed because the Egyptians, I bought this, I read through this entire, I can't read hieroglyphics, but I read the translation. They were very non specific because they want anyone stealing their secrets, I think. So they refer to things, but not as specifically as I can go out and find them. So that's kind of a bummer.

TalkToMeGuy: I've dealt with some Egyptians, and I've had that same experience more than herbal perspective, but it's still the same as always like a secret, they always have something hidden in a pocket because they don't know, and here's the great secret. It's like, why didn't you tell me that an hour ago?

It's been so helpful. Instead of like holding it back like we're playing a card game. Yes, I'm not, we're not, you know, this is not bartering at a mall. This is like, come on, are we working together to formulate something?

Yes, but I have the secret ingredient. Well, bad words. That's my response to that. No, that's, we're not, this is not, we're not playing here. We're actually trying to come up with a final formula.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: That's true, but it's funny. I've done this in many places. I like to go on crazy expeditions. So when I was in Patagonia, you know, I discovered Yerba mate and everyone drinks it and they seem to last forever. So I dissected Yerba mate, discovered the Maccabery, all sorts of fun, amazing things. And then Jungle discovered polypodium and that actually increases DNA repair rates. So there's just amazing biochemicals hidden in plants, challenged by the environment globally. And it is just a treasure chest or a treasure hunt, I guess is a better phrase. And I just love being part of it.

TalkToMeGuy: And the polypodium in nature, what is its function in nature? And how did you extrapolate out that it could affect our system?

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: So interestingly, it's the same sort of thing, right? Native people were eating polypodium and you say to yourself, why would they do that? So some very brilliant person took this plant, broke it down and determined that these leaves were high sunlight leaves, right? So in a jungle, you have low light, medium light, high light, right?

It depends on like the type of growth you're looking for. High light plants, UV radiation destroys DNA, destroys our DNA, destroys plant DNA. So these plants developed a way to repair their DNA from UV radiation faster, such that they could be in high light environments and survive better, right? So it turns out that if you eat this stuff, you do in fact repair your DNA rates faster.

Therefore, you are less likely to get cancer. So it's available on Amazon. It's called like it's sunblock or sun something, but it's leukopodium and it's just a plant from the tropics.

TalkToMeGuy: And see, I thought it sounds to me like something from a shaman pharmaceutical would take and market the.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: I'm sure that they probably have. I mean, you know, now there are a million of these companies. And so the question is then is what are they using? How good's the production, quality, purity, blah, blah, blah. And that takes a different kind of digging. Yeah.

TalkToMeGuy: And let's back up for a minute to, is it in Peru that they chew coca leaves? Yeah. And the result for the, because I know people who live in lead treks. And they were always amazed at the Sherpa were just like, sure, I can carry that giant bag up that mountain.

And they just do. And private is in their culture, they chew on coca leaves and chewing coca leaf. I chewed coca leaf.

Let's just confess right here now. I know an herbalist who had some, she actually grow her own. And then she was like, try to chew on this and tell me what you're thinking. It was like, wow. And I was in the restaurant world for quite some time. So I've had the experience with the purified form.

Let's just say it that way. And it's quite different chewing the leaf because it's a longer, slower get you there. But you do get, I can't say a buzz. It's deeper than a buzz. It's more like it's almost an adrenal supporter. That's my crude observation. Do you have thoughts on coca leaf chewing?

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: I actually don't know that much about it as terrible as that sounds. I have tried it too. I thought it was terrible and I spit it out. So I can't say I experienced anything overwhelming because I didn't give myself a chance. But obviously it's just a slow release cocaine. Like what it is. There may be other components in there too that are somehow affect the absorption or the metabolism. So it's sort of hard to say.

TalkToMeGuy: Well, I think the missing piece oftentimes when people think about chewing things is that the saliva breaking it down and the microbiome that's happening to that as it's being broken down has a lot of benefit to the process of assimilation.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Oh, well, without a doubt. So microbiome is just an extremely, extremely interesting subject. And the way I think people should think about it, the way I encourage people to think about it, is to think to consider your microbiome as your children.

