Announcer: Welcome to the Gladden Longevity podcast with Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC, founder and CEO of Gladden Longevity. On this show we want to answer three questions for you. How good can we be? How do we make 100 the new 30, and how do we live well beyond 120? We want to help you optimize your longevity, health and human performance with impactful and actionable information. Now here's today's episode of the Gladden Longevity podcast. The Gladden Longevity podcast is provided for informational purposes only. It does not constitute medical advice. This content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of a physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. The use of any information and materials linked to this podcast is at the listener's own risk.
Dr. Gladden: Welcome to this edition of the Gladden Longevity podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Jeffrey Gladden. Today, I'm going to be talking with a colleague, Ian Mitchell. Ian is a very interesting person. He's a polymath, which basically means he has the ability to go out and learn things at will and then apply them. And he's developed a host of products utilizing something called buckyballs, which are carbon 60-like soccer balls, energy production. They have a lot of amazing benefits, longevity, really interesting. The nice thing about it is that it all becomes actionable in various products that he's put together to optimize brain function, decrease risk of cancer, cancer metastasis, also optimizing inflammation, strength, athletic performance, really fascinating stuff. I think you'll love it.
So Ian is really a fascinating individual and really, a polymath I think is how he would describe himself, which is basically, if you're not familiar with it, it's a Ben Franklin that goes out in whatever he is interested in, he learns about and then becomes a master of it and then moves on to the next thing. So with that in mind, Ian has developed a number of products that we use on a regular basis that have been incredibly helpful. And they're based around a molecule called Carbon 60, which is, if you've heard of buckyballs, this is in the buckyball category of Carbon 60, which is 60 carbons basically held together in what looks like a soccer ball and they have some fascinating properties. So Ian, why don't you walk us through. Welcome first of all, and then maybe walk us through a little bit about how you got involved with buckyballs and Carbon 60.
Ian Mitchell: Yeah, for sure. Thanks Jeff. So way back in the day, about 12 years ago or so I actually, truth be told, lost quite a vast sum of money in the real estate market and thought, "Wow, I'm going to have to work forever in order to make this back." I had done all sorts of different things. It's the nature of the polymath, but one of them was early on, I studied chemistry and I was adept at it. And so when I was looking at this, I'm a numbers nerd and I was looking at the tables and I was looking at how my retirement was going to go and how long I needed to be active. And I thought, "Good God, I'm going to have to keep doing this forever." And I ran it out to 90 and thought, "Well, that's not so bad." So then just for grins, I ran out, if my usable lifespan to work were 110 in no diminished physical capacity. And I thought, "Well, that looks pretty skippy."
Dr. Gladden: So it was going to take you, let me get this clear. It was going to take you to a hundred, no, it was going to take you to 90 to get back what you'd lost. And then you were going to have 20 good years.
Ian Mitchell: Yeah. If I looked at a very conservative schedule. It was going to take until about 90 because the real estate market in Austin was booming and I had done quite well. And unfortunately what goes up as we know, must occasionally come down. That's why it's a cycle and I didn't surf so well at that point. So that being said, I thought, "Okay, 110, I'm oddly tooled to crack that egg." So I started looking at different techniques for lifespan extension and longevity and health span. And my dad, he was a professor and he sent me an article in early 2012. There was some research from a group out of Paris. Fahid Musa was the lead in the group. And they said that they had extended the lifespan of these Worcester rats 90%. And I thought, "Surely that can't be right." So I started digging.
Dr. Gladden: That's a big deal, we all know that it's easier to extend the life in a small animal by a larger percentage. You hear it all the time. Worms are living 200%, whatever it is, mice are 50% harder to do it in big organisms like us but nonetheless, 90% in a rat, that's massive.
Ian Mitchell: Yeah. It was huge. And I thought, "Eh, that seems a little sketchy." I didn't quite buy it at first. So I started delving into it. And then I got a cohort of p53 knockouts and p53, as you know, is the tumors suppressor gene, so you extract the tumors of the gene. And what I was looking for was a very short lifespan with a very well-established and defined mortality curve. And because p53 knockouts are the unfortunate tumor mice of the world...
