Anti-Aging Teleclinic with Dr. Ron Rosedale and Dr. Joseph Mercola Dr. Mercola: Welcome, everyone! This is Dr. Mercola, and I welcome everyone to our first anti-aging teleclinic. This is going to be an exciting, information-packed series, and we’re just honored to have Dr. Ron Rosedale with us today. He’s out in Colorado, and really, one of the leading experts in the country in this area. He’s studied quite a bit for many years, and attends many of the biochemical, scientific meetings to obtain the latest and the greatest information. So I’m just very excited to be able to pick Dr. Rosedale’s brain, so that we can capture some information that could make us happier and healthier and extend our lifespan. So we’re really excited about that, and I’m just delighted to have him join us today. So, Dr. Rosedale, you’re on the line now? Dr. Rosedale: Yes. Thank you. Dr. Mercola: Okay. Dr. Rosedale: Thank you for having me, and I’m looking forward to this morning. Dr. Mercola: So, what we’re going to do is, I want to make sure that everyone has their executive summary that was sent out by e-mail. So if you either have had that printed out, hopefully, and if you can gather that from your papers, you’ll find the topics that we’re going to discuss on the clinic today. And the first topic is going to revolve around skin, and that’s such an important area for all of us, the way we look, and of course, there are millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars spent every year in this country on skincare products and surgical procedures to improve the way we look. So, that’s certainly one solution. It’s not one that I’m greatly in favor of because it doesn’t really address the underlying cause of the problem, and we’re all about addressing foundational causes. So we’re going to have Dr. Rosedale enlighten us about some of the simple, inexpensive, basic strategies that you can go about and use to improve the way your skin looks and to maintain the young-looking nature of your skin. He’ll explain some Anti-Aging Teleclinic with Dr. Ron Rosedale and Dr. Joseph Mercola Page 1 of the biology and the issues associated with one of the reasons why that starts to break down. So, Dr. Rosedale, if you can start addressing that, that’d be great. Dr. Rosedale: Sure. Your skin, I think, can take us to much deeper issues also. One of the things that I like to do is find commonalities among different diseases. So when skin is aging faster, basically, what you’re talking about is more diseased skin. And what I’d like to do is give a little bit of a background first as far as what disease is and what health is, so that we’re on some common ground. One of the things that I noticed when I was working on another book, that I’m still working on, is that in order to tell somebody how to be healthy, I had to actually define what health was, and that’s not that simple. It seems like it would be very simple, but it takes you into some very deep realms. As an example, when one talks about skin, one normally is talking about the epithelium, the covering of our body. But skin can also be the endothelium, and that’s the “skin” that lines our arteries, and they’re essentially the same type of cells that do virtually the same things, that when they’re injured, secrete pretty much the same chemicals. You can very much think of damage to the lining of the arteries as your arteries wrinkling, and when the arteries wrinkle, instead of causing the scar tissue, sort of, that we call “wrinkles” on the external skin, we call it “plaque” on the internal skin, or the lining of the arteries. And the same biochemical processes that cause our external skin to wrinkle, cause our internal endothelium, the lining of our arteries, the arterial skin, to wrinkle also. And what we really want to do is, I think, first, define and examine some of the biochemical processes that occur in our body in all of our tissues; in our skin, in our brain, in our arteries, that cause us to age faster than we ought to. And if we can actually discover some of the commonalities, then there are some simple things that can be done that will not just be good for the external skin, but that will also be good for the lining of the arteries. It will be good for our brain. It will be good for our kidneys, etc. But first, we have to define what is our goal. What is our actual goal? Is our goal to lose weight, for instance? Is our goal to have glowing external skin? A goal, and my goal for everybody out there really and everybody that I see and talk to, is for them, as you mentioned, Joe, to lead a long, happy, healthy life. But we have to define those Anti-Aging Teleclinic with Dr. Ron Rosedale and Dr. Joseph Mercola Page 2 terms a little bit. We have to define our destination. I can’t just say, “We’re going on a trip”, without saying, “Well, we’re going on a trip to Sun Valley, Idaho”, for