Rapamycin: The Key To Extending Your Healthspan and Lifespan With The Natural Pharmacist, Ross Pelton

 

Watch the episode here

 

What if there was a compound that helped you not just extend your lifespan but do it healthily as well? That compound is Rapamycin. Today's guest is an expert on the topic and has even authored a book entitled Rapamycin, mTOR, Autophagy & Treating mTOR Syndrome. Ross Pelton, aka The Natural Pharmacist, is a certified clinical nutritionist. He was named one of the top 50 most influential pharmacists in America by American Druggist Magazine for his work in natural medicine in 1999. In this episode, he joins Corinna Bellizzi to discuss the multiple health benefits of Rapamycin and how it facilitates mTOR and autophagy. Listen to their educational and informative chat to learn which simple lifestyle and nutrition habits can affect your body's anti-aging capacity.

 

Key takeaways from this episode:

• The meaning of mTOR
• How Rapamycin works in the body
• How the body benefits from autophagy
• How intermittent fasting helps autophagy
• Rapamycin optimizes the body against multiple diseases in animal models
• How Rapamycin contributes to anti-aging and living a longer healthier life

 

Guest Social Links:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/naturalpharmacist/ 

Book: https://www.lifeextension.com/rapa

---

Rapamycin: The Key To Extending Your Healthspan and Lifespan With The Natural Pharmacist, Ross Pelton

In this episode, we get to venture into anti-aging nutrition and lifestyle hacks as we connect with a natural pharmacist that all of you should know. His name is Ross Pelton. Ross is a certified clinical nutritionist and has a PhD in Psychology. In October 1999, Ross was named one of the Top 50 Most Influential Pharmacists in America by American Druggist Magazine for his work in natural medicine.

In addition to being a natural pharmacist, Ross is also the Scientific Director for Essential Formulas, which is a company that specializes in making premium probiotic products. Ross has written twelve books. His most recent is Rapamycin, mTOR, Autophagy & Treating mTOR Syndrome, which can be ordered via Amazon. Let's get to know Ross and how simple lifestyle and nutrition habits can turn on the anti-aging capacity of your body.

---

Ross, welcome to the show.

Corrina, it’s nice to be with you. I appreciate the opportunity.

It's going to be a fun one. Ultimately, I am big on this whole world of anti-aging. There are so many ways that we can naturally activate our body's ability to heal itself and ultimately, start with nutrition. As we get started, I'd like to ask you first. What does this concept of nutrition without compromise, our very show's title, mean to you?

Nutrition is the foundation of good health. I agree with you on that. We want to have available to us good nutrition without compromising the environment. That's one of the biggest challenges globally. We have similar passions along that line.

We could get into talking about things like regenerative and agriculture in another show but before we get into talking about rapid myosin specifically, let's dive into mTOR and autophagy. What are they? What do they mean to our health?

These are terms that I hope very soon will become household terms commonly known to most people. mTOR is a protein inside cells. It stands for the Mechanistic Target Of Rapamycin. mTOR got its name because of the research trying to figure out how this new drug rapamycin works. It was discovered that when rapamycin crosses a cellular membrane and enters a cell, it binds with a particular protein. The protein got named the Mechanistic Target Of Rapamycin. It’s critically important for regulating metabolism.

When nutrients are available to a cell, mTOR is a sensor of nutrients. When nutrients are available, mTOR sends out signals to the cell that says, “Use these nutrients to build new protein, build new enzymes, build cellular components, grow and proliferate.” The other side of the coin is autophagy. This is a term and a topic that one Japanese scientist, the Nobel Prize in 2016, said, “I equate autophagy to the rest phase in cells and our human sleep phase.”

