Gladden longevity — Episode #39

Steve Reiter: 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. Jeffrey Gladden: Welcome, everybody, to this edition of the Gladden Longevity Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, and I'm here today with my guest, Oz García. Oz, it's great to welcome you to the show.

Oz García: Jeffrey, thank you so much. It's my pleasure to be here with you.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah. I wanted to start this show with a quote that you and I were talking about a little bit before we started recording, and I think it's really quite profound. It was written by a guy, Lawrence P. Jacks, who I think was some sort of a minister that was born in the 1850s and died maybe in the 1930s. But he has a comment here about life that I think is relevant for all of us. And he said: "A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both."

Oz García: The first time I heard you read it, now again, it's provoking a deeper crisis within me.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Okay, that's great. Yeah, I think it's beautiful to think about play and work and this kind of thing. Tell me about the crisis. What's going on?

Oz García: The way that I was raised, I come from a family of immigrants from Cuba, and you weren't really taught to actually enjoy life. It was pretty much “earn your way through it”. And I had a father who started out life as a busboy and a waiter, and a milkman, eventually became, within the culture, at large, “somebody”. But he was never very happy till the day he died. I think I saw him laugh maybe once in all the years that he was alive, and that got passed on through the value system, to work to the bone and really value your comfort or your happiness second, if at all. Nobody ever talked around me about happiness. So, it reminded me of that. And as we've spoken before, it took a crisis where I almost lost my life, that I began to look at life just from that gentleman's perspective.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah. So, tell us a little bit about that crisis that brought you to that epiphany, if you will. Let's switch in your perspective.

Oz García: Absolutely. Well, first, I'll tell you quick a little bit about me. I've been involved in progressive health, what used to be called holistic health, starting in the 1970s. I got very interested in running, long distance running, marathoning, and that brought me to question much of my personal habits. What is it that I ate? Did it make me healthier? Did it make me a better runner? Could I recover from injuries better? And so on. And as I kind of got involved in holistic health, I met many people that are iconic in the field. Anne Wigmore, who created Hippocrates, Michio Kushi, who created Macrobiotics, and Jeffrey Paul Bragg. I was going to say Jeffrey Bland. Paul Brag. Bragg's amino's which are everywhere and his apple cider.

So, these were my heroes. This actually moved me to become a nutritional consultant and a consultant to some of the world's top runners. That was the beginning of my career. So, up until recently, I ran a company that had a global reach-out, offices in London, before the catastrophe that's occurring in Russia, we had an office in Moscow, we had an office in Tel Aviv. So, it was a very cosmopolitan practice, and I really thought that I was special and unique and privileged in many ways.

And you and I touched on the notion of, what's that life like? You're on a hedonic treadmill, which you're actually pursuing is pleasure, not what you said before, which it really hit me also like a wall of bricks, which is joy. It never occurred to me that you could get joy out of your work. But what you did it for was the accumulation of money and power, position, prestige. But if you were happy along the way, that was the secondary notion. I remember-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Secondary notion and also very short lived, right? Because in that kind of world, it's a dopamine hit and a dopamine hit evaporates fairly quickly. And people don't know this, but we recorded part of this podcast before, only to find we had a technical difficulty so, if we refer to prior conversations, it's those. But one of the things that we were talking about is that in that world, that hedonic treadmill, that treadmill of hedonism, if you will, self-gratification, it's really kind of a dead-end street. And when you're in that economy of wealth accumulation and whatever else, and you think that your self-esteem, your safety, your self-worth, and all these things are related to that, it's really an economy of scarcity. And so, there will never be satisfaction there, and yet-

Oz García: No, there isn't. And anything that's provoking the pursuit of dopamine, if you're dealing off immediacy, “Oh my God, look at that wonderful car.” “Boy, would I look good in that Gucci suit or Tom Ford glasses” and you buy it. We know, based on a multitude of studies on emotional health and neuroscience, that you're going to get a dopamine hit. It's kind of like being on your phone and doom scrolling on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or whatever it is that turns you on. And so, the hits are momentary, nothing's lasting. And it's the same thing in terms of the accumulation of wealth. We know that if you're earning 70,000 a year in America, or a hundred million or you're a billionaire, the levels of happiness are no more, no less with the amount of money that you've put in your pocket. In fact, you return to baselines, or if you're a miserable F-U-C-K and you've got a billion dollars, what's the difference? There has to be an accumulation along the way of emotional intelligence, piece of mind, joy, and mindfulness.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah, I agree. I think it requires kind of a wholesale shift. I think people, myself included, and I think yourself included, from what I understand, shifting from an economy of financial metrics, if you will, which is the economy of scarcity and we know that biology is an economy of balance, getting things not too much of this, not too much of that, the right amount of sleep, the right amount of rest, et cetera. But then moving into the love economy, because the love economy is a true economy of abundance. And the more love you give away, the more love you have, right?

