What About Galectin-3 for Health? with Dr Isaac Eliaz

Today we're going to talk about a fascinating concept the survival paradox and how it applies to longevity , and I'm thrilled to be joined today by our expert , dr Isaac Elias , who has written extensively about the survival paradox and is an expert in this field . Hi , isaac , welcome to the episode .

I learned Shiatsu . I learned Chinese medicine . I'm a master of science in Chinese medicine , I'm a licensed acupuncturist and my focus in integrative medicine was oncology and how to cure INSS .

And in the same time I got deeply into meditation , into Tibetan Buddhism , and I spent about 20 years every year , two to three months in the mountains and for 10 years , half a day retreat , half a day working , and so I was fortunate to be the doctor and student of the greatest meditation masters in the Himalaya , on one-to-one for many years .

So I learned a lot of different esoteric meditation practices .

I've seen a lot of things that science cannot explain , and all of this really connected back to something very simple for me If we can connect to our heart , our heart has infinite healing potential , and what prevents us from connecting to what is in us already is our survivor response , which is innate within us . So that's the depth of the survivor paradox .

So it's really , it's a , it's a coined , this term to express our life . You know , we all want to survive , but there is a cost to it and the most direct result of this inappropriate survival response which is necessary , the survival response is inflammation . So that's a little bit about my background .

So I'm an active clinician , I'm a healer , I'm a researcher , I have large NIH grants where I research the removal of the survival paradox , protein galactin-3 through therapeutic aphorisms in sepsis , actually , and in kidney injury we are getting close to clinical trials , hopefully . Injury , we are getting close to clinical trials , hopefully .

And so I got in one head , just like you , you know academia and published papers and on the other end , I'm out there in the stratosphere with my experience and my understanding and I try to integrate it and hopefully , over time , I'm doing a better job in explaining it , you know .

What a fascinating journey you've been on , and it's interesting to me that some of the most creative , innovative ideas in this space are coming from people not so much in you know , not so much in you know , mainstream medicine or the science community , but those who have bridged both of those and embrace things like meditation or other alternative approaches and

that's where some of the real creativity comes .

You deal with the heads of departments in Harvard and Stanford , you know , and you and you have to , and some of them who are really really at the top , they allow their creativity to come out . You know they've made it , so they don't have to , they don't have to adhere to , to the box , you know , and so so , no .

So the reaction is wow , oh my god , if this works , it's , it's like it will change medicine . So it's an interesting process and we can talk just about this . But in many levels science is amazing . But for me , science is more a confirmatory tool . I get , I get my ideas from insights , from meditation , from contemplation , from clinical observation .

You know the one-on-one and then science and research become a tool to confirm it and to refine it , and the and the small details of science and and regulatory quality are critical .

Many people you know again , I'm talking to you because of your background I never actually talked about it in summit , but people you know in the alternative field want to do this treatment and that treatment and , I have to admit , a lot of the popular , even cutting edge treatments started in my clinic 20 years ago .

You know , now I'm , my life is simplified , so I've been there . The in-depth proof and the in-depth assurance of safety . It's very important and only until you start doing it and being in it and see why you have to make sure there's no side effect and no reaction and all this and you say , oh , my god , I got it .

I got an amazing invention can save millions of people . It's going to take me so much money and years because I have to prove safety , but there's value to it . You know there is value to it . So it's part of the integration that is not often talked about is taking the ideas and seeing how we can work with the system to make them available .

It has a conventional , qualitative quality conventional , which probably is what all your speakers are speaking about , which is the quality of our life , and it has a more esoteric qualitative quality about how many different things we do in life . So in Chinese medicine , longevity is measured by how many different things we have done in life .

And from Chinese medicine , if somebody lived 100 years and they've done one simple thing and they haven't evolved , they lived a very short life , and a great example I often give is Mozart . They lived a very short life and a great example I often give is Mozart , who died at the age of 32 and left a longevity of work that is still with us .

