Welcome to Special Guest Episode 445 of The Intermittent Fasting Podcast, hosted by Melanie Avalon, biohacker, founder of AvalonX, and author of What When Wine Diet: Lose Weight And Feel Great With Paleo-Style Meals, Intermittent Fasting, And Wine, and Barry Conrad, actor, singer-songwriter, and creator and host of Banter with BC.
Dr. Chris Rhodes is a PhD in Nutritional Biochemistry from UC Davis, and an expert in nutrition, biohacking, and longevity. He has spent the last 8 years of his research career unraveling the mysteries behind intermittent fasting and its incredible ability to optimize health and extend lifespan. During his clinical research into prolonged fasting, Dr. Rhodes uncovered that a 36 hour fast was able to greatly enhance the biological function of the human body, taking already young healthy people and optimizing their cellular performance, recovery, and protective systems. Dr. Rhodes discovered that these effects were due to a unique set of molecules that are produced in the body only during long periods of fasting and that these “fasting metabolites” could be used to recreate the beneficial effects of fasting without actually needing to fast. To share this breakthrough with the world, Dr. Rhodes co-founded Mimio Health, a biotech company creating first-of-their-kind biomimetic supplements designed from human biology to optimize health, slow aging, and enhance longevity.
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TRANSCRIPT
(Note: This is generated by AI with 98% accuracy. However, any errors may cause unintended changes in meaning.)
Melanie Avalon
Welcome to episode 445 of the intermittent fasting podcast. If you want to burn fat, gain energy and enhance your health by changing when you eat, not what you eat with no calorie counting, then this show is for you.
I'm Melanie Avalon, biohacker, founder of Avalon X and author of What, When, Wine. Lose weight and feel great with paleo style meals, intermittent fasting and wine. And I'm joined by my co-hosts, Barry Conrad. Actor, singer, songwriter, and creator and host of Banter with BC. For more on us, check out Melanie Avalon.com and BarryConradOfficial.com. You can submit questions for the show by emailing questions at I have podcast.com or by going to I have podcast.com. We would love to hear from you. Please remember the thoughts and opinions on this show do not constitute medical advice or treatment. So pour yourself a mug of black coffee, a cup of tea, or even a glass of wine. If it's that time and get ready for the intermittent fasting podcast. Hi everybody and welcome. This is episode number 445 of the intermittent fasting podcast. I'm Melanie Avalon and I am here today with a very special guest. It is a repeat guest. That's how you know we love these people. So I am here today with Dr. Chris Rhodes. He is the founder of an incredible company called Mimeo that we have had him on the show before actually episode, I was just saying this episode 379, so quite a while ago. And Chris and I met, we met through email right before meeting in person.
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think we actually met through Vanessa Spina on the Yeah, the keto girl podcast.
Melanie Avalon
Yes, yes, yes, that's right. So former IF podcast co-host Vanessa, that's right. Yes, we all met that way. And I was immediately overwhelmingly fascinated with what Chris does with Mimeo because they actually, and we're going to talk about this on the show, but they make a fasting mimicking supplement, essentially a supplement that you can take that creates biomarkers in your body that mimic the fasted state. And this science is just so incredibly cool.
And we were just talking before this, Chris, they are always doing really incredible research surrounding the supplement. So in today's episode, we're going to revisit that we're going to talk about what it does, how it can benefit you, how it compares to fasting, how it can potentially supercharge your fasting. And we're also going to dive into all the newest updates. I know so I'm now I am now seeing Chris at two biohacking conferences in real life in person. And he was really excited to see me. Well, that feels so that sounds so pretty just.
Dr. Chris Rhodes
I was, I definitely was.
Melanie Avalon
I was going to say you were excited to see me to tell me about a new formulation that you were working on. So there's just a lot of really, really cool stuff here.
So Chris, it's always a pleasure to talk to you, dive deep into all these things, and thank you so much for being here.
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me back.
I am really excited to be here. I am really excited to talk to you as always. We've got some fun new stuff to share and just totally ready to dive in.
Melanie Avalon
I am too. And I actually pulled out all my notes from our last episode. And I think it was long enough ago that we can make the assumption. We're going to make the assumption that people have not heard that episode rather than just reference it perpetually.
So to start things off, can you recap your story of how you came to be in this field? Because it is such a specific supplement. And I'm thinking in my head, I don't know that anybody else is doing is anybody else doing anything like this?
Dr. Chris Rhodes
No, no, we are 100% the only biomimetic supplement company. So really taking the time to look at human biology in these interesting regenerative states, whether that's fasting or exercise or sleep or meditation and really decoding what's happening in the body during these interesting times and figuring out ways that we can recreate those benefits on demand. And that's really what Mimeo is all about.
So Mimeo itself is a combination between mimic and biology together. So that kind of gets at our underlying biomimetic research approach.
Melanie Avalon
Is there a difference between the body manifesting these different states being created from you doing something to create that state endogenously versus just taking something that mimics that state? Like, how do we know if that's the same or different?
Dr. Chris Rhodes
for sure. Yeah. So there's definitely going to be some differences.
