Repair 1/3 of Your Genes & Heal Rapidly Using Copper Peptide (GHK-Cu) | Dr. Jon Harmon @ ClearMind Idaho

Nick Urban [00:00:07]:
Are you a high performer, obsessed with growth, and looking for an edge? Welcome to MINDBODY Peak Performance. Together, we’ll discover underground secrets to unlocking the full potential of your mind, body, and spirit. We’ll learn from some of the world’s leading minds, from ancient wisdom to cutting edge tools and everything in between. This is your host, Nick Urban. Enjoy the episode. Copper peptides such as GHKCU are sometimes dubbed nature’s first responders. They play a pivotal role in wound healing, inflammation, skin health and appearance, hair growth, cognitive function, longevity, and the aging process, recovery, organ protection, genomic stability, and even muscle growth. In this episode, we explore their benefits ranging from mitochondrial function to their impact on anxiety and enhancing collagen production and a whole lot more.

Nick Urban [00:01:16]:
Join me and doctor Harman as we delve into the science behind copper peptides, practical tips for their use, and why they might just be one of the ultimate overlooked tools in your health optimization arsenal. Some of the other topics we discuss include the science behind copper peptides, including GHKCU and one other. We talk about other peptides and neuropeptides and what you can stack copper peptides with to enhance their effects. Our guest this week is doctor John Harmon. He’s a highly experienced chiropractic physician with 35 years of experience in supporting both physical and mental health. He is also certified in oxidative medicine and board certified in QEEG and neurofeedback. Perhaps most relevantly, he also wrote a book called how to reverse aging, which focuses specifically on copper peptide, which is a peptide that our bodies naturally produce. And at the same time, we can influence those levels via a number of different means.

Nick Urban [00:02:22]:
This is actually a 2 part interview. This is the first part where we discuss the science and benefits, and then next week, we’ll be exploring the applications in different ways of administering copper peptides and particularly one that you probably have not heard of yet. That same technology can be used not only for copper peptide but other peptides and small molecules as well. I’ve actually been using this technology for several months now and if you want to learn more, I’ll put an article I wrote in the description for this episode. You can find Doctor. Harmon’s book on Amazon. Just search how to reverse aging. And you can also find that and all of the stuff I’ve mentioned so far and everything from this episode in the show notes, which will be at mindbodypeak.com/thenumber190.

Nick Urban [00:03:13]:
Before we get started, happy new year. Hope your 2025 is off to a phenomenal start. If you’re experimenting with peptides, copper peptides, or anything else to begin this year, perhaps even dry fasting, go ahead and drop me a note at mind body peak performance on Instagram. I’d love to hear from you. One last housekeeping note before we get started. If you’re listening to this right now, there’s a good chance that you are not subscribed. 2 of the best ways you can support this show are by either subscribing and or leaving a rating and review wherever you’re listening to this. If you do, huge thank you.

Nick Urban [00:03:52]:
That’s how I keep bringing you thought provoking guests and covering innovative technologies and topics like this one. Alright. Ladies and gentlemen, doctor John Harmon. Oh, and don’t forget to tune in to part 2 next week. Let’s get started. Doctor Harman, welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:04:09]:
Oh, thank you very much. I’m I’m really excited to share this information with your listeners.

Nick Urban [00:04:14]:
Yeah. Me too. Today, we’re gonna dive into the world of peptides and not just any peptides, one in particular, and we’ll expand from there. So first, you wrote a book on one particular peptide. Tell me about how you got interested in this peptide and what it is and why.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:04:32]:
There are actually 2 copper peptides, but the main one where most of the research has been done is regarding the GHK copper peptide. GHK just stands for the amino acids. Everybody goes, oh, why is it the k on the end? GHK, it’s glycine, histidine, lysine, but scientific as k. GHK copper peptide, and to be frank with you, prior to 2020, I hadn’t heard of copper peptides. We didn’t study it in school. It was actually discovered by doctor Lauren Picquart, and you can you can look it up online. The way they discovered it or discovered some of the power of it, they put old liver cells in a petri dish with the GHK, and these old liver cells that weren’t doing their job reversed in their aging and started making enzymes and proteins like young young liver cells. And so they thought, there must be something bigger to this thing, and that’s where the research started.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:05:41]:
The the main papers that are online are from 1977 forward. There are 15 pages, 15 pages of research papers. So I didn’t know about them, but I started elevating my own GHK copper peptide in April of 2020.

Nick Urban [00:06:00]:
Doctor Harman, let let’s take a step back. I’ve talked about peptides a number of times on the show. I’ve been using them for a long time, many years, but let’s just give listeners a brief rundown of what they are. Okay. I will give my explanation then you can elaborate. Basically, they’re very short chains of amino acids. You have proteins which are longer chains of amino acids and you have peptides and the body produces, I believe, thousands of different peptides. So they’re already there and they work very differently in the body compared to drugs or even herbal medicine, things like that.

