humanOS Radio

Perhaps you want to feel great about how you look at the beach. Maybe you play a sport in which it’s important to be powerful and strong relative to your weight. Or you might simply be interested in continuing to function well as years pass by. Whatever your goals are, you should be interested in the mass and quality of your muscle tissue. In this episode of humanOS Radio Dan speaks with Dr. Keith Baar, Professor in Residence in the Department of Physiology and Membrane Biology in the UC Davis School of Medicine, about this important subject, addressing topics such as how to exercise and eat to optimize muscle mass and function across the lifespan.

In this episode, Dan speaks with Dr. Mike West, CEO of AgeX Therapeutics. Here, we discuss a variety of important questions related to the science and potential of stem cells to positively influence human health including: The distinction between progenitor cells and stem cells; what goes wrong with stem cells during senescence; current clinical uses of stem cell therapies; what Dr. West’s team is working on at AgeX; and the future of stem cell therapies.

We now know that the gut microbiome is intimately connected to our own health. You can even think of these gut bugs as though they are another organ. But while we know of the great importance of the gut microbiome in our metabolism, oxidative status, brain health, gut health, and more, knowing exactly how to intervene to promote health is a science in its infancy. In this episode, however, Dan chats with Susan Westfall, who recently published a study in Nature looking at the combination of various probiotics prebiotics, including the ayurvedic polyphenol formula, triphala. In short, the formula promoted widgespread benefits to the fruit flies in which is was tested, but the most remarkable statistic on the research was a 60% extension in lifespan! Listen here to learn more.

If you value how you look and feel, you probably dedicate considerable time and effort to your physical fitness. But how often do you pause to ponder the state of your mental fitness? If you’re mentally fit, you’ll make better decisions and thereby enhance your ability to achieve goals, whatever they pertain to: physical performance, work, relationships, and the list goes on. In this episode of humanOS Radio Greg speaks with Dr. Andrew Hill about how to improve brain health and performance. Dr. Hill founded the Peak Brain Institute where people go to train and thereby improve their brains. Tune in to find out more about what you can do to boost your brain health and function!

Most of us know that the majority of our cellular energy is manufactured within mitochondria which are organelles that dwell inside our cells. The problem is when we produce energy, a byproduct of that process creates reactive oxygen species (ROS). These ROS - or free radicals - can cause cellular damage and so for a long time a prevailing idea was that it's good to take antioxidants, like for example vitamin E, C, A, to quench these ROS signals. Turns out, that's not that case. We need these ROS signals to trigger cellular protective mechanisms. In fact, it's these ROS signals that might just be the common pathway by which many behaviors and substances exert their health-promoting effects. In this episode, Dan speaks with Professor Michael Ristow, a key player who helped turn the oxidative theory of aging on its head.

In this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan hosts a discussion with Professor Antonio Nunez exploring the work and he and his colleagues are doing looking into how environmental light can lead to structural changes in the brain. For the great majority of us who aren't spending our days hunting and gathering, this could have important implications for our health and perhaps our productivity. The Environmental Protection Agency has reported that Americans spend, on average, about 90% of their time indoors. Is it possible that spending too much time in dimly lit rooms and offices is affecting our ability to learn? Might environmental light be involved in the regulation of cognitive performance and mental health?

Many other organisms have superhuman abilities, such as the capacity to ward off cancer, periodically reverse aging, regenerate limbs, and even regrow brains. Yet these non-human species share many genetic similarities with us. This naturally raises the question of whether we can learn from other animals in our quest to delay aging, reverse disease, and – dare I say it – return to life from the empty expanse of death. These lofty goals bring us to today's episode of humanOS radio in which Dan speaks with Ira Pastor, CEO of Bioquark.

The number of people with cardiovascular diseases is increasing at an alarming rate, and such disorders are now the leading cause of death worldwide. Because these diseases tend to cluster with pathologies like type-two diabetes, they are sometimes given the umbrella term “cardiometabolic diseases”. The number of people experiencing sleep problems has increased in lockstep with the growing prevalence of cardiometabolic diseases, and in the latest episode of humanOS Radio Dan speaks with Professor Kristen Knutson about why this is unlikely to be a mere coincidence.

