speaker-0: There are 14 areas that change the way you function to have younger cells. One of them is what we used to be senolytics. We used to try and get rid of old cells. Well, now there are senorejuvenators that turn on two genes in our cells, and they make proteins that make us younger.
speaker-1: Welcome back to this week's episode of Behind the Practice. I'm Katie Brinkley and we are in for a treat today because we are sitting down with Dr. Mike Royzen. Thank you so much for joining me on the show today.
speaker-0: Thank you for having me.
speaker-1: This is such a treat and for people who might not be familiar with you, Dr. Mike, you are the chief wellness officer at the Cleveland Clinic, co-author of You Series with Dr. O- I mean, the list goes on. You have quite a list of accomplishment and accolades to your name. So I really appreciate you joining me on the show today.
speaker-0: My privilege. So I'm one of the few docs who has an Emmy, a L, and a Paul Rogers Award for the best medical communicator from the National Library of Medicine. The only one who has the same things are my co-author, Mehmet Oz.
speaker-1: was just about to say, does anyone else have that honor? Because an Emmy in that awards list probably is pretty rare to get.
speaker-0: Well, it's from appearing on one of the Oprah shows. Yeah.
speaker-1: That's great. Well, let's talk, I mean, you've been doing this, you spent decades in this industry and focused on extending the lifespan.
speaker-0: Right, so I like to think of wellness as slowing your rate of aging. And so when we developed real age, what real age is, the actual age of your body. And you can be up to, for women, 31 years younger or older with just doing what we call lifestyle. Stress management, posse, purpose, play, nutritional choices, ⁓ physical activity, and then avoiding some unforced errors are the major ones. that slows it. We're now entering the area of longevity which actually reverses aging. So there are what we call 14 shots on goal. There are 14 areas of research into the mechanism of aging that mean that you'll be able to be younger than your children when you're 90. That is, they have taken, all 14, have taken three animal species. that are the equivalent of human 90 and made them human 40. So five of those are now in human testing. So within five years, we're going to see whether there will be a breakthrough at this type of event. And one of those is available now. So as I said, there are 14 that have been shown to actually reverse the process of aging.
speaker-1: That is, I'm sure that people listening right now are just blown away. They're like, what do mean reversing the process of antigen?
speaker-0: So your cells, every one of your cells functions as though it's a younger cell. As we get older, we lose some of the energy functioning of the cell and we grab garbage inside the cell which inhibits it. ⁓ So an old cell doesn't, whether it's heart or brain or kidney or whatever, doesn't look the same as a young cell. A young cell has more energy organelles. energy producing areas and a density of them and less, a young cell has less of the what you would call garbage collection. They're organelles where you're getting rid of stuff. What happens is there are 14 areas that change the way you function to have younger cells. One of them is what we used to be senolytics. We used to try and get rid of old cells. Well, now there are senorejuvenators that turn on two genes in our cells ⁓ and they make proteins that make us younger. So if we can do that, so we can take old cells and make them young. There are techniques now ⁓ that rejuvenate our repair systems. When you're under 30, you repair things almost automatically. Whether it's a knee, know, a medial collateral ligament injury or whether it is something with your brain or your heart, we have stem cells that repair, but we run out of those. Those don't function as well as when you get older. Well, there are two studies now, two companies now, one an offshoot of MD Anderson, one of Hopkins, that are now testing things to rejuvenate. are stem cells without causing cancer. And the one that's available now that I'm involved with is therapeutic plasma exchange. So we know, for example, if you look at heart failure, there are some things like diabetes and hypertension, et cetera, that are predispositions. All of those together are about 25 % of heart failure. We can explain. What's the others? Well, in the genome-wide association studies, it's called GWAS, There are hundred different genes that contribute to the rest of it. All genes do is make proteins. So you can get rid of all those abnormal proteins with what we call therapeutic plasma exchange, which is getting you your red cells back, throwing out your old plasma and your old proteins. And so why does, it's been a, if you will, a mystery of research project. Why does therapeutic plasma exchange reverse aging, and it's because it gets rid of all of these minor, you know, if you will, variants that we produce in our genes that produce proteins that cause problems. So I've gone through an awful lot.
speaker-1: is a lot and so people that are listening right now, they might be thinking here saying, wait a second, are you saying that one, I almost, I can reverse time on my age cycle.