Nick Urban [00:06:34]:
They don’t force changes in the body. They merely suggest them at to put it simply. And because of that, they have incredibly incredible safety profiles, at least a lot of them do, compared to the I guess it’s more than just the safety profile. It’s the potential benefits to the safety profile. It’s that ratio that puts them in a class of their own.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:06:55]:
Yeah. They’re signaling molecules. You know, in your body, we can either turn something on by a neurological connection, a neuron or a nerve, or we can if we we need to get this signal out to the body, they’ll do it. The body will do it with peptides. There are lots of them. Insulin’s a peptide. Glutathione’s a peptide. So they’re between they’re certain size, like you said, short chain of amino acids that are connected together, and so they activate different things.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:07:26]:
The unique property of the copper peptide is that those 3, the GHK is those 3 aminos, amino acids wrap around and hold on to this, copper, and copper has the property where it can carry 2 electrons. It has 2 places for it, two spaces, and so it can turn on a pathway that only needs 1 or one that needs 2, so it has broad use or application in the body for activating different things from turning on the genes that signal our body to make more, stem cells, collagen repair. It’s a huge antioxidant. There are 18 chapters in the book I wrote, and each one’s about a different organ system, except for the brain. There’s enough on the brain that there are 3 chapters about the brain.

Nick Urban [00:08:19]:
Awesome. And I believe that copper peptide alone, GHKCU, that particular copper peptide, also can repair how many of our genes? Like, a third of our genes?

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:08:29]:
The exact number, 4190. It’s about a third, of the genes, and doctor Picquart figured that out, in their research years years ago, decades ago. So here was all this research and, you know, doctors kinda caught on to it, so there were, you know, there’ve been infusions, injections. Dermatologists were some of the first to catch on to it. They started putting it in their creams and lotion because of the benefits to skin. You know, I I used to tell people when I was in my chiropractic practice, when they wouldn’t do their exercises, I would say, you know what? You’d take better care of your spine if it was on your face, which is true. I spent a lot of money on the on the face. So that was the first application, and then doctors started to find out gene you know, repairing the genes, activating stem cell production, and many, many more cardiovascular benefits, a lot of those too.

Nick Urban [00:09:30]:
It’s very commonly used in, like, high end cosmetics. It’s not cheap, so you won’t find it in most, but it’s one of those ingredients that appears to be really beneficial, and I have used it in cosmetics many times. I also know that you can get it in injectable form, which I also have, but I’ve heard that GHKCU is painful to inject and there are other ways of administering it that seem to be superior. Are there any other notable application?

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:10:02]:
Yes. Yes. In fact, one of my good friends, doctor Michael Karlfeldt, he and I used to be in the same clinic, and he does alternative cancer care. And part of his one of his protocols for this cancer care is actually IVs of the GHK copper peptide because it has the property of resetting the cellular death cycle in some cancer cells and the ability to turn off 25 genes that we can be born with that predispose us to get some kind of cancer. So it’s, you know, covering that base, and you’re right. I’ve talked to people who do GHK injections, and they said it stings really, really bad. It’s not a pleasant thing. So, yeah, they’re not happy to to do that.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:10:51]:
They like the benefit, but although it’s, you know, it’s got a short half life, like you said, whether it’s an infusion or injection.

Nick Urban [00:10:59]:
Yeah. So I think the half life’s about, like, less than an hour, so it doesn’t last in the body that long. Of course, the signaling benefits are gonna persist a lot longer than just the 1 hour. Right. But I think there’s there’s also plenty of rationale to keep it elevated for longer. I’ve also come across certain companies, one called LevelUp Health that I’m a big fan of and use their products that create liposomal GHKCU, meaning it bypasses the acidity of the stomach and can get into the bloodstream more easily. There’s very little research, if any, on liposomal copper peptides, but it’s fascinating to see the different ways that we’re discovering it can be used.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:11:34]:
Yeah. Lots of different parts of that industry are catching on to the benefit of GHKCU.

