Are supplements the key to health and longevity?
Today we find out as we interview
Sandra Kaufmann MD, author of ‘The Kaufmann Protocol’. Dr. Kaufmann began her academic career in the field of cellular biology, earning a Master’s Degree from the University of Connecticut and her medical Degree at the University of Maryland,. She completed a residency and fellowship at Johns Hopkins in pediatric anesthesiology. For the last five years she has been the Chief of Pediatric Anesthesia at the Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital, a nationally recognized center of excellence. Most recently, she was recognized as “Best in Medicine” by the American Health Council.
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Robert Lufkin 0:01
Welcome back to the health longevity secrets show I’m Dr. Robert Lufkin are supplements the key to health and longevity. Today, we find out as we interview, Sandra Kaufman, MD, author of The Kauffman protocol, Dr. Kaufmann began her academic career in the field of cellular biology, earning a master’s degree from the University of Connecticut and her medical degree at the University of Maryland. She completed a residency and fellowship at Johns Hopkins in pediatric anesthesiology. For the last five years, she has been Chief of Pediatric anesthesia at the Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital, a nationally recognized Center of Excellence. Most recently, she was recognized as best in medicine by the American Health Council. Now, please enjoy this interval interview with Sandra coffin MD. Hey, Sandra, welcome to the show.
Sandra Kaufman 1:02
Great to be here. Thank you.
Robert Lufkin 1:04
I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us. Especially during this time of COVID. I realize in your practice, you’re really in the trenches there. And we had to reschedule this interview once before, so we do appreciate it.
Sandra Kaufman 1:21
Well, I appreciate your generosity. In fact, I was in the car last night with a kid that had COVID. So it is it is alive and well in Florida, unfortunately, but hopefully we’ll get a handle on it soon.
Robert Lufkin 1:31
So message to everyone get their vaccines. Oh, 100%.
Sandra Kaufman 1:34
Yes.
Robert Lufkin 1:37
Yeah, I think there’s no confusion there then. And, and also, at least we didn’t pull you away from an expedition to the base camp of Mount Everest. Yeah, I saw that on one of your other programs. But we’ll talk about that another time. So today, we get to take a deep dive into the Kauffman protocol and understand metabolism and longevity genes and proteins in a way that that I haven’t before. You’re the author of this book, The Kaufmann protocol that I love, I love reading it, the detail is great for understanding these things, even for even for an introductory text. It’s, it’s very good. I think people can learn from it, if they’re willing to take the time to dive into it. But before we dive into this area, maybe you could tell us take a moment to tell us a little bit about your journey from pediatric anesthesiology to being an expert in health and longevity.
Sandra Kaufman 2:59
It’s kind of a crazy trip, I guess. It has more to do with life adventures than anesthesia. I think I was a cell biologist once upon a time before I went to med school. And as my dad pointed out, cells don’t pay bills. So I just became a doctor. Um, I became an anesthesiologist because it was just really interesting in terms of pharmacology and physiology, and how drugs affect people and how people affect drugs. But probably more than anything else. I’m a rock climber and a mountain climber, you refer to Basecamp Everest, and I did I should have gone to the top. I didn’t have that kind of time, cash at the time. But I just went to base camp and it was amazing. And since then I’ve climbed a few other big ones just snuck back from Aiken cogwa, before COVID hits. And I’m sort of waiting for the world to open up. So to continue my adventures. But I was hanging off of a cliff one day, I was probably my mid 40s. And I thought, I’ve got to stop aging, or this whole fund stuff is gonna come to a crashing halt. And it seemed ridiculous at the time people like really, people been trying to cure aging for 3000 years. How in the world am I going to do it? But I did what I always do you dive into reading, and I flipped through a billion plus or minus articles. And I realized that we actually do know why we age and there actually are really amazing things that we can do. But I also realized that it’s kind of chaotic. The scientific world has a zillion theory. And so they’re all over the place. And there was no directionality of sort of how to go about using these things on a practical basis. And so that is sort of the basis of the calcineurin protocol.
Robert Lufkin 4:41
What are the Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. When when I went to medical school aging was was believed to be just sort of the cumulative the accumulation of damage over time, and then our bodies just wore out and we now understand that It’s really not that way. And what what were the big key concepts that that fuel this change in understanding of aging? And what are the new mechanisms of aging as you understand it?
Sandra Kaufman 5:15
So agent, you’re right, my dad was a physician, and I would always say, oh, my gosh, what did that person die? And he said, old age. And I always thought, what does that mean? You know, like, what does it mean? And so, when you look at aging, you can think of it from different perspectives. So in medicine, as you call it, the same training I did, we learned about organ systems, right, you die of kidney failure, or liver failure, or your brain acts up. But in reality, coming from the perspective of a cell biologist, I realized that it’s because your cells don’t age well. And if you specifically look at all the little organelles that we sort of learned about in the fifth grade, this is the really what this is where aging lives. And it lives in all the teeny tiny mechanisms that we kind of have forgotten about, which I now obsess mercilessly over. The good news is I do it, so no one else has to. So my, my seven tenants of aging really revolve around cells and cells only that this can then get extrapolated to the types of tissues that things tend to go wrong in.
