The Beauty Molecule That Is Changing Everything Featuring Renowned Dr. Perricone

0:00Hey guys, welcome back to Skin Anarchy. This is Ekta and I have such a remarkable guest with me today. I am truly honored and humbled to be hosting him. He has been such a visionary and a leader in the space of skin health for so many years. And we're going to be talking about his new book that's coming out now. So without me ranting too much, please, I would love to introduce you guys to Dr. Nicholas Paracon. Welcome, Dr. Paracon. It's such an honor to host you. Thank you. And it's a pleasure getting to talk with you today and our audience. I'm very excited about the new book. It's just a lot of fun to get to talk about it.

0:37Yeah, I'm really excited that you're coming out with, you know, you came out with a new book and I'd love to learn about it. And I really want to talk about you because you've led that beauty and wellness world through so many scientific evolutions, you know, and for me, I mean, your brand was one of the first professional brands that I got my hands on, you know, when I was learning about skin health. And it's just so inspiring to see this, you know, kind of come full circle for myself. So I want to ask you, you know, what really inspired The Beauty Molecule, which is the name of the book for everyone listening?

1:07Why is right now the right time for this message? Well, it's a perfect time because my last book was 10 years ago. And people ask me why this long break. I said, because really, my research, I didn't see anything that was really different from my initial ideas about inflammation, aging, and disease and all the information I have on skin. But with my research over the past 10 years, it was kind of really enlightening to see what happened in terms of my studies. So I have an unusual background. I'm certainly a medical doctor, but I'm also a nutritionist. and I've done original research in nutrition.

1:48But this really all started back in medical school when I was doing my histopathology and looking at different pieces of pathology under the microscope and looking at a squamous cell cancer, and it was surrounded by inflammation. And then universally, as I kept on going with my career and did my dermatology residency, a lot of time spent in the microscope, and everything was associated with visible inflammation. And so at that time, I really came up with the inflammation aging disease theory. That was like almost 25 years ago, but it was not well received. As you know, in medicine and science, new ideas are not met with curiosity or met with rejection.

2:32And so it seems to me that at least my experience, I don't mean to offend anybody, but science seems to be more like a religion than science, because there's a set of ideas. And very much if you fall outside of the belief system, instead of getting open-mindedness and people looking at it, we have an emotional response. And so it was really a pretty bad time back then in terms of what I was getting from the medical community, the scientific community. It was just rejection and a lot of criticism. Now that it's mainstream, of course, it's accepted, and so it's a lot easier to talk about this. But science keeps on moving forward and there's always going to be new ideas.

3:14So what we need to do is probably change our attitude and start being scientists. We want curiosity. We want to look at the data and we don't just reject it on an emotional basis. So that's where we're coming from. So I'm really excited about this book because with the fact that we now know that inflammation is at the basis of all Western diseases and including the disease of aging. and when I first talked about aging as a disease, very, very negative response. So here we are, that's the downside, but there's 99 % bright light and a lot of good things to talk about today. Yeah, no, this is, everything you said hits home for me.

3:54I've never understood this either, you know, people, not only do they reject it, but it's almost looked at as like pseudoscience, you know, when you introduce something truly novel in the scientific community. And it's really kind of jarring in that way for, I think, many scientists, because you don't ever get to truly explore that idea in a timely manner. 20 years down the road, you see now it's become a buzzword. And I feel like inflammation, exactly what you said, now I'm looking at the industry and everyone's talking about inflammation aging. And unfortunately, even now, some of the conversations that take place that I've noticed, at least, I don't know if you've experienced this, But some of those conversations are actually poorly rooted in the science they're referencing.

4:35Talking about inflammation in a very isolated way rather than what you were talking about, where aging can be referred to as a disease. Inflammation can be, you know, talked about in a more broader scope where it's impacting every organ. We still don't see that enough. But here we are with a buzzword, you know, that people are using now. Yeah, well, one of the things, too, is, of course, inflammation theory came up quite a while ago. but what I was looking at was yes we know that the immune system certainly changes as we get older and that and inflammation starts popping up but I because of my background of being a medical doctor and a nutritionist I found that it was basically inflammation is tied very closely to the metabolic system and if the metabolic system is a ride then you need a lot more inflammation and that's I've been talking about all these years and so I when I developed the first anti-inflammatory diet, once again, it was easy for me being a nutritionist and then actually testing it and then looking in the old days at said rates changing and then in newer days we're using C-reactive protein, we can see some really miraculous things.

