Dr. Nathan Bryan
speaker
1,178 appearances
5 recordings
3 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 3 Apr
Dr. Nathan Bryan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And it regulates blood flow. When we begin to exercise, if we want to recall memory, that's dependent upon adequate blood flow to the organs. It's intimately involved in sexual activity and dilation of the sex organs for sexual function. So what we're finding is that the older we get, the less nitric oxide we naturally produced.
And now today, that's recognized as the earliest event in the onset and progression of age-related chronic disease. So my mission is to inform and educate the global population
on how important, number one, what nitric oxide is, how it's produced in the human body, what goes wrong in people that can't make it, and then perhaps most importantly, how do we prevent that age-related decline in nitric oxide production so everybody can be empowered to take control of their own health and prevent age-related disease.
And that's what the science tells us, but as you illustrated, most people have never heard of this.
Well, you know, if you look at population-based studies at different age groups, we see about a 10% to 12% decline in what we call endothelial function per decade. So nitric oxide is a gas. It's produced in the endothelium. So the endothelium is the single layer of cells that line every blood vessel throughout the body.
So the function of these endothelial cells is to regulate vascular tone and to regulate solute exchange and extravasation or transport of molecules across that endothelial layer.
And so when your endothelial cells can no longer make nitric oxide gas, they no longer dilate, so the blood vessels become constricted, you start to get inflammation, you get stiff arteries, plaque deposition, and that's what starts cardiovascular disease or atherosclerosis.
Well, we know there's a hierarchy, right? So the first sign and symptom of nitric oxide deficiency is usually erectile dysfunction. And when you think about this, when we're stimulated or we're about to have intimacy with our partner, we have to dilate the blood vessels.
So when erections in both men and women are dependent upon dilation of the blood vessels to get engorgement, to get increase in blood flow, and that's what an erection is. But if those blood vessels can't make nitric oxide, the blood vessels don't dilate, so there's no increase in blood flow, there's no engorgement, and that's by definition what we call erectile dysfunction.
And it's the same in men and women, right? Whether it's the penis or the clitoris or the labia, you have to have an increase in blood flow. And without nitric oxide, there's no increase in blood flow. So that's number one. And we call that the canary in the coal mine. Because for years, people thought it was a lifestyle disorder, right?
But now it's recognized that it's a symptom of loss of nitric oxide and really an accelerated form of cardiovascular disease. So we have to focus on the vascular component of erectile dysfunction.
Deficiency. So if you don't correct the ED, then what you start to see is an increase in blood pressure. And when you think about this mechanistically, so we have a finite volume of blood that's pumping throughout our body every day, every second. And if you can make nitric oxide, the blood vessels are more dilated. So now we're pumping that volume through more dilated blood vessels.
But if we lose the ability to produce nitric oxide, now you don't get the dilation. Now you have smaller blood vessels. You're pumping that same volume of blood through smaller pipes, and simple physics tells us that blood pressure goes up.
Well, you're going to have high blood pressure or hypertension. And at least in the U.S., and I think these statistics probably are worldwide, but two out of three Americans have an unsafe elevation in blood pressure. And 50% of the people that are given prescription medications to treat their blood pressure do not respond with better blood pressure.
It's because most of the drugs out there, whether they're ACE inhibitors, what's called angiotensin receptor blockers, calcium channel antagonists, the main classes of drugs that treat high blood pressure aren't targeted toward restoration of nitric oxide. So that's why we call that resistant hypertension. They're resistant to traditional therapies.
And the reason they're resistant is because it's a nitric oxide problem. And those drugs aren't designed to affect nitric oxide production or improve it.
You know, for me, I was a student at LSU School of Medicine. This was the late 90s, maybe early 2000s. But a Nobel Prize had just been awarded for the discovery of nitric oxide. There were three U.S. scientists that were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1998. And I was very fortunate at the time. I was a young student, probably a first-year student.
And Lou Ignaro, who had just won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of nitric oxide, came and spoke and gave a lecture before the student body. And I had a chance to have a conversation with him afterwards, and I was fortunate to be invited to have dinner with him that night. And he made a very poignant statement to me.
He goes, if the scientific community can figure out how to restore the production of nitric oxide, it'll change the world. And it'll change the landscape of medicine. Because even then, what is that, 25, 26 years ago, that it was recognized that a loss of nitric oxide production is leading to the onset and development of many poorly managed age-related chronic diseases.
So I go, that's a very profound statement from a guy who just won the Nobel Prize. But that was the first kind of eureka moment for me that stimulated the interest. But then my dad, and I talk about it in the book, his dad is 76 years old. In 1984, he had a car accident that left him paralyzed from the mid-back down.
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