You may have realized that being healthy feels different than it did in the past, now that you're over 50. If you want to maximize your health potential, but don't have time to read through overwhelming pages of Google links, this is the show for you. Welcome to HealthyTips After 50. We love doing the research, finding solutions, talking to health experts, and learning what works and what doesn't.
Now, your host, she spent the last 25 years dedicated to feeling her best, and is here share her best findings with you, Susan Rosen. Hello, everyone. This is your host, Susan Rosen. And my guest today is someone who, if we hadn't cut it off, we would have still been talking just about various different things we got along so well. Anyways, my guest is Dawn Muxley. And welcome, Dawn. And why don't you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself.
Thanks, Susan. Well, I'm excited to be here and get to know your tribe a bit. Again, my name is Don Moxley. To give you a little bit of background, I'm trained as an exercise physiologist. I did my graduate work back in the early '80s out of Ohio State. For about 25 in the last 35 years, I have worked as a college professor, either adjunct or assistant.
But while I've been teaching the exercise sciences, I've also kept a foot either in industry with technology as it relates, we'll talk more about it, we go, or I work with elite athlete populations. In 2015, I actually left my last teaching job. I worked as a sports scientist back at Ohio State with the wrestling program there, began studying this concept of recovery.
It's expressed in a thing called Heart Rate Variability, HRV, and was invited to join… Actually, I was invited to leave that position to go work in the cannabis industry and all of a sudden started to learn a lot about cannabis, cannabinoids, how they work. Then that led me to the work I'm doing now with Longevity Labs. Longevity Labs It's all about that longevity.
We're looking at human performance, but not your ability to beat someone in the game or do something like that, but rather, how do you beat Mother Nature and live a long, healthy life? The concepts just interlock. Whether I'm doing a lecture on what does it take to win a national title in wrestling, or whether I'm talking to that person's grandparents on how can you extend your health span to meet your lifespan, the concepts are very similar. We'll talk about that as we go.
That's how I wound up here working with Longevity Labs. Now I do a lot of work like this talking about our product, and particularly one called Spermodine Life. Then how does that work in the cell and how do these all things go there? That's a little bit about myself. Okay, interesting. Interesting. Spermidine, is it for a particular problem or is it the whole body? It's a molecule that when...
You're familiar with blue zones, the five areas around the world where people routinely lived a 1900 years old. I was going to say the old people, yeah. Well, and it's all people that thrive. Thrive, yeah. No, no. Our challenge, Susan, is the average American has a lifespan of 73 years on average. That's the number of days you're breathing, okay?
Okay. But the challenge is we have a health span of 62 years, which means for 62 of those 73, you're not in a hospital, you're not interfacing with the health care system. But on the average, Most Americans really begin significant involvement with our health care system at about the age 62. We have roughly 11 years of life that, frankly, is not optimized. I don't know about you. It's been funny. I was talking about athletics and longevity. In athletics, there's usually a goal.
We're trying to win something, we're trying to achieve something. Well, in longevity, the goal is great life. I describe it as we spend the first third of our life learning in school developing. We spend the second third of our life serving others, whether it's in work or a family or raising a family. But then my wife and I have a daughter who two years ago moved out and took a coaching job. We knew she wasn't coming home.
I looked at my wife and I said, Okay, well, we're officially third-third now. We're done raising our kids. What are we going to do? Well, that third-third is your third. It's for the first time in your life, it's about you. I don't know about you, Susan, but I do not want to spend the end of my life attached to tubes in a hospital bed, things like that. I tell a story a lot of times that I've coached amazing athletes, national champions, Olympic medalists, Olympic champions.
My favorite coaching job ever was my daughter's eighth-grade field hockey team. Without a doubt, my most favorite coaching. I want to coach my grandkids, and I want to coach my great grandkids. Five years ago, almost I know six years ago now, my nephew… I'm an old wrestler. My sport was wrestling, and I wanted to be pretty good at it. But my nephew qualified for the Florida State High School wrestling tournament. And my nephew's a big kid. He's my size, 6 feet tall, 280, 290 pounds.
And he's getting ready for the tournament. I got to go down and work out with him at 55 years old. And I was still pretty good. I was better than him that first day. The second day, Susan, you could have beaten me. The first day, I was good. The second day, I was not. It was an interesting look about preserving ability, but also the importance of investing. That just happened to be my test.