So, we're chasing life, meaning and satisfaction in an economy that can actually never provide it to us, and yet it's sitting there in front of us, we just have to move from this concept that I call of “making a living” where we're focused on making money and whatever else, having whatever else, into “making a life”, where we actually start to talk about how do we increase the capacity for our relationships? How do we improve those? The loving nature of that, how are we helpful? How do we take our expertise and impact as many people in a positive way as possible?

And I think this is such an important conversation around longevity, because if you're actually living your life and you hope to live for a long time and you're working in the wrong economy, I think it really sabotages your chances for longevity and health for that matter.

Oz García: We absolutely recognize that. And I have evidence, in terms of people that I know, including my own parents, the inclination to move... If I had to do it over again... And in fact, let's go to the question that you asked me before. Where did events turn for me? So, here I am, nutritional rockstar, marathoner, fitness enthusiast, biohacker or neurohacker, you name it, flow junkie. And I get laid out flat on my back with COVID pneumonia. And this is at the peak of COVID at the beginning of 2021, and the peak actually occurred in late February-March of that year.

So, where many people are just dying, just dropping like flies all over the place. And I was in the hospital, I was getting elective surgery on my neck, wound up picking COVID up in the hospital and wound up developing COVID pneumonia. Clearly, my immune system was already shot from the surgery. But little did I know that having picked up COVID in the hospital, that it was going to get deeper. And so, I wound up going back to the same hospital a little bit less than two weeks later. And I was put into the COVID ward with, like I said, severe COVID pneumonia. I had two clots in my right leg, and when they cat scanned my chest, half my lungs were filled with what the doctor called millions of micro clots with an aneurysm in my heart.

So, in a matter of days, literally days, I'd say about four days, Jeffrey, I drop about 35 pounds of muscle. And by the time I got out of the hospital, I weighed 98 pounds. So, everything was just hanging off me, couldn't breathe. I was still attached to an oxygen compressor. Everything in my body hurt, couldn't sleep. My brain was devastated by the virus itself, by COVID in terms of how it affects thinking. And you and I both know that COVID can use the lungs as a jumping off point to get into your heart, to get into your spleen, to get into your kidneys, to get into your pancreas, and it can penetrate the blood brain barrier. 

So, of course, many people that get COVID, certainly those that develop post COVID or long-haul COVID, can wind up with severe anxiety and depression. I knew enough to know that this was a result of being very ill, but it didn't weaken the suffering that I had thinking that I could die in a hospital, essentially, after having had the life that I led. Was this the way things were going to end?

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: This is a very existential moment. This is a very existential moment. You go from really a life that on the surface, at least, was blowing and going kind of thing, and now all of a sudden, you're actually wondering if you're going to get out of the hospital alive. And so, what was the epiphany that you had at that point? Was there a shift in your thinking or psyche, or how did that come about?

Oz García: Well, I think it deconstructed my hubris for sure. Thinking that I was indestructible, that everything would just keep flowing, even though there was a pandemic going on, none of this was going to touch me, but it did. And secondarily, the fact that my health was just coming apart in a catastrophic moment, and I couldn't even control my bowels. So, here I am in a converted hospital storage room into a hospital room. And during my stay in the hospital, I had two roommates die from COVID. I think the transformation kind of occurred on its own. I came to the conclusion that this could be my end and I wasn't that special. To have to come to that realization by being brought to your knees, maybe if I had to do it over, I don't know, I'd spend a few years in a zen monastery or something. Not trying to play big shot on a scoreboard and be a rockstar nutritionist.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah, no, I think that's right. If you could choose the things that you go through... In my own life, I've gone through ostensibly difficult times as everybody has, and I've kind of come to realize that actually all of those things, they're not bad things. I've reframed them all as being important and good things because they ultimately moved me closer to actually being in a place I need to be doing the things I need to be doing and being the person that I want to be. And so, you can never look back on those things as bad things, even though in the moment they seem challenging.

