Insights From the World’s Largest Longevity Database & Personalized Tools to Slow Your Aging (Cellular Health, Lifestyle & Supplements)

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. Is it possible that your longevity supplements contain ingredients, and perhaps your other health supplements have ingredients that are not synergistic, meaning they don’t work together, but, instead, they actually oppose each other and, instead, cancel out some of the benefits. In this episode, we how and why certain supplement ingredients don’t actually work together better, but they actually work worse. In this episode, we explore the other side of supplementation when taking ingredients together leads to a worse outcome than taking 1 or 2 or several on their own.

Nick Urban [00:01:17]:
We explore the basics of cellular health. We cover the core lifestyle habits for overall health as well as longevity. We examine some of the data around supplementation and whether or not you can trust it. We discuss whether or not apps on your smartphone, free apps, can yield actually useful measures of your biological age. If you’re one of the folks that likes to build your own supplement stacks, how the professionals construct a meticulously thought out stack to get the best results, We chat about the intersection of lifestyle and supplementation and then mention specific substances that listeners wrote in and you guys asked me to ask our guest about. Some of the substances we discussed included nicotine and rapamycin and metformin, astaxanthin, methylene blue, and a bunch of others. Our guest this week is Chris Mirable of Novos Labs. This is a serial entrepreneur, a brain tumor survivor, and the youngest winner of NYU Stern’s Business Plan Competition.

Nick Urban [00:02:30]:
But in this episode, we focused on why he founded Novos and what they are doing differently over there. You can find the show notes for this episode at mindbodypeak.com/thenumber177. And you can connect on his personal website, slow my age dot com, or try one of the Novos Labs products at Novos Labs dot com. And there, if you use the code urban 5, that’ll give you a $5 discount. In this episode, we mostly discussed their Novos Core formula, which is essentially an all in one longevity supplement formula. Alright. And with that out of the way, sit back, relax, and enjoy this interview with Chris. Chris, welcome to the podcast.

Chris Mirabile [00:03:19]:
Thank you, Nick. Great to be here.

Nick Urban [00:03:22]:
I’m looking forward to this conversation. It’s been a long time in the making because we’re gonna be discussing a lot of molecules that are very popular in the longevity world right now and your formula and your methodology behind how you guys formulate supplements. Before we get started, let’s warm up with, unusual nonnegotiables you’ve done so far today for your health, your performance, and your bioharmony?

Chris Mirabile [00:03:50]:
I woke up, and I didn’t go straight to my iPhone, which is quite the accomplishment. Just kind of eased into my day. I had a cup of black coffee, a lot of health benefits to coffee, associated with heart health and brain health and so on. As long as you don’t have severely high blood pressure, it’s a great source of antioxidants and MOG from the caffeine. So started the day with that, went outside, got some fresh air and sunlight, into my eyes. And, normally, I would do an intense workout, but I actually had an earlier meeting this morning than usual. So this time, I, actually just did a nice walk, and, clear cleared my mind, and I’ll I’ll do a more intense workout in the afternoon today, as opposed to the morning. I took a couple of supplements to start the day, trimethylglycine TMG and NMM, nicotinamide mononucleotide.

Chris Mirabile [00:04:53]:
And, that’s it on the supplements so far for the day. I’ll I’ll take more after I have a meal, which I have not yet had. It’s about just past 12:30 PM now. So after this interview, then I’ll have my first meal, and that’s when I’ll have some other supplements.

Nick Urban [00:05:08]:
Very interesting. Just TMG and NMN. How did you settle on those 2 to start your day, or is this an atypical day?

Chris Mirabile [00:05:15]:
You know, I I’ve also, had ashwagandha integrated into my morning routine for a while. I’ll I’m actually traveling right now. I’m in Long Island, with family, and then I’ll be, going to Europe for almost a month, for both pleasure and for work. And, I I don’t wanna carry a a heavy load of supplements, so try to minimize it as much as possible. So I I cut back to more of, like, the essentials. And so, you know, some of the essentials include Novo’s Core, which I can fit all of the packets. I wish I had it in front of me, but I could fit like a full month supply in in a little sandwich ziplock bag, and that’s basically 12 supplements in once, so that’s very efficient. And then, some creatine and, multivitamin.

Chris Mirabile [00:06:01]:
I take the pure encapsulations, o n e one multivitamin and, the TMG and the NMN, which I can fit into a little tiny, like, ziplock, like, this big for a full month supply for the NMN and and a couple of other supplements. So it’s really like cutting back and being at the bare bones for for this month.

Nick Urban [00:06:21]:
Yeah. Well, you’ve already touched on a number of different molecules I wanna explore with you in a little bit. But before we begin this, what is something unusual or shocking you’d say about the world of longevity and or supplementation?

Chris Mirabile [00:06:36]:
This is something I I came to realize after getting into the industry, that the vast majority of supplement companies are actually really just marketing companies. They’re not actually scientific companies. They’re not biotech companies. They’re actually just companies that do a good job of marketing, a specific ingredient or combination of ingredients. And typically, the way that works is you look for trending ingredients on Amazon and Reddit and so on, and who’s talking about it on YouTube and on podcast. And then you look at, like, some scientific studies on PubMed. You figure out what claims you can make at what dosages, and then you just, like, market the heck out of it. And you’re, you know, a supplement company.

Chris Mirabile [00:07:19]:
And so to that point, I I wanted to do something quite different. I wanted to actually make new novel discoveries, scientific discoveries. I wanted to, prove out the formulations. And because when you combine things together, this is actually something novel, to share. When you combine ingredients together, the the sum of the parts can oftentimes act very differently on your body than you would expect. So it’s not like you can take, you know, 1 plus 1 and get 2. Oftentimes, you take 1 plus 1 and you get 0, or sometimes you take 1 plus 1 and you get negative one. So it doesn’t always add up.

Chris Mirabile [00:07:57]:
In fact, professor, Brian Kennedy at National University of Singapore has firsthand experience about this, and he talks about it where he’s done a whole bunch of studies with mice and humans with all different natural substances. He’s he’s particularly well known right now for his work with alpha ketoglutarate. But his point is that in his studies, he’s found that when you combine different ingredients together, oftentimes, you can actually even shorten the lifespan of the mice or shorten the health span even though they’re both longevity ingredients. So it’s not nearly as simple as people make it out to be. It’s like, you know, I I’m one of these people on Reddit for the past 10 plus years and saying, like, oh, I’m gonna do a stack of, like, ingredient x plus y plus z because it makes logical sense. But biology is not logic. Right? There’s a lot it’s far more complex than that. And so back to my original point, we want to do scientific studies to validate, improve that the combination of ingredients are actually synergistic and having a positive effect for the stated goals of that product, as opposed to just assuming that it does, which is what a more traditional marketing focused, supplement company would do.

Nick Urban [00:09:13]:
Yeah. So are there any examples of the, I don’t know the word, the negative synergies or the ingredients that, like, cancel each other out or worse that come to mind from your own research, especially things people are making mistakes around?

