The Dr. Hyman Show
The Unexpected Dolphin Discovery That May Hold the Key to Longevity | Dr. Stephanie Venn-Watson
Wed, 26 Mar 2025
What if the key to aging well had been hiding in plain sight—inside our cells, our food, and even… dolphins? That’s exactly what Stephanie Venn-Watson, DVM, a veterinary epidemiologist, discovered while studying dolphins in the U.S. Navy’s marine mammal program. She found that some dolphins were aging significantly slower than others, leading to the discovery of C15:0—a newly recognized essential fatty acid that supports cellular health, fights inflammation, and may even slow the aging process. In this episode of The Dr. Hyman Show, we dive into: How studying dolphins led to the discovery of C15:0 as the first essential fatty acid found in 90 years. Why a deficiency in this nutrient could be accelerating aging and chronic disease. How C15:0 strengthens cell membranes, reduces inflammation, and promotes longevity. The connection between diet, metabolic health, and optimal aging. What you can do to ensure you’re getting enough of this essential fatty acid. This groundbreaking discovery could change how we think about nutrition and longevity. View Show Notes From This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal This episode is brought to you by PaleoValley, Timeline Nutrition, LMNT, BON CHARGE, and Big Bold Health. Get nutrient-dense, whole foods. Head to paleovalley.com/hyman for 15% off your first purchase. Support essential mitochondrial health and save 10% on Mitopure. Visit timeline.com/drhyman to get 10% off today. Get a free LMNT Sample Pack with any order—just head to drinklmnt.com/hyman. Order BON CHARGE’s Max Red Light Therapy device today and get 15% off. Visit boncharge.com and use code DRMARK for 15% off. Try Big Bold Health’s HTB Rejuvenate and get 25% off by going to bigboldhealth.com and use code DRMARK25 at checkout.
Chapter 1: What was the unexpected discovery about dolphins?
Coming up on this episode of The Dr. Hyman Show.
Numerous studies have consistently shown people with higher C15, just like we saw in the dolphins, lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes, of heart disease, specifically coronary heart disease, of developing fatty liver disease, and certain types of cancers, specifically a lot of work on colorectal cancer.
Dr. Nick Schork, he was at ARDD, which is one of the world's leading anti-aging therapeutics meetings. He said, listen, I've seen every longevity molecule, under the sun, and I've not seen a molecule that has more supportive data of being a longevity enhancing molecule than C15.
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Chapter 2: How does C15:0 relate to aging and health?
Before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone via my personal practice, there is simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. That's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab insights.
And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, the Hyman Hive. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website at drhyman.com for a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products. Stephanie, it's great to have you back on the Dr. Hyman Show. Yeah.
And your work continues to astound me and discoveries that I think are going to hopefully make us all live a little bit longer, feel a little bit better, prevent some of the disease of aging, and We're talking about today the work you've done as a veterinary epidemiologist working with the Navy SEALs, I mean the Navy Dolphins.
We're going to help the Navy SEALs too.
I feel like a Navy SEAL right now. I'm like trying to not shiver to death and I'm not in freezing cold water, but I'm wearing a thick coat because we're in Austin, Texas and it is freezing. freezing out. And with the wind chill, it's like minus 12 degrees or something.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of the Navy's dolphin health study?
So I'd love to start by having you sort of describe the sort of this incredible work you did with the Navy dolphins, which are used for kind of, what are they used for? And then what did you find as sort of you looked at the natural lifespan of dolphins compared to
the dolphins in captivity and how did that start to get you thinking about the sort of longevity aspect of what might be in the dolphins that you could discover and how did you begin to discover that?
Yeah, boy, this is going to be an exciting talk. I love the TF. Dr. Hyman, it's great to be here. It's always good to see you. So yes, as a veterinary epidemiologist, I wanted to track diseases. I read Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague when I was an undergraduate and said, I want to do that. And I thought it was going to be infectious diseases.
And it ends up that, thanks to being recruited by the Navy, to help lead their clinical research program with their dolphin population to help improve the lives of their dolphins, it quickly pivoted to chronic diseases and chronic diseases of aging.
So it's been a... So dolphins get chronic diseases of aging? This doesn't make any sense to me. They're not eating McDonald's and they're not exercising and they're not doing their normal sleep routine and they don't... I mean, maybe they have more stress living in captivity, but...
Right, well, that was the key question, right? It really, you hit the nail on the head. That moved over to the Navy, ended up spending 20 years there, 10 full years working with the Navy's dolphins with the pure goal of improving Navy dolphin health. So they live, Navy dolphins, they live in San Diego Bay, go out into the open ocean every day. Every day they choose to come back.
So it's a pretty nice environment with regard to quality of life.
They just are free to go and then they come back?
Yeah. It's pretty amazing, right? So they live in the open ocean. That's their pod. So they choose to be there. And it meant a lot to me as a veterinarian. I didn't know how I'd feel.
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Chapter 4: How does C15:0 compare with other known longevity molecules?
And we're not saying go back and eat a bunch of dairy fat. 1% of dairy fats is C15. Over 40% of the fatty acids in dairy fat are pro-inflammatory saturated fat. So we still need to work our way through that. But the Navy was interested enough to say,
hey can we find a way to use c15 and leverage it for longevity meanwhile let's also talk about the need to prevent these um you know deficiency syndrome that's showing up in our kids and that might just be by helping to get milk fat back into kids diets including mom's milk fat
Yeah, breast milk for sure, although conventional dairy has a lot of problems and is very inflammatory for a lot of people. That's right. I wonder if it's high levels in goat or sheep, is it?
