Peptides in Multi-Therapeutic Healing

Dr. Daniel Pompa

Now, likewise and thank you for that introduction. And I love to be here. I love this topic. Rarely do I get to slice into this topic. And so when you asked me to do this, I was like, “I’m so excited.” A lot of times we stay away from peptides, right? It’s like, yeah, the grades have people don’t wanna really bring them up and dig deep, but here we are looking forward to it.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Okay, awesome. So, well, tell me a little bit about just so people get a sense of you. Tell me a little bit about your history, where you come from medically and how you kind of put health together.

Dr. Daniel Pompa

Yeah, it’s life always takes you by surprise. Around the end of 1999, I ended up with just mysterious illness. Like so many people, started with just fatigue, right? And then it went from fatigue to anxiety. Then I couldn’t sleep. Then it was like, I either couldn’t get to sleep, wake up in the middle, I couldn’t get back sleep. Then I became intolerant to every food, which I never was. So I had gut issues all of a sudden then just debilitating personality changes, irritability, anger for no reason. I mean, literally I could go on with bizarre symptoms, brain fog that I just couldn’t even think. And I went from a photographic memory to where I couldn’t remember anything. So life as I knew it came to a screeching halt. I was running a very busy practice at the time, two young boys, amazing wife, all was well, except that I just didn’t know what was going on. And, Matt, it took me, I don’t know, probably three years to get really what was going on. And just a fast forward, I mean, I ended up with obviously what I call unexplainable illness, but it was neurotoxic-mediated illness, caused by a perfect storm, honestly, of neurotoxins. I had two silver fillings drilled out right before the fatigue hit and they contained 50% mercury. It’s put a lot of mercury directly into my brain, up into my pituitary. 

So like many people, I was downstream trying to fix my thyroid, all the symptoms that went along with it, my adrenals, all the symptoms went along with that. Really, I couldn’t even adapt to loud noise. I mean, clanging hangers would just be like, I couldn’t handle it. So my adrenals were fried. Although, when I was addressing those downstream things, I wasn’t getting my life back, right? It wasn’t until I realized, okay, mercury was part of the cause. I was definitely we’re living in an older home, had mold in it. I was training on my bike probably 200 plus miles a week, so physical stress, chemical stress, and it definitely led to emotional stress, but the perfect storm was definitely mold, mercury, and obviously the physical stress that I was bringing myself under. So fast forward, figured out what the causes were, dealt with them correctly. Matter of fact, all of what I learned in that, is what I teach doctors around the world on how to get mercury correctly out of the brain, how to deal with biotoxic illness correctly, right? So my five RS of cellular healing is my roadmap of what I teach detox really is, not just doing a Sanar, a colonic, or whatever 11-day, 10-day cleanse. If it we’re only that easy, Matt, it’s not, but real detox is at the cell and that’s what I’ve taught for almost 20 years now.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

By the way, I have always loved some of your products and the Zeolite product as a product, we weren’t scheduled to talk about it, but in terms of thinking about those mycotoxins, if you can bind them into the gut and help pull them out, then we’re pushing basically the total body burden that you have to deal with down. And that one’s the best actually Zeolite product that I’ve ever found.

Dr. Daniel Pompa

Well, and it’s clean. Many Zeolite products, like many binders are very dirty, meaning they have lead, arsenic, other contaminants, heavy metals. And so it’s clean and it still maintains its structure. A lot of Zeolite products, they try to get them clean, but they break the cages apart that bind and they become less effective. So you have to maintain effectiveness and keep the product clean. I mean, it it’s a curator, it works, but it’s only one part of detox. There’s so much more, meaning you have to up-regulate all of the cell functions that detox your cells day in, day out because they get broken. I mean, just talking simply, they get broken because of the toxic accumulation, bio-accumulation in the body. And if you don’t up-regulate those, you’re not going to really have a lasting effect in somebody’s life, right? You’re way downstream for what really the bigger problem is and that’s typically a cellular issue. But yeah, we use binders in the gut, we use binders in and around the cell as we’re getting the cells to do what we need ’em to do.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And then you were you were mentioning to ask you about cellular detox. What’s the key to that to actually turning that on.