So much so that when you sit at the dinner table and you have small children, you feed them first and you get the leftovers. So whatever you are chewing and swallowing, you are feeding them and honestly you're absorbing their metabolites. So it's sort of not as straightforward as you would think in terms of you eat X and you absorb X because it doesn't really work that way unless you do sort of a sublingual or rectal or some sort of injection. But anything oral feeds your microbiome.

TalkToMeGuy: I've been shows both with William Davis, who's now I've been interviewing him since he worked wheat belly and now he and he's a cardiologist. And so he's come all the way around to now where he really his primary thing that he advocates for is neutrifying the microbiome. Yeah.

Yeah, that sounds about right. And he has you making yogurt with El Ruderay and 36 hour yogurt to really get your microbiome healthy and happy and balancing out SIBO and having a lot of benefit to the bodies. And as well as Martha Carlin who has a company called Biotic Quest. And she makes enzyme formulas. And she extended her husband's life at Parkinson's and she extended his husband's her husband's life by almost 25 years by keeping his microbiome highly neutrified. Because Parkinson's has a lot of issues with sugar problems. And so I spent a lot of time talking with people about microbiome and it just seems like I don't know it's like we forgot.

You know, we think that if we eat some store bought yogurt every month that's like you're good. And ancient cultures and not even so age to older agents cultures. Let's pick on the Koreans.

And I mean that a good way. You know, they eat so many fermented foods and people don't think of kimchi as a fermented food. Of course, we don't think of sauerkraut as a fermented food. Fermented are so powerful for neutrifying gut health. So I think that you know some kind of ferment every day is beneficial. And I don't mean massive amounts just some. And I'm certain that that fits into what you do but just in different language.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Yeah, no it does. It does. The way, well so there's many ways to think about what I do. There's the cellular perspective and then there's the full body what do I do every day.

Right. Cellularly you want to think more about what it means on a biochemical basis. In a habit, I have I create longevity pyramids for people which is what do I have to do every day, every week, every month, so on and so forth. And that is clearly in the dietary recommendations on a daily basis. It's up there with you need to get some cardiovascular exercise.

You need to eat the following plus or minus drugs, supplements, you know, all the various adjacent therapies, etc, etc. So it is in there but it's sort of semi hidden.

TalkToMeGuy: And but then if we didn't have a I'll get off this in a second. So if we didn't have a healthy microbiome to start, aren't what we were taking not being as well assimilated or possibly well as well assimilated?

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: So what's really interesting about what nutrients you take is you select it's over time right it doesn't happen immediately. You select for the bacteria that you want.

TalkToMeGuy: Say more. Wow.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: So different drugs. So for example it was demonstrated many years ago that metformin selects for the bacteria that you want and you sort of kill the ones that you don't want.

So you can modify what's sitting there based on drugs and food. Right. I mean, swallowing antibiotics sort of isn't fair because you're just sort of like mass murder in there. Right. So that's not fair. But there are other things that will select out for beneficial bacteria without actually having to put in more bacteria. Right.

TalkToMeGuy: And can you say more about those things?

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: There's a well so there's a gazillion of them. Okay.

TalkToMeGuy: Name six. I don't know. I'm making it up.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: I don't know. Name six. So anything that's really interesting. So things that tend to be potently positive epigenetic modifiers tend to be selective for microbiome. So green tea is very useful. Sulfuraphane from broccoli is very useful.

Astaxanthin actually does not do. I'm going down my little brain list. Obviously NAD is huge. Right.

Because you are any time you consume any NAD precursor it's going to go to your gut first and that's selecting out. Right. For what you need.

Gosh. There's a whole list of things that are alpha amylase and alpha glucosidase blockers and those things it's really kind of interesting. So do you know about well let me take a step back because this is going to sound ridiculously convoluted and I don't mean it too. But so when we eat glucose or complex carbohydrates and it's not just glucose it's any reducing sugar for the most part but glucose always takes the hit because people know the name. But when you eat a band of glucose with Nicarbohydrate it has two enzymes that have to break it down. Alpha amylase and alpha glucosidase and if you if you don't block them the glucose gets break it down and you absorb it so on and so forth.

If you block those your body can't bring it down. Now you're feeding essentially your bacteria. It's fantastic and you know it's working because when you block your alpha amylase and alpha glucosidase you fart like a banshee because you're all of a sudden your bacteria like oh my god this is fantastic lots of food. You know they are breaking down the carbons and so you're just you know methane is pouring out of you and it's funny.