Chris Mirabile [00:09:27]:
So the word I think you’re looking for is dyssygy. So a negative synergy is actually a dyssygy, so you combine them and you you end up in the worst place than where you started. There there are certain combinations that, we’ve tested that I can’t really share too much about, just for r and d reasons right now. But I I I can give you an example of something. It’s it’s less about supplements, but it’s it’s more just a general story about longevity and an approach that an influencer in the space takes and shares with a lot of people as if this is going to be a good approach to longevity, but I think it just reflects a simple a simplistic understanding of the mechanisms and the biological pathways that lead to a longer and healthier lifespan. And that would be, imagine you are calorically restricting. So you’re trying to get the health benefits of caloric restriction, which can be a reduction in mTOR, maybe an increase in AMP Kinase, a reduction in androgynous growth hormones, and so on. Caloric restriction, generally speaking, is associated with longer lifespans, across animal species.

Chris Mirabile [00:10:34]:
In humans, it might be a little bit more complex than that, but, you know, more often than not, it’s probably going to lead to, if nothing more, better health span and, very possibly a longer lifespan as well. So imagine doing that to get those benefits, but then supplementing with testosterone replacement therapy, TRT, and human growth hormone, HGH. And as I mentioned, there there’s a very well known person who has a has a big audience, very recently over the past couple of years has built up this audience to, you know, following this in his routine. And I think it just reflects a simplistic comprehension of the, mechanisms at play when you do caloric restriction. If one of the reasons why you’re actually slowing down the the aging process is because you are reducing testosterone and reducing growth hormone, and this is something that actually Nir Barzalaiya, a very well respected professor, he’s famous for his tame study related to, metformin and all of the work he has done with metformin. He’s an endocrinologist at Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York. He has brought up himself saying that, you know, supplementing with TRT and HGH is most likely going to counteract, positive effects, of these types of approaches. I think that that’s just a a case in point example of something that you might think of as being good for longevity is actually going to run counter to, the other approaches that you’re taking.

Chris Mirabile [00:12:08]:
What what I can quickly mention about that is that it also brings up this idea. A lot of people confuse feeling younger with actually slowing down aging and they are not one in the same. I’ll give you an extreme example. Like someone might take, an illicit drug like, I don’t know, say cocaine and feel like they are, like, really energized and happy and great, and they feel like they’re 20 years old again. Meanwhile, they’re 60. And is that actually good for you? No. You might feel young, but that’s not actually good for you. No one would ever tell you that that’s healthy for you.

Chris Mirabile [00:12:40]:
Right? So simply because you’re feeling younger and looking better in the mirror from taking HGH, let’s say, does not mean that it’s actually good for you. You’re actually burning the candle on both sides, and that’s actually not conducive to a longer healthier life.

Nick Urban [00:12:55]:
And also with that example, I see, like, a pretty large evolutionary mismatch there. It’s like if you’re caloric restricting or you’re fasting for extended periods, your body down regulates certain hormones to conserve energy. And if you’re giving it the opposite stimulus, you’re, like, introducing exogenous hormones way beyond the physiological to a super physiological level. You’re, like, sending something that can actually happen. And another example that I see outside of the use of hormones, hormone replacement, and longevity is the combining of antioxidants. There’s, like, dozens, if not hundreds of different molecules that are very popular antioxidants along with oxidative therapies at the same time. And those in a way, they they cancel each other out, and they probably do more than just that as well.

Chris Mirabile [00:13:47]:
Makes perfect sense. And and thank you for bringing that up because that that back to your original question, it reminds me of another example specifically for supplements is, you know, the concept of hormesis where you have a small stressor that then your body comes back stronger as a result of that stimulus, that stressor. Imagine taking hermetic supplements. Right? So certain antioxidants, for example, are actually pro oxidants that lead to an endogenous increase in antioxidants. Right? So it’s a little bit of a toxin from a plant, let’s say, and then our bodies increase the production of glutathione or superoxide dismutase and so on and to counteract that toxin. And so net benefit is an increase in antioxidants. But imagine now tipping the scale out of favor by doing too many of these types of antioxidants. It’s not more is better.

Chris Mirabile [00:14:40]:
Oh, I heard terestilbene is great for me and resveratrol is great for me, and you go down the list of all of these things and then you just mix it together in a powder and you take super doses of all of these things, you might actually have a negative effect and combine that with other stressors you might have in your life, like UV radiation from the sun in the summer, maybe you work out really hard, maybe you’re alpha go getter personality and you’re drinking alcohol at night with your colleagues as well or what have you, like, all of these are stressors on the body. And I I think of it as almost you could think of different analogies, but almost as like like a a bucket full of water if, like, each stressor is taking a little bit of that water out of that bucket. Eventually, if you have an empty bucket, you’re in a really bad place, and that’s where things like extreme DNA damage and mutations can take place in cellular damage and perhaps increasing the risk of cancer and other dysfunctions of the body. So all of these different stressors are are having attacks on the body. You need to make sure that you can handle that and restore that that reservoir, if you will, up to an ideal level to be able to cope with all of these toxic insults, if you will.

Nick Urban [00:15:56]:
And also the the difference of, like, the polypharmacy, the the dosage might be much higher that’s required or much lower if you’re taking things together. You might see in the research paper you’re supposed to take 10 milligrams of this for an optimal effect. But if you’re taking this similar molecule or a very different molecule, it might be 20, and it might be 2. And if you go even in the rec general recommendation for that ingredient by itself, that might be too much or way too little.

Chris Mirabile [00:16:22]:
Exactly. And we actually have a lot of customers who ask the question about our dosages and say, like, well, I saw that your dosage of x is a 150 milligrams, but there’s this product out there that’s selling it with 250 milligrams. Isn’t that better? And the answer is no. It’s not necessarily better, for a couple of reasons. One is, you know, more is not necessarily better. We we just incorrectly assume that, especially as Americans, we always think, like, more and bigger is better, but, no, actually, oftentimes, less is better. You need the middle ground. Right? Like, it the the toxicity can actually increase, and there’s there’s different effects at different dosages, at different dosage curves.

Chris Mirabile [00:17:05]:
So that’s the first thing. But the second thing is that then consider the combination of all of the other ingredients. Like, if we have a couple of hormetic substance substances in our formula, we don’t want to overdo it with with that specific biological process of hormesis. So we might wanna do slightly lower dosage. What matters most is the end results. Right? So if we do then in vitro cellular studies and and we look at the mechanisms of action and the the effects if we’re having a positive or negative effect, and if we make our way all the way to phenotypical responses in living organisms in vivo, That’s where we’re getting our answers. Is this the ideal dose or is it not? And that’s where the scientific experimentation comes into play, which practically very, very few biohackers are actually doing that to a high standard at least. Right? And, and then the typical consumer is not.

Chris Mirabile [00:18:02]:
They’re just trusting whatever they read on on the website or a product package.

Nick Urban [00:18:06]:
I had this thought back when I first started supplementing that, okay, there’s gonna be a lot of interactions here. I can’t possibly imagine what they all are. Even someone who does this for a living all day every day, they’re probably they they can’t know all of them because we don’t even understand all the pathways that things are working through. Like, we can look at 1 molecule, and we, like, are still decades after discovering the molecule, figuring out, oh, it actually impacts this pathway over here too. It might not be the main pathway, but it still has an impact on it. So then to take a substance, let’s say a whole food substance, and then to try and isolate down to 1 or a couple constituents, and then just figure out each of the things that constituent impacts, it’s impossible. Do you have any useful heuristics for someone wanting to understand what they’re taking and how it may or may not be combining nicely with other things.