Robert Lufkin 6:18
So, so what are what are some of those concepts of aging for the for the cells, if we want to understand it at that level,
Sandra Kaufman 6:26
okay, so this is where your audience is going to get really, really bored. So I’ll try to make this moderately entertaining, because it’s, it’s pretty darn dry. But tenant one has to do with your DNA. The DNA, of course, has all the instructions for what your cell needs to do in it. And things go wrong in your DNA, of course, so everyone knows that your telomeres get shorter. Anytime your cell is under stress, or it replicates, telomeres get shorter, and shorter your telomeres get, the longer or the shorter your life is going to be. It’s a sort of a direct correlation. Secondly, your DNA gets methylated. And all sorts of horrible epigenetic things happen. So it’s methylation, phosphorylation, acetylation. But it’s the study of epigenetic modification, essentially, and all the bad things that you do in your life accumulate as crap, pardon my lingo all over your DNA causing it sort of malfunction. The other thing that happens to your DNA is it gets attacked by the outside world, free radicals attack your DNA glucose attached your DNA. So the third thing in this category, that sort of important is protection of your DNA. And we can talk about a few things later that actually do that. So that’s tenet. One.
Robert Lufkin 7:33
Yeah, we our audience has had some exposure to DNA. telomerase. So we’ve had Elizabeth Parrish on the show, who does gene therapy for telomerase reverse transcriptase. So they’ve heard a little bit about that. And then epigenetic modifications, we we we have had or will be hearing from Kara Fitzgerald, who’s doing her work to show DNA methylation clock reversal with lifestyle changes, and, and and some others. So they, we have had some exposure to that. But thank you.
Sandra Kaufman 8:11
Yeah, but the idea is, and I love these people, because they are amazingly brilliant. I love Liz, in their silos of expertise. And I was getting to the wars are like, Oh, aging is this. And I always say, well, aging is partly that, but it’s also C, D, E, and F. So this is sort of what I do. I take all of these things and organize them together. So they’re absolutely correct and what they’re saying, I just think it’s not complete. And that that’s basically tenant one. So tenant two has to do with energy of your cells. If you don’t have energy, you’re not going to be able to do anything. So this is of course, is the mitochondria. Mitochondria fail for many reasons. But the big ones are, number one, most people by the age of 40 are nicotine amide deficient. So there’s a big war right now between nicotinamide riboside and mononucleotide is everyone does it supplementing your na D levels is going to help yourselves. The other thing that happens in your mitochondria, of course, is oxidative damage. And your body makes free radical scavengers. But of course, over time, we don’t make enough. And then our DNA sort of succumbs to time, damage from these little tiny micro biomes is like all so we need to keep our mitochondria as healthy as possible. Otherwise, our cells just fail. And mitochondrial failure is one of the big reasons that women go into menopause, which clearly not your problem, but it’s probably mine and many other women’s out there and the longer you can keep your mitochondria up to snuff, the less likely you are to have to deal with that sort of issue. So that’s really quite important. Tenet three is what I call pathways. And these are pathways
Robert Lufkin 9:48
to excuse me, so attended to his his energy to a lot of the Dave Sinclair things about sirtuins and nada. So, we’re gonna get practice of doing
Sandra Kaufman 10:01
this three, two is mitochondria. And the reason you’re making that jump is because any day of course is essential in your electron transport chain. But it is also a necessary cofactor for sirtuin activation. And it is amazingly important. So though it does those two things, it says other things as well as a communication device in your cell that tells your nucleus what your mitochondria is doing. And the molecule is also taken apart and used for DNA repair. So if you have a big hole in your DNA, your body takes the energy molecule and pieces chunks it glues part of it back in like like a piece of construction work. So essentially, the older you get, the more and ad you need, and the less you have available. So a whole lot of systems fail with an ad shortage, which is why it’s always in the headlines. He says, and you’re right. David Sinclair is huge in this area.
Robert Lufkin 10:52
Hmm, okay, so. So now we’re switching to problem three, which is metabolic pathways.
Sandra Kaufman 11:00
That is correct. There are many, many, many pathways that are related to aging. I like to classify them as the big three. And people are going to get on your show and argue that okay, I left a few out and they’re right. But I can’t have everything everything all the time. But the big three are number one, the sirtuins. There are 7 million sirtuins. And as I said before, they are an ad dependent. And of course, they keep you young, and they get turned off over time, which is actually an epigenetic problem, which demonstrates that all of this is very interrelated. I like to tell people, I disconnect all of these things, pretending that they’re not related. But in reality, it’s a mishmash Venn diagram sort of thing. But to keep them separate back to sirtuins, there are seven of them. And they control a whole lot of things in your body, everything from how your mitochondria function to brown fat versus whites that too. Oh my gosh, the list is endless. But anything when you think about aging is basically controlled by your surveillance. So that’s really important. The second one in this category, of course, is a MP kinase. And this is a measure of how much energy your cell has, right? There’s the ratio of a MP to ATP ATP, of course, adenosine triphosphate that everyone knows about a MP two finger triphosphates run outs, you only have one, so it’s monophosphate to triphosphate. So when your energy is perceived as being low, the cell changes its metabolism puts itself in a state of hibernation, and it encourages longevity. And the cool thing about this is this is why all of the caloric restriction diets work. Because as soon as you limit energy cells, it turns on the anti kinase and the whole system gets activated. So people love restriction diets. I can’t do it myself, because I’m too much. I can’t do it. Um, that being said, a lot of people have fantastic results. And I’m sure you’ve got some dieticians on there talking about how to do it and when to do it and all the sort of intricate details, but that’s not my thing.
