In this episode, I am speaking with Nathalie Niddam who is a holistic nutritionist, a human potential coach, and epigenetic coach and is immersed in the world of health optimization and longevity. Natalie runs the large biohacking group Optimizing Superhuman Performance.
We will discuss the latest science on peptides (and bioregulators) and how they can level up your health.
Table of Contents
In this podcast, Nathalie and I discuss:
- Why peptides are still not on most people’s radars, nor much used by regular doctors
- What exactly are these bioregulator peptides and why should you know more about them?
- Why, despite being synthetic, peptides could be classed as “bio-identical epigenetic switches” and not a pharmaceutical product
- The pros and cons of these impressively promising compounds (and how much risk is involved in using them)?
- The most promising bioregulator peptides and who might consider taking them?
- Is epitalon (one of the best known) really as good as some people are claiming?
- Different ways of administering them – pills vs injection – and how easy is it to access this new frontier of medicine?
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Transcript
Ari Whitten: Hey, this is Ari. Welcome back to The Energy Blueprint podcast. I have an exciting show for you today, all about peptides, especially anti-aging peptides, a special class of them called bioregulators. This podcast is with Nathalie Niddam, who is a holistic nutritionist, a human potential coach, and epigenetic coach, who is immersed in the world of health optimization and longevity.
A few years ago, she stumbled upon peptides at a health optimization conference and has been immersed in the study of these as health optimization and longevity tools ever since. I have to say on a personal note, she is one of the most well-versed people on this topic that I have encountered anywhere. She’s really, really gone deep into the study of this particular area of peptides and specifically bioregulator peptides, maybe deeper than all, but a handful of people on the planet.
Natalie runs a large and growing biohacking community on Facebook, the optimizing superhuman performance group, and is the host of the Biohacking Superhuman Performance podcast. With all of that said, I hope you enjoy this episode. You’re going to learn about something you’ve probably never heard about anywhere else and a very exciting rapidly growing field of research that has a lot of potential, anti-aging and longevity potential in particular, which is these bioregulator peptides. Enjoy the episode and I hope you get a lot of value from it. Welcome to the show, Natalie, such a pleasure to have you.
Nathalie Niddam: Thank you so much, Ari. It’s such a pleasure to be here. I’ve heard lots about you. It’s very exciting to be here. Thank you for having me.
Ari: Likewise. I kept hearing your name from a lot of my friends, our mutual friends. At some point, maybe six months or nine months ago started checking out your podcast. I listened to a whole bunch of episodes with experts that you were interviewing on peptides as well as some of your solo episodes and I was very, very impressed with your knowledge.
Nathalie: Thank you.
Ari: I immediately said, this is somebody who I would like to have on my podcast to do yet another, maybe the fifth or sixth episode I’ve done on peptides because I think you have a unique perspective on them, a lot of knowledge, a lot of depth and insight into this and I think you bring a really nice woman’s perspective to the whole mix as well. I’m excited to get into this with you.
Nathalie: Thank you. Thanks so much. As like you, I spend a lot of time. I really started the podcast, my own podcast with a view to learn any more about peptides. I thought, how am I going to get all these people to talk to me? I thought, I know, I’ll create a podcast. [chuckles]
Ari: Nice.
Nathalie: Lo and behold, not only did– It brought a lot of people– It would allow me to speak to a lot of experts. There’s so much need for information and knowledge and not a lot of formal information around. I think that the people who hold the biggest base of knowledge are the clinicians that are working with peptides right now. Not that there’s not a lot of research going on, but there is, but it’s one of those things that’s being learned about a lot in real-time. It’s trying to keep your fingers in the pies and keep tabs on what’s going on. [chuckles]
Ari: Totally. I love what you said about just figuring out– For your own personal interest in the topic and wanting to learn more, how do I get these people to talk to me? Let’s start a podcast. I think having been in this space a long time myself, I know a lot of different kinds of people who are among our colleagues, among people who have businesses in the online health space.
I think, generally speaking, there are two, maybe three categories of people, if you include charlatans and psychopaths. The two main categories of people are, I think, business people who happen to be in the health space and true health geeks who are just doing it because they’d be doing it even if they weren’t making any money from it.
Nathalie: Exactly. [chuckles]
Ari: That’s for me, I’ve been doing health science. This has been my obsession since I was 12 years old. I did it for a long time before I ever made a dime from it. It’s what I’d be doing even in my spare time, even if I had a job doing something else. I’m blessed, I think, like you, to make my primary passion in life into a formal business that I can learn for my own selfish interests and teach and have fun and help a lot of people in the process.
Nathalie: Absolutely. The sharing is amazing. We’re not going to bore your listeners with too much of this little love Fest, but I think the other big piece of it is connecting with other like-minded people. We are really blessed to be part of a community of people that is rather very exceptional and very varied.
Ari: Agreed. If I can say so myself, I think the people who are the true health geeks do the best work. Kudos to you on that. [chuckles]
Nathalie: And you. [chuckles] Mutual pats on the back. All right. Let’s get into it.
What are peptides?
Ari: All right. Peptides, first of all, what are they? Just for people who might be new to this, who maybe missed the previous peptide podcasts that I’ve done.