Dr. Daniel Pompa

Yeah. Look, I mean, my five RS without getting deep into that science and people get bored, but our number one is, you have to remove the sources, meaning that if I didn’t get the rest of these silver fillings outta my head, they were leaching mercury that I was already bio-accumulated to a point where my body wasn’t tolerating it. So you have to get rid of the sources. If you live in a moldy home, you have to do something about it. Otherwise, you’re just never good going to get your life back. And as a matter of fact, one of the things I teach my doctors, Matt, is if someone’s not progressing as you would expect, there’s probably a hidden upstream stressor somewhere, whether it be a hidden infection, whether it’s more mercury, maybe it’s lead in the bone, whatever, something, you have to dig deeper in their history to figure out. But when you’re dealing with our number one, removing the source, like I said, it’s typically things that people may have thought they dealt with, but really didn’t. Our number two, is you have to regenerate the cell membranes. If you don’t do that, you have 50, 70 trillion cells in your body. The membranes determine what goes in and what comes out. The membranes in the inner parts of the cell determine cell energy, which is my R3. If you don’t restore the cell energy, you can’t detox a cell. And the reason I say that is because the mitochondria, every cell makes energy. When it makes energy, it makes waste. It’s like burning wood. 

If you don’t get rid of the smoke, it builds up in the cell, you’re dead, just like if you don’t open your damper. So these membranes determine what flows in and out of the cell. It’s cellular fluidity. And it has to be regenerated for real detox and to get someone’s life back. R3 is restoring the cell energy. As I said that once a cell becomes toxic, these membranes get inflamed. Now you don’t make energy normal and now you won’t detox. You have to up-regulate that energy. And then R4 is inflammation. You have to reduce the inflammation in order for everything I’m saying to work, whether it be fix the membranes up, regulate the cell energy. And lastly is R5. You have to re-establish methylation. As something called methylation goes down, glutathione, which cleans the cell goes down as well. Methylation, you need to get rid of toxic hormones, you need it for every detox process, protect DNA, goes on and on. The point is, if you don’t fix it, you’re not gonna get your life back. If you don’t fix it, you’re not gonna detox the cell. We have to fix that in order for all of the detox to flow. And then you have to open up downstream pathways. You have to open up the liver, the gut, the kidneys, the lymph, right, and allow the body to cleanse itself.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Okay. So then I’m 100% with you on all of that. And then interestingly, if you think of our interest, ’cause I’m also deeply interested in the complex illness and then also in exercise and wellness, it’s the same thing for both sides. And in a way maybe it was almost lucky that you figured that out because then if you can take care of those sick people and get them better, then it the same principles that work for them kind of work for basically people that don’t have too many problems.

Dr. Daniel Pompa

It’s so true. It’s like this, right? As it’s said in the business world, you can start it at Saks Fifth Avenue or Neiman Marcus and end up at Walmart. But you can’t start at Walmart and end up at Neiman Marcus, meaning if you’re trying to sell a product, right, the whole world, it’s the same. If you start up here with very complicated, you can evolve down in a better understanding of help, just performance, right? But to start with performance is an interest and work up to here. It’s very difficult.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

I like that analogy that high end antiaging is Walmart and that analogy, which I think is kind of true because we’re thinking about wellness, but it’s relatively simple compared to the deep .

Dr. Daniel Pompa

And the Walmart means it’s just, “Hey, this applies there.” Right? Now I’m saying, “Everyone.” And there’s a beauty in that. But when you’re dealing with people with unexplained wellness is, “Why am I still not well, I’ve changed my diet. I eat better than any of my friends. I’m using this hormone. I’m doing that. I’m using peptides. I’m doing whatever I’m doing. It’s like, I’m still not well.” There’s a missing upstream cause., look for it. Believe me, it’s there.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Yeah, okay. So then, let’s say we engage and we buy in and kind of we’re doing all that stuff, what’s been your experience with peptides. Where do you like to use them? What’s been in your personal life? How have they been helpful and what’s going on there?

Dr. Daniel Pompa

Yeah, look, I can talk just for fun. We can talk personal peptides that I absolutely love in my life all the time, ones I’ve experimented with. But for detox just on that subject of opening up the downstream detox pathways, there’s two in particular that I love, well, maybe more than that three or four, but we’ll talk about those. And then even at the cellular level, as I look at it, I just express my five Rs of how you fix a cell, one of which is R3 restoring cell energy. Well, there’s some peptides there that can be really amazing, but let’s go back to one of the pitfalls when you’re detoxing people and really getting to the upstream sources is, that many of the toxins end up in the liver and then they end up in the gut, right? And leaky gut and healing a gut becomes a real challenge, right? So if it were only so simple to take some bacteria and fix somebody’s gut today, or I I’ll even say this, if it were only so simple to just improve somebody’s diet and fix their gut, today, it’s not like that. There’s major, major complicating factors due to the level of toxicity that people are under. But having peptides as a tool to at least massively make a difference in the inflammation while you’re trying to get somebody detoxed is critical and in shutting down the leaky gut. So two peptides in particular that I love is the thymosin alpha one is wonderful because many people’s guts unknowing to them, are a problem because your own body’s attacking it. Believe me, autoimmune even though you’re not having been diagnosed, doesn’t mean you don’t have it. 

