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Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
Unlocking Longevity Through Telomere Science with Dr Bill Andrews
What if the secret to aging well lies hidden at the ends of your chromosomes? Dr. Bill Andrews, a pioneering scientist with a revolutionary discovery, takes us on a fascinating journey through the science of telomeres—those tiny "ride tickets" that determine how our cells age.
From a childhood challenge to "find a cure for aging" to leading the team that discovered human telomerase, Dr. Andrews shares the remarkable story behind his lifelong obsession. He reveals how telomeres shorten with each cell division, acting as a biological countdown clock that ultimately leads to aging and disease when they become critically short.
Perhaps most surprising is his explanation of the cancer-telomere connection. Rather than causing cancer as some feared, maintaining longer telomeres may actually protect against it by preventing the mutation-inducing effects of critically short telomeres. This groundbreaking understanding has led to the development of TeloVital, containing the five most potent telomerase-inducing plant extracts his team has discovered after testing over 20,000 compounds.
While Dr. Andrews acknowledges we haven't yet found something powerful enough to completely reverse aging, his work offers hope for slowing the aging process today. He shares personal experiences of improved athletic performance and vision after using telomere-supporting products, while emphasizing realistic expectations—you may not feel immediate effects unless you have critically short telomeres in specific tissues.
The conversation ventures beyond telomeres to touch on other promising health compounds and the ethics of the anti-aging industry. As Dr. Andrews continues his research—at the astounding cost of two million dollars monthly—he remains committed to the quest that began in his childhood: helping humans live longer, healthier lives by addressing aging at its cellular roots.
Curious about your telomeres? Visit our show notes for special offers on TeloVital and connect with Dr. Andrews directly with your questions about telomere science and aging.
Here's a link to a special offer
https://thegardensofhope.thegoodinside.com/tv0425-special-offer-lp
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Well, hello and welcome back to the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, joe Grumbine, and today we've got a very special guest. His name's Dr Bill Andrews and he's a leading expert on longevity research, a renowned scientist in anti-aging research. This guy's been around. He's been featured in Popular Science, the Today Show and numerous other publications. He's got a PhD in molecular and population genetics and in 1981, spent much of his career in medical research. Dr Andrews is recognized for his work on cancer research, which is very interesting to me and was second place at the 1997 National Inventor of the Year. Dr Bill, welcome. How are you doing today?
Speaker 2:Oh, pretty good, Lots of excitement going on today, Just well whatever. Yeah, I'm tongue-tied. What do you know? Okay so hopefully you'll edit that out. I usually am not tongue-tied like that.
Speaker 1:It's all good. Well, we gave you a pretty big intro, so you've got some big shoes to fill today. So you know, longevity research that's a big passion of mine. I consider myself a biohacker and you know I've gone through a big transformation Before I got diagnosed with cancer and now I've been beating the hell out of that and biohacking my way through that as well. So why don't?
Speaker 2:you tell us a little bit about how you got involved with longevity, aside from, just like the rest of us, getting older. Yeah Well, first let me just say that cancer is an aging-related disease. Oh sure, cancer increases a lot. So I consider that part of my research, and I do have a lot of products on the market right now that have gone through clinical studies for treating cancer. But I really got into this obsession with anti-aging when I was 10 years old. I just know that my teachers from elementary school sent me home with a note on my shirt. My parents opened up the note and it said your son is remarkably interested in science and medicine.
Speaker 2:You should nurture this Nice, and I'd already talked my parents into giving me a really big, nice 8-inch reflector telescope so that I could start looking at Saturn and the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter, things like that. And I remember one night I was out on the front lawn and my father came up to me and he said front lawn, and my father came up to me and he said, bill, I've been thinking when you grow up you should become a doctor and find a cure for aging. Wow, and no kidding. And then he said I don't know why nobody's done that yet. Okay, and it was like he made me think that's easy, okay, it's going to be easy to cure aging. Okay, it's just, it's a disease me. Think that's easy. Okay, it's going to be easy to cure aging.
