All right. Welcome to another episode of Biohacking Beauty. The ones who are watching us will notice Anastasia is still not. Has still not joined us and she is not feeling so well. So I am going to be your guide to today's information. Biohacking Beauty, the podcast that combines longevity science and skin health into one hub of knowledge. My name is Amitay Eshel. I am the co founder and co CEO of Young Goose. We have a new definition, Young Goose Skin Optimization Lab. Let's see how that goes. Let us know if you like it. We feel it encompasses what we're trying to do. And today we're going to have a very cool episode because we are going to prepare you for summer. Almost every living thing on Earth can repair sun damage using sunlight itself. The bacterium in a pond, the leaf on a tree, the frog, the fish, the fly. They all carry a small molecular tool that takes the energy of ordinary daylight and uses it to undo the specific damage that ultraviolet light does to DNA. It is one of the oldest repair tricks in biology. It has been around almost as long as life itself. And sunlight have been a constant presence on Earth. You don't have it. Somewhere back in the evolution of the mammals, our line quietly lost the working version of that tool. We kept the sun. We gave up the repair kit that came with it. Hold on to that because we are going to come back to that later on. It is the most interesting thing in this conversation we're going to have today in this whole episode. Here's what we're going to talk about. A single hard afternoon in the sun without SPF can deplete almost all of your reservoir of NAD in your skin. Some would say even 90%. It's not very substantiated. I've said it before, but it is for sure over 50% of the one coenzyme your cells need to repair DNA and run their mitochondria. That is not a sunburn story. That is a cellular energy story. And by the time you can see it, by the time you can witness it, by the time there's a wrinkle in the mirror, that story already is already about 20 years old. Today, I want to walk you through what UV actually does to a single skin cell, the cause and effect chain, and why the people who study aging read the sun completely differently than the people who sell skincare do. Again, welcome to Biohacking Beauty. In this show, we walk you through or we talk about the cellular biology underneath everything you put on your skin. Quick note. You know, as I said, it's just me today, which for a topic this mechanism heavy means I'm going to do something a little different. I'm going to tell you a story. It is June. The light is back, the days are long, the temperature is climbing. And every summer the skin starts behaving differently. More sweat, more congestion, more buildup. It can feel heavier, look duller and obviously recover slower. And it does all of that despite the sunshine, not because the sunshine is making it glow. The skincare reflex is to treat all of that as a surface problem. Better cleanser, lighter moisturizer and exfoliant. Cool it down, control the shine and we're done. By the way, this is if you want to get a spoiler alert. The next wave of K beauty would be ingredients that cool or heat up the skin, depending on the seasons. But that's not what is happening underneath. That's not what is going to change underneath. Underneath, your skin is carrying a different cellular load. And one molecule sits in the middle of all of that NAD. Here's the shape of the next 20 minutes, three movements. What UV does to NAD. We're going to call it NAD. What it does to your DNA and why the longevity field treats the sun as one of the biggest levers you have, not a wrinkle machine. Let's start with nad. NAD is a coenzyme and a coenzyme is just a helper molecule. You've heard us talk about NAD many times in the past. The enzymes are the workers. They build things, they break things down, they copy DNA, carry signals. But a lot of them can't do their job without a partner molecule to grab onto. By the way, if you remember long term learn, longtime listeners, if you remember, vitamin C helps build collagen, for example, it's a CO factor. NAD is the busiest partner in your biology. It works with hundreds of different enzymes. So you might be thinking, fine, if NAD runs low, the enzymes are still there, right? They are still there. They just can't work. Or they work very poorly, very badly. The workers show up and the tools are gone. By the way, that's how I feel all the time with adhd. I show up and I don't know where I put the stuff so I can empathize. Maybe, you know, maybe I need more NAD in my life. Anyway, NAD has two jobs we care about today. The first is energy. NAD shuttles electrons through the energy machinery of the cell glycolysis and the TCA cycle, oxidative phosphorylation. That chain ends in ATP, which is the actual energy Currency of the cell. Everything your skin does costs ATP. Everything in your body costs ATP. Repairing the barrier, making collagen, handling oxidative stress, building or repairing blood vessels. Really anything costs an amount of ATP. NAD also fuels the enzymes that protect and repair your DNA. There are about 14 different ones, but there are two families that I want us to focus on. First are Sirtuins, Sirt 1 all the way up to 37, which are the cell's management team. I normally call them the police of the DNA. They run DNA repair and stress response. The second one are what are called PARP1 or PARP1. The first responder that shows up in the instance or instant DNA gets