Nathalie: Peptides, really, is another name for protein, but peptides specifically speaks to small proteins. Generally speaking, and it a little bit depends on who you speak to. I’ve heard that some people will define a peptide with as many as 100 amino acids long. An amino acid is the building block of a peptide. They’re like the single-block Legos. If you’ve ever played with Legos as a kid or if you have kids who played with Legos, it’s those little single blocks. Amino acids, there are nine essential amino acids. There’s a whole bunch of other ones that we can make in our body, but a peptide by definition is a short protein.
It’s either 100 or more commonly 50 amino acids long. Those chains of amino acids are folded in very specific configurations in the human body, which exposes different binding sites that then bind to receptors and initiate different responses or initiate cascades in the body will also today as pre-agreed upon, we’ll also be talking about bio regulator peptides, which are a subset of peptides and they are only two to four amino acids long. These are the most teeny, tiny little proteins you can imagine. They’re not folded because they’re too small to fold, but they’re arranged in different 3D configurations, which has an effect on their charge and how they bind to different things.
Ari: Later in this podcast, we’re going to be talking about how do you administer these things. In some cases, you need to inject them. That’s going to immediately scare off some people.
Nathalie: For sure.
Ari: It’s also going to trigger a feeling of how does this differ from other kinds of injections and drugs and things like that. Maybe you can distinguish the category of peptides from medications, from pharmacological interventions.
Nathalie: That’s a really interesting point. First of all, when we talk about injecting peptides, typically, we’re talking about a subcutaneous injection. That means that it’s being administered under the skin, usually into the fat layer, even people who don’t have a lot of fat have a little bit of fat there. It’s a little bit like an insulin injection. A diabetic will administer just under the skin, a small injection of insulin to help control their blood sugar.
I would say that peptides are, when you say defiant, distinguish them from medications, what’s interesting about peptides is I’m trying to think, but I think any peptide that we know of right now is based on a naturally occurring protein in the body. What it is very often is it’s a fragment of that protein. It’s almost like you have a big structure, and within that structure, there are all these different functional elements. It’s almost like we’ve isolated a functional element. We’ve removed it from the main structure. We in reintroduce it to the body so that we’re trying to really tap into a specific effect.
The other interesting thing about peptides and it doesn’t give them a buy necessarily, but a lot of people say, oh, they’re very short acting. The body recognizes. It can break them down. Typically, and again, I’m trying to think of all the peptides that I know of. I’m not a pharmacist so I don’t have that big database if you will, that a pharmacological person might have, but for the most part, they don’t stick around for very long. Generally speaking, what they’re doing, rather than suppressing something, they’re initiating, they’re getting your body to do something that it would normally do, but maybe– Go ahead.
What do peptides do in the body?
Ari: Our body has thousands, as I understand it, of peptides that are naturally produced and circulating in the body.
Nathalie: 7,000.
Ari: Are already there performing physiological roles, correct?
Nathalie: Yes, for sure. Absolutely. I believe there are 7,000 peptides we know of in the human body, we’ve isolated and people are working with a handful of them. But I would also say, for most of the peptides that we will talk about and that people have been playing with, [chuckles] I’m and I’m using the word playing loosely, these are not FDA-approved compounds, for the most part. A couple are, the ones that are FDA-approved.
One of them, in particular, has been given orphan drug status in the US, but it’s approved as a drug in about 30 countries worldwide. But for whatever reason, it’s very hard to get your hands on in the countries where we live in. Without getting into any politics or anything, it’s sometimes a little bit difficult to understand why that might be, but it’s a bit of a wild, wild West in many different ways.
Ari: Would you say, as maybe an analogy to understand this distinction, this is the equivalent of supplementing with CoQ10 or creatine, compounds that are naturally produced in the body as compared with a synthetic compound that was designed in a lab that’s not natural, that interrupts physiological processes?
Nathalie: In that sense, yes, but most of the peptides, and lately I’ve gotten into the habit of calling them alphabet soup peptides, which [chuckles] are really not a very technical term, but it’s because the name, the nomenclature is so miserable. You’ve got thymus and alpha one thymus and beta four, BPC-157, you start throwing these things at people and their eyes glaze over and they’re like, what are you talking about? But definitely, what you said there is definitely yes. The peptide, although it’s synthesized in a lab, it is synthesized but it’s synthesized to be pretty much identical to what your body produces.
Ari: Right. That’s what getting what I was getting at. I want people to be less scared of these compounds, knowing that your body already has thousands of these peptides that it’s already using to perform various physiological functions.
Nathalie: For sure, but it doesn’t mean that things can’t go sideways. It doesn’t mean that like, for me, for example, I’m like a delicate flower in some ways, I’m super tough in many ways, but in other ways, I have an immune system that is sometimes pretty picky, I can’t touch any of the growth hormones secretagogues.
Growth hormone secretagogues, lots of big words there. Growth hormone, we know that we all produce growth hormone. We need it to grow and to repair and to recover. The word secretagogues means it’s going to make something secrete.