So, it kind of gives me a new perspective when new things crop up. I had a mountain bike crash this past weekend. I was riding with my son in Colorado. It was a beautiful moment. We were in flow together on this trail, and it was just a beautiful thing. And I got distracted by looking over at another trail that kind of veered off this one and came back together. And I hit a rock that when I looked back and looked at it, the only thing it had was a sheer kind of front to it, but it wasn't very tall. Anyway, it was enough to rip the handlebars out of my hand, and I went flying and landed on my back, and the handlebars hit me in the chest. And so, you go from feeling just great to being kind of beat up in a second.

Oz García: In a moment.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah. And I finished the ride. I was able to finish the ride. But then that's just the adrenaline of the ride. But then when you try to sleep that night, it's difficult to turn over in bed because your ribs are bruised and-

Oz García: [inaudible 00:15:01].

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah, exactly. But even that, when things happen, I try not to judge them. I just say: “Okay, this is interesting. I wonder what I'm learning here. I wonder how this is shifting my energetic in a way that's going to be helpful going forward.” So, I think categorizing the world as good or bad is another thing that leads to a lot of angst for people. And I think the facts are the facts, but we're the ones that supply the meaning, right? And since we know the brain basically has a bias towards negativity of thinking the worst, that's the default mode. And I really think one of our goals in life, if we're going to live a long time and accumulate a lot of wisdom, is to reprogram that software to where it's not the default setting that we think about the negative, but we actually think about what's the possibility here?

Oz García: Yeah, you're really going to have to earn that because it's hardwired into us to catastrophize, like you said. We're built in the way that we are as animals, the kind of primate that we are to expect the worst in terms of what may lay ahead. So, mature optimism isn't something that comes naturally to people. Either you've been institutionalized to think that way, or you were fortunate enough to have parents that instilled certain values in you that were altruistic and allowed you to look on the better side of life. But if not, the tendency of the animal, the fact that we were both the predator and prey, a lot of animals would hunt us. We look like the perfect subway sandwich.

So, this sense of imminent fear is something that lives in us, and most people just really don't know how to deal with it. They're going to go on antidepressants and see a shrink, talk for hours, days, and years and wind up at the beginning. There's nothing accomplished unless what you really do is a substantial paradigm shift. What is that? What's important? What am I going to do with the rest of my life? And, know that the tendency to actually catastrophize the future... There's a term for it in certain schools of psychology, it's called “affective forecasting”. Not effective, but affective forecasting where you're just terrible at predicting the future. You may as well not worry because you just don't know what's going to happen in the next 10 minutes, let alone the next week, year or two.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Right. And I think when you think about biological organisms, the things that enable us to survive are the same things that enable us to thrive. And that is resilience and adaptability.

Oz García: Yes.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: So, many people get married to a particular plan. If I don't have this car, this apartment, this whatever, if my business isn't doing that, if I'm not making, this isn't happening, my kid's not going to this school, whatever it is, they get married to a plan and then they're locked in. And when that plan deviates, rather than adapting and seeing it as a gift, “Oh, this is a new opportunity, what a cool thing, he's going to get to go someplace else and he's going to have a different life. What a cool thing.” They basically break down and it becomes a stressor for them.

Oz García: [inaudible 00:18:33]-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah, when you get married to a plan, you lose your adaptability, and then resilience is critical, and you build resilience by building health. And also, you build mental resilience by living out of an economy of love and understanding, as opposed to judgment and criticism. So, there's no resilience over there, right?

Oz García: No, not at all. And I think resilience comes when the trials that have come across your path actually stop you sufficiently to actually give it thought. Is there something here that I need to be paying attention to in terms of how I'm living, how I'm sleeping, how I'm eating, how I'm exercising, all of it? What's the end result that I'm looking for? Do I have an agenda? Do I have a private agenda that's invisible to me? And when you're an urbanized individual and you're living in a place like New York or in Dallas, and you're being driven by the consumer triggers that we're surrounded with, you're in a way being moved on, like I said before, on a treadmill, kind of like a thoughtless puppet. You're being moved to want things that you don't need. You're certainly not being compelled by gratitude or love or resilience.