So what can we do to help down-regulate that? Well, starting with the thymosin alpha one, is a really great starting point. And sometimes I even will stack on it TB-500, which we’ll talk about in a moment. But typically from the thymosin alpha one, the LL- 37 is a huge benefit. Next now, LL-37 absolutely has an anti pathogen effect in the gut, so you definitely have to be careful with dosing. Start very slow and low. LL-37 also helps down-regulate hyper immunity, just like the alpha. But I like to back down the immune system and then build it back up. So then we bring in the LL-37. And typically at that point, I’ll bring in TB-500, which is more of a help heal the gut, more of a help build integrity back into the tissue. Whereas the thymosin alpha one kind of backs down the immunity, but then we can come in with the LL-37, which just has a tremendous healing effect in the gut. I mean, it seems to just do more than just anti-pathogen, if you will, but you put that with TB-500 and then now you can start up regulation healing. And then also oral peptide BPC-157 in the gut that second month and even the first, is really a benefit too, because it does down-regulate gut inflammation enough that where some of your other strategies then start to work. So that combination is really good. And again, I can’t recommend anyone use peptides if they’re in the gray zone, if you will. So I’m not making a recommendation. I typically lead people to pages, peptide sciences, and others, where they can read and educate themselves. And in short order, they start to educate themselves on, basically, Hey, this is something a lot of people are doing to leverage the healing in the body.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Yeah, I also would say that, when I heard your story, there was a gut component to it. And then if you kind of dig into people with significant problems, almost 100% of the time, there’s something going on from an inflammation perspective in the gut. And then generally, there’s something microbial going on that’s a little bit of an exaggerated microbial response, especially if there’s yeast or bacteria in the small intestine and then that drives autoimmunity. So the thymosin alpha one as a way to regulate and modulate that, and then the LL-37 as an antimicrobial, I think makes all those functional medicine protocols that we have always been doing a lot better. And then I also like the oral version of it. And then somebody told me, this is kind of a way to think about it, that thymosin beta four is like a key chain and it has all of these different fragments. And that second fragment, the 17 to 23 is TB-500, which is like probably the best connective tissue healing thing. And so while you’re rebuilding and doing everything that we would kind of be thinking about from kind of this functional medicine perspective, why not throw that in. And then it’s great, I never really talked to you about this, but that’s also what I do. So that’s always kind of interesting.

Dr. Daniel Pompa

We never even discussed that. You just kind evolve into it. Look, I personally, I mean, I love TB-500 and just as a healer, right? I mean, just when I have an injury or when you hit 56, well, I’ll be 57 soon, you need an edge, right? And to TB-500 and BPC-157, they’re that edge. If I get hurt and I go right for those two, but yeah, people don’t think of those two though, as being amazing for the gut. And of course, they make both of those in oral peptides, which really can hit the gut even more so. But I’ll tell you the TB-500 seems just to help people’s gut, just even in a SUBQ injection.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Yeah and then we at our house, we’re exercising, we’re doing something daily. And so there’s always little things happening, musculoskeletal little things. And so then Barb always says, “Oh, we’re looking for a BPC miracle.” And interestingly, that’s kind of what happened to me. During COVID, I started having all these people who said, “Oh, I can’t come visit you until COVID is over.” And so then we started teaching people how to just palpate and find areas of pain and just stay away from the nerves and start to do subcutaneous injections and found that to be shockingly helpful. And we use it now was as a postop follow up for a lot of people after injections.

