The Longevity Solution

these 90 year olds, 100 year old, they were still doing things that they enjoyed. 105 year-old in Sardinia was riding his bike still, he was playing chess with his son.

And so, you know, like they we're still engaging with life. If there's a population here, anybody here that in their 70s, 80s watching this, the key to continuing to have good health into that 80's and 90's, and beyond, is to continue to engage with light.

Find things you're excited about, find things to wake you up in the morning that keep you engaged, that will keep your healthy beyond anything else. This is Dr.

Talks. Well, I am so excited here to have you here on this episode of Regenerative Medicine Summit. Jason Prahl, you're somebody. When we talk about regenerative medicine, You've been scouring the earth to find solutions with your longevity film project.

So thank you so much for being here. Yeah, of course. Great to be here. So what I like too is just to, so the audience get to know a little bit more about you.

I'll just kind of go through your bio a bit. They see all the cool stuff that you've done. Obviously you have done much more than this, but this is, I can only spend so much to tell all of the awesome things you do.

Jason Prahl is a health educator, practitioner, author and filmmaker. In 2018, his independent research and experience led him to create the Human Longevity Project, a nine-part film series that uncovers the true nature of chronic disease in our modern world.

He's currently finishing his first book title, Beyond Lungevity, as well as his next film, series, that explores ancient methods of healing mind, body, and soul from indigenous cultures around the world, That's fascinating, that's really fascinating.

It's going to be so cool. Yeah, I'm excited. it's been a little bit of a long project because of all the travel shutdown that we've experienced over the last few years.

But we have been to India to work with some of the premier masters of Ayurveda. We were in the Himalayas working with them, Buddhist and bone healers at 16,000 feet.

And we went to Peru so far to book with andean mountain shamans down there. and yeah, it is a lot of fun. So I'm, I know I want to get in to kind of your, uh, the projects that you've done and, and learn a little bit more of that, but I am really fascinated.

So some of the bone healers, you know, Buddhist up in the Tibet. I mean, so what were some other takeaways from, from there that that really kind hit you hard as, as you were there?

Yeah, it's funny because everybody that we worked with there didn't speak English, right? They were speaking in their native tongue. And so I literally had no idea what they were doing when it comes to the healing methods.

But fundamentally, without language to interpret what was happening, It was clear that the way that they approached healing was from an energetic level.

And in essence, everything is energy. And so, um, sure. We can work with the physical matter and that's fine because that energy too, and we can go above that and then we work on the energetic level.

So they use a lot of chance. They use their sort of Buddhist awareness practices, right? So, they used awareness and chance and energy to influence health.

Then of course, the use some herbal remedies, similar to Ayurveda. they have a herbal Chinese medicine, also similar practices. of using herbs to influence and bring things back into balance at the body level.

But there was a lot of very esoteric, very interesting practices that they used in the Himalayas for sure. So sound, I mean, that is so kind of primal and foundational.

And I know, like you're saying, with the chanting and with ensembles and all of these things. I mean, so did you get to experience that? Did you kind of feel what that felt like and the impact on you?

Yeah, I actually did do an actual sort of a modern sound bath style of healing in Kathmandu. And there was, it was literally this tiny room and there were gongs and different sound elements throughout the room.

It was a literally a felt experience in the body. But with most of the practices, they were so subtle, right? So, so really you have to use awareness.

And that's the key with a lot of that, the Buddhist and bone healing practices is that they're using awareness to influence your health. Right. So the sound is a mechanism by which you can transfer energy.

No question. There's an intelligence apply to, right? So this is the thing that I think a lot of times we forget about in energy medicine or these energy practices is that there's not only just the energy, there is an Intelligence.

And so we can use that Intelligence and invite that intelligence in. So that's what we do with a of the awareness practices. is that you're using awareness to open the heart, to be able to receive and essentially allow intelligence to do the work for you, right?

And the key is to kind of get out of the way. And so because these Buddhists and bone healers have been dedicating their life really to healing and to end suffering in all beings, this is literally what they do all day, every day.

They've developed, they've cultivated a certain level of awareness and a certainty capacity to harness energy, bring an open hearted, unbelievable, love to the practice and that is what does the healing.

It's not them, they're just a conduit so to speak. They understand how to work with it such that divine love, that Divine Intelligence can do the magic for you.

And it sounds really hokey and it sound kind of new agey but when you work it with those healers, it isn't new-agey at all. they are working with ancient practices and this is something they dedicate their lives to. They're not on Instagram, don't care about any fame, and they don' t take money, right?

They accept donations for their monastery that supports them, but they don't get paid. They live a very, very modest life and that is part of their duty.

So it is really, really fascinating to work with healers like that. And so when you tune into the subtle level of your field, you can notice things. It's not the gross level that we typically think of when it comes to healing and did I feel this or notice that?

It is very subtle, that the influence is extremely, extremely powerful. And in kind of the American society, we're used to like you're talking about kind these gross influences where something's just done to us.

We go in and do it to me and fix me. Here, the energy exists, but you need to be able to tune into that and let it flow through you. Otherwise, like you're saying, you need to get out of the way.

Otherwise you will then interfere with that and it won't have that impact. So the awareness is the biggest key of all. Absolutely. Yeah. And again, it's really hard to put words to what's happening, right?

But it is along the lines of how thought influences your physical health. How does emotion influence your health? These are really interesting concepts to think about and the same goes for these practices.