5:38And I get emails and letters from physicians or a friend of mine and people who've been on the anti-inflammatory diet. And they talk about, in fact, one of my colleagues that I was in my residency with just sent me a really nice note. He said he was thrilled. His C-reactive protein was up around seven or eight. He did the anti-inflammatory diet and he said my latest number is 0.73. And so this is another physician and someone I did my residency with. So I'm really happy that this is now getting to be mainstream because we've got to focus on inflammation at the basis of all diseases, including the disease of aging.

6:17Then, of course, being a dermatologist, looking in the microscope and seeing inflammation. I then said, well, I've got to set my sights on creating topicals that will have anti-inflammatories that have to be benign. And what happened, too, is I had a lot of, I think, fortuitous things happen. When I was an intern in pediatrics at Yale, there was a study going on in another pediatric center, and they were looking at asthma. And what they did is they did an interesting study, a double-blind placebo-controlled study. but they gave the children vitamin C in form of chewables about 500 milligrams twice a day which was a huge dose for children and when they broke the code 50 they had a reduction 50 percent of the inflammatory airway attacks and so that burned in my memory that so vitamin C antioxidant anti-inflammatory and started looking at all the other categories over the years And so I came up with a really nice group of categories to use as I started formulating my topicals and things like ascorbyl palmitate, which is vitamin C in a fat soluble form.

7:25Alpha lipoic acid was an incredible find. It's a universal antioxidant of water soluble and fat soluble. And so these went into my products, but also at the same time, I had to come up with ways to basically deliver this into the skin because you're putting on creams that just sit on top. It does nothing. And so I came up with certain formulas. And if I change the ratio, I can actually basically target the depth of penetration. And so I wanted to get into skin and dermis. I did not want to get into dermal vasculature. And so I created this. But what happened is I started a second company called Transdermal Biotechnology because I found that I can get most biologically active products, especially peptides, into the dermal vasculars, which then circulates.

8:10And it's a liquid crystal that doesn't break down until it gets to the cell membrane. And so what we could do, it would circulate. It wouldn't be broken down by the enzymatic systems. And we also get the blood-brain barrier. So Transdermal has been enormous. I have several, probably 25 or 30 patents in this area. And so I look upon this as an evolution of not just treating skin, but then systemic and then as a nutritionist and the things that we can do. So very exciting, still exciting time for me. There's so much more to be done in terms of using basically peptides that have biologic activity, but there's no way to deliver them.

8:45But with the transdermal system, we can do that. So it just opens up a whole new field for me. I'm really excited to hear about that because I feel like when it comes to topical application, there are so many redundancies right now. When I look at the world with all the products and all the devices and all that, but I think there needs to be this shift that occurs where we start looking at. For me, I hate hearing the word, for example, like everyone says peptides and no one talks about the role that they play, right? and what does a peptide actually do? How does that molecularly enhance the actual biology?

9:20And so there's a lot of question marks still, even though we're evolving. And so it's very, very exciting. Now, I want to ask you about, in the book, it feels like a true shift that's taking place because you're talking about from treating signs of aging to now truly understanding what fuels aging. How did mitochondrial health become your new frontier? Very interested in the mitochondrial function. And my last book many years ago came to the conclusion that we age in the mitochondria. So the mitochondria, of course, is our organelle that produces energy. But it also has so many other functions.

9:54It releases certain chemicals and other ingredients that actually then do things such as creating, basically whether we if we have cells that are dormant we want to get rid of those because many of those cells they may be dormant but they're constantly producing these pro-inflammatory chemicals and so and so if you start looking at total body burden of inflammation you realize that a lot of this is coming from these so-called cells that are are supposed to be just kind of sitting there but they're not they're active and so it's very important we get into autophagy and mitophagy so i became very interested in mitophagy and started looking at substances that can enhance mitophagy because we have to get rid of those mitochondria but the thing is the body is so efficient it breaks up mitochondria but using those those parts that and all of those various aspects it then makes new mitochondria then also gets rid of these sedentary cells that are still active.

10:56So this is why I got so interested in the mitochondria because we age in the mitochondria. And so it's been this whole thing I've been doing. And so this research I've done over the past 10 years, it all came down to inflammation, of course, but one molecule in the body. And so I had to name the book, The Beauty Molecule, because this is one molecule, which is acetylcholine. We're all aware of that as physicians. You know, it's a neurotransmitter. But what I found is it's also tremendously active as an anti-inflammatory because when it locks on to things like the alpha receptors in the central nervous system, it turns off inflammation centrally.