Nick Urban [00:11:42]:
There’s another one that we’ll talk about later because it’s one of your fortes. Before we get onto that, help me understand some more of the reasons and use cases and benefits of copper peptide because this is like one of the more broad spectrum, I guess, after b p c 157, TB 500, TB 4, whatever you wanna call it. This seems to be right up there as in the family of, like, universally almost universally beneficial peptides.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:12:06]:
Yes. And, I would say the most powerful effect that it has is that it it actually activates, turns on the genes that signal our body to make more stem cells. I ask people all the time, why do people travel all over the world and spend 5, 10, $20,000 for stem cell infusions that were obtained from someone else? Well, it it’s because it changes the outcome potentially of anything they have, and there’s a lot of a lot of research about that. And so that I would say that’s one of the biggest benefits from the GHKCU. However, if you look at the number one killer let’s just take cardiovascular disease for a second, and I’ll go through a few of those benefits. First of all, GHKCU is known as the great repairer of collagen. So what’s made of collagen in our body? Pretty much everything, or at least has a structure of that. Even our bones, our bones don’t get their strength from calcium.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:13:07]:
It’s the protein matrix, that then gets ossified, not calcified. So in the cardiovascular system, we look at, 2 different things that can affect us, and that would be Mi, myocardial infarction, or stroke. The GHK copper peptide inhibits a gene that’s involved in making fibrinogen, part of the fibrinogen molecule, and so it keeps fibrinogen in check and prevents the overproduction. What’s fibrinogen? It’s the stuff that makes our red blood cells sticky, so if you get a cut or a bleed, it’s going to clot, but if it gets too high, it’s too sticky, and then eventually, if enough red blood cells stick together, you’re gonna have a clot in one of the small capillaries or a bigger artery. So that’s one of the benefits. The other one is that it activates an increase in production of what’s called myostatin. Myostatin inhibits cardiac failure. So here we have this this simple thing that affects and can mitigate, you know, the the process of aging or being predisposed to something like the myocardial infarction or cardiac failure, which is the number one killer, and if you look at the collagen repair, it also stimulates elastin maintenance, which gives our vessels flexibility, so if you have stronger vessels that are more flexible, you decrease, a, because they’re strong, you decrease your chance of having an aortic aneurysm or other kind of aneurysm, and you decrease your risk of blood pressure problems because your your cat yeah.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:15:02]:
They can expand and and, contract without increasing the blood pressure every time your heart pumps. So those two key things with cardio cardiovascular are huge. You look at the GHK copper peptide, it’s antianxiety. It decreased aggression in mice within 12 minutes after the application of these really they I don’t know how they made mice aggressive, but they pissed them off somehow, and that was one of the studies. But the other one is it is the GHK copper peptide that escorts copper through the blood brain barrier where you needed to make neurons, neurotransmitters, BDNF, and you have to have copper to make all those things. It’s the GHK that does it, and then it holds on to it until it’s needed so you don’t get a buildup of free copper in the brain because that is toxic. Too much copper, and I’m I’m differentiating between copper that is attached to a peptide, it’s not free copper, it doesn’t act the same, and free copper, that’s what they say is predisposing a predisposing factor to Alzheimer’s. So think about the connection.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:16:17]:
When we’re in our thirties, our GHK copper peptide starts to decline. I started using GHK when I was 66. That was four and a half years ago, and I wasn’t making very much of it because it’s about 90% gone. So if you have ample GHK in any chemical chemistry, there’s GHK by itself and GHK attached to the copper, and that’s GHK copper peptide. So it donates copper, goes back and gets some more, donates copper, so there’s there’s this transition. But if you have enough of that, it’s gonna hold on to the copper rather than it being free. That’s my theory. I have no proof of it, but it just makes sense.

Nick Urban [00:16:58]:
Well, I’m glad you mentioned that too because when I posted that we were gonna be recording this episode, a listener wrote in and asked about copper toxicity and the balance of zinc and copper and mineral balancing in general. And that was a concern of theirs, whether or not this could cause issues with copper toxicity because after all, it’s copper peptide.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:17:15]:
Yeah. The opposite is true, actually, because it kind of vacuums it up, so to speak, meaning that, the GHK incorporates that copper and holds onto it until it’s needed and then donates it, and and copper is necessary for the absorption of iron, and it’s necessary for the implementation or inserting iron into hemoglobin, and, GHK copper peptide has a huge influence in carrying oxygen oxygen around the body. So that’s one of the reasons athletes like it, for their oxygen carrying. And and another benefit regarding the cardiovascular okay. This is a bit of a it’s a little bit of a you have to get this connection. When we’re working out, you know, you’re doing let’s say you’re doing 4 sets of 12 and, you know, on the, man, the 9th, 10th. Oh, man. My I start to get this burn.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:18:10]:
That’s hypoxia. So you ran out of oxygen, but here’s the connection with GHK when that happens. There is a whole process that’s set into motion when you have hypoxia. Hypoxia inducible factor 1 is what gets signaled, and it signals the brain, guess what, to send down GHK copper peptide that activates enzymes to enzymatically poke holes, so to speak, in the muscle where there’s not enough oxygen. Dude, I gotta make some more capillaries. I gotta get more blood flow in here. You know, when you’re in a bodybuilding contest, I haven’t been on 1, but you go to 1 and you look and they go, look at the vascularization on that, dude. That all starts with GHK, and the body knows, okay.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:19:01]:
Man, he’s lifting a lot of weight. We need to make that muscle bigger and stronger, so we’re gonna grow capillaries in it to bring in the raw materials to build a bigger muscle. So this is why athletes love this because it’s not dopey. It’s just signaling the or GHK is not a drug, and so you can it’s it’s something that naturally occurs in the body. Mhmm.

Nick Urban [00:19:28]:
What I find fascinating about this too is that HIF one alpha, I think it is, is also upregulated by intermittent hypoxic training, and that’s become really big recently as more and more research comes out around it. More celebrities are seen using it, especially pro athletes. I mean, the whole the whole idea of training high and then competing low is in part capitalizing on HIF one alpha and other things as well, but I didn’t realize the intricate role that copper peptide has in that whole process.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:20:00]:
That was a really fascinating thing that I found when I was doing the research for the book. I said, wow. That is so cool because I’ve seen these restrictive bands that I’ve actually started using that cuts off the circulation. So, you know, I’m squatting my own body weight, and it’s telling my body, he’s squatting £400. Yeah. And and, no, I’m saving my joints, but still getting the benefit of the hypoxia, which triggers more muscle mass. And I I gained an inch in my biceps in a month with those things.

Nick Urban [00:20:31]:
I love it. Yeah. I’m a huge fan of KAATSU. That’s the the brand. I recorded the podcast with them. It’s the original brand based out of Japan. And I also have been using blood flow restriction training, AKA occlusion training, since about 2013, and I used it yesterday. It’s one of the coolest fitness technologies for not just rehab but muscle building.