In this episode, Dan speaks with Bruce Hay, Professor of Biology at Caltech. Much of Professor Hay’s work focuses on the genetic and molecular mechanisms that regulate cell death, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. In brief, Professor Hay's research has shown that “we want to slow or stop… accumulation of the mutant genomes that inexorably occurs as we age”. Professor Hay and his team have done work showing that when they stimulate mitophagy – a process in which mutant mitochondria are selected, tagged, and then shipped to organelles that break them down - they might allow healthy mitochondria to substitute in their place, rejuvenating cellular function, a finding that could have profound implications for those of us seeking to ward off aging.

As the stage in which people dream each night, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep can bring euphoria, terror, and even genuine harm in some instances. On transition into REM sleep, your body enters a fascinating state. True to its name, REM sleep results in characteristic, swift, saccadic eye movements. But many other features of REM sleep are noteworthy. During REM sleep, activity in some brain regions is even higher than during wakefulness, so it is little surprise that it is from this sleep stage that you naturally arise each day. This state has therefore been dubbed the “gateway to waking”. But while your brain is highly active in REM sleep, your muscles are actually paralyzed (other than your heart and respiratory muscles). For this reason, REM sleep is sometimes known as “paradoxical sleep”. But what exactly is REM sleep actually for? In this show, Dan speaks with Professor John Peever, Director of the Centre for Biology Timing and Cognition at the University of Toronto. Professor Peever’s research focuses on how the brain regulates wakefulness and sleep, and our discussion focuses on REM sleep.

If you are alive today, you've benefited greatly from humankind's ability to deftly handle infectious agents via antibiotic medications. In fact, probably the single greatest achievement of modern medicine remains our ability to thwart (many) deadly microorganisms. But our high usage of antibiotics has put great pressure on these pathogenic bacteria to mutate for their own survival. As a result, deadly strains of bacteria have become more virulent and more resistant to our medications, creating so-called “superbugs.” For instance, an increasing percentage of tuberculosis cases worldwide are attributed to bacterial forms that are resistant to multiple drugs and require more complex treatments with an array of different medications. Eventually, former wonder drugs, like penicillin for instance, can be rendered ineffective. This is a very scary proposition and this problem is not likely to go away on its own. We need new ways to control bacterial infections and we need them fast. And that brings us to my guest today. In this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks with Paul Garofolo. Paul is the CEO of Locus Biosciences, a biotech company that is developing a novel class of antimicrobials that take advantage of the CRISPR-Cas system. If this pans out, it would offer a viable alternative to conventional antibiotics, and would presumably be less subject to the known mechanisms of drug resistance. Secondly, this method could be targeted to specific pathogenic bacteria, thus leaving your friendly bugs alone. This seems like a win-win that is both lifesaving and health promoting, potentially (depending on the context).

You probably already know that ambient light regulates circadian rhythms by interacting with light-sensitive neurons in the eye. What hasn’t been clear is whether visible light has physiological effects on other tissues in the body outside of the retina...until now. In this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan talks to Peter Light. Dr. Light is a pharmacologist and a leader in the field of cellular electrical activity. He is chief investigator at the Light Lab at the University of Alberta, and director of the U of A's Alberta Diabetes Institute. He and his research team discovered - largely by accident - that chronic exposure to blue light causes human fat cells to shrink, store less lipid, and alter their function in other ways that are likely relevant to metabolic health. This suggests that subcutaneous fat might be a sort of peripheral biological clock, and raises all sorts of intriguing questions. Could repeated exposure to blue light serve as a protective mechanism against insulin resistance, chronic systemic inflammation, or even obesity? Listen to the interview below to learn more!

Does a ketogenic diet cure diabetes? A new study set out to explore the efficacy of this diet in a diabetic population and it's been getting a lot of attention. The results, in fact, are impressive but claims are being made about what the study showed that are not entirely true. In this episode, I've brought on the multi-time guest, Stephan Guyenet, PhD - author of the book the Hungry Brain, and co-author of the Ideal Weight Program on humanOS.me - to help sort out the findings from the hype.