Dr. Daniel Pompa

Yeah. Yeah. Well, obviously it plays into immunity, right? And so there’s so many other benefits. Some of the peptides that I kind of like to utilize also is peptides that do work in the cell, on cell energy pathway. One that has been used for weight loss, or just the inability to burn stomach fat is Mots, M-O-T-S. Mots really up-regulates cell energy. It’s one of the reasons why it works. When you look at the research on mots, most of it is in and around the mitochondria. Matter of fact, that’s really why it was developed, how it was developed. And when you look at somebody who’s toxic, unable to detox, or at least has trouble detoxing. Again, oftentimes, or is this just ultra even sensitive? Oftentimes, it’s the cellular energy component. If we can up the cellular energy and get their cells more efficiently utilizing fat for energy, we can actually down-regulate cellular inflammation and decrease the sensitivity, up-regulate cell detox, and it can be a breakthrough. And you might lose some belly fat too. So mots is probably under-utilized for some of that because it just thought of as, “Help me lose belly fat.” Another one on that kind of same subject is AOD. AOD, I played around it with myself. and one of the things that I noted was, at that time, I had a left patella tendonitis, and I was doing some things to balance the musculature around it, et cetera. But I tell you within a week of taking AOD, it actually disappeared. So, I mean, and then I was like digging in because I wasn’t thinking it like that and realized, “Oh yeah, this actually is for joints as well in recovery.” And another interesting cellular peptide, if you will, that would help cell energy, but also some joint healing, so an interesting one.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Hmm, that’s interesting because that patella tendonitis can be a tricky one to fix because there’s not quite enough blood supply to those tendons. And so then if they get irritated, they heal a little bit slower. But then I like that you said that because then that kinda leads into kind of an interesting sports medicine conversation, because then I’m kind of grabbing my knee. You can pinch a little subcutaneous tissue sort of over that patella tendon. And then, I also got patella tendonitis from doing a workout and then I also fixed it also by doing subcutaneous injections there too.

Dr. Daniel Pompa

Yeah, yeah, of course. I mean, I used BPC-157 and it would help, but it seemed like I don’t know what it was with the AOD, but it seemed lasting. And again, look, no doubt I am a victim of this because the way my back is, I’m a more flat lumbar curve, so you can imagine it does this to the pelvis, which stretches those quad muscles, right, which put the patella tendon under fire, if I’m doing like you said, the wrong exercise too long. So for me, I definitely have to keep those muscles loose or I’m definitely gonna fall victim, but at least I have a good answer because you could be in that cycle where it’s very difficult to break out of that patella tendonitis. It’s hard.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Mm-hmm. The mots or Mot-C, that whole category, that also helps with insulin resistance. And so then you think about categories, like we talked about the gut BPC, LL-37, either the fragments of thymosin beta four kind of especially, you think about metabolic syndrome, who’s got that? And that’s like just most of North America these days. You talk about the percent, I heard there was gonna be a billion people on the Indian subcontinent that have diabetes. And then fixing that is kind of like goes back to the beginning of what you were talking about autophagy and kind of cleaning up the cell and getting it to be more efficient. And so then these are tools to manage that, but then they’re not independent of everything else that we’ve been doing our whole lives.

Dr. Daniel Pompa

Oh, exactly. These are tools in the shed that just work really well, right? Look, I mean, with very, very little side effects. I mean, there’s peptides that have too much of a hormone effect for me and I like things that add to health, add to my anti-aging regimens, but that all just helped the body heal. And some of those tools that we just mentioned, have very, very little side effects. I mean, I’ve never had side effects. I can tell you a very funny story of the only peptide side effect I ever had. And it may be humorous and maybe there’s a teaching moment in it. But if you want me to tell the story, I will.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Okay.

Dr. Daniel Pompa

It’s a little embarrassing, I guess, but that’s okay. I’ve said more embarrassing things. So I read somewhere about, okay. It was when I was learning about peptides. Okay, so it was like, oh once you reconstitute them, you really should use them within three months, right? And I was like reading this and I thought that’s been in there three, maybe four months, right? And I had some peptides in there and one was a growth hormone peptide. There was two, immumolin.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Ipamorelin.

Dr. Daniel Pompa

Ipamorelin, yes, thank you. And the other one was the…

Matthew Cook, M.D.

CJC.