We think about sleep as our rest phase but sleep is not a rest phase. There's a tremendous amount of metabolic activity going on during sleep. Autophagy is much the same. Autophagy is the rest phase in cells when nutrients are not available to the cell but during autophagy, cells are able to target and damaged old under-functioning cellular components, misfolded proteins and enzymes that are under-functioning and break them down into the cellular components to their nutritional components. It will either detoxify them, get some of the damaging substances out of the cell or reutilize these amino acids and other cellular components to build new enzymes and proteins. You've got this balance between mTOR and autophagy.

Throughout 99.999% of human evolution, mTOR and autophagy were in balance. When I use the term balance for these terms, I don't mean equal amounts or equal time. It's like the microbiome. When your microbiome is imbalanced or you have a healthy microbiome, you have about 85% to 90% good friendly probiotic bacteria and only 10% or 15% bad bacteria. We all have some bad bacteria but when the microbiome is healthy and imbalanced, there's such a predominance of good friendly bacteria that the small amounts of bad bacteria don't become a problem. That's like the situation with mTOR and autophagy.

Autophagy as the rest phase in cells when nutrients are not available to the cell.

The next way I want to lead into an explanation of these topics is to tell our readers that throughout most of human evolution, people did not get up in the morning, open the refrigerator, take out the milk, make a bottle of cereal and start making eggs for breakfast. People did not eat three meals a day for almost all of human evolution. Anthropologists and paleontologists believe that our ancestral humans for 200 to 300 million years probably only ate 1 meal a day and spent about 4 hours per day digesting their food.

Now, people eat all the time. 7:00 AM breakfast, lunch, dinner, mid-meal snacks, dessert after supper and evening nightcap. From 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM, breakfast to supper, 12 hours and another 4 hours to digest your food. That's 16 hours that modern humans are consuming food and digesting what they've eaten compared to the ancestral humans who spent about 4 hours per day.

Most people on the planet spend about four times more every day ingesting nutrients and autophagy never gets adequate time to function. Autophagy is the detoxification phase in yourself. Another aspect of autophagy that's important which a lot of people haven't focused on is the rebuilding of your body. You're breaking down old damage, under-functioning cellular components and rebuilding healthy new cellular components. It's not just detoxification but also revitalization, renewal and rebuilding of your body. Those are important topics, mTOR and autophagy.

Most people alive are terribly out of balance. Eating and consuming far more nutrients than most humans ever consumed. Not getting adequate time on autophagy. This is a fundamental problem that's related to most health problems. When we talk about health problems growing up, I like to emphasize to people that we have an epidemic of epidemics. We have an epidemic of heart disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, Alzheimer's disease, inflammatory bowel diseases, autism, ADHD and all of these illnesses. Hundred years ago, we didn't have any of these epidemics.

We also didn't have things like shortening in our food supply or aspartame sweetening our foods. We consumed far less sugar. Sugar is lurking in all sorts of things that might even be marketed as health products. We're over-consuming calories. We're consuming things that cause us to crave overconsumption of calories because we're not feeding our bodies the core nutrition that we need.

You have out-of-control cravings and people don't know when to stop eating because they are eating foods that are food-like substances as I often call them rather than foods. Just because it's edible doesn't mean you should eat it. We're getting to a space where most people understand what your grandmother identified as food.

Let's say you're in your 40’s. You have a grandmother who grew up in a time that was before a lot of these supposed advents in food technology. They did not battle the health challenges the same way we do. They may still have suffered from cancer or heart disease and had these issues crop up that they came up later in life.

They often were treated with things like diet and exercise. Whereas now, it seems we go to, “Take these five prescriptions.” While medical advances have occurred that help us extend our lives, we have not necessarily extended our health cycle. That is the piece that we're getting to when we talk about something like rapamycin. It's not just extending your life. It has the potential to extend your healthy life.

I emphasize this, Corinna. It's not expanding your lifespan. It's extending your health span. I agree. Many things contribute to accelerated aging. You've mentioned a bunch of them there with aspartame, sugars in foods and so forth. There are two of the things that I identify as major factors contributing to the almost universal imbalance between mTOR and autophagy.