So if you're on a carbo it's massive but if you're on smaller things you don't really notice it as much and one of my absolute favorite things to increase your gut decrease glucose absorption and increase epigenetic modification is chlorogenic acid that's the active ingredient coffee and also very active in your bimate. So I don't like either of those things so I just eat chlorogenic acid.

TalkToMeGuy: Okay I have to ask why do you I

TalkToMeGuy: think you just avoid it because you hate it so much. Why do you think you hate the taste of green tea so much?

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Oh it's just taste it's like drinking dirty water. I don't know I just I don't like tea. It's also it's a concentration thing too so for example if you had a cup of green tea it is 80 milligrams somewhere between 40 and 80 milligrams right. Yeah if I have a pill it's between 400 and 500 milligrams yeah and it takes me a second. So I would and I take 70 supplements a day and 13 pharmaceuticals so if I were to convert everything into tea I would be drinking tea until I died. I would never get out of the bathroom.

TalkToMeGuy: You have IV bags yeah.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Oh my god and I would much prefer an IV bag actually because it's just easier for me because I do do that once a month. I don't know it's not a big tea fan.

TalkToMeGuy: Okay and the same thing with your remitté you don't like the taste of your remitté.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Your remitté is terrible and it's actually what's really interesting if you drink it the way it's supposed to be in the communal glasses in in South America and they drink it super super super hot. Yeah so it's associated with esophageal cancer. So when I first started looking into this I'm like it's terrible but researchers suspect it's because the heat destroys the esophageal lining and over time we all know that inflammation causes cancer but if you cool it down obviously it's very it's better for you and I have a whole chapter on herbimalté. I think it's a great thing. I would just rather just take a capsule because it's easier.

TalkToMeGuy: Green tea is my sort of daytime. I drink one cup of coffee a day organic perfectly processed. Nothing else in it because I love the taste of great coffee. So I have a cup of coffee a day or maybe three and or on warmer days I drink cold green tea. Okay but but now as an herbalist I've been drinking teas for zillions of hours and years so I like that flavor profile. Your remitté is bitter but I've had bitters that are much worse that much more like kicking the head bitters like classic old school German bitters which are just really sloppy upside the head with a leather glove. I mean they are not kidding around but your liver is like wow what was that?

I feel great. So I like bitters in a general sense so I can understand the flavor profiles of both green tea and your remitté why those are not pleasant to the palate but I just like them because I'm weird. Well you may be weird but I have my own weird. I mean everyone you know yeah

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: weird comes in many flavors and many silos. Yeah you know it's an extremely valuable chemical compounds and I don't really think it matters how you get it into you as long as you get it into you.

TalkToMeGuy: Right and because you're taking the do you take any kind of digestive aids when you take these supplements all day long to help the body? No you just toss them in there.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: No no so I so it was interesting about the gut right so the gut is an organ like every other organ and there are certain things that are extremely important about that organ and they fail as you get older and some things are extremely good about keeping the health of your gut so that you don't need all these digestive enzymes. Like your body should make everything it needs if you just treat your cells well.

Right I have a whole idea and I sell this in my book not I don't sell anything but like I promote the idea that a cell is a factory and every cell has the potential to make 10,000 different proteins and if your cell or your factory is failing for a variety of reasons you can't do that right so people just sort of replace what they're missing but I my argument is you can't replace 10,000 different things it's just gonna work that way so if you fix the factory by definition your factory is making or allows itself to make whatever it is that you need. Right so I think if you keep your gut healthy and you keep your tight junctions tight and you keep your endothelium happy and you keep the vascularization of your gut happy you're going to be fine and you don't need anything extra. The consequence of that like there are many things that are really good for your gut one of my favorites is aloe vera it's cheap it is natural it it has like 200 different agents in it it's incredibly good for your gut your skin and your brain there's no downsides to it so I think everyone should be on aloe you can put it in a tea I suppose but it tastes terrible.

