Scientist Reveals How to BOOST NITRIC OXIDE to End Inflammation & REDUCE Blood Pressure

for me it's no wonder why we have the sickest population on the planet everything we do is disrupting nitric oxide production if you can't make nitric oxide you're going to develop chronic disease cardiovascular disease Alzheimer's diabetes chronic fatigue if you use mouthwash you kill the nitrate reducing bacteria and you now you don't get the benefits of eating a good diet so this is really the canary in the coal mine and it should be a warning signal for people that have erectile dysfunction that hey this isn't just a sexual problem this isn't just a testosterone problem

or an estrogen problem in women this is a vascular problem insufficient nitric oxide production and it's systemic what is nitric oxide and why does it matter for our health well thanks Jesse it's great to be with you and that's a look that's a very important question and really one we've been trying to answer for the past 30 years but today we know that nitric oxide is a signaling molecule it's produced in the body naturally the older we get the less we make and that's what's responsible for age-related disease but it really at its basis it's

uh it tells our blood vessels to relax and dilate so it improves oxygen delivering improves blood flow inhibits inflammation oxidative stress and immune dysfunction the key Hallmarks of every single chronic disease so now we understand how the human body makes nitric oxide What goes wrong in people that can't make it and now we know how to fix it all right well let's start talking about what happens when the body isn't making it correctly I know there's two different Pathways so let's take each one and get into the Nuance there so about let's first recognize that

there's an enzyme in the lining of the blood vessel called nitric oxide synthase and that enzyme converts L-Arginine which is an amino acid into nitric oxide so that was the first Pathway to be discovered now I just want to make a point that the first Pathway to be discovered doesn't necessarily mean it's the most important or prominent it was just the first to be discovered so this enzyme converts Arginine to nitric oxide and you get citrulline as a byproduct and it's the second to Second production of nitric oxide that regulates the second to Second blood

flow and oxygen deliberate every organ tissue and cell in the body and it's the dysfunction of that enzyme and we call that endothelial dysfunction so the older we get the less nitric oxide we make we call that endothelial dysfunction we have decreased blood flow decreased oxygen delivery to every cell in the body then we have inflammation oxidative stress and immune dysfunction so that's the first pathway it's very well elucidated we know the enzymology the biochemistry of that pathway we know what goes wrong in people that can't make it and we know how to fix it

now the other pattern right before we jump into number two I want to I want to pause here and take some time and get into the subtleties there so arginine is the amino acid you mentioned that is the first step of this pathway we know that as we get older this doesn't work as well talk about where the Arginine comes from if it's an amino acid I assume the diet and then let's get into where things go awry and why as we age does this not work as well now it's a fundamental question if you

want to understand chronic disease and keep from getting chronic disease so L-Arginine is a substrate that this enzyme uses to make nitric oxide and it's a semi-essential amino acid semia Central meaning that you get part of it from your diet so the breakdown of proteins proteins are made up of individual amino acids arginines of common constituent of most proteins and then it's also made through the urea cycle so the human body makes Arginine on its own so even if you're not getting enough from your diet you make enough through the urea cycle to theoretically saturate

the enzyme to make nitric oxide so this whole concept of supplementation of L-Arginine has never made sense to me biochemically because there's never a condition where patients or sick people are deficient in arginine so it doesn't make sense to give the body more in fact we now know that if you give the body more it can actually do more harm than good so the body makes enough L-Arginine to where you don't have to supplement if you supplement there's at least two clinical trials showing that actually patients get worse post-informed patients meaning people who have just

had a heart attack in 2006 they published a study that the people were getting high dose Arginine actually had a greater mortality it was killing more people than the placebo and then a similar study and I think 2011 in patients with peripheral artery disease give them high dose cell Arginine they got worse so we knew we've we've known for many many decades now that arginine is not the solution for nitric oxide deficiency in fact it can be counter uh productive and cause more harm so what happens and the reason people become nitric oxide deficient is

the enzyme that converts Arginine to nitric oxide becomes uncoupled so there's a there's a flow of electrons through this enzyme you get many different cofactors and substrates and when this enzyme becomes uncoupled then it can't transport this flow of electrons to the five electron oxidation of Arginine and production of nitric oxide so with now we know what causes enzyme uncoupling it's the oxidation of tetrahydrobotron we provide a certain redox potential or an electric potential to prevent the oxidation of bh4 you recouple the enzyme and now we can improve endogenous nitric oxide production without the need

for supplemental Arginine or citrulline or anything like that so that's the basic biochemistry of that pathway okay there's a lot in there I want to unpack so we know that the substrate Arginine isn't the rate limiting part of this whole thing we know that actually if we take in too much it can cause problems I'm curious in those studies where they did find there was problems where people were taking that what was the physiology there well when you when you have an uncoupled nitric oxide synthase enzyme and you give high-dose arginine this enzyme actually produces

superoxide which is an oxygen radical and causes more damage causes increased inflammation oxidative stress and immune dysfunction so the patients got worse the other problem we worry about is if you give high-dose arginine you know the body has enormous redundancy in it and it only it regulates what it needs in certain Pathways so if you give high-dose Arginine you get an increase in expression of an enzyme called arginase and then you divert the Arginine which would normally go through the nitric oxide pathway away from the nitric oxide pathway and through ornithine and urea disposal so

you can actually divert and basically have unintended consequences of what you're trying to achieve by giving high dose Arginine so I tell people arginine is not your problem or it can be a problem if you're using arginine-based supplements uh save your money save your health you don't need them in fact if you don't know what you're doing it can cause more harm okay so let's focus in now on the enzyme so we have this enzyme in the endothelium it becomes uncoupled and this is where the issue is is this just something that happens natural it

sounds like it is but is this just something that happens naturally as we age or are there certain things that we can do to slow that down or the things we're doing that are speeding that up that we can control all of the above if you look at population based kind of studies what we see is we lose about 10 to 12 percent of the function of that enzyme per decade so really by the time you're 40 or 50 years old you only have about 50 percent of that function of that enzyme that you had

when you were 20. now we know that that's not neces that doesn't have to be the case right so I'll be 50 in a couple of months but I have a biological age of a 38 year old and we know we have 18 20 year old kids who have the biological age and the vascular age of a 50 60 year old they have severe endothelial dysfunction so we can now modulate the activity of this enzyme so the rate limiting step is is oxidation oxidative stress so because we live in a toxic World we're exposed to

EMF we're exposed to herbicides pesticides we're exposed to a western diet poor diet processed foods a lot of sugar all of those conditions lead to an awesome coupling and nitric oxide deficiency but if we take into a can and eat an anti-inflammatory diet if we get regular moderate physical exercise if we're exposed to sunlight you know 20 or 30 minutes a day all these things facilitate and we take antioxidants to prevent oxidative stress then we can preserve the function of this enzyme and prevent this age-related decline in nitric oxide production and to me that's the

Holy Grail in cardiovascular medicine and really Health and Longevity okay so there's these different lifestyle factors you named a bunch of them where we can prolong at least the degradation of the uncoupling of that enzyme and food was part of that and this is where it gets a little bit more complex there's a second pathway that involves certain foods where we can boost I know so let's bring the second pathway in now and then we're going to tie all this together yeah that's really the remarkable thing about human physiology and I'm always intrigued by how

the human body works so we've known for centuries right diet and exercise is essential for health and well-being and longevity but come to find out about 20 25 years ago we discovered a pathway whereby the mechanism of certain diets like a Japanese diet a plant-based diet Mediterranean diet dietary approaches to stop hypertension all of these diets that through epidemiological evidence have been shown to reduce blood pressure reduce cancer rates improve longevity and and lifespan the mechanism of those diets revolves around a molecule called inorganic nitrate and this is a molecule found primarily in green leafy

vegetables things like beets arugula spinach kale the darker the green leafy vegetable typically the higher the nitrate content well when we consume these vegetables about 90 minutes after we consume them the nitrate is taken up in the gut it's concentrated in our salivary glands and now for the next six eight ten hours each time we salivate we're secreting nitrate and if we have the right oral bacteria in our mouth the night the bacteria reduce nitrate to nitride and nitric oxide so this is the first metabolic activation step of the diet so we're 100 dependent upon

the bacteria that live in and on our body to activate nitrate so that the body can utilize it to make nitric oxide and now our saliva becomes enriched in nitrite so when we swallow our own saliva we get a burst of nitric oxide gas in the stomach and that nitric oxide from swallowing around saliva kills things like H pylori the ulcer-causing bacteria E coli salmonella clostridium so if you've got a bacteria on the foods or the lettuce or the spinach or vegetables you're eating then it kills it through normal nitric oxide production in the Lumen

of the stomach so you may have caught three important points there number one we need enough nitrate from our diet number two we have to have the right bacteria and number three we have to have sufficient stomach acid production and this is where Americans get it completely wrong and we've Quantified this we know the standard American diet doesn't contain enough nitrate to fuel this pathway two out of three Americans wake up every morning use mouthwash killing the oral microbiome shutting down nitric oxide production and there are 200 million prescriptions written for antacids every year and

that's not even counting the over-the-counter purchases you can get Prilosec Prevacid Nexium all these over-the-counter products and people have been on these antacids for you know 5 10 15 sometimes 20 years and this completely shuts down nitric oxide production so it's just the the American lifestyle it seems like every every part of the American lifestyle leads to a decrease in nitric oxide production so for me it's no wonder why we have the sickest population on the planet everything we do is disrupting nitric oxide production if you can't make nitric oxide you're going to develop chronic

disease cardiovascular disease Alzheimer's diabetes chronic fatigue it's what Americans are faced with today most Americans all right a lot in there 10-pack I'm going to try and summarize a little bit here for us so we take in nitrates through the diet dark leafy greens best source the bacteria in the mouth are going to convert nitrates to nitrites and this happens as the food is passing over our tongue also as we take in the nitrates there's a pathway in our body that recycles them all the way back through the saliva onto the tongue again so there's

the two different ways that that happens then we need the stomach acid when we swallow that saliva to turn the knights right into nitric oxide do I have that right you got it well let's start with there's these three pieces that we need to be cognizant of and need to make sure we're optimizing you mentioned them there and I want to get into each of the three and make sure that we know how to do that starting with the dietary piece we know again leafy greens this is where we're gonna get our nitrates let's talk

about the absolute top sources in that category and then what we're looking for because for example I know spinach is is a good source or beets which beats is a little bit different not obviously part of the leafy greens but there are different factors as we're growing these and such that can influence how much nitrate are in the produce so let's really pick this apart we know we we attempted to answer I think the question you're trying to pose is if we wanted to use diet as a first line defense for preventing nitric oxide deficiency

how much spinach celery broccoli kale arugula would you need to eat to reach that threshold of nitrate so the body can convert it to nitric oxide instead of answer that question in collaboration with Texas A M University we went to five cities across the U.S and we just took vegetables off the shelf we brought it back to the lab and we analyzed it for the nitrate content and we went to Raleigh New York Chicago Dallas and Los Angeles kind of five corners of the U.S what we found was you know it's really pretty shocking to

us we we figured there would be some variability but you know there's as much as a 50 to 80 fold difference in the nitrate content of vegetables bought and grown in New York compared to those bought and grown in Los Angeles or Dallas so then when we uncover this a little bit more we realized well there's different farming practices on different parts of the US there's different soil conditions certainly different climate conditions and then we realized there's certain number of lightning storms in these different areas and so nitrogen is fixed in the form of nitrate

primarily through lightning storms so to break the triple bond of nitrogen you need high energy and really that only occurs through lightning things so we're finding that in areas kind of in the the Rust Belt of the South where there's a lot of thunderstorms the soil seems to have more nitrate in it and then other regions for for whatever reason they may not and then the other shocking thing so the point of that is we really couldn't make any recommendations on how many servings of a given vegetable you would need to eat because it depends

on where it was grown what the end what vegetable was because there's Regional difference then there's High variability from you know celery broccoli kale spinach across vegetable categories and then we did something a little bit on top of that we took organically grown vegetables so these are vegetables that have an organic label and then we compared those to conventionally grown vegetables and on average the the organic vegetables had about 10 times less nitrate across the board and now when you you got to think about that for a minute because most people think organic is good