instance. What really is our destination? If I were a cardiologist, for instance, I would say, “Well, our destination is good heart health, and good heart health is equating to low cholesterol”. But is that necessarily true? Is low cholesterol really our goal? And I would have to say, no. That’s not necessarily our goal. That makes a lot of assumptions. It makes assumptions that low cholesterol is going to lead to a longer, happier, healthier life, and that’s never been shown. What has been shown with cholesterol is, there is an association between cholesterol, for instance, and a reduction in heart disease. But what if it increases your risk of cancer four times? So is that really a good thing? In other words, if I could snap my fingers and come up with a drug, or even a supplement, that reduced your incidence of heart disease in half – which, there isn’t such a thing, but let’s make believe, for instance – that. Dr. Mercola: Well, the drug companies would like us to belief that. They’re selling Lipitor at $10 billion a year. [cross-talk] Dr. Rosedale: Yeah. ….. Dr. Mercola: As a magic bullet. And I think if you go in the PDR, the Physician’s Desk Reference, and you look at the actual, very detailed description of the drug, there is no mention in there that it actually has been shown to reduce the risk of heart disease. Dr. Rosedale: That’s correct. And there is a purposeful deception in all of the studies and advertisements about that drug, and that deception is, actually trying to pull the wool over the public’s eyes, into believing that an association implies a cause. So that if low cholesterol is associated with a lower risk of heart disease, that high cholesterol is causing heart disease. And that’s totally wrong. An example would be, for instance, that aging is associated with gray hair. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that gray hair is causing you to age. You know, there’s an underlying commonality between the two that has to be discovered. So putting hair dye to cover up the gray hair and give a person black hair again doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to slow their rate of Anti-Aging Teleclinic with Dr. Ron Rosedale and Dr. Joseph Mercola Page 3 aging any more than lowering their cholesterol is going to slow their rate of aging. And that’s really what I mean by kind of defining the end point. What really will constitute health? It’s not going to be low cholesterol. And if we have a little time, I can use cholesterol as a very good example of what ought not to be focused on and what is not necessarily good health. In fact, the figures that I heard, that I actually saw, Joe, last year, that the drug companies made over $40 billion on cholesterol-lowering drugs. Dr. Mercola: I was just referring to Lipitor alone, I think. Dr. Rosedale: Oh, Lipitor alone? Yeah, that could be. That very well could be. And if you add all the other statin drugs. [cross-talk] Dr. Mercola: It’s another $30 billion. Dr. Rosedale: ….. billion. Yeah. So it’s just totally ridiculous. But let’s get back to what health is, to me, anyway. And that way, then I can tell you the direction and the means by which we can obtain that health. One of the things that one can look at as far as health is concerned, is life. Let’s try and keep things really simple and relatively non-controversial, because there’s so much confusion in medicine right now, and that confusion, not just medicine, but in nutrition and health. Where does that confusion come from? There’s a number of reasons that there’s so much confusion. Number one, I think, is that the American diet is so bad, that if you make any changes whatsoever, you’ve improved it. So saying that one diet, is one diet good or is one diet bad, you can’t really say that. They’re all good because they’ve all made certain changes to the typical American diet, and as I said, if you make any changes at all, you’ve improved it, and so that’s not a great endeavor necessarily; it’s not a difficult thing to improve the American diet. Another reason there is so much confusion is what you kind of mentioned, and what seems obvious to certain people, and that is, that, many of the studies, in fact, most of the studies, are financed by drug companies, and they’re not doing a study to discover some new truth and trying to discover what is really healthy. They’re spending $50 million on a study as a marketing campaign. They want to publish something to tell you that Lipitor is good for you, and they could do five studies or six Anti-Aging Teleclinic with Dr. Ron Rosedale and Dr. Joseph Mercola Page 4 or eight studies, and the only one that they’re going to actually publicize, the only one that they’re going to publish, is going to be the one that might have come out in their favor. So there could have been eight studies that were done on Lipitor that showed an increase in heart