11:33And so we want to do that. And so in this book, I want to talk about acetylcholine and different ways that we can elevate in our body through diet, through supplements, and something as simple as doing something like meditation. And also there are also pharmacologic chemicals that can be also very helpful too so what really intrigued me was an excellent article it was an animal study and basically they looked at these animal models they were using mice but they would give they would give them basically heart disease by giving them a high fat diet and then looking under the electron microscope we could look at the mitochondria and those beautiful little footballs with those with those vertical lines the football is now distorted into almost a kind of a circular or a sphere and all of those lines where that means where the electron transport is taking place are now blurred and then what they did is they elevated acetylcholine by giving these animals a drug it's called peridostigmine it's used for myasthenia gravis and they gave them a dose and they followed it for four months and then if you look at the electron microscopy at this point all of those all of those mitochondria are now the perfect little footballs with the vertical lines so it was so impressive to see that just by elevating this molecule acetylcholine by using an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor can repair the mitochondria and then so this brought me down a road that was just amazing so things that we can do for example when we meditate um and we don't have to meditate for long periods of time we upregulate um the release of acetylcholine in just about every cell in our body and so by doing that we can meditate our way to repairing the mitochondria it's just phenomenal to think about it because if you look at people who discover meditation and then they're doing it and then you see them a year later they look like different people they're younger i mean they're more vibrant and so there's a real physiologic reason for this in the real world the repairing the mitochondria so we have this in this book we have all of these strategies food supplements meditation and and many other authors pharmacologic agents we could use and so i think this is going to be hugely helpful to people when they see this because it's all new and of course um it's interesting that many years ago when i chose the topicals i used precursors of acetylcholine and um so it acts uh as a penetration enhancer but it also elevates levels of acetylcholine so we've been there for many years and that's why my products have been so successful but now when we truly know the mechanism that's here we can now pinpoint this so if we can normalize metabolism we shut down inflammation because inflammation is always at the basis of aging and all age-related diseases and so i'm excited about that because now we have different methods of approaching this we don't just have the anti-inflammatory diet we have certain supplements we have certain way of eating and we can even use some some pharmacologics that are pretty much benign to do this and of course i think the biggest issue i'm always looking at is obviously a neurologic decline and it all takes place in central nervous system, the brain, and inflammatory reactions.

14:44And so things that we eat cause a cascade of inflammation. But in the brain, of course, this goes on all of the time. So by using these strategies, we can rapidly reduce inflammation systemically, especially in the central nervous system, and maintain our clearness and the cognitive function, you know, right to the last few days of our life. And so that's probably one of the most important things I'm looking at. That's so fascinating that you've tied so much together with acetylcholine. That's so brilliant because we never even talk about it. I think back to medical school and training and we barely learn about acetylcholine.

15:23It's kind of mentioned and then we just forget about it. But the immense role that it plays, like you explained, in every part of the system, it's basically the parasympathetic nervous system that's being activated here and and releases it. So when you think about that, we, people always kind of brush it off as like rest or digest, but really, I mean, if you, if you really dig deeper into that concept, it is kind of trying to, you know, I guess, dampen the inflammation throughout the body, right? Is that, would that be a correct way to think about it? Exactly. That's exactly the way we should think about it because it just puts it in the right direction and it doesn't have to be sophisticated and it's not complicated.

16:01So, um, and we looked at so many different examples. We We know that when we have moderate exercise, of course, it elevates levels of acetylcholine because it's the way our muscles contract. And then so many other things that we do. And, of course, rest is also very important and getting a good night's sleep. So we have all of these very, very simple, non-toxic, inexpensive ways of approaching this. And so I was so successful with my anti-inflammatory approach to life, the anti-inflammatory diet, what it can do for people. and then my anti-inflammatory supplements and the topicals, I said, well, what more can we do?

16:38Now we have to elucidate what is the mechanism here. And this is what this book is all about. But it's interesting and it's fun because there's so many ways of elevating acetylcholine. And so if you think about those alpha-7 receptors in the brain and when you lock on to that with acetylcholine, it turns off inflammation. But the same thing, there are other things that do this. And so I have a pretty good amount of time spent talking about nicotine because we have the so-called nicotinic receptors. But those are the ones that we want to activate because it turns off inflammation. So obviously the problem is most of people getting nicotine are through smoking.