Aging has long been characterized as a loss of complexity. The body loses the ability to adapt to various forms of stress, which gradually results in disease and loss of function. This is most evident in the muscles and bones, but neuroimaging has revealed that this occurs in the brain as well. The aging brain becomes less specialized than that of younger counterparts. We see increased secondary activation in areas of the brain that are not typically involved, possibly as a way to compensate for poorer signal transmission. One intervention that we know helps to restore complexity and plasticity is exercise. No big surprise there. Another, oddly enough, is beetroot juice. In today’s episode of humanOS Radio, Dan talks to Dr. Jonathan Burdette. Dr. Burdette is a neuroradiologist and researcher at Wake Forest School of Medicine, who uses advanced MR imaging techniques to study the brain as a complex and interconnected network. Recently, he and his team designed a clinical trial to investigate whether beetroot juice - in combination with an exercise regimen - could enhance neuroplasticity and improve brain function in measurable ways.

In this episode of humanOS, Dan interviews Dr. Alon Keinan, Professor at the Department of Biological Statistics & Computational Biology at Cornell University. His lab investigates the evolutionary origin of genetic variation in human populations, and have been looking into what factors may have shaped human genetic propensity to convert long-chain fatty acids. In his recent study in Nature, his team examined variants of the genes that code for fatty acid desaturase (FADS). This mutation consists of an insertion or a deletion of some DNA base pairs, which affects the expression of the fatty acid desaturase genes, which could then influence who well or poorly we create essential fatty acids from plant matter, which could subsequently influence what diet might be best for you. And good news, you can now get this test done to determine if you are the paleo type or farmer type in your FADS gene variant.

We are in control of our decisions, right? Well, at least we all feel that way but the social science of behavioral economics demonstrates that we are really products of our environmental triggers and cultures. Still, we can act willfully but it's typical that environment will win out, for many behaviors, over time. One interesting line of work that has come from this field looks to understand how to create better products that leverage true modifiers of behavior for better outcomes. Today, I have Duke University Professor Dan Ariely on to discuss the field and the science related to a new product he's involved in called the Shapa body weight scale and he thinks it can help you have better control over your weight than the scale in your bathroom.

We need a better approach to healthcare and we just might have the solution in our hands now. In this episode, Dan interviews Chris Kresser about his new book, Unconventional Medicine. Who is the book for? All stakeholders in the healthcare system, which means you. In our chat, we discuss Chris's personal health journey and the experiences that lead to the development of his plan for a better healthcare system.

So much of the discussion on nutrition is about the food itself. What's discussed far less regularly is the impact of food timing, fasting periods, and meal skipping on the same outcomes we're interested in when we talk about saturated fat, carbs, fiber, etc. It turns out, there is a whole lot to discuss here that matters for human health. In this episode, Dan speaks with two topic experts - both with several peer-reviewed scientific publications related to the subjects discussed in the episode - and both of whom are collaborators on humanOS.me. Enjoy the conversation.

Why is that we tend to see many diseases of aging occur around the same time in life? One reason is that we accumulate senescent cells with age, and these cells promote the aging process. There is, however, exciting new research that shows how these cells can be cleared as we age. Some of the compounds are drugs but others are natural compounds that could have a meaningful effect.In this episode, Dan speaks with an expert on the subject: Judith Campisi, Ph.D., from the Buck Institute of Aging in Marin County, California.

Ketones are getting a lot of press these days. They are produced in the liver under the conditions of low carbohydrate intake and also low-calorie intake. They are of interests for many reasons, including potential anti-cancer properties, weight control properties, athletic and cognitive enhancement, and now as substances with longevity and health extention potential. In this interview with researcher Neil Copes, PhD, of the aging diagnostic company Osiris Green, Dan discusses his work in this fascinating area.