Nick Urban [00:20:51]:
You can even put them on during walks to dramatically enhance the effectiveness and the adaptations that recur from walking. I call it super walking. And there’s, like, so many different use cases of that. I wonder the the synergy here if you were to use copper peptide with occlusion training, if you were to get

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:21:09]:
yeah. Dude. Yes. I’m glad you brought that up. Yeah. Absolutely. In fact, the people who sell those things, I walked up to them and I said, do you wanna know why those work? And he said, yeah. And then I told him about this the GHK and it enzymatically pokes holes in the mouth, you know, all that stuff.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:21:26]:
And they were their their mouths dropped open. Nobody told us that.

Nick Urban [00:21:30]:
Yeah. And that’s one of the big mechanisms behind it is the hypoxia, the temporary hypoxia in the HIF one adaptation and then also the changes to VEGF and a bunch of other things like the metabolites that build up in the muscles before you take before either the machine releases the pressure or you take them off. There there’s a lot of cool emerging science around that technology.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:21:53]:
And it sure shortens the workout that you have. Oh, yeah. Oh, man. You can get a workout done full body and and good for the day.

Nick Urban [00:22:02]:
Yeah. They’re intense workouts, though. If you can’t handle the burn of a normal workout, you’re not gonna enjoy.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:22:08]:
They are. You know, I’m a bit of an overachiever, and so they say you do your your biceps really fast, you know, 20 reps and then do 20 squats. Well, I do 20 I have resistance bands, and I do 20 reps for chest, 20 reps for biceps, 20 reps for triceps, and then my legs. And at at first, I just couldn’t finish it, but now I can finish it all the way through even with that severe hypoxia.

Nick Urban [00:22:34]:
I wanna go back to something you mentioned actually, a couple of things you mentioned previously that are very important to underscore. 1st is the role of collagen in the body and the fact that it’s not just in skin, although it is obviously a big component of skin and incredibly important to maintain skin quality and appearance, but also that it’s the backbone of your fascia and pretty much all of your organs, like a big chunk. Most of your body is made of collagen. So, of course, increasing the quality of that collagen is gonna make a huge difference. To play devil’s devil’s advocate, why can’t I just take a collagen supplement and call it a day?

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:23:14]:
Good question. First of all, it is the GHK that and if you think about it, it has these amino acids. So if and it’s known as the emergency response peptide. So think about it anciently. You know, we’re going to battle. I get a big gash from a sword in my thigh. If certain things don’t happen really quickly, it’s done. So here’s the GHK.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:23:39]:
You have these amino acids that can be used to make collagen out on-site, and you have copper that can activate different pathways, and then it activates production of your own stem cells. So your body goes, oh, emergency. All the alarms sound, and then I get more stem cells, I get rapid collagen repair, but here’s the other thing. GHK acts like the Pied Piper attracting capillary growth into damaged tissue, So it rapidly, causes those capillaries to grow in and to reperfuse and get oxygen and nutrients and, all of the raw supplies to make something. So that’s really important. The you mentioned strong collagen. There is a a deeper and I’m gonna start deep first. There is a lot of talk about how cancers can only break out of an organ and metastasize if there is not strong collagen.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:24:43]:
So having strong collagen, your body has a heartier response to things that are trying to get out like that to metastasize, but also your bone matrix. Let’s just take that to begin with. It’s made of collagen, and the media and, unfortunately, the medical community, they talk about calcium, and they talk about things like Fosamax to increase bone density. If you read the side effect of Fosamax, you have an increased risk of hip fracture because it attracts, it doesn’t it doesn’t build a stronger matrix. It attracts minerals to it that makes it more brittle. Like calcium is calcium carbonate is chalk. It breaks. It’s brittle.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:25:29]:
So strong protein matrix, strong arteries, strong connective tissue, strong capsule around your organ, the the structure of your organs makes for a healthier person in all aspects. And so that’s one of the things that’s so important, and if you’re using GHK copper peptide, I guarantee you’re not going to feel your arteries getting stronger. What you’re going to, not have, most likely, is some of those issues that affect us as we age, when our collagen starts to break down, our arteries are not real strong, there are all kinds of things that can start to happen, and then when you add on to that the increase or the way GHK helps keep the level of the sticky stuff, fibrinogen, in check, huge, huge benefits for that. But, yeah, skin decreasing, wrinkle depth, smoothing skin, decreasing those liver spots that have nothing to do with the liver. It has to do with melanin, being out in the sun and you get secretion and production of melanin and it stays there. And the GHK helps reverse those as well. I’ve, I’ve seen lots of pictures of people. They take before and after pics, and then their their skin looks so much younger, and it doesn’t have all those spots.

Nick Urban [00:26:55]:
I’m glad you also mentioned fibrinogen because, as I understand it, that’s also intricately involved in wound healing and scar tissue. So there’s, like, proteolytic enzymes that people use, like, serrapeptidase and nattokinase and things like that to help break down fibrinogen. Are you seeing that with copper peptide, it’s able to, like, help keep the fibrinogen in healthy levels?