disease or an increase in mortality rate, and the public will never see it, and they’ll never hear about it. Dr. Mercola: You know, Dr. Rosedale, I think I might have gotten us off on a tangent because what we want to do here, we’ve got seven questions to go over, and I really want to open up the opportunity for people to ask their individual questions. So what I’d like to do is spend about 10,15 minutes going over the specific things, the specific recommendations for each of those issues, and then we’ll open it up for questions. I also wanted to mention, just for everyone listening, that we are going to have bathroom breaks every 40 minutes or so, to give you a two-minute rest break, and stand up and stretch and relieve yourself. So if we can maybe get to some of the practical components and the recommendations, and then we can open it up for questions, it’d be great. Dr. Rosedale: Yeah. The majority of our time will be spent on that. Dr. Mercola: Okay. Dr. Rosedale: But I do want to just give a little background as to each of the recommendations for the specifics, how they relate, really, to the entire whole, because they’re all connected, as far as, for instance, memory and skin and all these things have some underlying commonalities that I think need to be discussed. And so anyway, to jump forward. But my definition of health is, communication, that all disease is some sort of deficiency in communication, that we are ten trillion cells that are having to coordinate with one another to create a republic of cells, and that coordination, normally, is so good that we kind of think of ourselves as a single individual. But it’s when that communication goes awry that virtually all disease arises, and it is always the communication that has to be corrected, and not as much the individual parts. And that leads you to a lot of interesting conclusions. For instance, that diabetes is not a disease, necessarily, of blood sugar, but a disease of the instructions given to the glucose. Glucose is listening to orders, and if you fix the instructions, which many people believe come from insulin, although we’ll Anti-Aging Teleclinic with Dr. Ron Rosedale and Dr. Joseph Mercola Page 5 probably see that it comes from other things too, that the sugar will be fine. So it’s always the instructions that you want to deal with ultimately. And we’re going to talk about some of the instructions that actually relate to the rate of aging of every system, including skin, including the brain, including the heart. They're all related. They're symptoms of the underlying disease of aging. And we can call aging a disease because we know that, although it’s not totally curable, we know that it can be greatly slowed down, it can be reduced, that studies in many different species of animals have shown that you can not only reduce the rate of aging 10% or 20%, but you can go up to 300% and 400% reduction in the rate of aging. By aging, let’s talk about what we’re talking about there. We’re not just talking about an increase in the number of people who would reach maximal lifespan. We’re talking about increasing maximal lifespan. So if we were to snap our fingers and have everybody live to be 120, now that would be a great thing. Don’t get me wrong. Everybody would be much healthier. If everybody died at 120 years old, we have not reduced the actual rate of aging, because right now, the maximal lifespan in humans is about 122 years. So what we want to do is, we want to slow down the rate of aging. We want people to be able to live to be 130 and 140, maybe 200 years old. It’s hard to say. But they’ve been doing that in animals now, or the equivalent aging in animals, for well over a decade. They can make animals that normally die in two years, die at six years now. And we know that the way to do this is by mechanisms that have very much to do with nutrition. There are no drugs that anybody has discovered. But via mechanisms that relate to insulin and leptin and nutrition, you can greatly slow down the rate of aging, and therefore, the symptoms of that aging process. And the symptoms of aging are going to be wrinkled skin, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, arthritis; all of these things are related to the rate of aging. It’s like catching a cold. Everybody can breathe the same rhinovirus. Some people will get a cold, some people won’t. Some people will get a sinus infection. Some people will get a cough. Some people get a stuffy, runny nose. The same underlying cause, different symptoms. And that’s really what you have with aging. We have the same underlying disease, but some people will get osteoporosis, some people will have excessively-aged skin, some people will get brain disease, some people will get diabetes Anti-Aging Teleclinic with Dr. Ron Rosedale and Dr. Joseph Mercola Page 6 or obesity. But underneath it all is the same