Speaker 1:Okay, it's just, it's a disease. But you know what, when you're young and you believe something is easy, it can be easy.
Speaker 2:You're also very influential when you're young. So I started, I became obsessed with this, even I was still in elementary school at the time. But but you know, off and on I get more and back. Interested in. My father was constant on on me to, you know, think about it, things like that. So in high school and college I was starting anti-aging clubs and I had friends that would get together and just brainstorm about what's causing aging and we were all pretty smart guys, in fact, one of about what's causing aging and we were all pretty smart guys.
Speaker 2:In fact one of my friends actually got the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2011. And even back then we were talking about all the theories and stuff like that and what aging is why we age, how we age, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:So tell me a little bit about the points that you guys were starting out. Like you know, I like to understand the genesis of a process, and what were you guys looking at at that point in your life?
Speaker 2:Well, we were mostly looking at what is advertised.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:You'd hear all these rumors because we weren't really experts on it and they don't teach anti-aging in high school and college no, they don't. But you know what is? There's products like Gerovital or something like that back.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, geritol or whatever, yeah yeah.
Speaker 2:And you know it's like we would think about okay, so how is this working? What's the mechanos action? Why is it affecting aging? And then we would brainstorm on this and we'd conclude that it doesn't make sense. Okay, I mean, the term we always use is all the twos, and twos have to add up. And if they don't all add up, then there's something wrong with this particular theory. And so I remember in college learning that a guy named Leonard Hayflick had discovered that human cells can only divide a limited number of times. He would take cells from a newborn baby and divide them in a Petri dish, and those cells could divide 50 times. Right, he would take cells from a 50-year-old, let them divide in a Petri dish. They could only divide 25 times. He'd take cells from a 90 to 100-year-old and they could divide less than 10 times before they would stop and go into a phase called senescence. They call this the Hayflick limit. So what I remember in college, we started and this is like 10 years after Hayflick had made this discovery because everybody at first thought Hayflick was nuts. But we started my team group. We started concluding that his data looks pretty good, his publication looks. You know, we started my team group. We started concluding that, you know, his data looks pretty good, his publication looks solid. And we started wondering boy, does this have something to do with aging? And so we started figuring out how could started having a discussion. How could a cell, human cell, cell know how many times it has divided and how many more times it can divide? And this was something that plagued us. I remember being in palm springs one time playing pool and I knocked a ball into the pocket and I reached out with my cue stick and slid a wooden pellet on the wall from one side to the other to mark the that I got a ball. Okay, oh, I wonder, could there be a mechanism like that inside of a cell? We brainstormed on that. We decided, no, that's too complicated. Genetic abacus yeah, that would be too complicated for what we knew, because we were all biochemists, studying biochemistry. 401, 501, all these kinds of weird things, all this kind of stuff, and we knew that a cell could not have a mechanism like that. But then, all of a sudden, we came up with the idea of ride tickets at an amusement park. All right, okay, so could there be something like that inside of our cell so that every time a cell divided, it would lose a ticket Right, and the cell wouldn't know how many tickets it's used. It wouldn't know, it wouldn't matter. Yeah, when it runs out, it runs out, it runs out. And so we brainstormed on that for a long time and really actually never came up with anything to explain it. But then the big breakthrough was in 1993.
Speaker 2:In fact, my father is still very interested in anti-aging. The more obsessed I got with it, the more obsessed he got with it. He was a television producer and he wanted to make a movie, a documentary, on scientists curing aging. I was going to this conference on aging in Lake Tahoe and I invited him to go with me and so we went and I introduced him to all the top leaders in the world in anti-aging I'd already become well-known because of my obsession.