speaker-0: We don't know yet. In animals, we can do it with 14 different processes. We don't know which of those, but if you ask, we give, I'm at the Cleveland Clinic, and as you know, we give, you probably don't know, but we give medical care to ⁓ the Toronto ⁓ Maple Leafs and the Montreal Canadiens hockey teams. And so when I was giving a talk to their group, I asked one of the defensemen, one of the star defensemen, if you take 14 shots on goal, what's the chance you're going to score? And he said, if I take 14, it's 100%. It isn't. It's about 80 % if you look at it. So, and you can see that in the Olympics with our goalie stopped 42 or 43 shots. So it's about 80%, so we think with about an 80 % probability that within five years,
speaker-1: back.
speaker-0: you're going to be able to, if you're 90, you're going to be able to be younger than your children. ⁓ And that's a huge emotional change. know, people say AI is a big disruptor. No, longevity, reversing aging, will make that a very minor disruptor compared to us living longer, younger.
speaker-1: And you mentioned the Cleveland Clinic, you work with professional athletes, you work with Dr. Oz. mean, the list of accolades for you is tremendous. So how are we actually, in five years, what can we expect to see actually happening?
speaker-0: With an 80 % probability, you'll be able, and my best guess is there will be three things done together, and I mention those. Something that changes old cells into young cells, something that improves our repair system, such as growing stem cells in our cells, not getting exogenous, and something that gets rid of our misstep or missignaling protein. So I think there'll be three things that, and there'll be clinics set up for, that will relatively inexpensive. Now, the key though is you have to stay young to get younger. That is if you develop what we call structural changes. If you, instead of having a heart muscle that's got all heart cells, you have some connective tissue cells where they've repaired things, then you're not going to be able to reverse that, we don't think. But you, in the animal models, don't reverse that. So you have to stay young to get younger. So we think that it'll be important to ⁓ stay young. we've got a whole bunch of therapies. The side effects of the GLP-1s are so good that you're able to keep a lot of systems young. there was an Oprah show in the late 90s. You get a car. You get a car. You get a car, right? I always ask Katie, do you know what car it was? No. Because it kept that car company alive for about 10 more years. It was a Pontiac. Oh. They don't have Pontiacs anymore, right? Didn't keep them alive forever. But anyway, she's brilliant. So we now, at the Cleveland Clinic, have a program where almost everyone in executive health, you get a statin and you get a GLP-1, you get a statin, because the side effects are so beneficial.
speaker-1: So with what we're seeing between the research that you're doing and some of the different technologies and therapies that are coming out, what do we see first? Do we see the cells living longer, the brain cells? What can we really expect? Because you said longevity, AI is not the thing we have to be on the lookout for. It's longevity.
speaker-0: ⁓ We don't know the answer to that. If you look in the animal models, everything changes at the same time. So, ⁓ women with, if you will, graying hair, it turns black or blonde again. ⁓ So, in the animal models, the hair regrows, the skin regrows, the heart regrows, the brain regrows. So it is all of the above. There are specific things that these techniques are used for now. So for example, therapeutic plasma exchange reverses about 70 % of Alzheimer's dementia. That is, it doesn't slow the rate of brain dysfunction, it reverses it. But it also does that for ⁓ long COVID. and it does it for a number of other what we call autoimmune diseases. Why? Because it's getting rid of the abnormal immune proteins that attack your immune system. the answer to your question, we don't know that any one cell will go faster than others. We know that there are some things, you can see it here, that are specific to, for example, ⁓ collagen or gelatin in a diet improves your tendon and ⁓ if you will connective tissue functions from muscles to bone and strength makes Achilles injury much less common. There's some specific things that we know will what we call slow aging but from a reversal of aging it looks like it all will curve relatively at the same time.
speaker-1: It's a very exciting time to be alive, that's for sure. So where do you see, 10 years from now, what does...
speaker-0: Well, it depends on whether this works in humans or not. Yeah. But if it works in humans, we're going to see that the problem of lack of babies. So right now we have a major economic problem because of the lack of babies, right? There aren't enough people, babies, young people working to support us older people. But what will happen is if you're going to live 50, let's just say it's good for 40 years. If you're going to live 40 years longer, you're not going to be retired for an extra 40 years. You'll get bored to hell. So what will happen is it'll change our education system. We now go education, work, retirement. It will go to education, work, education, work, education, work. But if you work 10, if everyone in America who The average age of retirement is 61. If it was 71, we would not have a budget deficit. We'd be able to afford all the social programs we worry about now. Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security wouldn't run out of money. So it solves an awful lot of problems that the lack of babies has caused, if you will, or the lack of workers. So if this occurs, and I said it's about an 80 % probability, Do you have children? Okay, so just imagine in 20 years or 30 years they're 40 or 39 and 30 and 41. How old, I shouldn't ask you how old, but you will be able to be as young as they are again. So very tough emotionally, right? Think of yourself That's crazy to like But that's maybe what will happen.