17:16But there's so many other ways to get it. And there's so much data that's popping up now with all kinds of diseases, a full spectrum of people using the nicotine patch. helps with prevents some cognitive decline, helps with Parkinson's disease, helps with normalizing your metabolism. And we keep on going down the road. So they're all here in the book. These are all different ways we go about it. And I certainly would love to see everybody stop smoking, but we don't want to give up nicotine. And so we have different things. And what I do is when I have work to do, I get some Nicorette gum and I chew a little bit and put it up in my cheeks and just leave it there.

17:53I forget about it. You get incredible clarity and energy. and this should be done every day. And I think the patches are probably a better way. I haven't tried myself yet, but I think I'm going to move to that. So we have all of these wonderful ways of doing this that are non-toxic, inexpensive, and we can change things. And the other thing was inflammation was everything. So I said someday I would like to discover what I call the magic bullet. And it would have to read three criteria. It would have to be non-toxic, have to be inexpensive, easy to use, and readily available. so about 10 years ago i was reading an article in a very prestigious journal nature medicine and they were talking about hydrogen water and the fact that it acts as an antioxidant and i thought this isn't wrong right to me i mean um you know h2 is a non-polar molecule it doesn't interact um but i forgot about some things like we have dehydrogenases in our body so i was coming out of japan uh so i took a trip to tokyo i met with the scientists i met with the manufacturers had been there for like 20 or 30 years and never left the country.

18:58And I was still skeptical. I came back and I did my own study. And what I wanted to do was I talked to a partner of mine, unfortunately passed away on Dr. Peter Poglasey, a brilliant guy, should have had a Nobel prize, by the way. And I said, look, Peter, I'm looking for a way to quantify something about hydrogen water. And one of the things they're touting is that it gives them, gives you energy. So I said, what can we do with this? He said, well, Nick, The good news is he said the only molecule that fluoresces in the skin under a certain frequency is NAD. Well, that's the molecule, right, to look at.

19:30So we went ahead and we had the LEDs made up at the right frequencies. And we then brought people into the study with double-blind placebo control. And we just took a little strap, a leather strap with the LED. And we had to basically looking at the fluorescence. And then we have the computer figure this out. so i was there and we said it was double blind so we had just plain cans of water we didn't know what they were and handed them out to the um the group it wasn't a huge what it was just uh you know like 50 people but so i'm sitting there it's going to be a long day you've got to drink the water you know it has to go in the mouth esophagus stomach get into the bloodstream circulate get into the skin cells and get into the mitochondria so i'm putting my feet up and looking at the computer and the first person that don't know whether drinking plain water or hydrogen water and I'm looking at the computer and in two and a half minutes, I'm seeing a movement.

20:22And I just kept on watching it. And in 15 minutes, it was up 12 and a half percent. I said, this is phenomenal. And so once I saw that, I said, well, hydrogen water is real and I've got to do it correctly. So I went ahead and started putting this together. I wanted to make sure that we could get hydrogen in the water at what we thought were therapeutic levels, which came out of Japan. It had to be above one part per million and it had to be stable. And it's a tiny molecule. You can't put it in glass or plastic. It's got to be in a sealed can. It's got to be aluminum. It's got to have a polymer to protect the aluminum.

20:56And we had several weeks at universities with 100 % hydrogen on these plain pieces of aluminum with a polymer to see if it leaked. And so we got the cans right. And then I bought the machines from Japan. This was a very big expense. So this was capital equipment. And we went ahead and spent the money. And we produced our own hydrogen. And we now have retains of those cans that are six and a half years old, and we haven't lost one molecule of hydrogen. So the hydrogen water company, which I started, is now out there. We're just ramping up now. It's great to be ahead of your time in science. Well, it's a two-edged sword, as we both know.

21:35But when you're talking about a product that we now so far invested$12 million in, and you have no sales because the world hasn't caught up, now it's caught up. And so you're going to see things changing out there. And probably one of the most impressive studies I've seen, it came out of India and it was done by the Hydrogen Foundation. And they basically took these people with metabolic syndrome. And they were told, listen, we don't want you to change anything. You're not exercising. Don't start. Don't change your diet. Just be you. And I don't think there's much of a chance of people changing their diet if you have metabolic syndrome, by the way.

