Foods & Supplements You NEED TO EAT For Longevity and Energy | Dr. Michael Murray

Ari Whitten, MS Okay. I want to go one or maybe two or maybe three layers deeper into this into territory that is almost never discussed. And I think given your very long expertize in, in natural health and nutrition being the legend of natural health that you are and your unique interest in flavonoids and my unique interest in flavonoids, there’s there’s some there’s some stories here that I think might be worth delving into that I’m pretty sure won’t be touched on by any other expert. So there’s a story around antioxidants and oxidants that is a very distorted and oversimplified story that has been widely circulating for many, many decades. And the story is very simply oxidants and oxidative stress equals bad. Antioxidants are good. And the more antioxidants we have, the better. And there are a variety of lines of evidence that have made it clear that this story is overly simplistic and that there are many layers that are incorrect. 

For example, there are many studies published online debunking the whole free radical theory of Aging. Harman’s free radical theory of Aging that’s been around for many decades. And there’s many, many studies as, as you probably know, Dr. Murray, where they have tested various kinds of antioxidants and found them to not be particularly effective and some in some cases to actually be counterproductive. As far as disease prevention or extending lifespan, both in animal models and in humans. Conversely, we also have the examples of things like exercise and water medic stressors which increase free radicals or reactive oxygen species, and yet paradoxically have a lifespan enhancing and disease prevention effect. 

So this basic again, just to recap, this basic model of oxidants are bad, antioxidants are good. And the more that we have antioxidants quenching the oxidants and the more we do things to avoid big spikes of oxidants, the longer we live, the slower the aging process is, the more we prevent disease. And again, we have these lines of evidence showing that many antioxidants don’t actually work to prevent disease or extend lifespan and many things that, despite that, create large amounts of oxidants, paradoxically extend lifespan and prevent disease. I’m curious to what extent you’ve spent time like looking at this whole story and how you reconcile all of those things. 

Michael T. Murray, ND Okay. So a lot of times when we’re looking at an antioxidant or antioxidant, we’re looking at a chemical reaction or in an in-vitro or test tube study. It has really no bearing. You know, so fruit, for example, if we look at flavonoids, flavonoids are generally referred to as antioxidants in as in a chemical reaction or in a test tube study, they show antioxidant activity. The problem is that you

cannot achieve the level of concentration to produce that antioxidant effect in the body. Does that mean that they don’t have on antioxidant effects? No, they have indirect antioxidant effects. And the things that you were talking about being stressors to our antioxidant system, they have the same effect as the beneficial compounds that exert systemic antioxidant effects, like antioxidants. We have the genetic controllers and we have very unique set of feedback stimuli, kind of like thermostats in the form of receptors on our cells that will activate signals to our nucleus to activate certain genes. And, you know, I don’t know if your audience or this audience is familiar with Nerve two, but Nerve two is kind of the body’s Antioch innate response. And that’s really what we want to be looking at. And again, if you look at what stimulates nerve to activation, it’s both stressors to the and to the antioxidant system and natural compounds that support the antioxidant system. So you eliminate that. That’s what seems to be an enigma, but it’s really not because you just look at what happens on a cellular level and exercise. This is a great example. 

Ari Whitten, MS So, just your spot on everything you’re saying is the way to reconcile it. But just for listeners, explain nerve to in a little bit more depth and explain the concept of, you know, like, let me put it this way, let’s say that you had just a simple machine like a hunk of metal, like a car or something like that. The more stress you apply to it, the more that you take it over bumpy dirt roads and, you know, subjected to different forces acting on it and getting dirty and getting wet and taking big, you know, taking it off jams. The more it’s going to break down. But the difference between that and the human body is we are a living, intelligent, adaptive machine that is designed to respond to the stressors that we’re subjected to and make adaptations to it. And we have a system in our body built into our biology that is designed to respond to stressors by becoming stronger and more robust. And as you alluded to, that one of the primary pathways that happens through is the nerve to pathway and the endogenous antioxidant system. So just assume people have no knowledge that there is an internal antioxidant system and explain how all of that works. 