How are these awarenesses, this awareness practice influencing your physical health, your mental health? And some of the effects may be felt or noticed in the moment, and some may unfolding as you go.

So when you work with these healers, they're dealing with things with concepts like karma, right? Like past life things, things have been unprocessed.

And so their belief, the way that they operate is that if we bring things back into alignment, if remove the blockages, then the course that you're on going forward can now be more harmonious.

That is a different level of reality that most of us in the West don't really operate from. We operate, there's something here, fix it, or there is something out of balance, let's fix.

Theirs is more, remove the blockages, get things flowing again, and see if we can change the trajectory of your future. That is a different paradigm. And so it's a really interesting, that's why we want to include that because it is such a way of thinking about that.

But I think we all have this concept in mind where if I eat this way or if start exercising today, the future starts to change versus me doing the same things that I do every day.

That's sort of the course that i'm on, right? So they're doing that same thing on the energetic level with the intent and the idea that is going to influence a more harmonious future for you.

And the key is, because we're talking about karma, the keys are to create action or have an action that does not have a karmic imprint. And to be able to do that, you have to kind of so refine your thoughts, your intentions, and your actions so that it doesn't have that ripple effect that generates karma in other areas in your own life.

Yeah. And really the key is to come from alignment, operate from your heart. Right. So when we take inspired action from our heart, this is the place where karma is not generated.

But when you start operating from the mind, From our ego, from our wounded parts, this is what is going to generate some more suffering, right? And that's just more things to realize.

And so all of this, is to recognize the way forward, the ways through all this. Is to move closer to living from the heart. Living in the moment, living in presence, and living the from heart, And this what all the ancient traditions say.

From Ayurveda, to the bone and Buddhist healers, To the shamans in South America, I mean to Maori in New Zealand, they're all saying the same thing. Well-being in all areas of your life, good relationships is to live truly from the heart.

And so to do that, you know, there's a lot of things that are kind of getting in the way, right? And a of them are past pains and past sufferings and conditions, we are conditioned throughout our entire lives.

So in many of these practices, one of the fundamental keys is get rid of that conditioning to unlearn everything you think you know. And that's a difficult thing for many of us because we rely on this information that we've been conditioned with to get us through our daily lives.

So to literally strip all that away is a fairly big threat to our nervous system. It's not safe to do that, but that is the practice for a lot of these traditions.

is to learn to let go to, learn, to relax, and to get rid of these conditioned beliefs, conditioned thoughts, condition behaviors. And when we can do that, now we live authentically.

I'm constantly living in conditioning. The things that I do, the things I think, that things, uh, but that, I believe are all sort of aspects of conditioning that have picked up.

And so, um, so it's a process, no question to let go, to unwind some of these things. But as we do so we can live more from the heart. This is what in a big way can allow us to heal, root, resolve the, things we might be dealing with.

In fact, just this past weekend I was with a Qigong master and we were talking about this very thing about the practice of anti-aging. This is a deep practice in Tai Chi and Qigong and some of these Eastern Asian practices, and it really comes down to living from the heart, living in the moment.

When you do that, the way he described it is that you're traveling faster than the speed of light. It's essentially instantaneous to the point where Time slows down and time can actually reverse.

So that was kind of his way of explaining this, but ultimately it's living in the present, right? Where time and space don't exist. Right? This is the practice.

A lot of these meditation practices and awareness-based practices getting into that, that sort of empty void state, Right. That quantum state that zero point and whatever we want to call that when you're there in a meditation, you recognize it.

To some degree, we get there in a flow state where time starts to work, right? And things seem like they slow down. If you've ever played sports or you have done ballet or dance or music, there's certain instances where things are just flowing so seamlessly and time start to change and work.

And it's really bizarre. It's sort of along those same lines. When we can get into that state, then we're outside of this space and that's where ultimate healing can really occur.

So this is bizarre stuff. stuff that we don't really talk about in functional medicine, integrative medicine. But I think as we go forward in this regenerative, medicine world, we're going to start talking about this stuff more and more.

We're gonna be using technologies that are going be introducing these concepts to us, right? This infrasound and And all these different sound technologies that we're going to be developing and light technologies are already here that are going continue.

These are quantum devices. I mean, the next 15 to 20 years is going be unbelievably exciting when it comes to Western technology starting to introduce some of these concepts that the ancients have been practicing for thousands of years.

Yeah. I mean, that's so cool. Because all of this, you're talking about zero point. That middle path, like the Buddha is talking, where there's neither this nor that.

Talking about this zero-point, I would consider that Nirvana in a way, or Nibbana, whether you do Pali. And at that zero points, there you have no craving.

When you don't have the craving, you're not holding on to your hurts. You're holding onto your perceptions, your traumas or your ego. That's when you let go of the suffering, so to say.

And that's the Buddhist words, but like you said, it translates into all these other ancient practices. You know, with what we're doing, recognizing the power of these ancient healing methods and with the technology we have, to be able to replicate these states, I mean, it's going to so fascinating.

I know we are doing it in so many ways already, but then to take this to that next level and to almost cheat the system using technology. Yeah, absolutely.

And this is what's cool. Because it's really introducing us to these ideas, right? Like infrared light, infrared saunas, you might use photobiomodulation, some sort of cold laser.