Dr. Gladden: So just so the audience understands what he's saying, what p53 knockout means, that they've engineered these mice not to have the p53 gene. It's been knocked out of their genome, so to speak, which makes them incredibly prone to cancer because they don't have this suppressor gene that ordinarily would recognize malignant cell transformations, DNA mutations, et cetera, and suppress those. So they no longer have that running in the background. So they're really vulnerable. So they're going to have a shorter life expectancy.
Ian Mitchell: And they constantly present with just idiopathic tumors, random presentation of tumors all over their body. So I got a small cohort, six mice, and I started administering the C60. And what I found was, with these guys, it was homozygous so they were going to have the shortest life span.
Dr. Gladden: Oh wow.
Ian Mitchell: And yeah, it should have been about six months and they lasted about a year. And so when I graphed everything out, I got a 93% extension on lifespan. And obviously statistically, if Fahid Musa's getting 90 and I got 93, that's not.
Dr. Gladden: That's the same number. It's the same number. Got it.
Ian Mitchell: Yeah, exactly. And so I thought, "Okay, there's something here." So then I started pulling the thread and I started looking at the molecule and have since gotten to know one of the fellows who discovered that, Bob Curl, and got the Nobel Prize for it, really brilliant chemist, professor emeritus at Rice, really sweet, gentle guy too. But really, when I started looking at it and delving into it more, I just thought, "God bless, this is an amazing molecule just for the different things that it does."
And because of the size, 1.1 nanometers, which is incredibly small, about effectively 11 angstroms, a billionth of a meter, it can go right past the blood brain barrier. It can transfer to any position in the body, in any tissue and organ system and what it has a tendency to do... And there's a really good paper, NIH paper that shows that it moves into the mitochondrial membrane. And what's a gift there is that when it wedges into the mitochondrial membrane, it acts as an oxidative buffer so really all is stop loss. You're not losing electrons to oxidation. And as you know, when you don't lose them, then your body can utilize them in the electron transport chain.
Dr. Gladden: To make ATP. Yeah.
Ian Mitchell: Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Gladden: One of the things that happens, so the audience understands this, one of the things that happens as we age is the mitochondria become less efficient motor, so to speak. And there's lots of leaks where electrons leak off and they're not available to actually go down this assembly line, if you will. It's not really assembly line. It's more of a handoff line if you will, that moves this electron down to create this gradient at the end, that enables you to make energy quite honestly, ATP. But if you've got lots of things that are interfering with that, with either the portions of the respiratory transport train 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 are all important as a five-step process, that's a problem.
Or if the membranes aren't functioning well, and there's leakage, the gradients not maintained, or the electrons are being siphoned off, or there's excess oxidative damage to membranes and things like that, it all starts to wear down the efficiency. So you go from a motor that has 400 horsepower when it's new to one that has 200 and then it has 150. And so you feel, that's why older people feel tired. One of the reasons older people feel tired.
Ian Mitchell: Yeah, exactly. Well said. And so initially I just looked at the effect of lipolyzing, which is binding the Carbon 60 to a lipid of fat because I could get it through the cell membrane. And normally it's hydrophobic so it won't actually permeate through the cells, but if you bind it to a fat, you can get it to translocate across the membrane. And then it separates, cleaves the fat and the Nanosphere actually localizes in the mitochondrial membrane. So that was the first part of it and the things that you've worked with before that I've made, they have a really pronounced effect because initially I was just looking at the stop loss, blocking oxidative loss. And it has this net effect where you feel like you have more energy because you have more ATP and you do. However, as you said, it's really like a relay race.
And so what I started doing is, I started addressing all of the different complexes in the electron transport chain, figuring out, "Okay, so there's a deficiency here. How do I compensate for that? There's a deficiency here. How do I compensate for that?" And it's not about stopping loss. I started balancing in nicotinamide mononucleotide and resveratrol so I could get an expansion on the upside of the wave too. You block the loss and you expand the input. And then things like CoQ10. And then actually in some cases, the ETC, if you overload it by virtue of making it too efficient, you can actually create problems by having too much electron potentiation so to that end, I started adding Pyrroloquinoline Quinone, PQQ because I figured rather than try and get 400 horsepower out of a four cylinder motor, I'll make it a 12 cylinder motor, by adding more mitochondria. So I used some PQQ to stimulate mitochondrial biogenesis.