So kind of like to orient people who have not been, you know, listening to the podcast where we didn't hear the other episode before Mimeo basically mimics the same things that happened in the body during a fast. And how we know that is that we did seven years of clinical research, looking at what happens in the body during a 36 hour fast. And basically what we found there was that when people fast for 36 hours, there's this unique set of molecules that are produced by the body that are really only elevated during a fast. And we found that those were the ones responsible for activating a lot of these cellular health and longevity benefits of fasting, whether that was, you know, creating anti-inflammatory effects or antioxidant effects or promoting autophagy, what have you. So we basically just took those molecules, put them into a daily supplement so that you can take it. And this recreates fasting at the molecular level, uses those same molecules that your body would naturally produce to activate those same beneficial fasting pathways and create these same cellular and longevity health effects, but without actually having to fast at all.
Melanie Avalon
And so to that point, because I asked for the audience for questions about fasting mimetics and Marissa had a really good question. She said, if you fast daily with just black coffee and plain water with a typical window of 20 to 24 hours, do you really need these?
And then she added, I do take your Sarah peptase in my fasted state. But so basically, if somebody is fasting anyways, potentially experiencing these states anyways, what is the benefit of adding this to that?
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. So this is basically kind of a jump start to a lot of the fasting that people would ordinarily be doing. So, you know, most people are doing the 16.8 style. The question was about 24, 20 hours of fasting. So Mimeo was designed to mimic a 36 hour fast, which is a, you know, a portion of fasting that people don't normally approach all that often. Right. So we found that the molecules that are elevated during a 36 hour fast are very uniquely elevated during a 36 hour fast. So you're not really going to experience the elevation of these metabolites. Your body isn't going to be making them ordinarily during these shorter term fasting windows of like 16 hours or 20 hours or 24 hours. So if you are already fasting, then these can be a great way to kind of supercharge your benefits and get the benefits of longer term fasting that you might not otherwise experience during these shorter fasting states.
And the great part about Mimeo is that because of the molecules that we actually identified, they have their own unique effects and benefits as well that can actually help to make fasting itself easier. So one of the molecules that we identified was ole oil, ethanolamide OEA, and that's involved in the gut brain access helps to stimulate satiety, reduce hunger. So that molecule can really help to make fasting easier because it has appetite suppression effects and it has P part alpha activity, which basically means that it can help your cells themselves switch over from carbohydrate metabolism, which you would normally be running in a typical fed state to beta oxidation, ketone production, fatty acid, utilization that you would experience during fasting. So it can really help to just get your cells in this more deeper state of fasting while still in a shorter fasting window. But we have also identified that this formulation, the Mimeo formulation can recreate the benefits of fasting, even when you are eating. So we've done three clinical studies that have basically shown that we can get these fasting-like benefits even when people are eating. So if you're a normal faster, but let's say you're going off of it for whatever reason, right? Like you are just taking a break, you have a day where you're not fasting, Mimeo can really help to keep you on track, give you those benefits of fasting, even when you're not.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah, this is so cool and it's really exciting for me because I think people might think, given how much I talk about fasting for, I mean, approaching a decade now and have been doing it for over a decade, that I would regularly engage in fasts that are, you know, longer than 24 hours. I really don't, like it's, and it's not easy for me.
And the reason it's not easy is it actually might not be what some people think because some people might think I would find it difficult going longer, but it's not an appetite thing for me. Like I'm not, I don't have any issue feeling hungry at the end of my fast. It's just the sleep piece. Like I can't sleep on an empty stomach. So because the days are not 36 hours, I find it really difficult to fast longer because I just need to eat before I go to bed. So this is really incredible because it sounds like it's a way for me to achieve those benefits that I would like to get in a longer fast while still getting to not go to bed on an empty stomach.
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, that is exactly right. And that's what we've proven out in those three clinical studies that I mentioned before in all of them.
People have just been taking Mimeo eating normally and not altering their diet or lifestyle at all. And we can still achieve those fasting like benefits, which is really, really interesting. And kind of, again, speaks to that underlying biometric approach that we're doing really taking what your body would naturally do during a fast and then just giving it back to you on demand.
Melanie Avalon
So in my use case scenario or somebody who's doing a one meal a day, for example, like say, let's say they're eating dinner, when would you take it to get the effects? So would it matter if I take it during my fast during the day? If I take it with food at night? And like, when does the timeline start?
How long does it last? What's happening there?
Dr. Chris Rhodes
So actually, the way that you use it is, I think, very similar to the way that I use it. So I'm also on a one meal a day schedule. And that is an artifact of back when I was originally doing the foundational research for Mimeo. I was doing experimentation on myself, on my own cells. I did a 72 hour fast and basically was taking my blood, looking at my cells every few hours throughout that time course. And what we found there was that when people and when I fast for 36 hours or longer, there's this really profound effect on cellular functionality that happens. So cells become more resistant to stress, they become less inflammatory, they become more antioxidant, they have better metabolic flexibility, they become more cardio protective, all of these really amazing things. And when you look at that as a young kid, like I was when I was first seeing this, I was like, wow, something that I did actually affected me. And it made my cells so much healthier, even though I was already a young healthy guy to begin with. So I got very into the fasting lifestyle.
