Transcript
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Speaker: Hello and welcome to Fit For My Age, the health and well-being podcast from Abbasida. I am your host, Michael Millward. Today, I am going to be talking to Douglas Mulhall, the author of Discovering the Nature of Longevity, Restoring the Heart and Body by Targeting Hidden Stress.
Speaker: Douglas is based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. If you plan to visit anywhere in Nova Scotia, Canada or elsewhere in the world, Do as I would do and make your travel arrangements with the Ultimate Travel Club because that is where you can access trade prices on flights, hotels, trains, holidays and so many other travel related purchases.
Speaker: You'll find a discounted link in the description. Now that I have paid the rent, it is time to make this episode of Fit for My Age. That will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading and subscribing to.
Speaker: very importantly on Fit for My Age. We don't tell you what to think, but we do hope to make you think. Hello, Douglas. Hello, Michael. It's a real pleasure to be here and thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to having this conversation with you and finding out more. Please,
Speaker: Tell me, how did you get interested in this subject? What's the history of Douglas Mulholl? This was actually a combination of curiosity and self-preservation. It is an intensely personal story in some ways because it started many, many years ago when my father died of heart disease.
Speaker: I was never really satisfied with all the explanations of what heart disease was, how it got started. you know I'd heard this stuff about cholesterol and smoking and drinking and everything else, but and No one really was able to explain to me the mechanisms, and no one was really actually able to explain to me what it was that exactly killed him in the end.
Speaker: I also realized that looking at my family tree, that actually heart disease doesn't run in my family, it gallops. Ooh. So, you know, right off the bat, I had actually a pretty strong personal incentive to try and find a way to, you know, not follow ah down that that path. So that was number one.
Speaker: Number two, the area that I work in is ah co-developing ah products that are healthy for people and the environment. And we use an award-winning methodology known as the Cradle Cradle Design Protocol that we developed over the years. And it takes a very different view of products and environment and health.
Speaker: It focuses on the positive and healthy impacts of ah products and making them that way for ah people rather than just making them less bad or reducing their negative impacts on the environment.
Speaker: Now, when it comes to pharmaceuticals, that is especially challenging because a lot of pollution comes from pharmaceuticals. We ingest this stuff and we excrete it.
Speaker: And that's the reason why frogs are changing sex because there's too much estrogen in the water, et cetera, et cetera. So the impetus to have healthy pharmaceuticals is part of this impetus to have ah healthy products. So it was a natural for me.
Speaker: to actually move towards the pharmaceuticals side of this. And far from being the only thing that we worked on, we worked on everything from healthy buildings to healthy inks on Carlsberg beer bottles. So every time you see a Carlsberg beer bottle, you know we designed the inks so that they wouldn't wash off onto your hands and give you skin irritation.
Speaker: ah Same with pharmaceuticals. And those two things came together in my life um many, many years ago. And I've actually been investigating why is it that we get heart disease and especially why is it that everybody's arteries eventually turn to stone? Everybody as we get ah older. And this has been one of the great unsolved ah mysteries and the traditional explanations like you have high cholesterol, simply you know are not accurate. That's how I started in this, from the personal and professional side, and I've been working on it ever since.
Speaker: You're a proper scientist then, aren't you? I would not call myself a scientist, but I'm the guy that scientists love to hate because I manage them in in my projects. And I'm the non-scientist who sort of points out the elephant in the room, of which there are many, because scientists tend to be focusing down on their thing. Many scientists are extremely subjective about their work. So, you know, when you're working practically on solving problems, you have to work your way around that possessiveness.
Speaker: I'm not a scientist, but I've managed a lot of scientists. I work very closely with them. And I have produced a number of scientific papers, but it's not my profession. One of the things that you said, which really sort of jumped out at me, was that our arteries turn to stone. Yes.
Speaker: Very simple to explain. Your arteries get hard. It's called hardening of the arteries. So In our age group, the physician will tell you, well, you have hardening of the arteries, you have hypertension that it leads to high blood pressure. Basically, your arteries stop being flexible, and so does your heart. And the reason that's important in the arteries is because actually your arteries expand and contract.
Speaker: And that allows the blood to actually flow through the arteries arteries. And it is especially important because the arteries feed the body.