speaker-1: Dude, they're 8 and 11. You Thank you.
speaker-0: And so you might be able to say, I don't want to be doing a podcast host then. I want to be running a corporation or I want to be ⁓ doing something different in education. You're going to have the chance to, and we don't even know the jobs that will be created then, but it'll be totally different.
speaker-1: Well, Dr. Mike, this has been an incredible conversation. feel like we've only barely seen the tip of the iceberg. It's been so great. I'd love to speak with you again. And I wish you the best of success with this. 80%. I mean, it looks like...
speaker-0: Well the one that's available now is as I said therapeutic plasma exchange and so lifespan edge if you go to lifespan-edge.com research you can read all the research that's accumulating on it and we update it constantly so as you can tell I'm a science nerd so you'll see that.
speaker-1: Amazing, yeah, and we'll be sure to include that in the show notes for anybody that's interested in learning more, which I'm sure everyone is. But if people want to follow you, connect with you, learn more about all of your studies, where's the best spot for them to go?
speaker-0: Well, they can go to lifespan-edge.com or I do have a sub stack called michaelfroisenmd.substack.com. we do a routine and as you may know, I've written a little over 6,000 columns with Dr. Oz when he went to, and it's in 68 newspapers, so when he went to, when he was a, approved as administrator of Medicare and Medicaid, CMS services. I'm writing them by myself now, so they're in 68 newspapers. You can see the latest medical news.
speaker-1: Amazing. Well, this has been such a great conversation. Thank you again so much for joining us on Behind the Practice.
speaker-0: Behind the Practice is produced by Next Step Social and Podcasting and hosted by Katie Brinkley and Sean Quintero. A special thank you to our guests today. This episode was recorded live at the Boston BioLive Functional Longevity Summit. A special thank you to the team that helped make this podcast happen.
speaker-1: Welcome back to this week's episode of Behind the Practice. I'm Katie Brinkley and we are in for a treat today because we are sitting down with Dr. Mike Royzen. Thank you so much for joining me on the show today.
speaker-0: Thank you for having me.
speaker-1: This is such a treat and for people who might not be familiar with you, Dr. Mike, you are the chief wellness officer at the Cleveland Clinic, co-author of You Series with Dr. O- I mean, the list goes on. You have quite a list of accomplishment and accolades to your name. So I really appreciate you joining me on the show today.
speaker-0: My privilege. So I'm one of the few docs who has an Emmy, a L, and a Paul Rogers Award for the best medical communicator from the National Library of Medicine. The only one who has the same things are my co-author, Mehmet Oz.
speaker-1: was just about to say, does anyone else have that honor? Because an Emmy in that awards list probably is pretty rare to get.
speaker-0: Well, it's from appearing on one of the Oprah shows. Yeah.
speaker-1: That's great. Well, let's talk, I mean, you've been doing this, you spent decades in this industry and focused on extending the lifespan.
speaker-0: Right, so I like to think of wellness as slowing your rate of aging. And so when we developed real age, what real age is, the actual age of your body. And you can be up to, for women, 31 years younger or older with just doing what we call lifestyle. Stress management, posse, purpose, play, nutritional choices, ⁓ physical activity, and then avoiding some unforced errors are the major ones. that slows it. We're now entering the area of longevity which actually reverses aging. So there are what we call 14 shots on goal. There are 14 areas of research into the mechanism of aging that mean that you'll be able to be younger than your children when you're 90. That is, they have taken, all 14, have taken three animal species. that are the equivalent of human 90 and made them human 40. So five of those are now in human testing. So within five years, we're going to see whether there will be a breakthrough at this type of event. And one of those is available now. So as I said, there are 14 that have been shown to actually reverse the process of aging.
speaker-1: That is, I'm sure that people listening right now are just blown away. They're like, what do mean reversing the process of antigen?