Michael T. Murray, ND Yeah, that was very well done. That was beautiful. That’s a great analogy and I’m going to steal it. That’s so good. Yeah. We are designed to have stress in our lives to create one. Now, if you take a single celled organism like an amoeba and you put it in what we think is a perfect environment, it would die because it needs that stress in order to grow and to thrive. And we’re the same way. We need stress in every aspect of our life in order to grow and thrive and evolve both individually 

and as a race. So our bodies and ourselves have mechanisms to take stressful situations and help us adapt to that stress. 

And as you said, you know, exercise is such a great analogy because the more load you put on body, the stronger it’s going to become, because it has to be a reasonable, overwhelming stress. But that continued stress leads to an adaptation of improving our ability to have endurance, stamina and strength. And that same thing happens on a cellular level. And when we look at

what are those cellular mechanisms that are responsible for helping a cell adapt to stress, it’s really interesting in this nerf to system is kind of a stimulus to our antioxidant system. And we have compounds in our body that exert antioxidant activity. We also have enzymes that exert 

enzymes attack antioxidant activity. So there’s a lot of vehicles that our body produces that nullify oxidative stress and we be in it. Like anything in nature, it’s always a double edged sword. We have we our body can also produce oxidants because that’s what we use to kill infecting organisms and things that might do us harm. And there are situations when our body is desiring to produce inflammatory processes because they’re important in promoting a healing reaction. So we don’t want to shut any of that down. 

Ari Whitten, MS I just want that I want I want to emphasize what you said there, just to pointed out to listeners us as because it’s a big key of why this story of oxidants are bad, antioxidants are good is is is so misguided because those oxidants are, again, as you said, serving a purpose. The body is designed to produce them. It’s not a mistake. They’re not just bad guys. The body’s not producing them by accident. Does some horrible thing that’s gone wrong in the design of human beings. It’s intelligent. They’re there for a purpose. They serve many vital signaling roles. They serve in immune defenses, and they serve as part of the adaptations system in response to exercise and other hermetic stressors where the presence of those reactive oxygen species is used as a signal for mitochondria to grow bigger and stronger and for mitochondrial biogenesis. 

So when you quench too much of those free radicals, for example, when they did studies many years ago where they supplemented antioxidants to people doing exercise, what they found is that it actually canceled out or mostly negated many of the metabolic benefits of doing exercise. So, you know, again, those reactive oxygen species, these oxidants are not just bad guys. They’re they’re they’re serving a purpose. We don’t want to just be constantly trying to pound as much glutathione and antioxidants, exogenous antioxidants as we possibly can to suppress those reactive oxygen species, because that is actually based on a mistaken and naive ignorant view of human physiology. That’s incomplete. And that’s I think, part of the magic of these flavonoid molecules, too, is they’re not just indiscriminate Antioch direct antioxidants. They’re working with our endogenous antioxidant system. 

Michael T. Murray, ND Yeah you know, we’ve seen a lot of different areas of focus in research and in nutrition and in medicine in general. And it’s been really interesting to view it, you know, and, you know, it was. Yeah. So one of the latest was is looking at everything, you know, an anti if it’s something it’s anti-inflammatory it’s going to promote life extension because boy, you know, inflammation plays such a big role in so many detrimental aspects of human health. But I came they did a study. If this is really is a paradigm shifting. They looked at the art of the there was an editorial that basically I’m paraphrasing the article, but everything that we thought we knew about pain relief was wrong because what they found, what they found was, is that the treatment of acute pain led to an increase in chronic pain. And it’s the chronic pain that’s created this opioid problem in and what they found was, is that if you’re using natural anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen, you know, after surgery or whatever, you know, it may be a trauma injury of some sort that it reduces the the the acute inflammatory process. And in the process of suppressing that inflammation, it also suppresses the formation of compounds in our body called resolved. And these are compounds that resolve inflammation and I think they’re going to be treating pain a lot differently in the future than they are. What we’re doing now, we have a tendency to think that pharmacology drug therapy is at the pinnacle, but we’re in the dark ages still. I think it’s foolish to think that we’re not. Because if you look at any class of drugs and you look at the the mechanism of action in the long term effects, you know, whether you’re talking about sleeping pills, whether you’re talking about anti-inflammatory drugs, you’re talking about antidepressants, you’re looking at, oh, they just discovered that all these cognitive enhancing drugs, they actually increase the loss of cognition. ‘’