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:27:20]:
That is what the literature says. I haven’t done any tests personally or in my office about that, but that’s what’s indicated in the literature. There was a there was a study, just to kind of give you some stats, they did a 10 year study on men in Sweden, and the number one predictor of having a stroke was an increase in fibrinogen. And if you had a high fibrinogen level, you were 2 and a half times more likely to have a stroke. So if you think about just that one thing, just that one thing regarding GHK, it’s huge. Number one killer. And then you look at things like we talked about cancer, and I’m not making claims here. This isn’t my opinion.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:28:00]:
It’s in the research, but the GHK helps with genomic instability. It repairs as soon as it gets into your bloodstream in high doses, it repairs 42100 we talked about 42100 of our genes, to a younger state. Well, when genes are in an old state, you know, cancer most of the time is a disease of the age, and so if you can help protect those genes and, you know, when we do get mutations or we get exposed to radiation or just normal metabolism. You know, we have a urinary tract and a bowel to get rid of the stuff that’ll kill us if it stays in us. So, you know, if we we don’t detox well, those things can build up and can actually cause mutations in our genes. It’s GHK that helps repair those. So that’s another thing regarding longevity and aging is keeping the genes young and healthy, And there’s it also plays a role in energy production. You know, if I can’t be a perfect little cell, a perfect little kidney cell, I eventually you know, if your body gets old, it’s supposed to destroy 50 to 70,000,000,000 cells a day because they’re old.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:29:20]:
Well, if I don’t have the resources or the stem cells, the body says, well, I can’t kill them off. There goes that organ, so they just become zombie cells. It’s a it’s a term that’s used a lot now. That means they’re not doing their job. They’re just demanding to be fed, and they have to exist, and they suck up some of your resources and nutrients to do nothing, and so these zombie cells, when you can increase your stem cell production, the body says, Hey, I can wipe all those guys out over there and replace them, and so there was another point on there. If they get older and they’re not able to maintain their their their genomic information, then they can mutate and become cancerous. But the other thing, GHK is it activates it has an influence over cytochrome c, which is one of the final stages to make ATP. So what happens is as we age, you know, a lot of people just, I don’t have energy to make my own lunch.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:30:33]:
It’s mitochondrial dysfunction. That’s one of the number one killers. Up there pretty high is mitochondrial dysfunction, and then the whole system can break down. You know? It can’t you know, my kidney cells don’t have enough energy. The cells don’t have enough energy to detox, so I store stuff. The stuff that are supposed to go away, the things that are supposed to go away in my urinary tract and my bowel, I can’t get rid of them, so I’m just gonna store them, and now we start to become toxic, and that also causes mutations in our genes. So maintaining my ability to make ATP is a huge thing as we age facilitated by GHK.

Nick Urban [00:31:12]:
Okay. So you’ve already rattled off a number of the different hallmarks of aging that this addresses, starting with genomic instability, then senescent cell accumulation, and then mitochondrial dysfunction. This helps each of those. And what else? It seems like it targets a lot of the hallmarks of of aging. Is it considered, like, technically considered a senolytic too?

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:31:38]:
You know, I I haven’t heard of it called that, because it doesn’t actually, you know, slaughter. It doesn’t actually terminate cells because the focus is more on repairing the genes so that that cell doesn’t go into senescence and become that zombie cell. But one of the other really, really, really important things as we age is, do I remember who I am? Am I meeting a new person in my house every 15 minutes? There was a brain study done using GHK, and it was what my board certification is in, and that’s qEEG, quantitative electroencephalogram. And they did these EEGs, to start. And then using GHK, they did another one at 3 weeks and another one at 6 week at 6 weeks, and there there are all kinds of measurements in acute EEG, but what they were looking at was a measurement called coherence. Everything we do in is processed by the entire brain, but every single thing we do is processed 80% on one side and 20 on the other. Like, I’m I’m looking at you. I see color.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:32:51]:
I see facial features. I have to decode those. If we were close enough, we could use one of our other senses, smell. We we vision. Everything has to be coordinated to form a complete picture, and it’s crosstalk between lobes, let’s say, both frontal lobe. There are there’s the corpus callosum. Those are the connecting fibers side to side, and it’s coordinating and correlating things that I’m detecting with the right brain with the stuff I’m detecting with the left brain, and a normal amount is considered normal coherence. Where there’s too much, what what has happened is one side is not functioning properly, and it tries to recruit the other side to process the same information that’s supposed to be processed on that side, and now it’s slow.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:33:44]:
The more it’s called hypercoherence. The more hypercoherence one has, the more autistic one is. Autistic, not artistic. Autistic. Then conversely, the more hypocoherence or not very much crosstalk someone has, the more incognitive decline they are. In this study, every single person in the study, where they had hypercoherence, it came down, and where they had hypo coherence, it went up. So we have better functioning brains, and this is why this has been incorporated into my protocols in my brain practice because it helps that aspect of the brain health.

Nick Urban [00:34:29]:
I was about to ask you about that also because it’s it’s a big fascination of mine, and I know that there’s a lot of excitement around psychedelics because they increase the connectivity through the corpus callosum.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:34:43]:
Ah, so that has a big effect on on coherence.

Nick Urban [00:34:47]:
Yes. But they’re not smart if if we can use that term. It doesn’t modulate levels. I think it indiscriminately just increases, the connectivity and activity of the corpus callosum or through the corpus callosum. This actually modulates it back into optimal balance.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:35:06]:
Interesting. And I’m I’m it’d be it’s gonna be exciting to see where that research leads. I’ve heard that the new incoming director of HHS is wanting to open up research on those things that you just talked about, things like that.

Nick Urban [00:35:23]:
Yeah. It’ll be fascinating. So if someone wants to use copper peptide for cognition, I can already think of a simple little stack that I would use which would include blood flow restriction training, some light exposure, some photobiomodulation, and then some kind of brain training with carbapetide. Anything else you’d add to that simple stack?