This is just healing with light. But this concept of healing with light is now opening up somebody's mind who maybe used to think about pharmaceuticals or vitamins or perhaps herbs.

Now we're talking about light and we are seeing what it can do or pulse the electromagnetic field. These are things we can't see and yet they are working wonders for people, for pets, for amazing amount of the population is now using things like light and sound.

And so once we start to open that Pandora's box of what sound and light can do, now we're starting to think beyond just this sort of macromolecule billiard ball style of healing.

these elements of energy healing that once you kind of open your mind to that and you see the reality of what this stuff can do, now we're talking about really interesting technologies that are kind hard to imagine, kind to hard conceptualize in the mind, but ultimately it just starts to open the door to new possibilities and that's what's really exciting.

That's so, so cool. And then backtracking. So that this is what you're working on now, which is kind of the beyond longevity project. But then going back, you know, that is, it's kind like the ultimate and then trying to find out, how can we replicate that existed for thousands of years.

but then also we're looking at them, these different cultures throughout the world, in your longevity projects that have lived in a way that allowed people to live healthy, vital, and a good for a long time.

I mean, so what are some, when you scoured the earth for these different cultures, what were some of the main principles that you were seeing that we can apply in our own life so that, we enhance our regenerative abilities?

Yeah. And this is really, really important, right? And the reason that I wanted to create the Human Longevity Project film series was because I saw this regenerative medicine movement coming, and it's been coming for a while.

We've got Silicon Valley talking about living to 180. to living forever, right? And curing the disease called aging, and so there's some deep philosophical things that come into play when you start talking about living for forever.

I mean, I don't know that anybody really wants to live forever and that actually sounds kind of torturous to me. And you started to recognize that when start to hang out with people that are 95 and 100 and 105. Despite their relatively good function, you can see that there is this winding down of the cycle of life and this acceptance of like, You know what?

I lived a good life. I'm ready to go whenever God takes me. Right? That was a common sort of mentality. And I think that's a pretty natural response for us humans.

I don't know that we're really intending to live really, really long time. That said, this idea of regenerative capacity, right? This regenerate of potential is super, super critical because I do want to.

But I want live healthy, like I wanna live a hundred sounds great, if I can live to a 100 and I could be relatively healthy by the time I get there, fantastic.

But it's really critical that we approach our lifestyles in that same vein. Granted, we're going to have amazing technologies. We've got some that are here already, right?

I mean, peptides and stem cells are doing amazing things in and of themselves and things like nerve hydro dissection. And we've done all kinds of amazing thing that's are happening in this space.

But I think it's really important that we don't just live in a way that is destructive to ourselves, to our community, our family, those around us, the environment.

So going forward, despite the fact that were going to have these amazing technologies at our fingertips and they're going come cheaper and cheaper, It's really important that we live in a way that's going to be sustainable for ourselves and for our local environments, right?

So living from alignment becomes ultimately critical. And because if you don't and you're living in way, that is destructive to your body, let's just say, just to keep it to ourselves here.

destructive to your body. Now you're trying to use something like stem cells to repair the damage that you did because you were doing stupid things. And so you are constantly chasing your tail.

That doesn't seem to be effective, nor do I think that it's sustainable. I don't think it is going to actually work. So we're going to have to live in a way that makes sense.

And so this is really what I wanted to do is because we've got these groups of people around the world that Ikaria Greece and Sardinia, Italy, in Okinawa, Japan, and the Guanacaste region of Costa Rica identified as blue zones, right?

And these are regions of the word where. people make it to a hundred at an exceptionally high rate. Like there's just so many people that make. And so that's where we went.

Not because we really cared about the regions. I actually just wanted to speak to these people in their nineties and one hundred. So I want to find them and it's not exactly easy to do.

Right. so, and the cool thing was because they live in different cultures and different regions around the world. We can kind of, we can't just say, oh, it's, they live a long time there because of this person lives a lot of time because they're genetics, right?

These are all different people living all around the world. And what we found was that there was a few fundamental characteristics that led to them being healthy in well into old age.

One of them is the fact that they were intimately intertwined with their environment. They got up with the sun, right? So let's just backtrack. Cause we've got to recognize that if somebody is a hundred years old today in the year 2022, that means they weren't born in 1922. Right.

Now these people were born. In, in. 10s and 1920s in little tiny villages in various parts of the world. So they didn't grow up with any cars, any electricity, no refrigeration.

They lived a very, very simple life. And so they were forced to operate with the seasons. There were force to operating with a daily cycle. They raised their animals, they were shepherds, whatever the case was, but they very physically active.

They couldn't just get up whenever they wanted to. Their work needed to be done and it must be during the light because they didn't have electricity. When the sun went down, the went to bed.

So they operated in rhythm and this is something that is fundamental to our health. We now know about circadian rhythm. And this idea that our whole biology is guided by primarily the light cycle.

And there's other things too, like temperature and movement and food. They also influence our circadian rhythm, our biological rhythm. Our 24-hour cycles within the body.

This was something in 2017 that was given the Nobel Prize for three scientists who were studying circadian rhythm at the cellular level. So we now know that we have clock genes and BMAL genes, and we've got all of these period genes inside our cells, everywhere in our body.

They're constantly reading and responding to the signals, primarily from our brain and as well as our skin, that are sending signals about what time of day it is based on the angle of the sun and the temperature and all these things.