Speaker 2:And he was talking, we had a dinner and we were talking about making a documentary and stuff like that, and then one of the guys that was there, a guy named Michael Rose. He and I started talking about let's start a company to focus on aging. But we decided to do it on mice and just like breed longer living mice and stuff like that, all right, and find out what changed in their DNA when they live longer. But then the very next morning after that we started a company. We stayed up all night. I was going to be the president of the company and things like that. We stayed up the next morning I heard a guy named Calvin Harley at Geron Corporation talk about the fact that telomeres get shorter every time a cell divides. There you go, and I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, oh my God, here's the ride.
Speaker 2:Here's the ticker, the ride. It's a telomere. So I actually now show pictures of chromosomes. Nice, the chromosome is ride tickets. Okay, so every time a cell divides, it doesn't lose a ticket, it turns out. It turns out when a single cell wants to replicate, it becomes two daughter cells. Everything inside that parent cell needs to be duplicated. So the daughter cells are identical to that parent cell, and that includes the DNA where all your genes are. Those have to be duplicated. So it goes through DNA replication. But it turns out that a human cell lacks the ability to be able to replicate all the way to the end. So the telomere didn't get shorter. The new DNA that gets made was just made shorter because it couldn't go all the way to the end.
Speaker 2:I use as an analogy when I talk at conferences. I'll use bricklaying as an example. So you've got a bricklayer on top of a brick wall, backing up laying a brick, backing up laying another brick, and when it gets to the end of the wall it falls off before being able to lay that last brick. So the new brick, so every roll of brick is shorter, and shorter, and shorter, and that's a remarkable similarity to what really is going on. Yeah and so. But that guy, before he could even get off the stage, I was at the bottom of that podium saying has anybody figured out how to re-lengthen them? I mean, he did mention that telomeres don't shorten in our reproductive cells because if they did, our children would be born with shorter telomeres than we have. Their children are born with shorter telomeres than they have. Right, they would have been extinct as a species millions of years ago or 300,000 years ago.
Speaker 1:There's an exception in there that can be explored.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So he said that they'd been working on it for years with teams all over the world and nobody had figured it out. And I just said let me come and work with you, I will figure it out in three months. Nice, now I had already had a history of major successes in biotech, accomplishing things when nobody else could get them done. That includes, like human growth hormone, tissue plasminogen activator, erythropoietin, beta-seron, on and on a whole bunch of lots of cancer drugs, things like that. So it was a pretty short job interview. He got me on board right away and then, three months and 17 days later, my team discovered the enzyme human telomerase. That was actually the one that actually, actually actually verified or said this is it no kidding? I couldn't have done it without my team and I had like three quarters of all the employees at Geron Corporation reporting to me at the time. It was a big effort, but we we discovered and then the 17 extra days that it took me. I blamed it on Geron for interfering too much with trying to redirect my efforts elsewhere. But we discovered the enzyme, we put it into normal skin cells and we showed that they completely lost the hafleck limit. Wow, what was more important is that their risk of becoming cancer decreased immensely. Interesting and the Because of my cancer background, I had some theories about cancer.
Speaker 2:There were a lot of people who started thinking at the time that this enzyme, telomerase, that we discovered was actually causing cancer. Really I was saying no, it's actually decreasing cancer. And it turns out that in the cases of where. So after we discovered the enzyme, we did find that a lot of cancer cells are immortal because they suddenly are producing telomerase. Oh really, yeah, but it's not. The telomerase didn't cause the cancer, the cancer caused the telomerase.
Speaker 2:Interesting, so now we know, years and years later, we know that when a cell starts dividing rapidly, like a cancer, every time it divides the telomeres get shorter and shorter and shorter. When telomeres get critically short, the mutation rates skyrocket. Short telomeres induce so many mutations that you can see them in the light microscope and so these mutations are doing all kinds of things rearranging genes and stuff like that, and then one or two of the cancer cells end up putting telomerase under control of some other promoter. So the cancers start producing telomerase and then the cancer becomes immortal and that's when it kills you If a cancer, if you're over 30 years old and a cancer gets bigger than a pimple okay, small pimple, that cancer has figured out a way to become immortal. Okay, otherwise it would die of old age, okay. And so, because of the skyrocketing mutation rates from the short telomeres, there was always almost always a chance that at least some of those cancer cells would mutate to start producing telomerase and therefore become immortal. So cancer caused telomerase and the telomerase caused the cancers to become immortal.