We know that as people age, they tend to get less sleep. But older people also seem to suffer less when subjected to sleep deprivation, compared to younger adults. This has led some to conclude that older people get less sleep simply because they do not need as much. However, recent brain studies have revealed that the aging brain changes in ways that makes sleep less restorative. This suggests that the real reason why older adults get less sleep than their younger counterparts is because they are less capable of generating the sleep that they really need. In this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks to Bryce Mander, a postdoctoral fellow in the Matthew Walker Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at UC Berkeley. Bryce and colleagues recently wrote a review that explores how sleep changes as we grow older, and the potential long-term implications of these alterations. Perhaps most alarming, research has shown that a lack of deep sleep is associated with higher levels of amyloid beta, which are the toxic misfolded proteins that accumulate in the brains of those afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease. This raises a number of interesting questions. If we could test for sleep disruption, could we determine who is susceptible to developing Alzheimer’s disease soon enough to intervene? And could we find ways to enhance slow wave oscillations as people grow older, so that we can enjoy high-quality restorative sleep our whole lives? Listen here to learn more!

In this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan talks to Dr. Laura Fonken who is a post-doctoral fellow in Steven Maier’s lab in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado. Her research investigates how disruptions to circadian rhythms may affect physiological functions, and ultimately could make individuals more vulnerable to disease. This affects all of us, to varying degrees, and perhaps in ways that we don't even realize. Listen hear as we discuss her fascinating work.

“Man is not going to wait passively for millions of years before evolution offers him a better brain.” - Corneliu Giurgea In this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks to Daniel Schmachtenberger. Daniel is a social engineer, an evolutionary philosopher, and he works with a group called Neurohacker Collective, who is dedicated to optimizing human performance. In this interview, we discuss current research investigating human cognitive enhancement and nootropics. We also talk specifically about the cognitive enhancer Qualia, which is a carefully formulated nootropic stack Daniel helped design.

"The main thing is that sauna frequency is inversely associated with the risk of dementia and Alzheimer's disease, which means that the more you sauna, the lower your risk." In this interview with Jari Laukkanen, MD, Ph.D., Head of the Cardiology Department at the University of Eastern Finland, we explore his fascinating findings looking at the difference in brain health in men who frequently take a dry hot sauna compared to those who sauna less frequently. If these results came from a new pill, it would be called a miracle.

Modern technology is messing with our sleep. But what if someone could develop a device that actually helped us fall asleep faster? In this episode, Dan speaks with Kelly Roman who is the co-owner of Fisher Wallace Laboratories, a progressive medical device company that aspires to treat insomnia and depression in novel ways. Fisher Wallace is introducing a neurostimulation product called Kortex to the market. This device non-invasively delivers a low dose of electrical stimulation, combined with a virtual reality headset that delivers relaxing VR content to the user.

Everyone knows what it's like to feel sleepy after a big meal. Think of what happens after Thanksgiving dinner, or after getting a huge lunch at an Indian buffet. If you're like me, you're ready to crash. But why does this happen? Is it the tryptophan in the turkey? Is it from too many carbs? What you eat, how much you eat, and when you eat it all play a role. Consequently, there has been some doubt as to whether the “food coma” is even a real thing. But recently, some clever researchers identified a good model organism for studying this phenomenon - the fruit fly. And through studying the behavior of Drosophila, we now better understand what causes a food coma, and perhaps why it occurs. In the latest episode of humanOS Radio, Dan interviews Keith Murphy of the Scripps Research Institute. He and his colleagues have been researching the so-called food coma, and have found some substantive evidence for this phenomenon. Listen here to find out more about his study - and some reasons why the food coma might be happening.

You are fully in control over your food choices, right? Well, we know that a wide range of rules govern how we act, and even our beliefs, when we are with different groups of people. Social psychologists characterize this influence as 'social norms,' and guess what? This influence affects eating, too. In this latest episode of humanOS radio, Dan speaks with Emma Templeton from Thalia Wheatley's lab at Dartmouth and Michael Stanton, Assistant Professor, Department of Nursing & Health Sciences, California State University, East Bay. Recently, they published a study in the journal, PLoS ONE, that elegantly tests the influence of social norms on the perceived healthfulness of food and also eating behavior. Listen here to hear more.

