#420: Spermidine UNLOCKED: Reverse Aging, Boost Immunity & Thrive After 40 With Leslie Kenny

Welcome to Longevity. I'm your host, Natalie Knidham. I'm a nutritionist, a human potential and epigenetic coach, and I created this podcast to bring you the latest ways to take control of your health and longevity. We cover it all, from new technology and ancestral health practices to personalized interventions and a very special interest of mine, peptides and bioregulators. Enjoy the show. Hi, I'm Natalie Knidham, your host. After facing infertility, autoimmune disease, and a life-limiting diagnosis, Leslie Kenny began questioning everything, from conventional treatment models to how lifestyle, grief, and immune regulation shape long-term health. An Oxford-based longevity expert and graduate of UC Berkeley and Harvard, Leslie personally reversed lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and infertility, later giving birth naturally at age 43. We explore how silent inflammation accelerates aging, why thyroid health is often the missing link, and the role of spermedine in activating autophagy. It's a deeply personal story woven into some of the most compelling longevity signs we've covered on this show. Leslie has a generous offer for you when you visit oxfordhealthspend.com forward slash bio-nat 20, and you get to use code BIONAT20 at checkout to get 20% off. Next, we'll thank two of the sponsors who helped make this show possible, and then we get to dive right in. I take my sleep pretty seriously. It's basically my favorite longevity tool. But even with the solid routine, cool room, no late caffeine, blue light blockers, the whole nine yards, there's still nights when travel stress or a late workout can throw things off just enough to notice. And this is where Trozii from Troscriptions has earned a spot in my nighttime stack. I'll use a trochee about 30 minutes before bed when I want to really lock in deep restorative sleep. It dissolves between your upper gums and cheeks so it works fast and fits seamlessly in my wind down routine. It's much more than melatonin. It's actually very low in melatonin. Trozii is physician formulated with compounds like honokial and agaricon to support GABA activity, plus adenosine and cortisapin to enhance sleep drive and deep sleep. The CBD, CBN, and 5TP rounded out for full spectrum relaxation. Each trochee is scored into four so you can dial in your dose, quarter, half, or full. Sometimes a little goes a long way. It all depends on what your body needs that night. So if you want to protect and optimize your sleep, not just fix it, head to trozcriptions.com and check out Trozii. And you can use code NAT10 for 10% off your order. If you feel tired, like deep tired, it might actually not just be your schedule. It could be your cells. Mitocondria are responsible for producing energy in every cell of your body, but as we get older, they sometimes don't work as efficiently, which means less energy, slower recovery, and that creeping, why am I exhausted feeling? But here's the good news. Mitocondria also depend on minerals to do their job. And when they're properly supported, energy production improves, sometimes dramatically. And this is why beam minerals is part of my daily routine. It's a liquid mineral supplement. You take as quick as a shot in the morning because it's liquid, it absorbs fast, because it's comprehensive. You're not playing mineral roulette. What sets beam apart is that it delivers all essential minerals in bioavailable form designed to support cellular energy, not just hydration or electrolytes. And because it's founded on folvic and humic acid, that means it's a nature's delivery system to get those things you need into the cell and get the things you don't need out of the cell. So if you want to support your energy recovery and healthy aging at the cellular level, you've just got to give beam a try. All you have to do to do that is go to beamminerals.com and use code NAT20 to get 20% off your first order. Leslie Kenny, welcome back to the show. It's been far too long since we've gotten to sit across the mic from each other. It's so nice to see you today. Oh, it's such a pleasure to be here. Always fun to hang out with you, Nat. Likewise. And we get to do that all over the world, which is really fun. So just to dive right in. So first of all, I want to tell the audience that we've had, we've recorded a couple of other interviews and published them to this podcast. So we'll put those previous interview links in the show notes so you can, so you guys can get some more background on PrimaDine. I mean, I think this was one of the first podcasts that we, you were on back in the day when it was called the Biohacking Superhuman Performance Podcast. And at the time, SpurmaDine was just getting known. It was only just getting noticed. And it's been a while. It's been a minute since then, and you've come a long way. So let's dive into this whole, the whole world of biological versus chronological age. And you've often said that you feel that biological age matters more than chronological age. So what's the moment you realized that your number really didn't match how you were feeling? It was when I was age 39. I was going through my fifth round of IVF using donor eggs, no less. And my doctor told me that instead of having a baby, I was going to have rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. And what great news. Yeah, what great news. And she gave me options with the rheumatoid arthritis immune suppressants to really stop the progression of the disease, destroying my joints and my hands. And a lot of rheumatoid arthritis patients will have nodules and some deformities as a result of autoimmune reactions. So I was told to take the immune suppressants. But when it came to the lupus, she told me, unfortunately, and this is in 2004, she said, there's really nothing that you can do because we don't have any drugs to manage it. There is no cure. And you should expect it to get worse. And in fact, she told me that if she were me, she would not do the IVF because even if I was to be successful, I would only have five years left. And I was only 39. I was only thinking about having a baby. And suddenly I have to recalibrate and think, okay, don't bring new life into the planet. Think about preserving your own. And that's when this idea of biological age really hit me because I was prematurely aging. This is not what life as a 39 year old should be like. And I was having to make plans the way that a 65 year old back in 2004 might have been told to do you have five years left, get your affairs in order. And today, I'll be 61 in a few months. And we're all around the same age. And I really feel like the second half of life is just better. So when I did my glycane age test, which is a biological age test, and it's based on immunoglobulin, so how your immune system is, how inflammatory it is, that gave me an age of 21. And for me, whether or not we agree that the biological age test are here to stay or ready for prime time or not, I'm always interested in how inflammatory my system is because when it was highly inflamed in 2004, and I was in flammaging too early, it meant disease, the onset of disease. And now the immune system is in order. And it's functioning youthfully. And if you look at Eric Vrudin did an interview recently, where he was asked, which of the organ systems correlates most closely to health span, he says it's the immune system. So I'm very, very interested in doing everything I can to preserve immune function as I get older. Yeah, I mean, listen, for I'm sitting right now, which we're not going to talk about me today, I could not agree with you more. And I love that you defined glycone age as a measure of the immune system. Because a lot of people run around talking about glycone age, like, look, I'm 20 years old. And it's like, well, not exactly. No, it's a very, it's a very, it's a very useful, but very specific biological age test. And, and I could not agree with you more on the immune system, because fundamentally, I can't think of a single chronic disease or disease of aging, or condition of aging, that is not in some way, shape or form, either driven, started or affected by the immune system. And that includes neurodegenerative diseases, cardiovascular disease, cancer for sure, cancer 100%. Like every single thing that you can think of is fundamentally goes back to the immune system. And a lot of people will say, but, you know, it all starts in the gut. And guess what else starts in the gut? Well, 100% agreement on the 70%. When you think about biological age in practice, you know, how should people really think about it? A motivational metric, a medical tool? Or do you think it's become a medical, a marketing trap? It can be all of those things. But, but for me, personally, it's, it's motivational. It's like a dashboard on the car. When the light goes on, the little red light goes on and says check oil, or check battery life, I know that I need to take note. And so we all will, you know, at our age, we will all be getting C reactive protein tests. That's a pretty common, commonly given inflammatory marker test. That's one indicator. If you're an autoimmune patient, things like cytokines, TNF, alpha IL-6, these immune markers also will tell you a lot. And when I was first diagnosed, my markers were terrible and life threatening. And over the years, since I have, you know, restored my immune system, sort of reset it and remove the triggers to it, I have focused on getting those checked every single year. They're not common biomarkers to check here in the UK, where I live, and I send off to the continent to get them checked. But I am always looking for these markers to nudge me in the right direction. So I don't get despondent, obviously, if you get a cold or a flu, those markers will go up, but they're just, they're good indicator, right? Are you getting, yeah, you know that game Marco Polo in the pool and you hear, you know, Marco Polo, you go closer, that's all that it is. We're just kind of trying to go closer to where we want to catch. Yeah, no, and that's a beautiful analogy. So what do you think you were doing in your life right before your health crashed? Like, what did that season really teach you? And I have a feeling that maybe there was some stress involved. But, you know, do you feel that stress was the accelerant to the aging or was there, you know, when we think