I should eat organic but from our studies if you're eating is only organic you become nitrate deficient and I think perhaps more importantly you need nitrogen in the form of nitrate to assimilate other minerals and nutrients so if a vegetable is deficient in nitrogen or nitrate it's not going to assimilate other nutrients so now these vegetables are deficient in things like magnesium chromium selenium all the trace minerals and vitamins and nutrients that we used to get so I tell people you it's really difficult to eat enough organic vegetables to get enough nitrate in your diet

to stimulate this nitric oxide production pathway an organic means that one no herbicides no pesticides but there's a restriction on nitrogen-based fertilizers added to the soil you can organically grown vegetables so for instance what I do when I grow my vegetables we raise our own beef we grow our own vegetables but I still I sample the soil and send it off in for an analysis to figure what's missing in the soil why do I need to supplement and then I add standardized nitrogen to the soil so I know that my soil is enriched in nitrogen

so the vegetables that I'm eating and I'm growing here in my own range it wouldn't be classified as organic because I'm adding fertilizers but I'm not adding herbicides or pesticides so I think there's a fine balance here and I think people are so caught up in this whole concept of organic and they really don't know what in the hill organic means they've been taught by the media that it's you know it's good it's healthy well I think it's free of herbicides and pesticides but we now know that the vegetables grown in the U.S since 1940s

have about a 78 percent less vitamins and minerals and nutrients since the 1940s so the pressures of feeding a growing planet population is at the expense of nutrient density let me just pause you right there because there's a lot I want to get into within what you've just shared so we know that in general organic has less nitrate so and you explain the whole nitrogen being added to the soil and the reason for that you mentioned the fact that you're growing your own food so you can add that back in and not add the poisons

what do you recommend to people then if they're not able to grow their own food they don't have you know the time the land whatever it is and they're they're buying from a grocery store and up till this point they've been buying organic can we just make up and there's another piece of this I want to make sure and tease out and this is something I haven't heard you talk about before I think the part about the nitrate not being in the soil is easy enough to understand but you mentioned the fact that it affects

the different nutrients beyond the nitrate so I know I threw a lot at you I want to understand that second part where it's affecting more than just the nitrate and then also on top of that for somebody who isn't going to grow their own food what's the best they can do you know there's the whole field of agronomy on how do you maximize product yield and nutrient density and so go back a hundred years ago you know Farmers used to do crop rotation so they would grow crops that would deplete certain minerals and nutrients from

the field then they would go back and plant the same soybean or Clover or some vegetable that would replete those nutrients back in the soil so crop rotation allowed for fertile grounds now you see these fields that are just all they do is is grow corn all they do is grow soybean or or a cotton so there is no crop rotation so we have to assimilate nutrients in the plants that we grow and you do that through nitrogen and nitrogen assimilation in the form of nitrate so if the soil is deficient in nitrate it's most

likely going to be deficient in other trace minerals and nutrients but more importantly is and you can see this fertilized versus unfertilized vegetables the fertilizer really dark green they have higher yield the unfertilized is a light green less nutrient less yield so in the organic world you know you can add manures you can add organic compost but again there's so much variability in there there's no standardization of the nitrogen so you don't even know what you're getting it from in fact the manure the compost may not have any nitrogen in it so what I tell

people is Buy Local you know go to your local farmers market talk to your local farmers support the local Growers and then ask them questions say hey here's what I'm interested in and you know people who live in really urban areas and inner cities you know it's very difficult so then really the only solution for them is they've got to do what I call a micronutrient analysis you can go get your blood tested and figure out exactly what what are you deficient in and then you can start to develop kind of some personalized supplementation you

know we know just broadly from the inhaling study from the US government that 75 of Americans don't get enough magnesium 95 percent of Americans are deficient in iodine 65 75 percent are deficient in chromium um selenium these trace minerals and this is what causing a lot of chronic disease you know Linus Pauling said you know famously 50 60 years ago that most chronic diseases are caused by nutrient deficiencies if we don't have these trace minerals and nutrients then the body can't do what it's designed to do and you become dysfunctional you get sick so it's

it's a very it's a very interesting question but it's the solution isn't very simple right so you have to be resourceful but I think the simple thing is Buy Local from your local farmers market and then ask these Farmers questions how are you growing your Foods how are these vegetables do you add herbicides pesticides uh I certainly don't want that in my food supply but we also I also want nutrients directly from the source okay so the part I'm still a little fuzzy on the fact that the other nutrients are low in the organic as

well is that just because when they add the fertilizer they're adding other things to the soil and upping those nutrients so I get the fact that the nitrogen isn't being added and that's where the nitrate is lower but is there something to the other nutrients and why they're lower in the organic as well I'll give you an example so when I fertilize my my land I get nitrogen I get potash get potassium and sulfur so there's a four kind of four main elements that we're adding to the soil so nitrogen in the form of nitrate

um and you get potash and so I use a mix because the soil samples tell me this is what I need for this type of land that I'm I live on and grow in so I know for instance is 28 nitrogen 14 uh 14 7 and then three and a half percent sulfur so I'm putting all these nutrients in the soil so that now the plant has a way and the nutrients it needs kind of like the human body the plant now has what it needs to assimilate transport all the other nutrients in the soil

provided those nutrients from the soil but if you don't test your soil and they're deficient in certain things then the plants can't assimilate it because it's not available and I think that's why Soul sampling is so important so you know exactly what's in your soil or what's not in your soil and then you can put in there so that you have a nutrient dense food that you're growing in that soil so it's it's a matter of availability and just not knowing but it's also important because even if you have those nutrients in the soil without

nitrogen in the form of nitrate you don't assemble or transport those nutrients and assimilate them into the vegetable or the plant that latter part is what I was trying to clarify so that's great so we know that when we're growing produce in different areas of the country we're going to have different amounts of nitrogen we know organic versus conventional is going to have a different amount I took you on a tangent there so continuing your thought process when it comes to nitrates in the produce so I guess the point trying to make is that this

and we've we've we've Quantified this so we took a standard American diet just what most Americans would eat and we grind it up and we quantify the nitrate content and Americans are only getting about 150 milligrams of nitrate per day through normal dietary patterns and we need at least 300 milligrams to see any trickle of nitric oxide production because the inefficiencies of conversion so number one we're not getting enough nitrate uh and then number two those that eat a plant-based diet they're not even guaranteed to get enough nitrate because depending on where they live what

vegetables they're eating organic versus conventional you may not even getting enough nitrate to reap the benefits of a plant-based diet so if we took kind of the best case scenario and so we published on this we took a Japanese diet we took a Mediterranean diet the dietary approaches to stop hypertension and we just took food choices from those dietary patterns and we Quantified the nitrate that one eating those diets would would consume over a period of a day and we see anywhere in those diets from you know 400 milligrams up to 1500 milligrams in a

Japanese diet of nitrate so now what you're getting is you're getting sufficient nitric oxide being produced from those diets provided you have the right bacteria and you can make stomach acid so that that kind of follows step one the problem is we're not getting enough nitrate from our diet because of the the variability in vegetables and Regional growing techniques in organic versus conventional number two and we stumbled upon this probably 20 years ago if you use mouthwash you kill the nitrate reducing bacteria and you now you don't get the benefits of eating a good diet

and think about this I mean people people mostly have good intentions right they try to learn as much as they can they try to listen and assimilate all the information they're getting bombarded with on TV the media advertising and you see the commercials wake up every morning use Listerine use scope it kills 99.99 of the bacteria in your mouth well that's not a good thing you know we and others have published that if you use bath wash your blood pressure goes up and you lose the cardio protective benefits of exercise and you lose the benefits

of eating a healthy diet so the worst thing you can do is use mouthwash and I try to put this in perspective because most people this is kind of like the aha moment for a lot of people like oh well I'm doing damage by using mouthwash yes the we've known for many many decades that you don't take an antibiotic every day for the rest of your life right if you've got an infection you take a regimen of antibiotics 7 10 14 days and then you stop you kill the bad guys but you don't continue to

take antibiotics because of the collateral damage it's mostly non-selective killing right so we're killing the bad guys but we're also killing the good guys and there are a number of problems that occur from that we kill the gut bacteria get gut dysbiosis he gets systemic disease well the same thing happens in your mouth when you kill the oral microbiome in your mouth every day sometimes twice a day there's consequences to that and the number one consequence is it shuts down nitric oxide production causes an increase in blood pressure you lose the benefits of exercise and

you can no longer get nitric oxide from this secondary pathway so I tell people all the time look if you're using mouthwash you have to stop I mean the risk benefit kind of quotient there is all risk no benefit so you have to stop and then the other important thing that a lot of people don't even consider either as fluoride you know most toothpastes have fluoride and fluoride is put in toothpaste because it kills bacterium it's an antiseptic so you have to get rid of fluoride in your toothpaste the other major problem is most Municipal