So he had an amazing longevity . The person who really is the Ari , the holy Ari , the person who revived Kabbalah in Israel , I think , 17th , 18th century . He came from Egypt at the age of 31 . He lived one year and he died , and there's a whole movement , you know , all over the world .

And so longevity is also how many different things and , from the perspective of simplifying it is how many different ideas we can hold , and the more ideas we can hold and shift between means , we have more flexibility , and when we have more flexibility , our arteries are more flexible , our blood flow is more flexible , there's less resistance , there's less fibrosis ,

there is less inflammation and it's like a rubber band that can stretch and let go and there's a resilience . There is a resilience not of just hitting the wall but of looking for another door and that's really the and again I'm a little bit off track , but it's interesting . I I often say there's always a choice .

Even somebody on the deathbed , they have a choice of how they are going to die and it's going to have an impact on their deathbed . They have a choice of how they are going to die and it's going to have an impact on their summarizing experience of life , on their transition and on their community around them .

You know , people can leave this world and leave a gift to the people behind them or make it very traumatic . So we always have a choice and the body will always do its best to survive and our role as people are trying to give some guidance in inflammation , aging and longevity is to show ourselves and show others that there are different options .

And in order to show that there are different options , we have to understand that because everything is changeable science , everything is impermanent , nothing is permanent basic quantum mechanics then everything is possible and that's really the driving force of longevity . So the more we are flexible , the less we are stuck , the less we are inflamed , the less

we are fibrotic , the longer we live . So if we look at the level of galactin-3 , the survival paradox protein , that's how I coin it centurions , robert , have a lower level than people in the 70s and 80s in published studies . And when you look at the study it's really nice .

You see 70s and 80s in published studies and when you look at the study , it's really nice . You see 70s , 80s and you know it's . There's a spread and at the bottom you see this whole layer of lower level of galactin-3 . These are the people that are going to make it into a centurion .

So you see the same proteins that drives inflammation , that drives fibrosis , that drives fight , that doesn't allow for flexibility and flow . You can see it . So I'm taking it back into science . So that's what I mean , the connection .

So because it's built in us , in every cell in our body , it's automated , it's not something we think about and it happens in a fraction of a second through the autonomic nervous system , through the sympathetic nervous system and the two basic drives of survival is fighting , which equates to friction and to inflammation , and running away , which equates more to hiding ,

to getting away from danger , which creates the isolating quality , the micro , the biofilm , the micro environment , the place where we can hide . We can hide Traumas can hide , multigenerational traumas can hide , bacteria can hide , viruses can hide . We get a micro environment , we get a change in metabolism .

It's a great environment for cancer right to grow , where there's an environment of survival , a survival environment . We need energy very fast , we use glucose faster . We get a high SUV in a PET scan right Because we're consuming a lot of glucose .

So this is the immediate sympathetic response that we can balance with the parasympathetic response , with taking a deep breath , with creating spaciousness , with changing our lifestyle , and that's the power that we each have .

But then there's a biochemical response and the issue of the biochemical response is that once it starts , it triggers a cascade of events and even if you stop the instigating upstream protein , you have gotten now a downstream effect of cytokines and inflammation and fibrotic factors .

And we all became acquainted to it with the COVID and COVID long haul and cytokine storm , which is really what killed people in COVID .

And so when we address a survivor paradox in many levels , on a biochemical level , by blocking the protein galactin-3 with modified cyprospectin , respectosol , by creating different methods that will change the environment of inflammation , by doing lifestyle changes or by changing our mind , the way we think about things , the way we feel things , it will have a profound

downstream effect . And it's really you either create an inflammation or you don't create an inflammation . It's not something we can escape , because every time we repair we leave a tiny scar . So the idea of combating inflammation and inflammation is to try to heal without a scar . And what is regenerative medicine ?

You know , regenerative medicine longevity addressing , which is the basis , is addressing inflammation . It's not that we have to generate a new cell , and it's impossible . We just have to try to get our cell to go back to its normal function .