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:35:44]:
That’s a good start right there. You know, I I have my own opinion about, diet, And I I was at a conference about a year and a half ago, and my mom was a self taught, nutritionist and homeopath. And she is all was always advocating, you know, vegetables and eating all of that stuff. And I went to this conference, and this guy is really healthy and fit. He’s in his fifties, and he says these things. He said, meat is for food and plants are for medicine. I said, wait a second. You know? He said, look at the things that plants make, gluten, oxalates, sulfites, and on and on.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:36:31]:
He said, those are things they make to kill their predators. I’d never thought of that. So I’m I’m mostly, you know, meat, and I’ve I can eat a rib eye for breakfast and I don’t need to get hungry till 2 or 3 in the afternoon. So there’s that diet thing. You can get nutrients from other things as well. Yes. Vitamin d is the only vitamin we make. We have to get the other vitamins from other things, But, if you wanna build muscle, obviously, you have to have a lot of protein.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:37:02]:
Get it however you want. Try just eating a lot of meat. Grass fed. Grass fed.

Nick Urban [00:37:10]:
You you also have to have fat for the brain. I mean, if you’re eating meat, you’re probably gonna get some

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:37:14]:
Yeah.

Nick Urban [00:37:14]:
Hopefully clean fats.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:37:17]:
Yes. I make sure that where the meat is sourced I certainly won’t just go down to Walmart and buy a rib eye. I would not trust that at all. Sorry, Walmart.

Nick Urban [00:37:30]:
You also earlier mentioned myostatin, which is fascinating because I usually hear myostatin in a context of bodybuilders wanting to reduce myostatin, whether it’s through follistatin gene therapy or it’s through natural substances that interact with myostatin. They want to lower myostatin because myostatin is considered like the brakes on muscle growth. But what you’re saying is that when you increase myostatin, you’re also protecting the cardiovascular system against potential issues.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:38:03]:
Correct. It actually inhibits cardiac failure. So it sounds like a trade off right there.

Nick Urban [00:38:10]:
Yeah. Big muscles are a working cardiovascular system.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:38:15]:
Yeah. You know, and bodybuilders sometimes do some things that could be potentially dangerous if if they’re not really experts at it. You know, the application of insulin and and other things, they have to have a lot of knowledge or go to someone who who can really fine tune that stuff. I hadn’t heard about that, the the myostatin inhibiting, muscle growth. I’ve only heard it in the context of inhibiting cardiac failure.

Nick Urban [00:38:42]:
Interesting. Yeah. I mean, if you’re playing around with insulin, you really should know what you’re doing because that is quite dangerous.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:38:48]:
Yes. And I you know, it it seems like a a heavy price to pay for, you know, some of those things that they do.

Nick Urban [00:38:55]:
So you’ve already mentioned also a bunch of things we can use alongside copper peptide to get better effects. And one thing one thing I’m thinking about is light therapy. We alluded to it, but, like, specifically, whether it’s natural sunlight when it’s either early in the morning or late in the evening, so you’re getting a higher percentage of infrared light than at the rest of the daytime. Or perhaps at solar noon, so you’re getting some more UV. I’m not sure which is the most beneficial to combine with, copper peptide or just one of the panels like I have in the background here, which has a mixture of red light and near infrared built into it. Any thoughts on those?

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:39:36]:
Yes. Actually, in the in the research, it shows that, first of all, going one way, the GHK enhances all of those light therapies because of the properties of GHK. Used in combination, huge, huge benefits. As far as, getting the building blocks for making GHK, one needs to have a source of copper. If you’re gonna make copper peptides, you wanna make sure you have copper. And if you have if you eat, nuts and seeds, seafood, green leafy vegetables. If you’re if you’re getting that, you’re you’re probably getting enough copper. If not, you can use some chlorophyll.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:40:24]:
Chlorophyll is a good source of copper. Not toxic, get some organic stuff on Amazon, take a dropper full or 2 a day, you’re gonna you’re going to have ample copper.

Nick Urban [00:40:33]:
So if you’re gonna be doing the light therapies, you wanna make sure you’re getting enough copper, first of all, so you’re getting the the benefits, but then also combining it with copper peptide is a good idea. Are there any changes or differences or best forms of, like, light spectrum to optimize the benefits further?

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:40:55]:
Yeah. In the 600 nanometer range, 630, 635 is a really good range. Red light. Yeah. And red light has benefits for collagen as well. So if you use GHK in tandem with that, really good for collagen and really good for the face repairing, you know, broken down collagen, elastin, in the skin.

Nick Urban [00:41:23]:
Okay. So I’m thinking of, like, a general wellness body rejuvenation stack being, like, collagen peptide supplements, then copper peptide, then red light therapy as, like, a simple stack.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:41:36]:
Yeah. An infrared infrared sauna for for detoxing. We kinda made our house into a spa. We have one of those, power vibe plates, you know, the not the little wobble thing, but, like, 50 times a second. We have a a sauna. We have a bio harmonic resonator. It’s a like a sound bed. You get you feel the music in your whole body.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:42:05]:
And then we have red light as well, and GHK. So my wife’s turning 60 and I just turned 70, so we wanna just we want our bodies just to be the best they can be forever as long as we can do it. You know, GHK is known as the reverse aging peptide, and so, you know, we incorporated that as well.