22:12And we gave them hydrogen water twice a day. But it was also double-blind, placebo-controlled. At the end of 24 weeks when that code was broken, 100 % of those people with metabolic syndrome who were drinking the hydrant water were completely no longer could be basically classified as metabolic syndrome. And all those who did not feel like metabolic syndrome. So I said, that's it. This is so important. You know that metabolic syndrome, all of the Western diseases are downstream. and we can interrupt this by drinking water twice a day i mean how many patients do you see and you say look you have metabolic syndrome diet exercise it never happens i mean it's difficult for people but they can drink two cans of hydrogen water a day and we can change that so my belief is you know the back of the envelope you know um looking at the numbers i think in in three years if we get the population drinking hydrogen water twice a day we could drop the health care cost by a third in this country and five years probably by 50%.

23:12Wow. That is remarkable. That's really, I mean, that's so fascinating to me. And then, you know, I'm, I'm curious what your thoughts are then on this idea or the, the way that hydration is perceived in our, you know, in our world, both on the medical side, as well as, you know, consumers, like, you know, because I feel like with hydration is talked about so much, right. Overall, I think in health and wellness, especially when we come to the realm of like trying to have you know mass education for people everyone talks about hydration but well what do you think there are some misconceptions are that are out there about it well certainly hydration is critical and um you know everybody and the problem is the thirst mechanism doesn't work very well until we're dehydrated by about one or two percent and and that's that's not not acceptable so since all chemical reactions take place including metabolic ones it's important to get enough water uh and so i always advocated you know, eight, you know, eight, eight ounce glasses of kind of spring water every day as part of the anti-inflammatory diet.

24:12And so now that we have hydrogen water, which is just an amplified, you know, effect of this, and then that becomes critical. But yes, hydrating is critically important. But now that it's catching on here with hydrogen water, it's going to change things for us very rapidly. And, you know, it's not just a metabolic syndrome. And I don't know, did we ever send you a case of the water? Because I wanted you to experience it. But it's interesting. I've given out so many cases over the seven or eight years, and everybody had a certain deficit, and they've come back to me, and it seemed to help. So I don't want to start talking about it.

24:44It sounds like snake oil because it works on everything, but it's real. And so I'm just so happy that this is going to happen now. It's going to happen. I'm talking to major distributors here in the country, getting hydrogen water out to everybody. It's going to be the new drink. It's so clean. It's non-toxic, and it's not expensive. So this is going to be a game changer and all comes down to reducing inflammation. But I want to focus right now, once again, on metabolics and inflammation. They're so closely tied. And so when you can normalize metabolism through the various receptors, the GIPs, GLP-1s, all the others, you actually have this change on a cellular level.

25:24And everybody was always skeptical about this. So are you sure it's the metabolism? Are you sure it's not just the nutrients and what you're giving in the anti-inflammatory diet. So then comes up these new peptides and like terzapatide. And so I'm looking at this and I'm looking at patients and I'm looking at data and it is without a doubt the best anti-inflammatory I've seen in my entire career. Why is that? Because it normalizes metabolism. It hits all of the receptor groups that happen when you're eating the right foods, only it does it in a pharmacological manner so it's very powerful so i wrote a letter to lily about two years ago i said you've got to start extending your patent you've got to talk about it's this is going to reduce cognitive decline it's going to be cardio protective hepato protective it's going to be anti-cancer it's going to do everything and they have all those patents now filed and you're going to see them coming out with new products every day and It's just, it is phenomenal.

26:25So when I see patients on these various things like terzapatide, yes, they lose weight. And it's important that they eat enough protein because you see a lot of protein wasting and they look, because you just lose your appetite. But if you have adequate protein, what you see is, yes, you're impressed they lose weight, but they all look 10 years younger. Their skin is now rejuvenated. They're just different people. and it also has some kind of effect on the central nervous system because it gets rid of all kinds of issues in terms of um uh addictions uh but it's not it's not just chemical addictions they also works on things like um gambling addictions i mean it's just incredible and so you know i have all these new theories about what's going on in the central nervous system and i've studied this over and over again as inflammation goes up in the brain all the neurotransmitters are not in the right ratio.