And we see that with blood pressure medications. We see that with just about every class of medication they end up creating the problem that they were originally designed to address. And when we’re looking at mitochondrial function and longevity, you know, I think finding alternatives to conventional medicines is the way to go. That’s one of the basic foundations of my latest book, The Longevity Matrix. And now we want to support our body with all these wonderful longevity aids. But from what I look at, whether you’re talking about proton pump inhibitors for treating esophageal reflux or sleeping pills or Tylenol or whatever you look at, you look at those sorts of drugs and you look at their impact on life extension and their mortality risk. These are putting people into the grave sooner. And just helping people get off of these drugs is a great way to extend their life. And that’s one of my big missions in life to help people live a long and healthy life. And it’s hard to do that if you’re on a medication, a drug. 

Ari Whitten, MS I think this really gets into a difference in paradigms like the foundational paradigms through which you are seeking to improve human health or within conventional medicine generally. It’s not about improving health. It’s about trying to fix disease and reverse pathology or stop pathology. And the general paradigm is based on a model of let’s do this sort of biochemical analysis of what’s going on, what are the pathways and the specific molecules that are out of whack that are driving this disease process. And then let’s create a drug to interfere or to interrupt with that cascade of chemical reactions. 

And that paradigm is distinct from one of saying, one of looking at the body as an intelligent system and saying how, or why is the body doing this? Why is the body just making this shift in this direction? And how can we do what can we do? What how can we understand the root causes of that of why this intelligent system is feeling like it needs to respond in this way, such that we can coax it back into its healthy regulation rather than interrupting the dumb that’s randomly sort of gone astray and is making this accident, these accidents, by having high cholesterol or up regulating hormones that act on the kidneys such that now you have high blood pressure or changing neurotransmitters in the brain’s levels of the brain, such that now you have depression or anxiety, and therefore we need a drug to fix this, this mistake that the body’s making. It’s a paradigm of saying, well, why is the body regulating neurotransmitters in this way or regulating blood pressure in this way? And and and why are these cholesterol and triglycerides being regulated by this intelligence system in this way? And how can we work with this intelligent system to bring it back into balance? And the treatments that one arrives at are wildly different depending on which one of those paradigms you operate in. And it’s very unfortunate in my mind that the dominant conventional medical paradigm is which which most people associate with, quote unquote, the science, you know, as the more scientifically advanced one is one that sees the body as a dumb machine, that makes all these mistakes, that requires drugs to interrupt all of these pathological processes, disease processes. So anyway, I just thought I’d add that to echo your sentiments, though. 

Michael T. Murray, ND Yeah, it’s it’s it’s going to be I want to stick around as long as possible because it’s exciting. The route that science is taking. If you really have your pulse on the research it’s clear that a new paradigm is emerging. And I really like this focus on not only our physiology but also the microbiome. And I think we’re going to be looking at ways to influence the microbiome in a much more sophisticated and meaningful way than what we’re doing now. And I’m excited to see what that might lead to, because there’s such a symbiotic relationship between our health and the health of our microbiome. And it’s not, you know, probiotics are there. 

They’re really not all that important. And we focus on them way too much. It’s almost like a reverse germ theory. I don’t know yet. Yeah, because it’s the microbiome is like a like a like most often it’s like a very rich environment, kind of like an Amazonian forest. And you’re trying to change the Amazonian forest by throwing some grass seeds out. There’s no room for it. So there has to be ways of altering it. And there there are. And we’re learning more and more what’s important in terms of or or lifestyle or diet or thoughts or hormonal levels, all these things that have nothing to do with, you know, taking taking probiotics.