Robert Lufkin 12:56
Yeah, the, for the people in our program, at least our speakers, there seems to be a consistent agreement that, you know, sirtuin sirtuins and tour and ANP kinase are the three at least major gene protein ones. And like you say, it’s interesting. They have many functions, but a prominent one is nutrient sensing and regulating that metabolic switch from ketosis to glucose metabolism back and forth. Well, we can get we’ll get we’ll return to that a little bit later. Why don’t you continue.
Sandra Kaufman 13:28
So as you said, the last big one in this free, of course, is the mTOR system. And this is a bit backwards compared to the other ones. So the other ones since nutrients and stop moving. mTOR just keeps building. It’s sort of like the youthful pathway. And unfortunately, cells don’t always want to be pushed to be youthful as they get older because they just can’t do it. So it forces cells to hypertrophy anomalously, it can cause high blood pressure and cause a whole lot of problems. So in a sense, we kind of want to turn the mTOR pathway off as we get older, which leads us of course, to the controversial discussion of rapamycin, which some people love and adore, and I think comes at a cost that maybe you have to sort of understand before you undertake such therapy. Because rapamycin, basically, it’s an immunosuppressant and it turns and stops fast turnover cells, which is fantastic. If you look at Mycenae and Rodin’s on rapamycin, it really does slow down aging, the codes are better, the activity levels better, all sorts of things are better. However, it does lead to sarcopenia because your muscle cells aren’t turning over, and it leads to hippocampal loss. So memories suffer significantly. And so that is just something people need to consider when they’re determining whether or not they want to take the rapamycin
Robert Lufkin 14:48
or those hippocampal volume loss. Is that determined from MRIs of patients that are taking rapamycin for organ rejection suppression. So you
Sandra Kaufman 14:59
can see in all sorts of types of studies, um, the biggest thing that you actually see is if you give it to rodents, and everyone’s gonna argue what we’re not a rodent, but there’s probably six or seven different types of memory that they can test for, and they’re all negatively affected by rapamycin. So it’s clinical as well as physical.
Robert Lufkin 15:18
Hmm, interesting. And there’s always that, that the question about the dosage, you know, the clinical Oregon expression dose is much higher and continuous than the ban, the longevity dose, which is again, an off label FDA use, which we’re not advocating about, we’ve had other speakers discussing it. And then they they give sort of a pulsed pulse dose type approach. But
Sandra Kaufman 15:46
well, I sort of think that partial mTOR inhibition is very useful. And I think one has to be very careful with it. The good news is that a lot of the other things that people use are in fact, partial mTOR inhibitors. So Metformin, I’m a huge fan of, and it’s a partial mTOR inhibitor. So I think a reasonable dose of metformin can actually cover for you’re not taking rapamycin. But again, not everyone’s gonna have a differing opinion on this, and we don’t really know for sure.
Robert Lufkin 16:15
Yeah, yeah. And, and we can get to this later, but the issue is monitoring response. And with the longevity treatment, what are your endpoints if you can’t actually measure longevity, but let’s, let’s set that aside, we can come back to that. And so we just done number three, then number four would be the quality problems with DNA repair.
Sandra Kaufman 16:44
That is correct. So quality control. And for people that are sort of following along, this is based on a factory model. So if things seem sort of factory, like, that’s what this is. So in my world, you have to check your widgets. So in cells, there are 10 to the fifth of a lot DNA errors per cell per day. And we have very specific DNA repair mechanisms, which of course, fail over time. And plus DNA damage actually goes up over time. So the ability to fix it fails and says cells malfunction. What’s really amazing is there actually are agents out there that increase our DNA repair mechanisms. So that’s sort of why is listed. There’s also protein failure is cells. One and only job is to make proteins. As far as I’m concerned, the little protein factories game, when they start putting out widgets that don’t work or you know, proteins that are non functional, we need to either stop the production, fix it, etc. And that’s all doable. With supplements. The other thing I put in this category is autophagy. I think recycling is sort of falls into the category of quality control. And we all know that autophagy is extraordinarily important in terms of turnover of organelles, to make the cell more efficient over time. Yeah, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Go ahead. I shouldn’t say the big one in this category, just so I get it thrown in there, of course, is spermidine. Probably the strongest autophagy stimulator that we have.
Robert Lufkin 18:10
Yeah, yeah. Go ahead. I’m hold my comment for later on, on a toffee G. We can come back to that. Yeah.
Sandra Kaufman 18:18
Anyway, so let’s see that we are on five now. Yeah, inflammatory issues. So right. So this is your immune system. And your immune system is amazingly helpful when you are younger, but it fails over time, leading to systemic inflammation. So people don’t necessarily think these two things are connected, but they are just two ends of the spectrum. So by the time you get older, your immune system fails, your ability to make have responses to vaccines, for example, fails, which is what we’re seeing now needing the third dose. And the chronic inflammation that your body is put in is overwhelming. And this leads to so many breakdown things around the body. All the itis is my back hurts. Every itis all the like the bone problems this that the other neuro inflammation, etc. It’s all related to a rise in your inflammatory system, which the good news is we can sort of turn off as well. So that is where we are. That’s five
Robert Lufkin 19:16
oh, yeah, it’s interesting that that aging and some of the underlying metabolic processes associated with with that are now linked to diseases that in the past, you know, like arthritis, which just sort of in one point was thought of as kind of a wear and tear disease general osteoarthritis but now it’s seen as an inflammatory condition that has roots in metabolic disease and these longevity genetic processes. Oh, without
Sandra Kaufman 19:49
a doubt, it’s really amazing. In fact, the people that made these names are really bright and whenever I look up some it says itis at the end of course, you know, it’s it’s it’s an inflammatory problem. And when you measure the cytokine ends and all the interleukins they’re all elevated. And as soon as you put someone on a program to reduce those things, they’re all the inflammation is go down, and people just feel so much better. So one of the things about all of this is that people frequently say, Well, I don’t really want to live forever. And my response is, Well, how about we just live better? Right? So if we can just sort of make disease better longevity sort of comes along with that. And as physicians, that’s sort of our job, right? Preventative Medicine, understanding disease, and just making people’s lives better. So I think that’s just sort of an important piece to throw in there.