Dr. Daniel Pompa

CJC, thank you. So, okay. So those two peptides both play into growth hormone, right? All right, so I decide, well, they’re probably almost done, so I’ll give them to my wife and I, right? And I’ll double up the dose, no big deal. Never had a problem with peptides before. Now, keep in mind that I must have some naturally high growth hormone because every time I would take anything that helped your growth hormone from a peptide standpoint, I would feel that hot feeling come over my chest, like a vasodilation right? And no problem, my wife never felt that. Okay, so I give us double dose and I’m sitting there and I’m saying goodbye to my son as he’s going off to school, and here comes that feeling, right? And I’m like, “Whew, I get that? Right? And I took more, so no big deal it’ll go away.” Well, it doesn’t. So I walk over to the couch and I’m laying down at this point, because now I’m getting nauseous, right? So unknowing to me, I’m getting basically every symptom of basically this massive growth hormone rush, okay? And then at one point, I’m like, I’m so nauseous that I have to go throw up and my wife is trying to talk to me and I’m just like, “Mm-mm, mm-mm.” She’s like, “What do you mean mm-mm, mm-mm?” I’m like, “I’m not doing well here.” I take two steps as she tells me, and I went face down and into the carpet, I wake up to her literally on the phone with 911 saying, “Okay, well, he is coming to now.” “Are you okay?” I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, I’m okay.” So long story short. I take my blood glucose. It was the first thing I thought of. It was high, 140s, which would be normal on the stressful situation, right? So I’m like, “Okay, not it.” Then I take my blood pressure and it was 170. I’m sorry, it was 70/60. I mean, it’s like, no wonder I dropped. Okay, like I said, what was happening was I took more, right? And then I was also at that time on another peptide that makes you more sensitive to growth hormone, right? My wife had no reaction. She was on the exact same thing as me, but I had that reaction. Stick to the doses in the studies. It’ll probably do you good. That’s probably the lesson to be learned from this.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

So then that’s a good one, but then that is gonna give me something to look up and I may do an addendum just to describe it. There’s a percentage of people that will have a blood pressure kind of vasodilating reaction to CJC and ipamorelin, and then you’re one of ’em. And then interestingly, it’s more common in patients with Lyme mold or any of those things. And it’s also dose dependent, and then you can also get a little bit of a local vasodilating kind of or irritation. And so then, interestingly, you’re one of those people. Now, some people will have fairly significant symptoms at low dose or any dose. Other people will only have those symptoms at a high dose, kind of like you, which is interesting. And then compare that to all of the immune peptides. And in general, the mitochondrial peptides, you’re not gonna see those side effects at almost any dose. But that one’s super interesting to be aware of.

Dr. Daniel Pompa

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that was me too. And I think let’s see, as I was going back, what I was on, I was for the first time trying tesamorelin, which, it helps your cells utilize growth hormone. So you can imagine I had my own little perfect storm there, but needless to say, I was fine, but yeah, we got a little vasodilation going on for sure.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

So then, that one’s interesting. And then, so tesamorelin doesn’t really have any of those side effects. And so if people struggle with CJC and ipamorelin, then tesamorelin is a good backup strategy. But then interestingly and you probably know this more than anybody, I remember back at the very beginning when I first went to A4M 12 years ago or something like that. and you see all of these guys walking around these big hulking people, everybody was taking growth hormone, and everybody was on high doses of testosterone. And then since the peptides have come out, the large percentage of people don’t do growth hormone anymore, just because they’re using peptides to tell your brain to secrete growth hormone.

Dr. Daniel Pompa

Yeah, It’s obviously much safer and I never experimented with real growth hormone or testosterone, but peptides just getting your body, just nudging your body as a tool, for me, is about as far as I go. I love experimenting. I love trying different peptides. And I was like obviously learning from it and just how my body reacts to it. But for me, it is. It’s because I was someone who lost my health, for me always first, it’s about health.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Yeah, it’s interesting. I was just thinking about your story and you were telling me you’re riding on the bike in that house. And that house had mold. I wonder if that, ’cause I often will see people and I’ll see like they have a gym in the house, but it’ll be not ventilated or something. And it’s interesting and I think it’s important for people to hear how crucial it is to manage the internal environment of wherever you are.