Nick Urban [00:42:27]:
I wanna talk to you about more peptides shortly. But what else is important to know about copper peptide?

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:42:34]:
Well, you look at I did a presentation, and it was the top things that cause us to age faster and die younger, and we’ve talked about some of them. You know, the first one was cardiovascular. The next big killer is cancer. I talked about the known benefits of that from the literature. Then there’s genomic instability, mutations, there’s telomere shortening, GHK has a beneficial influence on that, although there’s one that is more powerful than that one that we can talk about at another time. And then there is mitochondrial dysfunction, There’s brain dysfunction, you know, going into cognitive decline, Alzheimer’s, dementia, much better to prevent things than it is to wait there. There is proper sleep. Sleep is, you know, an understatement, important, but we have 5 one and a half sleep cycles at one and a half hour sleep cycles.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:43:34]:
Excuse me. If that gets out of balance, we don’t go into the different, levels of sleep and we don’t detox our brain. Once that happens and the circadian rhythm is off, we start to get hormonal imbalances, things like leptin and ghrelin balance. Ghrelin makes us feel hungry, leptin makes us feel satisfied, and people will eat when they really aren’t hungry. They feel hungry, but they’re not, and then they start to gain weight. They get metabolic disorders because of the hormonal and hormonal imbalances, restoring proper sleep is, like, the key or the first step to regaining control of that by re gaining our circadian rhythm. We eat during the day. We sleep at night.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:44:22]:
So one of the things I tell people, allow 3 hours after you finish eating, not start eating, finish eating before you go to bed. Oh no, I I have to eat before I go to bed. That’s a leptin ghrelin imbalance. You think you’re hungry but it’s nighttime it should be sleepy time and not eating time so that you’re digesting when you’re trying to eat because you will not go into those 5, 1 and a half hour cycles, and it will lead to serious health problems later on in life, not the least of which is Alzheimer’s because those proteins build up in the brain. You can’t detox them because you don’t go into the detox mode. You’re in digestive mode. And so those, and then, skin, cosmetic values, we talked about that, being able to maintain the skin. And and truly, it’s not just a cosmetic thing.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:45:14]:
That’s the barrier. It’s your immune. It keeps stuff out. You know, you get somebody who gets a lesion on their skin that can’t repair. They might die from that, get some serious infection because the skin is gone, and that’s our immune layer. You know, something comes in. You got powerful immune cells that take care of business. So the skin is not obviously, it’s not just for looks.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:45:38]:
I know you know that and your listeners do, but it’s not something that people think about a lot. You know, I get a break in my skin. Man, I could go septic because that is a a huge immune protector, lots of immune cells in there. And so we talked about that cardiovascular, but when you look at, in general, if all of my organs have a strong structure and the cells are not going getting genomic instability, the fact that the GHK can help organs function normally, if you look at the things that you could probably prevent from happening just just for that one thing alone that my organs function without, you know, some hiccup in the processes there, My detox pathways are healthy. My drainage funnel, the bowel, kidneys, gallbladder, liver, lymphatic system, skin, I’m able to get rid of those 80,000 other chemicals that exist now that didn’t when I was young, or or other things just in our food. If those are healthy, man, your your older years are much different if if those things are true, and the GHK helps facilitate all of those pathways.

Nick Urban [00:46:51]:
Yeah. I recently learned what’s sometimes called the NICE network, and it stands for nervous system, immune system, cutaneous, and endocrine system. And they’re all highly interdependent. And like you’re saying, the skin doesn’t just keep things out, it also keeps things in. And healthy skin leads to health improvements in all the other related organs and bodily systems.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:47:18]:
Yeah. And you know where aging shows up the first at at first? The face. And if someone’s not getting good sleep, during during sleep, somatotropin is made, and that’s human growth hormone. But it it it plays a huge role in collagen repair as well while we are sleeping. And if we don’t have that, we’re not getting good sleep, then the skin starts to get really thin. It’s not full and vibrant. It’s it’s dehydrated. We lose a lot of, moisture out of our skin at night.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:47:55]:
And then we see somebody, and and all we’ve done is look at their face. We say, man, she’s aged a lot in the last year. A lot of that has to do with proper sleep.

Nick Urban [00:48:07]:
Yeah. And insulin antagonizes growth hormones. So if you’re eating a lot of food right before bed, you’re not gonna get the same natural pulse of growth hormone release, and you’re gonna be putting yourself at a disadvantage.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:48:22]:
Absolutely. And that’s a hard habit to break for people. It’s one of the I would say one of the harder things to do in practice is, one, getting people to make nutritional better nutritional choices. I mean, the look on their face when I say, you know, they’ve written down this nutritional thing, I don’t do so much of that now, but I used to, and I would say, yeah, you you really wanna, start cutting down on the Mountain Dew. And they look at me or the Doctor Pepper. And they look at me like they’re gonna lose an old friend to give up that thing that’s making them sick. And it’s hard to make, though, to try to convince somebody to not eat right before they go to sleep because they’re used to it, and they feel hungry. And that’s that what I talked about before.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:49:06]:
The feel hungry and eat and sleep balance is way off, and they’re feeling hungry at the wrong times. So it takes a while to get through that, but you can get through it.