Speaker: So all human health arises from what is coming through your blood vessels to your body. you know The air from your lungs, all of the nutrients, you know that's all coming through your blood ah vessels. so When you're looking at longevity and and aging, this is one of the key things that can lead to a lot of these these chronic conditions.
Speaker: Do we mean that the arteries have have to be flexible? Is that as our heart beats, our arteries are also flexing in time with our hearts to move the blood around our body?
Speaker: That is absolutely correct. They're expanding and contracting to allow that blood to move along. As they get more brittle, that doesn't work very well. And you get back pressure on the heart, higher blood pressure.
Speaker: This is something called calcium phosphate, ah which is calcification. And calcification is in two places in your arteries.
Speaker: The place that it often starts is not in the area where the blood flows, not in the tube where the blood flows, but in the wall of the artery.
Speaker: You end up with this calcium phosphate particles depositing in the wall of the artery and hardening it. And this happens to all of us as we age. And it is also placing an upper limit, a ceiling on how long humans actually live because very long lived people almost invariably die because they turn to stone. And it's not just in their arteries, it's in their organs as well. So things just stop moving. They stop expanding and they stop being flexible.
Speaker: And so that's that's really what this this calcification is. In Yorkshire, we have Mother Shipton's cave in Narsborough where people can put objects underneath a waterfall. the The water just drips down. It's not Niagara Falls or anything. It's just water dripping down. But there is so much calcium in the water that as the water drips, the calcium sticks to the object. And they talk about the object turning to stone over over a long period of time. But where does the calcium come from in order to get into our bodies? We're obviously eating it, or is it something that just develops over time in our bodies?
Speaker: Well, it's interesting you should mention that example because that's not what usually happens in the body. The reason that you're getting this this dissolved calcium accumulating in the situation that you described is because you have this very high level of calcium in in the water. That's not why you get calcification accumulating.
Speaker: normally in the body. And that's what's interesting is that we calcify when our calcium levels are normal. Now calcium itself is essential for the functioning of cells. So you can't live ah without it. It does all kinds of things. It allows the cells to to function across a whole range of things.
Speaker: It's a healthy thing, but calcium phosphate, which is the combination of calcium and phosphorus, is a result of a response to injury. And that's where we get to our immune system turning against us. Why does our immune system turn against us as we age? The human immune system has a defect.
Speaker: Your immune system is very good at getting you out of trouble in the short run. So if you get an infection or you have an injury, Your immune system starts off with this chronic inflammation. Inflammation is designed to target the mess and and clean it up so that you can manufacture new tissue. It's also designed to attack invaders, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, which all of which is good.
Speaker: The only problem is that as you age, that immune response goes into overdrive because the degradation of the tissues in your body is interpreted by the immune system as a foreign body, as an infection or as an injury.
Speaker: And so what it tries to do is it it uses the same method that it does in a short-term injury and it tries to fix it. but it can't fix it because the tissue is continuing to ah degrade.
Speaker: The result of that is the immune response becomes chronic. So you get endemic, chronic inflammation that doesn't work. So what happens is your body goes to plan B and plan B is, okay, well, I haven't been able to fix this problem with inflammation, so I'm going to wall it off Now, walling off injuries is a common practice of your body, and it's quite healthy when you're young and you get injured.
Speaker: you know For example, when I was skiing, I froze the earlobe, my earlobe. And um so after about a year and a half, the body surrounded it with calcification and it popped out of my ear earlobe.
Speaker: And so that's an example of how the body gets rid of ah the damage, a damaged tissue from injuries. But guess what? You can't do that with your whole arterial system.
Speaker: So the result of that is this walling off, ah which is created by a cellular action. So the cells basically issue these micro vesicles that go to the site of the damage in the artery and release ah this this chemical that promotes the combination of calcium and phosphorus, ah phos and you get calcium phosphate, and it tries to wall off the problem. Which actually makes the problem worse.
Speaker: It makes the problem worse. So that's why I say, as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, your immune system hasn't figured that out, which is actually unsurprising in the sense that Homo sapiens are only a few hundred thousand years old. They're not like Greenland shark and the bowhead whale. you know, they live to be 250 or 350 years old. So their immune systems have figured out how not to do that. But our immune system and being a relatively young species hasn't figured, we just haven't evolved ah to that point yet because our body was busy doing other things like building brain and you know all those much more complicated things. But you know then again, bowhead whales have body to brain ratio just like we do. So we just, our bodies haven't gotten around to fixing that problem, which means...