There’s a class of peptides that will induce the body to produce and to release growth hormone, which is really cool because as we age, very often, our growth hormone production declines to the point where it gets in the way of us recovering from our workouts or healing from injuries and whatnot. These compounds when they’re reintroduced into the body will get the signaling in the brain to produce and release growth hormone.
Very cool because it’s great for sleep. It’s great for repair. It’s great for recovery. Myself and actually many other people, we use them for a little while and everything’s really great and our sleep scores are phenomenal and we look wake up in the morning feeling great, may get a little bit leaner. We’re recovering from our workouts better.
The skin starts to look really good and then you look down and you go, wow. I guess I must have a mosquito or a spider in my bed because there’s this bite and it’s super itchy and after a period of time, you realize that, A, the bites are getting bigger, and B, they’re shockingly lined up with the last place that you administered the [chuckles] grow hormone secretagogue. It’s your immune system saying, No, we don’t like that. Sometimes it can happen with certain peptides and certain people where their immune system develops antibodies to it and it becomes a no-go.
The other thing to know about peptides is, as much as they are native and the body recognizes them, they’re incredibly powerful. There’s a peptide called oxytocin, which many people are familiar with as a feel-good, bonding hormone. It can be used in high doses to induce labor and women, but also, in smaller doses, it can be used as an anabolic compound, post-workout. It’s pretty neat. Nobody’s turning into Arnold Schwartzenegger from this, I’m just putting it out there. I heard about this and I was like, oh, my God, this is amazing so I ran out and I got my oxytocin.
Ari: Actually, I haven’t heard of oxytocin having anabolic effects. This is new to me.
Nathalie: It can help with bone density and lean mass and what you do is one might consider using it right after a workout. Oxytocin’s interesting because you can either administrate it subcutaneously, as we talked about, or you can use it intranasally. People will sometimes use it– People who are very shy. For some people, they find that if they use it intranasally before social gathering, it helps them to relax a little bit. Doesn’t do that for everyone but the point of this story is to illustrate just how powerful these compounds are.
We are talking about 70, like in my case, 70 micrograms so we’re talking less than a 10th of a milliliter that is administered into the belly area. Within about 30 seconds, you have a head rush. You feel this pressure in your head. Your ears start to get hot. Your face starts to get hot. How crazy is it that the teensiest little drop of this substance introduced into the fat in your belly inside of a minute can produce a systemic effect like that?
I often will tell this story because I believe that a lot of biohackers are out there saying, Ooh, I heard about this peptide. I’m going to use this now and I’m like, what? You got to have a little respect for these [ chuckles] things because they’re powerful. They’re tiny and they’re mighty and we’re learning more about them all the time and we only get one body so go slow and do your homework.
Bioregulating peptides
Ari: Thank you for that. We’ve got this whole category of peptides. We’ve got thousands of them in our body and we now have access to manmade peptides that, in many cases, mimic the ones that are naturally occurring that we can use to amplify certain physiological mechanisms or functions. To name some of those you mentioned growth hormone, you mentioned oxytocin. There are BPC-157 and TB4 for speeding up tissue healing. There are some brain peptides. There are a number of others.
One of the most interesting categories that I want to talk to you about is bioregulators. This is something that there’s this weird thing where every time I try to look and find evidence for them, there’s very little to find like some of the available search engines, but then there seems to be also books written on the subject, and people referencing hundreds of studies that have been done on these, I think mostly out of Russia. Tell me about bioregulators and what that category is all about and what it’s designed to do in the body.
Nathalie: Bioregulators, I think they’re catching the attention of a lot of people and, frankly, they’ve been being studied, as you say, in Russia for the last 40 years. They’re nothing new except they’re new to us, and so, as we said earlier, they are the tiniest of the peptides. They’re only two to four amino acids long and that gives them privileges.
One of the books, actually, that you’re referring to, refers to bioregulators as epigenetic switches and that’s exactly what they are.
An epigenetic switch by definition is something that effect, the expression of your DNA, and a bioregulator peptide when it’s introduced into the body will make its way, it’ll cross the cellular membrane. It’ll cross the nuclear membrane into your nucleus, which is where your DNA lives. It’ll bind to the DNA and it’ll upregulate the expression of different proteins and whatnot.
Ari: Distinguish that from non-bioregulator peptides.
Nathalie: Some of them do influence genes, but generally speaking, they bind to receptors. They’re not necessarily honing in on the DNA. There’s the whole other category in class, if you will, of mechanisms of action of the other peptides. Whereas these ones are very specific to DNA and they’re really tiny. The interesting thing about these also is that without fail, they are modulatory. That means that they will never push you into overdrive. They will never suppress function. They only seek their gig, their role, if you will, is to get the body to homeostasis, to balance.
The best example of this is there’s a bioregulator for the thyroid gland. You can administer this bioregulator to someone who’s either hyperthyroid or hypothyroid. In either case, what it’ll look to do is to normalize thyroid function. There’s not a whole lot of compounds in the world that you can just throw at the body and the body’s going to know what to do with it. You don’t have a risk of, oh, we could go too far one way or the other. I mean, BPC-157 has a bit of those property. BPC-157, in certain studies on animals, was shown to normalize blood pressure.