Water Systems are fluorinated they put fluoride in the water in the drinking water why to kill the bacteria so now when you're drinking them with water you're killing the good bacteria you're killing the bad bacteria you're shutting down your thyroid function and fluorides and neurotoxin so we have to rid our body of fluoride I want to highlight the importance of this second step here the fact that we have these bacteria on our tongue and if we're killing them through things like fluoride or mouthwash we're limiting this whole second pathway and we already know that the

first pathway is going to decline naturally as we age so I can only imagine the number of people that are getting older their first pathway is degraded down and they're using something like mouthwash or even drinking unfiltered water and getting fluoride and killing that bacteria and then you clarify if I'm wrong but as far as I know from preparing and reading your book and digging into your work there is only these two Pathways so if you're impacting them both in a negative way the first one just by you know we talked about living a healthy

lifestyle helps accentuate that but aging is going to dampen it naturally it's so easy to mess this up is what I'm getting at that's right yeah it seems like I said everything we do from an American lifestyle is designed to shut down nitric oxide production now what happens your blood pressure goes up that's the number one risk factor for the number one killer of men and women worldwide which is cardiovascular disease nitric oxide is important for insulin signaling so you develop insulin resistance type 2 diabetes you start to develop mild cognitive disorders and vascular dementia

eventually Alzheimer's you don't have the energy to exercise because your mitochondria aren't producing enough energy so everything we know about the onset and progression of age-related chronic disease can be traced back to insufficient nitric oxide production then some people have to ask yourself well what am I doing to disrupt my nitric oxide production well you're not getting enough vegetables you're not getting enough nitrate two out of three Americans use mouthwash every morning and not coincidentally two out of three Americans have an unsafe elevation in blood pressure and think about this if you have high blood

pressure you go to your doctor and he puts you on a blood pressure medicine right and 50 of the people that are on blood pressure medicine don't respond with better blood pressure we call this resistant hypertension it's resistant to standard pharmacotherapy so why is that well these drugs aren't targeted towards the oral microbiome there's ACE inhibitors that that you know mechanistically that are affecting the Angiotensin converting enzyme shutting down aims 2 production there's calcium channel antagonists there's beta blockers diuretics so the reason that these patients are resistant to standard therapy is because it's the wrong

target if they don't have a radon Angiotensin problem they don't have a calcium dysregulation they don't have a fluid imbalance so ACE inhibitors arbs calcium channel antagonists and diuretics aren't going to affect their blood pressure hypertension is a symptom of oral dysbiosis so now we're finding if you're using mouthwash and you stop and allow this microbiome to repopulate and do its job blood pressure will normalize and now you can get off medications and Americans especially older Americans are over medicated they're put on one medication two three four I know people who are on 10 12

15 different medications and the human body cannot and will not heal or perform when there's that many synthetic enzyme Inhibitors at one time I mean that's not how the human body is designed to work okay so for the person tuning in here they're one of the two-thirds of Americans that have been using mouthwash to this point they're going to stop today but now they're worried that they've killed the good microbiome in their mouth what do they do how can they accentuate bringing that back I'm assuming there's a way and then how long does it take

you know we published on this I think and we published a seminal paper in 2019 and we designed this experiment to answer that question so we took normal healthy individuals that had normal blood pressure and for seven days we just use mouthwash twice a day and at the end of seven days we measure their blood pressure we did tongue scrapings to figure out well before and after see what happened to the oral microbiome and then we stop the mouthwash for four days then after four days let's see what happens to their blood pressure and let's

see what happens to the microbiome so the results of that study were after seven days of using mouthwash in otherwise normal intensive patients we saw an increase in blood pressure in fact in one person we saw a 21 millimeter increase in blood pressure 21 year old triathlete Dental student his blood pressure went up 21 millimeters of mercury in one week just by killing the bacteria in his mouth no change in diet no change in exercise activity the only thing we did was kill this bacteria and we made him clinically hypertensive and then fortunately once we

stopped four days later the microbiome had completely repopulated and his blood pressure completely normalized so this population is really resilient in the fact that if you stop killing it daily it repopulates we just got to give these bugs kind of what they need so number one get rid of fluoride get metal mouthwash and then start eating more green leafy vegetables because these are what we call nitrate reducers they're facultative anaerobic bacteria meaning that if Oxygen's around they can respire on oxygen if oxygen is not around then they were spiral nitrate so the more nitrate-rich vegetables

you you consume we're feeding these bacteria a normal respiratory substrate that they can rely on and respire on and they'll repopulate and the beauty about that is we also published in that study that the greater the diversity the oral microbiome the healthier the microbiome and the better management of blood pressure so we need diversity there's biofilms there's different communities on the dorsal part of the tongue on the gingival tissue so this is the ecology in the mouth is is quite remarkable but it's very resilient so even if you've been using mouthwash for months or years

once you stop at least the data from our study published study shows that within four days these bacteria will completely repopulate now you just got to feed them feed them the good stuff all right so we know from before we touched on this quickly the fact that the bacteria on the tongue feed on nitrates and they can feed on them as food as being chewed and before it's swallowed and then also there's a secondary system thankfully that digests and then brings the nitrates back up through the saliva and then we get a second chance at

feeding those bacteria no that's kind of this the second what we call A Time release so now each time you secrete you salivate you're secreting nitrate in the saliva and this is a very inefficient system so we can quantify this so the the nitrate that's let's let's call wheat 150 grams of spinach salad 90 minutes after we consume that the nitrate that's in that spinach only about 25 percent of that's going to be taken up in the gut right so about a third about a fourth of the load that you're getting from the diet is

taken up in the gut and then concentrated in our salary glands the rest is distributed throughout the circulation filtered through the kidneys you excrete some some is reabsorbed and then only about 20 percent you only get about 20 percent reduction efficacy of the bacteria in the mouth so each time you salivate so 25 absorption uh 20 reduction that's five percent of the total nitrate load we're reducing into or metabolizing into nitrite and nitric oxide so and we we've Quantified that we can we can verify it stoichiometrically I mean this is a very beautiful system so

I think it's an inherent inefficiency because it allows the body to produce nitric oxide over a long period of time in A Time release manner provided that we have normal salivary secretion we have normal nitrate reducing bacteria on the crypts of the tongue and that are parietal cells in our stomach can produce stomach acid okay so we know when it comes to the bacteria in the mouth you've mentioned fluoride mouthwash those are both going to kill it what about things like gum people are chewing um tongue scraping I'm just trying to think of different inputs

into the mouth and how they might benefit or cause damage there to the to the microbiome yeah there's there's a lot of unanswered questions still so for the most part there's a lot of you know the answer is we don't know but here's what we do know tongue scraping in that same study we found that people who did Daily Tongue scrapings had the greatest diversity the oral microbiome and had the best blood pressure but if you tongue scraped and use mouthwash those were the patients who had the greatest increase in blood pressure upon malfoids so

that our interpretation of that data was if you do tongue scraping and don't use mouthwash that seems to be very beneficial and I I equated to like tilling the soil right when you scrape the tongue you're basically kind of tilling the soil and and and kind of allowing these these organisms and bacteria to repopulate and diversify and that seems at least in our study to have better blood pressure management um things like chewing gum I think it depends on if it's sugar a lot of sugar in the gum then you know sugar causes an overgrowth

of you know acid producing uh bacteria in the mouth and carries and cavities and bad things there's other things like essential oils that we don't have any interest to things like oil pulling I get questions all the time and these are things that we just don't know we haven't researched it but unless it's antiseptic and kills non-selective bacteria the good the bad then I think it's probably gonna be fine if it's if it's antiseptic it's not going to be good if the oral hygienic practice isn't killing any bacteria like tongue scraping is a killing thing

it's just kind of allowing a disturbance of the of the terrain um so yeah I think you know again there's a lot of answers that we don't have but what we do have it's pretty clear that you can't use antiseptic mouthwash you can't add fluoride to your to your body in any capacity whatsoever and then just eat a balanced diet in moderation with some more green leafy vegetables and sometimes it's really that simple all right we're going to move into step three so for somebody that's lucky enough to get by step one and two taking

in nitrates they have the bacteria in their mouth they haven't killed that so now they have nitrite which they're gonna swallow and go into the stomach we need an acidic environment to take the nitrite and form nitric oxide you mentioned the antacids and how that's a problem and and I'd like you to get further into that to start and then we'll talk about other things to do with the gut so biochemically speaking nitrite so nitrate to nitrite is a two electron reduction and then nitrite to nitric oxide is just one electron so it's about chemists

we count electrons so we have to we have to balance equations when we when we do this chemistry so the pka of nitrite meaning the the the pH in which nitrite becomes protonated to generate nitric oxide is 3.4 and that means that a pH 3.4 50 of the nitrite that we swallow is going to generate nitric oxide gas the lower the ph the greater the efficiency of protonation and conversion to nitric oxide so when we do that again the nitrite becomes nitric oxide we can detect it in the limit of the stomach it kills bacterium

kills H pylori the ulcer-causing bacterium enhances gastric mucosal blood flow so now you've enhanced the blood flow to the stomach so you can absorb nutrients like magnesium iron iodine chromium B vitamins so it's facilitating this fundamental physiological response to to nutrient absorption if you can't make stomach acid because you have a chlorhydria for whatever reason or you're using an antacid now you shut down stomach acid production you eliminate the nitric oxide benefits of swallowing your own saliva so now you can get overgrowth of bacterium H pylori you can develop gastric ulcers you become nutrient deficient

without sufficient stomach acid you can't absorb iron you become anemic you can't absorb B vitamins you can't absorb zinc chromium selenium a lot of these trace minerals and nutrients but more importantly again you shut down nitric oxide production from the disproportionation of nitride to no but in 2013 2014 there was a paper published that these antacids specifically what's called proton pump inhibitors things like Omeprazole pantoprazole they actually inhibit nitric oxide being produced from the enzyme nitric oxide synthase so these drugs PPI specifically are shutting down both nitric oxide production Pathways and people who take these

drugs are completely devoid of nitric oxide now the consequences of that are apparent now in 2015 it was reported that people who have been on ppis for three to five years had a 40 percent higher incidence of heart attack and stroke not risk of heart attack and stroke actual heart attack and strokes and then just last week a report came out showing that people who have been on ppis for four years had a 35 percent increase in dementia in Alzheimer's so I mean to me this is like the most Awakening you know kind of Eureka

moment in terms of pharmacology these are very dangerous drugs in fact they were never approved by the FDA to be used chronically the FDA approval on this years ago was for acute use for gastroesophageal reflux disease or acid reflux use them three to five days and then get rid of them never use them again unless you have another acute flare-up but yet people are using these every day for 10 15 20 years and the consequences heart attack stroke Alzheimer's everything is on the rise so you have to get rid of stomach acid or you have

to get rid of antacids and so that's just the nitric oxide consideration the other problem with antacids is it prevents the breakdowns of proteins into amino acids it's part of our normal digestion process the human stomach is designed to make stomach acid hydrochloric acid to break down proteins into amino acids without stomach acid you don't get breakdown of protein so what happens you have undigested food particles undigested proteins are what we call peptides that are emptied into the gut they transport across the gut you get leaky gut syndrome now your body sees these foreign peptides

as an Invader now you're developing antibodies against these peptides and that's the basis for foodborne allergies you know when I was a kid we didn't have peanut allergies milk allergies all these allergies that kids in school today have and I think it can be traced back to the use of antacids as a kid because you can't break down milk proteins into amino acids you can't break down any protein amino acids you develop a foodborne allergy and it's the basis for autoimmunity these are very dangerous drugs and should never be prescribed it should be taken off