Speaker: that we have to start fixing it ourselves. What is it that we can do to, I'm not sure whether to compensate for this. It's a natural process, so we can't stop it completely, but we must be able to do something to slow it down, delay it or compensate for it. Right. There's two levels to this.
Speaker: One of those levels is a lot of what you're told already about living a healthy and calm lifestyle. But the other is actually therapeutics that directly address this issue. And in order to describe that, I need to describe what this tissue is that degrades in the human body to provoke this immune response, Michael. And that that tissue is called elastin fiber.
Speaker: It is the elastic in your body that drives every breath you take and every move you make. It's in blood. many, many of your organs. It lends flexibility to them. That's what makes your heart and arteries flexible. It allows your ligaments and tendons to expand and contract.
Speaker: It is the longest lasting protein in your body, and it expands and contracts from its standing length to eight times its standing length in a fraction of a second and back again billions of times in your life. So it is a wonderful, wonderful part of the human body. It's part of a network in your body that's variously called the fascia the extracellular matrix that basically connects everything in the body outside of cells. It's the stuff that stabilizes ah cells and holds them in place in your tissue, but it it basically connects everything. So elastin is the elastic part of that network.
Speaker: And I call it the elastic of life simply because it's so important and it's so underestimated. It's underestimated in medicine. It's underestimated in healthcare. care Most people have heard of it, but they don't know what it is.
Speaker: And that's why One of the reasons I wrote this book, Discovering the Nature of Longevity, was to describe what this stuff is and all the discoveries about it. Segwaying back to what happens with the elastin, something odd happens in the body.
Speaker: when we all reach around the age of 30, the body stops assembling elastin fiber. The world's top authorities, they don't know why, it's some genetic trait in us. So what happens is the elastin starts to degrade.
Speaker: All kinds of hidden stresses, which is the the subtitle of the book, start knocking the the coating, the protective coating off of this elastin fiber.
Speaker: And when that happens, it sends out a help me signal. The body cells start emitting these inflammatory substances that are designed to clean up the mess that we talked about earlier.
Speaker: So they go, they clean up the mess, but unfortunately the elastin continues to degrade because it's not being fixed anymore. And the result of that is the chronic inflammation I referred to earlier. So elastin fiber is at the heart of this chronic inflammation problem that plagues people as they grow older.
Speaker: Not only that, when the body figures out that inflammation doesn't work, that's when that calcification process starts. And guess where it starts? It starts at the site of the damaged elastic in your arteries.
Speaker: And that is why elastin fiber is so ah critical. So getting back to your question about what can we do to do this, the the miracle about all of this is that after 20 years of research, several different groups of scientists around the world have actually figured out how to fix damaged elastin fiber.
Speaker: it's It's a fantastic series of discoveries, and it is a bit of rocket science. I have the privilege of working with one of these groups based in South Carolina at Clemson University, Professor Naren Vavahari and Dr. Charles Rice have made a series of discoveries and inventions that basically led to the discovery of a naturally derived a substance that kickstarts the elastin assembly process. And this gets back to our healthy product thing because it's a naturally derived A group of chemicals called polyphenols, they're really good for your health and they're in grapes.
Speaker: ah They're in a lot of vegetables. they're You know they can get them in in Cabernet red wine. There's a particular polyphenol, and I'm only going to say the name once and then I'll abbreviate it It's called pentagallaglucose, but we call it PGG.
Speaker: And that one polyphenol, which is also a tannin, protects the elastin fiber and allows the body to start rebuilding and reassembling the fiber. Because your body is actually producing all the building blocks for the elastin, but actually it's not putting them together. And that PGG helps the body right kickstart that that assembly process.
Speaker: So this miraculous discovery, the really exciting thing is it's in clinical trial for PGG. aneurysms. Millions of people suffer from these aneurysms, and an aneurysm is the bulging of the artery that and eventually, when it gets to a certain size, it bursts and it can be fatal.