nicked. I call them the pol, the, not the police. I call them the fire department of your DNA. PARP1 burns through enormous amounts of NAD to do its repair. And by the way, maybe I'll touch on it later. It gets prioritized off of sirtuins. So the same pool of NAD fuels your energy and your repair at the same time. It's the same gas tank for that matter. Normally that's fine. Your cells rebuild NAD pretty continuously. Again, your body can recycle about 2 grams of NAD a day. It does it through something called the salvage pathway. I actually wrote an article called the niacinamide dichotomy, which talks a lot about. I call it the tollbooth, the cellular toe bolt. But anyway, that enzyme is called nampt. And day to day supply keeps up with demand. Then guess what shows up? UV shows up and it does two things that compound. The first is on the demand side. UV photons hit the skin and throw off reactive oxygen species or ros, which are which you would probably find it being referred a lot as free radicals. That's really interchangeable. It's the same thing. They damage everything they touch, including DNA. By the way, a lot of the things at the end of the day are going to be referred back to that ros. Okay? A lot of the damage that your skin, your DNA is experiencing throughout your body. The same way we're saying, hey, everything happens and then you get ATP. Everything happens and then you get free radicals anyway, including your DNA. Single strand breaks or fusion pile up. PARP1 sees that mess and basically immediately goes to work. And every repair that happens is demanding more and more nad. It makes, it spends nad. The second thing is on the supply side, UV also damages NAD directly and it knocks out some of the salvage enzymes that would replace it. So at the exact moment demand spikes, the supply chain gets cut. The recycling plant gets, basically gets hit at the same time the trash output triples. Exactly like my 2 year old. Every time I have something important, a call, whatever, suddenly there is an urgent demand to address the fact that he's drawing on our wall or something like that anyway, and that, you know, that is how you get the number. So published research shows that under intense UV skin, NAD can basically be depleted almost completely. Or, you know, the reservoir of NAD can really plummet dramatically. Some say 90%, some say 50%. That is, that's not a dip. That's a near total collapse of the molecule that powers both repair and energy. So what does the cell do? It triages. It protects survival first because if ATP stops, the cell dies. So it keeps the light on and it lets the longer tail work. Slide repair gets sloppier, by the way. It gets it. No, it's not that it gets sloppier, it gets shorter. Processes are getting prioritized. If you remember us talking about Morpheus 8, for example, we're saying when a person is older and they're getting such a high level of stimulation of damage that triggers repair, the body doesn't have the ability to handle that as well. So it prioritizes shorter processes, for example, like fibrotic tissue, like scarring, which is a faster way to make collagen rather than more youthful collagen. But going back to the story, inflammation immediately in this scenario goes up because inflammation is what a cell reaches for when it cannot keep order. The sirtuins, which I mentioned before, they go quick, quiet because they have no NAD to run on. If you remember I referred to it before that PARP one gets prioritized. The cell basically is in a burnout. Okay, the lights are barely on. Let's say it's not doing its best work. And that is actually what you see. The dullness, the slow turnover, the heaviness, the summer skin that looks tired even when you slept. The way any procedure or insult takes longer to bounce back from in that proverbial July. Your skin doesn't have a wrinkle specific problem in the summer. Think of it as the fact that it has an ATP and a DNA repair problem. And it gets worse. Because NAD does not only fall from the sun, it also falls from with age. The published numbers have, have it dropping by about 50% between age 20 and the 40 to 60 range. So if you're in your 40s or 50s, you start the summer from a lower baseline. You know, this is, this is just, just a, just a fact that we need to, we need to address as far as, like, how we treat it. Not if, not if it happens or not. It's unfair, but that's the truth. Then you take 50 to 90% off the top of that. The math is not mathing. Kidding. The math is just not friendly. Now you're probably asking the obvious. So. So what? Stay inside. No. Sun is essential. Light is essential. Vitamin D is essential. The question is whether you can support the system that is taking the hit while you take the sun. The answer is yes. But I'm going to make you wait for the practical part, because there is a second half to the damage. And the second half is the half that explains the mystery I opened with. Here's something most people never hear. Every cell in your body takes on the order of tens of thousands of DNA lesions every single day just from being alive. The only reason that that is not a daily catastrophe is that you have an extraordinary set of DNA repair pathways. Some of the most ancient machinery you own. It runs in the background pretty much constantly and you never know it's there. It doesn't have a heartbeat that you can listen to. UV makes a particular kind of damage. The most studied is called, basically, it's called cyclobutane pyrimidine dimer CPD