TalkToMeGuy: I was about to say I used to drink aloe vera and it's a bitter you know it's definitely another like what are you looking at kind of thing it's serious but I have that palate that just is like oh that's yummy.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Well yeah you're lucky well so I made the big mistake once and this is sort of funny I was on this massive aloe kick several years ago and I decided I was going to soak in it all the time so I would go to the grocery store and buy giant leaves like these huge three-foot aloe things I would chop them into squares and toss them in the bathtub and it was it was great but I was standing in line at the grocery store with my happy little leaves big leaves and some dude behind me goes you know you just eat it and I made the mistake of taking a bite and it was probably the worst thing I've ever tried to eat and I'm stuck in a grocery line and there's nowhere to go.

TalkToMeGuy: Yeah with a big guy behind you slapping his thighs and laughing.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Oh he thought this was funny as hell yeah it doesn't taste very good you know you could have told me that because well I didn't say that he goes I just said you can eat it like thanks.

TalkToMeGuy: Yeah yeah. It's not as good as a napoli which is the cactus leaf. Yeah. Cactus leaf is delicious. Yeah no that's it. But aloe vera there's nothing you can do to it. No. It tastes that way and it means it.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Yes on the other hand it is incredibly good for you so capsules you ought to go with capsules. You know and there's a lot of things that are incredibly good for your gut like alpha ketoglutarate amazing for your gut health also good for your brain also good for your mitochondria no downsides amazing stuff and if you complex it to arginine as an example that's a glucose decoy and it can theoretically help with nitric oxide development so I mean it's just win-win all the way around so there's so many good potential things you can do.

TalkToMeGuy: I'm not opposed to capsules I'm an amateur compared to you I probably only take 40 supplements a day.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: I'm a beginner such a beginner.

TalkToMeGuy: And a third of those are probably herbs just because I've never kicked the herb habit.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Well when you get serious we'll get you into pharmaceuticals.

TalkToMeGuy: I've that's a separate show that yeah that was a good time. What about this is making me jump to what is your view over what I would consider to be tonic herbs such as let's say ginseng, ashwagandha, danquai those are three really classics in the Chinese medicine world. Do you have a category for tonic herbs are you taking any tonic herbs and everything that you take every day?

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: So it's really funny as I don't think about it in that way at all. I have taken those things apart and looked for their components and said well what is what if anything is special about these. Yeah and in reality very little ginseng actually there's ginseng I want to say I'm gonna mess this up I want to say A, B and C chemicals and those are actually useful. Ashwagandha is not all that useful on a chemical basis it's just there's not that different from some other plants. Most of them are some combination of quercetin, rutin, some sort of polyestilbine and free radical scavengers so they're not all that significantly different. So when I'm looking at plants I am looking for biochemicals that are novel that can do something that something else cannot do.

TalkToMeGuy: Sorry for making notes. Yeah so you don't have that even from your experience in the jungle studying plants you don't really have that as a reference category.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: No in fact I don't have any categories. I mean so I've read your book yeah I understand. It's you know for those folks that haven't it's simply about what are the biochemicals and what do they do to your cell and if I was reading along and I found that something was bad for you in any way, stake or form I got rid of it right it's just not an option. Yeah and if it was if you're the risk-benefit ratio was was positive in a big way and then you just deconstruct a plant and sometimes you can't sometimes it's absolutely synergistic and you say you know you've got to eat this whole damn thing. Some of it's absolutely like one thing and you go oh I can just consume that but I make a big point of telling people that I don't really care if a molecule came from a plant that we've known about for a thousand years or if we invented it yesterday in a lab right. I look at efficacy and safety in terms of bodily and cellular manipulation. And so I get accused of being holistic and I'm just not. I am what I call efficacy driven. That is that.

You're an efficiency expert. Yes right so if there's a plant fantastic if there's a medication fantastic I have no true preference. The only thing that plants do for us that drugs don't is that we have better long-term studies.

TalkToMeGuy: Yes and my lean toward plants is well I've been doing them since the 70s is I think there may be things in plants now that we've gotten you know science has gotten a lot more powerful to break things down. I suspect that there are things in plants that we may not know yet and so I still like a whole plant orientation but I'm a nervous.

I can't not. Yeah I like I mean I take their reason I take supplements is because there are things that I want you know I take 300 milligrams of CoQ10 twice a day. I take that specifically because I want the cardiovascular benefit and.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Well let me look okay so let's actually this is a really interesting thing so let's go back let's let's talk about CoQ10 for a minute. Okay. How I'm going to be nosy here. How old are you.