the market over the counter the evidence is very clear now that this data is becoming public we just talked about there are a couple different studies do you find in the medical world doctors are hearing this and changing the way they prescribe you know it's very difficult to treat to teach an old dog new trick especially Physicians right so a lot of them think they already know everything so how can you teach me something new but some are receptive you know some are very keen on keeping up with the published literature and understanding the advancement

of Science and the translation into clinical medicine but here's what's I mean to me it's so obvious look from the outside looking in because if you look back kind of from a 50 000 foot View and just look at the observations these class of drugs are causing heart attacks strokes and Alzheimer's okay so that's that's an interesting observation and it's Association right but it's not causation but now we work backwards and figure out mechanistically exactly what's causing the increased risk of heart attack stroke and Vascular Dimension Alzheimer's it's because it's shutting down nitric oxide production

so now we have a biologically plausible mechanism for the interesting observations on a global population perspective and so now we know mechanistically that there is causation you shut down stomach acid production you shut down nitric oxide production this causes increase in heart attack and stroke causes decrease in blood flow to the brain you get mild cognitive disorders vascular dementia Alzheimer's you develop metabolic disease so now what do you do number one you have to stop but number two you have to restore the production of nitric oxide and that's kind of how we're trying to integrate

this because some people it's very difficult to get off antacids because they've been so dependent upon them for many years so then how do we address those patients and basically mitigate the risk of them having a heart attack or stroke or developing Alzheimer's when you look at all the people taking these drugs what is that the root of that for somebody that wants to get off of them and get to the root of that issue how do they begin well the problem with Physicians today is they don't have time to seek the root cause of

why the patient's presenting with certain clinical presentation right and so it's just easy if you've got a patient that comes to your office and says hey Doc I've got acid reflux well you know for 40 years you've written a prescription for antacid so it's easy they're in and out of the office in five minutes you get reimbursed for your time and it's a it's an economic model but it's certainly not a viable physiological model so what I tell people is you have to understand how the human body works so the human body is designed to

make stomach acid and so what then you got to ask yourself chemically how did the parietal cells convert the how does it create hydrochloric acid in the Lumen of the stomach well that that reaction is very well elucidated you need zinc you need sodium bicarb you need B vitamins and you need iodine but yet if you can't make stomach acid because you've been on acids for a number of years you're deficient in B vitamins you're deficient in zinc and you're deficient iodine so now when you get off these antacids your body doesn't have what it

needs for the parietal cells to make hydrochloric acid so you're going to make you're going to remain acid deficient so I tell people you gotta supplement with iodine 12 and a half milligrams a day 15 milligrams of zinc salt B vitamins and now you've given your body what it needs it has the raw material to make hydrochloric acid in the parietal cells now you can make stomach acid you can digest proteins into amino acids you can generate nitric oxide and your acid reflux goes away acid reflux is a is a symptom of insufficient stomach acid

production so giving a substance that inhibits further inhibited stomach acid production is counterintuitive I think the consequences of that over the past 40 years have been revealed it's not the way to eliminate acid reflux and it's causing more harm than providing zero benefit so this takes time right so what I tell people acutely and number one I think it's a very important point you can't just stop these drugs called turkey because you're going to get a rebound of acid production so what I tell people is you have to wean off so whatever you're taking if

you've been taken on a daily basis cut the dose in half take half a dose for three or four days then take that half a dose every other day for three or four days and then you can stop those drugs but you have to slowly wean off titrate the dose down and then during that process before every meal just take a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar apple cider vinegar vinegar is acetic acid so it's going to acidify the Lumen of the stomach so if your body can't make stomach acid we're going to deliver acid directly

into the aluminum of the stomach now you acidify that Medium you absorb nutrients you break down proteins into amino acids and you don't get acid reflux very simple how do you feel about supplements like HCL and taking digestive enzymes now look I think they're very important they're and there's for those because you know we need these enzymes and we need to give the body what it needs to break down proteins fats and carbohydrates right and then the bacteria in our gut you know use small chain amino acids and butyrate and fatty acids so we got

to feed the microbiome but we give our body what it needs in terms of amino acids from proteins carbohydrates and then break down fat so if our body's deficient in these digestive enzymes in fact I take digestive enzymes typically after every meal especially when I travel because it's not always we don't always eat healthy when we're traveling so we get to give our body all the help it can get and then yeah HCL butane hydrochloride I'm a big fan of those because we need to acidify the aluminum of the stomach it's the basis of all

digestion and nutrient assimilation and nutrient absorption okay so taking our story here even further we have the nitrite getting to the stomach assuming there's proper acid there it's going to turn into the nitric oxide what happens to it there because I know the molecule of nitric oxide it doesn't last very long so I'm picturing it either in the endothelium coming back to our first example how it can be made or it's now in the stomach how do we have a systemic effect that's a very good question let's go back to the start of this because

when the very first question is what is nitric oxide and maybe I might I didn't State this but it's a gas and once it's produced it's gone in less than a second so now you can imagine what's how does this gas this fleeting gas that once produced has gone in less than a second how does it control and regulate so many fundamental physiological processes and it does this to several ways number one it's a gas that fuel freely diffuses across cell membranes right so it can diffuse several millimeters in the tissue so it can immediately

be absorbed into the bloodstream it binds to the red blood cell hemoglobin in our red blood cells and so it's transported bound to hemoglobin in our red blood cells it oxidized back to nitrite the nitritis vasoactive in the circulation but it also binds to glutathione and glutathione is our Master antioxidant hormone and so that's a tripeptide three amino acids one of them being cysteine which is a sulfur containing amino acid so no binds to the sulfur of glutathione and then it transports and it extends the biological Half-Life from one millisecond up to tens of minutes

and hours so now we have a hierarchy of these nitric oxide vasoactive nitric oxide metabolites that are distributed throughout the whole body but again this is dependent upon sufficient nitric oxide production sufficient available files kind of redox active files and the ability of hemoglobin in the red blood cell to latch onto that nitric oxide and then transport it and that's what oxygenates individual cells and tissues of the body in Obama hemoglobin okay to make sure I understand this correctly then very quickly this gas is going to disappear but if it has secondary effects then it

can stick around in the body for longer yeah these are called second messengers right so nitric oxide is kind of the primary signaling molecule and then it activates and forms these other kind of chemical addicts right so the first pathway you know binds to an enzyme called guanocyclase produces cyclic GMP cyclic GMP is the second messenger it's dependent upon nitric oxide production glutathione is the second messenger that's dependent upon nitric oxide production no bound to hemoglobin in the red blood cell is a second messenger in transport mechanism for bioactive nitric oxide gas so it preserves

the Vaso activity it prevents it from being gone in less than a second got it and how does glutathione fit in again nitric oxide can bind to the the sulfur the cysteine residue of glutathione and then this tripeptide actually delivers nitric oxide uh systemically and so it's certain kind of what we call redox potential like certain so redox potential is an electrical potential at which an electron can be abstracted from a biomolecule and it's that redox reduction oxidation potential that allows for nitric oxide to come off at the right time in the right place from

glutathione and then it can dilate the blood vessels it can activate soluble Bond like cyclase and all these other second messengers and I believe you said for hours once some of these reactions have occurred it can stick around in the body what is the timeline again how far into the future can the no have an effect well there's there's different what we call biological half-lives of different nitric oxide metabolites one when nitride reacts when nitric oxide reacts with oxygen it forms nitrite so just like the nitrite formed in our saliva when Inno is formed and

oxygens around it reforms nitrite then if you just Infuse nitrite intravenously you get a half-life of this molecule of about 110 minutes two hours and a half-life means that after two hours fifty percent of that nitrite is gone and then after another two hours another fifty percent is gone or seventy five percent is gone so usually five or six half-lives tell us that that what you initially gave is like 99 gone so five to six Half-Life would be 10 to 12 hours for nitrite for essential glutathione it's it's probably a little bit longer maybe two

to three hour half-life and then no bound to hemoglobin it's the absolute essential kind of mechanism for tissue oxygenation uh and it's what controls nitric oxide delivery from the arterials all the way to the venous side so when when the red blood cell goes from the arteries to the vein through the capillaries it's what we call this p50 where oxygen comes off you pick up carbon dioxide but this process doesn't occur without nitric oxide so for that inner bound to hemoglobin the respiratory cycle you know probably you know one minute or so each time the

blood circulates uh you know basically getting six liters per minute pump through the heart which is full full blood body volume so Inno bound to hemoglobin is probably about a minute half-life and where this becomes really practical when it comes to Half-Life and how long this loss in the system is when it comes to dosing we know from before that you know different produce is going to have different amounts of nitrate to start but you did give us a baseline number there I think it was per day that we're aiming for I'll have you restate

what that is and then where I get curious here when it comes to again these Half-Life numbers is it better to have say like a bolus of nitrates at three times you know during the day at three different meals or is it better to have them spread out more through the day basically how often is the ideal of taking in nitrates to have the best effect well the data the clinical data if we look at the regulation of blood blood pressure and the impact on exercise performance or athletic performance we know that we need at

least 300 to 500 milligrams as a bolus as a single serving right so take it in at once you're not going to get the effect if you're taking 100 milligrams in a meal for breakfast 100 milligrams for lunch you need it as a bolus all at once but the beauty of this pathway is once you consume that it takes 90 minutes for this to become activated now for the next six eight ten hours we're slowly titrating that system and slowly generating nitric oxide over time so the best bang for your buck is going to be

all you need is just one kind of bolus whether it's ideally at lunch or dinner or whenever throughout the day you know depending upon what you're going to be doing if you're about to run a race or do a you know a marathon or triathlete then you probably want to do that before at least 90 minutes before um so yeah I think and what we're finding is there's really no added benefit to doing more right the body kind of self-regulates you give it what it needs it's going to take the nitric oxide generated upon demand

but giving more nitrate is not going to always generate more nitric oxide to see better performance better regulation of blood flow or blood pressure important we got into that because you took it the other way I was talking more about like having little doses throughout the day to keep topped up but you're saying you got to make sure you're hitting that bolus with enough in one serving to actually have the impact so if you were to do what I was talking about you wouldn't have the same impact on the body you got to have enough

in one serving to have the impact because it goes back to this five percent reduction efficacy right 25 uptake in the gut 20 reduction by the oral bacteria so let's just say if you if if you're taking in 100 milligrams of nitrate you're going to generate five milligrams of nitride and that's not going to be enough to really see any vasoactive activity dilate blood vessels normalize blood pressure induce mitochondrial biogenesis improve performance so we need to titrate it up enough to at least 300 milligrams or we're getting enough of that to activate these endogenous pathways

okay while we're talking about the 300 milligrams it gets me thinking but somebody that gets really ambitious and they try and aim for like 500 milligrams in a ballis and we know a lot of we've talked about a lot of the benefits of vanilla throughout the conversation one being that the vessels get dilated so what I'm getting at here can we have too much can we over dilate vessels can we overwhelm the body by having too much at once nitrate probably not I mean because when we looked at the night the Japanese diet you know