Why are we fatter than our ancestors? In this interview, the second with Dr. Stephan Guyenet, we discuss his new book entitled, 'The Hungry Brain - Outsmarting the Instincts That Make Us Overeat.' In this episode, Stephan and Dan discuss genetics, stress, food palatability and reinforcement, and other important factors to shed light onto the mechanics behind weight regulation.

Can we stave off the aging process by transfusing young blood into old people? The idea that youthful blood might have rejuvenating properties has lingered in popular imagination for centuries. In this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks with Drs. Michael and Irina Conboy of the Department of Engineering at UC Berkeley. Their lab investigates the process of tissue repair throughout the body, and is trying to determine why damaged tissue is not productively repaired as the body ages.

I have to admit, I love this story. Two parents saw a problem effecting their children and did something about it. But not only did they try to help their children and their children's friends, they also are trying to help every child in the United States. The guests of this episode of humanOS Radio are Kelly and Juliet Starrett. Kelly is a Doctor of Physical Therapy and the author of the books: Deskbound, Supple Leopard, and Ready to Run. Juliet has a history as a competitive athlete, rowing at UC Berkeley and paddling for the US Women's Whitewater Team from 1997-2000. Together, they founded San Francisco CrossFit in 2005 (one of the first 50 CrossFit Affiliates ever), they run the healthy movement website called Mobility WOD, and most recently, they started StandUpKids.org the mission of which is to put standing desks in every public school in America. I'm also honored to be on the Board of Directors, which I mentioned in this previous post, to help this great organization achieve its mission.

Why is it that when you’re binge watching your favorite new series on Netflix, you can stay up for hours past your normal bedtime - even if you were tired before you started watching? On the other hand, if you weren’t being entertained or captivated by a game or puzzle, you’d be much more likely to be lulled to sleep at that time. Indeed, sleep and goal-directed behaviors are mutually exclusive: you can’t do both at the same time. While this relationship is intuitively clear, for the first time, scientists at Stanford have clarified the circuitry between the brain’s reward and arousal systems. In the latest episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks with Luis de Lecea, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine. Recently, he and his colleagues published a study in the prestigious journal Nature demonstrating that dopamine neuron activity (in the ventral tegmental area of the brain) is necessary in order to be awake. Furthermore, when they inhibited these neurons, there were able to promote what seemed like natural, healthy sleep.

Protein is really important for dieting success, right? Anyone who has interested in the science of dieting knows this, but recent research from Bettina Mittendorfer, Research Associate Professor at Washington University in St. Louis’s School of Medicine, and colleagues published in Cell Reports has raised doubts that protein is indeed a wholly-helpful solution. To shed light on this study and its findings, Dan invited Dr. Stephan Guyenet to join humanOS Radio for a conversation. Perhaps no other person has done more in the last few years to help the general public, and even health professionals, understand the true meaning of new research dealing with energy regulation and weight control.

In this show, Dan speaks with Dr. Jamie Zeitzer who is an Assistant Professor in Psychiatry & Behavioral Science at Stanford and at the VA Aging Clinical Research Center of Stanford University. In his research on light and the timing of biological rhythms, he noticed something curious: A brief flash of light has a greater ability to adjust body clock timing versus continuous light exposure. For instance, sitting in a room with the light on 4a can adjust your internal clock by about 35 minutes. This means that if you usually wake up at 7:30a, tomorrow morning you would naturally wake up at 6:55a (and the timing of all your other body process would shift accordingly, too). On the other hand, if you were to get 2-millisecond flashes of light every 10 seconds at 4a (instead of sitting in a room with the light on), you could advance your internal clock timing by about 120 minutes - over 3x more than simply being in the room with the light on. That would mean that getting these light flashes at 4a would make 5:30a the next morning feel like your typical wake-up time. In this conversation, we also discuss an effort by the company LumosTech to commercialize this light technology and the many benefits that can come from it.