In the middle 1700s, refrigeration was invented. In the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, household refrigerators became available and refrigerators with freezers. A lot of people store more food and have it available easily more regularly. After World War II, in the 1950s and so forth, food packaging and food preservation took off. We have convenience stores with crap food and junk food.

We have a situation where people assume they have to get up and have that healthiest meal of the day, breakfast so to speak. Get up and eat. We're told, “Get your metabolism humming. It’s the most important meal of the day.” Guess who championed that phrase, the most important meal of the day? Cereal manufacturers, specifically Kellogg’s.

Kellogg's is the company name after the person that started that.

It’s propaganda. That's what it is. It's being shared with us from a marketing capacity, convincing us that we need more of something that may be deleterious to our health.

You're right. It's the easy availability of food all the time that has people eating all the time. Marketing has people brainwashed that they have to eat three meals a day. This is not true. It does impede health. This whole topic that I'm talking about, the drug rapamycin and 25 years of research trying to figure out the mechanisms of how these drug works have uncovered and discovered this relationship between mTOR and autophagy.

It is one of the most critical, important health discoveries of all time. I believe that everybody needs to learn the importance of intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating because these are the natural ways to activate autophagy and partially inhibit the inventory signals. If you're partially intermittent fasting, you're not taking in nutrients. mTOR is not getting activated. You give autophagy time to function. Every cell in your body starts to work better. In animal models, virtually every single disease related to the aging process where there are cardiovascular diseases, metabolic diseases and neurological diseases, improves with rapamycin.

The same thing can be said for intermittent fasting and time-restricted eating but there are a lot of people that are not going to discipline themselves to do fasting. This is where rapamycin comes in. Rapamycin does this for you. When people take rapamycin, it goes into the cells. It binds to mTOR and partially inhibits it, which allows autophagy to function. The downscale effect is that every cell in your body starts to function better. You delay the onset of age-related diseases. In animal models, many of the major diseases have a reversal of many of the symptoms. This is a critical new health topic that I'm passionate about. It will be my passion for the rest of my life.

An aspect of autophagy is the rebuilding of your body. It's not just detoxification, but it's also revitalization, renewal, and rebuilding of your body. 

Hopefully, your life gets extended through something like this incredible tool. I understand that something that is inhibiting the adoption of rapamycin is its success as an anti-rejection drug. Let's talk about what rapamycin is because to me, it sounds like an antibiotic. I don't think about it from the way the word is even structured as something that would be enhancing of a long-term life.

Let me start at the beginning and talk about how and when rapamycin was discovered and then I'll ease into how it got classified as a drug by the FDA for a couple of different applications. Back in the middle of the 1960s, a group of Canadian scientists organized a scientific expedition to Easter Island. Easter Island is one of the most remote places on earth. That’s several thousand miles West of Chili, middle of the ocean.

The reason the scientists targeted Easter Island for their expedition is that for centuries, horses ran wild on Easter Island. There were more horses than there were inhabitants on the island and where horses are prevalent, there's usually the tetanus bacteria in the soil. The Easter Islanders all went barefoot. The scientists that learned about this were puzzled if they were the tetanus bacteria in the soil and these people go barefoot all the time but aren't getting tetanus. Is there a possibility that there's something in the environment there that's protecting them?

The purpose of the expedition was to go to Easter Island and see if they could find sources of new antibiotics and antifungal drugs. They took a wide number of soil samples from different areas on the island and took them back to their labs in Canada. They discovered that a strain of soil bacteria produces a compound that they named rapamycin. The name rapamycin comes from the fact that the indigenous people call Easter Island, their name for it, is Rapa Nui so they named the drug rapamycin.

I am so glad I asked because I'm an anthropologist at heart. That was my undergrad. I've done archeology digs. I've been on expeditions and analyzed cultures around the world as well. I've even observed primates as part of my understudy and been part of studies related to them even preparing one of the chimp’s skeletons that Jane Goodall had studied in the wild. I look at that as one of my moments of touching greatness.