Nick Urban [00:49:16]:
Exactly. I mean, when I work with people, I see this all the time. And oftentimes, it has to do with what you’re doing at the beginning of your day. And if you’re getting outside, you’re getting natural sunlight, you’re resetting your circadian rhythm because it’s actually about a 24.1 hour clock instead of exactly 24 hours. So it loses track of time over a longer period. So by getting out, you’re resetting your circadian rhythm. If you even if you’re used to intermittent fasting, it could be a sign that your window is too late in the day because you shouldn’t be getting hungry that late at night. So to have breakfast, to have something, and let your body adjust to move your circadian rhythm up.

Nick Urban [00:49:55]:
And then eventually, if you wanna go back to not having breakfast, you can. But, like, initially to give yourself that nutrition so that you’re not hungry later at night. And if you have dinner late at night and it’s your biggest meal, that also sets the stage for sleep disturbances and to skew your circadian rhythm in the opposite direction. So morning movement, light, and food are, like, really strong circadian cues to help adjust the schedule, and usually people don’t wanna just change dramatically overnight. It’s like one of those things that becomes easier as you ease into it.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:50:29]:
I love that. I’m glad you said that. I like, the context of that and, shifting it by eating earlier. Oh, I’m gonna use that. I like it.

Nick Urban [00:50:41]:
And it doesn’t have to you can start off with like a a little snack in the morning or something just to get a little bit of food in the body and that way it it resets things because because there’s a bunch of different what they’re called Zeit Geiber’s of like the things that influence circadian rhythm. And some of the newer wearables actually tell you about the factors that are influencing your circadian rhythm, either pushing it back or pulling it up. And so there’s a lot of different things we can do, and having a small snack in the morning and movement and natural light is among the the best, highest impact.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:51:11]:
I like that. We’re we’re early risers in my house. My in order to make all of the things happen, you know, the sauna, the working out and everything, I mean, my wife’s alarm goes off at 4:15. So I guess I’m up now.

Nick Urban [00:51:30]:
Early risers in town.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:51:32]:
Been an early riser anyway.

Nick Urban [00:51:34]:
Cool. Well, we’ve covered a lot of ground so far. This is gonna be the end of the first part of our 2 part podcast series together. If people want to connect with you to give copper peptides a shot, you use them a bit differently than the methodologies, the roots of administration that we’ve discussed so far. How do they go about that? And we’re gonna unpack that a lot more in the next episode to explain how it works, why it works, and dispel a lot of the myths that I come across around this unique form of administration.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:52:10]:
Sure. So a couple of things, if they want to learn more about GH copper copper peptide, the book that I wrote is called How to Reverse Aging, a comprehensive guide to copper peptides. So that and 91 references to the research about copper peptides. Like I said earlier, all the stuff that I just told you, all of it’s been taken from my book, but all of that was taken from the literature because I don’t I didn’t give any of my opinion. What we’re gonna talk about next is very similar in its mechanism to walking out in the sun and then somehow magically we get vitamin d. And I ask people, where does it come from? I can honestly tell you that only a few people have been answered able to answer that question and say, where does the vitamin d come from? Is it in the air? Is it in the UV light? Does it, like, beam into us? Well, there’s actually a process that’s, in place. When we walk outside, the frequency of the UVB light hitting the nanoantennas in our skin, yes, we have antennas, That’s why you, like all the rest of us humans, when we walk into a room, we do something that you don’t realize you’re not you’re not gonna be able to unlearn this. They’re gonna go, oh my god.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:53:28]:
Doctor Harmon said that. Now I think about it every time I walk into a new room. We scan the room for threats and friendlies. It’s it’s natural, and we see people, and sometimes we get bad vibes. What are vibes? Those are frequencies that that person is emitting, and then you are interpreting it through the antennas in your skin. They look like Wi Fi antennas. Well, the UVB signal is interpreted by your body to make more vitamin d. We’re going to show you how a different signal can signal your body to make more of your own GHK copper peptide.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:54:10]:
That’s in the next segment.

Nick Urban [00:54:12]:
Perfect. If people want to get a hold of you, of course, they can pick up your book. It is a nice read. I’m currently going through it right now, and it is for definitely the scientifically inclined. How else can they reach you? Do you have a website or social media or anything?

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:54:28]:
My my email is doctorjharman.drjharm0n@gmail.com. Doctorjharman@gmail.com. My practice is called ClearMind Idaho, and we help people with brain issues with microcurrent neurofeedback and laser therapies and autonomic balancing. We help restore the balance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic. Most people have those brain things, anxiety, you know, depression, all of those things. Most of those start with an over activation and a and a and a sustained activation of sympathetic response to things. Can’t shut off my busy mind. I can’t sleep.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:55:13]:
My digestion is poor. I’m hypervigilant. I don’t sleep, and I have depression or other things. So ClearMind, Idaho, you can get ahold of me through there as well. A direct email is is, really good, and you can just ask a specific question at doctorjharmon@gmail.com. Perfect.

Nick Urban [00:55:35]:
Well, I’m looking forward to the next part of this interview with you.

Dr. Jon Harmon [00:55:39]:
Alright. Me too.

Nick Urban [00:55:41]:
Thank you for tuning in to this episode. Head over to Apple Music, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and leave a rating. Every review helps me bring you thought provoking guests. As always, you can find the show notes for this one at mind body peak.com/andthenthenumberoftheepisode. There, you can also chat with other peak performers or connect with me directly. The information depicted in this podcast is for information purposes only. Please consult your primary health care professional before making any lifestyle changes.