Again, bring it back to where it needs to be, but the bioregulators, without fail, seek to restore homeostasis. You’re never going to become a superhuman necessarily using a bioregulator, but what you’re going to try and do is mitigate the wear and tear on your body as you age so that you just keep bringing it back up.
Ari: You’re going to mitigate the side effects from all the other more crazy stuff you’re doing to become superhuman. [chuckles]
Nathalie: Hopefully, [chuckles] we hope we hope. Lots of other interesting little tidbits of information about bio-regulators is where do they come from? We can take bio regulators orally, the oral bio-regulators are sourced from animals and they’re sourced from those tissues, glands, and organs in the animals that they will target in you.
If we want to, let’s say, target the pineal gland, which is that little pine cone-shaped gland in your brain that regulates your circadian cycle. It regulates melatonin production. It happens to be the master endocrine regulator in the body. Also, it helps to restore telomere length, some really cool effects there.
That’s going to come from pineal glands of caps. Where I was going with that is that, when we look at the carnivore community and in some of the cases, some of the really transformative benefits that people have seen, usually it’s people who are eating true nose to tail or they’re consuming those, the supplements of desiccated organs and this is old medicine.
Ari: This idea has been around for a long time. I think largely in the naturopathic tradition, there’s this idea of using glands, using the adrenal gland or thymus gland or specific glandular tissues from cows or pigs with the idea that it helps heal those glands in us.
I have always been very skeptical of this claim because there was no apparent plausible mechanism by which that could be true under the assumption that all of those compounds will be digested and broken down to amino acids, but what we now know is that not all the proteins that we consume are broken down into individual amino acids. In many cases, they’re broken down into short peptide fragments. What we now know is that many of these short peptide fragments are physiologically active in that unique peptide configuration. Now, there’s a plausible mechanism for how that could be true.
Nathalie: Exactly. It’s being proven. The bio-regulator supplement, if you will, takes it one step further so they’ve now purified and concentrated it. It’s a little bit like you’re going to get vitamin C from orange, but you’re going to get a lot more vitamin C in a capsule.
Nathalie’s thoughts on the Carnivore Diet as it pertains to health
Ari: Just to be clear, going back to the carnivore thing. There’s no plausible mechanism by which consuming broccoli might negate the effect of some of those peptides, is there?
Nathalie: Not that I’m aware of?
Ari: I’m going to say no.
Nathalie: No, not that I’m aware of. Listen, I think carnivore is a great intervention, personally. It can be for some people but it’s not necessarily– I’m not fully in on the all carnivore all the time is optimal.
Ari: I’m much more critical of it than you. That was very charitable though. I do think that it’s possible that people can notice short-term benefits from it, where they often conclude that it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, usually before they notice the longer-term harms of it.
Nathalie: I’m kind of with you. I just think there are some interesting case studies out there of people who’ve made it work for them for quite a long time. We both probably know who they are, but I also think there’s bio-individuality at play here who knows what it is about those people, their genetics, and that it just works for them, but it’s definitely not– I don’t buy it as a panacea for the whole world, personally, but I love my steak. [chuckles]
Ari: I think, for me, no more than I see people who have been on a long-term potato-only diet, as you know, and improved loss weight and improve their metabolic health as evidence that eating only potatoes is the best human diet. There are lots of examples of extreme diets that one could have and you could cite anecdotes of great improvements in metabolic health. I think we have to be wary of then concluding that each one of those diets of raw vegan diets to potato-only diets to meat-only diets is the best way to eat.
Nathalie: I’m with you. No argument there.
Ari: We’ll get back to peptides.
Nathalie: Go back to peptides. [chuckles]
What research tells us on bioregulating peptides
Ari: On the topic of bio-regulators, what are some of the most compelling studies you’ve seen or evidence on specific bioregulators in terms of the effects that they’ve had?
Nathalie: Some of the most compelling studies have come out, certainly have come out of Russia. There are a couple of studies that the interesting, some of the many interesting things about Dr. Khavinson or Professor Khavinson is that when the Russian military approached him to develop this whole area, if you will, of medicine or regenerative medicine, if you will, it was really born out of the fact that they had their submarine operators and military guys coming back from places and cosmonauts, they were aged, they were falling apart. They’d sustained a lot of damage from what they were being exposed to being radiation and that kind of stuff.
They came to him, this young promising doctor in the military, and said, Hey, you have like [unintelligible 00:26:35]. You have as much money as you want. If you need subjects to do experiments on, we’ve got like factories full of people who are living miserable lives, you can test stuff out on them, within reason, I’m sure. When Khavinson went about doing his work and he did his first work on animals, and he did a lot of computer modeling and all the stuff that he did, when he came time to practice on people, he had access to large communities of people that he could run.
He could basically say you guys, they were double-blind studies. Half the people were getting bioregulators. The other half of the people were getting vitamins. Without fail the people, getting the bio-regulators always did better than the people getting vitamins. There are a couple of very slightly smaller studies. There’s one he did on, I think it was 266 elderly people. By elderly, we were talking, I think they were 65 to 75-year-olds. All he did is he gave them Epitalon.