back to the time before? Yeah. Well, it's very interesting. So certainly there was a lot of stress. And I think a lot of us with type A personalities, and I'd gone to Harvard to do my MBA, I'd worked in banking in Switzerland, I think that these are, these are things that are naturally stressful. I'd had my own business that was venture capital funded. These were stressful times. But when I finally got my thyroid, my Hashimoto's diagnosis, the doctor who diagnosed me said your cortisol levels are so low. It's a wonder you're even able to stand up. And I would guess that something dramatic happened to you in your teenage years. This has been going on for a long time. And I said, I can't think of anything. I had a perfectly normal childhood. And then I remembered, oh, yeah, my dad committed suicide. Oh, yeah, I found him, you know, in the garage, he hung himself. Oh, yeah, I was in a house fire, you know, like running through the house with the flames behind me. Oh, yes, I had a grand parrot that was much beloved. They died. And this all happened within a four month space. And I had to move schools, of course. And if you've ever heard of the, the ACE test, which is a childhood trauma test, that on that metric of 10 questions, I score a four. So if you score a four and above, you are at a greater likelihood to have some kind of a disease. And I think that the, you have two and a half times the incidence of cancer, you have seven times the incidence of mental health issues. And it's, you know, it's really quite interesting. So I'm sure that some of the roots were there. I mean, what you just said is so incredibly powerful, right? Because it speaks to the impact of stress and our previous experiences way back on, on the, our body's ability to keep us safe. And I interviewed one someone recently, actually, Dr. Amy Epiglian, who wrote a book, The Biology of Trauma. And what she explains in that book, which is, it's the first time I've really heard it articulated that way, is that those early childhood events basically prime your body to set guardrails around what it needs to do to keep you safe. And, you know, there's the, the body keeps the score book, the, you know, the biology of belief, all of these books kind of preceded her work. But because she's a medical doctor, one of the things she's done is tied back the, this, this trauma event to the physiology, to our physiology and biology and what you're describing, which is incredible, like in four months, the amount of loss that you experience as a child, the loss of safety that you would have experienced would essentially have probably programmed your body to say, holy jumping, like to keep us safe, we need to keep these guardrails super tight. So whatever, you know, so whatever then transpired in the years following, the autoimmune issues, that kind of stuff, and potentially at another really stressful time, when you're trying to conceive a baby, you're being told that you're five years to live, which is like, who could even imagine such a thing, right, as a 39 year old. Exactly. It was, it was pretty inconceivable. And so it would have challenged your, your, your body to say, whoa, we're back there again. I think that what it does is it, it makes your nervous system very trigger sensitive. And it just means that the threshold for stress is lower than for other people. So your resilience bucket is not as big. And that is, that leads to chronic, that can lead to chronic inflammation, low grade chronic inflammation, and that inflamaging or silent inflammation that prematurely ages us. And this was something that I read about in a book I relied heavily on at the time I was trying to heal myself called the anti-aging zone by Dr. Barry Sears. And he argued that those of us with chronic disease, we're all prematurely aging. Now chronic disease is on the rise all over the world, which means that a lot of us are actually aging a lot faster than we think we are. And so really, the question is, what can we do to put the brakes on the speed at which we're aging so that we can delay the onset of the diseases of aging? That's the million dollar question, right? Yeah, you clearly found some answers because you've done a lot of that work. And here you are, 30 years later, 20 years later, youthful and vibrant. Being able to conceive and deliver a healthy baby girl at age 43. Wow. Having been told that I was infertile, that my eggs were no longer viable, that I'd have to use donor eggs. And that really makes you rethink yourself. Whoa, my body's failing me. It's older than I think it is. My eggs are no good. And then to just have it happen out of the blue, once the thyroid got fixed, it happened within weeks. That is how many it was. Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit. I want to know, because here you are, you're 39 years old, you've been told all these terrible things. You've been told to, let go the idea of becoming a mother. And on top of that, figure out a way to put your affairs in order. So what was the first no you said to conventional advice? When did you say, yeah, no, this isn't happening? And what did you say yes to? What was that turning point where, because anybody else would have gone home, crawled under Houduvet and just, I don't know what. So, yeah, as a patient, we have, we have two options. We can either accept the diagnosis we're given, or we can protest. And I protested because I was so upset about this. And although my doctor continued to say there isn't anything you can do, I just thought it stood to reason that a patient who didn't drink, didn't smoke and wasn't sleep deprived, had to be able to do better than a patient that was. So it seemed to me from a common sense point of view, that surely there was something I could do. And my whole goal was simply to make myself comparatively better, even if that just meant 1% better, it would bring me 1% closer to meeting my doctor. My goal was meeting her halfway. And I thought, well, if I meet her halfway, then she can meet me halfway, and she can cure me. At this point in time, I'm still thinking, she's like the mechanic at the automobile garage, she's going to fix me. I bring myself in, it's a completely passive she fixes me. What I didn't reckon with was that, in fact, in becoming an active patient, I actually was able to contribute to reversing my diagnoses and staying in remission for over 20 years. And it wasn't just lifestyle things that I did, I want to make it clear that I did rely heavily on science and used a infusion called intravenous immunoglobulin, or IVIG, and it wasn't cheap, it's made up of antibodies donated from thousands of plasma donors. And there's always the risk that you could get an infection from any one of them, because they might carry a disease that we don't yet know how to identify. But because I had the five year, you've got five years left to live, I thought, if I don't do something in action can be deadly too. So you're weighing risk reward ratio, right? Exactly. And there had been a small study in Germany with 13 Lupus patients in 2000, it was published at the end of 2000. And every single one of these patients had improved. And this was something that my doctor had said was not possible. She told me to expect it to get worse. So when I discovered that publication, and I discovered it through other patients on the Lupus autoimmune boards, I thought, here's the evidence that I need. There's something to this, if every single one of these patients did better, what's the statistical probability of that happening? I know it's a small cohort. So my doctor declined to prescribe me the IVIG. And I went back to the patient bulletin boards, and I found through other patients, I found a doctor in San Francisco who was willing to take me on and prescribe me IVIG, two rounds of IVIG to reset my immune system. And the idea is kind of like resetting your laptop after you've got a virus. You're getting that wheel of the spinning wheel of death. The wheel of doom. Yeah. So I, you know, I thought, okay, let's reset, and then let's remove any triggers to this system in the future. And that meant completely revamping my lifestyle. Diet first and foremost, and I know it's hard for people, but you know, your taste buds change, you can adapt to a lot. And it was, you know, this is saving a life, right? So, yeah, the stakes are high. So when they're that high, you find you are willing to do pretty much anything. If you're, you know, if you've got a personality like me. And yeah, all I can say is that if there's anybody out there listening who's been told there's nothing they can do, and that they've got a limited amount of time left, I'm living proof of what actually is possible and don't give up hope. Yeah. Now, I really love that. So on the lifestyle side, what did you do? Right? What was the first thing that you felt moved the needle? Was it changing your diet? Was it modifying your stress, your sleep? Yeah. Like, what, what, what did it? Well, I did quit. I did. I quit work. What did you do all about? What kind of, where did you feel you got the first traction or the first bit of traction where you're like, oh, this is helping? I've definitely helped. So I will give credit to science there. Yeah. And, and then the next thing I will say would be diet because gluten, dairy and eggs were all problematic for me. And yet I love them. I was eating them all the time. I had been living in Switzerland. I was eating a lot of fondue and of course, nice crusty bread inside the fondue and growing up, I had loved pop tarts, grilled cheese sandwiches, right? I mean, I just, I had the, I had a kind of junk food childhood, unfortunately. And so all of these things were problematic and I had to remove all of them. Now I can, I've been able to reintroduce the eggs, but it was very interesting how my inflammatory markers dropped when I changed my diet because those triggers were no longer there. And I am always testing because just because you were allergic before doesn't necessarily mean you always will be allergic. Conversely, there may be things that you do become allergic to for a while. Not a true allergy, but a sensitivity. Yeah. And so that's why I am always testing. I'm always looking at my dashboard to see what, you know, what I should be doing. Yeah. And that's, that's so powerful, right? Are you also looking at your zonulin numbers to see? Yes, I look at zonulin every single time I test. So every six months. Yeah. Yeah. So zonulin, for those of you who don't know what it is, is a marker of how leaky your gut is. So basically, it's about the space between those cells that line the gut that might allow proteins through that would increase the chances of someone, someone's immune system reacting to a food. So which is, you know, I think this is an important point to underline, especially that you do this, you want to first test what's the integrity of my gut lining, because if you don't do that first, you're going to show up with a lot of food sensitivities that may, that may just be there because you have the wrong protein in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yeah, exactly. And it's, you know, it's another reason why spermedine is interesting to me is because it actually tightens up those tight junctions in the gut to make it impermeable. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's, I love that. And we're coming to spermedine. Like I'm dying to talk about spermedine, but I just want to take people through this. I'll say one other thing, trauma therapy. Okay. I'm glad you said that. I listened to mine. Because that's a four month period to me. Like, I mean, I chuckled earlier when you said your dad died, not because your dad died. I mean, that's horrible. But only because you had first said, well, there was really nothing. And then I realized, Oh, in a four month period, I lost my father, I lost my grandparent. I, you know, you had all these dramatic, even over a five year period, that would have been traumatic, never mind in a in four months. Yeah. The amount of reeling you would have been doing would have been insane. I think that you put up a kind of protective shield to just not deal with it. And I, it took me years to be able to cry about his death, because it, I think to survive the body locks away those emotions. And so the idea of trauma therapy really resonated with me. And in my own particular case, I wrote letters to my father. He'd been an alcoholic. I'd been his only caregiver. I had lived alone with him. So I was the child who was always taking the vodka bottle, emptying it out, adding in water to pretend it was still there, which of course, incensed him. But so, you know, writing letters to say the things that we need to say to the people who are important in our lives, who bear witness to our lives and whose lives we are witness to, and just bring closure. And then I burn those letters. And it is this letter writing practice is, you know, it's a well known trauma therapy practice. So that was very useful. I did do some mind body medicine based on the work of Professor Gerald Epstein at Columbia University. He has a book called Healing Visualizations. I did my in uterine massage, which is a physical manipulation of the uterus. And actually, it did correct my tipped uterus to the amazement of my IVF doctor who had actually suggested surgery for it. And I tinctured herbs. Honestly, I looked under every rock for anything I thought might work and was open to it all. But the one thing that I had real difficulty with was the idea of chronically suppressing my immune system with these immune suppressants. Exactly. And we know that auto immune patients who do do this are more susceptible to cancer. Why? Because the immune system is there to surveil for cancer and get rid of it in the same way it would surveil for pathogens, virus, bacteria. So we need our immune system. But back in 2004, the standard of care was to suppress the immune system. And I got that in the short term. Let's stop the damage. Yeah. But as a long term strategy, I was very guided by my, my, by my grandmother and grandfather on my mother's side who had studied medicine in Japan. And I had always been taught that the goal of medicine is not just to suppress symptoms, but to restore the body to balance so that this symptoms resolve naturally. And the body has an innate wisdom of how to do this so long as it is in its balance point. So my overarching goal was always restore the whole system to balance. That means sleep. That means emotion. So the trauma therapy. That means movement. And all of these things together restore the system to balance. That's so powerful. And, and honestly, it's music to my ears. You know, it's, it's my, it's ultimately my belief, right? So in terms of, you know, and you've already, you've talked about this, the most, I think the most dangerous thing a person can be told, anyone, a man, a woman, a woman in midlife, especially, and whether it's about her menopause symptoms or autoimmune disease is look, this is, this is, there's nothing you can do about this. This is just the way it is. So how do you balance this radical responsibility with compassion so that it doesn't become self-blame? Our bodies are there to protect us. And if they make a choice that goes against our favor, it is usually done as a stopgap to protect us from something else that is much worse. So that is how I look at what is happening in the body. And it's up to me to support it so that it doesn't have to make those decisions, those bad choices, right? It's sort of the lesser of two evils. The body will always choose the lesser of the two. It's kind of like with, with gray hair and adrenaline and stress. And I might have talked to you about this before, but it's so interesting. There is a known pathway to gray hair through stress. So when you're stressed, you raise adrenaline to deal with the stressful event. The adrenaline is there to help pump your muscles so you can run away, fight, fight or flee. And then the liver releases catalase, glutathione, superoxide dismutase to turn the adrenaline from hydrogen peroxide into harmless water. But if we don't have any of those three antioxidants, it doesn't make that conversion. And so it's not great for us to have a lot of adrenaline chronically in the body. It's terrible for the heart. So the body says, okay, let's make the next decision. It's, it's not great to have loads of hydrogen peroxide, but we have to do this. So we save the heart. So it makes a conversion to hydrogen peroxide, then it's up to the liver to take over. If the liver can't do it, guess what? We get gray hair. So that's an example of where the body is making the choice between the lesser of two eagles. And, and it makes choices like that every day, all day for us. And the less of a burden we put on our bodies by getting good sleep, good movement, good food, good relationships, joy, the easier it is for the body to stay in balance and the fewer of those bad choices it has to make. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for sure, in the hierarchy of needs, the body is going to pick the heart over how your hair looks. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Let's move to thyroid because you mentioned thyroid a little bit. Yeah. And I know that thyroid was a big deal. It was a big piece of your journey. So what role did thyroid autoimmunity and Hashimoto's ultimately play in your recovery story? Like he wasn't just about the immune system now. Now we're talking about the function of a very vital organ. Yes, absolutely. It's a good question. So because my symptoms came in my hands and pain in my hands, my doctor sent me to a rheumatologist and medical doctors in the current system tend to stay in their own lane. So as a result, I was diagnosed with rheumatological diseases, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, but nobody thought to look at antibodies to any other parts of my system. And that meant, that would have meant I would need to be sent to an endocrinologist because endocrinologists look at the thyroid. Now around 10% of patients with lupus are going to have, they're going to have Hashimoto's where the immune system attacks the thyroid and very commonly co-occurs with RA patients as well. But it didn't get caught. So doing the IVIG, changing my lifestyle did stop the autoimmune attack. But unfortunately, my thyroid had already been compromised. And I didn't understand this until I adopted my first daughter and I started looking at the other mothers on the playground and they'd have three kids with them and a dog and they'd be going to their garden allotment to, till the soil and then they were going to a scout troop meeting and I thought, how are these women able to do this? And I feel like I'm dragging myself out of bed, right? I was having such a hard time functioning. I felt brain fogged and I only had one kid and I wasn't working. So I went to Dr. Google. I put all my symptoms in. I know we're told we're not supposed to do this, but honestly, it was helpful. And these days, these days with the more advanced AIs, it's become much more powerful for sure. Exactly. At the time it was in its infancy, right? Yeah. Anyway, even in its infancy, even in its infancy, it kept coming back, hypothyroid, hypothyroid. So I went to the NHS GP who said, your bloods are all normal. I thought, I'll go to a private doctor, the private doctor on Harley Street said your bloods are all normal. This is an endocrinologist now. I thought this is just not right. I know how I feel. And back on the patient bulletin boards, I told my story and thank goodness for these other wonderful sympathetic patients who said, you're being phobbed off. This is the terrible standard of care if you're a thyroid patient in Great Britain right now. You have to go see this doctor, Barry Peepfield Durant, who actually looks at clinical symptoms. So what that means is that in Britain, if you want to get diagnosed today with low thyroid function, it can only be done based on a blood test. There are no clinical symptoms such as low blood pressure, cold hands and cold feet, low body temperature, none of this. Yes, none of this. None of this can be considered. And that frankly, enrages me. I mean, and I have met too many women who have gotten pregnant, they get to five months because the baby is dependent on the mother's thyroid hormone for its thyroid. The women, they sadly miscarry. And if you miscarry at five months because your baby doesn't have enough thyroid, it's a quality control thing because the brain needs thyroid, the infant brain needs thyroid to develop properly. But the trauma to the mother, because this is now a vaginal birth, your milk comes in. It is a heartbreak. Yeah. It's very hard to recover from. And I have so much compassion for these women. And I'm always going on about how we women have got to advocate for our thyroid