sometimes you're getting fifteen hundred two thousand milligrams through certain dietary choices and certain foods they eat and I think that's why this is an efficient it's such an inefficient mechanism right because if we converted all of that into nitrite and nitric oxide then probably after a you know heavy meal of vegetarian or plant-based meal everybody would get an unsafe drop in blood pressure that pass out and go to sleep because they don't have enough perfusion pressure right they get syncope so the body is very resilient in fact that it regulates what it needs but it's

like a U-shaped curve right just like everything in in physiology we know too little is bad too much is bad so we have to find that sweet spot in terms of nitric oxide so how do you know if there's too much nitric oxide well there's only two signs of toxicity number one you get an unsafe drop in blood pressure and number two you get what's called medhemoglobinemia where you start to oxidize the iron of hemoglobin in the red blood cell and you oxidize it to form met hemoglobin and then you reduce the oxygen carrying capacity

of the red blood cell so you become cyanotic you'll get blue around the lips and it's it's a very serious condition but typically you'll develop really low blood pressure before you will ever develop any meth hemoglob anemia and when it comes to the other way around when people find out that they're deficient in no how do they typically find their way to your information is it because their blood pressure is running awry and they can't control it I know erectile dysfunction I've heard you talk about that being a canary in the coal mine how do

people know symptom-wise if they're deficient in no yeah you know it's a it's a very good question and something we've been trying to answer now for for 25 years and so the first question people always ask was how do I know if I need nitric oxide how do I know if I'm deficient it's about 15 years ago I developed a celebrate test script that we can test for saliva and we're really what we were testing were Europe the the ability of your bacteria in your body to reduce nitrate to nitrite so we sample saliva we're

looking at number one are you ingesting enough nitrate do you have the right bacteria to convert the nitrate to nitrite because on the saliva test strip we're measuring salivary nitrite and I think that's I tell people that's a good tool to have in your toolbox there's no false negatives if you're low you're low but there are some false positives and that's why I've gotten away from the test strip because there's people with active Dental infections oral infections show that they're kind of optimal on the nitric oxide test trip but systemically they're completely depleted right the

best example is a 50 year old hypertensive overweight diabetic patient with Ed spits on the test strip and it's bright pink well obviously this guy isn't replete in nitric oxide it's a false positive on this test so what what we rely on is the question you brought up we have to rely on symptoms so if your nitric oxide deficient what happens the first thing that typically happens is you develop erectile dysfunction right because when you lose the regulation of blood flow when you can no longer dilate the blood vessels of the sex organs whether it's

the penis or the clitoris and that's dependent upon Nitric oxides if those that vascular bed can't generate nitric oxide to dilate those organs to get engorgement then your nitric oxide deficient you develop erectile dysfunction as you said the canary in the coal mine that tells you that something's wrong that's usually first second your blood pressure starts to creep up right when you lose the production of a main vasodilatory molecule nitric oxide blood vessels start to constrict they get rigid they get stiff and now with each beat of the heart they causes damage this pulse wave

travels really quickly through the vascular tree causes a lot of damage into fecal dysfunction upregulation of adhesion molecules platelet aggregation monocyte neutrophils start sticking to the lining of the blood vessel and you start to get plaque then thirdly typically you develop exercise intolerance so if you walk up a flight of steps you become short of breath and you just can't catch a breath or you can't even go out and walk 20 minutes without feeling tired that's a nitric oxide deficiency problem if you're the insulin resistant type 2 diabetic that's a nitric oxide deficiency problem because

nitric oxide is required for insulin signaling and glucose uptake and then typically fit you start developing you lose your memory you develop mild cognitive disorders if not corrected vascular dementia if not corrected Alzheimer's because all of those are a loss of regulation of blood flow to the brain when you don't get blood flow to the brain you can't get the good stuff in you can't take the trash out bait amyloid plaque builds up towel Tangles the Hallmarks of Alzheimer's so you mentioned the test strips there being an objective way of testing this I know there's

also a test I've heard you talk about called the endopat talk more about what that is and then if you feel that's something that is only warranted if we're suffering from other symptoms like you mentioned or who should get one of those done I think everyone should you know this is a functional test it's a it's an invasive function Al device but it's really the only device that tells us how well our blood vessels are making nitric oxide right and so the basis of this we call this flow mediated dilatation or reactive hyperemia so the

basis of this test is you put a blood pressure cuff over your brachial artery up in the near your bicep and then you inflate this cuff to Super systolic levels so now there's no blood flow into the forearm so you're completely shutting off the blood supply to the form and you do this for five minutes and it's a little bit I wouldn't say uncomfortable but you start you know it's like kind of like sleeping on your arm right and your arm falls asleep you're gonna get tingling but what happens is when you release the cuff

now these blood vessels and tissues have been deprived of oxygen for five minutes and they want to increase blood flow and they do this through the production of nitric oxide so you can look at the degree of vasodilation what's called reactive hyperemia and that tells you and through a pretty complex algorithm it can tell you you're endothelial function or how well the endothelial cells of your blood vessels produce nitric oxide if you get a lot of vasodilation that tells us that your blood vessels are making sufficient nitric oxide if you don't get any dilation in

response to relieving the the releasing the blood pressure cuff then that tells us that your blood vessels aren't making any nitric oxide and even though you may not have Ed or high blood pressure any of the symptoms we talked about that's really the first sign and symptom that you're on a very slippery slope to developing chronic disease Ed hypertension everything we talked about so now you need to take corrective steps and figure out why aren't my blood vessels able to make nitric oxide is it because of my diet is it because of what I'm doing

is it because of some drug therapy I'm taking is it and then you start got to start asking questions and then start doing the things that we've shown clinically to enhance endothelial nitric oxide production all right just so I'm clear the test strip I see how that's going to be testing the second pathway although not perfect he talked about how there can be issues there doing the the Endo pot it sounds like it in the beginning when you're talking about it it's testing the endothelium but then you mentioned taking in nitrates I believe so what

I'm getting at is what can we decipher from each test is it an overlap of the two different pathways or is it one is testing one and one is testing the other the test strip is kind of measuring what we call total body nitric oxide availability so whether you're getting nitric oxide produced in the lining your blood valves from the endothelium that nitric oxide is primarily oxidized to nitride and nitrate right and so the human body doesn't discriminate nitrate coming from the diet or nitrate being produced from the oxidation of nitric oxide it just sees

nitrate circulating in the blood and then through the saline receptor is taken up in our salivary glands and then secreted in our saliva then we reduce it to nitric oxide so if you're low on the test strip let's just let's use an example if you test your saliva and it doesn't turn pink and it's completely white that tells us that you're low in nitric oxide but it doesn't tell us why you're low is it because you have endothelial dysfunction and your endothelial cells can't make nitric oxide is it because you're not getting enough nitrate from

your diet is it because you're getting enough nitrate from your diet but you're using mouthwash you don't have the right oral bacteria so but now you can start to interrogate each of these and then figure out exactly what's going wrong and why the test strip isn't lighting up but the very important distinction is a test strip is a biochemical test it's measuring a single molecule in one biological compartment the Endo pad is measuring the functional production of nitric oxide in the lining of the blood vessel so a functional measurement will always be more Reliant and

and meaningful than a biochemical test because there's too many factors that are affecting the biochemistry and the saliva in the night in the nitride and the saliva and when it comes to both of those tests how far back are they looking are they just kind of looking at the last 24 hours and how much nitrite we've taken in plus our endothelial function how do we get a picture over a longer period of time is it just doing the tests again and again yeah you know any any test we do whether it's a blood drawn whether

it's a functional test it's basically one point in time right it's what's in your blood at the time they did the blood draw same thing with the test it's how your blood vessels are reacting at the time we do the test is it when you're fasted did you just eat a really unhealthy diet because when we've done these studies so if you do it fast and you get you can show good in athelial function you go and eat McDonald's fries you know anti or an inflammatory diet then you'd redo that test you can have a

blunted response to your endothelial function and then some of our clinical trials we've done with our product technology you can get a baseline in the female function take the Los Angeles or take our nitric oxide four five six 12 hours later we retest and now we can improve it so all these tests are basically capturing a single Moment In Time based on what you did before that so I think to get a true sense of how your body's reacting or performing is you do this over time and track it and if it gets better then

I tell people don't get away from what's working keep doing if it gets worse then you gotta stop thinking what am I doing that's making my endothelial function worse right as you explain that it gets me thinking about the person that goes on a week vacation and forgets their mouthwash at home and then all of a sudden they try and do a test to see where they're at and you know you mentioned I think it was only four days that the bacteria can start to repopulate and and start converting so I could see how things

could change quite rapidly yeah look I mean oh even though we insult the body some people insult their body every day all day for years decades and yet they're still living right the body's so resilient I mean they may not may not be healthy but the body's still performing in some capacity or then be dead so and I think it's just remarkable the body's able to put up with all this abuse that we give it um but yet it doesn't have to be that way we understand the biochemistry specifically as it relates to nitric oxide

that we know what interrupts it we know how to improve it and so for me there's really no excuse and there's no excuse for cardiovascular disease being the number one killer of men and women worldwide even today billions of dollars in research you know we know what causes cardiovascular disease we know how to diagnosis and we know how to fix it what's the problem it's education and awareness right we have to go out and change the way people are treating cardiovascular disease we have to bring nitric oxide to the fore and make it the number

one consideration for Physicians seeing patients with poorly managed chronic disease uncontrolled high blood pressure uncontrolled diabetes why is that well think about nitric oxide nitric oxide controls insulin signaling glucose uptake regulation of blood flow to every organ tissue and cell in the body and it decreases inflammation oxidative stress and immune dysfunction every single chronic disease whether it's diabetes heart disease Alzheimer's same three things decrease blood flow inflammation oxidative stress and immune disruption nitric oxide corrects every single one of theirs all right let's get practical for somebody that's tuned into this point they're headed to the

grocery store they're going to start loading their cart with with a lot of the leafy greens and beets try and get their nitrate level up but then they get to the meat area and they go and grab their bacon and they see nitrate nitrite free and then they're really confused they're supposed to be getting these through their produce but yet they're bacon and their meats are advertising that they're free of these so let's talk about what's going on there well first I'll tell people turn off your TV and stop watching advertising we're being misinformed I

know in today's time that's probably not a surprise but you know I think one of the greatest myths that's ever been perpetuated there's two in the medical Sciences the first one is cholesterol causes heart disease the greatest myth that's ever been perpetuated in the medical Sciences cholesterol doesn't cause heart disease the other one which is near and dear to my heart is that nitride and cured and processed Meats causes cancer I mean it's completely myth it's been perpetuated now for 50 or 60 years so why is that well years ago they found in the 1950s