As it stands, understand that our physical bodies are capable of doing something to preserve and protect us. Essentially, science is getting to a point where it starts to understand these things is one of the things that inspire me to continue learning because our bodies are a mystery to us in so many ways. The more we know, the more we don't know but these incredible discoveries keep coming up. The root of that word, how incredible, Rapa Nui.

This is a very exciting time. As science progresses, we learn more. You mentioned your interest in anthropology. I didn't know that and I'd like to learn more about that in another conversation, maybe offline sometimes but it's interesting to me that anthropologists and paleontologists have discovered in samples that have been preserved. That single cell organisms that are 3.5 billion years old have mTOR and autophagy mechanisms in them. These mechanisms were present in single-cell organisms when life began to emerge on earth.

They’re present analogy then? That's what you're saying. Some of the oldest organisms. I did not know that.

 

Yes. mTOR and autophagy were present in cells at the beginning of life and they are present in every single living organism. That's how fundamentally important these topics are. Going fast forward, after they discovered rapamycin, it started to be developed as an antifungal drug. During the developmental process of rapamycin as an antifungal drug, they learned that rapamycin suppresses the immune system. All that research came to a screeching halt.

Several years later, some physicians realize that people that have a kidney transplant need to be taking immune suppressive drugs daily for the rest of their life. They tested rapamycin and found out that it works very well. It works better than some of the most common immune-suppressing drugs that were used like cyclosporine. Rapamycin was FDA-approved for people to prevent the rejection of a kidney transplant in 1999.

Samples of rapamycin were sent to the National Cancer Institute. They did some tests and found out that rapamycin is the first example of a new type of chemotherapy drug. Most chemotherapy drugs are what we call cytotoxic. They kill cancer cells but also other rapidly dividing cells like the lining of your gastrointestinal tract and the cells in your bone marrow that are producing your red blood cells and so forth. That's a lot of the side effects of chemotherapy.

Rapamycin is not chemo toxic or cytotoxic but cytostatic. It stops cancer growth but it doesn't have all the toxic side effects. Rapamycin has been approved by the FDA to treat several different types of solid tumor cancers. We have a unique situation where the FDA approval for rapamycin is a drug to treat the prevention of organ transplant rejection. Several different types of chemotherapy is a barrier to rapamycin acceptance as a life-extension anti-aging drug.

Most doctors don't know about it. They aren't aware of rapamycin. Secondly, most of the doctors that are aware of rapamycin know about it as a drug to prevent organ transplant rejection or a chemotherapy drug and those are not indications that you usually use to prescribe a drug to somebody interested in life extension and life extension enthusiasts.

You would think that it would work by inhibiting essentially your body's natural functions that you want to support a long and healthy life but it's an oversimplification of how it works. It gets prescribed as an anti-rejection drug or an anti-cancer drug. Is that correct?

That’s right. Along comes a physician by the name of Dr. Joan Mannick, who worked at one of the big drug companies, Novartis. She had a unique position at that company where she could work on anything she wanted to be related to aging. Dr. Mannick chose rapamycin to study and selected a group of people to study elderly people, 65 years and older. She divided these people into four different groups.

One was the placebo group. She didn't use rapamycin. She used what's called a rapalog, a version of rapamycin. It’s slightly different but the drug is called RAD001. This drug has virtually the same effects of rapamycin. She gave people either 1/2 milligrams daily, another group with 5 milligrams once a week and the 3rd group with 20 milligrams once a week. We got four groups that added the placebo. These people are taking their drug or the placebo for six weeks. At the end of 6 weeks, there's a 2-week washout period. At the end of the two-week washout period, all the participants received the seasonal flu vaccine.

There are many things that contribute to accelerated aging.

Dr. Mannick measured how their immune system responds to the challenge of the flu vaccine. Elderly people, 65 years and older, all have an under-functioning immune system compared to people in their 20s and 30s. That's part of the aging process. She found out that the 5 milligrams once per week were the sweet spot. Those people got about a 20% boost in the effectiveness of their immune system.