The cool thing is this was an eight-year study. All they did and nobody changed their lifestyle, nobody changed anything about what they were doing, they were just taking these vitamins and they took the vitamins. I believe it was either two or I think it was only two years, maybe three–
Ari: Take taking these vitamins, do you mean [crosstalk]?
Nathalie: Half were taking vitamins and the other half were taking bioregulators. He was able to show that at the end of eight years, the bioregulator crew had, I think it was 30% less all-cause mortality than the other guys. They had better immunity. Their immune system was better. First of all, it upgraded their immune system.
Epitalon is they were getting. The only thing they were getting was Epitalon. When he added Thymulin to it, which is the thymus bioregulator, things got even better. Then he went and he took about– Oh, no, that was the 12-year study. Sorry, because then when he did the 75 to 85-year-old study, that’s when it was only six years because, of course, nobody expected them to live that long anyway.
Again, the number of the all-cause mortality was a fraction in the group that got the bioregulators versus the group that got the vitamins. They slept better. They had better bone density. They had a better quality of life. Their immune function was far and above better. Is it because they had longer telomeres? Unlikely. I think you know as well as I do, the relationship between telomeres and longevity hasn’t fully been elucidated. Obviously, having super short telomeres is not a good strategy, but having long telomeres isn’t a guarantee either. There’s something there. We haven’t pinned it down yet. Those two studies were incredibly important.
Some of the other studies he did, he did some rat studies where they took, and again, you need– I don’t have a research lab, but apparently, research rats are super expensive. He did some studies on rats. He had male rats and female rats, exposed them to 24/7 light. These are rats that are prone to develop tumors. In the rats, getting the Epitalon, the male rats would develop, I think it was leukemia, whereas the female rats would develop mammary tumors.
In both cases, the rats getting the Epitalon did way better. They had lower mortality and/or they had smaller or fewer tumors. If you go on PubMed, it’s like anything else. You just have to know the question to ask because the studies, a lot of the studies are there and he’s actually still publishing work. Still, to this day, identifying new bioregulator peptides.
[unintelligible 00:30:35], our mutual friend was telling me the other day that he recently published a paper, and one of the fragments of Thymosin Beta 4, which is one of those peptides over there, he’s identified, he believes is a bioregulator peptide. It’s interesting that Thymosin Beta 4, there’s another study that came out a while ago that showed that it can restore the stemness of cardiac cells. It can help to rejuvenate the heart muscle.
Ari: Very, very interesting. Have you personally experimented with bioregulators and if so, what are some of the ones that you notice the biggest effects from or the most noticeable effects?
Nathalie: That’s a good question. I will tell you that I’m part of a clinical trial where I’m using anywhere from eight to nine bioregulators a month. I’m cycling through these things all the time. One of the big differences between bioregulators and peptides is very often, when you’re using a peptide it’s for I’m trying to fix this. I have a sore back. I pulled a muscle. I’ve got an injury I’m trying to fix. When we use the peptide, we experience the benefit usually within a month, sometimes within days.
With the bioregulators, it tends to be much more subtle. I can’t tell you that when I’m taking the kidney bioregulator, oh, my kidneys feel so much better or the liver [chuckles] bioregulator but where we see it sometimes is in people who really have an imbalance that they’re trying to fix. This is where the Facebook community that you just recently joined is a bit of a gift to me because it is a living lab.
We have over 12,000 people, many of whom are using different bioregulators. Every once in a while you hear from people. As a matter of fact, one of the people on my team is a young woman who’d not had a cycle in almost a year. She was doing all kinds of different things. She was working with a practitioner to figure it out. They were stuck. She started taking Epitalon and then she added the ovarian bioregulator. I would say within a month, her cycle came back.
Ari: Wow.
Nathalie: Now, before everybody runs out, stampedes to the store, [chuckles] just to be clear–
Ari: I’m just to be clear, I’m going to be the one stampeding to the store to get my cycle back.
Nathalie: I can see it in your eyes. It’s like, “Oh, my God, I can get my cycle back.” If you read the literature also, in her case, it was what was needed. It was the final piece that was needed to move the needle. I’ve had women in the group also with overactive bladders who will use the bladder bioregulator and they find that things start to improve.
There’s different ways of using bioregulators. One way of using bioregulators is as a stopgap. You’re just using it a couple of times a year. Two or three times a year, you’ll do a cycle just to make up for those deficiencies that build up over time naturally or bioregulators can also be used in a more therapeutic sense.
In that case, they’re used with more intention. They’re used for a longer period of time. They’re used in different types of cycles, but they’re also combined with all of the other things you’re going to bring to bear, to [unintelligible 00:34:14] restore balance to that area.
If I’m working on thyroid, I’m going to make sure that my diet is not destroying my thyroid. I’m going to make sure that I’ve got enough iodine in my system, that I’m not exposed to chlorine and fluoride, and all the other things that are going to displace the iodine. Then make sure I’m not deficient in selenium. I’m going to check on those thyroid antibodies. The bioregulators are amazing, but you still have to do all the work around them to make it happen.
Ari: Of course, yes.