TalkToMeGuy: Old I'm 74.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Okay and are you on a statin. No. Okay good so what's really interesting about CoQ10 is yes you see make significantly less of it as you get older so you have to augment it but most people don't really realize that if you are on a statin you have to take CoQ10 because you don't produce it because it comes from cholesterol but then but then they think oh I'm good I have on that but it turns out that you're also not making bile acids and sex hormones and you're not making squalene and just this whole batch of things so I just I love CoQ10 because it's part of a very interesting ornate pathway that we have elected to block completely with statins right yeah but people don't understand but it's you know I'm on CoQ10 I'm fine on the statin the answer is not really anyway but I digress that's my little it's my medical thing.

TalkToMeGuy: Well I think there's always I always feel like there's no this is a tricky statement I think there's no harm in getting more oxygen into the body or things that help benefit our mitochondria the little engines that are in there really kind of with the I think I can I think I can I think I can producing energy for our bodies so I just like the idea of elevated levels of CoQ10.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Okay so I will agree with part of your statement which is which part well so you started by saying anything to get some more oxygen into your body and I think that's actually wrong okay cells were they evolved in low oxygen environments right and it turns out that oxygen is actually quite toxic oxygen adopts free radicals especially electrons from iron. Dr. Sandra Kaufmann, TalkToMeGuy. Dr. Sandra Kaufmann, TalkToMeGuy.

TalkToMeGuy: Dr. Sandra Kaufmann, TalkToMeGuy.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Dr. Sandra Kaufmann, TalkToMeGuy. Dr. Sandra Kaufmann, TalkToMeGuy. Dr.

TalkToMeGuy: Sandra Kaufmann, TalkToMeGuy. Dr. Sandra Kaufmann, TalkToMeGuy. Dr.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Sandra Kaufmann, TalkToMeGuy. Dr. Sandra Kaufmann, TalkToMeGuy. Dr.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Sandra Kaufmann, TalkToMeGuy. Dr.

TalkToMeGuy: Sandra Kaufmann, TalkToMeGuy. Dr.

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TalkToMeGuy: Jenny L-------- Dr. Mary ministers. called Endropause, and I can't find anybody to talk about it. I mean, I could, I can drag somebody sort of into it, but nobody's writing about it flagrantly like, here's a subject people should know about. And that's what I feel about, not just because I'm a man, but because I see it in men, I see menopausish like occurrences, and nobody's talking about it. I think it would be helpful to society.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: We can absolutely do that. And actually, I have to admit, so one of my partners in this longevity business is a gentleman, Steve McCain, who he's an ex-Olympic athlete, and he and I became mutually obsessed with exosomes. And so we run Club Exosome in Vegas all the time. But he asked me that question about six months ago. So but I told him before I get to testosterone and everything else with men, I was going to conquer women because I am one. But I did actually promise him the same thing. So I will I will put that on the list. Excellent.

TalkToMeGuy: I'm with Steve. Manopause, Endropause, Endropause. Okay, we're going to go just slightly long because I have two things that I have to ask you about. Well, or another hundred. Talk about the grumpy old man in the cafeteria, the senescent cells. These fat, dysmorphic, exuding, inflammatory cytokines. There's something out of, I can't think of the ghost, ghostbusters. It's like a bad character in ghostbusters, kind of oozing, wandering around, sliming on people kind of thing.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Talk about senescent cells. That's even better than my grumpy old man idea. That was good. Well, so senescent cells, people, if you've people have done any longevity reading, whatever they call them zombie cells, and I don't like that phrase, I think that sounds just, that's not real. So a senescent cell is any cell that has DNA damage.

And I'll back up a step or two. Every cell in your body every day has 10 to the fifth DNA errors. Most of them are single stranded.

There are probably 10 to 12 double stranded. Some of them are significant, some are less significant. And your body has five different DNA repair mechanisms that it can draw on to fix these things.

But it's a lot of damage. So what happens is when a cell perceives a significant amount of damage, it goes into a state of quiescence, sort of resting, and it turns out all of its repair mechanisms. And if it is successful, the cell gets to go back to being a normal cell.