And this is where, we had talked offline, I've been delving lately, and this is in great part because of viruses that have been very profound as of late to all of the planet, that have an impact on mitochondria. When you go back and you assess those things, it's no longer just trying to optimize and increase the energy and decrease the loss. It's also, how do you replace the parts that are damaged, that aren't going to fix themselves, that are going to...
Dr. Gladden: Yeah. So there's two things here. One is, in the initial conversation here, you've been talking really about a product that you developed, which is sounding like Olympic, really is what it's sounding like.
Ian Mitchell: Yeah.
Dr. Gladden: It's going in and essentially modulating mitochondrial function in a positive direction. It's not only decreasing the loss, plugging the holes if you will. But then he's also bringing in co-factors that make that respiratory transport chain work more efficiently. So now you decrease loss. Now you have better function there so you're augmenting energy production. Then he is dropping in a molecule to help you make more mitochondria so all of a sudden, now you've got more motors. And now what we're switching over to is, there's another challenge here that comes in with viruses that we all know about. That basically starts to poison the mitochondria in a different way. And so that's what we're talking about now. So walk us through that because everybody's really interested in that long haul COVID, people with brain fog, they don't feel as much energy, et cetera.
Ian Mitchell: Yeah. So for myself personally, I had COVID twice, as you know, and I ended up with myocarditis. Actually, the initial infection I thought, "Ah, great, no problem. I'll just suppress the viral load and I'll be fine." Well, that didn't actually come to fruition. And on the second incidence, it actually really damaged me. I got to the point where I could literally walk half a block and I'd actually have to take a knee or sit on the curb because I... And this is coming from a point where I'd swim a mile, run, work out all the time to literally having to stop after half a block of walking. And one, it was a bit effacing to my ego and two, it was really humbling.
Dr. Gladden: Humbling, and concerning. It's very concerning, it's really concerning. You feel like your capacity is slipping away from you.
Ian Mitchell: Well, and I was tachycardic, my heart rate was over a hundred all the time. Literally the moment I'd stand up, I'd have pots a lot of times but the moment I'd stand up, I was tachycardic just right out the gate, over a hundred BPM every time. And yeah, it was concerning. I'm a right guy and I looked at it and thought this can't go on, my prognosis here is not so skippy.
Dr. Gladden: And did you ever do an echocardiogram or any testing to look at hard function? What did that show?
Ian Mitchell: This was the very frustrating part is, when I went to my GP, I had him do a full workup and we did an echo and he said, "No, everything's fine. You're fine." I said, absolutely, unequivocally, "I am not fine." I ended up flying to LA to go see Michael Galitzer. He's an MD out there and has a practice in Santa Monica. And he has a lot of electromedicine tech that can do a more effective diagnosis on a subcellular level. And Mike actually was able to find just... And this is actually, there was an Israeli research group who's been doing the same thing recently...
But Mike was able to find that the infection was actually in the mitochondria and it hadn't dissipated. On the surface, I wasn't expressing proteins on the surface of the cells. So you'd think virus is gone. However, it became this loop where the mRNA stays inside and continues to replicate even though it's not expressing as a virus, it's just replicating inside the mitochondria. And so the net effect of that is it sucks off protons, which means your energy level is dropping and there's nothing about it. So that lets you, oh, go ahead.
Dr. Gladden: I was just going to say, so that's really a long term problem, and do you think that this is really what's underneath the long haul COVID scenario, is this process?
Ian Mitchell: I think that's at the root of it, that the replicative cycle continues, even though it's not expressing in the classical sense, you still have mitochondria that have a burden and they're in a loop and that loop isn't dissipating, if anything, it's increasing.
Dr. Gladden: Right. And so with that, you had been utilizing your technologies, right? You were using your Olympic, which basically has the Carbon 60 and all the other you spoke about.