I was like, I can do something, I can make a change, I can actually improve my health, I can turn my ordinary healthy cells into basically super cells. That's so cool. So I got really into that lifestyle, started doing alternate day fasting and stuck with that for about two years. But there's an interesting element of social isolation that comes along with that, right? Because so much of our society is about bonding over food. So you're not, you know, having lunch with co workers or dinner with family and friends. And if you are having, you know, those meals with those people, then you're like, okay, cool, I'll just, you know, watch you eat while I just sit here and stare at you and drink water, right? And like, no one's about that. And so my sister eventually told me like, you know, Chris, you are gonna live longer, that's gonna be very cool. But like, what's the point of living longer if you have to live less? And that really struck a chord with me. So I ended up modifying from like an alternate day fasting schedule to more of a one meal a day schedule. But how I supplement with that is I take Mimeo in the morning, that gives me the appetite suppression effects that gives me the like the kind of cognition and energy impacts that I really want out of the day. I'll finish my work day out, go to the gym, work out in a fasted state, and then have my big, you know, one meal of the day kind of like as a reward situation really help promote the pro growth, pro protein, pro muscle incorporation pathways in the body with that meal. And that's just my day to day schedule now. And I find that that works so much better just to exist in society with the fasting lifestyle.
Melanie Avalon
This is so cool. So when you were doing the ADF, you were doing like eating nothing one day and then eating regularly the other day.
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yep, that's exactly right.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah. Oh my goodness. Could you sleep on an empty stomach when you were doing that?
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, I could.
It was definitely hard to adapt at first.
I would say that it took me probably around two weeks.
And it's very jarring, you know, the first time you do it, because I think that we have this mental preoccupation with food that's kind of been ingrained in us since we were kids just in American society, right?
It's like you have to eat three meals a day, like plus snacks, you should never ever be hungry.
And if you are hungry, that means something's going horribly wrong, like your body's eating itself, like you're starving, right?
And then you kind of have to break through that mental barrier of like, Oh, no, it's fine to be hungry.
It's fine to go to sleep hungry.
But there were definitely times when I was first doing it where I was very, very convinced, especially when I was like on a 48 hour fast, trying to go to bed on a 48 hour fast, there's just something I don't know, primal in your body that was like, if you go to sleep, you will die, you will never wake up, you know, that kind of thing.
And like once once you get through that, it's very empowering, because you kind of have this sense of Oh, wow.
Yeah.
If, you know, I just don't have to be eating all the time, if something pops up, and I don't want to eat it, I don't have to like I can go 48 hours without eating and be totally fine.
So there's a certain amount of freedom that comes with that.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I could not agree more. And still, I don't know. I don't know if I would ever adapt to the sleeping aspect of it.
Yeah, I think I did in total, maybe like three or four times I did a 36 to 48 hour fast and never really was not my cup of tea question because you mentioned the OEA. And didn't you test like over 300, like over 370 different molecules to find the four?
Dr. Chris Rhodes
That's correct. Yeah.
So when we looked at what the differences were between a baseline state and a 36 hour fasted state, we did find over 300 metabolites that were significantly different between those two states. So like 300 metabolites that were uniquely upregulated during fasting. And those were the ones that we screened through to see which could kind of mimic those beneficial cellular effects. And we ended up finding that combination of four of them that eventually became the Mimeo formulation.
Melanie Avalon
And I get just a little bit overwhelmed thinking about all of the potential, I forget the math terminology, permutations, whatever the word is for all the potential combinations of things there. How did you, and this was presumably before today's current AI, how did you like figure out that combination of four? I'm just overwhelmed by those numbers.
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Oh, I know. Yeah, it is a very overwhelming set of numbers. And yes, unfortunately, this was really before the advent of AI. So I was just, you know, a struggling grad student at the time being like, well, I have this list of 300 molecules, best get to researching. So that's exactly what I did.
I just I took that list of 300. And I looked at all of them through pub med, which is, you know, where you can find all of the scientific literature that's ever been published. And we were able to identify from that list of 300 around a two dozen or so that already had some kind of scientific literature behind them of having what we call bioactivity. So these molecules can actually impact cellular functionality, whether that's creating these anti inflammatory effects, these antioxidant effects, these autophasic effects. So from that list of, you know, two dozen or so, we then started screening through the individual molecules on these cellular assays that we have just looking at what the individual molecules themselves did to cellular functionality. And that's where we found, you know, these four different molecules that could, in some way or another, recreate the benefits of fasting. And then when we combine them together, could basically recreate all of the cellular effects that we were seeing through fasting. So that included creating those anti inflammatory effects, creating those antioxidant effects, creating those cardio protective effects, those cellular protective effects, those metabolic flexibility impacts. And really significantly, when we combine those four molecules together, we were also really interested in how this affected longevity and lifespan. So we did an experiment looking at how the four molecules together impacted longevity in C. elegans and found that we could increase their lifespan by 96% just through supplementation. So doubling their lifespan, but without any kind of fasting without any kind of caloric restriction at all, just by using this, you know, biometric fasting, the medic formulation.
Melanie Avalon
I have so many questions here. I just love talking about this.
Okay, so just a quick question about C. elegans. One, I'm just smiling and laughing to myself because I feel like I feel like C. elegans are used in lots of studies, especially on things like fasting, like I read about them a lot.
Were you actually like doing the research and like, like, like how big are it? Like, can you see C. elegans? How big are they?
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, you can definitely see C. elegans. That's a lot of the research that goes behind them. So we have, you know, we have a lot of cellular studies that happen with C. elegans. We have a lot of kind of like phenotypic studies that happen with C. elegans looking at how the genetics alters how they behave, how they look, how they grow, all those things like that.