health. You know, we talk about hormone replacement therapy. Well, guess what? Thyroid is a hormone too. And in both men and women, it will go down as we get older. So among some doctors giving even a subclinical dose of thyroid hormone is part of an anti-aging protocol. So yeah, that's my thyroid story. So what biomarkers did you track week to week as you're on this journey now? You finally found the guy. Yeah, I found the guy. You're taking your symptoms seriously. Yeah. And so were there biomarkers you were tracking week to week? They're so easy. They're so easy. Anybody can track these. Yes, I was tracking my basal body temperature. So that means when you were lying down in bed before you raised the upper half of your body to get out of bed, you take a thermometer that you've got on your nightstand, put it under your tongue and just check to see where you're at. If you are below the normal body temperature, I want to say it's 37.6 in Celsius. Yeah. Then you should consider the thyroid. You do that over five days, five consecutive days. And another thing is pulse. So my pulse rate, again, while you're lying down, take your pulse. And what I realized was whenever I went to see doctors, they would say, wow, you've such a low pulse. That's so athletic. Without ever asking me, did I do any exercise? Are you an athlete? Yeah, which I was not an athlete. And in fact, this was a sign that my heart was having a really hard time pumping. My body had essentially gone into hibernation because I had so little thyroid hormone. So as I started taking armor thyroid, which is desiccated pigs thyroid, I, and the reason I take that is because it has not just the thyroid hormone known as T4, that's the precursor to T3, which is the bioavailable hormone. So our cells all have receptors not for T4, levothyroxine, but for T3. And I don't convert T4 into T3 well. And a lot of other people don't. I think a lot of people of Irish heritage are from countries where there were famines, they don't convert so well, because for those populations, it was a survival benefit. You could slow down on fewer carbs, you are your metabolically slower. And so I started on armor thyroid and my doctor taught me how to titrate up until I got to that 37.6 basal body temperature. And then I stopped. And he said, in the future, you have to judge this yourself because when it's very warm, you're not going to need as much thyroid hormone. So always check. And when it gets cold, you may need more. And I loved how he empowered me. That's incredible. Right. Because obviously things change between medical visits. And it was a great gift. And there are thousands of thyroid patients in Great Britain who absolutely love this man who sadly was hounded out of practice by the general medical council, because he continued to prescribe thyroid hormone to people with clinical symptoms, even though their bloods were quote unquote normal within the normal range. That's criminal. Okay, criminal. Yeah, we're not going to dwell on that. We have more more grounds to cover here. So so can you maybe share with the audience some of the common healthy habits that youth that people think they're practicing that can really backfire for an autoimmune prone, stressed out woman? Like what are the are there a couple of just fasting is one I think that especially for someone who's hypothyroid, if I fast for too long, and and of course, there are many definitions of fasting, fasting is just abstaining from eating. And of course, when we sleep overnight, we are effectively fasting. But let's call that an eight hour window. When I meet women who are doing 24 hour fast or three and five or even 10 day fast, this scares me because and the body will tell them because the feedback loop is that their fertility goes down, basically menstruation shuts down. If you are hypothyroid, the change in the body is very similar to famine. And your body says, wait, food is scarce. I have to down regulate metabolism. That means that you will be producing something called reverse T three or RT three that sits on the thyroid receptor, blocking actual T three from getting to the cell giving you energy to burn calories. And you will gain weight. And so I've seen couples where they go on these fast, the guys do great, they lose all this weight, the women actually inexplicably gain weight. Well, what is happening is this production of reverse T three. So I always say, be very careful if you are hypothyroid or even sub clinically, the hypothyroid because a longer fast is not good for you. And you can fast with a window of 12 hours. That's perfectly fine. Yeah, I think that's fine. I love that. And I think, you know, what you're getting at is any of these hormetic stressors, right? So stressors that are supposed to make a stronger and it's again, it's within the context of a body that is more or less in balance. If your body's at a balance, these hermetic stressors that, you know, all the happy influencers on Instagram are telling you are the best thing for you, whether it's cold plunging, fasting, crazy workouts, your body is not in a state right now that it can, that it can take advantage of that in a positive way. It's just adding more load to the bucket. So yeah, yeah, I feel the same way about cold plunges for women. I'm much, much more cautious about them than a lot of other influencers. We had a woman here in the UK who did it who sadly died. That's obviously an extreme outlier, but I do think that women are here to reproduce. And that means that we are constantly, our bodies are constantly scanning the horizon, sensing any kind of threat to a new baby. And cold, extreme cold, that's a threat. Yeah. Well, any of these stressors. Not enough food, right? And extreme exercise too. 100%. Running from a bear. Yeah. So everything in moderation, right? And if you do the cold plunging, you feel like, oh, this is killing me. Well, stop. Yeah, 100%. All right, let's move into autophagy. Let's start to talk about fixing things, but let's talk about this mechanism that the body has to fix, to repair or to get rid of damage. And so at one point, did you realize that, okay, symptom management is gray, inputs are great, all this thing. When did you start looking at cellular renewal? Like when did your attention go, okay, I'm going to go even deeper here. It was probably this nature review paper that I'm holding. You're holding this up. If you're watching this on YouTube, you get to see it. Yeah. And it is a paper co-authored by Professor Katja Simon, an immunologist at the University of Oxford and now also at the Charité Hospital in Berlin. And she is, she was working at the Kennedy Institute for Rheumatology in Oxford and essentially discovered that a very common compound in food called spermedine could activate a cellular renewal process known as autophagy, which was also the subject of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology. And when it did this in the presence of elderly immune cells, it rejuvenated them. Yeah. That word rejuvenation, I don't use lightly. But as you can see from the title, autophagy in the renewal differentiation and homeostasis of immune cells. That's pretty powerful. And in another paper, she actually does use the word rejuvenation. That's incredible. And this is not something that's supposed to happen. Of course, we all learned about Ponce de Leon and his folly looking for the fountain of youth. How ironic that it actually exists in all plants. And we actually, when we're young, we produce it in our tissues, but our gut, when it is in balance, can produce it too. And the unfortunate thing is that just like with hormones, whether it's estrogen progesterone, testosterone, or thyroid, our production of spermedine goes down. So first it goes down in our tissues around age 26, 28. And then if our gut is compromised by ultra process food, by broad spectrum antibiotics, then we produce less or even none at all of this. And what's interesting, autophagy, you can activate it by fasting and you can activate it by exercising. But guess what? A paper came out last year, which said that if you exercise, or if you fast and you do not have presence of spermedine in your body, you do not get the benefit of cell renewal. Interesting. That's a paper that came out of Germany. And I just thought this is, this is a lot more important than we think. And sometimes, you know, it's kind of like the glasses at the end of your nose, we're like, where are my glasses? It's, you know, it's like it's hiding right underneath us, underneath our eyes. And it's, it is actually really fascinating. The Japanese have done a lot of research on this and the Nobel laureate for his work on autophagy is Japanese. And he's created something called the Japan Autophagy Consortium, which is a governmental industry and academic body, because for Japan, which is aging more rapidly than any other nation on the planet, they see this as a way to keep their population healthy. Why do you think that is? Why do you think they're doing this? No, why are they aging faster than anybody else on the planet? Well, not when I say anybody else. No, why do you think accelerated aging might be an issue in Japan? That's a good question. So accelerated aging, it's chronological aging. It's more that they don't have enough babies. So they have an aging population. They have an aging population. So it's not that they have accelerated aging. As a matter of fact, they have decelerated aging. That's what surprised me. I was like, wait a minute, I would have thought they're aging slower. They are aging more slowly. So any of us in the West who think, oh yeah, our countries are going to age like Japan, you better think twice, because only 4% of the Japanese population has obesity. Whereas in America, it's 42% right now in Great Britain. It's less than that, but it's not far behind. It can be too far behind, yeah. Which means that, again, as I said at the beginning of this interview, any of us with chronic diseases, and I will put obesity in there, we are aging faster than we think. And so the Japanese are actually aging more slowly, but they have a larger cohort of people, this 30% that are over age 65. And they don't have enough young people to support taking care of all these older people. So what they need is they need these people to stay healthier for as long as possible. And they see autophagy as a way to do this. Because if it's not just in the immune system that you can have