Nathalie: There are a couple of immune bioregulators that they talk about, will help to restore the health to the immune system after cancer therapies, for example. Now, what we know, the cancer, the radiation, or what have you has taken a huge toll on your system. If we can have access to these bioregulators that can help to restore that function, can we maybe help to improve people’s long-term outlook?
Ari: Very interesting. There are several categories or types of these bioregulators. We have, as you mentioned briefly there, there’s some for the thyroid, there’s pineal gland bioregulators, there’s kidney, I think liver and–
Nathalie: There’s heart.
Ari: A number of others. Yes, heart.
Nathalie: Heart, blood vessel, thymus, liver, pancreas, kidney, testes, prostate, ovaries, adrenals, bone marrow, muscle, cartilage. Cartilage is really interesting. Cartilage is one of my favorites only because when I read about this, I was like, oh, of course. Cartilage upregulates the production of collagen and elastin. We think of a cartilage,
Oh, it’s going to be good for my joints. It’s also really good for my skin, but it’s also really important for my heart and my kidneys and all the other organs that have to have flex because they also rely on collagen and elastin.
It’s just when you start to dig into them a little bit, it’s just really interesting how, although they’re very specific, they have wide-ranging effects on the body. Epitalon, which we think of for the pineal gland, there’s actually receptors for Epitalon also in the thymus gland.
Ari: Interesting.
Nathalie: It’s really cool that it’s very specific to that pineal gland, but it has a real effect on immunity as well.
Ari: Very interesting. Given that there’s, whatever, 15 or–
Nathalie: 21. There’s over 20.
Ari: Of these different compounds and it can be expensive to use, let’s say, all of them. Let’s say if somebody was inclined to use all of them, let’s say, every month, this–
Nathalie: But you’re not to use all 21 every month but, yes. [chuckles]
Ari: There are probably some people out there, and I might be in this personality type too, who wants to do everything possible to optimize–
Nathalie: Bring it.
The best guideline to using peptides
Ari: How would one go about figuring out how to do a routine, which ones to choose and how often to use them?
Nathalie: The bad news is there’s no manual of how to establish bioregulator protocols. I would say that the researcher who’s running the clinical trial that I’m involved in is probably as close to that as anybody. Right now he’s not sharing. Having said that–
Ari: We’re all shit out of luck, huh?
Nathalie: We’re not. I’ve been working with the bioregulators for a while, for a couple of years now, and I’ve started to figure out, run protocols for people. Where I shy away is in someone who has a real disease or real imbalances going on.
I’m not going to say, oh yes, we can fix that with bioregulators, [chuckles] have no fear. When it comes to thinking about restoring function in the body, what my approach is, is to look at where are your strengths and weaknesses, if you will. We may lean into certain areas more than others, but generally speaking, over the course of 12 months, you might cycle through most of the bioregulators.
Some of them you’re going to use for 3 or 4 months over that 12 months and others you might use for 6 or 8 months. Let’s say you did your biological age test and you found out your telomere length is not really where it needs to be for your age group.
This is in a world where we’re looking at our chronological to our biological age. If we’re tracking ahead, this is the race you don’t want to be winning. You want to be slow. You want to be the tortoise here. You do not want to be the rabbit. If you’re in accelerated aging, we want to slow that down. We want to restore telomere length.
We know we’re going to be using Epitalon a whole bunch of times through the year. We’re going to lean into that. Let’s say somebody’s got issues with their bladder, we might repeat that bladder bioregulator more often, than we might, for someone who’s never had an issue with their bladder.
We’re not going to expect that someone who’s taking thyroid medication is miraculously going to come off that thyroid medication. Sometimes, in some cases, if the timing is right, if there’s enough health left in the gland and they’re doing everything else right, you might see someone who suddenly is able to reduce their medication, but we don’t know going in that that’s going to be an outcome that we can expect, at least not with the insight that we have right now.
Ari: Are there rough guidelines about how many one should use at once or what would be considered overkill?
Nathalie: Certainly, what I’ve seen in the work that I’ve seen is usually like three or four at a time. The way that it generally works is you would do the way I like to do it with people is I like to start people with almost like an induction period. A 30-day run, especially when we’re working on a system that needs a little bit more support. We might start with a 30-day run, but a typical cycle of a bioregulator when we’re talking maintenance or even if we’re talking therapeutic but we’re doing it over time is we’re going 10 days a month.
The logic behind that, if you think about it makes sense, the body responds really well to pulses. It does that in so many ways. There are so many reasons why you don’t want to chronically be pushing on that receptor over and over and over again. It’s a 10-day on, 20-day off, 10-day on. What we might do is we might cycle, for me, if I’m using nine bioregulators in a month, I’ll be doing 3 for the first 10 days, 3 for the next 10 days, and 3
for the 10 days after that.
Ari: That was going to be my next question is if it’s better to use all of them during one specific 10 days and take 20 days off from everything or?
Nathalie: Yes, no, think about it this way. You’re giving the stimulus to different parts of the body to do the work at different times.
Ari: Got it.