And if it is not successful, there are three choices. Choice one is what I call polite cell suicide. It's apoptosis. The cell just goes, yep, I can't do this anymore than my mitochondria. Call it, boof, the cell dies. Other two options are cancer, which is pretty terrible, or senescence. So senescence is a normal round ish cell gets very dysmorphic.

It gets, it blows up. The membranes are not as normal. All of the sub membranes of the little organelles get very globular and mucky.

It doesn't do what it's supposed to do. And it exudes something called the SASP, which is basically a plethora of inflammatory cytokines. They're just evil. And these things go all over the body. So they tend to affect not only increase in systemic inflammation, but they also have a paracrine effect where they can go to the neighbor cell, piss that cell off, and make it become senescent. And the sort of like the running joke is that the older you get, the more senescent cells you have. So that when you go to have anti-senescent therapy, you have to do it slowly so that you don't turn into a pile of dust. When you, like, I'm running a joke with Bill Andrews, who's like the telomere God, but like, he's like, don't give old people anti-senescent therapy because the next day they'll just be like, poof, you've killed all of them.

So we do anyway. So a senescent cell, I like to call it, as you mentioned, a grumpy old man cell because he's the employee in your factory who's been there for a gazillion years. And once upon a time, he was a good worker. He was in shape. He had a good brain. He was positive.

He was doing his thing. And over time, he ate too many donuts and he's sitting in the corner and all he does, he's just grumpy as hell. And he just whines about everything. And if anyone comes near him, they become grumpy once as well. So I thought that the grumpy old guy in the corner was a better thing than a zombie because I thought, that'll go out with like, you know, time. Anyway, so that's, that's my senescent cell model.

TalkToMeGuy: I think it's a great model. I like to say, I lean into Ghostbusters just because I like those slimy characters because they were so good at being like slimy bad. And they were very much senescent cells. They were grumpy. They were mean. They were angry because they were slimy and, you know, bad guys.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: I do like that. I do like that. And it's interesting. So if I have patients, I always, you know, areas of inflammation, have you had any radiation? Have you had chemotherapy? Because that's where senescent cells accumulate. And it's amazing because I'll say, you know, like, oh my, I had knee damage, whatever, whatever, whatever. And now they just start everywhere. So if you can sort of eradicate or control the senescent cells there, it's amazing how much better you can make the rest of the body.

TalkToMeGuy: All right, that's a whole separate show. I have to ask, because I can't help myself. Yes, sir. In this, in everything that you look at, where do we fit in the onslaught of environmental toxins? Meaning some of my favorites, DDT.

Well, DDT partially because having grown up near the Silvius Valley, when we would drive up to silicon, what is now silicon-valid, if this isn't my grandparents, I would stick my head out the car and be crop dusted. Yeah. Classic old school, north by northwest, Hitchcock movie. DDT sprayed. So I've been repeatedly sprayed by DDT because it was like, cool, wow.

Made my eyes burn a little, didn't think much about it. So we have those kind of toxins. We have, of course, the dreaded glyphosate, and now this is going to be even more glyphosate because stupidity. Microplastics, insecticides, to methyl bromide. Where does this fit into the aging solutions? How do we protect?

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: It's a fantastic question, and it's almost impossible to answer. So all of the things that mentioned obviously harm us, and the question is in which way. Some of them clearly interfere with DNA processes, so you're going to get cancer. Or they affect your epigenetics so that you can't run normal cellular processes, and you're more likely to get other pathologies.

Some of it, like in epigenetics, if you are epigenetic, we don't know, if sticking your head out that window has epigenetically modified you such that your grandchildren are more prone to get something horrible. We just don't know. We also don't know what the half lives of these things are. Do they accumulate in their body? So do we have them forever? Is it a transient attack, and then it's gone and we're just dealing with consequences? My biggest fear at the moment are the microplastics, because they're everywhere.

People are like, oh, I only get out of glass. I think it's too damn late for that shit. It's in our ovaries. It is in babies. It is in our brain. It's in our testicles. It's in everything.

The great hope is going to be plasmapheresis, but I don't actually know if that's going to get rid of microplastics or not. They're inflammatory. They're going to screw with all sorts of processes.