If we get a cell that is functioning abnormally to go back to normal mitochondrial function , to have a good relationship with its neighbors and change the receptors on the membranes for the macrophage outside to become , to feel more safe and not to produce inflammation and become , like you know , m1 , m2 , inflammatory macrophage excrete galactin-3 .

Where the cell can more easily , insulin receptors work better , ampk works better , pdk is inactivated . Pyruvate comes into the mitochondria . That's regeneration . You , you know that's a different person , right , and that's why , in the field of cancer , from a , from a basic philosophical perspective , we try to attack but we also try to re-differentiate .

It's a law , it's a , it's an ancient concept . What can we do to make the cell more normal , less aggressive , and so it's , you know , so it's a . As you can see , as I mentioned a little bit , there is clear , detailed , accurate biochemistry .

I just gave some simple example and there is also this understanding how can we make a cell go back to feeling that it's a part of a community , that it has a certain lifespan , and then it just ends its life and another cell will come in ? Normal apoptosis , normal energy production , which is very efficient , but much slower .

Time of safety , where no rush to produce energy . But we can produce 18 atps from one glucose , as you know so well , and without any byproduct , lactic acid , or we are in stress , we are in danger . We produce energy 100 times faster , but at a very heavy cost . The cell feels like it doesn't have oxygen . Hypoxia inducing factor goes up it .

It becomes the mass we age . So that's a little bit deeper into the survival paradox , the inappropriate survival response . And what it does is the understanding that we have the power to change .

We've talked about mTOR on this program , which is another master signaling protein that switches back and forth just to review for our guests that , between food abundance and glucose utilization , essentially , and inflammation which it drives because the food's coming in and it's foreign material , versus survival , or let's not say survival , let's say sort of starvation mode

or fasting mode , repair mode , when autophagy is activated , inflammation is turned down , which people will achieve with fasting and ketosis , I guess , is the survival paradox .

Does that have any analogies to mTOR , the activation or turning off of mTOR , because mTOR has been cited as a longevity drug and rapamycin as a longevity target , for rapamycin and fasting and ketosis and all . Does that fit in with the survival paradox ?

. I'm smiling because I cured somebody from prostate cancer in 2005 using MTO1 , using metformin and other stuff , and the medical board in California came after me . You know somebody , and there were already 160 studies me . You know somebody , and , and there were already 160 studies . You know eventually . But I'm smiling because I I've been doing it for 20 years .

So , yeah , definitely so we have to understand the mto1 . Ampk is a metabolic expression of safety and danger . So there are things that regulate mTOR1 , you know . So metformin is a drug , berberine a little bit curcumin . The most important one is honocuole , which is underused . Honocuole is the most powerful because honocuole has an effect on mTOR1 , blocking it .

It stimulates AMPK , it blocks AKT , it blocks HIF . All of these . You know , if we had a diagram here , which I often show our pathways that activate PDK , the enzyme that stops the normal metabolism , and it also blocks N-kappa-beta and TNF-alpha on a long-term basis . So , yeah , very important , but what starts it is a reaction on the membrane .

What starts it is insulin receptors being blocked . It's the idea that you know something is wrong . We can't get our , we are not getting our nourishment and , on a deeper level , the cellular feeling that it cannot take a deep breath . That's really what happens . It's .

You know , often when I work with a cancer patient , I will ask , I will go to the , to the cancer area and I will ask the patient , or or just connect with what made you , or the cancer , the tissue , not be able to take a deep breath .

Because the moment we take a deep breath , cellularly , this whole mechanism because AJF goes down , m2o1 gets shut down , you know , ampk goes up and we're in good shape . So , yes , absolutely , and that's one of the most exciting areas , to really that we are making contribution .

And fasting is very interesting Because when we have scarcity , when we are in a survivor mode , there are two kinds of survivor mode . There's the classical survivor mode , which is very short term . We have to survive the next 30 seconds , the next five seconds . Somebody is shooting at us .