speaker-0: So your cells, every one of your cells functions as though it's a younger cell. As we get older, we lose some of the energy functioning of the cell and we grab garbage inside the cell which inhibits it. ⁓ So an old cell doesn't, whether it's heart or brain or kidney or whatever, doesn't look the same as a young cell. A young cell has more energy organelles. energy producing areas and a density of them and less, a young cell has less of the what you would call garbage collection. They're organelles where you're getting rid of stuff. What happens is there are 14 areas that change the way you function to have younger cells. One of them is what we used to be senolytics. We used to try and get rid of old cells. Well, now there are senorejuvenators that turn on two genes in our cells ⁓ and they make proteins that make us younger. So if we can do that, so we can take old cells and make them young. There are techniques now ⁓ that rejuvenate our repair systems. When you're under 30, you repair things almost automatically. Whether it's a knee, know, a medial collateral ligament injury or whether it is something with your brain or your heart, we have stem cells that repair, but we run out of those. Those don't function as well as when you get older. Well, there are two studies now, two companies now, one an offshoot of MD Anderson, one of Hopkins, that are now testing things to rejuvenate. are stem cells without causing cancer. And the one that's available now that I'm involved with is therapeutic plasma exchange. So we know, for example, if you look at heart failure, there are some things like diabetes and hypertension, et cetera, that are predispositions. All of those together are about 25 % of heart failure. We can explain. What's the others? Well, in the genome-wide association studies, it's called GWAS, There are hundred different genes that contribute to the rest of it. All genes do is make proteins. So you can get rid of all those abnormal proteins with what we call therapeutic plasma exchange, which is getting you your red cells back, throwing out your old plasma and your old proteins. And so why does, it's been a, if you will, a mystery of research project. Why does therapeutic plasma exchange reverse aging, and it's because it gets rid of all of these minor, you know, if you will, variants that we produce in our genes that produce proteins that cause problems. So I've gone through an awful lot.
speaker-1: is a lot and so people that are listening right now, they might be thinking here saying, wait a second, are you saying that one, I almost, I can reverse time on my age cycle.
speaker-0: We don't know yet. In animals, we can do it with 14 different processes. We don't know which of those, but if you ask, we give, I'm at the Cleveland Clinic, and as you know, we give, you probably don't know, but we give medical care to ⁓ the Toronto ⁓ Maple Leafs and the Montreal Canadiens hockey teams. And so when I was giving a talk to their group, I asked one of the defensemen, one of the star defensemen, if you take 14 shots on goal, what's the chance you're going to score? And he said, if I take 14, it's 100%. It isn't. It's about 80 % if you look at it. So, and you can see that in the Olympics with our goalie stopped 42 or 43 shots. So it's about 80%, so we think with about an 80 % probability that within five years,
speaker-1: back.
speaker-0: you're going to be able to, if you're 90, you're going to be able to be younger than your children. ⁓ And that's a huge emotional change. know, people say AI is a big disruptor. No, longevity, reversing aging, will make that a very minor disruptor compared to us living longer, younger.
speaker-1: And you mentioned the Cleveland Clinic, you work with professional athletes, you work with Dr. Oz. mean, the list of accolades for you is tremendous. So how are we actually, in five years, what can we expect to see actually happening?
speaker-0: With an 80 % probability, you'll be able, and my best guess is there will be three things done together, and I mention those. Something that changes old cells into young cells, something that improves our repair system, such as growing stem cells in our cells, not getting exogenous, and something that gets rid of our misstep or missignaling protein. So I think there'll be three things that, and there'll be clinics set up for, that will relatively inexpensive. Now, the key though is you have to stay young to get younger. That is if you develop what we call structural changes. If you, instead of having a heart muscle that's got all heart cells, you have some connective tissue cells where they've repaired things, then you're not going to be able to reverse that, we don't think. But you, in the animal models, don't reverse that. So you have to stay young to get younger. So we think that it'll be important to ⁓ stay young. we've got a whole bunch of therapies. The side effects of the GLP-1s are so good that you're able to keep a lot of systems young. there was an Oprah show in the late 90s. You get a car. You get a car. You get a car, right? I always ask Katie, do you know what car it was? No. Because it kept that car company alive for about 10 more years. It was a Pontiac. Oh. They don't have Pontiacs anymore, right? Didn't keep them alive forever. But anyway, she's brilliant. So we now, at the Cleveland Clinic, have a program where almost everyone in executive health, you get a statin and you get a GLP-1, you get a statin, because the side effects are so beneficial.