Speaker: Being able to prevent that from bursting by restoring the elasticity in that aneurysm has been achieved. It's remarkable. So that's that's one therapy.
Speaker: ah The other therapy was developed by ah dr Tony Weiss at University of Sydney in Australia. ah He developed a scaffold that is that they populate with a precursor, a starter for elastin fiber. It's called tropoelastin. And then they take this scaffold and they insert it into any type of wound.
Speaker: And it prevents scarring. The reason you get scarring is because the elastin isn't there. It's destroyed. The elastin is destroyed. I can't believe I finished your sentence there, Douglas, but I'm paying so much attention. That was very good.
Speaker: So like putting two and two together and miraculously coming up with four, yeah it's just makes so much sense. But well you're a quick study, Michael. Thank you very much. Thank you. But the, the whole sort of process of our body is that it it changes and it moves and there are things that need to move. more than other parts. So like our arteries are working in in sequence with our heart. And as our blood is pumped out of our heart, it goes through the arteries. So like the one part the artery moves it onto the next part of the artery and it moves around our bodies. I get all of that. And I can understand what it means when we say, okay, the elasticity of those elements in our body, the elasticity of life declines with age. And and I was thinking, that you know, if you have a rubber band, an elastic band, the effectiveness of that drops as it gets older. And you can extend that by keeping your elastic bands in the fridge. But Exactly. They dry up and and they they snap. And that's exactly what is happening within our own bodies with those parts of our bodies that are supposed to be flexible and stretch are losing that. The analogy goes further with the elastic band because elastic bands are degraded by UV radiation, just like the elastin in your skin is, by chemicals, just like the elastin in in throughout your body is. So, yes, that's an excellent analogy We need to be more aware of that this is the thing that is really driving our aging process. And if we can learn how to better manage the management of our flexibility of our bodies and inside our bodies as well, then we can live longer and live longer in a more healthy way as well. Yes.
Speaker: What we're working on at Elastrin Therapeutics is the tricky part, and that's the arteries. So what we're focusing on right now is reversing calcification in the arteries by targeting the damaged elastin where the calcification ah starts.
Speaker: It's quite exciting to see this because it's a very sophisticated technology. I won't get into too much detail here, but It it combines a drug loaded nanoparticle ah with a ah antibody that was developed by Dr. Charles Rice that is specific for damaged elastin. And the reason that's important is it means that you can go right to the source of the problem instead of shotgunning the body with a drug.
Speaker: So all these drugs that you pour into your body to do various things, this goes straight to the problem. which means that you can reduce the amount of drug that you need because you increase the concentrations right at the site. So that's all being done by Elastron Therapeutics. And there's another company, Neolaston, which has a skin cream that is on the market that contains this PGG.
Speaker: Michael, this is really exciting. We've got all these different therapies and products at different stages of development, and it's a real revolution and it's really exciting. But... As you said, then there's the first part and that is what can we do individually to slow down that process? And the good news is there's a lot you can do, but the first thing you need to understand is what are these hidden stresses that i refer to in the book that actually lead to the destruction of this elastin fiber?
Speaker: It is absolutely fascinating that we have scientists who are developing drugs that can go straight to the cause of the problem. We have increasing understanding of this whole elasticity issue, the elastic of life, and how that all helps our body to function. And even to do the comparison between ourselves and other mammals like a whale and see that in comparison to our evolution, they have developed naturally the ways of managing this disease. so that they can live 200, 300 years. Yeah, it's a great story. I mean, that's why I wrote about it.
Speaker: There's technical books on Elastin, but there's nothing that tells this story and the story of the discoverers, all of that. So so then if you get back to what are these hidden stresses, I'll start at the top.
Speaker: There's something called total stress load. which is the sum total of the emotional, physical, chemical, and repetitive stress ah injuries that happen to your body over time. Many of them are cumulative.
Speaker: It's interesting that it's really this total stress load that increases your risk of these chronic conditions and of premature ah aging. But total stress load increases is not well recognized in the literature and it's not well recognized in standard ah clinical practice. Standard clinical practice tends to be focused on two, three, one, two, three, four at the most, you know, types of insults that lead to disease.