27:21And so what you see is just other problems. There's anxiety, there's depression, there's just a number of things happening. And of course, cognitive climb. And that's the biggest thing we're facing in our healthcare system. We have, you know, the baby boomers born in the late forties and early fifties. I mean, they're a huge population. And if they move at the standard way, it's going to break the healthcare system. and this can be this can be stopped anti-inflammatory diet drinking hydrogen water every day there's so many things and so what i'm saying is that my whole theory of validation came through these these peptides because they're the magic they hit those receptors and then it turns off inflammation and um if you're ever interested in anti-aging you'd want to be on this yeah you know this is very very fascinating for me because i am hearing a you know when we talk about anti-aging especially in the context of you know like you know prolonging lifespan you know all this longevity talk there's a lot of buzz around epigenetics right now for example however for me I've I'm still stuck you know I think in what everything that you're speaking of with this antioxidant potential right of of different molecules I am still stuck there because I feel like that is really the the crux of it I mean people talk about epigenetics and it's tied to inflammation.

28:44What are your thoughts on that? Just obvious. It's really obvious. And yes, you get genetic changes and you get epigenetic changes. But we take the anti-inflammatory diet, just doing that at a fairly long period of time, we're going to slow the aging process down by a third. And not only that, and of course the pathology goes with it, is skewed even more in the direction of helping us here. So yes, I think they were there. And now with the fact that we know that these certain peptides that affect metabolism, that's the button we're pressing. And so what I'm hoping to see is instead of injectables, I spent a lot of time with my transdermal company because I like to use biologically active peptides, but they have to get into the system.

29:28So if we took these peptides and they're small enough to get into the blood system, instead of giving a bolus once a week with an injection, you have smaller doses using on a daily basis. I'm also doing a study right now to see if there's very low amounts like 0.01 or 0.05 for a topical to see if it rejuvenates skin and it looks like it's happening. Wow. So, you know, we're there and we have this. The other thing is this business of muscle wasting, yes, you see it a lot. And whether it was ozempic, I actually like a terzapatide better because it hits two of the receptors. But all you have to do is make sure you get adequate protein.

30:04And when you do, what you see is you actually get increased muscle mass from very little from little exercise and that makes sense because you're normalizing your metabolism and so everything's working better the endocrine system's working better the central nervous system's working better now as far as antioxidants go i'm a big fan but you know the problem is people are taking too much and and so we know about oxidative stress but very few people know about about this um stress that you get from uh antioxidants and so we better curtail that to to a great extent. And if we do this correctly, use the diet and sub supplements with anti inflammatory activity, but not, not huge amounts that people are taking out.

30:44And so there's reductive stresses as real and as damaging as oxidative stress. So we need to know this. And if we balance this, we're, we're doing well. And I can tell you from all the people I work with when I'm, you know, in any way. So I think the answer right now is like hydrogen water. um i i would like to see these um uh these peptides like trisapatide and others um utilized but not in such a powerful way where they're getting these boluses now it's great for weight loss i agree and it's good but we want to maintain muscle mass and we want to be able to do this in a physiologic manner but this is the future and i'm telling you that uh when i say that we can get the country drinking hydrogen water which is a real mild way of doing this but if you also had other people with obesity problems in that and are using that as well you know we are going to just change change the world in terms of how we approach medicine no absolutely i'm i'm you know very much trust me i'm very much convinced of it because i think that there is um there's so much tied to this not just about you know obviously with aging but then also understanding very very critical diseases that we still don't have answers to you know and it's a lot of it has to do with catabolic events that are taking place in the body and it really makes you wonder about what truly is catabolism you know what is what triggers it right in certain states i mean you spoke about protein and how there's protein um breakdown that's happening and protein wasting in people who are not supplementing but then it that takes my brain to like well there's a lot of different disorders that i think you could also apply the same concept to you know so i think if we do apply this approach, it could be very revolutionary for medicine at large, you know, not just, you know, from the lens of, yeah, we're looking at longevity and we're looking at aging, but I think across the board, this could be pretty huge.

32:32It is. I spent a lot of time in the book translating this science so it's understandable to the average person. And so I talk a lot about AMPK and mTOR. And so those things sit at the opposite end of this, of the seesaw. And of course you need mTOR because it's anabolic, but you also need to have amk activated and we know now that if you can really inhibit mTOR to a great deal but not to the point where it becomes pathologic um you change everything in the body and so so here's this this seesaw ampk when it goes up inflammation goes down mTOR anabolic when that goes up so does inflammation to a certain extent but we have to have a balance we need to have mTOR but any drug that's going to come up that's going to control mTOR is going to be a life extender, I'd say by, by decades.