We have this amazing clock. And these are like survival mechanisms because the body is based upon surviving. So if we don't know what's coming next, if, we learn what the changes in nature and how to prepare for the next step, then we won't survive.

That's how important it is genetically that these different clocks exist within us. That's right. And as you said, they're predictive. So this is what is really interesting is that based on past information, our body is going to predict when the sun is gonna come up tomorrow.

Based on that information it's gonna kick on digestion at a certain time. It's going kick cortisol. We're really familiar with this cortisol rhythm that wakes us up, that gets the body going, increases blood sugar.

It started and starting to get us going, right? Once the, once the sun rises, our cortisol starts to rise, melatonin declines, Right? When the Sun starts set our melotonin rises.

Our cortisol is supposed to anyway, decline. And this is what allows us to fall asleep and a whole different set of programs start operating at night.

Right. So this, this a fundamental one that all of these elderly people, these wisdom keepers around the world were did amazingly well is in a circadian rhythm.

They were operating on the circading rhythm and so Very, very critical aspect that we really need to get in tune with again here in the West. Many of us are sitting in front of computers like I am right now.

We've got lights on at night, right? We are working out at six or 7 PM. This is not in alignment with circadian rhythm. And this idea of circading rhythm and operating by the daily cycle has has deep roots in Ayurveda, thousands of years old science, deep root in Chinese medicine, right?

Thousands of year old. So this is fundamental. They've known about this science in these traditions and we are now confirming it in our own scientific way here in the West.

But we're all familiar with this. If you've ever traveled time zones, you travel three or four or five, 10 timezones and all of a sudden your body is trying to predict what time it is, but your airplane just gave it through you for a loop, right?

Because you're now in a different part of the world. The sun is setting at a time based on your biological clock. So it takes a few, a, few days for your body to readjust to the, the current light cycle.

Right. And so this is a fundamental one and bringing it to this sort of scientific aspect here, circadian rhythm, if it's not in alignment with the natural light.

If you have somebody that's working night shifts and swing shifts, all-cause mortality increases dramatically. This means cancer, autoimmune conditions, food sensitivities, skin conditions.

You know, cluster headaches, you name it. All of the diseases, All-Cause Mortality increases when we are awake at night and sleeping during the day or somewhere in between.

If we're not getting really good sleep and operating and doing so in the right part of night, then our machinery just gets all out of whack. And so you can kind of imagine an individual that never know what's going to happen next.

And that's kind the environment that we put ourselves in, you know, with all this blue light, the screen, like I said, working out at night and the body has no idea what is going take place next, so the stress level It's going to be elevated.

We're going be in that inflamed state. You know, you said cortisol level's gonna be elevated. That's insulin resistance, more weight gain. All these things are then just gonna compounded on us just because we're not living by the simple principle, living with nature.

Yeah. And this is your metabolic function completely goes into chaos, right? And so in fact, this was one of the things when I work with a client, no matter what they come in with, whether it's cancer or autoimmune diseases or hormonal imbalances, it doesn't matter.

Weight gain, they want to lose weight. One of first things I do is make sure that the circadian rhythm is optimized. And so, and the biggest part of this, because the lights get a lot of attention, the blue lights and lights at night, but the big part is getting outside and getting enough daylight in our eyes and on our skin, primarily in the eyes.

Most of us spend most of the day inside, so we don't get outside enough for the light to actually influence our biology in a way that is profound enough to change our circadian rhythm.

So simply by being inside most of the day, and then look, a lot of people go outside and they put sunglasses on, right? So this is influencing the spectrum of light that hits the eye, then hits super chiasmatic nucleus and the pituitary and hypothalamus that then communicates to the rest of body.

So those signals really need to be authentic and they need be strong enough to set these clocks in our brain and our body. So one of the things that we can do is start to get outside more.

First thing in the morning, as soon as you wake up, assuming the sun is up when you get light in your eyes. And you can just sit there with your tea. I would say for most people, it's a good idea to cut the coffee back a little bit.

Even though I love coffee, cut that coffee. Back too much caffeine is not a Good thing. But, but sit There and just allow the light to come in. Your eyes, even if it was a cloudy day, if its a rainy day that natural daylight, so 15, 20 minutes, at least in the morning, first thing we'll set that, that that morning clock and that is critical.

So this is a big piece. Of course, when you think about how they're living, you know, the elders around the world, They never had to worry about this.

Their entire life, their circadian rhythm was optimized. They got amazing sleep, they never dealt with digestive issues. Like nobody I talked to knew really anybody with digest issues, except for the younger people that lived a more Western lifestyle.

So that was a big one. It's just literally being in touch with the environment, in touched with nature, constantly in relationship with it. With the food, right?

Everything was grown organically and locally. They consume their own foods, local foods. Another big factor for all of these populations was movement.

Constant movement, they never worked out. They never exercised. they didn't have a lot of recreation, but they were constantly moving. They didn't say to computers like we do today, right?

Now, this is an element that I think is important to recognize that it's pretty unfair to ask everybody that's listening to this, including you and me, to start to move like they did, because it is probably not going to happen.

We live in a modern world that has changed dramatically. And so most of us don't have that opportunity. So what do we do? The key is to constantly move throughout your day.

I actually have a standing desk so I can just get up and sit down. Instead of standing all day or instead of sitting all Even if I'm sitting, I can get up and move around, right?