I don't know what the long-term complications are going to be, but it's going to be horrible. I don't like to ever leave on the doom and glim scenario, but I really think that this is a challenge that we really have to figure out. I don't know how to combat it on a cellular basis, because at the moment, we don't have any way to deal with it. It's not a biologic, so you can't nuke it with Ozone. You can't stick it with something and then pee it out. There's no way to remove it. I don't know. I just don't have an answer.

TalkToMeGuy: I'll use my calm voice, because I'm so ridiculously angry about microplastics. I used to watch them driving up this soiliness failure. I think they still do this. I've cut this back quite a bit, where they would cover the hills with long plastic rows and then they would run methyl bromide, which is a horrible gas, into the soil to basically sterilize the soil, because they were growing strawberries. The strawberries are so in my thinking, so immunosuppressed they have no ability to resist anything in nature. They would sterilize the dirt and plant strawberries so the strawberries could grow. Then they'd let that rip up the plastic, but much of it would just fly around and you'd see it next year. Then the next year, they'd do the same thing, more plastic, more methyl bromide, more DNA altered strawberries. It looked great, but have no flavor. They just kept doing it and eventually they made them stop.

I'm certain they have some other way of sterilizing the soil, but it's about bad farming practices, not regenerative, not any honoring of the earth in any way. I don't think I have an out to this rant.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Yeah, the problem is there isn't. I was environmentalist as well, and unfortunately, capitalism always wins until we're desperate. The only hope is that we are reaching some moment of desperation. I don't know what we're going to do about it, because whatever is in us, we keep passing it along to our children. We're stuck with it for at least five to 10 generations, assuming they can start eradicating it. I don't know what it's going to mean for morbidity or mortality or intelligence or changing of chemical makeup in our bodies. I have no idea, and no one does.

TalkToMeGuy: I think one of my considerations about microplastics, and I've been talking about it since forever because of Salinas Valley, but also is that it's an estrogen mimicker. I think that is screwing people up because of that. Just that little effect alone that it's an estrogen mimicker, I think is bad news.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: So I will tell you what's really interesting. As I mentioned, I'm obsessed about estrogen at the moment. There's three types of estrogen receptor, and then they can be located in two different places. You basically have five, because GER has to be, can't go to the nucleus. You have five possible places where an estrogen receptor can be affected by something. They all have different affinities for different agents. We even have four types of estrogen in us.

Well, you don't, but I do, or at least I did. So depending on the type of estrogen or the type of estrogen agonist and where it is in your cell, you're going to see various different things occur. They do say that microplastics are an estrogen agonist, but the question is, they're not as specific. Is it alpha? Is it theta? Is it internal? Is it not? Because surface receptors do significantly different things than nuclear receptors, and I don't know if they get that far in. So there's a lot of questions that are unknown to us.

TalkToMeGuy: Thank you very much. That's been great. Have a great weekend, everybody. No, no. Yeah, that's I always end up on a sad puppy thing when I talk about plastics, because it's everywhere. I just want to do a really very good review of a number of real salts, mined, dehydrated, just a variety of salts. And I was looking at it mostly from a culinary perspective, because I do use different flavors of different kinds of salts, and pretty much 90% of them had some kind of microplastic.

Yeah, and part of that is that they're sold in plastic bags or plastic containers, but some of them are, you know, anything coming from the ocean is going to have plastic in it. I don't care where it is. I don't care if it's at some rare lake in Mexico, it's going to have plastic in it.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Well, they have demonstrated that if you grow plants out there anywhere, it's in the soil, and it ends up in your food. So even if you're like, oh, I eat organically, you're still eating microplastics. So there is no escape at the moment. I am just hoping to hope that we're going to come up with some Q-later, dissolver, something, something.

TalkToMeGuy: Some magic enzymes I may discover in a platypus in Africa.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Yes. Platypus being one of my favorite animals. Yes.

TalkToMeGuy: Yeah, mine too. Yeah. Really? What is that? Why? Because they're crazy.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: It's the most mismatched animal. Like, I'm an atheist, so I can't, you know, say God did this. But if he had, and he had a whole lot of spare parts sitting around, that's a platypus.

TalkToMeGuy: I mean, come on. It's like one day, I'm also not a believer. Well, that's all I could show. I just, I believe in the spirit of the earth. But it's like a joke, joke animal. Yes. Like really, here's some parts, make this into something. Like really? Platypus? Wow.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: It has five X's and five Y's in terms of chromosomes. So there are 25 sexual options for a platypus. Isn't that great? Good for them. Yeah. I'm like, I want to be a platypus. That sounds fun.