Robert Lufkin 20:38
And and aging is the single greatest risk factor for most of the chronic diseases, we we have increased age and so if you can control the aging mechanisms, then these chronic diseases would, would decrease in incidence, hopefully,
Sandra Kaufman 20:57
although a very obnoxious friend of mine always points out that the greatest risk factor for death is birth. Now help that one. Anyway, so let’s see kind of six I call individual cell requirements. And the reason I throw this in there, my factory model, this, of course, is the personnel. And they’re very different, right? There’s the summer employee that comes in works a few hours doesn’t do a whole lot. And then there’s the person that’s been in the office for eight years knows everything gets a little senescent sometimes. And so cells are just like these people, like a red cell floats around for three months, bone cells around for about 10 years, and brain cells around absolutely forever. So all of those things have different specific requirements. In addition, I throw in senescence cells, and then I throw in stem cells in this category, because those two have very specific requirements, one in terms of increasing its longevity, and the other in terms of getting rid of it, right, because we don’t really want our senescence cells and we can touch on that a bit. But that that’s basically individual cell names. And then last one is waste management, again, back to the factory model, you have to take out the garbage. And this is basically glucose issues, for the most part, because anytime glucose gets into the body, it just causes trouble. I tell people that it’s sticky outside, and it’s sticky inside. And of course, it sticks to other molecules creating advanced glycation end products, or EGS, which my is my favorite abbreviation ever. And he is just caused problems all over the body, they’re inflammatory, they break up tissues, they’re just evil, evil beast. And I have this theory that we’re all pre diabetic, even if our glucose levels are reasonably well. And I take zillion things to sort of block the ag production. The other thing in this category, which is sort of a tuck in is accumulation of liquidation. Only because it accumulates with age, it’s garbage. And it’s really hard to get rid of. I also think it’s cool because this is how you can age lobsters. Because they have the same LIFO liquidation accumulation as we do. So if you ever want to know how old a lobster is just look at it’s like diffusion accumulation.
Robert Lufkin 23:04
Oh, interesting. Interesting. I thought I heard lobsters had negligible senescence. Is that right? That they? They, they age rapidly at the end, but they don’t have a normal life going up a normal aging process going up like that? I have no idea. It’s a good question. Anyway, nevermind.
Sandra Kaufman 23:24
Before they get that old. I don’t exactly.
Robert Lufkin 23:26
We never, they’re never around long enough to find out.
Sandra Kaufman 23:33
Anyway, so in a nutshell, I think that those pretty much encompass every reason that we age, people are going to be very picky about others things that I have not necessarily included. But they all talk into one of these reasons, like people talk about issues with protein production. And obviously that falls into quality control. And anyway, so various experts have decided that different things should belong in different categories. But in general, as a place to start, this was my organizational system. Because, you know, disorganization is just just horrible. So this is not organized. And then the other thing that I did, which I think is very important, at least for the clinical aspect is of course, the Kaplan rating system. And I’d be very curious to hear your thoughts on that.
Robert Lufkin 24:19
Yeah, no, I think I think it’s a great approach because you, you’ve taken a basic model where you analyze the mechanism and then you analyze certain molecular agents and then can apply this system to really personalize it to each individual because the the problem I think, a lot of us are seeing is that they’re different camps for approaches to health and longevity. And like you say, there’s a low carb camp and there’s a, you know, a Metformin camper rapamycin camp, and you could give the same drugs to three different five different people and you’ll get five different responses and we all know it suppositions that, that there’s great individual variability. So this is a way a way to get into that. I think it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s genius.
Sandra Kaufman 25:10
Thank you. Thank you. So what’s actually kind of funny is when I started doing this is I would read about all the reasons as you age. And then it would use something as an example. For example, everyone loves resveratrol. And these examples are Aston’s anthem. And so I had this huge piece of paper grid on my desk. Because I’m old school, I don’t, you know, hate making things on spreadsheets. So my piece of paper, my stupid lines, and it started with checks, like, does the do anything in this category, check, check, check, oh, big negative, and then I would find something that really was truly amazing. I’m like, ooh, check, check. That’s amazing. And that was like, check Tech Tech. I’m like, Okay, this is just becoming absurd. So I decided to make a formalized. So if an agent did something in a category, physical, it’s rated from zero to three, it does absolutely nothing, it’s zero. If it does something, in theory, or in culture, or in a test tube, it got a one, if there was evidence in rodents, or any mammal that wasn’t human, it got it to. And if there was human evidence, it got to three. So then every agent now has seven digits associated with it, which then meant not aging sort of became a mathematical algorithm, which is so much easier than having to rethink through all of this all the time.