Dr. Daniel Pompa

Yeah, I just did a piece that is going to be on HT on HGTV and it’s about this very topic of how many people lose their life because of their environment in some way. And it was interesting. I went in for the shoot. I actually I’m, in Arizona Fort now and I went into the shoot and the woman who I had helped in 2017, was the woman that they chose for the show because the environmental engineer that actually she brought into her house because she heard me talking about how many people are sick, unknowingly from their home, she hires this gentleman who brought me in on this HDTV project, right? We didn’t know that it was the same woman that, she was following my work and hired him. And here we are years later in her home to shoot this show of how her home which is making her sick. Here’s an ironic situation, the same home, her daughter became very sensitive because of the hidden mold that they found in the home. And she was getting headaches at night. And so when he came in and he measured EMF load in the house, he measured everything, right? Mold, chemicals, I mean he measures mold behind walls, not just air samples. Anyways, he measured the EMF coming off of her wall where her head is when she was sleeping, off the chart. Now, electromagnetic frequencies can be very, very oxidative damaging, right, which we know, well, it was from the refrigerator on the other side of the wall. And so they moved where she was sleeping in the room, not another headache. And I’m sure the mold, as we explained, actually made her even more sensitive to the EMF. And so anyways, peeling back, perfect storms. This woman also had very high mercury levels that she gave to her daughter, right? So perfect storm situation, house heavy battles, very similar to mine.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Since we’re still in pandemic to some extent, but now I feel like we’re dealing more with long COVID than actual COVID, especially as COVID gets better, have you had any insights or thoughts on that side of things either from clinically how people are coming and presenting or in terms of therapies?

Dr. Daniel Pompa

One of the things that I believe is happening is what is known as a cellular danger response, AKA integrative stress response. So what happens in a stress situation? I use myself as we’ve been telling my story, is that your cells go into a phase to save your life. We all get under stress and there’s kind of three phases to this response that your cells in a healthy situation go into and out of. And it does that to protect you. Literally, it starts shutting down cell energy. It slows down protein synthesis. It does all of these cellular processes to literally just save your life. The problem is, if you’re under chronic stressors, again, I describe that perfect storm. Typically it’s not one thing that makes people sick like me. It’s a couple coming together. If you remember the movie George Clooney, “The Perfect Storm,” they describe three weather fronts that come together and cause a catastrophic storm. That’s typically how people end up where they don’t want to be like myself. But what happens is that, perfect storm comes together and the cells end up in the cellular danger response. Now, when you look into the research, infections are especially viral infections, put the cells into this response. The problem is, why do some come out and others don’t? One of the things that I believe is, we have to start examining other unknown stressors in your life, meaning that, a month before my bottom fell out, I got very sick. If I would’ve gotten COVID as an example, I definitely would’ve been a long hauler because my cells were already ripe and ready to be locked into a cellular danger response. So one of the things that we’ve been doing and I teach a group of doctors and we experiment with different things, is helping people come out of this cellular danger response as a potential answer to the long haulers in COVID. I also do believe that a lot of people that have a lot of senescence cells, unknowingly to them, you could be 35 and say I’m very healthy, but still have a lot of senescence cells. And most people know what this is, but some don’t is that, cells that just live too long. They typically are low immunity cells and drive hyper immunity, drive inflammation, right? So they cause mischief, they’re wasting cell energy, and hanging around doing nothing, right? It sounds like some very bad people. But when we can reduce the senescence cells, we also seem to be able to knock people out of cellular danger response as well. But anyway, so there’s this combination of too many senescence cells that people get very sick and can end up in long haulers and the cellular danger response.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And then if those senescence cells, they basically have what they call an inflammatory phenotype. And so then they basically drive inflammation. There’s a peptide FOXO4-DRI that will actually facilitate killing senescence cells. Then there’s all kinds of supplements and then people will take these wrap log type of medications that will work on senescence. And so then, there’s this whole spectrum of things that are sort of managing in senescence. There’s a whole sort of spectrum of things that are helping yourselves kind of become more efficient. I think that it is often that perfect storm of two or three things that are just like you said exactly, right? People didn’t know about.

Dr. Daniel Pompa

Yeah.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And so they didn’t know that they had that under the hood, but then when you start to look and figure that out, often we find tick-born illnesses or infections, which is why that long COVID population, regardless of all of the things, seem to respond quite well to the immune peptides, because generally, there’s an immune process, but it is several weather fronts coming in. And they also, to me, seem to respond to, they can respond to the Motsy, they can respond to humanine and kind of from a cognitive kind of enhancement perspective, which is just feeling a little bit better. I’ve noticed FGL can be fairly helpful. And I would say a third of that long COVID is just mentally feeling a little bit better. If you can get people just feeling a little bit better and maybe that actually helps with the self-danger response.

Dr. Daniel Pompa

Yeah.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

It does.