Constantly move your body throughout the day. Go for a walk at lunch, get some exercise in the morning or early afternoon. Late afternoon and early evening is not the greatest time to exercise, but if you must, you know, that's, okay too.

But it's this idea of constantly moving and doing as much activity as you can, whether it is play, hiking, jogging, running, lifting weights, pilates, yoga, what have you, but just constantly moving.

That's a really, really important factor. And the biggest part of that, I think, is play. If we can introduce more play into our life, it's probably the best way to move.

So if we're forcing movement, if were doing movement exercise that we don't like to do, pretty unsustainable and from a mental-emotional standpoint, you're sort of doing yourself a disservice, right?

So finding something that you engage with, whether it is playing with your dog, playing playing games of any kind, but just doing something that you really enjoy is probably the best way to incorporate movement into your life.

But really, if you don't move hard, that's another aspect. It's like moving hard sometimes, right? Really forcing your body to adapt to a new stimulus and new pressure is really critical for strength, for optimizing certain hormones.

And that something they constantly did, they were working hard throughout their day, a lot harder than we do. They would walk 30, 40 kilometers sometimes just to go get some food that they didn't have, whether it's fish or the market.

And they were dealing with a kind of changing environment. So they had their natural cold, natural hot, and the body had to adjust to that. In regards to movement also, we It is like the best possible brain stimulation to move and be engaged because if you're just sitting still, you are staring straight onto the screen like we're doing right now, there's no eye movement.

So there is no exercise for the brain because the eyes are just looking straight. And also we are not adjusting posture. The brain does not have to calculate as to how should I adjust for this movement or do this or running on uneven ground or, you know, jump rope or all these different things where the brain has to continually adjust based upon what the body is doing.

So for dementia, for Alzheimer's, I mean, it's actually the number one thing that you can do to avoid or to reduce your risk of dementia and Alzheimer's.

It's not brain exercises, memory. To have a healthy brain is to exercise and things like music. There's some other activities there too. Language is a really good one to pick up a language.

So, this is what we saw too in those that were in their 80s, 90s and beyond was that they were still engaged with these things. In fact, one 94-year-old lady, I was chatting with her and I asked her, your friends have passed away.

In fact, many of your family, they're either not here or they've passed way. What keeps you going? And she said, well, I've got to learn this song for the violin class on Wednesday.

And I thought, what an unbelievably genius and brilliant answer that is, right? Because she kept everything in perspective. It's like, what else do you live for?

You live with the things that are in front of you right now, right? And so it was important for her to learn and she picked up the violin at 92 when she was 94. And she's horrible and I used to play the violent.

So, I mean, she really bad, but it is the most unbelievably cool thing I've ever seen. I was so inspired by it because, to have the courage to pick up a new skill at ninety-two years old, it's truly amazing.

to not be good and to lose your faculties. I mean, she didn't move like she used to, right? So everything becomes a little more challenging and yet those are the things that kept her going mentally, emotionally, as well as from a brain perspective and physically keeps her engaged, so these are type of things we saw over and over.

These 90 year olds, 100 year old, they were still doing things they enjoyed. 105 year-old in Sardinia was riding his bike still. He was playing chess with his son who was like 70 something or 80 something.

And so, you know, they were still engaging with life. So if there's a population here, anybody here that's in their 70s, 80s watching this, the key to continuing to have good health into that 80's and 90's, and beyond, is to continue to engage with live.

Find things that you're excited about, find things to wake you up in the morning that keep you engaged, that will keep your healthy beyond anything else.

Over and over again, this is what we saw. It's the love of life itself that keeps people going. And when we lose that, when you lose this drive to get up and to live life, to actively live live, then sort of we're sending these subtle signals to our body that it's time we kind of wind down here, you know, we are almost done, right?

And so everything starts to shut down. Yeah, and I think it's so, in the modern society, I mean, we think that we are so great because we have these assisted living.

We store our elderly away so that they're comfortable. They can, you know, they are all taken care of. But then they're just existing. Like you're saying, they don't have that purpose.

They don' have something to live for. They don have the community engagement where there's multi-generational that really kind of stimulates their activity.

Because in assisted living, you are just going to hang out with people who are waiting to die instead of having that. Yep. And this is a big fault, I think, of our society.

This is something that I really think we have an opportunity to shift, which is to really embrace our elderly, embrace these elders who really have tons of wisdom to share.

I mean, the research is abundantly clear that when the older generations hang out with the younger generations, they get younger. From a biological perspective, all their immune markers, everything starts to shift.

Internally, it's really amazing that all of their biomarkers start to become younger and so they really benefit from hanging out with the youth. And of course, the young can benefit tremendously from learning from the elderly.

I don't just mean 98, I mean 60 and 70, right? Still really, really valuable information that we can all learn from those who have gone before us, so we're missing out on a huge opportunity to re-engage our elderly population and to bring them back and say, hey, what can I learn from you?

What is it that I can gain from to make my life easier? This is what we found over and over again. I didn't expect the humor and the wisdom to the degree that saw it, like 95 plus.

Expected by that age, they'd be kind of kind of losing it a little bit. And some were, you know, when they get into that age, it's, we just start to decline.

But the humor and the very subtle wisdom of just the simplicity of life, the profound things that they said, in fact, I remember asking, um, and I was talking to a guy named Orestes in Icaria, Greece.

