Dr. David Sinclair
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And in fact, my professor tried to prevent me from working on it when I left, on sirtuins in general.
It's crazy to think about, but...
What they discovered was that there's a metabolite, a molecule that goes up and down with food and up and down with sleep called NAD.
We have lots of it.
There's grams of it in our body.
It's one of the most abundant molecules in the body.
It's very ancient.
It's in yeast.
It's in us.
And what they found was that sirtuins, to control genes and to repair DNA that's broken, they don't do it unless there's NAD.
It's the catalyst.
It's the fuel for their reaction.
They need NAD.
And when we're young, we have lots of NAD.
So it works well.
The sirtuins control the information on the genes, and they repair the DNA very well, because they've got lots of NAD to carry out their work.
These are enzymes.
They work.
They do things.
As we get older, by the time you're 50, about my age, you have half the levels of this NAD molecule