Speaker 2:I just want to learn from that. Let's make a non-cancer cell immortal, right, exactly. And it turns out that when we do that, the incident the risk of becoming cancer decreases immensely, and it's because of one. It's not only just inducing the cells that you're treated, but it's inducing telomeres in your immune cells, which is lengthening telomeres in your immune cells, which is giving your immune systems a much better chance of fighting a cancer if you get cancer. But, more importantly, it's preventing your cells from having the critically short telomeres that induce all the mutations. Makes sense. So telomerase doesn't cause cancer. Telomerase decreases the risk of cancer and this has been shown over and over again. Dr Rhonda Pinnell, who is a doctor at Harvard, very famous doctor at Harvard, who was very, very into cancer, he was convinced that telomerase causes cancer and I actually provided him he and I were friends I actually provided him with the technology, the telomerase and everything like that, so that he could prove that telomerase causes cancer. Okay, because I'm just a scientist, that's good science, though Try to prove that.
Speaker 2:I'm not trying to make one something true, that's not true. So I want to know the answers too. Absolutely so. To his disappointment, the mice did not get cancer and they actually had what he called a remarkable reversal of the aging process. Wow, okay. And he used engineered mice, because mice don't normally age by telomere shortening they. So he had to create a mouse that does. And he there's a really great video of of diane sawyer interviewing dr ronda pennel showing the pictures of the mice and he was like stunned, you know, he he was like a remarkable reversal of the aging process.
Speaker 2:He also ended up later doing more studies and found the telomeres were the kingpin of aging. Uh, he published papers showing that even mitochondria, health and everything like that was affected by telomere. Like he keeps the telomeres long, nothing else happens, none of the other aging markers happen. So, and you can, he was doing it like I, we've even done these experiments here but telomere shorten, relengthen them, shorten or relengthen, and we find that aging goes up and down, up and down, just on telomeres, nothing else. That doesn't mean that nothing else causes aging. Okay, I want to be clear. But it does tell me that no matter what else we do to try to cure aging.
Speaker 2:Aging will never be cured unless we also solve the telomere shortening problem. Right, maybe we'll find that it does solve all the problems of aging, but I would be surprised if it did, because I think you can get aging just by by other things. Even with long telomeres you can still have aging. So we have to solve these things. And then there's diseases like my favorite one I like to refer to is alcoholism. Okay, alcoholism has nothing to do with telomeres, okay and so, but it does accelerate telomere shortening. Okay, by killing liver cells and things like that. But so even after we do cure aging with telomeres, we still have other things we have to do. We've got plenty of ways to get old. So I don't know, I'm kind of long-winded.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, this is very interesting to me. Oh, no, no, this is very interesting to me. You know the whole idea of telomeres. I was introduced to, I don't know, probably about seven, eight years ago, when I sort of began my journey of it, and I understand the importance of trying to keep them long, and so you've come up with some ways to do that. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, first of all, we had to develop some pretty sophisticated, high-throughput assays, ways of testing for different ways of lengthening telomeres, because there's a lot of claims of things that lengthen telomeres and they actually don't, but, uh, but I wanted to really figure out something that does, and it's actually a lot tougher than you would ever imagine. Um so, so we haven't found a uh like a chemical or a nutraceutical or anything like that that actually is potent enough to reverse aging, and, despite everything else you hear in the marketing world, nothing has ever been discovered that does. But we have found the most potent things so far, and so let me, before I explain that telomere shortening and lengthening is like a tug of war, and in our reproductive cells it's a tie.