And so, the value system itself isn't really there, isn't all that good. And there's a bottomless pit that you can't fill by adding more to it. This is going to sound very banal, but it really took me getting to a point where I almost died so that I could see that, that had to come to an end, that I couldn't continue on that path, that helped. [inaudible 00:20:20]. Yeah, thank you. Meant the body and what we’re talking about, a love economy.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah. What a great gift. On one hand, it's a shame that you had to almost die to get there. But in the end, here we are, talking. And so, in retrospect, what a gift, right? To be able to change your perspective... So, tell us a little bit on the medical side now, how you actually got through the symptoms because you left the hospital at 98 pounds, with no muscle mass, you couldn't breathe, your brain was foggy. How did you go about recuperating from that?

Oz García: Thank God, I had the background in health and wellbeing that I have. As I mentioned before, I was a runner, got into this field decades ago. So, I already had a ramp going into COVID and being in the hospital and having my cell phone, looking... To the extent that I could think at all, I would just spend hours every day because there's nothing else to do except suffer in your bed trying to find the means to get out of the hospital. I was told I'd be in there probably two, maybe even three months, and I was able to get out in three weeks. But a lot of it had to do with the research that I was doing online and having a lot of the supplements that I needed smuggled into the hospital in birthday gift boxes. I actually spent my birthday up there.

And so, that continued when I got out of the hospital. Since I couldn't breathe the way that I did before, could there be a methodology that I could appropriate that would help me recover my lungs? What did I need to do to build back my muscle mass? What did I need to do to not be anxious, improve my sleep patterns and so on? So, everything became formulaic. In the book that I wrote, After COVID, the first part of the book is pretty much the horrific experience of getting COVID and then the systems that were in place to actually keep you alive, but not really keep you alive so that when you came out of the hospital, you had hope that if you lived, life would be worth living. And there are millions of people. I think last estimate is 30 million Americans are living with long COVID or post COVID. So, that is they have severe fatigue, which I had, and I found the right protocols, the right breathing technology, the right supplements that allowed me to breathe better.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: What were some of those supplements? You want to speak to any of those in any specifics or-

Oz García: Absolutely. A number of things that I picked at were things that are not very conventional. And again, this is not a very conventional illness. So, the doctors gave me a spirometer, and I'm sure you know what that is, Jeffrey.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Sure.

Oz García: They gave me-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: It's a little device, for the audience, that you blow into that measures how much air you're able to exhale. And it's kind of a measure of lung capacity, if you will. So, it's a little bit of both a measure and a challenge simultaneously.

Oz García: Exactly. So, you can get a high quality spirometer on Amazon for $8. You can just imagine if your lungs are just ravaged, what is an $8 toy going to do for your lungs? But I was told in the hospital that this is going to really save your life. And I remember playing with it, and I just didn't know where it was going to go. So, I was fortunate enough to know leaders in athletics that bought me a device, for instance, called Airofit. Instead of being $8, it's almost a $400 device that you put in your mouth and comes with an app and it trains you to breathe. You work out on the device. And that brought me back to almost a hundred percent breathing capacity on a daily basis.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Nice. Let me just explain Airofit to the audience if they're not familiar with it. And there's also an elevation training mask that's a similar thing. And basically what Airofit does is it makes it harder for you to get a breath in. It provides some resistance, so you have to pull in harder. You have to work your intercostal muscles, the ones between the ribs and your diaphragm. To get the air in, you have to work harder. And then on the flip side, when you go to exhale, there's resistance there too. So, you have to blow out harder.

Again, your diaphragm intercostal muscles have to work harder. And so, what you're really doing is kind of retraining the nervous system, because all training is ultimately the nervous system. You're retraining the nervous system to work those muscles harder and building strength inside those muscles and the nervous system to where you can get your lung capacity back. That's what we're talking about.

Oz García: Exactly. So, the first time that I used my Airofit, it was beginner level, two minutes, and it knocked me out on my ass. These days, I can use the Airofit twice a day for 10 minutes on advance and extremely difficult breathing techniques. So, the app itself will move you through them. You can actually mimic riding a bicycle up a mountain just like you did, that kind of breathing pattern. So, that retrained me, but it also retrained my mind. It calmed me down immensely. And then besides that, I started to build up a protocol of supplements. So, among the-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Tell me how it retrained your mind. How did it calm you down? Because you felt like you were taking action?

Oz García: Breathing itself, getting into breathing techniques. For instance, I love Wim Hof, right?

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yes.

Oz García: You know who Wim is, of course.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Oh, sure, the Iceman.