Dr. Daniel Pompa

Yep, it does. Absolutely. It sure does. I just led a fast of 1600 people and I was shocked at how many people said that they broke out of their long haulers because of the fast. And then I literally did one of these to myself. This is someone who wrote a book on fasting and understands that the fastest way, cheapest way to get rid of senescence cells is to fast. Your body utilizes senescence cells for energy during a fast and recreates new cells via stem cells, right? Okay, so knowing that, of course, and then me saying, “Gosh, yeah. This long hauler has to do with cellular danger response and senescence cells.” Of course, fasting, actually we know will do the exact opposite, gets rid of senescence cells and knocks people out of a cell danger response. So anyways, fasting and I had many people who do partial fast as well as pure water fast, but shocked how many people felt like that was the thing that kicked them out.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

That’s amazing. That was my next question, actually, so we’re doing good. How long was that one? And then what sort of timing do you typically see the most benefits in terms of fasting?

Dr. Daniel Pompa

Yeah, yeah, look, five-day fast I’ve done since the 1990s and there was no science around it then. I came to five days for people because it would take them at least three days to break through. And day four felt like, “Wow, I broke through.” Okay, “Write it out for another day,” was always my advice. And that’s really how I stumbled on these five-days fast. Now, fast forward Volta Longo and his group have maybe there’s magic around five days that you hit. Most people hit what we call maxotophagy day four, where their body’s just getting rid of all these senescence cells. And you have this big growth hormone rise that takes place on day five. So now, would people benefit from some longer fast? Some people would, but just as a general rule, most people will get a most benefit from an extended fast for at least five days. Now, I do a lot of fasting in my life. I can enter into maxotophagy, which simply means that, the body is just using cells at a very rapid rate for energy. I can get into that by day two. So I can benefit from shorter fast. Although this one, I did five days of water, that was just last week, actually. Look, there’s an art in a science to fasting, right? It’s a little different for everybody. Many people in the fast, I recommend it as their first fast, just doing a partial fast, where they’re eating at least under 1,000 calories a day and keeping protein under at least 20 grams protein a day. And if you’re smaller, you’d probably have to keep the protein a little lower and your calories a little lower. 

If you’re bigger, you can get away with a little more. But the bottom line is even in a partial fast your body goes through this otophagy where it’s eating bad cells, simply put, and there’s many other benefits from fasting, the stem cell creation, because it doesn’t just take a bad cell out. It stimulates a stem cell to replace it. Years when this whole COVID thing, literally, when it first started, they interviewed a scientist and he seemed like he was out because of an amazing article that he wrote about who will be hit hardest from this virus. And he said, people that have the most immuno senescence cells. Now these are immune cells that live too long and he cited some great research. I was fascinated by it, that, again, if you have a lot of these immuno senescence cells, you will not do well. It doesn’t matter if you’re 80, it doesn’t matter if you’re 35, it just so happens that older people typically have more of them. So that led me to realizing that fasting would be some type of hidden solution as always with fasting because it gets rid of immuno senescence cells. And then you stimulate a stem cell and you produce a naive cell that’s ready for action. It’s ready. It’s not senescence at all. It’s ready to fight in a good way, not hyper immunity, lazy, dropping inflammation, driving cell. So fasting, obviously, even when you look at that research from a senescence cell standpoint, makes a difference.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

That’s awesome. That’s kind of like a reboot or a reset.

Dr. Daniel Pompa

Yeah. Yeah. And then also during fasting, you have this, what I call energy diversion. It takes so much energy to just process food, right? Assimilate food, digest food. Then what happens at the cellular level? When you take that break, it’s like taking a stay home vacation. You get bored watching TV for one day and then you’re out doing things in the yard. You’re fixing everything right?. It’s like, that’s what your body does in a fast. It doesn’t just sit on that energy. It takes that energy and diverts it to massive healing. And it’s really fun to watch the bodies innate intelligence take over in a fast.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

There’s the thing about the mental game too? When I started fasting, I remember the first day I thought I was gonna die. I was so hungry and then I remember being so hungry and then all of a sudden, I felt stone cold normal. And then I felt crazy again and normal, but then after, and so then for years I did a fast, a 24-hour fast every week. And then basically, I just got to the point that I got free from that. And now basically, if I eat, I eat or if I don’t, I don’t, but I, I feel fine every way, either way.