Speaker 2:Okay, we have people on one side pulling to lengthen, one on the other side pulling to shorten, and it's a tie. So we don't. We have they shorten and they lengthen, they shorten and they lengthen. It's a back and forth kind of thing. In all the other cells of our body we only have the shorteners. Okay, pulling to shorten, and that's just going on. Now we can decrease the number of shorteners so we can slow down the aging process by living a healthy lifestyle, like antioxidants don't smoke, don't be obese, things like that and inclamatories. But there's a basal level that, when I was talking about that brick layer falling off the wall, we can't get below that. Okay, that's called the basal level telomere shortening what sort of gravity always going on.
Speaker 2:So we started this assay, this high-throughput robotic screening, where we were testing like 4,000 different ingredients a day and looking for anything that would cause the cells to start producing telomerase, and we started finding some. First they were weak and then we found stronger. Then we started doing medicinal chemistry to start redesigning things. We started getting smarter and smarter from the results that we got, learning from looking at structures, and so we started coming out better and better. But the problem with these things is that most of the things is that as soon as we did anything to engineer it or redesign it, it became a pharmaceutical. And pharmaceuticals require like 20 years of FDA clinical studies and billions of dollars and things like that.
Speaker 2:So we just took the approach that you know let's find a nutraceutical, yeah, and so we started emphasizing nutraceuticals and we found a lot of nutraceuticals, but still so we're putting people. So we got the shorteners pulling to shorten. I got my hands reversed this time, but now we are putting people on the other side, but we aren't tying the tug of war or even winning the tug of war. We are just slowing down the tug of war, right, so it's still short, but that's a really good thing. Yeah, I can't tell you how often people say you know you don't reverse aging. What good is your product? You know it's like that's because they believe that everybody else has products that reverse aging.
Speaker 1:As a point of reference. You know, when you're going through cancer treatment, they talk about, you know, six months of life as this big gift, and so if you're shortening your telomeres and you give yourself any amount of extra time, it's definitely a benefit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's not just life, it's health too. I know you weren't saying that, but a lot of people say, well, I don't want to live a long time if I'm not healthy, right, right, there's not a scientist in the field that I know of that is thinking oh, I just want to extend people's lifespan, right, exactly, it's quality of life, for sure. So we've tested like 20,000 different plant extracts throughout the last 10 years and we've continually found more and more potent ones. We did have some companies license some of them a while back, years ago, and they discontinued them because of profit margins weren't high enough, of course. They were too focused on profits and not enough on actual health, right.
Speaker 2:But then I got approached by Touchstone Essentials, which blew me away because they seem like they don't care a thing about profits. They just want people to be happier and healthier. And, by the way, I never market. I believe in when I promote a product, I promote it on its benefits, not on the lack of benefits by other products that come, right, you know. So I, but, but the but I, I. I did find that I really like touchstone's attitude and so I licensed our latest nutraceuticals yeah, our plant extracts, now that we had discovered, and so the top five plant extracts that we have ever discovered, and we've tested everything else that's out there that's marketed to be able to do that. They don't do anything. We licensed our top five what I call telomerase-inducing plant extracts, licensed them to touchstone essentials and they put them together and created telovital.
Speaker 1:Nice.
Speaker 2:I didn't create it, I just licensed them. I'm the scientist. I'm not going to market the product or anything like that. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:You can't put the ingredients to work with.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then they wanted to. Also, I mentioned that you can reduce the number of shorteners by antioxidants, anti-inflammatories, and so they wanted to know some of those too, but they wanted them to be vegan and natural and organic. Okay.
Speaker 1:And so.
Speaker 2:I was able to provide them with a list of things, and actually I'm going to confess my business partner, a guy named Christian Chase, who is in New Zealand. He actually came up with a list of things that are organic, natural and vegan. All right, that actually would do that, and so those are included in Tilo Vital also Nice. So Tilo Vital is not only decreasing the number of shorteners, it's actually adding lengtheners, so you're getting the best of both worlds, but it's still not winning the tug of war. But slowing it down is good.