Chris Mirabile [00:18:56]:
The most obvious thing that somebody can do, to, you know, track on their own, which is, again, it’s not nearly as ideal as a scientific experiment, which we can talk about why scientific experiments are better, overall. Now, of course, you can also make a counterargument saying that when you’re looking at yourself, like, you are the best, judge of whether something is good for you or not. There is some truth to that, but you might have a subjective perception that this is something that’s working well for you on on the the one hand, but on the other hand, you’re not noticing negative effects that are actually taking place behind the scenes biologically, let’s say. Right? But there there are, you know, obviously, these these quantified self biohacker types of, tools, whether hardware devices or software and so on that, are are useful. So everything from looking at, say, blood glucose levels and, whether it’s a continuous blood glucose monitor or hb a one c and, seeing how that might change over time. We can look at, I I like to call this more of like a North star health metric. We can look at, like, the epigenetic biological age clock, which we can talk more about if you’d like to. But that’s kind of like over I I like it because it gives all of these different blood biomarkers are quite complex and it’s difficult to know for sure, like, well, you know, LDL went up by 5 points, but HDL also went up by 5 points.

Chris Mirabile [00:20:23]:
Like, am I in a better place or a worse place? I don’t know. And I don’t think most, cardiologists would have any clue. They would basically just say, oh, you’re you’re fine. Don’t worry about it. Like, your ratio is okay. But did you get healthier or less healthy in that that change? We don’t know. But an epigenetic biological age clock is quite complex and is looking at the epigenome, and it can give you a either your pace of aging, if you’re aging faster or slower, or your your estimated biological age, which is correlated with morbidity risk, mortality risk, and so on. So that that’s a really nice metric.

Chris Mirabile [00:20:58]:
The only problem with it is it takes about 6 months to really see a significant change. At 3 months, you start to see the change, but 6 months is really the amount of time you you want to give it. And so that that’s not ideal in a lot of cases. You can you can track your sleep quality, your exercise performance, how physically active you are. Like, I, for example, noticed that when I added, supplemental taurine into my routine, that my activity levels went up significantly. Like, just looking on my Oura app and seeing, how many calories I’m burning each day, I went up by about 6, 7% starting from, like, a week after I started taking the taurine, and it sustained itself now for, like, 7, 8 months. It’s definitely there. Right? So that’s there are tools like this to help to approximate, but it’s not going to be nearly as ideal as doing studies.

Nick Urban [00:21:53]:
Of course not. And you’re also not gonna be able to isolate out unless you just introduce things one at a time. If you take 3 new things, 4 new things, you change your lifestyle, you have these other life circumstances that are going on for prolonged periods of time. It’s very hard to distinguish the signal from the noise.

Chris Mirabile [00:22:10]:
I’ll give you a case in point example. I and and this is, you know, as somebody who is as knowledgeable as I am in the field, and I’ve been doing, you know, my biohacking and quantified self for more than a decade now, how how foolish I was with something. So I, I I measure my pulse wave velocity with the Withings Scale, and this is correlated with with, heart health and cardiovascular health. And I, I took a couple of new supplements, and I noticed that my my pulse wave velocity was increasing, which is a bad thing. I was like, what is it about these supplements that’s doing it? So I would remove one and it would start to improve, but then it got worse again. I’m like, oh, it must not be that. And then I remove a different one. The I went through this whole process of trying to uncover what it actually was, and I couldn’t figure it out.

Chris Mirabile [00:23:02]:
And eventually, I just almost gave up. It’s like, I don’t know. I got rid of all the supplements and it’s still fluctuating. It’s like, well, I guess it’s not the supplements. And it turned out that it was actually the amount of sodium I was getting in my diet. Right? Like, just from the foods I’m eating and then also I have, like, potassium, salt, and I sometimes try to offset the sodium. And I was just kind of all over the place with it, and I wasn’t as methodical as I should be and careful with it. And pulse wave velocity is also very closely correlated to blood pressure.

Chris Mirabile [00:23:32]:
And so I was changing my blood pressure with the sodium intake and and, and the potassium intake, and I I just couldn’t figure it out. But the whole time, I was convinced it was the supplements I was taking. And so these are confounding factors that are in our real lives that is as precise and careful as you might try to be. It’s inevitable there are going to be factors that you don’t even you’re not even aware of. It could be stress levels or things in your subconscious that you’re thinking of that are raising your blood pressure that you don’t even know are doing it. Right? The sunlight and the UV rays that you’re getting, the air you’re breathing, the the fact that your, you know, your sister called you and and stressed you out or your mother called you and made you happy. Like, all of these things can have an effect.

Nick Urban [00:24:16]:
Right? Yeah. That’s one thing I see when I look on social media and I see someone mention, oh, this supplement increased my HRV or my deep sleep by 15%. And I often think of myself, yeah, but could that have been the meal you had, the different workout you just did, the time you spent outside, the fact that you changed your air and water filters earlier that day and you’re getting cleaner inputs? Like, how do you know it’s that supplement unless it’s consistent across a long period of time, and that’s the only change you’re making. AI could possibly help there. Some machine learning algorithms can help us, like, separate the little tweaks here from the rest, but I think we’re still a little ways from that.

Chris Mirabile [00:24:52]:
We are we are a ways from there. But, yeah, to to your point, like, with taurine, I’m I’m I would still not say I’m a 100% certain, but I’d say that maybe I’m at the 90% threshold cert of certainty because it’s been so long, and that was, like, the one thing that I changed and was consistent. I’ve added other things and then removed them and so on. That’s the one thing that was changed, and it was right when I changed it, and it has it has held up throughout that time. Right?

Nick Urban [00:25:20]:
What are some examples of other things that you’ve noticed work really well for you, Chris?

Chris Mirabile [00:25:26]:
So another another thing that I’ve noticed, for my athletic performance that helps a lot is, believe it or not, lecithin. So lecithin contains different phospholipids like phosphatidylcholine, phosphatidylserine, phosphatidyl lecithin, and sorry. Not, phosphatidyl phosphatidylinositol. My theory behind this is that choline is a methyl donor, and, there’s controversy around this topic, but, like, the methylation genes like MTHFR, I have a homozygous mutation of c 6 7 7 t. When I say there’s controversy, it’s because the Internet claims that this is, like, the most significant gene for everyone to be aware of. And then meanwhile, you talk to scientists in the field and the researchers, and they’re like, there’s really not any solid evidence to say MTHFR has these types of effects and that you can actually solve it with with, like, b vitamins and methyl donors. So, you know, like, where where’s the truth is probably somewhere in between the 2. But I have found that adding the, lecithin perhaps from the methyl donors, combined with me already taking b vitamins could lead to better my mitochondrial function, better energy production.

Chris Mirabile [00:26:42]:
And I noticed that, like, when I go for a run, my either my speed is significantly increased or the distance that I want to run is significantly increased. I set a goal for myself when I turned 40 to be able to run my fastest mile of my life, And, I’m now 40, and I haven’t quite achieved it yet, but I’m within just a few seconds. I have run a 5 minute and 36 seconds mile, outdoors in the, you know, blistering heat of of South Florida, and I’m hoping that when it cools off a little bit, maybe I can get below 5:30, which would then be my my all time record. I’ve run faster than that, but it was on a treadmill, so I wouldn’t consider that, to be as good of a test. So, at 40 years old, to be running the pace that I was running when I was 20

Nick Urban [00:27:31]:
Yeah.