But one of the assays that you can do with C. elegans is kind of like a, you know, a vitality assay for lack of a better term. So that's really just you looking at them under a microscope and seeing how vigorously they, you know, thrash around how fertile they are, you know, what their actual movement patterns and their activity levels look like over time. And that's really what we ended up seeing with the C. elegans lifespan. So like, not only could we extend their total lifespan, the amount of time they lived, but it also seemed like we could really extend their health span as well because these C. elegans were really like moving around. They were much more fertile, even in later stages of life where they would normally become more like docile and more dormant. So really not only just increasing their lifespan, but also it seems like their health span as well.
Melanie Avalon
Is there an understanding in the scientific community around life span extension with C. elegans for how this translates to humans?
Because I feel like we see, you know, we see 96%. Like you're not, you're not, you're never going to get 96% extension in a human. I mean, not right now. That'd be like almost double your, your life. Like what practically does that mean when applied to humans?
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, it's a really good question. And I think it varies depending from experiment to experiment, from organism to organism.
But typically how the progression of longevity research goes normally is you identify some candidate for a lifespan extension and you start testing it out in cells, right? And normally they're not even human cells. They're probably mouse cells or I'm like, maybe even see elegant cells, something like that. Once you find these cellular effects, then you move up to the organism level. And usually that next step is C. Elegans because they typically only live about a month anyway. So it's very easy to test lifespan extension interventions on them, but they still share a very good deal of genetic similarity to humans, which is really interesting. Then after that, you would probably go into a higher organism, maybe a zebrafish or like a drosophila, a fruit fly. Then you would go up to mice. Then you would go up to maybe dogs, and then you would go up to like chimpanzees, and then you would go up to humans. So the pathway of these lifespan extension interventions going from the initial cellular research up to the humans has a lot of gaps in between, I would say. And I think that the cool part about the bioemetic research that we're doing is that we kind of bypass all of that instead of starting in cells and then kind of leapfrogging our way up from organism to organism to organism and kind of hoping that it's going to have an impact on human health, we actually start with human research and then kind of confirm our results through the lifespan extension and animal models. So we know that whatever we discover from the human research, especially this bioemetic research is going to apply immediately to human health because that's where the research started. That's where the discoveries happened. And we're just seeing, does this thing that definitely has a context within human biology also work in these lower organisms?
Melanie Avalon
And so to that point, and I would love to go through the four different compounds, two questions that are related. One, because this is a supplement, not a medication, did that make it easier for the process of going through the studies?
And then, wait, side note question, did you ever think about going the pharmaceutical route versus a supplement?
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, yeah, no, definitely. I mean, me coming from the scientific and clinical background, I would have actually really liked to go down the pharma route. But the problem is that the way that the regulation happens with pharma is really, really antithetical to the biomimetic approach. So how things work in pharma is essentially, it almost always operates on a one-molecule, one-target style approach, meaning that we're going to create a chemical compound that targets a specific cellular pathway that's related to some kind of disease state ordinarily. So let's put it in the context of longevity and say like rapamycin. Rapamycin is specifically targeted towards inhibiting mTOR. And it doesn't do anything else. And that's kind of where it got its drug status from.
Just one molecule, one target, and lots of clinical research. For the biomimetic approach, we're talking about things, like we said before. In the fasting state, there are 300 metabolites that are upregulated during fasting. So if you really want to recreate these beneficial effects of fasting, and more holistically and accurately regenerate what's happening at the molecular level, you would need to use all 300 of those metabolites. And the pharma pathway cannot allow for that. Because the way that the regulatory works for pharma is that for every individual ingredient that you have within a formulation, you have to do individual testing for each ingredient, as well as testing for each various combination of those ingredients. So as you increase a formulation's complexity, then you also kind of create a higher and higher and higher mountain for yourself that you have to climb to get through the final pharma pathway to the point where it's basically impossible to do so. So in order to actually recreate the full biochemical complexity of the human body that happens during fasting, you cannot go down the pharma pathway. It's just not possible from a logistics, a financial, an economic, a timing perspective. So that's why the supplement pathway made a lot more sense. So really, we went down the supplement pathway because it was the way that we could make a better quality product at the end of the day with these multi-ingredient formulations that actually have these scientifically validated synergistic effects, because otherwise it just wouldn't have been possible to even make the product.
Melanie Avalon
Wow, yeah, that is so fascinating. Did you have, I know you said you were thinking about it, did you have a serious moment where you really did consider going the pharma route?
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, we were thinking like, like, okay, we only have four molecules, right? Like, what would this process actually look like? And what would the expense behind it be? And then what would the final kind of output be for it, right? It would have been, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars to be able to take this formulation through the pharma pathway. And then at the end of the day, it would have been kind of cordoned off from the general population, right? It would have been a drug with a specific use case for a specific condition or disease.
And that's what it would have been prescribed for. So you're taking something that was originally designed to help everybody and give them, you know, the power of their own biology on demand. And then you would have had to put it in the context of like, you can only use this for maybe, you know, 0.5% of the population who has this one specific condition. So it really would have, you know, taken a lot more time, a lot more expense, not been available to people who actually need it, who is, I think, in my opinion, like everyone, right? It's the universal human biology that we're mimicking here. And it just, you know, it would have really taken down the accessibility of the product. It would have prevented people from getting the benefits of them, which I think they deserve.
Melanie Avalon
This is such a fascinating conversation, and it reminds me of, I've had on the show David Sinclair a few times, and in his book Lifespan, he talks about how until aging itself is a disease, you're not going to really be able to have drugs to quote, treat it. So there's just like not a pathway there.
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, exactly. And I think that there's some really important strides that are being taken in the field right now to kind of address this a little bit.