for short. A UV photon fuses two neighboring timing bases, that's DNA letters, for that matter, into a kink in the strand. So it's a very special type of damage because it is not a. It's a. It's a fusion. So the cell can no longer read that spot cleanly. The copying machinery hits the kink and either stalls, makes a mistake or skips it. So basically your DNA indeed is the recipe for every, you know, how every cell is supposed to function, however, that is in like this ancient language. And for your body to actually act on it, it needs to get translated, or the specific segments of that are useful for that specific, you know, software that's running, you know, create collagen or create pigment or whatever that is, gets translated. That becomes rna, then it become, then, you know, goes further and further and you get the action that you wanted the cell to function. So that translation machinery gets to that fusion and it cannot read it, so it makes a mistake or it skips it. Think of it as a CPD typo. UV is jamming typos into the cell's instruction manual. The cell has a default way to fix a typo. It's called nucleotide excision repair. It basically cuts out the damaged stretch Fills the gap and reseals it and it works. But it's very, very slow and it eats a lot of resources. And remember, if you've, if you've been listening until now, what fuels that repair work? Nad so in the summer, the exact moment you are making the most typos is the moment your repair budget is collapsing. But there is a second more elegant fix. And this is the tool from the top of the show. It is an enzyme called photolase and it's light activated. It binds directly to the typo. It accepts a single photon of light, visible light, and it uses the energy that of that photon to flip the kink back into normal DNA. A light activated proofreader, straight up, straight out of the Marvel Universe. Anastasia is not here, so I can make boy jokes. Anyway, space. Just think of it. Sit on that for a second. One kind of light, ultraviolet UV makes the typo. Another kind of light, visible light, fixes it. The same source that does the damage carries the energy for the repair. Biology co evolved with sunlight so that basically it evolved so tightly that it learned to repair the sun with the sun. And here is the part that has nagged me for years. Humans lost the working version of photolase. Almost everything else on Earth kept it. We run on the slow default pathway constantly. Instead, we are the creatures that walked out into the most sunlight and gave up the elegant tool for handling it. Nobody can fully tell you why. But that is the puzzle I do not want to get. I don't want. I don't want it to be the finish of this episode. The end of this episode. Here is what we can do. Photo lays can be delivered to the skin topically and in the published research, it stays active when it is paired with light. That is the entire design behind a product that we made called LADR Ladder. The name, by the way, is also. It's like a. It's like a pun on the. The fact that the DNA is designed like a ladder, but it stands for light activated DNA repair. You should be applying it three to 10 minutes before a light, before red light or going out to the sun. And the light is what switches the photolase. On the consumer side, I will say it supports the look of skin recovering from the sun from sun exposure. I will not tell you it repairs your DNA because that is a drug claim and we do not cross that line. Okay? But the mechanism is real and it's very well covered in literature. There's a lot of publications about it. But the claim that we're making here is staying Cosmetic safe, although we're running some very interesting studies around that. What I will say is this. We are giving the skin back a tool it used to have. Now connect that to the first half of the of the show. Depleted NAD means slower parp, answer to and repair. Slower repair means damage that doesn't get fixed in real time. Some of it gets carried into, even into daughter cells. And some of it pushes a cell into senescence. A senescent cell, if you remember from other episodes, is one that stops dividing, but it refuses to die, AKA zombie cell. So it sits in the tissue and it leaks inflammatory signals and it ages the cell around it. Senescence is one of the 12 hallmarks of aging. And chronic UV is one of the things that drives it in the skin. The second cost is photoaging and it is dose dependent. The more cumulative UV you take without enough repair support, the more the skin shows it. Collagen loss in the dermis, thicker disorganized elastin pigment changes, a weaker barrier, less ability to recover, more glycation, by the way, which makes the skin kind of rougher, more brittle, not as supple. And there is one more layer underneath all of this, and that's the mitochondria. NAD fuels ATP production, but the actual factory is the mitochondria. And the same UV free radicals we talked about oxidize the mitochondrial membrane. The electron transport chain starts leaking, ATP production or output drops. So you get a triple negative effect. Triple compression, less NAD to refuel the chain, damaged machinery inside the chain and rising demand for energy because the cell is trying to repair everything or trying to repair everything else at once. That is why mitochondrial function is the center of this whole season. Before the zoom out, Let me take one minute on what we are running through June 15th. It is called skin under the sun. And it was built backward