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Dr. Alexis Cohen (Jasmine Cohen) and the host discuss a wide-ranging view of health, science, and society, centered on mitochondria, light biology, and decentralized approaches to knowledge and healing. - On science, health, and authority: - Cohen argues that “we really haven’t been doing science for about seventy years now” and that modern science has become scientism, with people looking to scientists and doctors as authority figures over personal health, even though no one can fully know another’s lived body experience. - She emphasizes that aging is a reflection of mitochondrial heteroplasmy and that there are ways to slow or speed that burden, but contemporary living habits harm mitochondrial health. She asserts there are incentives to promote lifestyle advice that is not monetizable (outdoor activity, barefoot grounding, seasonal eating, movement), which she says slows research and access to information. - The conversation asserts a need to reclaim personal authority over health and to recognize life as magical and miraculous. - Personal entry into Bitcoin and crypto curiosity: - Cohen notes she and her partner became interested in Bitcoin in 2018, with a continued engagement including taking a cryptography course to understand the underlying proofs rather than accepting information at face value. - Background and work: - The host introduces Cohen as a Princeton-trained molecular biologist, a PhD focusing on metabolism, gut health, and circadian biology, who shifted from academic research to helping people rebuild health through nutrition, movement, mitochondrial function, and light exposure. Cohen shares that her own childhood illnesses, weight issues, and colitis prompted a pivot from academia to health coaching, emphasizing ownership of wellbeing through science and practical lifestyle strategies. - Cohen highlights that she values rigorous science but seeks practical lifestyle strategies to empower clients to understand their biology and take ownership of their health. - Dance, embodiment, and biology: - Cohen describes taking up social dancing (salsa, bachata, merengue, fox trot, hustle) and training intensely. She explains dancing challenges the brain in novel ways, requires being guided by a partner, and expands neural connections. - The host shares similar experiences with dance, noting body memory across decades and the importance of movement, rhythm, and social connection for health. - Mitochondria, heteroplasmy, and light: - Cohen explains mitochondria as the battery of the cell, with their own circular DNA and multiple roles in ATP production, biosynthesis, and epigenetic regulation. Heteroplasmy, the mutation burden in mitochondrial DNA, reflects dysfunction that can lead to energy production deficits across tissues. - She notes three key mitochondrial outputs: - ATP production powers cellular processes and metabolism. - Metabolic water production (including deuterium-depleted metabolic water). - Biophotons, photons largely in the UV range, emitted by mitochondria and nucleus during electron transport; older, sicker individuals emit more light due to increased permeability of the system. - Cohen argues aging mirrors mitochondrial heteroplasmy and mutation accumulation, with higher mutation burdens in tissues like immune cells, gut, liver, and brain associated with disease. She also discusses that mitochondria contribute to energy, water, and biophotons, and that modern life elevates heteroplasmy by lifestyle choices. - She argues heteroplasmy can be slowed or sped, and that there are actionable interventions—though the exact list is not exhaustively enumerated in this segment. - Why mitochondrial health isn’t the central target: - Cohen says mitochondrial health research is less profitable because it emphasizes lifestyle and environmental changes rather than drugs, which affects funding and research direction. She describes a system where focusing on broad environmental and lifestyle changes could be financially less lucrative than drug-centered approaches. - She expands on historical dynamics in science, including siloing of scientists and the development of a paywalled academic publishing model, suggesting that the system discourages holistic, integrative approaches that would unify mitochondrial biology with systems biology. - Light, circadian biology, and UVA/UVB: - The discussion shifts to light as a regulator of mitochondria. Cohen divides the sun’s spectrum into ultraviolet (UVB and UVA), visible light, blue light, and near infrared (NIR). She emphasizes that near-infrared light penetrates deeply and stimulates mitochondria, while UVB promotes melanin production via POMC and MSH peptides, affecting energy balance, mood, and metabolism. - UVB light triggers alpha-MSH and beta-endorphin production, the latter contributing to mood and dopamine support, and helps regulate energy expenditure and appetite via POMC-derived pathways; UVB exposure supports melanin synthesis, redox balance, and photoreception across tissues. - UVA light activates Neuropsin receptors on eyes and skin, aiding circadian entrainment and nitric oxide production, which improves vasodilation and nutrient delivery. Neuropsin is present in skin and testes; its stimulation is linked to testosterone and fertility enhancements. UVA also helps anchor local circadian rhythms in tissues. - Cohen discusses the misperception that UV light is universally harmful and argues that melanin is not only protective but can facilitate energy capture from high-energy photons to support energy metabolism in humans. Melanin’s roles extend beyond protection to potential energy transduction, with POMC, MSH, and alpha-MSH linking light exposure to metabolic regulation. - The My Circadian app is recommended as a tool to track sunrise, UVA/UVB