TalkToMeGuy: Yeah, that sounds fun. Okay, I think we have to stop or it's going to be another hour. Oh no, I do have a closing thought because I love this so much. The Mark Twain quote about, be careful about reading health books. You may die of misprint. I just love that so much. That's so perfect. It's so true.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Yeah, I did. I went out of my way to find the funniest quotes about longevity to stick them in that book. And I really do like that one because it's just really good.

TalkToMeGuy: I'd wear that as a t-shirt. I also had, this is a, we are moving toward the close. I ran through this when I was prepping for the show. This popped up in my brain about, I think there's a merch opportunity for you here where you have a t-shirt that on one says, one size says, Church of Not Getting Old. And the other side says, Seven Tenants of Cellular Aging.

Speaker 1: I like that. I like it. I like it. Yeah. I think I will do it.

TalkToMeGuy: So many more questions. We're going to do this again. I can tell. I think we should. This is fun. That's the idea. This should be fun no matter what we're talking about, even if we're talking about the end times because of microplastics.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: All right, next time we end on something a little bit more pleasant.

TalkToMeGuy: I'm sorry. People know me. They know it could happen, you know, and don't get me started about glyphosate. Oh, dear God. That's not cool. So where would you like people to find your books? And where can people find it about working with you and give us a little zinger about Club Exxazone, please?

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Yeah, sure. So I have physical clinics in Miami and in Las Vegas. So I also have sort of online stuff. And if you go to my website, it's Kaufman Longevity. I answer all emails. And if someone wants to consult, you get sent to my assistant and she does everything. The actual science of it is under Kaufman Protocol.com. It's a different website, but it all comes to me.

So it doesn't really matter. Instagram is Kaufmann Longevity. And I try to put on their different podcasts or conferences or that sort of thing.

Books, everything is on Amazon. There's two regular imprints. The first one, which is why we age and how to stop it.

And the second one is aging solutions. And then not in print, but as an e-book, there's mastering the mass cell. That is my first e-treaty.

And there will be more of those to come. And then as a closer, I am big into biologics. So I believe in all sorts of different ways of improving longevity and health. And exosomes are liquid gold.

I believe they're liquid gold. Anyway, there's lots of ins and outs of the exosomes. And that's a huge long conversation under itself. But we host Club Exosome in Las Vegas four times a year. And there's a whole lot of people that come together for an afternoon. And I inject everyone with exosomes while they're gathering and sort of sharing information and what I call the French salon of longevity in Las Vegas. So it's a good time and good therapies, good people. And it's just kind of fun. So that's Club Exosome.

TalkToMeGuy: That sounds great. That sounds like a good reason to go to Vegas.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: It's fun.

TalkToMeGuy: There is great food. There is really stunningly great food in Vegas, I have to say. I have to give them credit for that.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Well, good. Then you should come. We'll go have dinner and I'll bring you to Club Exosome.

TalkToMeGuy: Wow. Yikes. That's a scary idea. Yes. Shoot me up.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Bring me around. It's amazing.

TalkToMeGuy: Yeah, I bet. That was really wonderful. Thank you. I was a little overwhelmed at first. And then once we got into flow, I know it was going to be a lot of fun. Because it is, if you just pick up the book, it's like, wow, what am I even reading, man? Whoa. This is such a different way of brilliantly organized thinking.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: Well, thank you. Yeah, it'll never be a bestseller. But that's the running joke. Yeah, I'm never making the New York Times list.

TalkToMeGuy: But that's okay. That would be a blot. That would be so fun if that happens. The bestseller list. That would be amazing.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: The best book that no one's ever read.

TalkToMeGuy: Yes. Yeah. We loved it so much. We just couldn't read it though.

Dr Sandra Kaufmann: We give it away as gifts, but we've actually, I didn't have my dad. Like, have you read it? He's like, no.

TalkToMeGuy: No, no, I can't. I love you, dear. But I can't. It hurt my brain. Can't do it. All right. Thank you so much. And everybody else have a great rest of the weekend, and we'll see you next week. Bye-bye. Thank you.

Speaker 1: You