Robert Lufkin 26:27
Yeah, that’s, that’s a great approach. You’ve mentioned some of the tools you use as molecular agents, you mentioned resveratrol, and metformin, na D supplements, what are some of the other ones? And what are the strategies that you use with them?
Sandra Kaufman 26:41
That is a huge question. So there’s 15 agents in the book, and I’m about to put up Book Two, and it has another 28. And the idea is everyone depending on how old you are, and who you are, would benefit from some combination thereof. And I certainly don’t suggest that everyone take all of them, because that’s a little bit much. But the idea is that people have the education and the ability to pick what’s right for them. And based on what diseases you have, how old you are, etc. You weight one category over another, right? So if you’re just if you’re a normal, healthy, 40 year old, and you’re nothing going on at all, you just need to cover all the bases reasonably equally, which which led to the development of them called that I call the panacea. And clearly it’s not really a panacea, but the letters kind of spelled it out. So I thought that was cool. Bunch of years ago. So basically, it’s it’s terror still being because it’s a big stir to an activator. And it does a variety of other things as well. It’s either that or was bearish will be the top choices, just tear stilbene has better bioavailability people argue that if you have any lipid problems, you should do the resveratrol instead, then you need something that’s more bioavailable, blah, blah, blah, anyway, but one of those two things to get your Siemens moving. Um, that’s p in the panacea, A is asked to xantham anyone knows me knows that acid Xanthine is my all time favorite molecule because it’s the coolest thing in the world. My kids call it the angry algae of thing because when you piss off algae, it creates these molecular globs, and they are bright in color. They’re orange, pinkish. And what it does for algae is what same thing it does for us, it protects us from radiation and free radicals stuffs amazing. I frequently tell people, I give it to my 15 year old tennis player who is a redhead. And when she takes it, she doesn’t burn in the sun. It’s really, really remarkable. It protects all of your body. It’s truly amazing. There’s no There’s no downside, the anti inflammatory as well, they’re not quite as potent. And also so in the mitochondria category, it is a free radical scavenger unto itself. And it also increases your own endogenous scavengers like your SVOD is and your catalase peroxidase, etc. That’s one thing. Let’s see that. Pa and Nicotiana mine, right? Everyone over 40, as I said, needs to be on some form of nicotine and wine. There are serious wars being raised about what type to be on. I’m sure you’ve had your experts on. There’s the nasal sprays and the patches and the this and the IV drips and the pills and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don’t really know if one is better than the other. Although all the companies have tried to convince me of such I don’t think it really matters as long as you take something
Robert Lufkin 29:24
as far as the oral ones. You have a preference and mn or NMR.
Sandra Kaufman 29:28
I’ve tried them both. And I haven’t really seen any evidence that one is better than the other I sort of bounced back and forth a bit.
Robert Lufkin 29:36
What’s your endpoint just feeling or I mean, with a lot of these it’s hard to track a necessarily biomarkers right for for NA D supplements. What’s the endpoint other than a subjective feeling of well, I you know, I have more energy or something or what how do you how do you track response?
Sandra Kaufman 29:57
You can actually measure your energy level right? for 300 bucks or something, you can do it. Um, have I done it? No, I’ve been on an ad for so long, I’m not really sure what it would tell me. Um, I do however, when I get sick or I have less energy, I tend to up the dose a bit, or I’ll switch it up, you know, is it placebo? I really have no way of knowing if I’m out in the sun a bit, I need more DNA damage repair. I’ll take a bit. Um, so
Robert Lufkin 30:27
one gram a day. Take a day.
Sandra Kaufman 30:32
Probably half of that. 500. Yeah. Because I think that if you’re, if you’re deficient, and you need to, well, if you think of it as a vitamin, right, if you are extremely deficient, you want to polish yourself up until you hit some sort of homeostasis. And then you can back off the dose and just take it you know, a little bit less all the time. So since I’ve been on this now for years, I take decent amounts, like once a week, and then just like standard dose every day. Okay, fine. So I tell people bolus up your levels come down to homeostasis and that level out. And the starting dose. And the bolus dose depends on how old you are, what your medical problems are, and how long you’ve been on other things. You know, like, if you’ve been on sirtuin activators and you’re not on nicotinamide, it’s not doing squat. So as soon as you haven’t acted in your body nicotinamide in your body, it’s going to really get sucked into one area versus another. So I think you need a bigger bolus for a longer period of time to sort of get started. This is where anesthesia plays plays a role, right? It’s all about farming.
Robert Lufkin 31:36
You’re the perfect person for doing this.
Sandra Kaufman 31:38
It’s a weird set of skills, right. Moving down the list panacea we get to the seas. And Curcumin is one of the best natural anti inflammatories that there is. I’m not a homeopath in any way, shape, or form. But I think that this is just an amazing molecule. Very little side effects. Of course, the the challenges the bioavailability. So I use one that’s in a nano my seal. And I know it works, because if I take more than two, I turned bright yellow. So it is definitely getting into my body. Also, as a rock climber, I beat the crap out of my body. And when I don’t take this I hurt like how and when I do take it like perfectly fantastic. So I know it works. And then the last one in the panacea is carnosine because everyone has glucose issues, and carnosine is a fantastic transplant oscillating agent. So when you take it bonds with the glucose, and it can’t necessarily take the glucose or take the energy off of your tissues, but it can definitely decrease the formation of EGS. That is top five for anyone that sort of new to the program over the age of 40. A beyond that, then we start catering to people’s individual needs. Easy examples, if you are prone to sun damage, and clearly you need to increase your DNA repair mechanisms. There’s something like how podiums, or AC 11 is the way you want to go. If you have osteoarthritis, for example, it’s an inflammatory issue. So you want to max out on category five, if you are history of diabetes, family history of diabetes, that sort of thing, and we max out on the agents hit category seven for Waste Management’s. There are 1,000,001 ways to block eg production. So it’s just a matter of picking and choosing how avidly one wants to chase these problems. To determine what their ideal protocol is.