Chris Mirabile [00:27:32]:
I mean, within 6 seconds of that pace, I wasn’t I wasn’t hitting those numbers before I started supplementing with the lecithin, and I wasn’t supplementing the lecithin for that reason. I just noticed that it didn’t. And when I I took the lecithin out, my paces started to slow down. And e even my b o two max also started to decline, as I took the, lecithin out. And I don’t think it’s the lecithin itself. It’s that the capacity or how fast I could run was higher because of the lecithin, which kept my b o two max up higher. So it was a couple of steps to arrive at that b o two max change. It wasn’t the supplement itself.

Nick Urban [00:28:08]:
Some athletes will use acetylcholine precursors like alpha GPC or CEP choline, those types of things to help them with their performance because acetylcholine is very involved in the motor system.

Chris Mirabile [00:28:21]:
Yeah. For for the actual muscle triggering and and movements, you need acetylcholine. I found that, these other forms of choline, I don’t respond well to. I get, like, very tired after I take, like, CBP choline, and these other forms. I just I get exhausted. I feel like I need to take a nap, and I I don’t know what it is. And I I don’t know what it is about lecithin that doesn’t do that to me, but for some reason, I’m able to to deal with the lecithin. It improves my my quality of sleep.

Chris Mirabile [00:28:52]:
I know this as well. Now that’s not for everyone. I I I’ve given it to a friend who took it at night, and she couldn’t fall asleep. But for me, it actually helps me sleep better, and that could also be involved in the athletic performance. Obviously, better sleep, you’re gonna perform better. So it’s as typical, it’s multiple different things combining together, and in this case, they conspire in a positive way.

Nick Urban [00:29:16]:
Yeah. It’s certainly multifactorial, and I believe that the phosphatidylcholine will also help improve the integrity of cell membranes too. So it’s a good cellular health supplement as well.

Chris Mirabile [00:29:28]:
Yeah. So all of the phospholipids in general and phosphatidylserine, for example, is, good for memory, good for focus and relaxation. Yeah. Stress. And then, phosphatidyl inositol is also good for stress. And, I believe that it’s been studied even for for women that have, like, very severe menstruations and, psychological effects from the menstruations and the hormonal issues and so on that they find beneficial effects from the, inositol specifically.

Nick Urban [00:30:00]:
I’m curious about why this and a bunch of other ingredients I’ll ask you about later did not make it into Novoscore.

Chris Mirabile [00:30:07]:
We took a a very specific approach, for that methodology behind, the creation of Novoscore. So we are really the 1st company in the space directly confronting, lifespan and health span. There were others that kind of dabbling in the industry, but they were not taking a mechanistic approach to longevity like we were. So our, perspective when we started Novos was to look at the mechanisms of aging and to try to address all of them simultaneously. No one was doing this in the world, even like academics and biotechs and pharma. They’re really focusing on individual mechanisms. Right? So, like, a researcher you can imagine might focus on 2 or 3 mechanisms, like, say, DNA damage and, telomere shortening or DNA damage in the epigenome or something. Right? But practically no one is focusing on all twelve of those hallmarks.

Chris Mirabile [00:31:04]:
And then in the biotech field, why weren’t they focusing on the hallmarks of aging? Well, the reason is because even if the biotech company wants to address aging and they want to hit these hallmarks of aging, they need to create something that treats a specific medical indication, a specific disease in order to get FDA approval or EFSA in the in the, European Union. And then if they want any sort of insurers to pay for things, it needs to be for disease because aging is not considered a disease. And so they are forced to target, like, set their sights on a disease and the symptoms of that disease and trying to, address 1 or the other symptoms or the disease itself. And they might, as a secondary goal, be targeting these mechanisms of aging, but it’s not their primary. Plus, they are almost always just doing a single molecule. And how can how powerful can you make a single molecule to directly address all of the mechanisms of aging? You can’t really do that. Right? When I came to realize this and getting involved in the industry back in 2018 and meeting with bio, biotech executives and, scientists and so on, I realized that this was an opportunity where I was already, you know, deep in the in the nutrition and supplement world and biohacking and so on. And I started researching natural ingredients that could impact these different mechanisms of aging.

Chris Mirabile [00:32:32]:
And I started to ask these scientists questions about these mechanisms and these ingredients and whether they thought the ingredients actually showed promise that they could have a significant impact on the aging process. And I was pleasantly surprised to hear that they actually were very optimistic about these ingredients. I was kind of, you know, skeptical going in expecting them to be, like, oftentimes medical doctors will say, oh, you’re just creating expensive urine. There’s no point. You know, you essentially you need pharma. And it was it was a pleasant surprise to hear that there was promise. So that’s when I decided that I wanted to create a formulation that could address all of these mechanisms of aging simultaneously. So that was the the first, consideration.

Chris Mirabile [00:33:17]:
The the next consideration was and we actually have this on our website and I’m gonna pull it up right now in front of me. So, I don’t miss any. But if you go to our our website in the science section, so novoslabs.com and then science, and you click on approach, you’ll see, we have a handful of, qualifications for ingredients. So one is that they have to have the ability to impact at least 1 and ideally multiple mechanisms of aging simultaneously. So that’s what I was just speaking to, and we wanted to hit all of them with NovoScor. The second is they have been able to extend lifespan in various animal models, hinting at conserved evolutionary pathways. So what that means is that every single ingredient in our formula has been found to extend lifespan in at least one organism and most often in multiple organisms. And what I mean by conserved evolutionary pathways is that if a specific ingredient is targeting a specific pathway or combinations of pathways and it’s extending lifespan, then let’s just say, C elegans.

Chris Mirabile [00:34:22]:
And then it’s also doing the same in killifish, and it’s also doing the same in mice. What are the chances it’s not going to have a positive effect on humans? It’s significantly lower. In other words, it is a very high chance that this is going to have a positive effect on humans because there’s something in the genetic code, that evolution has preserved across animal species because it’s something vitally important. And the chances that humans no longer have that in our biology is quite low. Now the exception would be if it extended lifespan in C elegans, but not in any other species. And it’s like, okay, this is probably not making it’s not that important for other species for life itself. So it’s probably not going to do something in humans as well. So this is something that we consider.

Nick Urban [00:35:10]:
And the vast majority of research also that shows, like, promising results, it only applies it’s only been replicated on the one animal and very few like, a very small percentage of the the research is replicated in across different animal models, so that’s actually quite significant.

Chris Mirabile [00:35:27]:
Exactly. And and, you know, since you brought that up, one thing to note is that the head of r and d at Novos, his name is doctor Diogo Berardo. We stole him from National University of Singapore under, Brian Kennedy’s lab, and he created what’s called the drug age database. So this is the world’s largest database of longevity enhancing compounds across I believe it’s something like 36 or 37 different species. So it’s thousands of well over a 1000 compounds. I think it’s around 1700 compounds, though I could be getting the numbers wrong. But I believe it’s around 1700 compounds studied across, like, 37 different species, and it’ll only tracks those that have extended lifespan. And so he’s intimately familiar with all of these scientific studies.