it was first reported that nitrite cured fish when consumed was causing an increased risk of certain cancers liver cancers gastro or certain stomach cancer so this is what we call an association right this is nutritional epidemiology where you take populations who are eating certain amounts of these Foods looking at outcomes years later an association but not causation now to establish causation you've got to have a biologically plausible mechanism to tie that observation to the increased risk of cancer so in the 60s and 70s they they came up with this thought that nitrite can form nitrozamines

nitrosamines can enterocolate DNA cause mutations and cause cancer so out now the story was complete nitride cures meat causes nitrosamine formation nitrogenes cause cancer well now their story falls apart because in 2000 the uh the national toxicology program of the US government did a dose escalation study to try to answer that question does nitrite cause cancer what they found was through dose escalation studies and mice rats and rabbits then there was no evidence of cancer-causing activity by nitrite in any animal on any cancers in fact at some doses it was anti-cancer so now you start

to think well we know that vegetables a plant-based diet vegetarian diet lower incidence of cancers right if nitrate and nitride cause cancer vegetarians the Japanese Mediterraneans would have about a hundred times higher cancer rate than meat eaters but we know it's just the opposite so nitride and nitrate does not cause cancer and I've I've consulted for companies like Kraft Oscar Meyer these meat companies and I tell them look you you have to get away from advertising no nitrite no nitrate added cured meat because nitrites absolutely essential for food safety if your sausage and bacon and

hot dogs didn't have nitrite there would be an epidemic of foodborne uh illnesses and deaths from E coli botulism salmonella nitrite is the only thing that preserves the antimicrobial activity of ready to eat Foods and so now in the 1970s the code of Federal Regulation changes it says if you're adding nitrite to any cured and processed meat product you have to add a certain amount of ascorbic acid erythropy and today they use erythorbate right so that prevents any nitrogative chemistry and we actually measured this we published this in 2009 and we took regular nitrite cured

bacon and then we took no nitrite added bacon and we brought it to the lab we Quantified the nitrite in it and we found that the no nitride added bacon had five times higher nitrite in it than the conventionally nitrite cured bacon so it's really consumer deception because what these meat companies are doing is they're adding vegetable powder which is a source of nitrate then they add a starter culture of bacteria called staph carnosis and these bacteria convert the nitrate to nitrite on the surface of the meat and then the nitrite cures the meat so

they're not adding sodium nitrite directly to the meat they're adding celery salt or different powders and then putting bacteria on it to form nitrite to cure the meat and what does that mean well it's a variable yield so that the food quality the shelf life of these organically cured products or less the quality of these products are much less and there's very little residual nitride even in conventionally grown or eventually cured nitride added Meats so I tell people don't spend an extra two to three dollars a pound to buy no nitrite no nitrate added meat

go and buy it you shouldn't be afraid of it in fact I tell the meat companies you should say supplemented or fortified with nitrate or nitrate because you need that we know it's an essential indispensable nutrient needed for human physiology all right so there's a lot there the fact that when you're buying nitrate free you've in your lab tested in the actual nitrite free had higher levels because of this celery powder or celery juice and the conversion with the bacteria okay but underneath all of this is the fact that you're saying it doesn't matter it'd

actually be potentially in our advantage to fortify with these but you got to ask yourself no that's exactly right so the use of nitrate salts dates back thousands of years excuse me long before Refrigeration and these early settlers had to preserve meat so if they went and killed a buffalo or a deer or some animal there was no Refrigeration so how did they preserve that carcass that's going to get them through the winter how do they do that well thousands of years ago it was discovered that if you use sea salt and to preserve that

then it created this cured meat color and so what it was it was what's called saltpet or potassium nitrate that was naturally found in sea salt that when the bacteria on that would convert the nitrate to nitrite so this goes this chemistry goes back thousands of years and so in I guess the early 19th century and and later the turn of the century it was realized that the mechanism for this was nitrite being reduced in a low oxygen environment to nitric oxide nitric oxide binds to the iron of uh myoglobin in the muscle and that

forms the nice pink nitrozeal hemochrome pigment and that's the pink color you see in all cured meat but it's not just the antimicrobial activity nitride also inhibits lipid oxidation you know lipid oxidation in humans causes a lot of oxidative stress and disrupts membranes and causes oxidation of fats and membranes nitrite prevents lipid oxidation so that's an essential anti-inflammatory molecule in human physiology so the chemistry of meat curing by nitrite basically is the exact same in what we would hope to get in kind of curing the only human body of chronic disease so nitrite is absolutely

a cure it's a cure for uh for me it's to prevent foodborne pathogens prevent lipid oxidation and the rancidity and warmed over flavors but it's also a cure in human physiology for curing conditions of nitric oxide deficiency which is heart attack stroke vascular Dimension and diabetes so that's what we focused on for the past 20 years is how do we provide a treatment a therapeutic a safe and effective nitric oxide technology that can overcome a lot of these poorly managed diseases so when it comes to the nitrite in conventional Meats are they getting that from

sea salt and from plants or what are they doing to to get that and add it to the product well and conventionally cured meat products like your normal hot dogs bacon sausage ready to eat meat they're adding sodium nitrine so it's just a salt it's a white salt they added there's restrictions and there's regulations on what type of product how much you have to add to get an efficient cure in antimicrobial activity for the organ organically cured or no nitride added cure they're adding primarily the industry standard is cell result so celery is a high

source of nitrate you sprinkle that as a brine then you add the starter culture the bacteria the bacteria reduce the nitrate to nitrite and that's where you're getting the Cure but in turn even in you know uncured meat like if you take a steak for example it's uncured unprocessed just call it a rib eye and we grind that up there's still nitrite and nitrate in that muscle and why is that well that cow was once eating grass green grass right that green grass has nitrate in it and cows are ruminants with several stomachs so now

they've got a diverse microbiome that's reducing that nitrate into nitride and nitric oxide and it's actually assimilated into the muscle so now when we eat the fresh meat from that cow whether it's hamburger meat or a steak we're getting a source of nitrite and nitrate because of what that cow ate grass cows are vegetarians I just happen to eat vegetarians the cow I'm a meat eater right which brings me to my next question because there's so much popularity these days in the carnivore diet and only eating meat how much of a significant Source would beef

be of nitrates and nitrites it's it's not a significant source so I I think you know I'm not a big fan of either these extreme diets like a hardcore carnivore or hardcore plant-based I think we get our nutrients from a balance of food in moderation from a diverse food population I think that's how we evolved and I think that's what's going to give us the most nutrients we get so when we quantify this and we've actually done this because we wanted to see if if doing a straight carnivore diet for a period of months or

years is this going to cause problems in terms of vascular compliance and nitric oxide production and the data tell us that you're really not getting enough nitrate from eating a strict carnivore diet because there's so little in the muscle itself that we need the vegetables we need the plants to fuel this pathway and so I think that's why it's important that we eat a balanced diet in moderation throw in some green leafy vegetables um you know get we need B vitamins and iron and a lot of the micronutrients found in in animal proteins and animal

meats that we're not getting from plants and we need the nutrients in plants that we're not getting from from animal proteins and meats so I think I think we need a balance and if you're not if you're not doing that then I think it's uh you know you should do a micronutrient analysis to figure out what is your what's your body missing and then supplement that nutrient and that's personalized nutrition which this naturally takes us to plant toxins so people on a carnivore diet typically talk about plant toxins wanting to avoid things like phytic acid

and lectins and oxalates and we can take the oxalate piece there and expand upon that say somebody's using spinach to get their dark leafy greens to get their nitrates they're going to be getting a big hit of oxalates at the same time so what would you say to that person well you know some people are sensitive to it and some people aren't obviously if you're sensitive to oxalates you're prone for kidney stones gallstones things like that so everybody's different and so we have to that's why I think it's impossible to kind of ascribe a one

size fits all for everybody you know I think there's some truth in you know blood types and requiring certain nutrients and certain dietary patterns from based on your blood type I think it's dependent upon the gut microbiome some people are sensitive and can't digest things because they have gut dysbiosis so we have to fix the gut and then now they become less sensitive to different foods or food allergies but again the body is really resilient in the fact that if you give the body what it needs the body's going to perform for you but if

you're sensitive to certain things then obviously that's a sense and the sign that your body your body telling you hey this really doesn't agree with me so let's let's avoid that as you talk about the blood type there gets me thinking about genetics as a whole and this to me would apply more to the first pathway the endothelium how much variance do you see between different people and how good they are at making I know we know the whole field when I took genetics as a sophomore at University of Texas when I was an undergrad

that genetics course is completely into Antiquated to what how we know genetics today so the genetics I learned is completely different thanogenics today you can no longer blame your disease or your condition on genetics because now this whole field of epigenetics of how we regulate and turn genes on and turn genes off is what controls the day and we know certain foods can be epigenetic drivers and turn certain pathways on expression of down regulate certain proteins upregulate other proteins and it's the nutrients from the diet that control the epigenetic regulation of protein expression so let's

take for example and there's all types of different genetic Snips or what's called single nucleotide polymorphisms and so those are just um errors in the genetic code or the sequencing to transcribe and translate that protein so the most obvious or if you've got a snip in your Enos or any of the NOS enzymes then probably that enzyme even if it's expressed and made into functional protein it's not going to have optimal activity right because there's a there's a problem in the there's an error in the sequence of that the DNA sequence the amino acid sequence

and the other problem is MTHFR what we call the methyl tetrahydrofolate reductase and that snip is you know depending on which reports you read 45 to 55 percent of the US population so if you have an MTHFR snip then you're by definition nitric oxide deficient because that enzyme is what converts biopter into tetrahydramopter and that's the rate limiting step in nitric oxide production through the enzyme so MTHFR you have an uncoupled NOS you can't make nitric oxide so now you're dependent upon the nitrate pathway because you have severe endothelial dysfunction all right so where that

comes into play is genetic wise like you just talked about and then also aging the good thing about this is we know there are two pathways and not that you should be neglectful of pathway two till you get older but when you do get older if you do have a genetic you know predisposition luckily we can make up for it or at least largely so with the second pathway yeah you know the there's enormous redundancy in the human body and it didn't make any sense to me that if nitric oxide is so important and critical

in everything we read in the science and observe in clinical medicine then why would the body develop a single Pathway to make nitric oxide and then this pathway becomes dysfunctional over time and so I think the way the human body is designed is one can compensate for the other there's a balance of these but if you develop endothelial dysfunction then you become Reliant upon the dietary pathway if you have good methyl function then you can get away with eating a poor diet and I think I look at kids you know I have young kids 15

and 12 now and they you know even when I was young I didn't eat a very healthy diet but yet I was in great shape I was Physically Active I wasn't overweight and I was an athlete so why is that well it's because my endothelial function was good and I could get away from not getting nitric oxide from my vegetables but now the older I get I realize that now I've got to compensate some I need to throw in some more green leafy vegetables and feel this pathway because you know if I do some bad