We have to survive the next 30 seconds , the next five seconds somebody's shooting at us . We got to run away , we got to produce energy . It doesn't matter if we get hurt , if we get cut , if we pay a price for another 50 years . We got to survive .

That's a traumatic survival response and in this sense , when it's deeply registered in us , it creates scars in our dna . That's the epigenetic component which we know so well . Holocaust , you know , and I I tell my story how I had very intense chest pain right here for 50 years and upper back pain that I knew was not mine .

I'm named after my grandfather , who was Isaac . That I never met and only at the deathbed of my grandmother I write it in my book 50 years after he died at the age 50 from stomach cancer . I couldn't stomach what happened . My mother just tells all of us five siblings that 10 of his 12 siblings were killed by hitler . Nobody told us .

So he held the trauma , nobody talked and it was passed to me and when I healed from it , when I went through a sense of forgiveness , my pain went away immediately .

After 50 years I have no more pain , but my mother in her 80s , who could never watch anything about the holocaust , was able to start watching programs about the holocaust without knowing what happened to me . So that's the multi-generational . So for the viewers , for the listeners , when we address inflammation , there is a multi-generational effect .

There is an effect on the people around us At the present time , backward and forward . So that's the importance of the topics that we are addressing . So , when we look now , going back to fasting , so we talked about the survival fasting and I want to elaborate on it because ketogenic diet is a tricky one .

Because ketogenic diet is a tricky one and I went , you know , on a limb in 2010 when the first big studies came on ketogenic diet in cancer . I was teaching at A4M , at the Integrative Oncology Program , and I said it's going to be overused , because if ketogenic diet was the ideal diet for longevity , the body would have done it anyway .

It would have been our choice , right , and it's not . But autophagy and intermittent fasting is where we shift to a longevity survival . Well , now , our survival is long-term . It's how can we live longer ? And that's what happened in starvation , how can we manage longer without food , right ?

So when you start tapping into autophagy , you start tapping into survival mechanisms that are very beneficial for inflammation and that's why , in my opinion , intermittent fasting is so critical .

It's probably the most important dietary advice and there are exceptions , of course , certain people and certain mechanisms but it's key and ketogenic diet has its role at very specific times when we want to really shut down certain pathways , for example , cancer during radiation therapy or during chemotherapy , or we want to create .

The body really needs a time to take a break , to take a deep breath . We want to shut down glucose metabolism completely for a few days and let the body recapture itself .

But in this sense , autophagy , intermittent fasting and agents that can help it , apophagy , intermittent fasting and agents that can help it , and dietary advice are the simplest and most important key factors in addressing inflammation and the hardest because it requires a lot of discipline for each person , right ?

But yes , so people kind of lump them together and they lump dietary approaches together . And the beauty of autophagy , it bridges the beauty of intermittent fasting , it bridges day-to-day functioning with long-term functioning . It's right there , right at the 16 to 24 hours . To 14 doesn't matter , I'm not . I'm sure a lot of people went into details .

I don't want to take the time , but that's . And so lately I've , as people are asking , I've been trying to point out that there are different movements in these different approaches and each person has to , of course , match them to their capacity . People who have great antioxidant capacity can push more oxidative stress .

People who are not able , don't have a good antioxidant capacity , cannot push oxidative stress .

Not only you said we affect the people around us and all . It's not in our , in our intergenerational things , in our family , but also other people . And it's not to be clear , if I understood you correctly , it's not just through epigenetics but also through psychological factors and human interactions with them that we affect people .

It's not all directly biochemistry .

Our electromagnetic field from the heart is bigger than our body . So what we feel in our heart , if we are more reactive , ego-driven , struggle , but if we're more responsive , and the heart is I don't know if we'll have time to talk about it , but I talk about it a lot the heart is built different than any other organ to do this job .