rise, and lux (brightness) to optimize exposure. Cohen notes indoor environments rarely exceed 1000 lux, while outdoor brightness can reach 60,000–60,200 lux, significantly impacting serotonin production, mood, and cognition. She emphasizes the importance of bright daytime light for circadian alignment and melatonin suppression at night. - Infrared, LEDs, and indoor lighting: - The conversation covers lighting technologies, noting fluorescent tubes and LEDs minimize near-infrared and maximize blue light, which disrupts circadian rhythms and flicker, stressing the eyes and sympathetic nervous system. Cohen argues that modern lighting deprives people of infrared and UV radiation, both critical for mitochondrial function and circadian health. - She criticizes the push for energy efficiency that reduces thermal and infrared energy, arguing it contributes to systemic health issues. She emphasizes the importance of incandescent and near-infrared-rich lighting for indoor environments and sun exposure to sustain metabolic health. - Grounding, EMF, and environmental exposure: - Grounding (direct contact with the earth) is presented as a way to discharge excess positive charge in tissues, reducing inflammatory burden and supporting mitochondrial function. Cohen shares practical grounding instructions—grounding directly to the earth when possible, wearing natural fibers, and using grounding footwear. - Non-native electromagnetic fields (EMFs) from Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 5G, and other sources are discussed as contributors to mitochondrial dysfunction and inflammation. Cohen cites Robert Becker’s historical work on non-thermal EMF effects and Havana syndrome as context for potential biological risks. She suggests practical mitigation, including reducing EMF exposure, using Ethernet where possible, and using tinfoil to shield exposure in certain situations. Plant life can absorb EMF, and grounding, sunlight, and strategic use of red and infrared light are recommended to compensate where exposure is high. - The discussion includes practical home strategies, EMF-blocking window panels, EMF-blocking paint, and even temporary shielding (e.g., tinfoil) as a do-it-yourself mitigation approach. - Travel, circadian disruption, and protocols: - Cohen outlines travel challenges: high altitude cosmic radiation exposure (non-AVMF exposure), cabin EMFs, circadian misalignment, and sedentary behavior. She suggests pre- and post-travel strategies such as grounding, sun exposure, hydration, lymphatic support, and blue-light management to ease time-zone transitions. - She promotes an ebook protocol focused on lymphatic support and circadian realignment, available for purchase, with a holiday discount code holydays. Blue-light blocking strategies and red-light strategies are included to facilitate adaptation to new time zones. - Health, mental health, and pediatric considerations: - The hosts discuss mental health concerns, including PTSD, anxiety, and depression, emphasizing circadian regulation, light exposure, sleep hygiene, and reducing screen exposure. Cohen notes the importance of bright daytime light and a dark, cool sleeping environment for sleep quality and mood. She mentions a study showing even small nighttime light exposure can influence daytime metabolic markers, emphasizing the importance of darkness at night. - Birth, medications, and vaccines: - They touch on birth experiences, epidurals, and how early life interventions can influence long-term health and microbiome development. Cohen discusses pain as a portal to healing and critiques reliance on certain pharmaceutical approaches. - On vaccines, Cohen describes observed adverse effects post COVID-19 vaccination, including histamine issues, barrier permeability, and rapid cancer reports linked to vaccine exposure, while underscoring the lack of widespread funding to investigate these relationships. She mentions turbo cancers and batch variation as topics already discussed by researchers like Kevin McKernan and a need for independent inquiry. - Decentralization, science, and Bitcoin again: - Cohen envisions a decentralized health system in which multiple modalities (acupuncture, Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, allopathic medicine) can be tested for proof of work, with outcomes guiding what works best for individuals. She believes decentralization is necessary for genuine innovation, with a future vision of a decentralized, funded light research lab and a retreat model to study circadian biology, mitochondrial function, and nature-based health in diverse environments (North America and equatorial regions). - She sees Bitcoin as a tool that enables financial sovereignty and autonomy, providing an opportunity to fund decentralized science and publish findings on blockchain to protect against censorship. She highlights the potential for Bitcoin to support a lab through deflationary funding and to empower researchers and patients alike. - Closing: - The conversation closes with practical resources: Thinkific-hosted classes, an online book club, and a QuantumU course that reframes science education around decentralized, nature-based principles. Cohen emphasizes accessible contact options (Instagram and email) and a holiday discount for courses and ebooks. The participants express enthusiasm for ongoing collaboration, travel and events, and continued education in Bitcoin, science, and holistic health. Overall, the episode centers on mitochondria as a foundational health driver, the essential role of light and circadian biology in energy, mood, metabolism, and aging, and a call for decentralized, nature-aligned science, with Bitcoin framed as a funding and governance tool to empower individuals and researchers to pursue health innovation beyond centralized institutions.