from the exact science. We just walk through more uv, more oxidative load, more demand on cellular energy. So this is not a gear change. It is a breath. It's. It's a breath inside the same conversation. It is structured in three tiers, applies automatically at checkout. So at three $350 and up, you get a free adaptogenic cleanser. Because summer means more sweat and more surface buildup. So a clean canvas matters more in this season than any other. We also have a unique. This cleanser has a unique ability to deny what we call sticky skin, which is pollutants lingering on the skin throughout the day, etc. Builds a little barrier to, to that problem. And that is very you know, if you're outside a lot in the summer, you're going to get a lot of that. So it's, it also supports the barrier without stripping it. So bear that in mind. At $500 and up you get a free blue peptide spray. This is the layer we, we just spent the last, let's say 10, 20 minutes on. The product is built around methylene blue which has been studies studied as an alternative electron carrier in mitochondrial energy production. In other words, it supports the ability of your mitochondria to run pretty close to optimally even if it's damaged. And it's also within the same product we also have copper peptide, ghk, Cu, which supports the production of more mitochondria actually. So basically and it supports in general cellular energy in high oxidative demand. So it helps the skin look more energized and even toned throughout the summer. If you remember, we also also talked about free radicals and we have a really, really cool antioxidant system there. We talked about methylene blue which is a crazy antioxidant that can go basically and fight damage over and over and over again. But we also have there something called SOD or superoxide dismutase which is your skin's native antioxidant. Some people think it's glutathione. Surprise. It's actually sod and at $750 and up you get both of those. So you'll get the cleanser and you get the blue peptide spray. That tier is for someone running a full protocol through a high exposure stretch. So bear that in mind. The dates are June 1 through June 15. The the link and your code are in the show notes. But I think and you know, follow up follow you know subscribe to our newsletter and we should give a lot of information about it. I think it's going to be automatic so you wouldn't need a code. So now back to it. There are two normal ways to think about the sun. The beauty world treats it as an aesthetic problem. Wrinkles, dark spots, a burn. The medical world treats it as a cancer problem. Risk screening, mole tracking, both of those are real, but neither one is the most useful frame for someone who thinks in terms of longevity or skin optimization. Remember what I said in the beginning skin optimization lab. So in, in terms of function, of youthful function, the most useful frame is this sun is one of the largest, most controllable inputs into the rate at which your skin is biologically aging. And I don't mean wrinkles, I mean the real trajectory Senescent cells accumulating mitochondrial function, declining telomeres, shortening epigenetics, genetic markers drifting, NAD depletion, stem cell pools thinning. The 12 hallmarks of aging. And almost every one of them accelerates under cumulative uv. In fact, some researchers look at the skin as a sentinel organ to kind of to inter extrapolate your biological age. Which changes the question. It's not only will I look older sooner, it's what is my actual rate of cellular aging in this tissue and what would change if I did something about it? And the longevity answer is not wear sunscreen and go home. SPF is kind of it's the floor, it's not the ceiling. The ceiling is what you do to support the cell while UV is hitting you. What you do to handle damage that gets through. What you do to hold mitochondrial function and keep the NAD pool from collapsing. That is a different conversation that than most of the of the conversations around the industry. And it's not about one summer, it's about 30 summers. There's a lifetime dose of UV and there is a lifetime dose of repair capacity every year. You support the machinery that handles UV stress in a it is a year you do not let the damage compound damage compounds, but support also compounds. This is where it gets actually personal. For me, the real question is not what your skin looks like at 35. It is what your skin can stand, still do at 65, at 75, at 85, whether it can recover from a procedure, whether it can take an environmental hit, whether it can hold the structures that make you look like you. All of that is downstream from how well you supported the skin during the seasons of highest load, which makes June, July and August the months that matter most. So that is the science. Now let me give you what to actually do. So here are five moves protocol level. And I'm only going to name a product where it is the cleanest expression of the move because I don't want this to turn into a commercial more than what I did already. But hear me out. So move one is the morning foundation. Clearly, SPF is non negotiable mineral SPF applied generously and reapplying every two hours in active sun. Okay, obviously we make BioShield SPF 40 and non nano mineral SPF with supportive longevity ingredients that comply to the philosophy that I laid before you here in the episode. But honestly, like whatever you have, that's the one that or the whatever you want to use, that's the