He said when I younger, my body was busy and my mind was still. Now what I see is that the mind is busy, but the body is still, thought, my God, he summarized like, probably somebody written a book on that, right?

And he's summarizing it in one sentence. So it's those type of things that I think we can gain these tremendous wisdoms that can really land from these elderly populations.

I if we can incorporate those elderly populations back into our lives. And if you are an elderly population, to find a way to engage with the youth has been shown in the research over and over again to be extremely beneficial.

And I think that allows power to flow through the generations. I mean, as we have it now, we're segmenting things, which does not allow that generational power, to kind of fuel us so we don't feel as supported.

We step out into life and feel confused. we feel lost because we do not have that foundation behind us of the generation that have lived before us and have this tremendous wisdom and understanding.

Yeah, this is a big one. I remember speaking with, oh, I forget her name. She was in her late sixties or early seventies in Okinawa. Very, very smart woman.

And she was a very educated woman and she talking about the West. One of the problems I see in the United States is that you guys really value your autonomy, your individualism.

What you're missing is, is you are isolating yourselves. And this isolation causes disease, and this is isolation itself is a driver of disease. And of course, we see this in a lot of the research when it comes to community and the value of having a support network.

It's a total game changer, but we have become so autonomous here in the West and there's pride to that, right? Because we can, We've literally done such amazing things socioeconomically that we we live on our own.

right? Where some of these people that we met, there's no way they would have lived on their own. In 1945, Sardinia, Italy, in the mountains, they relied on other people.

So there was a network of support. Now, on the one hand, you could say that's a weakness, that you rely on others, and they must, but on another hand it's such an amazing strength when you have a big enough network that you can all count on one another.

And disasters would happen. Things would, things would happened to certain families or their, their homes or what have you. The entire community would come and help out because they realized that if, if somebody in the community was suffering and hurting, then that actually affected them too.

So there was such an amazing support network, which provided a level of not only actual safety, but perceived safety. Right. This sense in my body that I am safe and I'm okay.

That if something happens, there's people that have my back and I know that, right? There's a lot of us that don't actually have that essentially built into our nervous system because we live such an autonomous life and there are childhood traumas and other things that I've incorporated or that led to this feeling that that i'm not safe.

Even people with a ton of money have this thing of I'm Not Safe in the nervous And so that was really, really noticeable too, was the fact that you could tell that they all had a profound sense of connection with others that are around them.

And that's different than community, right? Community is sort of the physical thing. The connection is the non-physical aspect of community that may or may not be there.

I can be in an online Facebook community but without the connection. Right. Or I can be in a community and feel ostracized, in which case that's even worse because I should feel connected, but I don't.

Right? So they all had a profound sense of connection with, with their community. And I will say. Perhaps even more importantly, they had a profound sense of connection with God, with the divine, something that was beyond themselves.

In the case of the more Shinto belief systems in Okinawa, it was the connection to nature, the connections to ancestors. That, I think, was really, really important too.

As we spoke with more and more of them, you got this feeling that they They kind of just turned things over to the divine. They didn't have to carry it all.

See, you know what? I'll be here until God says so, right? And it was quite funny because I asked people, how long do you want to live? Not to me, except to God.

And so they just didn' t care. they didn t have any desire to get to 100 or 105 or 180, like some people were talking about. They just let go of so much and turn you all over.

And so I think that's something that I notice in the West that many people have lost that. I'm not even saying that we need to have a fundamental religion that that subscribe to.

That's great if we do, but that wasn't my background and upbringing. And yet it's come into my life as I've recognized the value of it in so many ways, both on the physical health, mental, emotional, spiritual.

There's something there that is so, so valuable. So that was a really, really big one that, that it was at a thread throughout all of the communities that we visited.

And that spirituality is, whether you're Buddhist or Hindu or all these different shamanism, that that's spirituality kind of brings that focal point and bring the people together so that it's kind like their heart beats in the same rhythm.

They have something that they come together with and they live within that energetic matrix, so to say. Absolutely. And there's something there, like there is something that is bigger than you.

There's some thing there that we can look to beyond ourselves, right? So it actually expands our level of awareness outside of just this small me here, here right now, and so as we get beyond our selves into the family, into community, the sort of universal levels of consciousness or awareness, Now we're starting to operate our entire life with that in mind, right?

This sort of focused inward small self perspective that, I mean, this is what I thought for a long time, it tends to be more constricting. And so there's just something bigger at stake.

When you recognize that there is a bigger hand at play, then there are less worries about some of these small things. I love it. One of the things I want to touch on before we end is we're talking so much about circadian rhythm, about the patterns that exist, preparing for winter, prepare for summer, we've got night, day, all these different things that are taking place.

And one of glans that we are really kind of looking towards to help us to understand what's going on around us is a pineal gland and there's a lot of research coming out in regard to this pinea gland.

And this ties in how important circadian rhythms are for longevity and for anti-aging and the hormone that one of the main hormones it produces is melatonin.

I know you've done a kind of a research in regards to melotonin just based upon what you're seeing in this. So, Ken, can you tell them a little bit about you know, the high dose melatonin.

I mean, what does it do to the body and how can a person benefit from that? Yeah, this is a hormone, a supplement that I think will be a part of regenerative medicine going forward.

And it sort of already is now to some degree, but melatonin is hormone that's produced by the pineal gland. That's what we typically think about. It's typically thought of as the darkness hormone.