Ian Mitchell: And didn't provide enough of an oomph, to really get over the hump. Actually, one of the things that was really great... And we filed a patent, myself and one of my partners at the university filed a patent on this... Was the use of Benadryl because Benadryl competes ionically for protons, so if the Benadryl preferential draw on the protons, then that replicative cycle in the mRNA can't steal the protons to replicate as much. So it actually inhibits the replicative cycle of the mRNA for a virus and it suppresses your symptoms.
So if you couple that with something that say, in the case of what I've come to find was Urolithin A was the thing that I actually ended up with. And for those of you who don't know, Urolithin A is the... There's not a ton of it, but one of the trade names is Mitopure. That's the one I actually take. And it's intriguing to me because what it does is it triggers mitophagy so my strategy was to take my own Carbon 60 so I could upregulate mitochondrial function and then to take Urolithin A so that my body would say, "Oh, these are all functioning at this level. And we've got a couple that are functioning at this level," and the Urolithin A triggers mitophagy so your body goes in and cleaves and kills those mitochondria.
Dr. Gladden: Well, let's talk about that because people are familiar with autophagy where the cell is basically recycling, clearing out itself, clearing out things. But there's also mitophagy where the mitochondria can undergo a similar process and purify out the bad that's in there and recycle things, or even destroy the mitochondria and actually then create new ones that aren't contaminated with messenger RNA. I think that's what you're saying here.
Ian Mitchell: That's exactly it, right, because your cell if... Typically the way your immune system handles a virus is you'll express some protein. Your body will see the protein and it will go in, with a phage of some sort, which just means something to eat it, to break it down and that phage will break down whatever is infected. And that's how your immune system recognizes and deals with that issue. Well, if something isn't actually expressing on the surface level, but it's contained within the cell and within a specific organelle inside the cell, we don't actually have a mechanism for that. So my thought was, "Well, if I can create some sort of a division and a contrast," so your body can see that because your body's always shooting for the most beneficial homeostasis. It's trying to keep a good energy balance so I thought, "Okay, I'll upregulate all the mitochondria and I'll use the Urolithin as a contrast agent."
So whatever isn't functioning really highly, the body will, "Oh, we just need to clean house," because that's far more likely that it can clean house on a subcellular level than to go in and whack all the cells, because my worry was not knowing and not having a way to really quantify how many cells have infected mitochondria. Your heart runs on beta oxidation of lipids so I can get the lipids in there, but let's suppose I get this stuff in. And it triggers something that wipes out all of the infected mitochondria. Well, if I've got 5%, no problem. If I have 55%...
Dr. Gladden: Yeah, you're going to be in an energy deficit, big time all the sudden. So just...
Ian Mitchell: Just take the safe route.
Dr. Gladden: So have you put your Urolithin A into any product at this point in time? Or is this...
Ian Mitchell: Yeah, just in the lab here I have and I've been doing that for myself so I've been using myself as a Guinea pig.
Dr. Gladden: As we all do.
Ian Mitchell: Yeah. As we all do. And the thing that actually has been the most profound for me was a combination of using my stuff, the Olympic with Urolithin A, with another compound from, everybody thinks of it as a SAR, but it's a PPAR-delta agonist. The peroxisome progenitor or peroxisome proliferator. And it's basically the GW 501, 516. And the names that people use, a lot of people who are doing workout stuff use it, is Endurabol or Cardarine. And that actually gave me the largest shift, but it's something I can't recommend that other people take that because the clinical trials were shut down in Phase Two, because they noticed that there was a preponderance towards the animals getting cancers and one of the interesting effects in that p53 study was, none of those animals developed tumors.
One had a very small tumor, but that also led me down another path in thinking, "Well, this is not right." The first necropsy, when the first animal died, I opened it up and did the necropsy. And I looked at it and thought, "Well, this is very odd, there's nothing here. I'm probably just missing it." I thought it was obvious that it had died of a femoral hemorrhage. And I thought, "Okay, this isn't what I do. I'm not a veterinary pathologist. I'm going to just take it the next time. I'm going to put the rat on ice and ship it off to a vet pathologist." And I did that, no tumors, I did it the third time, no tumors. And none of them really very clearly, none of them died from tumors. They all died from old age. And because of that, I feel though I don't have clinical data to support it, other than my cohort of animals, I feel reasonably confident that there's definitely some mechanism that's suppressing oncological formations. There's some sort of tumor suppression going on there.