Robert Lufkin 33:33
Yeah, it’s it’s a, it’s a beautiful system that, like we said, allows you to personalize the approach there. I’m wondering, even though these other than the Metformin I think, are all non prescription or they’re over the counter, over the counter supplements and such? Do you recommend that person do this by themselves? Or do it with a health coach or with a physician? It seems like there’s a lot of complexities and and variabilities here to be looked at what what’s the ideal way to administer this program?
Sandra Kaufman 34:15
So that’s an excellent question. And it’s sort of a trick question. I would love as a physician to say go to your physician’s office and sit down and figure this out. But physicians, again, they work by organ systems, and they’re, they’re reactive instead of proactive in general, click clearly not everyone, but they wait for you to get a disease and then they try to treat it. Longevity medicine is about looking into the future and trying to avoid things. And most physicians today just don’t have that insight. I think over time, they will and one of the reasons I like doing shows like this is to try to create create a system where physicians do understand that this is not Hocus Pocus, this is real medicine, it needs to be incorporated. But what that means for regular people today is a little bit tough. So if people are educated in the longevity world, they can certainly undertake this on their own. And if they want a little help, I am out there. And I’m more than happy to help people figure this out. My email address is on my website, which is very easy, because it’s Calvin protocol calm. And the email is on there. And I answer everyone’s questions. Sometimes it takes me a bit of time to get to that if people send me like a brief sentence about who they are or what they want to do what they’re trying to accomplish. I’m happy to set programs up for people.
Robert Lufkin 35:33
I mentioned this, we were talking before offline about an app that was in development, or that you were considering is that something that you plan on bringing out as a software tool for people to help them in this situation?
Sandra Kaufman 35:48
Right, so we put an app out a few years ago, and the unfortunately, the company that we chose to put it out, probably was the wrong company. And it had a lot of issues. And every time we paid to fix it, it just had more issues. And every time I talked about it, people would try to do it, and some percentage would just have horrible issues. So I don’t tend to send people to it at the moment. That being said, we are incorporated into a big company called worldwide strategies group. And they are going to fix the app. It’s in process now. So when all of this gets announced that I will be encouraging people to sort of turn to that, but I don’t want people to waste their money right now. Because it’s it’s just not working as well as it should. But it will be.
Robert Lufkin 36:34
Yeah, sounds like the app would be a good idea. And then, and then with the new book, going from 15 agents to how many 25 and the new one,
Sandra Kaufman 36:44
I think I overshot, I think I got to 28, I was going to go to 30. And then I just, I just qualify things. Everyone sends me Oh, you need to check out my favorite agent. And I look at it, I look at many, many things, it has to do many things in many categories, there has to be a lot of evidence, it has to be reasonably affordable, and it has to be obtainable. For example, there are some fantastic things that you just can’t get, there’s something called p&l, and it comes from China, and I can get it in a cream, it increases epidermal stem cell, it’s amazing. But it is a pain in the butt to get. And if I tell people to get it, they’re just going to go crazy. And I’m going to get you know, my door knocked down, you told me to take this and write the certain things got rolled out. So there are 28 agents. And within those agents, I also talk about other things. For example, everyone’s worried about skin. So we talked about things like poly uronic, acid, and collagen and what they actually do do for your tissues and your skin. The other thing is I’m introducing some new concepts. I couldn’t put too much in the first book because it was just going to be incredibly drab. I mean, it’s pretty boring as it is now but there’s even more boring stuff coming. My talk about something called the mitochondrial transition for it sort of flutters on almost like a pop off valve in your mitochondria. And when your cells under stress, it opens a bit leaves some pressure and then your mitochondria go back goes back to functioning. Unfortunately, under a decent amount of stress, it just blows open. And it’s kind of like opening up mitochondrial floodgates all these horrible cytotoxins porn yourself cell doesn’t do very well it sort of blows up undergoes apoptosis, and you got a dead cell in your hands. So by controlling the mitochondrial pore, you can actually delay cell death and sort of make it better. So I’m introducing concepts such as that as you sort of read along. So it’s not just encyclopedia for the agents, it’s also education as you go through it.
Robert Lufkin 38:39
So in addition to increasing the number of agents, you add on these new concepts, but the fundamental overall concepts of the original book remain in place, and it’s just expanded, expanded on those your thinking really hasn’t changed necessarily, about that. How did you where do you go for your knowledge about this? Is it mainly from the obviously the scientific and medical literature do you do go to certain conferences you find valuable in this space? Or what what? How are you able to get on top of this such a, such a diverse and changing area of knowledge?