things and I go out and you know eat an inflammatory meal or I've been traveling a lot and exposed to a lot of toxins then my endothelial function goes down and I've got to compensate over here but I think if we can maintain good endothelial function maintain nitric oxide production from our diet then we're truly optimized humans and I think that's what defines you know human optimization and whether that's you know Improvement in longevity longer lifespan better quality of life better performance in the boardroom the bedroom or on the athletic field I mean for me

it's about human optimization earlier we talked about Arginine and the fact that there's definitely no advantage to supplementing and putting more of that substrate into the mix there could even be detriment I want to zoom back from that and talk about supplements as a whole and I know you have a lineup of products as well let's talk about your products versus some of the more classical supplements people are tuned into like possibly going to the health food store and not Arginine we've already got into that but other ones and what's useful and what's not yeah

you know it's one of my biggest frustrations you know I'm trained as about chemist and physiologists so my whole motivation in getting this filled was to develop understand human disease to the extent that we could fix it right so we we've we've accomplished that we know nitric oxide enzymology biochemistry inside out now we know how to fix it so that my underlying objective and motivation was to develop safe and effective drugs for nitric oxide get this technology through the FDA so we can have safe and effective drugs for for Physicians to write prescriptions for their

patients but we know that that takes about 10 years and 800 million dollars to bring that to Market so years ago I developed a dietary supplement product technology so that we could take what's missing from the diet primarily in the form of nitrate or the ability to convert it to nitride and nitric oxide and then give that back to nitric oxide deficient patients right but the frustration and the problem in the nutrition and dietary supplement industry is that everybody says the same thing right you got the Arginine folks pushing their nitric oxide products in it's

a nitric oxide product it's going to promote nitric oxide help in blood pressure performance blah blah blah well there's a there was an act called The Shea act the dietary supplements health and Education Act uh from years ago maybe 20 years ago that allowed companies to now market and support the normal structure and function of the human body that was how dietary supplements were born but you can make drug claims you can just say they support the normal structure and function of the body but yet 99 of the products out there that are marketed as

nitric oxide products do not work we've tested them they don't stimulate they don't activate they don't produce nitric oxide so these are called nutraceuticals so my challenge was how do we differentiate what I do what my products do which actually generate nitric oxide gas that we can quantify we can verify and we can detect how do I differentiate that from all these other yahoos on the market that are selling nitric oxide products that don't do anything but deceiving and defrauding the consumer so I created a new term called nitraceuticals so it's on the kind of

a play on nutraceuticals but what we do are nutraceuticals and we actually generate nitric oxide gas and so I've copyrighted and trademarked this term we own it and we make products that are nutraceuticals that are completely different than any other products on the market and so any product that we bring to Market we can detect nitric oxide coming off of it we see the physiological effects of nitric oxide we can look at valid endpoints in terms of patients who take it we can see normalization of blood pressure and proven exercise performance improve Improvement and cognition

blood flow throughout the body Improvement endothelial function everything that nitric oxide is known to do we can actually quantify and detect that in the products that we develop and then the other the other major problem is you know beats beats became a kind of a hero vegetable in 2012 in the Olympic Games in London when it was realized that most of these Olympic athletes were drinking liters of beetroot juice because there was evidence that it would produce nitric oxide and then enhance their performance now the market is flooded with bead powders beet gummies beet chews

and I mean it's it would be humorous if it wasn't dangerous for the entire industry because these products can't work you cannot get nitric oxide in a gummy or a chew and so there's nothing super about some of these beet products that are marketed on TV in fact it's you know it's outright fraud and it's deceiving the consumer and the customer so what we do is we try to and and my motivation for this is is authentic because it could kill the entire nitric oxide industry and I hear this all the time and I go

well I've taken nitric oxide and it didn't seem to do anything for me what do you mean we go I took this beat powder that I saw advertise on TV or this beat gummy and it didn't do anything but it's nitric oxide and I don't know what you didn't take Nitric Oxide you took a product that was fraudulently marketed as a nitric oxide product so when people come to me and say hey I've tried nitric oxide didn't work it's not that important I go what no no you this could kill an entire industry Nitric oxide's

so important for what we're doing in the history of medicine in the future of medicine that this cannot be allowed to happen so we have to call these companies out we have to demonstrate products that actually generate nitric oxide now when they take our products they actually see the effects we can we can support normal blood pressure we can improve performance and now when they take nitraceuticals or products actually generate nitric oxide now they see the effect now they got the aha moment ago this is life-changing so that's the point and we have to call

these companies out we have to call a spade a spade and you know some of these products contain certain nutrients that may be good nutrients but they're not nitric oxide products so stop calling them nitric oxide products so would it be fair to say the big difference between what products you're making versus some of these others that are on the Shelf at the supplement store that say a beet powder at the health food store would be more of a nitrate supplement where you'd need to still create nitric oxide in the body and yours is bypassing

the endothelium and those other steps in creating nitric oxide final product in the body that it can use yeah that would be the best case what you talked about the night the Beet powders being a source of nitrate so we've taken I've tested hundreds of these beet powders and 99 of them don't contain any detectable amounts of nitrate or nitrite so they're not even providing the precurchers at a level that your body even could convert it so these are deadbeat products in fact we use them as placebos in our clinical trials the only thing they

do is turn your pee in your poop Pink and cause a lot of anxiety they do nothing in terms of nitric oxide so what we do is completely different and the whole the whole motivation for this was if your body can't make nitric oxide because you have endothelial dysfunction or because you're not getting enough nitrator because you're using mouthwasher but because you're using in acids then we have to do it for you your body can't make it it's clear I can give you all the substrates precursors but if your body can't convert it to nitric

oxide which is your problem then you're not going to get a benefit from that and I don't want to create a product that creates benefit for one in three people I want to develop a product that's going to provide benefit to every single person that takes it whether they're getting enough nitrate from their diet whether they're using mouthwash or not whether exposed to fluoride or not or whether they're on an acid or not so my product technology when you take it it generates nitric oxide for you we're not dependent upon the conversion of nitrate we're

not dependent upon the oral bacteria we're not dependent upon stomach acid production we control and dictate the metabolic state of the product technology that we put in your body more importantly we fix the enzyme that makes nitric oxide in the lining of the blood vessel we create a certain electrical potential in that product technology that recouples the NOS enzyme prevents tetrahydrobotter and oxidation now we improve endothelial function you know the other thing by giving these bacteria on the crypts of the tongue a source of nitrogen in our Lawsons we're seeing that we we can increase

the diversity of the oral microbiome we can increase the number of nitrate reducing bacterium so now we're improving the body's ability to make nitric oxide from both pathways we're giving the body a source of nitric oxide but we're actually improving the body's ability to make it on its own so over time theoretically you would need less and less of my product over time because we're actually fixing the reason your body couldn't make so that's probably a poor economic model from a business standpoint but it's a beautiful physiological model and I'm more interested in maintaining the

Integrity of science than I am in making a profit from selling products because we have to understand why people can't make nitric oxide and fix it that's how the human body is designed to work you went right where I was going to go next the fact that taking a supplement like that gets me thinking about is it something I need to take for life and you you addressed it sort a little bit there the fact that it's going to fix the physiology at least to some extent have a long-term benefit but have you guys done

specific research where people have taken this for a period of time stopped and then say like a year later retested to see if the changes are lasting yeah you know it's it's hard to change people's habits right and humans are conditioned to they want to fix they want a simple fix they want to peel they can swallow to overcome their bad habits right nobody wants to change their diet and start exercising right so people are looking for for a silver bullet and I'm gonna tell you nitric oxide is not a silver bullet my products are

not a silver bullet that doesn't exist so what we're finding and I'm probably the best example I've been doing this for 20 years been taking my nitric oxide for for about that long and I take it every day not because I think I need it every day it's because the world we live in is so toxic right the air we breathe I'm on an airplane every week for the past five six seven years every week I'm on an airplane going somewhere going into a hotel with a lot of emfs airports you know exposed to environmental

pollutants intoxicants and a lot of times I don't get to eat a very good diet so I take it prophylactically to protect my body from The Assault that I'm getting on a daily or weekly basis so with that said if we lived in Utopia in a perfect world where we didn't have herbicides pesticides environmental toxins the air we breathe was pure then no you would never need to supplement anything and if the food we ate was replete and all the vitamins minerals and nutrients we needed then you would never need to supplement and it would

be true Utopia but unfortunately that's not the world we live in so I think what we're finding is a daily nitric oxide boost is I think fundamental to preventing the sage-related loss and I think the conversations needs to be to for people being proactive instead of reacting today medicine is a reactive practice humans are reactive right we don't take action until we have a heart attack or stroke or or something we're driven by fear we have to change that we have to be proactive do the things that we need to do to prevent our body

from getting sick and developing these so-called fears of and having heart attacks and strokes because we know how to we know how to completely prevent that so maybe that was a long-winded answer to your question but I think if if you get modern physical exercise which stimulates nitric oxide you eat a good clean anti-inflammatory diet and you get exposure to 20 30 minutes of sunlight a day and you restrict your exposure to things like fluoride chlorine things we're exposed to then typically not your body is going to perform and do what it's designed to do

but very few people live in that in environment I live out on 800 acres out in the middle of nowhere we eat our own beef we grow our own vegetables the air we breathe is clean we don't have fluoride in our water we've got a full filtration system and I haven't been sick in more than 20 years so but you know I take care of myself I exercise I supplement with nitric oxide and a few other supplements that I'm typically not getting from my diet so everybody's different and everybody has a different kind of objective

and uh you know metabolic Demand on what they're trying to achieve and what they're trying to do so you know you have to personalize your own approach as we're talking about supplements it gets me thinking back to something we mentioned earlier erectile dysfunction which when we hear that we all automatically think about Viagra and the blue pill what I'd like you to do is compare the physiology of somebody taking that versus one of your supplements do they act in a similar way in the body and is the Viagra just more powerful or decipher between the

two now look everybody's familiar with with the blue pill and these drugs were approved in 1998 so they've been on the market for 25 years and these drugs are called phosphodiesterase Inhibitors so there's there's a misconception in Medicine by some really smart Physicians you just understand the mechanism of action but there's a misconception that these drugs are nitric oxide donors these drugs are not nitric oxide donors in fact they're dependent upon nitric oxide production so when I mentioned earlier when we started this when nitric oxide is produced it creates a second messenger called cyclic GMP

and that cyclic GMP is what leads to the calcium dependence smooth muscle relaxation in blood vessel dilation and it's drugs like Viagra the phosphidesterase Inhibitors that prevent the breakdown of cyclic GNP so I tell people nitric oxide turns the switch on and then the Viagra keeps it on because it prevents the breakdown from cyclic GMP and that's the reason you're warned against four-hour erections and unsafe drop in blood pressure that's why you have all these side effects because now you've lost regulation you've turned the switch on but there's no off right you're continuing to have