For elderly people, that's a pretty important benefit once a week. What we've discovered is that taking rapamycin daily will suppress the immune system. If you take it episodically once per week, you temporarily partially inhibit mTOR, which gives autophagy time to function but not doing such tremendous inhibition of mTOR to get the immune suppression.

I want to bring something up here because there's a popular trend even within intermittent and fasting or fasting communities to try and choose one day a week to simply not eat or extend the hours in which they don’t eat to a longer stretch to do some of this work. Do you think that there is validity behind simply even doing that one day a week if somebody is trying to boost their system and work towards a more regular fasting regimen?

One hundred percent. I'll make a couple of comments about this. I have known about fastening for a long time but I've never gotten into it until I wrote this book. I discovered how and why fasting is important. It inhibits mTOR so you give autophagy time to function. You start to detoxify your body and rebuild a new body. The most common form of intermittent fasting is called the 16-8 protocol. People start eating at noon. They have their last meal at 8:00 at night. They go from 8:00 at night until noon the next day, which is 16 hours without eating.

You consume all of your calories in an eight-hour window from noon until 8:00 PM. Also, it's called the 2/7 protocol where a lot of people will have complete fasting two days per week, maybe Monday and Thursday. Some people do complete fasting. Some people will take a very minimal amount of calories on those fasting days but those are probably the two most common popular types of fasting. Either the 16-8 protocol fasting for a complete day occasionally or 2 days a week. Some people do longer fasts.

Here’s my personal story here. My wife was gone for a couple of weeks on a little vacation with some of her girlfriends. The first week she was gone, I did a two-day fast. I anticipated that it would be a miserable experience. It was not. It was amazingly simple for me. The second week my wife was gone, I did a three-day complete fast. I had herbal tea and coffee with no sugar, cream or water. It was amazingly simple for me.

I'm not saying that's going to be simple for everybody but I was astounded to find out how simple this is for me. I will do this periodically for the rest of my life. Maybe a two-day fast once a month is what I'm targeting. Everybody will benefit from doing some fasting up to the individual how committed they want to get, whether it's a 16-8 protocol or doing a day fast occasionally or even more frequently.

I have a bit of experience doing intermittent fasting and also fasting myself. You start omitting breakfast, that simple act. Maybe you have black coffee. I use a bit of nut milk in mine so it's not a pure fast but I'm not eating any food, generally speaking before lunch. Sometimes, I'll even forget to eat until 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon. I'm like, “It’s close enough to dinner. I'll do a small snack.” I'm eating something around 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon.

 

When my family comes together at dinner time, we have a complete meal. We have time together and I'm not sacrificing that moment. That's important. It's part of the whole experience of having a healthy relationship with food. I also went through a multiple-day juice fast cleanse when I was in my late twenties, which ultimately resulted in me self-diagnosing a thyroid problem, which was then confirmed. When I started to reintroduce food after that fourth day, I had difficulty swallowing. I knew that to be asymptomatic.

I also then reflected on a moment where I had had a reiki professional doing some body work on me. When they'd gotten to my throat, they said they felt blocked. I put these two things together and said, “I'm going to go get a blood test.” It turned out my thyroid was dramatically underperforming. I addressed that with some core vitamins and ultimately wasn't able to 100% solve that. I use a natural thyroid support system but I used this combination of would be natural medicine, natural practitioner work, foundational supplementary support, good nutrition and a little bit of Western medicine all in one to help me reach my best health.

One of the things that you run into as you approach a diagnosis, which is in the auto-immune category like Hashimoto's or hypothyroidism, which is what I have, is a lot of people will end up getting sick much more frequently. They'll also worry that something like fasting is going to kill their thyroid. That's not how it works. I want for you to talk about that because there's a lot of misinformation out there around this process and what can cause something like thyroid disruption.