Oz García: Yeah, the Iceman, exactly. So, Wim has breathing techniques that I found to be very useful, too. And they all kind of bring you to a state of equanimity. So, breathing with the Airofit, breathing, doing Wim Hoff breathing techniques and so on, calm you down immensely. And that was critical the first several months and still is now. So, out of that, my optimism lifted immensely. And then, as I combine that with certain kinds of supplements... so, supplementation, I broke down into morning, afternoon, and evening, what do they do? And we'll get into that. Along with that, I also developed an IV protocol. 

So, there were different IV treatments that my clinic would put together, very rich in amino acid, it's vitamins, minerals, nootropics, elements, nutrients that actually improve thinking. So, bit by bit, by using the supplement protocols; morning, these were nutrients like acetyl-L-carnitine, mildronate, which you probably know very well, Jeff, it's a product developed to actually help cardiac function and it's not available in America. I literally had it imported by friends from Europe.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: What he's getting at here, audience, just so you understand, is that when you go through an illness like this, your mitochondria get trashed. And the mitochondria are the powerhouses of your cells. As you know, when you get ill, and this can happen for other reasons too, like Lyme disease or mold or some other things, the mitochondria go into this cellular defense response where they actually shut down power production as a defensive mechanism, not to create ATP for the bacteria or the mold or whomever to use. It's kind of defensive. That's why whenever you get sick, you feel tired because your mitochondria have shut down ATP production.

But what happens in these long-haul diseases is that they stay shut down. Even though the virus is cleared or whatever, they don't fire back up to normal production. And so, taking supplements to improve mitochondrial function... we like to use ozone as well, because it's a good way to reboot mitochondria and boost NAD levels and things like that. 

Oz García: In fact, the second part of the book is the workbook where I lay out all the products and protocols, including ozone therapy. I would get, what's called a 10-pass. So, that means that they would draw the blood out from one vein, it would go through the hyperbaric ozone machine, it would get fully ozonated, then introduced into my other arm. And the 10-pass means that the blood would be drawn out 10 times. I'll fill the bottle through the ozone machine back in. And I did that a number of times. That was critical in alleviating the fatigue.

So, the fatigue was the overwhelming thing. I never had experienced such exhaustion. Then it was like: “okay, so how do I fix my sleep?” So, that's where the Oura Ring came in. So, making sure that I could quantify and measure the quality of sleep that I have, and then correct it from there. So, there are nutrients that I would use to go to sleep. [Oshigan 00:28:40], the Bacopa, Serene, [Fossotial 00:28:43] Serene, magnesium taurate, magnesium malate, magnesium threonate, combination of nutrients that has hops-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Did you use any melatonin?

Oz García: At the beginning, I tried melatonin. There's a lot of evidence that it helps a lot with long-hauling symptomology. I'm not a good candidate for it. I found that melatonin leaves me very groggy the next day, and I was trying to battle grogginess. So, there are people that do very well with it, and I know you know this, but there are doctors, functional MDs that are giving long-haulers 100, 200, 300, 400, 500,000 milligrams of melatonin. So, I can only imagine. I just wasn't willing to experiment at those levels, knowing that it could take two or three days of trying to get past the melatonin hangover.

But some of the nutrients that I just mentioned actually allow you to go to sleep quicker and expand out the amount of time that you're asleep. And then if you wake up in the middle of the night, you fall asleep again pretty quickly. So, that was critical because in the hospital, I just went straight to PTSD from sleep. You didn't sleep, they kept the lights on all night. They would come in two, three times a night to draw my blood, take my blood pressure. So, I just got conditioned to be in this chronic state of a deer in headlights 24 hours a day for two, three weeks.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yep. No, exactly. What about prophylaxis going forward? Because, a lot of people are getting COVID a second time. I've had it twice and had a bad experience the first time. I think it's certainly less malicious at this point in time, probably-

Oz García: Like you said, at this point in time, I would track information on what's occurring. There's an article that just appeared yesterday in the Atlantic on the potential for B15 to fool us of all. We could with the mutations that are going on and the intelligence of the COVID virus to mutate again, one more time to be terribly aggressive. So, to that end, what are things that you can do immunologically? And I don't want to get political in terms of let's say boosters or-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: No, let's not get political. I don't want to get political either. There's no joy in that, quite honestly.

Oz García: But there are peptides, right? And these are very novel combinations of protein precursors of amino acids. One is called thymosin.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: [inaudible 00:31:07].