I don't know if you've heard about the company loyal.
Melanie Avalon
Is it loyal?
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, loyal. So they are a they're a pharma company who is looking specifically at dog longevity.
And they are the first company to have ever gotten the FDA to acknowledge that aging is a disease and that can use drugs to treat it. And again, specifically, this is in dogs, right? So this hasn't been totally applied to humans yet. But loyal is the first company that's ever gotten, you know, FDA approval for a longevity treatment of any kind. So that's a very, very exciting kind of milestone in the longevity field of kind of opening the doors for human longevity extension drugs.
Melanie Avalon
super cool so maybe we can have a memo for dogs in the future pharmaceutical
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, oh, not to give too much away, but we are actually already working on a Mimeo for dogs products. So we just got the first prototypes for that made and are really excited to start doing the clinical testing after that.
Melanie Avalon
Oh, super cool. Congrats. That's really cool.
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Oh, yeah, we're very excited about it because I have you know, I have a seven year old husky pit bull mix who I love to death and I'm like must keep him around forever.
Melanie Avalon
And I think with dogs, doesn't their longevity correlate to their size? I think.
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yes, it does. Yeah.
Well, smaller dogs definitely live longer than older dogs. And that's actually one of the things that Loyal as a company is trying to figure out. So they think that one of the reasons why larger dogs don't have as good longevity is because larger dogs tend to have higher circulating levels of IGF-1, which is of course a growth factor, right? So that gives them larger size, but it's also generally not great for longevity because it promotes cellular division, cellular replication. And the more your cells divide, the more they replicate, the more opportunity there is for DNA damage, mutations, kind of cancer formations, a lot of things that can go wrong, right? So that's kind of the thinking behind why larger dogs versus smaller dogs have these differential lifespans.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah, it's so interesting. But what's weird about it, because that completely makes sense.
And then you also wonder, though, why do we not see that across the entire animal kingdom? Why do whales live so long? And they're massive.
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, the longevity does not take a straight path. Like if only it was that simple, maybe we would have solved it long ago. But yeah, exactly.
Like you have things like tardigrades, right? Like, you know, the little water bears that are also really highly used in longevity research because they're so hardy and can survive space and, you know, crazy amounts of radiation and things like that. And they can go dormant for 50 years and then like come back to life and you spritz bits of water on them. And then yeah, you have something super huge like elephants too, which are pretty long lived, but not as long lived as tardigrades or not as long lived as tortoises or, you know, some birds too. It's kind of, it's kind of just really interesting how the cellular mechanisms of longevity come about in the animal kingdom. And you have, you have like the jellyfish too, the immortal jellyfish that can just kind of button their way through life. It's really, really fascinating.
Melanie Avalon
It's funny, on the Mindblowing podcast, we actually talked about tardigrades the other day because we open it up with a mind-blowing fact. And we just talked about these things because A, if you Google them, they look terrifying. And then B, apparently they're just like the most resilient animal ever. Like they just don't die.
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, they truly do not they are they are fascinating to study and yeah, like, when you look at them really close up, they're super horrifying. And then if you take like, you know, just one step back, they're super cute.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah, they're super cute. So it's really interesting to see. It's so funny. Oh my goodness. Okay. So back to these four compounds. So you mentioned the OEA, then you also have PEA, correct?
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, that's palmitoyl ethanolamide.
Melanie Avalon
Okay, and then you have the nicotinamide-related one.
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, then they had nicotinamide itself. So that's serving as a broad spectrum NAD precursor in the formulation so when you take nicotinamide it gets converted by your cells into nicotinamide riboside and nicotinamide mononucleotide and NAD itself, so it's kind of giving you the Advantages of all three of those molecules, but just with one molecule and then nicotinamide itself is much more Well researched because we've been doing nicotinamide research probably since you know, the 1930s versus nicotinamide riboside or nicotinamide mononucleotide which we've really only started paying attention to More rigorously in the past, you know, 10 15 years or so
Melanie Avalon
Yeah, and for listeners with those other two that Chris is mentioning, people probably hear them referred to as NR and NMN, and it's the ever ongoing debate about which one to take and what is doing what.
Did you consider using one of those instead, or was it pretty clear that nicotinamide was the way to go?
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, we definitely considered using one of the other ones instead. But when we looked at the actual data from the fasting study, we didn't find that NR was upregulated.
We didn't find that NMN was upregulated. We found that nicotinamide itself was upregulated. So that was kind of our cue to say, all right, well, this is the molecule that we want to use and then the downstream benefits of also, you know, creating the NR and creating the NMN and creating the NAD were really important to us as well, because that's, you know, if you've existed in the longevity space for a long enough amount of time, you kind of come to realize that the whole NR, NMN, NAD debate is a lot of marketing hype and a lot of marketing press. And when you look at the actual scientific studies, the clinical studies that have been done with each of the molecules, they have, they all have very similar effects, which makes sense because they're all part of what we call the NAD salvage pathway. So that's that interconversion between nicotinamide, nicotinamide, riboside and nicotinamide, myonucleotide and NAD, they all just kind of like swap back and forth between each other from a biological and biochemical perspective. So as long as you're getting a form of these precursors that can actually be absorbed by cells, you will most likely be getting, you know, all the same effects, regardless of which variation of them you take.
Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I'm so, there's just so much information out there and I think it's very confusing to people. I've landed kind of in what you're saying that I think I would just, to be safe, take NMN and NR and I could take Mimeo and get all the things. The one that I feel, if I use NAD patches that I talk about a lot, I feel that the next day. Like that's what really, I notice a difference. So that's why I like that route.
But yeah, it's confusing. And I wonder, do you think when they were potentially banning NMN, that was because they wanted to make it into a pharmaceutical? Was that?
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, that was exactly the pathway. In the whole NR, NMN drama, there is definitely the impacts of what David Sinclair was doing and his NMN company, his NR company, where the patents fall, right? Because True Nyogen Chromadex is the one that actually owns the patent for NR, which is kind of why NMN ended up becoming so popular because people were like, well, we want an NAD precursor, but NR is already walked up with patents, so we need to create another version of it. So we'll do NMN instead.
And then NMN got all controversial because everybody started using it. And then, yeah, we wanted to make a pharmaceutical out of it. The FDA regulations around that are basically, if it's been sold for six months legally as a supplement, then it's grandfathered in. So even if a pharmaceutical is developed from NMN, then you would still also be able to sell NMN as a supplement. But then of course, the pharmaceutical companies that were making NMN didn't like that. So then they petitioned the FDA to kind of like, you know, make an exception for NMN so that they could sell exclusively and it couldn't be sold to the supplement. So it's, yeah, there's just like a ton of weird regulatory drama that goes along with all of this stuff, which is kind of another reason why we ended up choosing nicotinamide for the Mimeo formulation, because we didn't want to have to deal with any of that regulatory drama while still being very scientifically and clinically sound, because again, of basically the hundred years of research that has already been done on nicotinamide itself.
Melanie Avalon
Oh, yeah. What was the timeline of making it versus when that all happened? Because I know, for example, I was literally about to make an NMN and then all that drama happened and I was really sad.
So had you already had did you already have memo when that was happening?
Dr. Chris Rhodes
So this was happening at around the same time. We were seeing all the drama around NR and NMN, and we were kind of just like, I, like, you know, as a scientist, seeing all the clinical research, I can kind of recognize this as like, this is marketing drama, essentially, right? Like this is people fighting over technical definitions and patents and, you know, regulatory stuff. And we just don't really want to be a part of that when we don't have to be, right?
Like if I truly saw in the data that NR or NMN had these, you know, far better effects than just nicotinamide proper, or if they were really different pathways or really different metabolites, you know, we would have entered the fray. But what we saw from our own research, what we saw from the existing clinical evidence just showed us that nicotinamide was the more well-researched one. It was the safer one. And it was the, from our experiment, more effective version. So that's what we ended up using.
Melanie Avalon
Awesome. And then the fourth one, Spermidine, which I remember, I feel like there was a moment, I remember when people started talking about Spermidine and then I feel like there was this massive wave where it was like all the Spermidine all the time.
I might've mentioned this last time, but the moment where I became really intrigued with Spermidine was actually when I read an interview Dr. Michael Greger for one of his longevity books or maybe his like How Not to Die Book, I think. And he had a whole section on Spermidine and he mentioned this one study, which I probably should go and look exactly at how they did it, but they looked at a lot of different foods, I think like hundreds of foods. And they tried to find what was most correlated to health and longevity and Spermidine was like the thing, like the amount of Spermidine in the foods. And I was like, oh, that's really interesting. So Spermidine, what's going on with Spermidine?
Dr. Chris Rhodes
So sperminine is really interesting. Sperminine is what's known as a polyamine. So it's a breakdown product of amino acid metabolism. And in sperminine's case, it's specifically a breakdown product of arginine. And sperminine exists in a lot of foods across the food stream, but especially whole grains, because it's a very important growth factor for seeds and grains and things like that.
So one of the most abundant places to get it is wheat germ. That's where a lot of the current extracts come from. And sperminine itself is an autophagy promoter. That's kind of the thing that it's most known for. And the way that sperminine promotes autophagy is still up for a little bit of scientific debate. But basically what we know right now is that it is an inhibitor of an inhibitor of autophagy. So it's not entirely like directly promoting autophagy so much as it is inhibiting something that.
Melanie Avalon
would turn it off.
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, turn it off. Exactly.
That's kind of what we see in a lot of the literature research as well is that spermidine is really good at promoting autophagy, especially in the context of fasting. And what's really interesting about spermidine, kind of to your point before, is that it's been really well correlated with human longevity. So higher intakes of spermidine are correlated with longer health span, longer longevity. And there was actually a recent paper that came out kind of looking at health outcomes and dietary spermidine intake. And it seems like you get a really big inflection point for better health outcomes, better longevity outcomes at around 30 grams of spermidine intake per day. And Americans on a whole eat around eight grams of spermidine per day. So we seem to be pretty deficient in our general spermidine intake. So taking a spermidine supplement really seems like a great idea, especially with all of the large scale observational data that we have for spermidine intake being tied to longevity.
Melanie Avalon
Wow. Okay.
So, so to go back to its mechanism of action, I guess an analogy would be, if you wanted cars to go, you could make them go faster or you could just remove stop signs. So it's like removing stop signs. So out of these four, the OEA, the PEA, the nicotinamide, the spermidine, were they all... So spermidine, it sounds like a nicotinamide had a lot of research. Were OEA and PEA well known for these benefits or did you kind of piece that together?
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, we were definitely the ones that put PEA and OEA within the context of fasting. No one really knew that those molecules were upregulated during fasting before.