Dr. Gladden: Yeah. And now you're talking still about the Olympic.
Well, yeah. We know that mitochondria get hijacked into the cancer right into the cancer story. There's different ways. Things get siphoned off. Energy becomes skewed. The glycolytic pathway gets activated. You can imagine that there's ways that if you keep the mitochondria energetically sound, that might have an anti-cancer effect in and of itself. I want to circle, I want to go down that pathway, but I want to go off, on another pathway too, which is, what do you think about the vaccine, these messenger RNA vaccines, do you think they're having a similar impact on mitochondria? Because you certainly hear about people that have...
Ian Mitchell: I do.
Dr. Gladden: Long haul symptoms from vaccination.
Ian Mitchell: Based on what I've seen I would be surprised if that wasn't the case.
Dr. Gladden: Okay.
Ian Mitchell: And not that I'm trying to beat the drum, be harbinger of doom, but yeah, it would actually scientifically, it would surprise me if that weren't the case. This is, unfortunately I think this whole thing is, with all that stuff, it's the unintended consequences. You know, when you look at vaccines, if you want to get a clear idea of how vaccines function, read the animal studies. Cats don't sue people so there are very less...
Dr. Gladden: There are no animal studies here. That's the problem.
Ian Mitchell: Yeah. Well, and I did this way back when people started prattling on, about vaccinations, which I'm actually very Pro-vax, but the reality is, if you're trying to take care of a large populace, there are going to be some casualties. It's the fate of the many over the fate of the few and you have to make, if you're adjudicating that from a cultural standpoint, you have to make that call. But if you really want to understand, are there detriments? Yeah. There absolutely are detriments. Just read the animal studies, again, cats aren't going to file a class action lawsuit so they don't obfuscate the data and you can find the actual effects in an animal.
Dr. Gladden: Yeah. Well, that's interesting. So do you have a strategy? I know that you've also been involved in using some very small embryonic stem cells, which are endogenous to the body and can be activated and utilized. And was that a part, because I remember speaking with you before, when you were telling me you were having trouble going up the stairs is what I remember. And then once you got yourself put back together, you were able to go, I think you were running up the stairs. If I'm not mistaken.
Ian Mitchell: I did. Yeah and that was all, that was the V cells so I think I had scratched the fire to a certain extent, but there was still a tremendous amount of damage. And so I started looking at the very small embryonic-like stem cells. And so I started doing that procedure in my own lab. And after the third procedure, I started to notice that I was starting to feel robust again. And normally, in the parking garage where I would park, I'd go up four flights of stairs and I literally would have to stop every level or sometimes, and ha, catch my breath. And then after the third stem cell treatment, probably, I don't know, week, 10 days after the third V cell treatment, I started going up the stairs and I felt really good. And so then I started running and then I started just running. I ran up all four flights of stairs and I thought, "Oh my God, this is great."
Dr. Gladden: Right. It's so exciting to be able to do that, quite honestly, it's super exciting to be able to get your capacity back like that.
Ian Mitchell: Yeah. Well, you don't know what you got till it's gone.
Dr. Gladden: Totally. No, totally. So really, as you're thinking about this now in light of that, if this were to happen again, let's say, it sounds like you'd be reaching for the Olympic product, which has the mitochondrial enhancing elements to it, plus the Carbon 60, you'd be reaching for the Urolithin aid to increase mitophagy. And you'd be going after the very small embryo-like stem cells. That's what I'm hearing as the trilogy. Am I missing something there?
Ian Mitchell: Benadryl.
Dr. Gladden: Benadryl.
Ian Mitchell: And I'd take Benadryl right at the very inception of the virus. That's if I knew then what I know now, actually, it functions very similarly in terms of... And you can pull up my patents on this and read it, but just, because it competes for protons, it really does have an amazing effect that suppression.
Dr. Gladden: That's interesting. So if somebody comes down with a virus, they should take Benadryl. When I think about Benadryl, I don't think about energy production, I think about feeling tired.