Nathalie: For something with Epitalon, you asked earlier about seeing results. Epitalon can be used really effectively, sometimes for people with disrupted circadian cycles or even for insomnia, there are some studies that show. I don’t know how many other things they’re throwing at people, but we know, you and I both know, that if somebody’s taking Epitalon hoping to fix their circadian cycle and they’re staying up at night and they’re sleeping in the morning and they’re not exposing themselves to natural light and they’re not stopping their food at the right time and starting to eat at the right time, you have to lean into it. You have to do all the things.
Ari: Of course.
Nathalie: So that this thing can now [snaps] flip the switch.
Ari: What about, there’s another compound that I know you’re a big fan of that I think that there’s some debate over whether it’s in the bioregulator category or not, and that is GHK. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Nathalie: GHK is a great peptide. I’m hoping that I get to meet Dr. Khavinson at the end of September. I’m going to be at a conference that he’s speaking at. You and I both know, whatever it takes, I’ll put a tablecloth over my head and cycle up to him when he is not watching and say, “Hey.” [chuckles] Whatever I need to do. I don’t know what his criteria are for what is a bioregulator and what is not because on paper, GHK sure looks like a bioregulator. It’s only three amino acids.
Ari: It affects DNA.
Nathalie: It affects DNA, but the thing with GHK, is it affects 1,000 genes. It’s like busy, busy bee running up and down the DNA flipping genes on and off. It’s a bit nutty. It’s like– What’s the word I’m looking for? The overachiever [chuckles] It’s like, it doesn’t stop at four or five genes. It’s like, “Ooh, look at all these things. I can flip all these switches.”
Ari: Basically, what you’re saying is, look GHK, you do a little bit too much as far as turning on too many genes. We don’t know if we’re going to call you a bioregulator or not?
Nathalie: What I’m saying is I don’t know what Prof. Khavinson’s criteria is. I don’t know if it’s not a bioregulator because he didn’t discover it [chuckles] or if it’s not a bioregulator, [chuckles] you know?
Ari: This is one of the few that he didn’t discover. It was what? Some guy named-
Nathalie: Loren.
Ari: -Loren something.
Nathalie: Loren Pickart.
Ari: Yes.
Nathalie: In 1973, who’s got a really cool site called reverseskinaging.com because, of course, GHK, what’s best known for is for skin but the truth of the matter is, that GHK-Cu, right? It’s GHK, it needs copper to be activated, is incredible for wound healing. It has immune benefits. Every time I find something on GHK and I read about it, I’m like, it does that too? Oh, my God, it does that. It’s unknown, still. It needs to be studied and studied and studied some more.
Ari: Got it. Are there any other compounds, peptides, that you think we didn’t cover adequately that are worth mentioning here?
Nathalie: Sure. Tons, but I think that–
Ari: I mean in the bioregulator category.
Natalie: I think in the bioregulator world if you had to pick one, you would pick– I mean, if I had to pick one, I would pick Epitalon hands down every time. It’s anti-tumorigenic, which I probably didn’t say earlier, it’s master endocrine regulator. It normalizes your melatonin production so you’re going to sleep better. You’re going to recover faster. Melatonin, we know, is much more than a sleep hormone. It’s got 1,000 different uses that we still don’t know. That would be the one, but when we look at the literature, there are 3 bioregulators that are really at the center of almost any protocol.
That would be Epitalon being the pineal bioregulator, the thymus bioregulator because thymus being the seat of your immune system really, other than the gut, but that’s different. Then the blood vessel bioregulator. The blood vessel bioregulator, if you can restore function and flexibility and integrity to your blood vessels, both on a macro and a micro level, that means you’re able to bring nutrients to and remove waste products at a cellular level. Everything’s going to get better from that.
Ari: Those three you would use as a base stack, regardless of somebody’s specific needs or priorities, and you would use those may be the most times per year?
Nathalie: Probably, I just make sure, and then when I think about it, somebody comes, and let’s say, they’re being treated for cardiovascular issues. Their heart’s not the best or they have blood pressure issues, whatever the case may be. I’m sitting there going, I’m thinking of the system, and I’m like the blood vessels are going to be really important here. The heart’s going to be really important and the kidneys are going to be important. We start to think in systems a little bit.
The other thing I think that would be good for your audience to know on the bioregulator front, is there are different methods of administration. We have the oral bioregulator, which we can get in capsule form, which are actual extracts from those tissues, glands, and organs. Vegans need not apply because, yes, it came from an animal. Putting it out there. The advantage of the oral bioregulator is that there are probably other cofactors in addition to those bioregulator peptides in those capsules. Typically, we talk about the oral bioregulator taking longer to act, but having a longer runway of action. It lasts longer.
There are then the synthetic bioregulators. This is in the case where scientists have identified and isolated that two to four amino acid chain and it can now be recreated in a lab. Those could be administered either by subcutaneous injection or increasingly, we’re seeing them being produced as [unintelligible 00:47:57] sprays, and some people are even using them as intranasal. I’m more skeptical on that front.
Ari: Do you have a preference on oral versus sublingual?
Nathalie: Oral versus synthetic?