Environmental toxins are everywhere. One of the areas that they attack is the thyroid. When you do fasting and detoxification protocols as you did, you will start to reactivate your thyroid tissue. That's how a lot of people turn that condition around. Most people have no real understanding of how toxic our environment has become. The number of chemicals in the environment is astounding. The herbicide glyphosate is one of the worst sins against humanity and the history of the world. We're killing the microbiome and the planet. That's also contributing to killing the microbiome in humans.

It kills our soil. It makes it less productive with time.

I'm very passionate about regenerative agriculture and the health of our environment as well as the health of human individuals. Let me emphasize a couple of more things about rapamycin. You would never give it to a child or a teenager because these are times of rapid growth. If you inhibit mTOR, mTOR is the regulator of growth. It senses nutrients and sends out all the signals for growth.

I don't think it's appropriate for people to start taking rapamycin until somewhere in their 30s or 40s. I want to emphasize that we don't have many answers to this yet. This is a very new area of research. A lot of research is done in animals but a very limited amount of research in humans because you can't do life extension studies in humans. I'll talk about some interesting studies that are underway.

You've answered another question I was going to ask, which was ultimate whether you ever thought that this would be an over-the-counter drug. The answer is no then if teens can never take it and children not either.

Rapamycin is not chemo toxic or cytotoxic; it’s cytostatic. It stops the cancer growth, but it doesn't have all the toxic side effects.

Yes, but I will emphasize that this is a natural product. It is produced by a strain of soil bacteria. It's not some obscure chemical that the drug company has produced in the laboratory. It's something that nature produces but it probably never will be available over the counter. I don't know if there would be a movement where people start to get this strain of soil bacteria and grow their own.

Perhaps but then they'd be producing something in violation of FDA drug law.

Nobody knows how early you should start or could start taking rapamycin. It’s probably variable depending on not only age but people's health conditions and lifestyles. If you get somebody that's grossly obese in their 30s, they can probably benefit from rapamycin whereas a healthier individual might not want to consider it until they get into their 40s.

If we start thinking about from the age of 40 on, about everybody on the planet, except maybe some indigenous cultures somewhere, are eating far more frequently and ingesting calories from far more hours per day than 99.9% of human evolution. Virtually, all adults on the planet with the exception of maybe people who are already on respirators or in hospice are probably too far gone to get many benefits from rapamycin. Most alive adults can benefit from taking rapamycin.

Some of the researchers in the scientific community have even suggested that the older you get, people might be able to benefit from higher doses of rapamycin. I'm not recommending that yet. I don't think we have enough research for that but we still don't know what's the optimal dosage. In several years, we'll get more information but it will be very individual. What's the property dosage for people? How fast is it getting metabolized in different individuals? How frequently should different people take a dose?

Maybe some people should take a dose once a week. Some people should only take a dose once every other week. We don't know the answer to these questions yet but the research in animal studies is very suggestive that most of the benefits that are seen in animals will happen in humans because animals get the same diseases that humans get.

A gentleman by the name of Matt Kaeberlein, a scientist at the University of Washington, started the Dog Aging Project. They hope to get over 100,000 companion dogs into this study. These are pets. The reason for doing this is that dogs age about seven times faster than humans but dogs get most of the same diseases humans get. If we study dogs and there's an arm of the trial that's devoted to rapamycin, a double-blind trial, we'll start to learn more about rapamycin and how rapamycin affects age-related diseases and the onset of these diseases.

I'm very happy about the Dog Aging Project. I'm getting ready to publish the second edition of my book. I'm going to have probably 5 or 6 new chapters on it because there's so much new information that has come out since I published a book earlier in 2022. Stay tuned. There's going to be more information in the second edition.

 

I understand too that you have an entire presentation that you plan to deliver via a webinar or a screen share that I can also make available to the audience here, which will hopefully touch at least somewhat deeply on some of that new information. I also want to say that this is incredible research. It's also showcasing that we are on a bridge in a way with the human species.