Oz García: Exactly. Thymosin mimics white blood cell function within the body. That's a very powerful nutrient to have in your war chest at home. And then there's a sister to it called thymulin, which also has a profound effect in immune system function. I talk about these in the book, how to procure them and so on. But those are critical to use almost on a daily basis. And what I did in conjunction with these products was probably a lot of the things, Jeffrey, that you and I know may extend life. Again, not independent of context, but certainly NMN, fisetin, spermidine, any apetigen too, which is an extract of cat's claw. All of these have an effect on telomere length. These are the tips on DNA that shorten with illness and with age. So, I took a lot of the nutrients that are meant to deal with your concerns for longevity.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Telomeres take a beating with COVID. My telomeres got really beaten up. If you haven't measured yours, you should have them measured or let us measure them for you. We have ways to re-lengthen them now that are dramatic, quite honestly. I went from being five years older than my chronological age to being probably in the 75th percentile for a 30-year-old.

Oz García: So, there you go.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: It is possible to rebuild these things.

Oz García: Oh, yeah. And no question about it. I would also recommend the [Pidilon 00:32:38] in that regard, which is-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah. [inaudible 00:32:42] is not nearly as potent as I would like it to be in our hands, but it's not to have an impact. But the peptides that you mention, those are all very important. There's also MOTS-C, which can be used to reboot mitochondrial function.

Oz García: Oh yeah.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: And then BPC-157 is good in general for just body protection compound. And then there are brain peptides, too. CmaX and CLAC and Cerebrolysin and Dihexa; all these things can be used to boost the brain. And one of the things that we like and we had all of our clients on was sulforaphane in the form of Avmacol because sulforaphanes combined with myrosinase, which is the enzyme that activates it, and it protects your respiratory endothelium from viral penetration.

Oz García: Very much, yes.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: And then, [inaudible 00:33:31] is another one we love because it's been shown to block the viral penetration into the vascular wall, also.

Oz García: Remarkable.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah. We take those things on a regular basis. And then there's a company called NES Health, that's Nancy Edward Sam, that makes some infoceuticals that have been tested at the University of California, San Diego, and shown to significantly boost immune function. So, they take salt water and imprint information into it.

Oz García: Amazing.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah. So, they have one called Immune that will boost immunity, Energy will boost energy, COH has been shown to boost stem cell function. So, there's a lot of different things that you can do if you're struggling. I'm saying this for the audience's sake, there's a lot of things you can do if you're struggling with this to go out and look at this. And I think you have to have a two-pronged approach. One is, how do I get better? But then also, how do I prophylaxis against what may be coming? Yeah.

Oz García: Well, I love what you said. A combination that was a lifesaver for me was cerebrolysin actovegin, and another nootropic that I would put into that mix. Then to that I would add glutathione, NAC, vitamin C, a nootropic called piracetam. So, all this would go into a bag and I would just drip it. I would have my clinicians do it. And then separately from that, Jeffrey, I also found NAD was critical. I just came across a bunch of studies on how the COVID virus depletes NAD within the body, certainly in long-haulers. So, it's like, okay, there's no question about it, I got to get on this stuff right away. So, it may sound technical to the audience, but when you're that desperate, even if you do 5% of what you and I are sharing here, people are going to improve.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yep, that's true. And just so they understand too, there's some interesting things going on here. As we age, our natural NAD stores are depleted by an enzyme called CD38, which is released from synapsin cells, and you can block it with apigenin, which comes from parsley, and I think that's what you're referring to. So, now you're blocking the degradation of something you want, and then you can augment its production with ozone, which basically oxidizes NADH back to NAD, and now you really boost your NAD levels.

So, the point is, if you're working with a knowledgeable functional medicine physician, they can typically put together a combination of things in the right order, in the right sequence, that can be incredibly helpful in terms of getting you out of these long-haul symptoms.

Oz García: How you pronounce, I call it apigenin.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah, epigenin. I call it epigenin. Tomato, tomato.

Oz García: Sounds genetic. But that's one of my favorite all time supplements, hands down generally for anxiety and all the other effects that [inaudible 00:36:30]. Well, I'll combine that also with DHH, which is a very compressed form of magnolia, and they also produce an explosive effect in thinking, calmness of mind, BDNF production. So, you can actually begin to regenerate your brain. My brain had turned to shit afterwards. I literally would walk from my bedroom into another room and I didn't know what I was doing there. And this is my primary asset, as I know it's yours, your brain.