cell renewal, you can have it in your skin, your hair follicles, your gut, your heart, your brain, yeah, the heart is a very big one. And I don't know if or when I should go into the cardiomyocytes that govern how our heartbeat starts, but this is a pool of cells that we really want to keep young. And one of the ways we can maintain them is with autophagy. Okay, one very quickly. Can you define autophagy? If somebody's sitting and listening to this podcast right now and has never heard of autophagy and has no clue what it is, in as few, a little time as possible, can we just give them a very short description of what is autophagy, which is one of the principal hallmarks of aging? Yes, to be clear. Exactly. Marie Kondo for yourselves. It's housekeeping in yourselves, gets rid of old mitochondria, old organelles, old proteins, and it recycles where it can. Yeah, beautiful. And autophagy, autophagy, cell feeding. So basically it's the cell looking inside. And this is the work we should all be doing for ourselves, looking inside, going, what do I need to get rid of? I love the Marie Kondo reference here. What do I need to get rid of? What sparks joy? And what doesn't spark joy? Exactly. I love it. What are the biggest myths that you're hearing about autophagy in the longevity space that you would just like to just squash right now? Is there anything out there? Well, I think the biggest one is really around fasting, heavy duty fasting in particular for women. I see it work well for men these long fast. I don't see it working as well for women, again, because of the nuances around women's bodies and this higher, more elevated sensing of famine, stressors basically. Do you think that's different for pre and post menopausal women? Because I feel like in our reproductive years, a woman's going to be much more sensitive to this. Post menopausal, maybe we can play with things a little bit differently. You're right, except that our thyroid hormones decline. And that's, that is the, you know, if you are hypothyroid or you are subclinically hypothyroid, I'm cautious. But, you know, you can experiment and you can, you know, you can, you can push the boat out from shore a little bit further. Start with 12 hours, try 14, see how you feel. You will get a feedback loop. And if you feel more fatigued after going on a, you know, eating in just a four hour window, then that's not what should happen. You should not feel more fatigued. Maybe you need to widen your eating window to six or eight hours. If you're a regular listener of this podcast, bioregulators are not news to you. If you're new to the podcast, this may be a new concept. And I'm telling you now, this is one of the craziest, most cutting edge concepts that's been around for decades that so few people know about. And that concept are bioregulators. Think of bioregulators as seasonal upgrades for your body, not a fix, not a hack, just foundational support. As the weather cools and routines change, your internal systems have to adapt. And we know that when they don't adapt smoothly, which they often don't do as we age, we end up feeling sluggish, foggy, or just a little off, even if you're doing all the right things. Now, this is why I love Nature's Marvel's natural bioregulators. These are organ specific peptide complexes that support your body's own regulatory systems in a rejuvenated way. And there's decades of research behind these. Now, this time of year, I'm especially fond of the liver bioregulator, a gentle way to support the liver's detox pathways and metabolic flow at a time when the liver is working overtime from the holiday goodies, delicious drinks, and stresses of the season. Bioregulators as a whole improve communication at the organ level, helping the body to do what it knows how to do, just like when you were younger and more efficiently. Now, pro tip, you'll want to stack that liver bioregulator with the pancreas bioregulator and the stomach bioregulator for a full digestive support and renewal stack. I would do two capsules a day of each for 30 days. Now, head on over to profound-health.com. Use code NAT15 for 15% off your first order. Do it for a month. Let me know how you feel. Okay. So if the Hoffeji is a cleanup crew, what happens when it's chronically understaffed? Then the garbage, the garbage piles up, right? You have too much rubbish and we all know what it's like when the kitchen isn't clean, the pots are dirty, the fridge is a mess, right? You can't function. And so dysfunctional Hoffeji, as you said, is one of the 12 hallmarks of aging, but mitochondrial dysfunction comes, come together with that as the battery packs of the cell. And one of the great things about compounds like sphermidine is that it actually activates another cellular process called my Hoffeji, which just means sparking new mitochondria. Yeah, I love it. All right. So the biggest lifestyle Hoffeji killers you see, is it poor sleep? Oh, overeating. Over eating. Just over, not even nourishment, over eating. We're so accustomed to having snacks today. When I was growing up as a kid, I never got a snack at 10 o'clock in the morning, right? We just, I mean, went to school and it was lunch at 12 and you didn't eat anything. I mean, when my kids were at school, it was like, oh, they have to have their 10 o'clock snack. And now we, you know, we eat from morning all the way until before we go to bed, maybe at 11, because we're eating while we're watching TV. I'm not saying you and I are doing this, but I'm saying that this is, unfortunately, not uncommon practice in some countries that have a lot of ultra processed foods and a lot of ads instant gratification. And when you overeat like that, you don't give your digestive system, but also the entire cellular system an opportunity to just clean things up because you're just pushing things into the factory nonstop, right? Yeah, yeah, you literally can't clean up. You can't clean up. Exactly. Okay, so you talked about how you first encountered spermedine. You came across this paper, which I would love it if we could get the link to that paper because I put it in the show notes for the audience. What made you think, because, you know, we're filled, the world is filled with these trends in supplements, right? Oh, yeah, this is the big supplement right now. That's the big supplement right now. I can say, I can say five years down the road now for me, spermedine has remained. But what made you analytically, in analytical Leslie, look at spermedine and say, yeah, this ain't a trend. This is a thing. The immune system obviously was a big one for me personally, because like Eric Verdin at the Buck Institute in Nevada, California, who said the immune system is the big player in aging, I knew that this was the case. And if I could simply rejuvenate my immune system, I had a good chance of avoiding things like cancer, but also COVID. So my introduction to spermedine was in 2019. And I decided to go live with this during COVID. And I really wasn't sure if it was a good idea. But Professor Katchesheim and the immunologist said, Leslie, you have to do this, because we have nothing right now to fight COVID. And this might help. You have to get it out. And possibly because I was a SWATI student and listened to my teachers, I thought, okay, I'd better do this. I did. And I also could see that polyamines, spermedine is part of a class of compounds called polyamines. There were over 13,000 papers on polyamines. People had studied them for decades, but they didn't understand autophagy. They didn't make the connection between spermedine sparking the cell renewal. And so that was one thing. But the other thing that got me very interested was that spermedine does not activate autophagy by inhibiting mTOR. So for those who don't know, I like to think of mTOR as the gate or the door, the tour, to muscle. So and if you are, let's say you're taking metformin, you're going to be inhibiting mTOR. And that's why bodybuilders say, I won't take it on the days that I lift, because it inhibits muscle growth. Or even, you know, they're friends of ours that we have in common, you and me that who said, no, when I took it, I lost my muscle or I lost too much weight. So spermedine does not inhibit mTOR. And as we get older, one of the big problems is muscle loss. Now, if you inhibit mTOR, you stop that muscle loss. Yes, you get the autophagy benefit, but you lose muscle. Here's a way to preserve muscle. You're not stopping mTOR, but you're using a different pathway to activate autophagy. And so, you know, whether you're a bodybuilder and just want to stay swole and still get autophagy, you know, this is great. But if you're an older person who suffers from sarcopenia, like my mother, who's 86 and is around 85 pounds, it's terrible for her to fast, because the first thing that will go when she fast is her muscle. So I give her, exactly, she has nothing else. So I, and I don't want her to get frail and fall over. So I give her primadine in order to, you know, give her the benefit of autophagy, but without jeopardizing muscle loss. Yeah, no, I love that. And you've basically described spermedine. One of the questions I was going to ask you is how does spermedine ask as a fasting mimetic? And you've basically just explained it right here right now. This is where, and so, you know, I think when we use the term fasting mimetic people, they don't know what to think. They're like, but what do you mean? Like I'm eating, how can I possibly be fasting? But what you're explaining is that those cellular mechanisms that we are trying to initiate through fasting can still happen in the presence of appropriate and healthy food, by the way, that you can still get the benefit of autophagy without putting your body through the, and there's a lot of people who shouldn't fast as you've already described, who may, who may not want to fast. So this gives your body that, that extra kind of impetus to keep that cleanup going. Exactly. It's like sending in some extra housekeepers. And if you know, you've got a 12 room house and you have nine, I'm saying 12 room because of 12 hallmarks of aging, you send in nine housekeepers because spermedine inhibits nine of the 12 hallmarks of aging. Well, guess what? It just makes it so much easier for your body to handle the other three rooms. And so that's, you know, these are the reasons I love it. Do you think that that claim ever gets overextended about, about acting as a fasting mimetic? Like