Speaker: And that's been part of our problem is we haven't been taking a holistic ah look at this. And for employers out there, and I know your program talks to employees and employers, this is particularly important because they're the ones who can actually drive this by recognizing that developing a total total stress load monitor could really help ah with ah you know their employees you know avoid some of these problems. So having said that, that's sort of the the top you know total stress load thing.
Speaker: So the first thing that we need to do then as individuals, as employers, organizations, schools, is to find ways of well measuring our total stress load and identifying those elements of life that add to our total stress load. You don't have to take it upon yourself to do that. ah The good news is that there are individual things that you can do if you know what the problem is. And I just want to give you some examples of that that I described.
Speaker: ah in the book. So the first one, which is significantly underrated, is something called heavy metals or toxic metals. Heavy metals are heavy simply because there's any metal that are five times more dense than water. Don't ask me why the scientists did that, but It means that everything from ah tin to cadmium to lithium, uranium, cadmium, chromium, and lead, you know, these are all called heavy metals.
Speaker: Heavy metals have been with us ah forever. they they They're in the Earth's crust. They're in our soil. ah We have been taking them up ever since we invented agriculture. Our grains take them up, so we ingest them.
Speaker: And most importantly, as soon as we discovered fire, we started inhaling the heavy metals in wood. And that's why in ancient mummies, they have found this evidence of heavy metal contamination in the tissue of the mummy. So to be clear, these toxic metals have been with us for quite some time, and it means that they've actually been causing problems for quite some time that hasn't necessarily been recognized. And if you fast forward to today in the Industrial Revolution and the post-Industrial Revolution, That issue has multiplied because guess what? Heavy metals are so good for making products work. yes So we've loaded heavy metals into our electronics, you know into our coatings, into all kinds of things. When you get things like wildfires, all these houses and cars that contain all these metals burn up. And guess what? You're inhaling When the smoke comes along and, you know, right now, for example, across North America, there's wildfires burning. Everyone's heard about them in Europe. It's it's a huge problem.
Speaker: So the number one thing you can do there is make sure that you're well protected ah from ah heavy metals. So how do you do that? And there's a lot of ways that you can do that. What people can do and employers can do is to make sure that there's very good air quality. And this is a huge thing.
Speaker: This is really important for minimizing the amount of toxins that are getting into your lungs by inhaling these metals. What you need is you need these really good filters in your car and make sure that you change them ah frequently because most, you know, many of the people listening to this show are in their cars. And I'm telling you right now, if you're on the m one you're breathing this stuff when you're in your car. So in your vehicle, in your home, in your office, make sure that the air quality is good. This is something that everyone can do. And it's the same thing for water.
Speaker: So get a good water filter because most of the water filters, unless it says right on the label, removes heavy metals, that's what you have to watch for. okay So you need to make sure that your system actually removes those, your water system does.
Speaker: And by the way, the municipality doesn't do it for you. And if you're on a well, ah you you know you have to watch for that because a lot of well water has this in it as well. Time flies when you're learning something new. And I really do appreciate, Douglas, the time that you've spent today explaining this. I think there's more information in your book, Discovering the Nature of Longevity, Restoring the Heart and Body by Targeting Hidden Stress. But for today, really big thank you. I've learned a lot and I really do appreciate your time today. Thank you. Michael, thank you so much for having me. And hey, let's do something on something called exosomes, which is the trillions of particles running around your body. So there's there's lots more to do.
Speaker: You've given me lots of different ideas to sort think like we need to do something on on this and something on that. And we'll certainly get those organized very soon. But thank you very much. Appreciate the offer. Really do.
Speaker: I am Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abbasida. And in this episode of Fit for My Age, I have been having a conversation with Douglas Mulhall, author of Discovering the Nature of Longevity, Restoring the Heart and Body by Targeting Hidden Stress.
Speaker: You can find out more about Douglas and his work at calcify.com. I'm sure that you will have enjoyed listening to this episode of Fit for My Age, as much as Douglas and I have enjoyed making it.
Speaker: So please give it a like and download it so you can listen anytime, anywhere. To make sure you don't miss out on future episodes, please subscribe. Remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abbasida is not to tell you what to think. We do hope to have made you think.
Speaker: Until the next episode of Fit For My Age, thank you for listening and goodbye.