one you should use. In other words, the brand matters far Less than the act. If you're walking out out of your door in, in June without spf, that is the single highest leverage thing to fix this week. Move number two is the layer most people skip. Add a step that supports the cellular machinery taking the load. So most people use SPF and moisturizer and basically stop there. They don't use anything basically with nothing for the energy system underneath. Our version is blue peptide spray. So methylene blue plus copper peptide plus nad, Apex which is our proprietary NAD boosting complex and superoxide dismutase which is a light mist before you put your serum or moisturizer. Although it has a substantial amount of methylene blue, which is basically the highest amount that was researched to be positively affecting the skin, it becomes invisible once it, it hits the skin. I'm going to tell you something about blue peptide spray. You only notice the difference when you stop. It's really crazy. So move three is photolase plus light. If you do red light therapy, run ladder first. L A D R is the product. Apply it three to ten minutes before your session. Basically just apply it and not have your skin damp. If it's takes you one minute, so be it. Then sit through your normal light time. The light switches, the photo lays on and it supports the look of skin recovering from sun exposure. This is one of the most synergistic moves in the whole line and it only works because of the mechanism we talked about earlier. Within that I'm going to say a few things. This could be used if you, if you don't use red light therapy. I also call this product this is not a sunblock, meaning if I'm going to go outside even in the winter because I suffer from melasma, I'm going to use it as my serum of choice within the morning routine. It has, you know, spermidine and NAD and apex and spirulina and really cool ingredients just to nourish the skin. But it also has it, you know, so, so it's a serum on its own. But again it's designed to work significantly well because of the photo lasers when you are which are called photosomes by the way when you're going outside. So it really plays nicely there. And so one other thing I'm going to say there are studies that show that red light improves your. So if you do a red light session before you go outside to the sun, it improves your mitochondria's ability to, to handle sun damage so you become less pigmented, et cetera. So the entire session ladder plus red light therapy is a very good idea before going to the sun in the first place. Let's talk about move four. Move four is evening recovery. The cell does its repair at night. So sleep is the single largest recovery intervention. You have seven and a half to eight and a half hours consistent bedtime, cool dark room. And evening is also where your NAD supports support layer is the most important for us it's the, it's Youth Reset serum and Youth Daily moisturizer which are built around NAD apex with spermidine and copper peptides. Actually the peptides there we should, you know we've, we've. These are what, what, what we call designer peptides. We've designed copper peptides in a way that is significantly easier to work with, much more stable, et cetera. So it can live with other ingredients that are good for you like ergothioneine which is mitochondria specific antioxidant which would make sense to you all why it's really good to use. We'll talk about it in another time. But the principle holds beyond our line. Whatever your NAD layer is, it is most useful while the cell is doing its overnight repair and move 5. The bonus do not skip antioxidants in the morning. I mentioned ergothioneine but also vitamin C and resveratrol. These give the skin a head start on the free radical damage assault UV is going to generate later in the day. This is extremely well studied and very easy. So that's the list. SPF mitochondrial support photolase which are called Photosomes Plus Light. If you do that evening, specifically focus on NAD heavy support and morning antioxidants like methylene blue, ergothioneine, everything that resveratrol that you mentioned, you can run all five in well under 10 minutes a day. It might take double if you do it twice a day. And that's the protocol. So that's the episode. Thank you for being here and on Anastasia's behalf, thank you as well. She will be back in this chair next week. If you take one thing from this conversation, take this. Sun is not a wrinkle problem. It is a cellular energy and a DNA repair problem. And you can support both of those systems while still living your summer. We walked out into all that light and we lost the elegant little tool that fixes sunlight with sunlight. That part of the story does not have a happy ending built in. But we are not helpless about it. We can give the skin back a version of that tool and we can support the systems that do the rest of the work. That is the whole point of treating the sun as a longevity question instead of a wrinkle question. If you want to go deeper, the Yungoos protocol library on yungoos.com has a full breakdown of ladder with photobiomodulation, the NAD apex science behind Youth Reset and Youth Daily and all the youth products, and the Blue Peptide Spray Protocol. The June campaign runs through June 15th and the link is in the show notes. Next week will be a whole new episode. Tune in and we'll see you next time. Thank you very much. Take care. Sam.
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