basic process that is causing everybody’s problem, and, in general terms, that problem is going to be damage to the communication systems, damage to the mechanisms that are allowing our ten trillion cells to work as a collective whole. And we need to correct those messages, and the most important of those messages relate to metabolism. And metabolism can roughly be defined as the chemistry, the biochemistry, that turns food into life. And when that metabolism is damaged, when that metabolism goes awry, you can’t continue to make life out of food, and you become diseased. You’ll get heart disease, skin disease, brain disease, kidney disease. So the metabolism is one of the major things that we need to correct in order to correct any underlying disorder. There’s really no exception to that. For instance, now, let’s go back to skin. One of the things we know that causes skin to age more rapidly is a process called glycation. Glycation is where sugar combines with important molecules in the body. Normally, we think of glycation as sugar combining with proteins, and in skin, that’s very important. When glucose combines with collagen in the skin, it causes the collagen, essentially, to become bent and misshapen and to stick together, and that’s called cross-linking, and we know it as wrinkles. We know that wrinkles are a form of glycation, and glycation, increased glycation, is accelerated by damage to the skin. So, radiation to the skin will increase glycation, will increase damage to the collagen. The collagen molecules will kind of become entangled with one another, and we know it as wrinkling. One of the ways that you can reduce that wrinkling is, number one, to reduce the radiation damage. Number two, to increase the processes that repair damage. One could look at aging in general as a battle, constantly, between damage and damage control, rate of repair. What ultimately will cause us to age, and finally succumb to that damage, is that the repair mechanisms ultimately become damaged too. So, one of the things that we want to try and do is preserve the repair mechanism. If you can repair damage as fast as it occurs, you’d live forever. Ultimately, however, that doesn’t occur. It occurs better early in life. We can control damage better when we’re younger than when we’re older, and ultimately, that will cause our perception of aging. Anti-Aging Teleclinic with Dr. Ron Rosedale and Dr. Joseph Mercola Page 7 One has to understand that aging itself can’t really be helped. Aging just means that we’re a day older tomorrow than we are today, and that’s always going to occur. But what I was talking about, when we think of the aging process, is the damage associated with that being a day older, and we want to reduce the damage, and we want to increase our repair of that damage. And that’s done intracellularly. We know, and aging studies have shown, that you can greatly increase the genetic expression of the processes that allow you to repair damage, but it has to come from inside the cell, and that’s an important process. So, you can reduce the damage that is occurring outside the cell, but to increase the rate of repair, you have to upregulate the genes that determine how well you’re able to repair tissues. So we have genes, for instance, that will upregulate a mechanism called heat shock proteins, that keep proteins in the proper shape, which determines their function. You have mechanisms that increase the production of antioxidant systems, and there are even DNA-repair enzymes that need to be upregulated, and there are even anti-glycating agents that need to be upregulated. Much of that, in fact, the most powerful mechanisms that we know of to increase the genetic expression of repair mechanisms, are dietary. There are no drugs that can do it. But a change in diet can be so powerful because we know that it changes genetic expression. So once again, with skin, you want to reduce glycation, and you want to increase the repair of that glycation. One of the easy things you can do to reduce glycation, to reduce the combination of sugar with the proteins in the skin that causes them to kind of stick together, that we know as wrinkles, is to reduce the glucose that’s floating around in your blood, and the easiest way to do that is just not to eat it. Nothing Einsteinian here. If you want to reduce glycation and you want to reduce your rate of aging, reduce the amount of sugar that’s floating around your blood. What are the foods that turn into sugar? Joe, you’ve talked about that for a long time, as have I. You want to reduce the starches that turn into sugar, and the other basic food group that can turn into sugar is protein, and so you don't want to eat necessarily excess proteins, because that excess protein can easily turn into sugar and sugar-like compounds that amount to the same damage. Anti-Aging Teleclinic with Dr. Ron