Ian Mitchell: And it does, absolutely. I'm very sensitive to Benadryl and for the first three weeks, it will whip you, or at least for me, it absolutely whipped me, but if I'm going to be tired versus have some long term detriment, I think I'll stick it out and be tired for a couple weeks.
Dr. Gladden: Yeah. Got it. So what dose were you using? 25 milligrams or 50?
Ian Mitchell: In the morning and 25 mgs at night, if that's too much, do 12 and a half mgs, BID.
Dr. Gladden: Got it. Interesting. Okay. Let's talk a little bit more about cancer. You were talking before about the Carbon 60 and the p53 knockout mice and how they weren't developing cancer. Even when they died, you couldn't identify cancer, and now you have this product, or you've had this product that's specifically designed to go after inhibiting tumor cells from dividing. I call it, sticking the wedge in between the DNA so it can't replicate. We had that conversation.
Ian Mitchell: That's actually, after you said that, I was like, "Oh, that's a genius way to explain it." Jokingly around the lab, we call it the wedge kit now.
Dr. Gladden: Oh, well, good. All right. Good.
Ian Mitchell: Yeah, the basic idea, and I had done the work on this probably almost a decade ago now and really pegged everything down in 2014. And then the patents were issued with the company I was previously with, in 2019. And then I went back and revamped it and changed the structure because like anything else, the odds that you nail it first shot out of the gate and you get the optimum format are slim, but if you're paying attention, you see what you did and you go, "Oh yeah, that worked. And it was good, but not quite so." And you optimize and you iterate and you just... The thing I always call it is reinventing the oval, we always think we have a wheel but really it's...
Dr. Gladden: But we're reinventing the oval. I like that. I'm going to use that. We hope to get it a little bit more concentric, but you know, it's still...
Ian Mitchell: Exactly. Yeah, so I went back and I kind of looked at all the different components and rejiggered everything and restructured the molecules and the configurations. And that's exactly what it does is, cancer, interestingly enough... And there were two different research groups that pegged this down. One was at the University of Spain, I think in Bilbao, and the other was Johns Hopkins. And they each got two components of it. Hopkins pegged down that if you suppress cytokines specifically interleukin six and eight, cancer co-opts the cytokines to signal spread. Right? And so if you splunge the cytokines, you cover that the university of Spain, they noted that. And I think it was the Catholic University of Spain in Bilbao. They noticed that you have a very narrow band, and this is what you had alluded to before, where your mitochondria gets sort of hijacked.
And everything becomes glycolytic and they're trying to burn sugars. And as long as you're within this band, cancer can propagate. If you have energy that's in a surplus, it can't, it's literally not able to replicate. And so the idea was to figure out how to up-regulate the mitochondrial energy production. So you're above that threshold simultaneously splunge the cytokines so you're below the threshold where they're going to transmit any signals. And then as you said, the wedge kit, where if you look at cancer, cancer just spits out copies over and over. It's not interested in fidelity. It's not trying to create a good copy, normal somatic cells in your body have an error rate that's incredibly low, right? Super high fidelity, maybe one in 10 million in terms of an error on a nucleotide. Cancer, it doesn't care. It's just throwing copies out. And because of that, you end up with mismatched, nucleotide base pairs, aberrant protein stranding, and all the things that become the cascade that we call cancer.
Well, in the DNA, that double helix, when you always see those little lines drawn across, those are the nucleotide base pairs. Well, if those are mismatched or one is missing, then you end up with a charge, because most things in the body work to some degree ionically, and they bind. Well, and that's no different, you bind the different sides of that. And that's why they go together in the specific groupings that they do. If you take one out, well, you're left with a differential charge. And interestingly enough, if you have a Nanosphere and you have a missing charge, you can get it to suck in. And it will localize in that spot and cancer cells, as you know, they do what a normal cell does. They separate and do mitotic spindle formation to replicate. Well, when it goes to the process, it can't actually do it because it reads up the code in the S phase of the cell cycle.