Chris Mirabile [00:36:17]:
And what I’d say going beyond that is he is also he has read all of the studies before they’re inputted. So he’s also aware of, like, which which studies have been replicated, or which compounds the results have been replicated, which studies were not really a good experimental design, which studies he believes that the study actually failed and had a false positive. So he has a lot of this tacit knowledge about all of these studies to then inform him and us as as a company, Novos, on what is actually having a positive effect on longevity versus what isn’t. So that that plays a role in the decision making process as well. So in another criteria is they’re associated with reduced risk of different aging related processes and outcomes in humans and animals, indicating that they act on the underlying aging process. So, as humans, we live a long life, and it’s incredibly difficult for us to be able to study a longevity compound on human lifespan. It would be just too expensive and too I mean, we we’re looking into doing it for metformin, and it was tens of 1,000,000 of dollars and would take, you know, many years to complete. And we’re all aging in the process.

Chris Mirabile [00:37:29]:
We don’t have time to wait for that. Right? Like, we we need to make educated guesses. And so if we’ve met these first criteria that I mentioned, and now this newest criteria, which is that when humans take this ingredient, they’re actually having favorable health outcomes, short term health outcomes. The phenotype is improving. Then that is a signal that it’s probably also having a positive longevity effect in humans as well. If it extended lifespan in other animal species, evolutionarily conserved, positive health effects in humans, it’s fair to reason that this is probably going to have a favorable longevity effect in humans. The next is that they are associated with reduced risk of mortality in humans. So it might not be definitive, but there could be associational studies.

Chris Mirabile [00:38:18]:
For example, glucosamine is one of the few, substances that was found in a very large study of 100 of thousands of people, self reporting what supplements they take, but reduced mortality, especially for cardiovascular events for those who were taking glucosamine. So that that’s a marker for the positive potential, when it comes to longevity. It’s not as good as directly studying it, but the association is positive and in favor of that ingredient. We can go through these last ones quicker. So they’re nature based. They’re either found in food or human biology, but these levels decline with age. Things like alpachelaglutarate and hyaluronic acid, decline as we age. They’re in our bodies, NMN as well.

Chris Mirabile [00:39:03]:
Or like lithium, for example, microdose lithium. We evolved with microdose lithium in our food and our water supply. Levels decline, ever since we have started to filter water. Right? So, like, municipal water supply filters out the lithium. Buying bottled water does the same. And but people that have higher levels of lithium in their water have like, the entire community is found to have longer lifespans than those who don’t have it, lower levels of psychiatric disorders, lower levels of depression, schizophrenia, bipolar, murder, rape. I mean, all of these things are lower in people that have these micro doses or trace doses, technically speaking, of lithium.

Nick Urban [00:39:46]:
I keep seeing research coming out these days too in 2024 about lithium in the water, how it has all these downstream effects on, like, cognition and helping reduce the risk of dementia and other things that most people don’t want.

Chris Mirabile [00:40:01]:
Exactly. You know, you said it, not me. I can’t make any sort of medical claims, but but, yeah, there’s research that’s that’s finding promise, for that. It it has a favorable effect on the epigenome as well, which we can talk about what the epigenome is if you care to. But, yeah, a lot of a lot of powerful results, from from lithium. People associate it with, like, you know, the prescription drugs, but you have to keep in mind that that’s, like, 100 to 200 times the dosage, and the dosage makes the poison. You know, imagine having, like, just a sip of a beer versus having a whole keg of a beer. Like, there’s no comparison in terms of the effects that that will have on you biologically.

Nick Urban [00:40:41]:
Yeah. You can’t find that dose in nature no matter how much water you drink. You have to it’s kinda like the whole resveratrol thing where you have to drink an entire, barrel of wine to get an appreciable dose of resveratrol.

Chris Mirabile [00:40:52]:
Exactly. Yep. Same same thing. Just wrapping up here, they have to have a low side effect profile. So we gotta make sure that if there are any side effects, they are not anything significant. And they’ve been used for decades or even centuries to specific to to, treat specific symptoms or afflictions in humans without any serious side effects. So those are the criteria that we put the ingredients through. And even after that, and then when we’re comparing different ingredients, we then went directly to our scientific advisors to get their thoughts on it.

Chris Mirabile [00:41:27]:
Scientists oftentimes have a lot of insider knowledge about ingredients, that you don’t actually see in the scientific studies, but from their own experimental research or talking to each other, they learn things about these different ingredients and, you know, side effects or concerns that might not be expressed in the scientific paper. So getting that type of feedback and then also looking at the mechanisms. And are we overloading a specific mechanism or biological pathway like we talked about for Mysis earlier, but other ones as well? And we wanted to make sure we covered some of the the high importance ones like reducing mTOR, increasing AMP kinase, and so on. There’s multiple, that we considered when we were putting together the formula.

Nick Urban [00:42:09]:
Yeah. And so your formula is fairly thorough. I’m curious. When you guys were evaluating sites, you chose to use vitamin c. Why did you not use vitamin d as well and or other minerals? You added magnesium. My I think it’s magnesium malate specifically. But, like, how did you settle on those versus all of the other options out there? Because I’m sure vitamin d has more research. I’m not sure about life span per se, or health span, but there’s a lot of other, like, well researched substances that seem like they could get a spot on the table.

Chris Mirabile [00:42:43]:
It really comes down to the rationale for why we included these ingredients. We we weren’t trying to create the all in one general health supplement. Right? Like, multivitamins, are closer to that concept. What we wanted to do was create a product that focused specifically on longevity. So that means health span and lifespan. And we also wanted to have some short term effects that people could see and feel that are associated with youth and health. So for example, aesthetic effects, improvements on skin health, energy effects and improvements in sleep, and the resultant energy that you feel from good sleep, improvements in cognition, and improvements in mood, which is closely correlated with cognition. So those were like the the short term benefits that we also wanted to have.

Chris Mirabile [00:43:34]:
So with that in mind, that’s that’s what our goal was longevity and short term longevity relevant effects. And so vitamin C, we specifically included because of its synergistic nature with calcium alpha ketoglutarate. So it wasn’t as much for the vitamin C itself, though it could have favorable effects on the epigenome and so on. A lot of people are already getting adequate vitamin c, like, how many people are getting scurvy nowadays. Right? So, like, you’re getting plenty of vitamin c in our diets and and, you know, sport drinks and so on. But taking the vitamin c along with the alpha ketoglutarate could have a synergistic favorable effect. The magnesium, we actually were the longevity ingredient is actually the, malic acid or the malate that the magnesium is attached to. So we wanted malate in the formula.

Chris Mirabile [00:44:30]:
Magnesium was an ideal way to do it because most people are deficient in magnesium, about 70% or so of people are deficient in magnesium. They can improve energy and cognition and muscle functioning. I mean, you go down the list, there’s a a whole multitude of things that magnesium reactions that magnesium is involved with. So it was a nice to have addition to have magnesium attached to the malate, but the primary reason to include that was for the malate and the research, associated with longer life spent. Malic acid is the same as malate. It’s what makes, apple peels tart. Right? And you would need to have many, many apples to get the dosage that you actually have in the Novos formula.

Nick Urban [00:45:14]:
Aside from ionic magnesium, magnesium malate is my favorite form too, and it tastes much more pleasant than the others, easier to combine. The dosage required to get enough elemental magnesium is a lot lower. It has a lot going for it. Yeah. And then you out of, like, all the adaptogens, you chose rhodiola, I’m guessing, again, for, like, the mood and the cognition and the ergogenic performance enhancing side?