It's a good question. So what the studies have learned is that C15 levels are driven by what the ruminant. So it could be a cow, goat, sheep.
Whatever what you're eating.
What they eat. Yeah. So if you feed either cow, goat, or sheep grass, it has twice as much C15 in its dairy fat than fed corn. If you feed it high altitude grass, it has even higher C15. So we don't know when you go buy your dairy product.
Yeah.
what that animal was eating and so one thing that we're pushing for is to have the dairy industry report c15 levels um in their you know in their foods and to help change industry practices to help maximize c15 levels interesting yeah so it's not you're not what you eat you're what ever you're eating eight that's right that's
But you've got that, yeah.
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Chapter 5: What are the key health implications of C15:0 deficiency?
And mice, you know, have to be like 120.
So, you know, Nick really, Nick and I really came in and we're like, oh my gosh, we have this incredible opportunity. Nature's already figured it out, right, Mark? I mean, nature's already figured out how a mammal can live 27, 30 times longer because humans and dolphins and elephants live a lot longer than a mouse. So why?
So let's figure out what, how evolution has already enabled massive longevity, enabling tap into that and then make it even better.
So the bow had whales of like 200 years, right?
So it was just like, let's focus on these species, not to dismiss the short list, the basic science, but it's an unlock. So the seven must-haves of longevity, and this is assuming that longevity, the way we define it is as a geroprotector, so a molecule that slows our aging rate and therefore slows the onset of the chronic diseases that kill us.
You may not actually live longer, but you'll live healthier.
healthier, and then by default, be able to extend your own longevity so that you can live longer. So of those, the seven longevity must-haves are first, this molecule needs to tap into the longevity-regulating pathway. It's this complicated keg, it's called the keg pathway, and it's based upon a hypocaloric diet.
So caloric restriction and the whole pathway that's been built out on how caloric restriction works extends longevity across multiple species. At the heart of it is activating AMPK and inhibiting mTOR, which, as you had mentioned, metformin activates AMPK and rapamycin inhibits mTOR. C15 does both. So that was really exciting to see. It's really hitting at the heart as other longevity molecules.
Did you know that staying hydrated isn't just about drinking water? It's about replacing both water and electrolytes. Here's the thing. When you sweat, you're losing water and sodium, and if you're only drinking water without replacing those electrolytes, you're missing a key part of hydration.
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Chapter 6: How can we optimize our intake of C15:0?
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Chapter 7: What are the seven must-haves of a longevity enabler?
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The second is that it needs to target these... And just to back up on that for a minute, because people might not understand that.
So AMPK regulates a lot of things, inflammation, your blood sugar control, your mitochondrial function, and interacts with a lot of other longevity pathways. I call them longevity switches, like the four longevity switches that I wrote about in my book, Young Forever, which is mTOR, which regulates protein synthesis and also...
When you inhibit it, it causes autophagy, which is cellular cleanup, which is really important to healthy aging. Insulin signaling, which we can talk about. And that causes us to kind of overproduce insulin and leads to obesity and diabetes and Alzheimer's and cancer and pretty much everything else. And then there's the...
pathway called sirtuins, which is very involved in regulating DNA repair and oxidative stress. And a lot of them have overlapping redundancies in terms of the key fundamental things of aging, which we talk about in the hallmarks of aging, whether it's mitochondrial dysfunction, whether it's autophagy, cellular cleanup,
whether it's inflammation, oxidative stress, blood sugar regulation, protein synthesis. So all those things are necessary and they're fundamental to understand because they're the things that underlie all disease. And what people don't realize is now we're discovering these new frameworks for understanding disease that are based on root causes.
And so the hallmarks of aging are really discoveries that have helped us map out what are those things that tend to go wrong as we get older And now we can think about how do we treat those. And if we treated those, we might extend life by a third rather than just, you know, if we got rid of cancer and heart disease, we'd extend life by five to seven years.
You know, we completely eradicated from the planet. So that's not much of a life extension compared to 30 years, right?
That's right.
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Chapter 8: What future research is being conducted on C15:0?
That's right. We saw complete reversal of anemia.
If you get the fish, if the dolphin herring, that's good. But if you give them like flounder, probably not so good, right?
Yeah, that's right. It was not like a common food that we eat, but it was like capelin and squid. Squid had no C15 in it, but you're right. Herring was a great, and mackerel were great fish. So that's how it led to all of those. So then with the hallmarks of aging,
uh you know it targets six of them it helps with we now understand from a clinical trial it helps with gut dysbiosis how does it do that right so c15 multiple ways a lot of exciting research coming out on c15 for gut health um not from us from other teams around the world
They've shown, multiple studies have shown that in multiple mouse models of colitis, of IBD, with regard to leaky gut syndrome, that C15 specifically helps improve the gut lining and it stops the leakiness. So it decreases inflammation and it stops the leaking.
Is it because it sort of embeds itself in the cell membranes in the gut? That's it. It becomes more stable and less fragile? Is that the kind of hypothesis?
That's the hypothesis. We know that it gets in there. We know that it has this effect. And so it helps with that. In addition, really fascinating work on the microbiome that in a clinical trial that was done in Singapore with C15 supplementation showed that women... who had a history of fatty liver disease.
When they took C15, they saw an improvement in the growth of Bifidobacterium adolescentis, which is like a mama microbe that's really good at helping to regulate our metabolism. It's also been shown to extend longevity in worms. So we already talked about the limitation of that, but it was an interesting side point.
I knew that worms have a microbiome. Exactly. Worm poop.
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