That's another kind of myth. Right? People think, oh, my metabolic rate's high. That's why I keep the weight off. Probably what you are experiencing is a better relationship with food. It's not metabolic rate. I'll say that. You walk into a bar, you wanna play some darts and they've got the dart boards hung on the wall and you're throwing your darts at the ball. You don't know if that dart board has hung a little high or hung a little low. You just know you're trying to hit it. And that's what your body's doing with expenditure and intake. It doesn't know if you happen to have a little bit of a high metabolic rate or a little bit of a low metabolic rate. It's just trying to balance the budget and hit the center of the bull's eye.

The aging process is essentially a loss of bifidobacteria, and gut diversity follows a bell curve, initially increasing and then decreasing. Low diversity and low bifidobacteria are detrimental, especially in older individuals, though some rare cases show older people with high bifidobacteria levels. Those older patients with high bifidobacteria were much healthier. Retaining bifidobacteria could be a key factor for longevity, hence the hashtag "save the biff." The goal is to develop a protocol to maintain bifidobacteria throughout life to achieve the best health outcomes. The hypothesis is that the longer you retain your bifidobacteria, the longer you can live.

Research indicates that individuals who eat slowly are four times less likely to develop metabolic syndrome compared to those who eat quickly. This suggests that the speed of eating, rather than the specific food consumed, is a critical factor. Therefore, altering eating speed can significantly impact health, even without changing the diet itself. The core message is that mindfully sitting down and eating slowly can profoundly improve core metabolic health.

From birth, humans slowly "cook" and age, like a chicken in an oven, until death. This cooking process is glycation, evidenced by cartilage turning brown over time. Glucose spikes accelerate glycation, thus speeding up aging. More glucose spikes lead to faster aging, manifesting as wrinkles on the skin and aging of internal organs. The speaker claims to be 85 years old but appears younger due to avoiding glucose spikes.

Researchers at Duke University conducted a large metabolism study, measuring changes from 8 days old to 95 years old. They found a spike in metabolism from birth to 20 years old, but then it remains constant from ages 20 to 60. The speaker claims the reason people have a harder time losing weight after their twenties is not due to age, but because life slows down. As people grow up, get jobs, and settle into adulthood, they tend to work out less, sit more, sleep less, and carry more stress. These habits decrease the number of calories the body burns at any age. Therefore, it's harder to lose weight due to changed habits, not a mystical event after high school or college.