Ari: Are all the sublingual synthetic or some of them are–
Nathalie: They’re always synthetic. The oral is always going to be the extract and the synthetic is always– One thing that I learned this summer is that in Russia at the Institute of Bioregulation and Gerontology, they will use the synthetic bio regulator first in people who have a lot of autoimmune issues. That’s because there’s just less for them to react to and they’re faster acting. You’re going to get a faster pickup. You’re getting a faster impact if you will, and then they’ll finish them off. Then after they’ve done their first couple of months with a synthetic, they will then move over to the biologic.
Ari: Got it.
Nathalie: There are just different ways of using them.
How to find the best peptide for our needs
Ari: My last question to you is about questions. It is about your least favorite question. I’ve seen it asked a number of times in your Facebook group and I know you hate getting asked this question. It is, is there a peptide for blank?
Nathalie: Ah, [chuckles] Is there a peptide for what?
Ari: Is there a peptide for blank issue? Why is this your least favorite question?
Nathalie: It’s my pep peeve question. It’s like my desert island peptides and my pep peeve question because if you don’t know what’s driving the issue, we don’t know what the peptide is, what peptide you need for it. Think about it. Your issue, 99% of the time, is a symptom. It’s an expression of a problem. It’s an expression of a pathway that’s not working properly or an injury that’s being done to the body, and so, if we don’t know where it’s coming from, it’s hard to know what peptide can help.
The possible exception to that rule is, is there a peptide for leaky gut, for healing the gut? Yes, BPC-157, it gets special dispensation in so many ways, that peptide. It’s one of those peptides that sometimes can help people to feel better before they’ve even started to do what needs to be done to finish the job, but there aren’t a lot of peptides like that and it’s not always the case.
Of course, you know as well as I do, you’re going to get better results if you stop drinking alcohol and eating crappy food and sitting at your desk, inhaling without chewing, super stressed, doing all the crazy things that are driving the problem in the first place, stop doing those, use the BPC, add in some glutamine, some zinc, maybe some tributyrate, throw in some stuff that’s going to help to heal and all of a sudden, guess what? The magic is really going to happen and it’s going to happen fast.
Ari: Beautiful. Last is just where can people find you and learn more about the work you’re doing and are there any resources or places you want to direct people towards?
Nathalie: Thank you for that. The Facebook group which I’m on the cusp of pulling the trigger on– I’m not going to move it off Facebook because I learned the hard way a year ago that you can’t move thousands of people anywhere unless they want to be moved.
I am going to be launching a community on a different platform soon. It’s going to cost a little bit of money, but we’re not going to get censored and we’re not going to live under this cloud of possibility that our host one day is not going to be happy with what we’re saying and just shut us down.
Until that day, Optimizing Superhuman Performance is the name of the group on Facebook. If you join that group, I’m in there quite a lot. It is a remarkable community. It’s very, very active. There’s the Biohacking Superhuman Performance podcast which–
Ari: I’ve listened to a number of episodes and I enjoy it.
Nathalie: I’m going to have to have you on it sometime. We’re going to have to [crosstalk].
Ari: I would love to and, yes, I will say there are not many health podcasts that I do listen to and yours is one of the ones that I do listen to. You have always very unique guests on and I enjoy your commentary and the questions that you ask, the insights that you bring to it as well.
Nathalie: Thank you. I appreciate that. Then Instagram, look guys, don’t waste your time on Instagram. I publish stuff for the podcast on Instagram. I can’t live my life on Instagram, I try. Every once in a while I throw up a video or something, but I just can’t do it. [laughs]
Ari: I’m with you, by the way, I spend very little time on social media. Follow the podcast and what’s the best place to do that? on iTunes or YouTube or Spotify?
Nathalie: Yes, iTunes, Spotify. It’s also on YouTube if you’re a more visual person. It’s the Biohacking Superhuman Performance podcast. I think I left out a couple of letters of the alphabet there I tried to get them all. Then the Facebook community is Optimizing Superhuman Performance. In the next little while they’ll be either a course or something coming out. I need to sit down long enough to actually do it.
Ari: I know you were working on, I think I remember in one podcast you did recently where you said you were working on some kind of cheat sheet for peptides or something like that. is still in the works? You’re still going through the volumes, encyclopedic volumes of works on peptides to compile?
Nathalie: I think I’m going to do it for bioregulators, honestly. I think I’m going to start with bioregulators because there’s lots of stuff out there on peptides, although I’m sure I could do one too. What’s happened is I’ve recently gotten a virtual assistant, and so, we’re just getting up to speed with each other.
I’m not going to lie, I need to be trained as much as he does. I need to be trained to help him to help me kind of thing. He’s got some graphic design ability so I think I’ll try and pull something together in the next little while. When you sign up for my newsletter on my website, you’ll be able to get the bioregulator cheat sheet and that website is natniddam.com.
Ari: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Natalie. It’s been an absolute pleasure and I look forward to our next conversation.
Nathalie: Me too, likewise. Thank you so much, Ari. This has been great.
Show Notes
What are peptides? (05:32)
What do peptides do in the body? (09:49)
Bioregulating peptides (16:48)
Nathalie’s thoughts on the Carnivore Diet as it pertains to health (23:30)
What research tells us on bioregulating peptides (25:30)
The best guideline to using peptides (37:33)
How to find the best peptide for our needs (49:05)
Links
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