And in fact, OEA for a very long time was thought to only be upregulated when you eat food, right? Which makes sense, right? You're eating food, your body is going to produce OEA as a signal to say, hey, we have food, we're full, we don't need to be hungry anymore, we're all good. We found that yes, OEA was upregulated during these fed states, but it was even more highly upregulated during the fasting state. And we think that this is actually a evolutionary adaptation, right? Because let's say that you are in a 36 hour fast, it really doesn't do your body any good to have you doubled over in hunger pangs, right? Unable to move, unable to focus on anything else except for the hunger. So we think that OEA is the body's natural way of suppressing appetite in these longer term fasted states so that you can then focus on, I got to go find those berries, I got to go hunt that, hunt that gazelle, right? And actually be able to focus and concentrate on getting the food you need to get out of that fasting state.
Melanie Avalon
Awesome. Okay. And then the PEA, it's a natural endocannabinoid?
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's an endocannabinoid involved in that whole system. It's able to cross the blood-brain barrier and specifically stimulates through PPAR alpha, simulates through CB1, CB2 receptors, as well as being a COX1 and 2 inhibitor. So what all of that means together is that essentially it's acting almost like your body's natural CBD.
So it has these mood elevation effects, it has these cognition enhancement effects, it has these anti-inflammatory effects, and then it also has this really interesting effect on pain relief. So you really get a relief of nerve pain, joint pain. There's been a lot of interesting studies on PEA in terms of like fibromyalgia or diabetic neuropathy or even menstrual pain where PEA has shown really, really great effects and even greater effects than ibuprofen when they compare the two together.
Melanie Avalon
Wow, that's cool. And these effects, is it something where you have to be taking it for a while to get the benefits or does it work pretty immediately? What does it look like for people?
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, that's a great question. I would say that there are some effects that you might be able to feel right away, like the hunger suppression effects from the OEA or the discomfort pain relief effects of the PEA. What we have seen in our clinical studies, which have typically taken course over an eight week timeframe, and a lot of the other clinical studies that have been done with the individual ingredients, it seems like it takes around eight to 12 weeks for significant impacts to really be able to be measured from the biomarker analyses, from the quality of life analyses, from like the surveys and the questionnaires and things like that. But we have had plenty of people who are on the MIMIO formulation who can feel the effects right away and have had especially the appetite suppression effects.
So one of the things that I was really excited to talk about today was we just finished our large scale, randomized, double blind placebo controlled study with the MIMIO formulation. And in that study, we were basically looking at what happens when we take older folks, 55 years and older, and in equal proportion of men and women, we put them on MIMIO or placebo control for eight weeks, but we don't have them alter their diet or lifestyle anyway. And what we found there was that there was this very profound effect on appetite suppression, hunger control. So these people were rating their distractions from cravings as significantly lower after eight weeks, their maximum and overall daily hunger as lower after eight weeks, they had much better ability to eat only when hungry, and they had a much better satiety. So basically getting fuller faster and staying fuller longer from the meals that they were actually eating. So that was a really big effect there. We saw lower bloating, lower digestional discomfort when people were eating meals. And then when we looked at the blood markers themselves, we saw these really powerful impacts on metabolic markers. So better glucose levels, better cholesterol levels, lower LDL levels or bad cholesterol levels. We have lower cellular stress levels. We have lower inflammation levels. So all of the things that fasting would be doing for you, but just through two capsules a day of MIMIO and without changing diet or lifestyle at all.
Melanie Avalon
Oh, wow. First of all, congrats. Amazing. That's incredible.
Wow. So going into and setting up that study, did you have to choose to power it to detect? Because you just mentioned so many benefits. Were you focusing on, you know, measuring only a few of those or like how many things can you realistically test in a study?
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, we had the advantage of working with a really great decentralized clinical study operation called People Science. They really helped to reduce the cost of the clinical study overall, because usually you would do these things through a university or through a third-party research organization that has a singular physical location and that has a lot of overhead that's related to it.
Using these decentralized clinical study platforms, we can reach a lot bigger audience because we're recruiting from everywhere around the country, so we not only get a larger audience but a more representative population of the American public. And then we can have them all just go into lab cores which are all around the country to get their their blood work done. We can use app integrations to get their questionnaires and do cognition games and like all kinds of cool technological tracking of their bio data. So it was really really cool to be able to work with People Science and do this clinical study where we got to touch a lot of different data points for much lower overhead costs than we would have otherwise had to spend to do a clinical study of this magnitude.
Melanie Avalon
That is so cool. Okay, I just have a question.
Was there a moment, like do they give you an indication or do you see the results of that's coming in or is it like completely you don't know and then there's like a moment where you...
Dr. Chris Rhodes
We were blinded throughout the whole thing, which basically means that, you know, we don't get to see the data until the entire study is finished. And even after the entire study is finished, when we do the analysis of the data, we don't know which group is which. So it's all completely unbiased when we do the analysis and we get the data.
Melanie Avalon
So was there a moment where it was like the result moment?
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, there was definitely a result moment. Leading up to the trial finishing, it's a hugely stressful moment, right?
Because up until that point, we had already done two clinical studies showing that the MIMIO formulation worked, right? But they were a bit smaller scale, because that's how science operates, right? You start small and you get bigger, you go bigger, you go bigger, you go bigger. So this was our first gold standard, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study in a very large population set. And throughout the process, I was like, man, fingers crossed, fingers crossed, fingers crossed, fingers crossed. So when the data actually came in, and we saw these great impacts, I was just like, yes, we have something that is super impactful. It's making a difference in people's lives, and we can see the data. I think that was the biggest thing for me, especially as a clinical scientist, is like, there it is in black and white, kind of unimpeachable in a gold standard study. This works.