speaker-1: So with what we're seeing between the research that you're doing and some of the different technologies and therapies that are coming out, what do we see first? Do we see the cells living longer, the brain cells? What can we really expect? Because you said longevity, AI is not the thing we have to be on the lookout for. It's longevity.
speaker-0: ⁓ We don't know the answer to that. If you look in the animal models, everything changes at the same time. So, ⁓ women with, if you will, graying hair, it turns black or blonde again. ⁓ So, in the animal models, the hair regrows, the skin regrows, the heart regrows, the brain regrows. So it is all of the above. There are specific things that these techniques are used for now. So for example, therapeutic plasma exchange reverses about 70 % of Alzheimer's dementia. That is, it doesn't slow the rate of brain dysfunction, it reverses it. But it also does that for ⁓ long COVID. and it does it for a number of other what we call autoimmune diseases. Why? Because it's getting rid of the abnormal immune proteins that attack your immune system. the answer to your question, we don't know that any one cell will go faster than others. We know that there are some things, you can see it here, that are specific to, for example, ⁓ collagen or gelatin in a diet improves your tendon and ⁓ if you will connective tissue functions from muscles to bone and strength makes Achilles injury much less common. There's some specific things that we know will what we call slow aging but from a reversal of aging it looks like it all will curve relatively at the same time.
speaker-1: It's a very exciting time to be alive, that's for sure. So where do you see, 10 years from now, what does...
speaker-0: Well, it depends on whether this works in humans or not. Yeah. But if it works in humans, we're going to see that the problem of lack of babies. So right now we have a major economic problem because of the lack of babies, right? There aren't enough people, babies, young people working to support us older people. But what will happen is if you're going to live 50, let's just say it's good for 40 years. If you're going to live 40 years longer, you're not going to be retired for an extra 40 years. You'll get bored to hell. So what will happen is it'll change our education system. We now go education, work, retirement. It will go to education, work, education, work, education, work. But if you work 10, if everyone in America who The average age of retirement is 61. If it was 71, we would not have a budget deficit. We'd be able to afford all the social programs we worry about now. Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security wouldn't run out of money. So it solves an awful lot of problems that the lack of babies has caused, if you will, or the lack of workers. So if this occurs, and I said it's about an 80 % probability, Do you have children? Okay, so just imagine in 20 years or 30 years they're 40 or 39 and 30 and 41. How old, I shouldn't ask you how old, but you will be able to be as young as they are again. So very tough emotionally, right? Think of yourself That's crazy to like But that's maybe what will happen.
speaker-1: Dude, they're 8 and 11. You Thank you.
speaker-0: And so you might be able to say, I don't want to be doing a podcast host then. I want to be running a corporation or I want to be ⁓ doing something different in education. You're going to have the chance to, and we don't even know the jobs that will be created then, but it'll be totally different.
speaker-1: Well, Dr. Mike, this has been an incredible conversation. feel like we've only barely seen the tip of the iceberg. It's been so great. I'd love to speak with you again. And I wish you the best of success with this. 80%. I mean, it looks like...
speaker-0: Well the one that's available now is as I said therapeutic plasma exchange and so lifespan edge if you go to lifespan-edge.com research you can read all the research that's accumulating on it and we update it constantly so as you can tell I'm a science nerd so you'll see that.
speaker-1: Amazing, yeah, and we'll be sure to include that in the show notes for anybody that's interested in learning more, which I'm sure everyone is. But if people want to follow you, connect with you, learn more about all of your studies, where's the best spot for them to go?
speaker-0: Well, they can go to lifespan-edge.com or I do have a sub stack called michaelfroisenmd.substack.com. we do a routine and as you may know, I've written a little over 6,000 columns with Dr. Oz when he went to, and it's in 68 newspapers, so when he went to, when he was a, approved as administrator of Medicare and Medicaid, CMS services. I'm writing them by myself now, so they're in 68 newspapers. You can see the latest medical news.
speaker-1: Amazing. Well, this has been such a great conversation. Thank you again so much for joining us on Behind the Practice.
speaker-0: Behind the Practice is produced by Next Step Social and Podcasting and hosted by Katie Brinkley and Sean Quintero. A special thank you to our guests today. This episode was recorded live at the Boston BioLive Functional Longevity Summit. A special thank you to the team that helped make this podcast happen.