So, to then walk back to my bedroom and then try and remember what was I doing? Why did I walk to... and then do it again and forget again? That was pretty scary. That was a horrible experience. So, using a lot of the nutrients that you're talking about started to bring back my thinking. Into that, I would also recommend things like Cognizin, Citicoline, Alpha GPC, piracetam. Just off the top, [inaudible 00:37:30]. So, these gave me the ability to actually get my mood and my thinking up and above my body so that I could get my body back.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yep, exactly. No, all that's critical. So, that's a really interesting story. I think it's a story of, first off, survival that led to an epiphany that then led to really resourcefulness in terms of pulling yourself out of the long-haul fire, so to speak.

Oz García: That's correct. Yeah.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah. So, that's an inspiring story. I hope the audience takes some-

Oz García: Thank you.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah, exactly. And I hope they take some inspiration from that as well, because these things can be done. So, that's awesome.

Oz García: Well, I did need to draw from inspirational thinkers. One is James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, and I know you were familiar with him. But here you had a young man who was in high school, loved baseball, and went up to play ball. The guy in front of him lost control of over his bat and went right into Jame's skull and crushed it and almost killed him. So, when he was in the hospital recovering, somehow he had the will to live, that moved him to look at little tiny habits, atomic habits he called them, that could get him back eventually to what he wanted to do, just play ball again.

So, I must have listened to Atomic Habits a couple of times on Audible in the hospital. And when I got home, that was what moved me along. I knew that I needed to have that understanding. You're not going to get better by tomorrow, but if you can do a little bit today and build on that little bit every day, you'll get back to yourself. So, that was critical.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah, that is critical. This is not a blanket statement, I suppose, but one of the things that works best for me if I'm ever feeling somewhat depressed is taking action. And I think in a situation when you're trying to recover something, if you can actually take action every day, create that habit, do this thing, push down this pathway, you start to generate momentum out of that, and you start to generate a sense of opportunity and hope as opposed to despair and depression. So yes, keep that in mind, too. Yeah.

Oz García: No question about it. And so, discipline also becomes very important. I just became absolutely clear that unless I stayed within certain practices and protocols, things were not going to get better. To your earlier point, resilience. And to get as much resilience as possible, you need to be very disciplined. So, as much as I took for a kind of... I took for granted, it's the best way I could say it. I couldn't do anymore. My body just wasn't my body.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: So, let me ask you one more question, and that is based on everything that you've gone through here with COVID, with the recovery, with the epiphanies, et cetera, and the rehabilitation.

Oz García: Yes.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: What are the three things now, and I assume that they may be different from what they would've been pre COVID, so that's what I'm curious about here... What are the three things now that you would recommend to the audience as being highest priority for making a 100 the new 30, or living a long life of impact and things like that? What would your thoughts be?

Oz García: Not in any special order, but I would say one is, you need to really expose your thinking to a lot of novel thinking, a lot of novel thinkers, so that you expand your world perspective. You need to read every day, you need to read a lot. And curiosity has to be the compelling force for everything that you do. So, my appetite for what I think you need to know, what I think I need to know is unstoppable right now. I just signed up for a course at Yale online through Coursera, with Laurie Santos and the nature of happiness and wellbeing. It's just blown my mind, you think you know it all, but you don't. 

But I think number two would probably be respecting your body and knowing that yes, like the old saying says, it's a temple and you're going to get old. And as you get old, you're going to have to fight infirmities and be educated enough to know that youth doesn't last. And when that, kind of what you said to me before, not so much accepting the fact that you're going to die, but that knowing for a fact that you're going to die rather than accepting it and knowing that there's a certain amount of energy left in your battery pack that you use your time knowing that time is a commodity also.

And I think third is to really embody the practices that you and I have been talking about. Get educated about nutrition, about sleep, about your microbiome, about the food set that actually feeds your mind, about fitness and movement and sunlight and being outdoors and intimacy and sociability. The work of Dan [Goodner 00:42:33], I think it is, the guy who wrote the blues songs. How is it that people that live to be a 100, 110 and 120 are doing it by having lives that are rich and in touch; community, children, grandchildren, great grandchildren. And a study just came out today again on how having dinners with the family really has a measurable impact on quality of life, how happy you're going to be and how atomized families are now. One kid's on a cell phone, another one in the room on their laptop, and you and me are off doing whatever we're doing, right?