This field not only touches every cell in our body talking about inflammation but it touches people around us . But in this sense , we have the choice if a gene will be turned on or turned off . Right , you , you already mentioned it and you know the very beautiful saying in hebrew , a very ancient saying , saying which means everything is predetermined .

That's genetics . But we have the choice and it's actually so ancient , they knew this , and the choice is epigenetics and the beauty about it is a multigenerational effect . So , really , when we do this now , why am I mentioning it ?

Because if we are taking care of our health and again I don't know , I mean I'm going a little bit esoteric , I apologize If we focus on our health , on addressing inflammation from a very selfish , just for me , there is a contracting focused effect and this contraction by itself is counterproductive when we open our heart and understand that we all want to reduce

inflammation . The world sure needs right now less inflammation . Right , you can see in society it , in strife and struggles . What is global warming ? It's inflammation on a global scale out of our body . When we can address it , we have more space to let the heat the inflammation causes heat , right the heat to dissipate . We get more support from other people .

When somebody is down , we are there to hold them . When we are down , somebody is there to hold us . Of course , when we have friends and family , it's obvious , but energetically , that's how it works . Robert , we have almost 50 trillion cells in our body . We work as one system . Each cell has close to 1 million million reactions a second .

People are not aware of it . If this is not a miracle that we can talk right now , what is a miracle ? You know how is it happening . There is support , there is a system . And who nourishes the system and takes all the complaints from the system ? All the time ? Our heart . Our heart gets all the dirty blood from everything in the body .

Right , what we don't want ? Oh no , take it away . Connect with the universe . That's an infinite community , infinite space , and gives nourishment . And then our job and what we are talking here , one is to realize and connect with the heart . We're not talking about this so much today , but our cells have to be willing to take nourishment .

See , it's many times , you know , it's like , yeah , we can give nourishment through the heart , but if the cell is blocked , if the cell is microenvironment , if galactin-3 protein creates a lattice formation and the nourishment can't come , we have high lipoprotein A , or we have heavy metals , or we have toxins , or if the cell is traumatized and contracted , nmto1 is

activated , the cell is not taking the nourishment . And the classical is the Warburg effect . Right , the Warburg effect . You have oxygen and the cell still goes into aerobic glycolysis . If the cell could just open itself to nourishment , the cancer will dissipate in a fraction . There will be no cancer . The cell becomes normal .

So we talk about biochemistry , but there's a bigger picture in it , because we are dealing with inflammation on a global scale . On a global scale .

No other organ does it , you know I mean the kidneys in some ways , but it's different , it's still . It's still arterial blood . So so it's different and it's connected to the heart and the heart is the only organ that nourishes itself through the coronary artery after it finishes its job . The blood is clean , it gives it without discrimination .

The aorta is stiff artery gives it and then it relaxes . The coronary arteries open up outside of the heart if people don't know in the aorta and it gets nourished . So the heart survival is to nourish selflessly , and the moment , physiologically it stops in 60 seconds we are dead .

So of course the mental aspect , the psychological , the emotional , the spiritual are part of it , and the reason why it's easier to connect to it than to change our mind habit of not being caught in thoughts is because it's happening anyway physiologically .

And as long as there is flow , as long as there's good oxygenation , then everything you mentioned is drivers of inflammation goes away because mpk is jumping up and down . You know it's getting plenty of oxygen and nourishment and everything is cleaned up and there is no lactic acid and no acidosis and all is good . You know , know paradise .

It carries different ligands inflammatory ligands , sticky-disrupting molecules , over time metastatic molecules , neuroinflammatory molecules many of them are called ligands , and it attaches , creates five , it creates a pentamer of five and five , and five and five it creates a lattice , a coating , a different environment and once the microenvironment changes , everything starts going

wrong . So if we can block galactin-3 , we can reverse and disrupt the process . If you look in about 10,000 papers on galactin-3 , I made some of the key discoveries that blocking galactin-3 with modified citrus pectin will attenuate inflammation and fibrosis . I mean , I have patents for this and we have about 80 published papers on pectin-3 , on modified citrus pectin .