We can take from our knowledge as far and implement things as simple as fasting a day a week or perhaps two days a week or implementing strategies like intermittent fasting with a healthy diet, proper supplementation and the right nutrition for you to ultimately stimulate some of these naturally occurring processes within our body to extend our lives and health spans. Even if we don't gain access to rapamycin as a drug, I don't know if it'll happen for me or how I would go about that. Perhaps you could speak to that for a moment if there are doctors in anti-aging medicine that are prescribing this for this particular effort or not.

The purpose of my book is to accelerate people's learning curve about rapamycin. A lot of people get my book and they take it and give it to their doctor and ask their doctor to read it. If you have difficulty finding a physician who will prescribe rapamycin for you, some doctors are doing telemedicine visits and writing prescriptions for rapamycin. I'll have some information from people on that.

Also, several generic drug companies in India are producing the generic form of rapamycin. Let me mention that the drug company Pfizer has a patent on rapamycin and the name of the drug is Rapamune. Rapamune is the name of the pharmaceutical product. Rapamycin is the name of the drug and the generic name of the drug is Sirolimus.

Several Indian generic drug companies are manufacturing Sirolimus and quite a few people are ordering the drug without a prescription from these Indian drug companies paid by credit card. They say it takes 4 to 6 weeks to get delivered by mail but the deliveries are coming through customs without being confiscated. I hope my publication of this information doesn't cause the customs officials to start to look into this but that's another way that some people are getting rapamycin without having a prescription for it.

I don't know if I'd be ready to take that leap yet but it's interesting to see that you could do something like consume a drug as little as 5 milligrams every week or so and see a positive effect like that.

Another comment I'll make is that there's Dr. Alan Greene in New York. He's got over 700 patients taking rapamycin. Also, a doctor in the Houston, Texas area, Steven Hotze at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center. One of his physicians read my book, took it to Dr. Hotze and said, “You have to read this book.” Dr. Hotze read the book, got in touch with me and had me on his podcast. He's ordered 600 copies of my book and gave them to all of the physicians that use the compounding pharmacy at Hotze Wellness Center.

Things like this are starting to happen to spread the word about rapamycin. I'm very happy to have these things start to unfold as word of mouth has its effect. People realize this is a very important topic. I encourage people that read my book, please tell your friends about it, write a review and post it on Amazon because a lot of little comments make a big difference.

Fasting is important because it inhibits mTOR so you give autophagy time to function and start to detoxify your body and you rebuild a new body.

That’s where everybody goes to look at books. Even if it is available on another third-party site, which I'll share, for those that don't want to shop on Amazon. Also, at the same time, even if you do buy the book elsewhere, you can write a review on Amazon and that helps to bolster a book’s success. That's one of the small tricks that we have in the world of publishing. It's obvious to me that you believe we're out of the guinea pig trials for this and this is ready for adoption mindfully used within the proper bumpers and guidelines, which you detail as well in your book.

There is another thing I'll mention to our readers. There's a website called Rapamycin.news. This is an online forum that is the best place to have to find all of the information about rapamycin and current information. There are ongoing discussions. People can ask questions there and get answers. It's a very good site to know about. You mentioned one comment about nutrition and you and I both know that nutrition is the foundation.

Somebody made a comment that I'm using. I’m not even sure whom to credit with this comment but the comment was, “You can't outrun a bad diet.” What I mean by that is no amount of exercise is going to compensate for a bad diet. We have to make diet the foundation of a healthy lifestyle. There are lots of other things that people can do to promote good health, including adequate sleep and exercise and avoiding aspartame, glyphosate and these things. Rapamycin is right up there on the top as one of the most fundamental things that can improve everybody's health.