Chris Mirabile [00:45:37]:
Yeah. Exactly. But also there’s research that, has found lifespan extending effects of rhodiola specifically. So we were looking at different ingredients that could also contribute to energy, and we considered caffeine, for example, or coffee bean extract. And we decided against caffeine because, and and this is a point that I I was pushing was not everyone wants caffeine. If you are including caffeine, you’re limiting the time horizon that somebody or the time window that someone can consume it in. Some people really love having their coffee or their green tea or their matcha, like, whatever it is, like, it’s an experience. Many people don’t wanna overdo the caffeine, especially the biohacker type is going to be like, I only want, like, 200 milligrams a day, let’s say, or a 100 milligrams a day.

Chris Mirabile [00:46:28]:
And if we’re delivering a 100 milligrams in our formula, well, there goes those other traditions of, like, having an a morning espresso or whatnot. So I didn’t wanna, like, take that away from people even though there are health benefits to the ingredients. So we then turns to alternatives, and, adaptogens was one consideration. And then looking at adaptogens, there were, you know, a short list like, Schisandra and,

Nick Urban [00:46:54]:
Ginseng, Gotu Cola. There’s a ton

Chris Mirabile [00:46:56]:
of them. Exactly. So, when it came to the long the longevity effects, though, we were impressed by the studies on rhodiola specifically. And by the way, we have all of these studies referenced on our website. So if you go to novoslabs.com and you go to science and you click on studies, we have scientific studies that we’ve published. In fact, we need to update this because we have, a new study, peer reviewed study that was published last week. But if you scroll all the way to the bottom, you’ll see a section that says 500 plus scientific studies backing Novos ingredients. And if you click on that, it will bring you to a table, and that table has more than 500 studies, associated with each and every single ingredient and essentially the benefits that they provide.

Chris Mirabile [00:47:45]:
So you can search, specifically rhodiola if you like, and then you’re going to see the studies that we refer to, and it’s 2 pages worth of studies. So I think that’s about 20 or so studies that we’ve got in here. And even just reading through the titles very quickly gives you a rough idea of the logic and the rationale behind, the studies. And you’ll see if it’s a human study, if it’s a human cellular study, if it’s an animal study, if it’s a cell line study, and so on.

Nick Urban [00:48:15]:
Nice. This is a great resource. And then something fairly controversial in your formula, and I’m sure you get questions about this all the time, is your decision to use terestilbene instead of resveratrol.

Chris Mirabile [00:48:27]:
Yes. Controversial. Though I think the controversy is more on the resveratrol side than the terestilbene side. I think resveratrol was really overhyped and, there are people that really believe in it. There’s, one prominent researcher who still talks a lot about it, but that researcher kinda staked his name and his reputation on the ingredients. So I would be a little bit skeptical of that. You know, mind you, we we had the option to include any ingredients that we wanted. We the you know, we went into this open minded and, we we considered Resveratrol.

Chris Mirabile [00:49:05]:
There’s no, like, incentive or financial reason, to bias us from for one ingredient over the other. We went into this with an open mind, and we chose Terastil being over Resveratrol for a couple of reasons. One is that resveratrol doesn’t really have any solid evidence that it does anything for healthy people. The the study that found positive results in mice was in obese mice. And so maybe maybe it can do something for obese humans, and I there’s no study that I’m I’m I’m aware of that has investigated that. But in theory, maybe it could do something for them at very high dosages. But we aren’t creating a supplement simply for obese people. We’re we’re creating a supplement for healthy biohacker types, as well as the average American, which might be slightly overweight.

Chris Mirabile [00:49:54]:
But then the question turns to, well, what about pterastolamine? Can it also be helpful for those obese people and for the healthy people? And so there’s more scientific evidence behind positive effects from pterastylpine, but not only that, when you look at the pharmacokinetics of the pterastylpine, it, first of all, is much better absorbed through the gut. Much more of it is absorbed through the gut. And second, it has a much longer half life in the blood. And so you’re getting more of it into your system and it is it is impacting your cells for a much longer time than resveratrol is. It also has, I believe, 3 methyl groups attached to the molecule. So the molecule is very similar to resveratrol. It is like a sister molecule, but it has methyl groups attached to it. I believe it’s 3.

Chris Mirabile [00:50:46]:
And that improves its performance, its absorption, and so on, and also potentially could serve as as, methyl donors.

Nick Urban [00:50:54]:
Yeah. To me, it seems terastolvene is superior to resveratrol almost across the board in every way. Doctor Sandy Kaufman told me that there might be an issue with people who have high cholesterol. They have, like, high lipids, then they wouldn’t necessarily wanna use it. But that’s, like, the only case that she said would make sense to perhaps choose resveratrol instead. But even then, I’m not sure I would still choose resveratrol at all.

Chris Mirabile [00:51:19]:
Yeah. And and so we were mindful of that. So, you know, increase potentially increasing, cholesterol from terestalpine, and that’s why we use the dosage that we did. Right? So I was actually literally thinking of it when I gave the example before of a customer asking about, you know, why didn’t you use a higher dosage? And that crossed my mind because there are products out there that have higher dosages of the terestilbene. But most consumers are just not aware of all of the complexity of these ingredients and the, you know, cholesterol effect, for example, from terestilbene. So we only have 50 milligrams, and there are some companies selling products with a 150 milligrams, 200 milligrams. So we wanted to do a small amount enough dose where it’s not likely to have any impact on your cholesterol, while still providing favorable health outcomes, favorable effects. It’s a hormetic substance.

Chris Mirabile [00:52:07]:
It’s an antioxidants. It has a whole bunch a whole host of of benefits. And it it combines nicely with Novo’s Boost, which is the NMN as well. They complement each other well.

Nick Urban [00:52:17]:
Absolutely. So when you were designing this and you were looking through the different ingredients, were there any core targets, any core hallmarks that you were focusing on specifically? Because there was originally, what, 3 hallmarks, then there was 5 and 9, now 12, and soon will be 25. They’re obviously not all weighted equally. Some are more important and more impactful in the aging process, and they actually the dysregulation there spills over and causes issues with the other hallmarks. Are there any that you’ve put at the top of the list? Like, focus on these primarily. Of course, it’ll be individual dependent. Like, what you need to focus on different from what I need to focus on. But in general, like, what are the primary ones that you’d say deserve the most attention first before going on to the rest?

Chris Mirabile [00:53:05]:
So let me just quickly list what all of the all of them are so your audience is is on the same page with it, and then I can talk about the ones that, we care more about. So there’s mitochondrial dysfunction, cellular senescence, loss of proteostasis, altered intercellular communication, genomic instability, epigenetic alterations, telomere shortening, deregulated nutrient sensing, stem cell exhaustion, inflammaging as opposed to inflammation, disabled autophagy, and dysbiosis. And so those last 3 are the 3 recent additions that after 10 years, the original researchers added those additional 3. When we formulated the products, there were only 9, but we were conscientious of inflammation, disabled autophagy, dysbiosis, and another one cross linking, which is not identified specifically as a mechanism of aging, though it may one day be considered 1. So those are those are the 12 mechanisms. So now to your question, which ones are perhaps the most important? If any one of these is in a really bad place, you’re you’re gonna be in a, you know, in a unfavorable position in the first place. Right? Because they’re they’re all it’s a complex web. They all interact with each other.