When you fast, your metabolic rate increases, as shown in numerous studies. This is due to basic physiology. When you don't eat, insulin levels fall, allowing your body to use stored calories. Simultaneously, other hormones rise. Your sympathetic tone, or fight-or-flight response, increases, as do cortisol and growth hormone levels. These hormones signal your body to start using calories. Consider a hungry wolf in the wild: it's activated and more dangerous than a well-fed lion. After eating, you become lethargic and want to digest your food, lacking energy. The idea that fasting slows your metabolism is false. In reality, it speeds up.

Eighty-seven percent of people are metabolically dysfunctional, meaning their metabolism is not working, resulting in high blood glucose and insulin, hypertension, and dysfunctional mitochondria. This leads to prediabetes/diabetes, increased body fat, hunger, fatigue, and accelerated aging. Dihydroberberine, the optimized form of berberine, is a glucose disposal agent. It is claimed to be the speaker's number one most powerful way to anti-age and protect against metabolic dysfunction.

Speaker 0: The more muscle you have, the higher your metabolism, even when you're just sitting around doing nothing. You see, muscle is metabolically active. This means that it burns more calories than fat even at rest. In fact, studies show that after a strength training workout, your metabolism stays elevated for hours, sometimes even up to forty eight hours. And get this, research suggests that regularly lifting weights can increase your resting metabolic rate by as much as 7% over time. That's like getting a free calorie burn while you sleep. You don't even need to lift super heavy. You see body weight exercises like squats like lunges and push ups these can all do the trick.

- Can definitely see people's, like, basal metabolic rates go get lower when they go on really, you know, kinda crash diet kinda things. - Yep. - As far as I know, I don't know of any evidence that says it doesn't just recover when you kinda go back to a more normal amount of food and a more normal exercise load. - And so I don't think anybody is sort of forever damaged from whatever they tried in the past. - Again, let yourself off the hook a little bit and it's gonna be okay.

Yeah. It's all calories in, calories out. Now the question is, how do you manage that or manipulate it? It turns out the calories out part's not as easy manip manipulated as we thought it was. That's what lesson one. And then I think on the calories in part, why do we eat so much? You know? That's that's that's fundamentally the question. Well, I think an evolutionary perspective on that helps too. I think working with folks like the Hadza helps us too, because you can kinda see that the dietary differences between a population that doesn't have an issue with unhealthy weight gain versus a population that does. And we gotta kinda pick those apart. Now I'm not, you know, I'm not a nutritionist, so be really clear about that.

- "If I measure you today, and I see that you have a high metabolic rate, and I measure you again in two years, I'll see that you have a high metabolic rate again. And it kinda even independent of what you report anyway as lifestyle change. If you're slow, you're slow. If you're fast, you're fast. Now the good news is, it doesn't seem to have a big impact on whether you've gained weight or lost weight in the intervening years." - "Yeah. So that's another kind of myth. Right? People think, oh, my metabolic rate's high. That's why I keep the weight off." - "Probably what you are experiencing is a better relationship with food Uh-huh. That you aren't being pushed to overeat the same way that somebody who says, oh, I have a slow metabolic rate is maybe more food focused and is having a hard time that way. It might not be meta In fact, it's not metabolic rate. I'll say that."

Eating one meal a day can extend your life by reducing the strain on your digestive system and activating longevity genes. These genes respond to factors like food intake, exercise, and overall consumption, and they help our bodies fight aging and slow down the biological clock. A simple swab test can accurately determine your biological age, which is more meaningful than the number of years you've been alive. With advancements in science, it has been discovered that human aging can even be reversed.

We don't have a single metric of humans that we can measure that better predicts how long they will live than how high their VO2 max is. So if you compare somebody who is in the top two percent to someone who is in the bottom twenty five percent for their age, the difference in mortality is 5x. We normalize this by weight. So the number is actually reported as milliliters per kilogram per minute. So to be clear, if you take a 35 year old man and one of them has a VO2 max of 53 and the other one has a VO2 max of 35, there is a 400 difference in their all cause mortality over the coming year.