do you think people ever over overstate that? Or maybe is it just that they don't qualify all the other things you should be doing at the same time? Yeah, I think that some people see fasting as weight loss, which it is if you are, if you are overweight or obese. And if you are, there are many benefits to fasting. One is weight loss, one is autophagy, glucose sensitivity, you know, there are these things. But if you are doing it primarily for the weight loss, I can't, I'm not saying takes spermedine and you will lose weight. It is not going to be a mimetic of weight loss. It is going to be a mimetic of cell renewal. And it can help with that glucose sensitivity. But it's not going to mean dramatic weight loss like you might get when you stop. Perfect. Great answer. Great. Okay. So mechanistically, what's the strongest case? Because you've talked about this. What's the strongest case for spermedine supporting autophagy and immune balance from a mechanistic perspective? Like what do we know? Well, this is the research done here at the University of Oxford. Yes, exactly. There are several papers that have actually come out. And we know in mice, we know in elderly cells that if you take these immune cells, then that are that are older. And again, older is biologically older. So I don't care what your chronological age is, if you have an autoimmune condition, you are biologically older just like I was. Then you, if you have spermedine, you will rejuvenate those immune cells so that they function again as young. And there have been some really exciting papers that came out in the last year from a lab in Japan at Kyoto University. The fellow's name is Tosuko Hanzo. And he won the 2018 Nobel Prize for his work on cancer tumor genesis. You think again, the immune system in cancer, what's the link? Well, the immune system surveils for cancer. As we get older, why is it that older people tend to get more cancer? It's because their immune systems cannot properly surveil for it. And in his lab, they had a mouse study. They had these older mice covered in tumors, and they gave them spermedine. And what's so amazing is that the spermedine went to the immune system first, and it rejuvenated the immune cells such that they could now target the cancer and get rid of it. Wow. There's been another paper that came out of China, which showed that for breast cancer patients who take immunotherapy, if you pair it together with spermedine, you get better outcomes. Wow. This is really exciting. It's something that when I last spoke to you, I was unsure of. Because if you take cancer cells in a petri dish and you give them spermedine, those cancer cells will grow. But if you think about it in the system, we ingest the food-derived spermedine, it goes to those immune cells that line the gut. 70% of the immune system is there. They get first call on it. That means you're rejuvenating those cells and then they attack the cancer. So it doesn't get to the cancer first. It gets to the immune cells. And that is such a powerful point you just make. So for the audience who's listening to this, this is where it's so important when you hear somebody talking about a study. The first thing you need to do is, was it done in a petri dish? Was it like in isolation? Was it done in an animal? Was it done in a human? Because what you've just described is if we give spermedine, I just want to repeat this because it's so important. If we put cancer cells in isolation in a petri dish and we give them spermedine, they'll use it to their advantage. But when we systemically consume spermedine, now we have an entire system. We have a whole body that is going to interact with that spermedine. And in that body, the spermedine first pass is through the immune system, which then will be better fueled to deal with the cancer. Now we're not saying that spermedine is a cure for cancer, just to be clear, but that it shows promise. So question to you, given what you've seen in terms of spermedine's ability to help an aging immune system or a dysfunctional immune system that's out of balance, do you think we'll ever see a medication or a drug that is derived from spermedine? Like, you know what I mean? Like, I'm sitting here listening to this because one thing I want the audience to remember here is we're not saying that spermedine is going to solve all your problems here. It is going to help at a cellular level to your body's ability to deal with certain things, but it's not a cure. It's not a treatment. And yet it seems to me like, do you think there's ever a world where we can harness spermedine and potentially have it, you know, beyond a therapeutic level to a medication for some of these conditions? Well, there are certainly papers that say exactly that. And one of those four papers that came out last year, and I'll send you links to all of them, one of those four papers was really that it said, you know, old molecule, new tumor fighting abilities. And I know it was part of a paper that was published in Nature Pharmacology that was authored by Professor Linda Partridge and Professor Brian Kennedy that said, you know, targeting aging, it was all about targeting aging. What are the compounds to target that? And spermedine is one of them, along with, you know, the usual suspects, metformin, bisphosphonates, rapamycin, right? And it's, so they were talking about it, but we would need human, we would need human trials. So right now, we don't have any synthetic spermedine clinical trials. So human trials that have lasted more than, say, 28 days. And that, I think, is a real limitation. But I'm a food first kind of person because I am too. Yeah, in the in the in the food world, and it's something that Dr. Terry Wells taught me, she says that when she cured her multiple sclerosis, one of the things that she did was she ate the rainbow and that for her getting it from food was very important because there were all these naturally co occurring compounds that we might not have discovered yet. And so she wanted to take them in their whole food nutrient package. And it's the approach I've taken with primidine as well. Because when you take primidine, you're not just getting spermedine, but you're getting spermin, another polyamine that turns good genes on and bad genes off. So it's for DNA methylation. And then you get putrosine, which is a precursor to both of them. And if you have that complete package, it actually is part of a recycling loop. So you're not just getting the one milligram of sperminine, you're getting the machine, you're getting the machine, right? Yeah, I love it. That is that is the power of nature that we sometimes underestimate its beautiful complexity. And, and it's why I've gone food first, you know, not just from a safety perspective or because the clinical trials we have say in cognition, we're all done with food derived wheat germ, but also because there's so much we don't know the more we learn the less we know. Yeah, no, I think that's so powerful. I mean, it's one of the reasons why I personally love the natural bioregulators as well. Yeah, the natural bioregulator will come with a cohort that putrosine and spermin are the cohort, right? Yeah, it's the path it's or the reason why desiccated liver as a supplement is a much better multivitamin than your multivitamin of synthetics. 100% and exactly why I take armor thyroid, which is desiccated pigs thyroid, because it has the whole component of thyroid hormones from T0, T1, T2, T3, T4. We don't know what T0 and T1 do. We know T2 has something to do with slenderness. Yeah. But maybe in 20 years, we'll learn that T0 and T1 are actually really important. So I take mine from from pigs. Yeah, and I actually think that, you know, Mother Nature doesn't foolishly produce things that are useless. We just don't understand them yet. So yeah, and I may not take 20 years, you know, it may just take okay, so if sperm spermating is so great, but first of all, is there a way for people to get it from their diet? You know, yes, I'm a first person. Yeah, I know you are. Yeah. Yeah. So mushrooms, legumes, so lentils are a great source, beans are a wonderful source. And I like making a little, you know, casserole with all those beans and with lots of mushrooms. Shataki mushrooms are much better than say, chestnut mushrooms, definitely pay the extra to get the shataki because you'll get more oyster mushrooms also good. And with both of those mushrooms, you get a twofer because they both have ergo-thionine, which will prevent old person smell. Nice. Another topic. I just read about that on Instagram. I was like, what? Now we have to worry about how we smell as we age. Come on. It's so funny because when we're young, we all know about sebum because that leads to acne. But guess what? We have kind of reversed sebum as we get older and it sort of sticks in our skin for longer and it oxidizes on exposure to air and it's hard to wash off. And so as a result, you have to ingest mushrooms that have a high source of ergo-thionine to dissipate the oxidation and get rid of the smell. There we go. Okay. So shataki mushrooms and oyster mushrooms. Yeah. Soybeans are good source and anything fermented. Now for people who have histamine intolerance and you and I were just talking about this, you want to be careful with fermented things. So if you've ever had a mass cell reaction, which I have had before, you need to be a little cautious. But if you can handle it, natto, which is a fermented soybean dish, is the highest source of spermidine on the planet. And the Japanese are constantly micro dosing with this. And if you can micro dose, then that would be great. It's a wonderful way to do it. For people who find this difficult, you can then get it from food derived supplements like primidine. And for those, you know, we have powders. So you can just add it to your porridge or, you know, to your yogurt or your acai bowl or however you want to take it, you can just add it there. Just don't cook it, right? If you're going to add it to your porridge, you put it in after you're done cooking your porridge. I just want to put that in because we don't want to cook our prime, our spermidine. Yeah, exactly. We're about to launch a gluten-free powder. And it was what we launched at the Grammys. I love that. Yeah, we launched it at the Grammys. And that one is heat resistant. But our Weterm one is sadly, it does lose potency after around 41 degrees Celsius. And there's no need. You can put it in your smoothie. It actually tastes really good. What would you tell someone who tried spermidine and felt and say, I didn't feel anything. I don't know what they're talking about. It's a timing thing. So what I would say is, first of all, if you have any wearable trackers like an aura ring, yeah, exactly. We're part of the same. We're part of the same clubs. Yeah. The same club. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. If you've got a wearable tracker, look at your deep sleep, your REM sleep on your HRV. Quantified Bob, who I think you know as well, he took primidine GF and he was like, you know, I didn't feel anything. But then I looked at my sleep scores, my HRV and my sleep scores were up. And that particular product is great for sleep. And so I would look there, I would check how quickly your nails are growing. Do you notice that you have to clip your nails faster? Yeah. Take it for a minimum of three months. Now, my partner has actually been taking this, he was taking primidine for around, I don't know, let's say a year. And he wasn't seeing the effects that I thought he should be seeing, but I forgot he's six foot five and 100 kilos. So he needs a slightly different dose. So I'm sorry. Yes, it's more expensive. But if you are six foot five and 100 kilos, you're going to need more. And I upped his dose and now he's getting the restoration of hair color, which is great. And he's getting the little baby hairs. Actually, I've got some here. So I noticed it, you know, just kind of these little tiny hairs coming out that looked a little bit like a, I don't know, a QP doll or something. And I thought that's really strange. And then I realized, oh, it's the it's the spermidine, it's growing the hair longer, and then the color was coming in. So he's getting that windy band that you get the dark black band from the bottom of the roots, whereas the ends are white. So he needed a higher dose and he needed to be on it for longer. But you need spermidine as you we need this daily because we excrete it just like you would with with vitamin C, it's water soluble. So you need to get it in your diet daily. And again, food first, but when in doubt, then top up, right? Well, I think the supplement, what it does is it takes us into a more therapeutic dose, right? Yeah, I think that getting your food foundation in gets you kind of a baseline. Yeah. But certainly over the age of, I don't know, call it 40 or 45, 40, especially for women. Yeah, where your, your, your needs are going to outstrip, not to mention the fact that as we talked about earlier, your body's going to prioritize renewing the things and applying the spermidine to the things it considers the most important for your survival. That may not be your hair, skin and nails. No, it's definitely. It's going to be other things under the hood. Yeah. Yeah. And so I mean, I know with my mom who, you know, like that was my first exposure to primidine was I sent it to my mother who'd been losing her hair. She was in her early 80s at the time. And within three months, I get a call from my father and I did not tell them a thing. I just said, take this. And people hear me talk about this all the time. The good news with my parents is these days, they just do what I tell them to do. And, and my dad called and said, you know, is there anything you've given your mother, any of the things that you've given your mother, which weren't that much at the time, I think she was taking magnesium or whatever else, that might have done something to her hair. And of course, I have this moment of terror going, what do you mean something? What's something are we talking about? He goes, her hair's amazing. Like all of a sudden it's growing back. And it's, and I was like, and I think I called you. Yeah, you did. Because I had put her on a double dose, right? Because again, like, just like your partner, who is a bigger person, so needs more, to me, an elderly person, especially to get started, you might need more. Yeah, I would agree with that. And you start, you start at a, at a kind of Kickstarter dose of say two milligrams. Yeah. And then you can go to a maintenance dose. I think that works better if you were older and you have greater biological need. It's very interesting how the body knows wisely where to allocate these resources. I will just say one thing about women, because if you've ever had a child, your body is going to preferentially give the sperm eating you have to your baby to grow and breast milk is full of sperm eating. So when you are breastfeeding, you are giving your baby a load of sperm eating and your body says, I don't, we keep the mother alive, but we need to support the survival of the next generation. That is the priority. So that's why women who've had babies and have been breastfeeding tend to find my hair is falling out. Why is that? Yeah. So at that point, you should really top up. And also if you've had a virus because sperm eating activates a wonderful garbage clear up process called virology where it bags up all the viruses. If you lost hair after COVID or another flu, that's what, what happened to your body. We're saying, let's throw the kitchen sink at it. We're going to take the sperm eating that might have gone to the hair follicles and to the nails and we're going to end the skin and we're going to give it to, you know, our troops to get rid of this virus. Yeah, that's fascinating. All right. So let's talk a little bit about standards in this supplement, right? So like what matters to you most in a sperm eating product? Like, and I think all of these things do so we were going to, I want to, I'd love you to touch, touch a little bit on sourcing, dosage, contaminants, delivery form, the cofact, well, we talked about the product just a little bit. But you know, you produce two very powerful forms from two very different sources. But both food. Both food. But both, like it's not just any wheat germ. It's not just. Clorella. Yeah. Clorella. Like, yeah. Exactly. Okay. Well, well, first of all, I'll say that I'm working together with a Japan autophagy consortium and Yoshinori, assuming the 2016 Nobel laureate to create a global standard for supplements that activate autophagy. So I am the global, it's a funny title, global executive ambassador for the Japan autophagy consortium. But what I'm trying to do is, because there's so much rubbish out there, is to create a standard mark that can be put on the bottles that says this has passed muster with this group with the Japan autophagy consortium with an expert, a panel of people on autophagy who agree that these supplements actually do what they say they're doing, because we know from the work of Professor Andrea Meier at National University of Singapore's Aging Research Center that lots of supplements claim to have bioactive ingredients, but have zero at all. Nothing. Which is a shocker. It's not just with spermidine. It's with urolithin A. It's with, you know, some of these other, these other supplements and that people are knocking off. People are knocking off originals, right? Exactly. I mean, honestly, we know more, women probably know more about how to identify counterfeit handbags than we do counterfeit supplements. And I think we need some education here. So first of all, the vast majority of supplement compounds come from China. Now, I am half Chinese or Taiwanese, so get that out of the way first. I'm not, you know, bashing my own people. Well, no, you can bash your own people because you are your own people. Because I am. Yeah. Okay. So I will just say that, you know, as a country, a country that has so few standards that they allow baby milk powder to be contaminated with melamine, a plastic that killed thousands of babies in a country where people are only allowed one. And there was no accountability for that zero. Well, what do you think they're doing with other products? I mean, baby powder isn't that expensive. When you look at supplements, some supplements are very expensive. Can you guarantee hand on heart that there is no contamination? Well, this is the problem I deal with is I see companies, they come to me, they say, you're selling spermidine, we want to sell you spermidine, look how cheap it is. We'll bottle and label and give you the bottle itself. I mean, capsulate bottle label, and it'll be a dollar a bottle for spermidine. And it's, it's, it's synthetic. Of course, it's synthetic. But I've had companies also say, I'll give you 10 milligrams of spermidine from we term derived sources. And I'm thinking, is that true? So we've tested. And guess what? They don't have sperming and they don't have putresine, which means that they're lying. And you've got, yes, you've got 10 milligrams of spermidine and, but you don't have those other compounds that would naturally co occur, then that is not that certificate of analysis that these other companies selling these compounds, that's not right. And it's very easy to forge a certificate of analysis today. This is what is normally given to a supplement manufactured when you sell a raw material. So this, you know, this alarms me quite frankly, because a lot of people believe more is better. But we don't know what we don't know. We don't have those clinical safety or efficacy tests using synthetic in humans. And until we do, I don't have the confidence to sell it because I'm a patient, right? And there's, there's just too much rubbish that has gotten onto the market. So I'm really careful about it. I will also say that there is something called chirality or handedness when it comes to molecules. So synthetic molecules are synthetic. They are, they are perfect mirror images. And I've explained this, I think on the podcast before. You talked about it before on this podcast. Yeah, exactly. So you can have something that is a mirror image, but is not a three dimensional image, kind of like taking, you know, a leather glove for your left hand and thinking, Oh, it will work on your right. And it doesn't. It doesn't fit. Yeah. So then what happens when our receptors get those compounds? Now we have co evolved with plants, plants that have spermidine. Our receptors are not there looking for something that is kind of like a spermidine compound or a spermine compound. It's looking for the exact key that fits the lock. And if you really want to unlock the cellular renewal potential of your cells, you had better go with the food derived compounds. Yeah, you know, the