Susan, I want to be that crazy wrestling coach at 80 years old that's still teaching, that's still able to go in. I don't see myself competing, but I see myself continuing to teach and stay engaged. You can't do that when you're hooked to a tube. No, it's hard. Longevity is funny that way. I'll take a step back. We talked about blue zones, and I don't know if you've talked about this on your podcast.
I haven't heard you talk about it, but there's a term that we refer to in cellular medicine that's called autophagy or autophagy. It's pronounced both ways. It's an internal cellular cleaning process. Now, they just gave a Nobel Prize in 2016. This is relatively recently. They gave a Nobel Prize to a Japanese researcher who described autophagy in the It has genetic components to it.
Well, the founder of Longevity Labs, his name is Dr. Frank Madeo at the University of Graz in Austria, was doing work with this molecule that's called spermadine. He was using spermadine to treat what's called senescent cells. These are cells that have stopped functioning correctly. Well, you put spermadine with these cells, the cells would transform, autophagy would upregulate, and these cells would return to functionality.
This was one of the first indications that, Oh, this spermadine thing is interesting. We've known about the molecule for hundreds of hundreds of years. The guy that invented the microscope, Anton Van Laenwo. He was a textile dealer in Belgium. He invented the microscope to count threads in silk. Well, this was the first time we ever looked at things that you couldn't see with the human eye. We found bacteria.
Well, he's obviously a freak because it didn't take me long to where he had semen and he was looking at semen. Imagine what would have happened if we gave a microscope to a woman instead of a man. Yeah, not that. We'd have been a lot further along than we are now. Probably, yeah. Yeah. But anyway. It is what it is. He identified these crystalline structures in semen. They They didn't name them for another 200 years. Well, another group of Dutch researchers said, Well, there's sperm in semen.
Let's just call these molecules spermadine. That's where the name came from. We've known about them. In the '80s, we spent a lot of time looking at spermadine as it relates to disease. We were never able to get it connected. It was 2016 when we really understood autophagy that we see, Oh, here's where spermidine comes into play. What we know now is that spermidine declines with age. Spermidine content in the cells decline with age. Okay. So does autophagy.
But when you raise spermedine levels, and it's through oral consumption of food, when you raise spermedine levels, spermedine goes up, autophagy goes up, longevity improves. People who live in blue zones have high spermedine their diets. Their food is raised globally. One of the challenges that we have, and I'm assuming the majority of your audience is American, most of our food sources are industrially produced.
Well, what we know is that that industrial production of food tends to wash out some of the micronutrients. In fact, we extract our spermadine from wheat germ, but we do it in Europe, in Graz. We We cannot find wheat germ in the United States that we can extract spermadine from. Wow. This is important. That's the full circle on the molecule. It's called a polyamine. You've probably heard of an amino acid. If you take an amino acid and peel the acid part off of it, you have an amine.
That's the nitrogen. There's three nitrogens and seven and the accompanying hydrogens. But this is an important molecule in this autophagy process. Does that make sense? Yeah. No, it does. That's where that comes from. Okay. Now you found this thing. You guys have named it. You're looking at it in more detail. What next? Where is it? Is it something that if you feed it to Are these people, they're going to feel better or it depends on what they have? We have a lot of clinical data on this now.
The product has been researched extensively. If your listeners want to learn more, a couple of places you can go. Number one, if you go to spermaninelife. Us, that's the website that we sell things through. But there's another website out there that's called Long LongevityBioresearch. Org. This is where we place all of the articles that we can find related to spermidine. Okay.
So longevitybioresearch. Org. Org. But the other thing about that is that the first article that you'll see on that website is an article from CEL, and it's called spermidine in Health and Disease. It's a review article that was published in CEL. It's not so heavy that the layperson can't read this and understand it. I think there's a review at the beginning of it, but then the second part of the article goes deep. Yeah, they usually put a summary or something.
Yeah, It's pretty good for most people. But when you look at what we saw in spermidine and health and disease, number one, people who consume spermidine-rich supplements, we see an improvement in autophagy. No two ways autophagy increases and improves. Which, again, when you think about autophagy, as autophagy improves, inflammation drops. This is really important because what we know in our third third, the thing that's going to probably take us out, it's one of four diseases.
Cancer, which are usually inflammation-related, heart disease or cardiovascular disease, which is inflammation-related, neurological problems like dementia or Parkinson's, which are inflammation-related, and lack of autophagy. What did I say? And immune system. Your immune system, inflammation blocks your immune system, and autophagy is critical in the immune maintenance. That's what you see in the clinical data that we have from studying spermidine in humans.