So when you blow galactin-3 , there is a great health benefit . And from this perspective , when it comes to inflammation , modifatate respectin is your number one supplement Because as we age , galactin-3 goes up . Also , modifatate respectin pulls out heavy metals and toxins or everything is published .

It regulates immune response and it attenuates , it takes down the cytokine storm . So it's really a basic supplement , really a gift from nature . I think it's a modification of a fiber , a specific modification that you can integrate with different treatments , but it's key to addressing what we talk the mTOR1 , the MPK from a systemic point of view .

So if you look at diseases affected by galactin-3 , it's practically every disease Cancer , of course , and sepsis , and acute kidney injury and chronic kidney disease and NASH and NAFLDS and pulmonary fibrosis and stroke , narrow inflammation , autoimmune diseases you name it . It's really what will turn an infection into sepsis .

In our studies we show when we blow galactin-3 , we attenuate sepsis , we reverse , we prevent the acute kidney injury and the death of the animals . When a patient comes to the ICU with sepsis without pre-existing condition , the level of galactin-3 at admission will determine who is going to die later . That's how important it is .

It represents the biochemical response that is turned on and cannot turn off and that's the simple , straightforward supplement everyone can take as part of the regimen . So that's the importance of galactin-3 . And I mean it's so much bigger than me . I've been involved with it for about 30 years , but you know it's really . There is an interest .

That's why you know , I know I got NIH grants and I'm working on different studies and it's very exciting , it's really .

And I'm presenting I mean we are doing this interview ahead of time and next week I'm presenting at ASCO-GU our multicenter trial on biochemical relapse of prostate cancer , showing an 18-month follow-up on people whose prostate cancer was removed and then came back and over 18 months people who took modified C-trospectin the cancer growth was slowed down or even got went

down . 90 of the people benefited over 18 months . Show me a drug that does this and the side effect was that their memory was better , their joint pains got better and the energy got better . So that's the importance of addressing GAL3 .

I said you know , this is the first substance ever modifed and respected in the work of Avram Raz and in my work to be shown to slow down and prevent metastasis in cancer in animal models published in Journal of National Cancer Institute in 1995 . If this was a drug , it would have been a multi-billion dollar drug . Okay , I'm getting a poster session in ASCO-GU .

If I was a drug from Big Pharma , I would have had a planetary session . You know that the same session that presented Herceptin in ASCO the very important drug in HER2-neu positive , which is an important drug , and all the journalists were there the same session showed that losing five kilograms doubled five-year survival in women , doubled with breast cancer .

Not one journalist wrote about it and the results were five times better than erceptin . Accepting , you know . So it's part of an industry . You accept it with an open heart . It doesn't even bother me anymore . I just don't spend time trying to convince people that you know when there is a wall , there is a wall . We just do our work .

We talk to one person at a time , but that's the reason why I'm talking in dozens and dozens of summits . Now it it's time to share it with the world . It's a stage in my life and so I'm sharing it . You know , and I paid my dues , I was doing this in the 80s .

There were very few people in the field in the 80s , you really had to do it underground , you know . So now , yeah , now there are great colleagues we're all recreating an energy of joint energy , you know I mean . So now , yeah , now they're great colleagues .

You know , we all , we all , we're creating an energy of , uh , of , you know , joint energy , just a concept of a summit , you know , of people who want to do good coming together to send a message that's healing by itself yeah , yeah , it's there .

I teach a lot in Israel , actually for the last decade , but now I'm going to start teaching united states , so people who join and come to my website and sign up , they will get the notification . I want to offer this as a free , zoom , zoom retreat in the second part of 2023 , because it's amazing .

It's amazing how our health can change in a few days if we just put the right components together , because the regenerative power is within us , we are born with it , we are built to do it and that's the power of healing , you know .