Speaker 1:You know, progress is progress, and, as we start getting to the other side of our hourglass, that any progress is good progress. The way I see it, you know, especially if the quality of life is, uh, included with it all what increases your chances of still being around when we come up with something that does reverse aging?
Speaker 2:because we're still working on this. I mean, our, our research literally costs us two million dollars a month. Wow, okay, to run the robots, to have all the assays, to get all the plant extracts and things like that, to pay the salaries. It's two million dollars a month to perform this essay, but we're doing it okay and we're we're finding and like we it says we tested like 20,000 different plant extracts. So far there's at least 3 million out there.
Speaker 1:I was going to say there's a lot more to go, yeah.
Speaker 2:And so you know, I'll confess some of the nutraceuticals, some of the plant extracts. I don't want to call them nutraceuticals because they're not on the market, but some plant extracts are toxic, right. And so I don't want to call them nutraceuticals because they're not on the market, but some plant extracts are toxic and so those get thrown away right away. But it turns out some of those ended up being toxic against cancer cells. Okay, so they become useful too, in different ways, Absolutely. So we're moving along, and I am, I got to say, I do something that's called critical meta-analysis of peer-reviewed studies. I'm really good at looking at scientific studies and looking at their experimental design and their data analysis and the logic and statistical theories and things like that of papers and being able to weed out what's right and what's wrong, because you can find anything you wish to be true, in even the scientific peer-reviewed literature.
Speaker 2:but so I did this kind of like due diligence on the other products that touchstone has and I was blown away. Nice, they have products that I I can't find the equivalent of anywhere else, like their glucocontrol, which is converting sugar into fiber. Fiber is good, sugar is bad, sugar tastes good. What else? Their zeolite is, I think, one of the best things I've ever seen for getting rid of toxins, heavy metals, things like that.
Speaker 1:That's wild. They use that in kitty litter.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, not as pure as this stuff is.
Speaker 1:Right, I would imagine, I would hope.
Speaker 2:What else? The fulvic acid. You know I've always been a fan of Shilajit, yeah, yeah, but Shilajit has side effects and stuff like that. Right Turns out fulvic acid is the active ingredient in Shilajit. Now it costs more because you have to purify the fulvic acid from it. You can't synthesize it or anything like that, because then it wouldn't be organic. But they provide fulvic acid, which is safe and does the same thing as Shilajit without the side effect. They're natokinase, okay, which is a Okay. So one of the products that I discovered a long time ago were, like tissue plasminogen activator or other plasminogen activators that break down blood clusters, inhibitors of those. And then there's things that inhibit those, the inhibitors. Natokinase is one of those. It's a protease Even though it sounds like a kinase, it's actually not a kinase which is an enzyme that adds phosphates to proteins. It's a protease that inactivates the inhibitor of telomerase. So what is this? It's an inhibitor and it activates the inhibitor of the activator, okay.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 2:But it's a really, really great product for preventing or decreasing the riskator. Okay, so so it it. But it's a really, really great product for preventing or decreasing the risk of heart disease. Okay and so, uh, touchstone has that too. Okay and um, so it's like a great company. Yeah, no, I, I'm, I'm blown away with the ethics of this company. I'm, I'm. That's why I say, when we develop new things in the future, I'm not looking for anybody else to market these products. I'm sticking with Touchstone. Um, and I'm not a marketer myself.
Speaker 2:I hear you I haven't spoken bad about any other companies as far as I know, but I, I just uh, I, I'm, I like working with Touchstone immensely. Um, the uh, uh. And then they have the other products, they have their proteins and they have this green juice. That's really, really good. I take it every day and I pay for it. I'm not getting a free product from them.