Now, we've got some other articles coming out right now. We've got some other resources research as it relates to improved sleep, spermidine. We've got a good sleep study. We have a study out of Berlin that individuals who consume spermidine stopped the development of dementia. Stop it. We've not reversed it, but we stopped it. Again, so when we start to look at Alzheimer's disease, it's from the development of plaque of Tau proteins.
Well, those proteins, when autophagy is upregulated, those proteins are typically digested because that's what happens with autophagy in the cell. They'll be that that Tau protein will be formed. It can't go anywhere. Well, autophagy encapsulates that protein and then digests it. Proteins are strings of amino acids. When it digests it, those amino acids go back to the cell for refunctioning. This is where autophagy is such a beneficial process in that.
Again, when you look at that, we have a good sleep study. We've got some stuff coming out on human reproduction. One of my challenges, Susan, is not making this sound like snake oil because there's so many areas that it- Yeah, that's touching. That autophagy works at a cellular level, and so much of medicine happens at a little higher at an organ level. You have a cardiologist or a neurologist or a neurologist. Well, we're talking about cellular medicine here.
We're talking about deep, deep, a full organizational level below the organ. You have cells, organs, human. We're talking about working it at the cellular level. It's been really exciting being part of a team that gets to do these kinds of things. Oh, no kidding. No kidding. Yeah. So you're doing all this. Everyone's doing all this work and coming up with all these new interesting interesting areas and how it works. So how is it being applied now?
I mean, is it something where people can go into a pharmacy and either off the shelf or through a prescription or something, get a hold of some of these things. You can just walk in the store. If you're in Germany or Austria, you can go into a pharmacy. If you're in this country, we don't have a pharmacy connection yet. Most our e-commerce is where it happens. Again, spermadinelife. Us, that's the best place to go learn about. Listen, you can go to Amazon. You'll see us there.
Now, I'll warn you, with anything good, there always winds up being some other junk that comes along. There has been the emergence in the last year of synthetic spermadine. This is coming out of China. One of the things we're very proud of is there's been over 100 human studies done using spermadine life as the product. In fact, we don't know of a human study that's been published that did not use spermadine life. We do not know of a study that's been done that's used synthetic spermedine.
So be careful. There's definitely a buyer beware there. I hate to say this, but that's That's where vitamins and everything else in there, out in the world. They've replicated all of these things, and they don't do what the original does. And most of the time, they do something negative. If they can. Or nothing. If you're lucky, they do nothing. Yeah, there's a lot of that, isn't there? That's part of the challenge. Oh my God. Yeah. Yes. That's part of the challenge.
Again, if you do go to Amazon, you'll see multiple products there. Again, it's fun for me. I've not seen another company with someone like me. It tells me that they're not selling the science. It just tells me they're writing it. In fact, what's funny is I listen to other promotions. There is one other company that does a really good job. Don't get me wrong, they use a natural spermidine extract. They do a nice job. All the research that they mention is ours. Well, good for them.
Absolutely. It's good on it. It's real stuff, right? Right. I'm nursing a little cough, so that's the reason I'm working on it. But so that's where spermidine comes from. It's a natural food extract. By the way- What food? Weed germ comes right out of weed germ in Europe, European weed germ, which is very different than America. Does it have any real wheat in it? Well, it's the germ of the seed. It's the germ of the seed. Frankly, there is a small amount of gluten.
This is the challenge with wheat is the gluten. There's roughly a one-to-one ratio of gluten to spermidine. Now, let me put this in perspective. The Celiacs Association says that if you're a celiac patient, this is someone who's very allergic to gluten, they should keep their gluten consumption below 10 to 50 milligrams a day. A piece of bread is 1,500 milligrams, just to put it in perspective. We have 1 to 3 milligrams.
The product, in fact, we have a lot of physicians around the country that will use... One of the benefits of spermidine supplementation, and you'll read about this in spermidine and health and disease, is there's an upregulation of what's called epithelial stem cell production. So your epithelial stem cells are the cells that make your skin, which become your hair, your nails.
Most of Our customers tell us that 3-5 weeks after they started using spermidine, they noticed their fingernails start growing like crazy. So this is one of the benefits. Hair improves. Not that my hair is a sign of that. But what you got may be improved. I'm doing okay. But what we know is that the epithelial also create the lining of the gut. Those are the same cells that make that lining of the gut.