Right? It is our sleep hormone but it does so much more. in the body. It trumps superoxide dismutase. I mean, it tramps glutathione. And it's amazing what melatonin can do from an antioxidant perspective and how it works.

There's sort of three ways that antioxidate can work. Antioxidant can directly quench oxidative free radicals, right? So it sort chemically quenches those.

The other way is it can turn on antioxidant enzymes, things like superoxide dismutase, which melatonin does, right? And the other way is to turn down inflammatory cascades.

So actually turn the oxidative sort of chains. And so it's turning down the pro-inflammatory genes, it is upregulating the anti-inflammatory antioxidate genes and it directly quenching.

It is in three ways unbelievable at lowering inflammation, excess inflammation. Interesting thing about melatonin from a hormone perspective is that unlike things like testosterone or growth hormone or some of these other hormones that we might supplement with, there's no negative feedback loop.

So you can take tons of melotonin and when you take it away, the body's still going to make its own meletonin. That's not the case for some these hormones.

This is why they can be so dangerous and also You know, difficult to work with is because you're constantly having to monitor your body's own ability to make it.

The receptors, they're going to start shutting down these types of things. And so it's got an unbelievable safety profile when it comes to these high doses as well, which is, interesting because again, it is a hormone.

So we're conditioned, I think, in the scientific community and the practitioner community that when we are dealing with hormones, tiny, you know, just getting this sort of physiological dose is the best thing you want to do.

You don't want go above and beyond. But with melatonin, there's something called LD50, right? The lethal dose of 50. And so this is a number that with just about every substance that we use, table salt for example, We're going to try to find how much table salt it's going take to kill 50% of let's say rats, right?

So we take a rat population and we try and find this dose. And I think it is something like three milligrams per kilogram or something to go 50 percent of the rats.

So, we do this with vitamin B, vitamin C6. We do it with everything. And they haven't figured out the lethal dose for melatonin. They tried, but they can't get there.

And so this is what's fascinating is that you can take… The rats just get younger and younger. That's right. This is, what is fascinating, is not only can they not figure out how to kill a rat or a mouse with melotonin, But they cannot even really generate any negative consequences, negative side effects.

So this what really fascinating about this hormone, and I'm not saying there aren't any. But what I'm saying is the safety profile is remarkable considering, you know, compared to other vitamins and minerals that we might take.

I mean, it's way more safe than magnesium, for example. Right. So, so we can take this at high doses. And in fact, many people have hundreds of milligrams for years and no negative side effects.

There was one study that looked at 6,600 milligrams, so 6.6 grams of melatonin nightly for I think upwards of a month and no negative side effects. So when we're talking about 50 milligrams 100 milligrams 200 400 milligrams this is really nothing compared to what the research has shown.

And what we find, what I've found both personally and clinically, my clients, is that it's unbelievable for gut function. So it really, really regulatory from a gut nervous system perspective.

And we see microbiome shifts with melatonin because your microbiomes are actually responding to your secretion of melotonin. The gut itself, normally, without even supplementing, has 400 times more melatonin than what's produced by the pineal gland.

So melotonin is something that's not only produced the pineapple gland, it's produce by mitochondria. What's really fascinating is that we're starting to recognize, and this isn't, I wouldn't say it is consensus yet, but the evidence is suggesting and pointing to the fact that all mitochondrion produce meletonin.

and use melatonin because of its antioxidant properties. So I think we're still early in the melotonin research because you can't patent melotonin. There's not a lot of financial incentive for these companies to spend millions of dollars looking at meltonin and what it's going to do.

But what I've seen clinically is that it it, it unbelievably helpful for gut inflammation. of all kind, it improves skin. So you get softer skin, more even toned skin it actually helps is beneficial for you to get a lot of sun.

Your skin will actually produce more melanin. You'll be more protected from UV rays. It regenerates the thymus gland. Actually, speaking of pineal gland, there's an interesting pineothymus gland connection here.

I think it was Dr. Walter Pierpolli who swapped out pineo glands of old mice and young mice. And when he took the pinea gland from the old mouse and swapped it into the young mouse, the younger mice got older.

Everything about them, muscle wasting, cataracts, all the hallmarks of the older age started to increase. Now the young mice and taking their pineal gland, putting it into the old mice, they started to show signs of reversing aging.

So they start getting healthier in every way. They re-grew their coats, increased muscle mass. I mean, when they did an autopsy, they showed that the degradation of the thymus gland in the young mice with the old pineal glands was significantly increased.

So the thinking here and the confirmation and later research has shown that melatonin actually helps regrow the Thymis gland. And the Thomas gland is critical.

This is where T cells are produced. For your inflammatory processes, for your immune system as a whole, having good T cell function, Having good thimic function is absolutely critical And so the interesting thing about our thymus gland is that it sort of peak size and peak function at about puberty.

So right about 13, 14. And then from there, it starts to decline. It starts gain a little more fatty tissue. Functional tissue decreases. Thymic output T-cell function decreases from puverty.

By the time we're 30, 40, 50, 70, our thymeic function is dramatically decreased. Right? And 35 is about this age range where it's starts decline rapidly.

So what we see then is with melatonin starts to regrow the thymus gland. And so this becomes really, really interesting when it comes to immune function and immunosenescence.