Sandra Kaufman 39:23
So it’s actually really a question, by the time information makes it to a conference. Um, it’s kind of old hat, to be honest with you. So what I troll the most esoteric literature that you would ever find? Absolutely, just crazy. And what usually happens is there’ll be a plant from East craziness somewhere that no one’s ever heard of. Right? And some culture seems to think that it increases longevity and some crazy sciences that you’ve never heard of spent his life isolating that one little itty bitty thing, and then someone else looks Got it. And then it just sort of grows and grows and grows and starts catching on in the literature. But it’s very kind of hard to find. And I have just uncovered amazing little agents that are really just under appreciated because they’re in a little tiny corner
Robert Lufkin 40:16
of the world. Like what are some examples? Like one of
Sandra Kaufman 40:19
my favorite ones is something called Delfin it in. It comes from the Mackay berry in Chile in Argentina. And I wouldn’t have known about it except I went hiking in southern Patagonia a few years ago, I actually traverse the Southern Patagonian icefield It was cold. But everyone’s like, Oh, you want to try this stuff and still fitted? And I’m like, What the hell’s that? Turns out, it’s the most amazing free radical Scavenger, it’s water soluble. So it’s sort of acid santons oil soluble. So this one’s water soluble. So it gets to different aspects of yourself. And it’s just an outstanding free radical Scavenger. It’s amazing, but Who’s ever heard of them? Like Highbury? Right? Ah, cool, right? And then when I was up in the Himalayas, people are popping villages, I’m probably saying that incorrectly. Which dawned on me, it’s sort of the equivalent of Fred Flintstone mountain, just loaded with amazing free radical scavengers in key letters. And these people swear that it makes them stronger. And now there’s actually evidence that it does make people stronger. It’s, it’s, it’s truly remarkable. There’s something else called Salidroside comes from plants up in the high mountains. And what’s amazing is the Sherpas take it but we finally came to realize it changes the subunits in your cytochrome specifically cytochrome c is changed out in people that take this and you can actually do way better at high altitudes on Salidroside. And it’s real it’s not it’s not imaginary, it’s absolutely mitochondrial real. The other neat thing is it changes how your brain processes neurotransmitters and it’s used as a natural antidepressants. Wow, wow. All of these little things from corners of the world and as soon as you dive into them they’re just unbelievably remarkable.
Robert Lufkin 42:16
Yeah, it’s it’s fascinating how the things out of history like like in the era Vedic tradition ashwagandha and that you know have results from the past and and now that we can see how they work and then and then completely new things that were unexpected like well like rapamycin
Sandra Kaufman 42:38
you know, rapamycin came from
Robert Lufkin 42:40
Yeah, Easter Island, but I think they’re islands. I don’t think Rapanui Yeah, but man tell the story because we haven’t discussed it with our listeners on this show. If you if you want to it’s such a
Sandra Kaufman 42:50
sentence or two. I just think this is truly amazing. So there was a bacteria growing up as they will statues. And they took it and they called heard it and they found that rapamycin what it was it blocked. It was it’s just the key to mTOR right? Mechanistic. Shoot, I’m totally blanking Yes,
Robert Lufkin 43:09
the MEK Well, M mTOR was the mechanistic target of rapamycin rapamycin.
Sandra Kaufman 43:14
Yeah, right? They discovered the entire pathway. Right? Thank you to big giant statues. It’s amazing where the stuff comes from, right?
Robert Lufkin 43:23
Yeah, and the the actual the, the organism that they cultured it or that they grew it that produced the rapamycin. And when they brought it back, it was it was basically used by a company to develop it. And then the companies went out of business or they got bought and they said, just discard, discard the sample. And the scientist who was working on it, I’m blanking on his name, but he put it in his in his refrigerator and refuse to throw it away. And he went worked for another company. And finally, a few years later, I can’t remember if it was the same company, but basically, after his actions of saving it, he brought it back out and revived it and started testing it. And then it sort of triggered this whole understanding of mTOR, like you say, and, and sort of a revolution in longevity.
Sandra Kaufman 44:11
I actually did not know that part. That’s pretty cool. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, definitely. It’s just It’s truly amazing where these things come from, like one of my new favorite agents is something called spermidine. You know, it’s it’s in sperm. Yeah. Yeah. It’s
Robert Lufkin 44:31
to tell us why it’s so. So interesting.
Sandra Kaufman 44:35
Well, I think it’s amazing, right? Because it was sort of discovered by Vaughn leaving hook in the 1600s. Right, and then they said very, very flatly, right. Yeah. Look, discoverability one. Yep. You gotta wonder like, what was he doing? Right.
Robert Lufkin 44:53
That was one of the things he observed. Right,
Sandra Kaufman 44:55
right, right. So bizarrely human like more more approachable. Because clearly I look around for other people’s specimens. Right? He’s
Robert Lufkin 45:07
excited by his work. Yeah.
Sandra Kaufman 45:11
Yes. It’s related molecularly to these other great molecules like, was it putrescent is like a few few molecules off and cadaverine Yeah. horrible, terrible sounding names. It’s marvelous. But spermidine is just miraculous because it’s an epigenetic modifier, which is really cool. It affects the P 300. system, which then increases autophagy, which is really cool. But my favorite favorite thing, it’s a positively charged Amin, the probably mean, it’s a long chain, and it it loves to line up with the negative grooves in DNA, there’s major and minor grooves, it’s all negatively charged. And this molecule just sort of wraps itself in there, and it protects it. And I decided that it’s bubble wrapping your DNA. And if you put DNA in a test tube with this stuff, it protects it from radiation, and it protects it from free radicals. Now, I don’t actually know if it does it in yourself, but there’s no reason to think that it wouldn’t. And I’ve run this by some, you know, a few DNA experts. And hey, they laugh at me for say, like really sandy DNA bubble wrap? And I’m like, yeah, and then they think about it, they go Alright, you’re not so stupid, after all. So I really think that it’s a protective of your DNA that we have not been aware of before, that is truly extremely important in the longevity field.