Dietary fat is a class of nutrients of which there are many different types. Some types appear to have clear beneficial effects on human physiology in certain contexts, like for example olive oil, while others appear to impair our health when they comprise too high a fraction of our calorie intake over time. Saturated fat has been called out for decades by health authorities as something we should monitor and limit. Recently, however, this idea has been called into question by several meta-analyses, which is a type of scientific examination where all the research on a subject pooled and analyzed together to help determine what the weight of the evidence tells us on that subject. In this interview with Dr. David Katz at Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, we discuss not only the findings but also how to best interpret them so that you can continue to make good dietary choices in your own life.

Can we really stay young forever? This has been a goal of humans since the dawn of time. I know I would like to keep my peak abilities and not see those diminish over the decades. Aging is a subject that I have become increasingly interested in and it's not necessarily because I'm getting older. Understanding it can help guide how you live, even way before you start to feel old. Plenty of things we can do today can help us live longer by not dying early from disease. Diet and lifestyle make a huge difference here, but this podcast is really about something entirely different - it's about using cutting edge biotechnology to actually keep the aging process at bay far beyond what good lifestyle practices could achieve. We're talking about staying close to your peak abilities in life through the age of 130 to 150, or even longer.

Where to you get the energy to do something hard or inconvenient? It matters because so much of what's important in life comes from finding that strength. The topic of the discussion in this podcast is motivation, which can be described as the activation energy needed to do most-to-all volitional activities. Specifically, we'll be discussing the leading behavior model of motivation called Self-Determination Theory. Like most complex subjects, motivation is NOT a monolithic entity, although it's usually referred to as if it were. Rather, there are different types of motivation, and these different types have different affects on behavior. The good news is that with a greater understanding of the subject, you can better strategize when to use the specific types and, ultimately, how to use various the types together to stay engaged with something that is important but hard or inconvenient, long term.

Dan Pardi interviews Professor Stephen Hinshaw from UC Berkeley. Dr. Hinshaw is a world authority on the condition of attention deficit. He described ADHD as an 'equifinal' condition, meaning that it appears that there are multiple different biological pathways to inattentiveness. Optimal strategies to address the condition are reviewed.

Sitting has been called the new smoking. Is this true? Dan Pardi interviews Professor Travis Saunders of The University of Prince Edward Island and the founder of the Sedentary Behavior Research Network. Dr. Saunders discusses the state of the research on sitting and standing - what do we know, what questions remain, and practical ways to integrate this information into your day.

In this interview, Dan Pardi interviews evolutionary biologist, Professor David Samson of Duke University. Dr. Samson talks about his work research the sleep platforms (i.e., beds) or great apes in Africa. We discuss how these platforms appear to have contributed to deeper sleep in certain great apes, and in turn, how this deeper sleep seemingly contributed to greater cognitive abilities than compared to primates with shallower sleep.

Have you ever woken up and felt that you solved a problem during sleep? Maybe it's because during sleep our brains go through a process where neurons strengthen their connections with other neurons that fired together when we were exposed to new information during the day before we slept. In this interview, Professor Marcos Frank of Washington State University discusses the state of the science on this topic and explains how things work.

Dr. Matt Buman, Professor at Arizona State University, joins us to discuss his work on exercise, work performance, and quantified self technologies.

In a ground-breaking study published in Current Biology, Professor Jerry Siegel at UCLA evaluated three societies living in natural conditions (e.g., modern day hunter-gatherers) to examine their sleep behaviors and physiology. He also analyzed external factors like natural light, ambient temperature and the season in which the data was collected. And by doing so, Dr. Siegel appeared to turn the wide-spread belief that we are chronically sleep deprived on its head. At least that seemed to be the emphasis of most news reports that came out describing the study. But to really understand what this data means, we need to discuss the study and interpret the findings with an emphasis to explain the difference between sleep period and sleep time. Here you can listen to my interview with Dr. Siegel where we discuss the study and his findings. Article on the subject found here: http://is.gd/a4iOTf

Dan Pardi interviews Hanno Pijl, M.D., Ph.D. and Esther Van Zuuren, M.D., both of Leiden Univeristy in the Netherlands, and both authors of a systematic review and meta-analysis of the paleolithic nutrition pattern for metabolic syndrome which published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in August of 2015.