the cyclic GMP around because you're preventing the breakdown but here's what we've also learned in 25 years 50 of the men that are prescribed Viagra or Cialis or Levitra the three main branded drugs don't respond with better erections so why is that if you're given a phosphodus inhibitor why don't they dilate the blood vessels and improve erectile dysfunction it's because in these non-responders they're not able to make any nitric oxide to activate the second message recycling GMP so now there's no substrate for these drugs to work on so what does that mean erectile dysfunction is

a symptom of insufficient nitric oxide production and now if you fix their nitric oxide with our technology or something else now the non-responders to Viagra become responders and the responders you can actually titrate down the dose because they need less of the drug to optimize the effect because we're improving the underlying problem in these patients with Ed is we're improving their nitric oxide production and now allowing the signal Cascade to do its job produce cyclic GMP activate the enzymes dilate the blood vessels improve blood flow improve erectile function and then type of GMP is broken

down you gain regulation again and you don't have a four hour erection but you can perform and then recover and that's how the body's designed to work and I want to tie this back to what we said earlier the Ed is a canary in a coal mine and I'm sure for a lot of people that's what brings people into this world and wanting Solutions but if you're having a problem in that Realm it means you have a huge no issue Beyond Ed and use this as a warning sign to get to the bottom of this

and prevent hopefully quote unquote more serious issues such as a heart attack or stroke look if you have in the female dysfunction in the vascular bed of the sex organ right that same the conditions that allowed for endothelial dysfunction in the Corpus cavernosum of the penis for example those conditions are going to cause endothelial dysfunction in the coronary arteries the endothelium in the heart so if you have endothelial dysfunction in the sex organs you have endothelial dysfunction in the coronary arteries you have endothelial dysfunction and cerebral arteries you have any female dysfunction on the pulmonary

arteries the liver the kidneys every organ in the body so it's just kind of socially inconvenient that you're not able to regulate blood flow to the sex organs upon demand but think about this if you can't regulate blood flow to the heart upon demand and dilate the blood vessels when you start to exercise you're going to get ischemium or angina because you can't dilate the blood vessels and you're going to get chest pain occlusion of the blood vessels and heart attack or if it happens in the cerebral arteries are going to get a stroke so

this is really the canary in the coal mine and it should be a warning signal for people that have erectile dysfunction that hey this isn't just a sexual problem this isn't just a testosterone problem or an estrogen problem in women this is a vascular problem insufficient nitric oxide production and it's systemic it manifests in the sex organs first but you have systemic disease and it's called nitric oxide deficiency you mentioned there the fact that it affects the sexual organs first how long does that take when somebody has Ed is this they've been having issues with

no for years or did they catch it really quickly with that symptom we know the sex organs are pretty dynamic in the fact that you have to respond with an increase in in vasodilation to a larger degree I mean probably I mean the coronary arteries are probably the most responsive because the only way to increase oxygen delivery to the hearts increase the metal demands on the part when exercising is through vasodilation in the heart there's already 100 maximum oxygen extraction through normal blood flow so to increase oxygen utilization and oxygen delivery got to dilate the

blood vessels and the sex organs you know there are a number of things that control vasoactivity you know you have hormone regulation if you have low testosterone obviously you're going to have some degree of erectile dysfunction but you can have optimal testosterone decrease nitric oxide production and you're never going to get an optimal erection so what we're finding is that there's a it's a spectrum right it's not just like a switch where one day you have good erectile function the next day you have full-blown Ed it's a spectrum so you start to develop slight erectile

dysfunction sliding Cathedral dysfunction if not corrected and you're not changing your habits and improving your endothelial function then it's just going to continue to get worse one day you wake up and you're not going to be able to get an erection and that's full-blown Ed so I think with any disease process we can if we catch it early on we can certainly reverse it and I think it's we demonstrated this in in erectile dysfunction or patients with mild cognitive disorders if we catch it earlier in the process restoring ethelial function produce nitric oxide then we

can completely reverse that vascular dysfunction and that's the goal is that we start to make people aware of signs and symptoms of nitric oxide deficiency stop doing the things that are disrupting it get off mouthwash get rid of fluoride stop using in acids and start doing the things that promote it start exercising 20 30 minutes a day get modern physical uh or sunlight 20 30 minutes a day and throw in some more green leafy vegetables that's pretty simple and that actually saves people money and then if all else fails or you want to kind of

a biohack it then we have product technology that does it for you we've gone deep into the dietary piece and obviously that's foundational for all this but before we part ways you've touched on exercise and sunlight a couple times and you gave a little bit of a description of what we'd want to do in those Realms but let's get more nuanced and talk about what the ideal dose would be frequency and what's happening with the physiology with those two specifically well sunlight first there's certain wavelengths of light there's both on the on the UV side

of the spectrum on the ultra or the infrared so these different wavelengths of light provide a certain frequency that will liberate nitric oxide down to what we call photo label stores whether it's Metals in the tissue or even cysting thoughts so when we generate nitric oxide as I mentioned nitric oxide gas is gone but it creates these second messengers and then when we're exposed to sunlight for instance infrared light that frequency will actually knock nitric oxide off of metals so if nitric oxide is captured by a metal it can liberate it become vasoactive that's why

you know sunlight lowers blood pressure you know it does a lot of things and then the UV side will actually cleave inno-bound assisting tiles so we have to have enough of these kind of photo label stores of nitric oxide to be acted upon by the sunlight or infrared or certain wavelengths of light so I tell people if you're using infrared light or an infrared sauna dose up with nitric oxide prior to going out in the sunlight or the getting an infrared Sona because we can actually improve the efficiency of light therapy and then an exercise

you know we need oxygen to make nitric oxide and we need nitric oxide to deliver oxygen when we exercise we reach an anaerobic threshold where we run out of oxygen so the body is no longer able to produce nitric oxide but if we titrate up with nitric oxide first we create a buffer a reservoir that when we run out of oxygen now we have a kind of a reservoir of nitric oxide that pushes the oxygen gradient extends the anaerobic threshold and improves performance so they're both even if you don't titrate up then exercise has been

shown to stimulate and activate nitric oxide production because what happens that tissue is running out of oxygen and going hey I need I need to adapt to this exercise because I don't want to run out of oxygen again and the body responds by creating more blood vessels called angiogenesis generating more nitric oxide nitric oxide improves mitochondrial biogenesis so now the cell has more mitochondria generating more ATP more efficiently with less oxygen so that's the Adaptive effects of exercise and the Adaptive effects of nitric oxide production so loading I think what we do is and I

mentioned this earlier if you're if you're like us Jesse we're relatively young and healthy and don't have any disease or symptoms then the dosing and the metabolic demands on us are much different than somebody with you know 60 with high blood pressure Ed and diabetes so for us usually one one dose a day of our lozenge or our nitric oxide beats product before a workout and we developed this to kind of titrate in what's called restorative physiology give the body What's missing so obviously somebody who's 50 or 60 with diabetes Ed high blood pressure they're

going to need a much higher dose or much different dose than what you and I are requiring so for those I say one laws ever you know six eight ten hours depending on the individual to start with that's kind of the loading dose and then you know your body's going to respond and kind of reset the rheostat if you will and then you can kind of lower the dose and just be on a maintenance dose but everybody's different and you know you just have to kind of self titrate in and pay attention to your body

when it comes to the lozenges or the Beet powder what are the biggest symptom differences people report when they start taking those yeah you know it's always I mean there's three things better blood pressure better erectile function and better sleep uh and those those are three big ones I mean most people don't get enough sleep um Ed 50 of the men over the age of 40 self-reported some type of erectile dysfunction and then blood pressure two out of three Americans have an unsafe elevation and blood pressure and many people are looking for natural remedies for

blood pressure so those are the big three for the laws and the the No Beats which is our fermented bead powder we pre-convert it we take the oxalates out so it's a it's a beet powder but it's white uh no beep pulp no beat crystals no oxalates and no bead taste we use that as an energy source or a pre-workout we've seen an enormous Improvement in exercise efficiency um the perceived exertion of an exercise regimen is much less and then just more energy I mean you can take it in the afternoon and we really position

this to be a replacement for things like Red Bull Monster Energy Five Hour Energy these stimulant ridden really dangerous energy drinks that people are drinking so why not take a natural source of energy that repletes the body of nitric oxide improves circulation it improves energy naturally I mean that's the beauty of these products and if somebody tuning in right now wants to give one of them a try we have a discount I think it's a discount code we'll put in the show notes so people can access that so thank you for that and I just

want to thank you for coming on the show this was super informative we went into a lot of detail and I learned a lot I'm sure the audience did as well and I just appreciate the work you're doing Nathan thank you well Jesse thank you I mean it's look nothing we do would ever mean anything if we can't get it out to the masses and I think that's what you do is so important because now we can speak directly to the masses and and cover really the tough biochemistry and Physiology but hopefully put it in

a in a way that's easily digestible but most importantly that is practical and you can from the moment you get up from watching this you can start making changes and to stop doing the things that disrupt nitric oxide production and start doing the things that promote it and your body will thank you for it yeah there's a lot of powerful inputs that's what I love about this conversation that people can Implement right away and and see changes and Nathan one last thing we'll end on here the fact that you've been in this world for so

long you've done so much research and you have this lineup of products you've written books what's next for you you mentioned you're still relatively young and healthy you got a lot of years ahead of you and you've done all this work where you going next well I hope I have many years ahead of me you know we never know right but you know I think what excites me every day is getting up is we have a drug Discovery program I've got a drug company called Brian Therapeutics we're developing nitric oxide drugs we've got drugs and

clinical trials for ischemic heart disease we've got a drug for Alzheimer's got a topical drug for diabetic ulcers and non-healing wounds and I see this as really the way we treat patients for the next hundred years so there's really not an indication that would not be affected or improved by nitric oxide at the right dose at the right time in the right patient and that's the that's the objective and mission of our drug company is to bring safe and effective nitric oxide drugs to the market for every major health indication there is out there so

that's exciting I've got a new book coming out probably in the late fall early winter called The Secret of nitric oxide picked up by Major publisher so we should have that out hopefully uh in the winter at the latest but it it's really to try to build awareness in educational nitric oxide it's partly autobiographical talking about the discoveries we made from 20 25 years ago and how we've seen this into the translation of safe and effective nitric oxide product technology but more importantly it's to hopefully teach and get people to understand the importance of nitric

oxide and what they can do to take control of their own health and be proactive and not reactive all right like I mentioned before we're going to link up the discount code we're going to link up your books and your research everything in the show notes and I just want to thank you again for coming on the show it's been great thank you Jesse appreciate you now that you're finished Nathan you're going to want to stick around here and catch my chat with Dr Lou he won a Nobel Prize for his work in nitric oxide

you don't want to miss this I'll see you over there and then I realized that I was awarded the Nobel Prize I just want the world to realize how important I