Robert Lufkin 46:35
Wow, wow. That’s I wasn’t aware of all that detail. That’s fascinating. Well, knowing knowing what you know, how do you? How do you apply this to yourself? What aspects of the protocol do you use? And what other what other choices do you make in your own life?
Sandra Kaufman 46:55
Good question. So I have this theory, it’s sort of like the the triangular theory of longevity, right? There’s stuff that you do all the time at the bottom stuff that you do sometimes, and then stuff that like you do every once in a while, right? So at the bottom, I’m an avid exerciser, I love exercising, I don’t get to do as much as I used to because I have three jobs. But I absolutely love it rock climber mountain climber, I just I adore it, I swim a ton.
Robert Lufkin 47:24
A daily thing or, or whenever you could fit it in,
Sandra Kaufman 47:28
you know, I do something every day. Um, I only get to climb big mountains once a year. But I rock climb all the time. My hands look horrific because of it. But otherwise, I’m swimming or the gym or whatever it is. And I think it just makes people feel better, and you do better, whatever. So that’s a baseline thing. But in no way am I going to dictate how people exercise because I’m totally not an exercise physiologist. Diet would be next. But I’m the world’s worst eater. So I really don’t want to offer any advice on that, because I just get in trouble all the time for saying things that people get angry about. But moving along, I take a lot of oral supplements, I probably take 50 a day, which is probably a bit much. However, I feel that I can’t recommend things to people if I haven’t already tried them myself. And every time I go to get rid of one I’ve read up on it. And I think simply get rid of that it does use amazing things. I probably don’t take the recommended dose, because I think that they’re probably a little bit too big. So I tend to take a fraction of it, but I do it every day. And so instead of taking a full dose of a free radical Scavenger, I’ll take like a third of a dose. But then we’ll take three different types of free radical scavengers and also spread them out during the day because most of these things half lives are pretty short. You’re lucky if anything has a half life of six to eight hours. So if you take everything in the morning, but it’s not to get to the evening, you’re unprotected. So there’s like the morning pile that afternoon and the evening pile. And I decided at some point that I look like an old lady with my drug boxes. So I actually decided I created something I call and I have one to show you call it the stack. So they come they come apart. And so these little containers, so I have my little little pills. When I travel. I take my stack. So it’s super easy and organized. And I don’t look like an old person.
Robert Lufkin 49:16
It’s a great idea. Wow, I love
Sandra Kaufman 49:19
the idea was to sort of, you know, have these at conferences and stuff. And then as soon as I bought them the conferences stopped. So there’ll be soon as conferences are sort of up. I do you do that every day come hell or high water. And then in terms of intermittent therapy, I probably take polypeptides once a month. I probably take exosomes every month or two. I do red light therapy every day. And I’ve yet to graduate to gene therapy but I’m sure Liz at some point will talk me into that.
Robert Lufkin 49:55
And no IV any D supplements or no IV thanks. It’s all oral.
Sandra Kaufman 49:59
I think that the IV stuff is it’s a fantastic thing to say this because someone’s gonna shoot me up. If you are extraordinarily deficient, maybe it’s helpful. But in general, like, no one’s ever come to the emergency room dying of an energy deficiency or glutathione deficiency, it just doesn’t happen. So it probably takes a good 10 days to make up a supplement deficiencies. So if you’re willing to wait the time and support cheaper to take things by mouth, I know it’s fancy, and people love getting IVs. And I probably put in literally 30 IVs a day and people so it’s honestly not a huge deal for me. But people are paying 1500 bucks $2,000 for these infusions, and it’s entirely unnecessary, as far as I’m concerned.
Robert Lufkin 50:44
Yeah, that’s good. That’s good to know. Well, whatever you’re doing, keep it up. You look, you look great. It’s working. And you mentioned before, how can people follow you on social media and maybe give us your the website one more time so that everybody can find it?
Sandra Kaufman 51:02
Sure. So the website I’m so unoriginal, it’s Calvin protocol.com. And basically, it’s very simple and has a seven tenants and a variety of the agents on there was instructions of how to how to create your own program. And then on Instagram, I am prominent anti aging, and I usually post anything interesting that I’m doing, I don’t like, you know, take a picture of me sitting there doing nothing kind of bullshit. But if I’m in a conference, or I think something’s interesting, I’ll throw it up there. Oh, and I also will admit that my 15 year old runs my Instagram account. So if anyone has any questions, you’re going to get filtered to a kid.
Robert Lufkin 51:43
No, that’s, that’s great. And and thanks so much for taking the time to spend with us today, Sandy, and I, I hope, I hope want to stay in touch with you. And hopefully, when the new book comes out, we can get you back on the program to talk about that some more.
Sandra Kaufman 52:01
Oh, it would be my absolute pleasure. It’s so much fun. And you’re, you’re fantastic to talk to you.
Robert Lufkin 52:07
It’s been great. I’ll talk to you again soon.
Unknown Speaker 52:11
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