other good example of that is T three and reverse T three. Oh, yeah, exactly. Beautifully earlier, like reverse T three is the mirror image of T three. So it might hit the receptor, but it doesn't activate it. And it blocks it from the actual T three that will initiate that cellular cascade you're looking for. So okay, we're, we're coming up on time. I think we came up on time and pasted a while ago. But this is such a great conversation. I always love talking to you. But so I'm going to ask you a couple of questions, a few more questions. But let's try and make these more of a kind of a speed round for the audience. I'll do my best. So what's the next frontier in immune rejuvenation and inflammation that hasn't hit the public's attention yet, do you think? And it could be just the renewal, the ability for me, for me, it's still, I feel, I still feel people don't know enough about spermidine. I mean, that that is really it for me. I hate to be a cliche, but yeah, no, it's still spermidine. Yeah. Okay, cool. Your site recently highlighted spermidine being included in a newer clinical study. What question is the study trying to answer? And what outcome would change the field? Can we slow aging and the onset of the diseases of aging with spermidine? And they're also being given rapamycin as well, not not in the same cohorts, they're being, they're being compared. And this is something that we have done here at the University of Oxford in Professor Gada Al-Salay's lab, looking at both of those two head for head, head to head. What would you love to see funded in women's longevity research that isn't getting attention right now? Oh, thyroid health. There's so much. There's so much thyroid health, hormone health. And yeah, those two for sure. Maybe early and earlier, earlier intervention with HRT. Yes. Yeah. And used differently, honestly. Beautiful. The most underrated longevity lever for women is? Oh, HRT. The habit you'll never give up even on a bad day. Of spermidine. A supplement trend you're so over. And no, man. The most common mistake people make when trying to reduce inflammation? Probably using too many hormetic stressors. Yeah, what we talked about earlier. One thing you change that improved mood really fast. Lovemaking. I love it. So if you guys go back and listen to earlier episodes, you will learn that one of Leslie's earlier careers was a sex sexologist. So I'm going to let you go back to one of those episodes yourself to find it guys, but that informs Leslie's answer. And truthfully, intimacy is one of the most powerful levers we have for so many of the things we've talked about today. Not a toffi g maybe. Well, anyway, we're not going to go there. This is supposed to be the speed round. So. Yeah. And there's a there's a cool paper out by my mentor, Professor Dennis Noble about how touch activates the meridians used in acupuncture, but also allows extracellular vesicles or exosomes to go to the sites of repair that need to be repaired. There you go. The belief about aging, you want to delete from the culture. That aging means decline. It doesn't. Beautiful. So for the women listening who feels older than she is, what do you want to say to her right now? What's the message? Decline is not inevitable. Embrace your new prime. But in order to do it, you need to top up the things in which you are deficient, whether that is hormones or spermedine, you need to support your body actively. And then if you do those things, you might just enjoy a healthier, longer and even younger second half of life like I have. And just to leave the audience with a bit of a, you know, little to do list, right? So if we were going to design a perfect day for our audience who's listening, starting with a couple of lifestyle things you feel they should do, and maybe how they might weave spermedine into if they're feeling inspired and say, okay, I'm taking the plunge, I'm going in. How would they really apply spermedine or primedine, whether it's the gluten-free or the original formula? How would they weave that into that day? Okay. Well, first of all, when we go to sleep at night, we have a natural fast, and you can leverage that period where we're doing literally nothing to activate autophagy. So I would start in the evening. And with the last food of the day, I would take some primedine GF, which is better for sleep, the gluten-free one. And then that kick starts the autophagic process. So say you have it with the last meal of the day at around 8 p.m. You go to bed at 11, you wake up again at 8, you then got your 12-hour fasting window. When you have food in the morning, have primedine original, you could again, yogurt, acai bowl, smoothie, porridge, and you then extend the autophagic or cell renewal benefits that you've had overnight into another, let's say it's another four-hour window. So you're getting effectively a 16-hour fasted window benefit, but you have actually been able to eat both dinner and breakfast exactly without starving yourself. So that would be one way to do it. There are other things that help, so coffee can activate autophagy as well. And then I would, in your diet, there are so many wonderful compounds that we can layer on in a nutrient-dense, even high-protein meal. I know a lot of people are thinking about getting more protein into their diets, but layer them together with polyphenols, with your vegetables, your broccoli sprouts. Broccoli sprouts are a powerhouse. So for a thing, but they have spermedine too. All sprouts have some spermedine. And so I would garnish as much as you can with those sprouts. Yeah, on everything. Garnish with, I like to use lots of spices as well to get extra benefits. And fiber, aim to get at least 11 different plant fiber types into your diet daily. And that alone is a challenge. Yeah, for most people. I mean, it's not too hard when you do it, but once you get into it. But I think for a lot of people who might eat their vegetable list is carrots, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, maybe. But as Leslie, when we talk about the beans, the sprouts, go to the radish, go to the cabbage, go to the, even if the cabbage is cooked cabbage right now, is all the rage online, right? Yeah, I've seen it everywhere. Yeah. But even just parsley. So parsley grows easily everywhere, but you can freeze it and just throw it on as a kind of, you know, garnish. Yeah, that counts. That counts as something to your gut biome, right? Yeah. And the porridge that I make in the morning, which I make with almond milk has blueberries, ginger, because we can get chopped frozen ginger here. It has a chopped, an entire chopped apple, diced finely. It has cacao nibs. It has cinnamon. It has flaxseed. And, you know, that's six. That's six forms right there. So yeah, I throw in some buckwheat groats and chia seeds as well. Yeah, yeah, exactly. There's just so many things, right? So anyway, so I think that what you're saying, extend that autophagy window using the, the, the primadine supplements, but at the same time, underscore it with that nutrient dense diet that's going to support all of these things that you're doing, which is really powerful. And I'm sure we can add in there, you know, move your body, see natural light, all the things, but foundationally not to overload you guys. And, you know, if you're eating a five food diet right now, because that's just your habit, then start to think about gradually increasing it. Don't get overwhelmed with 11 different vegetables right now. Just start improving it gradually. I would agree. I would say think of it like painting with only a few colors. You want your palette to be as colorful as possible. Try painting with more colors. Beautiful. All right. So the smallest today move that can really start to reverse biological age in as little as a month. I'm going to say sleep because we are chronic, many of us are chronically depleted in sleep. Actually, Great Britain is one of the countries that suffers most. Get more sleep and get more deep sleep because once you get deep sleep, you activate the lymphatic system and that's the only time that the waste in the brain gets taken out. Spermating can help with that waste, but you do need to get into deep or slow wave sleep. Love it. If your story had a title, Ms. Leslie Kenny, what would it be? Have you thought about this yet? Are you writing the book? I am writing the book, but they've chosen the title for me. I can't do anything about it. I heard. What would you do if did you have a title in mind when you started this process? Yeah, it was rewriting time. Beautiful. Beautiful. That would be the story. Yeah, rewriting time, changing my biological age and taking my life back. I love it. Leslie, as always, this has been a fantastic discussion. Thank you so much for your time and thank you for all that you do. I'm stopping myself from rushing to my cabinet to grab my Spermating right now. But if the audience who is listening hasn't had the good fortune of getting their hands on Prima Dean yet, where do they find it? How do they buy it? Where do they find you? Well, in particular for Canadians, once the tariffs went into place, we decided to manufacture in Canada just for the Canucks. Yes. So now available to Canadians and Americans and all the other people. Yes, exactly. And so you can get it online at OxfordHealthsMan.com. And in the United States, same. You can also get it at Arrow One in the Los Angeles area. You can get it at Six Senses Resorts. But really, it's online and a big push to the Canadians. Yeah. Thank you. And Canadians, thank you. And we have a special code for the audience. You can't use the code at Arrow One or at Six Senses. And I think the code is, I believe the code is not 20, but we will put it in the show notes, which will save you at least on your first order. 20%. 20%, which is a very generous, very generous gift to help people to kind of get started on their journey. And where do people find you and follow you on social media? All the things. Leslie's New Prime, LES, LIE, S New Prime. Beautiful. On Instagram. Thank you so much. This has been amazing. It has been great fun. Thanks so much, Nat. My pleasure. Hey, folks, just a quick reminder that all of the information presented in this podcast is for information purposes only. No medical advice, no diagnosing, no treatments suggested here. Before you try anything that you hear about or learn about here, make sure that you check with your medical provider.