Rosedale and Dr. Joseph Mercola Page 8 Unlike carbohydrates, we know that protein is an essential nutrient; 50, 52, depending on your age, up to 54 so-called essential nutrients. These are nutrients that you have to eat because our bodies can’t make the components that it needs entirely. We know, for instance, that carbohydrates are a non-essential nutrient. In other words, we can make all of the carbohydrates that our bodies need from other compounds. We can make carbohydrates from protein. We can make a little bit of sugar from fat. So we don't need to take in any carbohydrate. However, protein is a different story. You have to take in protein because we can’t make all that we need. But you want that protein to be able to repair your body tissues. You want to be able to incorporate those amino acids into your muscle, into insulin, into leptin, into signaling molecules, into enzymes, so that we can keep functioning. However, you can only incorporate so much in a particular period of time, and if you eat excess of that protein, you’re not going to waste it. You don't want to urinate protein away, for instance. If you did, you know your kidneys are in trouble. So what we do with that extra protein is we make fuel out of it. So we want to use that protein to make body parts, lean body mass. But if you eat excess protein, you’re going to make it into fuel, and that fuel is going to be sugar like, and then, you’re going to burn sugar. Dr. Mercola: So one of the keys then is to limit the amount of extra sugars and starches and keep your protein in moderation. Dr. Rosedale: Exactly. Dr. Mercola: Are there any other key principles or guidelines you want to advise for minimizing the amount of damage and wrinkles on our skin? Dr. Rosedale: Sure. We always have sugar, I mean, even if you minimize your dietary sugar and foods that turn into sugar, we have to have some sugar, and the reason we have to have some sugar is to fuel our red blood cells and a couple other tissues; not so much our brain, but our red blood cells have to burn sugar as fuel because you can burn sugar, so called anaerobically. You don't have to use oxygen, and red blood cells don't want to consume their major cargo, which is oxygen. So they want to preserve their oxygen, and they can do that by burning sugar rather than fats. And so everybody has a certain amount of sugar. You know that if your blood sugar Anti-Aging Teleclinic with Dr. Ron Rosedale and Dr. Joseph Mercola Page 9 goes down to zero, you’re in trouble; you’re not going to live very long. And so, sugar is one of those things that’s kind of a built-in aging mechanism. You have to have some around to feed some of those cells that require it. But that same sugar is going to cause accelerated aging. So our body has systems to combat the damage associated with that sugar. So certainly, one of the major ways to reduce glycation is to reduce your sugar intake. The next major way is to reduce the combination of whatever sugar you have with your proteins and your DNA; so, reduce the damage that that sugar is causing, and that can greatly be aide by certain supplements. We know that there are anti-glycating supplements that are, to me, among the most important of all the supplements that people take; things like lipoic acid, we know is a very good anti-glycating agent. There are fat-soluble forms of vitamin B1, the class of compounds called allithiamine, or benfotiamine, is a particular brand that takes that glucose inside cells and converts it into ribose, which can then be made into RNA, or ribonucleic acid. So it takes something bad, extra sugar inside cells, and turns it into something good, and that prevents the internal components of cells from glycating and becoming damaged, and that’s an extremely important compound, also. Carnosine, not to be confused with carnitine, but L-carnosine, or just carnosine, is a dipeptide - it’s made up of two amino acids – that is there, apparently, specifically, to reduce glycation, and those tissues that are extremely important have a higher quantity of carnosine. So that’s another supplement that can be taken to reduce damage associated with sugar. Dr. Mercola: Can you review some of the dosages here, or food that might have these nutrients in them? Dr. Rosedale: Sure. The lipoic acid, for an effective dose, I would say, at least 200 mg, and then it can go up to 600 or 800 mg, depending on your degree of health. Dr. Mercola: Is that per dose or per day? Dr. Rosedale: That would be per day, divided up. So alpha lipoic acid 200 mg twice a day would be a typical dose for an average, semi-healthy person. If you’ve got neuropathy, for instance, then you would want to go to 300 or 400 mg twice a day. Now, lipoic acid, as the name sounds like, is a fairly powerful acid, and so it should be Anti-Aging Teleclinic with Dr. Ron Rosedale and Dr. Joseph Mercola Page 10