Melanie Avalon
amazing. Wow.
Yeah, I'm not justifying this. But just hearing that story, you can, I can see how people, you know, or entities will fund these studies and then not get the results they want. And then they kind of, you know, make the abstract and title pull out like one piece of data, you know, to that supports them. And it's not I'm not justifying it. But it's like, it must be exhausting for people who actually go through all that and then don't get the results they want.
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that you do end up seeing that all the time. And a lot of times when companies do this work, if they don't get the results they want, they won't even end up publishing. And then like you said, the ones that, okay, well, we got one or two hits off of the 20, 24 things that we actually tested, we're going to put that in a paper and just be able to use it.
This was actually a big controversy that happened with another dog longevity company, Leap Years. They kind of had a big blowback because they were making very big claims about a clinical study that they had done with dogs where they had tested kind of like 20 things. They got one hit and they were like, oh, okay, cool. In this one, we improve things. And they started making these big claims about it improves dog cognition and prevents brain aging, that kind of stuff. I think that we have to be very careful about that as an industry of not putting the cart ahead of the horse and really focusing in on let's make sure that we are actually giving people something that works and something that's going to make an impact in their lives. So the way that I think about it is very much like I always call myself a selfish founder, because I'm making products that I want in my life and I want them to work for me. So it doesn't do me any good to sell anybody snake oil because at the end of the day, I want the benefits of the product and I want all the things that I say are happening with it. So I'm motivated to make a product that actually does work because I want it to work for me.
Melanie Avalon
I cannot agree more. That's exactly how I am.
I think going back to the conversation about pharma versus supplement companies, I feel like that's much more common with supplement companies where it's founder-focused. You know who's making it and why, and they often want it for themselves. So awesome, incredible. So is that your latest? Are you working on another study? Because you mentioned you had a few different things.
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, so the two things that we're working on right now are the pet side of the coin. So getting that made and getting that tested out, I'm really excited for that because of the great lifespan extension data that we already have from the C. elegans and the great clinical data that we have in humans. I'm very confident that this is going to be a great pet product as well.
But then on the back end, we are also, of course, as just part of our biometric research platform, looking at these other interesting states of the body. So just like we ran this process with fasting, we're really excited to run it with things like exercise and meditation and sleep and cold exposure. And it really tees out what is happening in the body during these states. And is there a way that we can recreate those benefits on demand? And the next one that we're really looking at is exercise. And we already have a couple data sets that we're working from where we can see, oh, there are these specific molecules that are uniquely upregulated during different types of exercise. And we're thinking that we can use them to kind of recreate those exercise-like benefits.
Melanie Avalon
Oh, awesome. And would this be something that athletes could take or are there issues with what you can and can't take being a professional athlete?
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Oh, yeah, no, definitely. So everything that Mimeo works with is all going to be things that are naturally produced by the body, right? So by the by the FDA regulatory framework, anything that's a metabolite can automatically slot into the dietary ingredients category. It's so it's a natural molecule like that. So it shouldn't it should be totally water compliant because it's all just going to be part of natural human biology anyway.
Melanie Avalon
Awesome, awesome. Oh my goodness, this is all just so incredible.
So vet listeners are super eager to get some Mimeo now. What forms can they buy it in? What's like the dosing protocol? We do have a code for listeners, so we'll give that.
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, so the form factor right now is just two capsules per day. That's what we have done in all of our clinical studies and that's how we're selling it right now.
We definitely want to explore some more things down the road like gummies or maybe incorporating it into mouth dissolvable strips that are coming onto the market. So that's something that we have on our radar for sure. But otherwise, yeah, just two capsules per day and you can take that with food. That's how all of our clinical studies have been performed. Or you can take it like I take it as a fasting enhancer to just kind of jumpstart, supercharge the benefits of your fast and make fasting easier.
Melanie Avalon
Awesome. So listeners go to memiohealth.com. That's M-I-M-I-O health.com and use the code I have podcasts to get 20% off.
So again, memiohealth.com M-I-M-I-O health.com and use the code I have podcasts for 20% off. Perfect. Oh my goodness. Well, this has been so incredible. We're just going to have to have you on annually if you're down because there's just so much. I just love geeking out on all of this with you. And you're always doing so much. And it sounds like there's many developments on the horizon. So thank you for what you're doing. We'd love to have you back again.
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Absolutely. This is always a good time. I love nerding out about longevity and biohacking and all this fun stuff with you, Melanie. It's always a good time. So happy to come back whenever you like.
Melanie Avalon
Awesome, awesome. And hopefully, hopefully I'll see you at Unimonia Conference.
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Yeah, absolutely.
Melanie Avalon
Awesome. Well, thank you, Chris. We will talk really soon. You are the best. Again, listeners, MemeoHealth.com. Use the code IF Podcast for 20% off. And awesome. I will talk to you next time.
Dr. Chris Rhodes
Alright, awesome, thanks for having me.
Melanie Avalon
Bye. Thank you so much for listening to the Intermittent Fasting Podcast. Please remember, everything we discussed on this show does not constitute medical advice and no patient-doctor relationship is formed. If you enjoyed the show, please consider writing a review on iTunes.
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