Dr. Daniel Pompa

Fasting is in vogue now. When I was into fasting in the ’90s, I mean, it was me and some natural hygiene society guys that are gals that I had nothing in common with, but now it’s different. Fasting is so in vogue. Now I go around reminding people that a feast is as important as the fast, meaning people are fasting too much. It does, this atophagy pathway. It’s a catabolic pathway, but too much of it’s no good, just like too much caloric restriction. Your metabolism slows down. It ends up to be a negative, not a positive. I mean, I don’t know if you remember the biosphere two project, but that’s when they said, “Okay, if caloric restriction basically extends your life and turns on all these gray genes for life extension, then surely we could do this in a study. They built this biosphere, which was the perfect food, perfect environment, no pollution, amazing. And there was eight people that dedicated themselves to two years of 30% caloric restrictions and all these wonderful things were going to happen. Not, it didn’t, it was a fail. They actually came out catabolic, their organ shrunk, their immune systems were lower. Oh, they did stimulate the cert one gene for longevity, but the problem is, is they were more unhealthy. And so it didn’t work. And that’s when we realized that short terms of caloric restriction or fasting are awesome. Too much is no good. ? And then the opposite. There’s a pathway called mTOR that a lot of these peptides stimulate. Short term mTOR pathway’s anabolic, it’s amazing. Your body heals. Too much time, and you run into the same problem. You are running into hyper growth and you could make bad cells, and tumor cells, and cancer cells, right? So too much atophagym too much mTOR, the key is both. So think of mTOR as feasting. 

You need to feast. So I typically, one or two days a week, eat one meal, but I always have two days a week where I feast, I eat, I eat a lot of food, right? The feast as important as the fast. So if I fast somebody for five days, I’m telling them to look ahead and pick five days to feast, whether it be higher calories, whether it be higher protein, because high protein for short periods can act the same way and stimulate mTOR and act in a good way as long as you don’t do high protein all the time, because high protein, you and I both know it’s damaging, right? So bodybuilders that are doing high protein, high protein, not good. It will age you prematurely, but short bursts of it. like what tribes would do if they would have a kill, is that actually can be healing. The feast and the famine are both equal. I believe the magic and that’s part of a concept that I teach called diet variation. And it actually is a way that we utilize in my doctor group to add diversity to the microbiome. We stress the microbiome. It’s a premise called hormesis. If you add a stress, just like exercise, you don’t get stronger in the gym. You get stronger because you add a stress and your body adapts to the stress. And if it does adapt to the stress, you get stronger, better. Well, if we stress the microbiome, we can actually create diversity as long as your body adapts to the stress. So diet change is a way that we hermetically stress the microbiome and create more diversity. Fasting, feast, famine is another way. It’s a stress on the microbiome. When you fast, all bacteria stress down, and then you have an opportunity to reinoculate. So anyways, those type of feast, famine, diet variation strategies are one of my strategies I’ve been teaching for many years.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

I 100% agree you with that. And then I also think probably when you’re taking peptides, feast and famine on that one as well, because taking that when I like to do it, and then I’ll take days or periods of time off, and then I’ll sort of feel how I feel in that time. And that’s sort of one of favorite times as in the juxtaposition of those.

Dr. Daniel Pompa

Yeah. Yeah. I agree. It’s just like everything, right? The body finds what we call homeostasis, meaning that, “Okay, it’s, I figured out the stress, it’s not stressful anymore, so it just kind of sits back.” Well, exercise is a great example of that, right? If you’re doing the same exercise all the time, you plateau in your results, but worse than that, you actually start to decline and no different by eating the same diet all the time. Your body finds this plateau and actually starts working against you. So diet change is magic, peptides, right? So you’re taking them. Your body is adapting to what the peptide is doing. And in that adaptation, just like exercise, diet change, there’s a hormone optimization. The cells are doing things and responding, but then you could start losing effectiveness. So that’s why running different peptides at different times and using different things, keeps the cells out of this homeostasis, no different than taking supplements and herbs. If you rotate things, change things, your body will actually benefit greater than being Mr. Consistent all the time.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Mm-hmm. Amazing. Well, you are Mr. Consistent all the time. And I always love talking to you ’cause you’re a wealth of information and I would say everything you talk about, I agree with. So thanks for what you’re doing for the world and for your practice, and for all the doctors that you teach. And I’m grateful.

Dr. Daniel Pompa

I’m grateful for you as well, one of the best injectors on the planet right here and a great mind. Matt Cook, you are, so thank you for having me.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Oh, thanks so much. Have a wonderful year this year. and I look forward to seeing you.

Dr. Daniel Pompa

Yeah, likewise.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Okay.