Well, we have a lot of doctors that believe that when they start using spermidine and they improve that epithelial cell production, it heightens the junctions in the gut. If there is a leaky gut situation they're dealing with, they're willing to trade the benefit of the spermidine for the risk of the glute. We have a lot of docs doing that. Now, again, you got to kick the glute out of your diet some other way. But It's a trade-off.
Yeah. Well, and a lot of it, too, as you said, depends on how much it ends up being. Exactly. And again, we're doing three milligrams max. Yeah. Well, I was going to say, There aren't that many people who are that allergic to it. And if you are, be careful. Yes, exactly. We've worked with a lot of people. If someone is very celiac or very gluten-intolerant and they want to try it, just contact me. We'll figure out a way that you can try it. Or if you buy it and you can't use it, we've refunded.
We've done this. Listen, we're not trying to... We're trying to help you. We're not... That's right. That's what we do. Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. I don't do real well with gluten or with wheat, but it doesn't mean I I don't... What's the right word? Cheat. Right. And eat a bagel. That's the way most people are. Yeah. Now, there are some people who can't even go into a restaurant that's cooking stuff that has a lot of gluten in it.
Those people might want to talk to their doctors before they start doing it. Absolutely. My daughter and I walked into Costco last night, and I said, Man, I tell you what, those Costco pizzas, I love it. But man, after I eat it, I feel awful. I've just gotten to the point to where the pleasure of eating, it's not worth the price you pay for it afterwards. Yeah. Well, and you never know what it is in it, that actually, because it could be the cheese. It's the gluten. Oh, is it the gluten? Okay.
Oh, it's the gluten. I can eat the cheese right off the top without a problem. But when I eat the crust, that's what turns me out. It's a high gluten. Most pizza crusts are. That's that gluten It's sticky, so they can do that. Yeah, and chewing. The chewy ones. Yeah. Pretzels, and pizza crusts and things like that. Yeah, I know. I have certain vitamins I take when I have pizza or some other bagels and stuff like that and can't do it every day.
Well, I think I told you my daughter moved out two years ago, January second. My wife and I, we lived in Ohio. I grew up in Ohio, lived there for 60 years, I guess, 59 years. Well, my wife and I sold our house immediately. My daughter moved out January second. The house was sold by January 21st. And we moved into an RV. We moved into a fifth wheel. We've been traveling the country ever since. When your space gets really tight, you got to be selective on what you put in there.
My wife is celiac, too. We've been able to create a very-That's great, actually. Gluten-free environment in our RV. Again, it's not until I walk into a Costco or something like that that I'm tempted. Yeah, I know. I know, exactly. Yes, I know the feeling. But anyways. Okay, so then is the spermidine, is that the product that you guys create? Spermidine Life. Again, if you go to spermidinelife. Com- Is it pills or powder? What is it?
Well, it's a powder that we're able to distribute in either pills or sachets. If you look at our entry-level product, it's called spermidine Life Extra. It's a 2 milligram a day. Susan, the European Union gave us permission to sell 1 milligram a day product when we started three years ago. Oh, wow. Okay. What we learned, most people need more than one milligram.
Most of the doctors we work with and most of the biohackers that we work with immediately went to two and three dosing at two or three X. We saw that, and the research is starting to point this out, too, that most people need... Some people do fine with just one. I don't want to minimize that, but most people need a bit more. When you go to our website, you'll see what's called Extra Plus. That's a 2 milligram a day product. It's two capsules once a day.
It's food without food. It doesn't make a difference. Okay. Well, some things do. This is the half life on This is very, very long. I typically mix mine up. I have an evening cocktail I take before I go to bed that has magnesium and things like that in it. I usually mix because that's when I do my cocktail. There's no alcohol in it. It's just everything's on the. No, I understand. It's an energy or whatever, a vitamin cocktail. That's when I put it in.
But we don't know that there's a benefit, whether you do it in the morning or night. In fact, we're pretty sure there's no difference. Now, if you go with a higher dose- With food without food. It doesn't make a difference. Last meal. Put it with your last meal if you're going to do something like that. We have a three milligram product that you'll see on our website that's called Ultra. Now, this comes in what's called a sachet.
We can't cram enough of our what's called Selveo complex to get 3 milligrams into a capsule. It's a sachet. You tear the top off it, mix it with water, and drink it. We also have a 6 milligram product that's called Pro Plus. That 30 day is only sold through physicians or practitioners that we work with. You can buy 10 days worth. We buy a 10 day package of our pro, which is a twice as big as sachet as the ultra. You can buy that on our website as well.