Speaker 1:Well, you know we're running a little low on time and I want to continue this conversation, but I would love to have you back to go deeper into some of these things, especially some of your work on cancer. But I want to talk about the products a little bit. Televital. I was working with your guy. I set up an account and they're sending me over some samples. I'm curious and interested to try them out myself. I, you know, I'm curious and interested to try them out myself. I, you know, with this show I meet a lot of people, a lot of companies, try a lot of products and all sorts of ideas, concepts and all this stuff. But one of the things that is important to me is, you know, I'm going to try the product and I want to know, like, what am I looking for to validate its efficacy? You know, I mean a lot of things. You know you can feel energy, you can feel clarity, you can feel all these different things, but what's going to tell me that this is doing anything?
Speaker 2:okay, well, first of all, most products you are especially an anti-aging you are are not going to feel anything because you can't detect the slowing down of aging. So a lot of the companies that promote products, they add things that are called instant gratification stuff. So when people take the product they suddenly feel a buzz or something like that. That's just to make them think that the product's doing something, but in reality it's impossible to measure the slowing of aging. Okay, now, that said, we do know that when telomeres get critically short, they're easier to lengthen. So the shorter a telomere is, the easier it is to lengthen. So even though we aren't winning the tug-of-war in normal cells, in the cells that have critically short telomeres, we are winning the tug-of-war we are lengthening. And so if a person taking telovital has critically short telomeres in any of their tissues or organs, they can possibly see a reversal of the symptoms.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And so that's really the only thing that you can look for. But you know, I've mentioned stuff like instant gratifications to Eddie Stone, who's the head of Touchstone, and he said, no way, yeah, they're making products that really work. They're not trying to just make money cheating people. So you really shouldn't. I mean you will be slowing your aging down. You have to kind of go on faith and people can do due diligence on me and all my successes in the past.
Speaker 2:My track record is impeccable, uh, and they, they can find that you know every and they can listen to me talk at medical conferences. I never make false claims and things like that. Uh, they can find that that what I say is pretty legit. I've developed a good reputation for being somebody that you can trust. So it is slowing down the rate of aging, okay, and you're not going to be able to measure the slowing of aging. You can do it if you want to put 1,000 mice in two different groups and treat one and not the other. You can measure a slowing of aging there, but you can't measure individual people. Even if you had an identical twin, your identical twin going to have left led a different life than you had, and so exactly night.
Speaker 2:By the way, I do have an identical twin and oh wow, all right, identical twin is a measure of my success at slowing down my aging uh, but uh the uh, because he's only recently decided to start getting on my bandwagon and so getting on your bandwagon, so you got a head start on him.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the but yeah, you're not going to. You're not going to feel anything unless you do have critically short telomeres, and there are a lot of people that have critically short telomeres even though they're young. So things that people could look for are improved vision, improved endurance, improved like hair coming back or hair color coming back. But that's only going to happen if the loss of the hair or the change in color of the hair was because of telomeres, got it. And if your mother's father was bald and he was bald because of that.
Speaker 1:That's not going to happen with telomeres.
Speaker 2:But there are, even with the past, products that were on the market and stuff of that. That's not. That's not what you do with telomeres, okay so, but but there are, even with the past products that that were on the market and stuff like that, I was stunned by people's hair color coming back, people's hair coming back, uh, things, things like endurance. So I, I can tell you that personal, and I don't believe in anecdotal data, but I was surprised, believe in anecdotal data, but I, I was surprised.
Speaker 2:I'm an ultra marathon runner, okay, so I never, ever, came anywhere close to winning races and stuff like that but after finishing an ultra marathon, that's winning a race yeah well, I always say it's like I hope it never ends, because when you run as often as I do and stuff like that, running is more fun, it's adventure and stuff like that Running is more fun, it's adventure and stuff like that. I love the races. I'm not one of those runners that finish on their hands and knees throwing up. I usually can't. I want the race to last forever.