Chris Mirabile [00:54:25]:
So if you suddenly have, like, a lot of stem cells dying for one reason or another, you’re going to have a hard time replicating cells and so you’re gonna then have, you know, probably tissue not functioning as properly. You’re gonna have, you know, poor intercellular communication because you have more unhealthy cells and and so on. Right? So any one of them going to rise is going to have a negative effect on all of the others. But some might be a little bit more, higher up in the waterfall at the cascade of these effects than others, typically speaking. So mitochondrial dysfunction, I’d say, is pretty high up. Genomic instability, I’d say, is high up. Epigenetic alterations is high up. And I’d say that those those are probably the highest in in the cascade, because, you know, take for example, genomic instability.

Chris Mirabile [00:55:24]:
Right? So you’re getting you’re having, DNA damage. DNA damage can come from being out in the sun. It can come from our metabolisms. Eating food can cause stress, oxidative damage, and DNA damage as a result, but our bodies have the ability to repair this DNA damage. If our bodies are not adequately repairing the DNA damage, then those cells are going to either turn senescence, so there’s another mechanism of aging. They’re going to become highly inflamed, another mechanism of aging. The epigenome might get disrupted. It’s another mechanism of aging.

Chris Mirabile [00:56:05]:
The cell doesn’t perform its function properly, so intracellular communication, starts to fail. Our telomere, you need to replace that cell, so the body, like, knocks it out. Autophagy maybe eats it up. In essence knocks renders it unuseful. So our body now needs to produce a new cell because the DNA wasn’t adequately repaired, so you need to now activate the stem cells. Well, stem cell produces a new cell fine. Every time there’s a cellular division, you’re going to shorten your telomeres. So that one mechanism, genomic instability, just impacted whatever it was, 7, 8 different mechanisms, and I’m probably forgetting a couple of other ways that that can also impact other mechanisms.

Chris Mirabile [00:56:47]:
Right? So I’d say that’s pretty high up, and it’s something that happens regularly, frequently, the the DNA damage. Inflammation, is another one, which I didn’t mention as as causal, but it actually is. The reason I didn’t is because, like, a lot of these mechanisms can lead to inflammation, but inflammation can lead to a lot of these mechanisms. And so if we’re eating, like, highly inflammatory diets, we talked earlier about, like, having this bucket with water in it. And if you start getting to the bottom of that bucket, you don’t have the reserve to be able to protect. And so most Americans, unfortunately, are living those lifestyles. They’re indoors during the winter, eating unhealthy diets, not full of healthy antioxidants and carotenoids and so on. They’re drinking a lot of alcohol in the cold winter.

Chris Mirabile [00:57:31]:
They’re not physically active. They’re not building up their their cellular defense networks and so on. And then they suddenly go out in the sun in the summer. They continue drinking a lot. They’re barbecuing and getting a lot of these, you know, cross linked proteins in in their diet and so on. And, like, all of these things are happening and, like, they can’t take that sun exposure because they don’t have the carotenoids in their skin to help protect against the damage that can come to the UV rays. They don’t have enough NAD, or NMN to produce that NAD to lead to sirtuins, and that’s those sirtuins to repair the DNA and so on. And so that inflammation, just goes out of control.

Chris Mirabile [00:58:15]:
It’s like a fire is burning within us, and then that is leading to the degradation again like genomic instability can take its toll as a result of all of this excess inflammation that’s taking place.

Nick Urban [00:58:28]:
Yeah. And you’ve made a good point that everyone should know at this point that a lot of the core lifestyle factors, sleeping, moving, light exposure, proper breath work, stress reduction, diet, like, all these things play a pivotal role, and you can’t out supplement your way to longevity. You have to check your lifestyle and optimize the area that needs it the most. But then again, having a little nutritional assurance, that can also be helpful.

Chris Mirabile [00:58:56]:
This is coming as founder and CEO of a company that sells formulations. I look at these formulations as a slice of the pie. There are multiple other slices that when combined are bigger than the slice this slice of the pie. That is your sleep, your diet, your activity levels, your recovery, your psychology, and that psychology can even be impacted by your environment. For example, being in green spaces and blue spaces, so, you know, in a forest, the woods, a park, or the ocean are associated with significant increases in health span and lifespan. By association, the particulate matter that you breathe in with if you’re in a green space versus an urban center is quite different and and so on. So all of these things are playing a role. And to say that you can just take a magic formula as powerful as NovoScore and our other products are.

Chris Mirabile [00:59:53]:
It’s it’s not going to, be able to make up for all of these other aspects of your life if you haven’t. As part of the reason why as a public benefit corporation, we launched the Novos Life app. It’s completely free on Android and iOS, where we give you personalized recommendations for what you can do in your lifestyle. Almost all of them are free. Our supplements are probably 1 out of a 100 recommendations. Right? 99 others are not our supplements. So all of these things are things you can integrate into your lifestyle now to slow down your rate of aging based on what the latest science tells us. And then we also have a free biological age clock in there and then, like, a chat GPT that’s trained on your data and soon your wearables, so that you can ask it specific questions about your lifestyle and how you can achieve different goals to be able to slow down your region.

Nick Urban [01:00:46]:
And I believe last time we talked, you mentioned the accuracy of the app in terms of, like, the current clocks in the market is astoundingly high.

Chris Mirabile [01:00:55]:
Yes. So we, so we sell a biological age clock, that you can measure with with a a very small blood sample. You prick your finger. You put it on an index card. You mail it in. And in about a month, you’ll receive your biological pace of aging based on the very popular Dunedin PACE clock created out of Columbia and Duke Universities. The most accurate and precise of the clocks out there tell you your telomere length. Let me tell you your biological age.

Chris Mirabile [01:01:24]:
This kit is the most accurate on the market right now. With that said, there are many other biological age clocks being sold by other companies out there, and many of them are selling 1st generation clocks like the Horvath clock, for example, which was it was an amazing discovery and invention, but that’s a decade old now. And the algorithm we use in the Novos Life app, which is, again, completely free, was created by a brilliant computer scientist, mathematician, statistician, at University of Washington. Her name is doctor Soo In Lee. She’s the first female to ever win the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in mathematics. It’s the Samsung Korean prize. And, we imported her AI algorithm into our app. So we built out her mathematics into our app, and that’s essentially what you’re getting.

Chris Mirabile [01:02:19]:
It’s just over 20 questions. I think around 22 questions. Some of them are a little bit odd. You wouldn’t expect, like, for example, how many bedrooms you have in your home, believe it or not, is strongly correlated with your lifespan and health span. And what you have to consider is when when you build an AI algorithm like this, it’s not about, like, any rational logical reason that we as humans can really, like, think of. Like, yeah, maybe it’s associated with with wealth. Maybe it’s associated with, like, open space and the psychological effects on it. Maybe it’s something else that we’re not even detecting.

Chris Mirabile [01:02:53]:
But you arrive at that by looking at, in this case, tens of thousands of people’s survey responses, their health data, their epigenetic test results, and being able to then determine whether the most, highly correlated factors, the the biggest contributors to different health outcomes and mortality outcomes. And then based on that, we can then create a clock, which is what we now have, that is more accurate than all of the 1st generation clocks. And it’s much more aligned with the 2nd generation clocks, which companies are oftentimes selling for 3, 4, $500.