I'll tell you what, what we'll do, let's create a code right now. We'll call it Rosin 15. Anyone who listens, who uses that code, will get a 15% discount if they want to try it. Okay. Wow. That'd be great. I wrote it down. Okay, good. I have to I remember to send it to my e-commerce people. I've made that mistake in the past. Well, you have a lot of time. I'll let you know. I have a long list of videos that are already done that I haven't.
Okay. And since we're recording this around the holidays, I will say to everyone, although they probably will know this before this goes up, that I didn't post one at all last week. Okay. Because I just went, you know what? I'm not doing it. I'm taking a week off. You know what? Sometimes in life, you got to do that, right? Yes. And it's very rare. It's very rare that I do that. So, yeah, I figured the holidays are a good excuse. Good for you.
Yes. And a friend of mine said, Well, people are going to notice. I said, Are you crazy? Nobody's going to notice. She goes, No, you don't understand. People will notice. I Well, nobody ever tells me. I don't get any feedback. People will notice, but they'll be very accepting. That's probably true. They'll be very accepting. That's what happens on that. So yes. If you go to sperminylife. Us, put in Rosin15, you get a 15 per cent discount.
If people have questions, we have a great customer service team that you can address through the website. You can see it there. Ask questions, or if you want to get a hold of me, I'm pretty easy to get a hold of. I'm on social media. Linkedin is the best way to get me. Don Moxley on LinkedIn, all one word, Don Moxley, just search LinkedIn and pop up. Message me. If you give me a message that says Hey, the system put us together. You look like a nice person. I'll probably block you.
But if you put in a message, Heard you on Susan's podcast. I have a question about this. I'll accept it, and we'll start talking. So that's not a problem. Okay. It's a deal. That sounds good. Very good. Yeah. Great. I know we've wrapped up already, but is there anything else that you want to share or that people should think about or look at or watch out for? You know what?
It's so fun working for a company that has a product that is mature and safe and effective and backed by just ridiculously good science. Our advisory board, I describe it as the Mount Rushmore of longevity researchers worldwide. David Sinclair and Guido Kramer and Frank Madeo and Cate Simon, Harvard and Oxford. It is so fun for me to be part of that team and be able to be the storyteller on this. I'm not the guy in the lab. I'm the guy that's got to translate what comes out of the lab.
I love that. It's just fun being part of a good company and telling that story. Yeah. No, I think that's great. That really is. It makes it easy to get up in the morning. Susan, I don't I know about you, but I hope I'm able to do this every day I breathe on the face of this Earth, I hope I'm... It was funny. I'll tell you a little story to close off with. I was at Ohio State working as a sports scientist, doing some really ground-breaking work. It was so much fun.
I left for multiple reasons, but I left to work in the cannabis business down in Florida. My wife and daughter were still living in Ohio. I'm living down in an apartment in Palm Beach, and I'm sitting there to myself saying, What in the world just happened? Because I go from a job that I thought was my last job. I thought, Okay, I'm set. That you like. I was an alumnus. My daughter was an athlete there at the time. All of a sudden, I described how I was selling weed in Florida.
I'm like, What happened, I sat back and I was listening to a podcast one day, and the podcast said, Don't define yourself on what you've done. Develop a personal mission. Susan, I sat back and I thought about that, and I wrote my personal mission as, Helping individuals better understand the changes necessary to alleviate suffering and contribute to the of well people. That's Don Moxley. That's what I do. I don't see a reason why... I don't know how I'm going to exit this world.
I hope I'm 90 and walking along the edge of the Grand Canyon, and I slip, and I enjoy the ride on the way down, I hope. But wouldn't that be a fun way to go? I don't know. The flight was great. Except for the 30 seconds when you Yeah, the ending was rough. But until then, it's so fun. Listen, they gave a Nobel Prize in 2016 to the researcher that described autophagy. There is so much more to learn. We don't know it all yet. We're learning as we go.
And I'm I'm so excited to continue to be part of that. I'm sure you are, too. Listen, I just get to draw a paycheck from a really cool company that's force-feeding me really good information and turning around and telling that story to people like you and your crew. Yeah. No, I think that's great. That's fabulous. Thank you again for the opportunity. Yeah. Well, thank you for coming on. Thank you for approaching me. It's not a problem.
So with that, I will close with what I usually do, which is that neither of us are doctors. And this is not to be seen as medical advice. And before you start doing anything with your health, be sure and talk to a health professional. And with that, I will say thank you very much. And I will see everybody next week. This has been HealthyTips After 50 with Susan Rosen.
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