I would be remiss if I didn't share a couple of simple truths. One is a great probiotic like those offered by Essential Formulas, whom I know you work with and a great Omega-3 like those offered by Örlö Nutrition. Both of these things help extend your health span and lifespan. There's even research that shows that getting proper amounts of these nutrients helps to extend things like the length of telomeres on the ends of our DNA, which enables our DNA to go through more replications without running into issues. It means that you're less likely to do things like developing cancer.

Getting that core nutrition and a couple of key supplements, I am a big believer in Omega-3s, probiotics and greens. You can't eat enough of them. Even getting a green supplement is a great idea. Doing something like supplementing your immune system with spirulina, we even produce one over at Örlö Nutrition. Spray in your mouth. You get your Vitamin D and some B vitamins. It’s health-promoting and supports a healthy immune system because you need that like no other. We're in the world still of a pandemic here.

I'm thrilled that you're passionate about probiotics. I'm working on an article, maybe a book at some point called The Microbiome Theory of Aging.

I'm sure you'll end up getting into soil health there too because we're talking about soil-based organisms and where you get your probiotics in the first place. Much of it comes from food. I even know people who grow their produce and choose specifically not to wash their vegetables because they want to get the soil-based organisms with the food that they're eating. They're confident in the soil quality because they're managing it themselves.

These are all sorts of strategies you can implement to ensure that your body is as healthy as possible. I want to thank you so much for taking this time with me. This has been great. Where do you prefer people to connect with you if they want to get to know more about you specifically and your work?

 

My website is NaturalPharmacists.net. My blog and bio are there. There’s a tremendous amount of information and a wide range of health topics. I'm interested in everything related to health. It’s the best place to connect with me and a lot of my work.

You're a prolific author so I'm sure they can find 1 of your 12 books there as well.

They’re on Amazon too, most of them.

Thank you so much for joining me. This has been my pleasure.

I appreciate your invitation and the opportunity to chat with you.

---

The message that Ross Pelton leaves us with is that we should all be advocates for our health and think deeply about how to extend that health span. We can do simple things like even fasting intermittently or choosing 1 or 2 days a week to stimulate the body's ability to harness the power of autophagy. Whether that be consuming something like rapamycin, that is left up to you. I encourage you to pick up a copy of Ross Pelton's book. It is an incredible read. I'll be digging more through its pages and sharing the knowledge I gain with you in future episodes.

To get all of the access to links, I encourage you to visit OrloNutrition.com for the video version and features that you won't find anywhere else. Also, that link to an in-depth review of the research around rapamycin by Ross Pelton himself. Thank you for joining us on this journey. If you have questions about what we covered, please reach out via email or social channels. You can contact me @OrloNutrition on social channels and also via email directly to Hello@OrloNutrition.com. As we close this episode, I hope that you'll raise a cup of your favorite beverage with me, even if it's water or a cup of tea. As I say my closing words, here's to your health.

 

 Important Links

• Essential Formulas
• Rapamycin, mTOR, Autophagy & Treating mTOR Syndrome
• Ross Pelton
• Novartis
• Dog Aging Project
• Pfizer
• Dr. Alan Greene
• Hotze Health & Wellness Center
• Rapamycin.news
• Örlö Nutrition
• @OrloNutrition - Instagram
• Hello@OrloNutrition.com
• https://www.LifeExtension.com/Rapa
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/NaturalPharmacist/

 

About Ross Pelton

Ross Pelton is the Natural Pharmacist. His personal website, and blog are at: https://naturalpharmacist.net.

Ross is also a Certified Clinical Nutritionist (CCN) and has a Ph.D. in psychology. In October 1999, Ross was named one of the Top 50 Most Influential Pharmacists in America by American Druggist magazine for his work in natural medicine.

In addition to being the Natural Pharmacist, Ross is also the Scientific Director for Essential Formulas, which is a company that specializes in the marketing of premium probiotic products.

Ross has written twelve books. His most recent book is Rapamycin, mTOR, Autophagy & Treating mTOR Syndrome, which can be ordered at: www.LifeExtension.com/rapa