Speaker 2:After taking one of the products that I had invented a long time ago I'm not going to mention names because the product's really not available anymore I was running a race in salt lake city and I was like stunned that I was doing really well and I ended up finishing in the top 10 overall, winning my age group, and I'm driving home and I'm thinking what happened? How did that happen? And all of a sudden it dawned on me oh my God, it's this new product. Somehow, because of, I guess, maybe all the running, I had some critically short telomeres that was holding me back from my endurance. Endurance has been stayed up there ever since then, and I also my ophthalmologist.
Speaker 2:I had to put my glasses on at the beginning because you were such a blur, but my vision started getting better three ophthalmology appointments in a row and I actually took pictures and I made a slide out of the different things that show this. And, you know, was it because of the telomere product? I don't know, I can't think of anything else different I was doing. Yeah, yeah, but uh, yeah, the two things that I had were the endurance getting better and the vision getting better.
Speaker 1:But I was pretty convinced that some of the other people, their hair was coming back and uh, well, I'm paying a lot of attention to my body right now as I'm overcoming this problem that I've got, and I'm looking forward to trying the product and I believe we've got a special for the listeners that I'll be able to offer. I'm going to put that into my show notes, but why don't you give us a little parting shot and how to get a hold of you or how to find your information?
Speaker 2:Okay, well, yeah, I'm actually pretty open. People are welcome to email me with questions and things like that. I won't mark it, but I will talk about the science behind it and my email address you can put it on your website is basboyandrews at sierrascicom, and Sierra Sci is short for Sierra Sciences, which's S-I-E-R-R-A-S-C-Icom, and Sierra Sci is short for Sierra Sciences, which is my company. Yeah, I don't work for Touchstone, I just license the ingredients to them. But I'm feeling like I'm becoming a follower. I'm interacting with them so much. But, yeah, and that's the best way, and then, if it gets crazy, I can actually provide my phone numbers to them after the email discussions and we can talk even more.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I find I enjoy my favorite part of ever giving a presentation on stage is the Q&A. I can answer any question and I just love doing Q&A. I understand the science of aging. I can answer any question and I just love doing a Q and a. I understand the science of aging, not just telomeres. I'm I'm into all aspects of aging and and I understand there's a series of talks that I do.
Speaker 2:One is like what is aging. Another one is why do we age? Another one is how do we age, and then the other one's how not to age, okay, and so there's there's YouTube videos that people can find and listen to those, and they're going to find that I understand the whole what and why and how better than anybody in the world, the and I'm not trying to pat myself on the back, but oh no no, my entire life studying, studying this stuff, and my my things aren't theories anymore.
Speaker 2:What I do is I focus on explaining how everything we know about life and stuff like that causes us to age and there's nothing we can do about it. Yet, and we don't have to create theories to explain aging. I explain how lack of theory is just everything that we know does it all by itself. And that doesn't mean the theories also don't work. But it turns out you're going to still age even without the theories, sure, and so I explain all that and then how we're going to undo, how we're going to prevent aging too, and nobody ever comes back and says to me Bill, you're wrong. Everybody comes back to me and say, wow, I've never heard it presented that way and it makes complete sense. So that's the skills I have, okay, where I can do something like that, and people, if they listen to those videos, definitely trust me a lot.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, what I would like to do is I'd like to have you come back on in the future and I would like to put together a series of questions for you. I've got a ton of them, as you might imagine, and this conversation could go on for a long time, but the constraints of the show keep that from happening. So I would certainly like to invite you back and just really grateful. This has been a great conversation and you know this is important to anybody who is concerned about their health at all, and aging is a thing that you know we're we're all affected with one way or the other.
Speaker 2:So I Sorry, I didn't give you enough time to talk. I talked my head off during this. No, no, no, I'm just obsessed with the subject of aging.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is good conversation and again it opens the door for further discussion.
Speaker 2:All right, well, thank you.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, thank you for joining us, and this has been another edition of the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, joe Grumbine. I thank you for all your support and we will see you next time.
