Dr. David Agus
speaker
53 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Dr. David Agus’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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You know, there's a hormone called oxytocin. It's the love hormone. When you look in your dog's eye, your oxytocin goes up and so does theirs. And when oxytocin goes up, your blood pressure goes down, you feel more relaxed, you get a sense of calm, anxiety goes away. And so we all need these bursts of oxytocin in our life and dogs can provide it.
And then there are the little things they do to our schedule, right? Dogs like to eat the same time every day, which by the way, is what we as humans were made to do and is much healthier for us. So you get up in the morning, you walk the dog. Walking is good. The regular times a day, hopefully that tends to your own mealtime. And you have companionship.
What you look at in every study of health outcomes, longevity, is people with companionship do better. Dogs with their oxytocin bursts are an amazing form of companionship.
Oh, first of all, that was a big assumption. Some people have connections to rhinoceri or rhinoceroses. I'm not even sure which one it is. Um, but you know, he, The rhinoceroses were unfortunately captured much for their horns because there was this notion that it can affect sexual potency and other things, even though it's not true. They were endangered.
Several zoos tried to breed rhinoceros in captivity, and it didn't work. Everyone was getting very nervous that this species, which literally looks and acts like a dinosaur, would be extinct. Then they noticed that, you know, renaturas are big. They eat a lot of food. So zoos don't have a lot of resources. They were feeding them basically soy protein.
and soy has estrogenic components it acts like the hormone estrogen is what we call a phytoestrogen a plant source of estrogen so when they change the source of protein to a different source of protein that didn't have the estrogenic parts all of a sudden they were able to breed rhinos in captivity and what we clearly see is that you know eating natural food is tremendously important
But too much of anything can have unintended consequences. And in this case, phytoestrogens, if you feed a child soy milk, they will develop breast buds. The breast will be slightly enlarged compared to a child who's not because of the estrogenic components. So it really begs to look at what we eat. And we were made to eat a varied diet. We're made to eat real food, so not processed food.
And we're made to eat either two or three meals a day, you choose, with nothing at all in between.
Yeah, dolphins are pretty interesting because they're the only creature that we know of that has what is an equivalent to human Alzheimer's disease. And what we see in the dolphins is it correlates to insulin signaling. And we know that's also true in adults and humans, is that when insulin signaling is off, type two diabetes happens, it's very hard to modulate sugar.
And when your sugar goes up in your blood, you have to maintain what we call the same osmolality. So fluid goes in to dilute out the sugar and your blood vessels get stressed and it affects your brain and other parts of your body. Dolphins can actually modulate their insulin signaling, and they do so through a connectivity with others. And they do throw as part of their daily life.
They do with exercise, they do it with social connections. And we certainly have to learn with that, right? You see, when people have very few social connections, they actually tend to be higher body mass index, they tend to eat more, they don't have the controls that they do when they're with other people. They actually normally exercise less and do less.
Obviously, these are generalizations, but it's something we concern. Get a load of this. Totally an aside with Alzheimer's, what we just learned from AI was that the shingles vaccine, which is a vaccine to prevent shingles that we classically do in our country after age 50, looks like it may reduce Alzheimer's by almost 50%. We knew Alzheimer's was plaques in the brain.
Now we're learning that it's an infection of a neuron, in this case caused by the virus shingles, the chickenpox virus, that can lead to the plaques. Pretty powerful observation.
So the way these studies are done is your electronic health records are bags of words. And with AI now and these large language models, we can convert that to structured data and do analysis. So in three separate studies, this was observed. So nobody could ever do a randomized trial over 30 years and say,
get shingles vaccine i'll give you placebo see what happens we had to pull data and say who got the shingles vaccine who didn't let's make sure they're equal in terms of their weight where they live how old they are etc and see the observations and it certainly was a very important observation it didn't necessarily prove causality but it was a hell of an association from something that's already on the market already reckon or recommended for everybody over the age of 50
And it's certainly something that I acted on and I hope others do also.
All right, so the pig. The pig is something, obviously, we make fun of all the time. You live in a pig pen, et cetera. So they studied the pig. And what was really interesting is they studied their pain response. And so when pigs had pain, they would squeal and they would run away from it.
But what they showed is when a pig had altruism, when it was able to share its food with others, the pain threshold went up dramatically. And it was a staggering observation that altruism, sharing things, being kind to others actually changed our pain threshold and how we responded to pain. Pretty wild if you think about it. And then get a load of this.
The queen ant, which is the same genetics, she gives birth to all the worker ants. Well, she lives 42 years. The worker ant lives six months, same genetics, dramatically different lifestyle. That queen ant doesn't go out into the wild, doesn't get exposed to bacteria, viruses, doesn't do manual labor to get inflammation, harm things, and she lives much longer.
The ants, if you get sick and you're an ant, you stay outside the colony for three days. And if you get better, you go back. If you don't, you die outside the colony and you don't spread that virus or that bacteria to others. Well, look what happened during the pandemic, right?
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