From Lab Discovery to Everyday Application: The Journey of Mitophagy

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IN THIS EPISODE OF THE HUMAN UPGRADE™…

…I’m going down a rabbit hole of exciting scientific research and clinical studies supporting Urolithin A’s influence on your mitochondrial health. The short version? Urolithin A stimulates mitophagy and renews your mitochondria. Specific big things to know? It upgrades your cells, your strength levels and offers pretty powerful anti-aging benefits.

And a fun thing to know? The origin story of Urolithin A has to do with beavers. (!)

To find out the basis of Urolithin A and its relationship to pomegranates, check out my previous podcast featuring two experts on the subject: How to Get Fitter Cells, Stronger Muscles and a Longer Life – Timeline Nutrition with Dave Asprey – #772.

This time, I’ve invited Dr. Anurag Singh to the show. His expertise lies in clinical development and translational research. That means he translates new discoveries in science into real-world stuff you can actually use. He’s worked for several consumer health and biotech companies; authored more than 30 articles for top science journals; and designed and led more than 40 clinical trials over the last 15 years. 

As Chief Medical Officer of Amazentis, the parent company of Timeline Nutrition and the maker of Mitopure, a Urolithin A product. 

“A lot of times in the nutrition world, people put extracts and blends of probiotics together and they just give it to healthy people and expect magic to happen,” says Dr Singh. “Here, we've actually done the deep dive of the signs and how this molecule hits mitophagy and mitochondrial health. Then, bringing it to human translation and commercialization. This is really the holy grail for real world evidence.”

He’s spent seven years focused on Urolithin A research and clinical trials. His initial round of research with Urolithin A showed that it could increase aerobic endurance and increase grip strength. 

Urolithin A also is the first postbiotic shown to repair mitochondrial health via mitophagy. Mitophagy is the process of renewing your mitochondrial growth as you age. As healthy mitochondria get older they accumulate free radicals and reactive oxygen species. They lose shape and stop communicating with one another, too. These faulty mitochondria have need to be replaced. Urolithin A revs up the mitochondrial recycling.

Dr. Singh explains how you can get the benefits of Urolithin A and how to take it to achieve results.

“Our gut microbiome is very complex ecosystem with hundreds of millions of different species interacting with each other,” explains Dr. Singh. “They need to be interacting in perfect harmony to release these postbiotics, which is the way I look at it is the perfect gut health relationship within the microbiome. So it's not one bacteria. It's not one strain that you can isolate and give. It's really got to be multi-species. I think you can probably conceptually find that strain or probiotic that could do it, but the process will be so inefficient that the best way is to short circuit it and provide the postbiotic, which is Urolithin A, directly in a pill or in a food product.” 

Another direction for Urolithin A is sports performance. Amazentis teamed up with renowned researcher Dr. Louise Burke in Australia to look into how Urolithin A affects mitochondrial health in athletes. Those results will be available in 2022.

The future of Urolithin research keeps going in exciting new directions, including brain health. 

“So, there's a lot of research going on around this molecule,” Dr. Singh says. “[The] Buck Institute of Aging in California just got a multimillion grant from the National Institute of Health to study the effects of Urolithin A on the cognitive aging and how it can reverse some of the neuronal circuitry to look youthful. So we are actively looking at it and keeping our eyes and ears open for exactly feedback like this because brain cells also after muscle cells have the highest number of mitochondria that decline with aging.”

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