Nick Urban [01:03:30]:
And that question about the number of rooms in your house has come back as statistically significant because I know there’s a website called I think it’s spurious correlations, and you can figure out if you look at enough data points, things that shouldn’t and don’t make sense to line up how they do. Like, say, the score of the Golden State Warriors basketball team and the amount of rain in the in Nebraska, and it’ll link up because because if you look at enough points, you’ll find things that link up. They there’s no reason that they would link up, but they do. And so this one actually like, you guys have refined it further and made sure that it actually does make a difference.

Chris Mirabile [01:04:06]:
Yes. Well and and in full transparency, we, as Novos, didn’t. Doctor Soo Win Lee and and her her, PhDs and her lab did this. Right? And they are bioinformaticians. They understand, like, the the difference between, you know, correlation and causation, and, it we’re mindful of that when putting together the algorithm.

Nick Urban [01:04:30]:
Yeah. I figured. Just wanted to make sure, though. Chris, I have a couple other substances that I’d love to get your yay or nay on to know if you think it’s overrated or underrated and why can be a rapid fire round because we’re already coming up close to time. And I know it goes against the spirit of a lot of this conversation where you don’t wanna reduce to any single one ingredient, but I’m just curious to hear your thoughts on these. Sure. Nicotine.

Chris Mirabile [01:04:58]:
In full transparency, there’s going to be some ingredients that, when it comes to longevity, I haven’t closely researched. Yeah. When when it comes to nicotine specifically, we’re not talking about any sort of, like, inhaled version of nicotine, and we’re talking about, like, a patch or a lozenge, like, sublingual. I have seen positive, associations with nicotine for, like, brain health, but my only caution to it is that it could be, you could build a dependency on it. And I don’t know enough personally on, like, if you need to take a large dosage over very long periods of time, what that would do for brain health. But I I I do recall seeing some research that showed that it could potentially have positive effects.

Nick Urban [01:05:42]:
Rapamycin?

Chris Mirabile [01:05:43]:
Rapamycin. I think it’s, incredibly promising. It is the gold standard drug to compare all longevity interventions to. We compared Novos to rapamycin in a study we ran looking at cellular senescence, and we performed, almost equally as well as we were on par with rapamycin, which was really encouraging for us. I think rapamycin is fantastic and rapalogs for that matter. I think what we need to be mindful of is the effect that can have on the immune system. It can increase your susceptibility to infection, potentially, particularly right when you take it. If you’re doing a pulse dose, like, the first few days after taking it, it can increase the susceptibility.

Chris Mirabile [01:06:25]:
We are big fans of the dog aging project, which, doctor Mac Haberline, one of our scientific advisers is in charge of, and we’re actually going to be doing some promotions with them to try to get people to donate to that cause. So, yes, a fan of rapamycin, but just be very careful with it.

Nick Urban [01:06:42]:
Yes. Metformin.

Chris Mirabile [01:06:43]:
I’m sorry. These aren’t rapid like, I’m giving, like, full, like, answers to these. Metformin, yes. Optimistic about it overall, but I think it’s it’s, on a case by case basis. Like, I don’t personally take it. I think that if you are in very good metabolic health, you are very physically active, you, you know, for example, I run a lot, I weight lift a lot. It can counteract some of the benefits of exercise. And so when you look at the favorable effects of wrap up sorry, of metformin, extending lifespan in unhealthy diabetics relative to the general population, I always look at the general population as being quite unhealthy as it is anyway.

Chris Mirabile [01:07:23]:
And so, perhaps for an average sedentary person, metformin is good and could be favorable. But for somebody like you or me who’s very active and probably your audiences as well, I would take it with a grain of salt and and use caution. And if you are going to use it, perhaps you use a lower dosage than what, a diabetic would use. So, like, not a gram to 2 grams. Maybe you use 500 milligrams or something.

Nick Urban [01:07:49]:
You brought up carotenoids earlier. What’s your take on astaxanthin? Yes or no?

Chris Mirabile [01:07:53]:
I very much like astaxanthin. I’ve been taking it for a very long time. It has favorable effects, potentially for longevity. We we saw, in mouse studies that it did extend lifespan, in multiple replicated studies. It also has favorable effects for skin health. And, there’s actually this bioscanner. I I forgot what it’s called that that, I’ve used a couple of times that can measure your skin carotenoid score. And, yeah, I’ve I’ve posted about it on my blog.

Chris Mirabile [01:08:26]:
If you go to slow my age.com, it’s it’s one of the later posts, like, within the last 3 or 4 posts. And, and I had a very high score for it, like, in the top percentiles, and I owe it to eating a healthy diet full of a lot of vegetables plus most likely, Aztec Xanthin as well. And I mentioned earlier UV rays and the damage that can come from that. Having the high peritonoid score and aztecxanthin can contribute to that, I think, is going to significantly reduce the skin aging effect of the sun.

Nick Urban [01:08:57]:
Cool. I agree. I take it also. What about methylene blue?

Chris Mirabile [01:09:01]:
Methylene blue, I have experimented with it before. I actually found it to be very helpful for me in in a less than typical use case, was actually to, help with my gut health. I was getting, like, a lot of, stomach discomfort and gas, at a period of my life and and taking, small doses of methylene blue. I think it it helped to kill off. I don’t know if it was, like, bacterial overgrowth or or yeast or something, but it really helped for that, and it kind of cured that issue for me. I I would defer to, doctor Chris Masterjohn on this. I think he did a really good thorough analysis on on the topic, and, I think there are use cases in which it can be helpful for people and other use cases in which it wouldn’t be.

Nick Urban [01:09:45]:
But, Chris, if people want to try out Novos, they wanna use your app, connect with you personally. You’ve mentioned you have 2 different websites, one for Novos and a personal one. Can you repeat those?

Chris Mirabile [01:09:56]:
Sure. So Novos Labs dotcom. We’re also on all of the social networks as Novos Labs. We we provide a lot of educational content. We’re very much a science driven biotech company, but we also know how to have fun too.

Nick Urban [01:10:09]:
We’re partnered with Erewhon in Los Angeles.

Chris Mirabile [01:10:09]:
Equinox Gyms were the first partnered with Erewhon in Los Angeles. Equinox Gyms were the first supplement that they’ve ever sold in their 32 year history. We did something with the Surf Lodge out in Montauk Hampton’s area in New York, and we’re doing more and more to get out there on the consumer side. But at the core, we’re a true biotech. And so you’ll you’ll get a combination of that on our social network platforms. I personally have slow my age.com where I report my results and my personal interventions and so on. I’m also on, TikTok, Instagram, and access, Slow My Age.

Nick Urban [01:10:43]:
I’ll put a link to all those in the show notes for this episode, and I think your team set up a code for my audience. I believe it’s urban. That’ll save them on their order.

Chris Mirabile [01:10:55]:
Great. Fantastic.

Nick Urban [01:10:56]:
Well, Chris, this has been a blast. We’ve covered a lot of ground today. Thank you so much for joining the podcast, and I’m looking forward to seeing how your formula changes or doesn’t change and how it withstands the test of time. And I look forward to recording another one of these with you down the line at some point.

Chris Mirabile [01:11:13]:
Thank you, Nick. And I I appreciate the depth in which you can, dive into for these topics.

Nick Urban [01:11:20]:
Yeah. Next time, we’ll cover the other half of my list of things to talk to you about. So I’m Nick Urban here with Chris Mirobelli signing out from mindbodypeak.com. Have a great week, and be an outlier. 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 mindbodypeak.com/andthenthenumberoftheepisode.

Nick Urban [01:11:56]:
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.