And it goes, ATG soccer ball, ATG soccer ball, normal cells become senescent zombie cells. And they have a death back that way. Cancer cells are a little different. Cancer cells because they're replicating en masse, if it can't replicate, it triggers apoptosis, which is just programmed cell death. And it literally blows itself apart. The other therapeutic that I've seen like this is a thing called tumor treating field therapies, the TTF. And it's an electric field therapy that was just approved by the FDA for thoracic cancers. And it was one of the only things, in fact, it's the only one I've ever seen that came with a quality of life statement when the FDA approved it because no drugs, no radiation, the people would carry a battery pack around and the TTF would emit an electric field. And all it simply would do is when the mitotic spindle formation tried to happen, the electric field would block that. And exactly the same thing transpired. It would just, the cell would just simply trigger apoptosis and blow itself apart. So I followed the same idea just with a wedge in.
Dr. Gladden: So basically you took the mechanical engineering approach and they took the electrical engineering approach.
Ian Mitchell: That's exactly it. And the beauty is, if you look at the DNA, right? The minor groove in the DNA is 1.2 nanometers wide, and then you've got this that's 1.1 nanometers wide. So you've got half an angstrom, which is just a fraction, it's like a half of a ten-billionth of a meter apart. And so when it's wedged in there, you're not going to shake it out. It's not going anywhere. It's a very strong magnet. And so the cells just do what they're supposed to do.
Dr. Gladden: And so do you find yourself, if we're talking about cancer now, do you find yourself putting together a cocktail of things here where you're using the Olympic to basically up-regulate mitochondrial function and you're using the MX to throw a monkey wrench or a wedge into the DNA replication process so that your cells undergo apoptosis? Is that how you're thinking about it? Or how are you synthesizing this together? And also I'll throw this in too because fasting plays a nice role in all of this. And I think the way that your MX is structured is it has a glucose-like molecule on it that enables it to be taken up by cells or cancer cells. And that's a bit more avid when we're fasting or something like that. So maybe you can link all that together into a strategy.
Ian Mitchell: So the most critical component, what I tell everyone, whether you do anything I recommend or not, fine, but put yourself in a ketogenic state. Go keto. And don't just go mild keto, go full-bore keto, do upwards of 80 to 90% fats. And really just approach that...
Dr. Gladden: You're talking about for cancer patients now, right. Cancer.
Ian Mitchell: Yeah. And for a normal person, huge pain in the ass, would never recommend that, ketosis is fine, but that type of extreme ketosis is not something I would recommend unless you're trying to deal with a problem. And that is, your diet becomes a therapeutic tool so puts someone in the state of ketosis where they're 2.4 millimolar or above when they're blowing their ketones or doing their blood. And I always tell people to just get a Keto-Mojo, the little keto strips and do a finger prick with the strip. It'll tell your ketone level and keep it above 2.4 millimolar. And that fluctuates a little bit throughout the day. It's actually much lower in the morning because when you're in ketosis, your body burns just solely ketones after you go to sleep. And so you wake up and you have fewer ketone bodies, and then over the course of the day, it modulates up. So I tell people try and stay around 2.4 millimolar or above. Simultaneously drink deuterium depleted water and there's...
Dr. Gladden: Drink what now?
Ian Mitchell: Deuterium depleted water.
Dr. Gladden: Okay. Deuterium depleted water.
Ian Mitchell: Yeah. And at this point there're probably... Laslow Boros is a researcher at UCLA who's done a really bangup job of doing a lot of research on it. And there are probably 800 different studies I've seen about deuterium depleted water and its effects on the prolongation of lifespan after the introduction of some sort of a cancer and really that too is mitochondrial modulation and very purely. So inside the mitochondria, you have nano-rotors that are literally revolving at 9,000 RPMs, thereabouts. And the water that you take in, your body actually creates the water that you utilize so you ingest the water, but that's not in a format that you're going to use. Your mitochondria actually process it, and then it becomes usable for you. And so in that process, we always think of water as H2O.
Oh, well, the H is for hydrogen. And this specific type of hydrogen is called proteum, which just means it has one proton with one orbital electron. Deuterium is a proton and neutron with one orbital electron. So it's twice as heavy. And so for reference, what I always tell people is, if you're lobbing tennis balls back from a tennis ball cannon, and every one comes across and out of every couple thousand one comes across with lead, well, that's going to hurt your arm. And that's, ah, that's effectively the same thing that happens with these nanoscopic rotors. Your body just cannot process the additional weight. And it doesn't seem like much, but our bodies evolved over thousands of years with somewhere around 140 parts per million. And now the rates are upwards of 152 parts per million in the environment.