This idea of the immune system not functioning is one of that best predictors for aging or for death is that when the system doesn't work anymore, this is when we go downhill quickly because we're suspected to have infections and also the inflammatory processes in our bodies just aren't regulated well.

That is just one component of what melatonin can do is regrow the thymus gland. The other big parts have to do with how it influences downstream hormone like luteinizing hormone, follicle stimulating hormone.

These are hormones typically thought of with regard to puberty, right? So interesting enough, we have this follicles stimulating hormones, lutenizing hormones in women starts to increase and of course cycle.

Once puberty hits and then in women after menopause starts to shoot up, luteinizing hormone, follicle stimulant rise dramatically and that is part of this aging process.

When we supplement with melatonin, we actually suppress lutenizing hormones, suppress follicles stimulating hormone and there is the typical relationship between these hormones these sex hormones and melotonin.

And in that vein, we actually have seen that if you give tons of melatonin to a prepubescent, you can actually delay puberty. So I guess that's a downside if want to give it to kids.

It's not a good idea because it will suppress luteinizing hormone, follicle stimulant hormone to the point where it'll suppress the development of puberty.

On the plus side, for women that have gone into menopause early, perhaps, we can actually pull them back out of menoppause by supplementing with higher doses of melatonin.

This has been shown time and time again, and it's partially because of this relationship with luteinizing hormone and follicle stimulating hormone. We can start to decrease those, basically put the brakes on those hormones, that pulls them out along with the reduction in inflammation.

So melatonin is a fascinating hormone, really good for gut health, good skin health. Amazing for lowering the inflammatory load overall. Improves immune system function, improves the gut microbiota composition.

I honestly can't say enough about it. For quite a while now, I've used it with a lot of my clients. And you're 75 years old, right? Yes, exactly. Yes.

And I love melatonin. I do it for my cancer patients. So I have them on 200 milligrams at bedtime. Beautiful. Love that. Totally forgot about cancer. This is the research and I'm glad you brought that up.

Research has shown this over and over again. In fact, there's people in Europe that only give melotonin for cancer, which I thought was pretty crazy because you can do other things, but I didn't know you were giving it to them.

That's fantastic. Yeah, no, it is cool. And then also you have like autism that that's something that really flaring up and they see a strong correlation between high dose of melatonin on autistic children and how it really wakes up their brain.

So, I mean, It's just a fascinating hormone that we're learning more and more about. It used to be, you know, in the way back when that We thought the pineal was just a useless gland.

In fact, they saw no function and no reason for the penile gland, kind of like what we do now with gallbladders and appendix, that we just jank them out.

And we have for anti-aging, we're talking about thymus and a pineel. So in the peptide world, like the major peptides for anti-aging like thymus and alpha-1 and epitalin of penelion, these are the key peptide for ant-ageing.

So to really revitalize your thimus, and the pineal gland, it's like for an ant ageing that's key. Absolutely. And this, and this may be, you know, when it comes to aging, the research is actually starting to point to not this damage associated aging.

But actually there's a clock. There's an aging clock that is what all the researchers pointing to is that it's sort of programmed this program, this idea of programed aging and, philosophically that makes sense that we have this life cycle.

And so we're constantly looking for this aging clock in the body. Where is this thing and how does it, what's the sort of master controls? And there's a handful of sort markers that we were finding now that can control a large part of aging, but it's interesting to think about that potentially the pineal gland may hold some of these answers as being a kind of a master regulator.

I mean, it is obviously a very important gland when it comes to spiritual awakening. to going into different levels of awareness, right? When we talk about things like ayahuasca and some of these psychedelic medicines, they're really having an influence on pineal gland in Ayurveda and in some these ancient Eastern practices, there's a lot of aspect to the pineo gland and the practices.

So there is something going on there with the Pineal Gland and I suspect that there are going to be really important discoveries when it comes to anti-aging medicine, regenerative medicine.

But when we talked about melatonin, I really want to highlight the fact that it's to go beyond this idea of sleep, right? Sleep is important. So that's an important way and circadian rhythm to regulate your own natural production of melatonin.

And so definitely do all that. When you supplement with melotonin, you can put skin cream with Melatonina on your skin and it is really, really beneficial.

Every cell is utilizing melotonin And if mitochondria are producing melatonin like the research is suggesting, then it goes beyond just the sleep function.

It's actually serving a cellular regeneration function, right? It actually helping to clean up the cells and mitigate excess damage. And to me, that's really where I get excited about melotonin is what can it do to kind of clean some of this damage that is naturally occurring as I got older.

And it's kind of hard to stop throughout the body. So we need something to kind mop it up while we also do all these other things to help, you know, increase our regenerative potential with things like peptides and things, like stem cells and, and post electromagnetic field and all of these things that we can utilize melatonin seems to come in there and play a really, really important role in assisting the mitochondria primarily, as well as the microbiota.

I love it. Well, Jason, and tell everyone where they can find your, where the can watch your documentary. Cause I mean, it's a fascinating documentary and if we learn from what has been done, then we are able to move forward better.

So where can people find it? Yeah, they can find me at the Awakened Health Academy. So AwakendHealthAcademy.com as well as you can my new book at BeyondLongevityBook. Com.

And you could also go to HumanLonggevityFilm. com. I love it. Thank you so much, Jason. Thanks for everything you're doing. Absolutely. Thank you for tuning in to Doctor Talks.

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