So if you want to give yourself an edge, you deplete your deuterium levels, it's like putting in higher octane fuel, your body runs higher and you get more energy potentiation out of your mitochondria. And it's not something I recommend long term, but on the short term, it's fantastic.
Dr. Gladden: Would that be part of your viral recovery protocol too?
Ian Mitchell: A hundred percent. Yes.
Dr. Gladden: Yeah. Okay. So the deuterium depleted water. So I've read about this, I've read about people shipping. I've talked with people actually that have shipped it in from particular places in Europe and containers. And it comes out of the ground or whatever, deuterium depleted or relatively depleted. So is there a way to take ordinary water and turn it into the deuterium depleted water? Or do you have to get it out of some cavern in...
Ian Mitchell: No, it's actually, so the cavernous approach is really rare. It's usually when they're above a certain elevation and that's literally because atmospheric pressure decreases and the weight of those molecules actually keeps it down lower. So you end up with pure water, the beautiful mountain peaks, they have very pure crystal spring water, and you can drink that. And it's very low in deuterium. This stuff at a normal level is higher. And the way you actually have to do that is, most of it comes out of Hungary. And there are a couple places in Russia, but there are very few and far between. Preventa is one of the brands, Lightwater Preventa. And very shortly there's about to be another one.
But you have 50 foot tall cooling towers, and you do a Peltier cooling technique and you freeze it and separate it because the deuterium freezes at a different rate.
Dr. Gladden: Got it.
Ian Mitchell: And so separate like that. Actually, I developed another way to do it. And then I've been working with another group. And that's why I say there's another one, because the problem is the stuff is stupidly expensive.
Dr. Gladden: And it's stupidly expensive. Yeah. I just want to say this for the audience, when I was talking to these people, they're shipping water in these specialized containers to keep it depleted. It's not contaminated. And by the time it gets here and the shipping and everything else, I don't know. It was like hundreds of dollars for a bottle of... Might even be thousands. I can't remember, but it was crazy expensive.
Ian Mitchell: Yeah. And well, and part of that is the process, you got to have all these cooling towers and electrolytically separate them and freeze them and separate them again. And it just seemed untenable. So I, myself and one other fellow, we came up with a couple of different ways to do it. So now we're going to be able to produce it at just the cost of normal water.
Dr. Gladden: Oh, wow.
Ian Mitchell: Yeah. And the thing for me is I'm not... It's the same approach I take with C60. C60 right now is very expensive, but I'm working on dropping the price of that too, because it's really beneficial and I want it to become ubiquitous. And the way you do that is by shifting the economics because if it's... A Ferrari I'm sure is a great car.
I don't have one. Why? Barrier to entry, they're very expensive. I'd rather have peptide machine than a Ferrari, but it doesn't mean that it's not the best thing out there. It may be. They may have the most effectively running motor. I can't do that all the time and deuterium depleted water, it's great. But in good conscience, I can't go, "Yeah, this is going to be terrific for you. Go out and spend $600 a month on the water that you consume." I'd sound like a total jerk when I recommend that. So rather than continue propagating that lameness, I thought, "Okay, well, I'll just fix this," so shortly in a couple months, we'll have one that comes out that's just the cost of normal water.
Dr. Gladden: And what are you going to call it?
Ian Mitchell: I don't know. We've been bouncing ideas back and forth, the company's Wizard Science. So we were pondering Wizard Water, I don't know. I'm sure we'll come up with something. I'll let you know when it comes out because I'm going to send...
Dr. Gladden: We'll try it for sure.
Ian Mitchell: I think it'll make a dent. That's one of those things that I really want to, or more to the point, Jeff, I think sometimes when I look at things, I think about making a dent in the universe. Steve Jobs had said that, but I think actually I'm trying to buff out dents. I think I've really realized my point here is not to make a dent in the universe, but buff them.