All right, everybody, welcome another and really super exciting. I mean, do not leave. Get out your notepad. You're going to want to write this down. We're going to be talking once more about stem cells in the heart.
This is the wildest conversation we've had Reversing Heart Disease. Naturally Summit 2.0, is bringing you the best of the best. This is Christian Drapeau and not just is he a handsome man, but he's a stem cell scientist and author and creator of the first stem cell supplement and it's plant based.
He has a degree in neurophysiology medical research for 30 plus years. The last 20 plus years, stem cell research, author of five books. I recently read his book, "Cracking the Stem Cell Code." It's amazing.
It's really pretty serious science, but you can learn a lot. And he's coined the term we're going to talk about in a moment. Endogenous Stem Cell Mobilization.
Maybe you don't need to take a trip to Panama and Colombia to get your stem cells. He lectures all over the place just there the next few weeks that he's going to be appearing in southeastern Florida.
I just saw him in Las Vegas and a lot of very large medical conferences. And he's surrounded by people. So, Christian, thank you for taking the time to discussing your long history of really novel research.
My real pleasure. Thank you for having me here. Yeah. So you and I have had a ability to have a telephone chat. I think I was in my car and I dialed you up and got to know each other a little bit after meeting at a major medical meeting. And we spent a lot of time talking about stem cells, but we have a couple other interviews and stem cells in this Summit.
Actually, we interviewed Dr. Pedro Gonzalez, who uses warden jelly from the umbilical cord to get mesenchymal stem cells. Those are not the same as we have in our bone marrow, are they?
Yes or no? I mean, they're not coming from from from the umbilical cord, but in terms of what they are, in terms of stem cells and they're potential, they are essentially the same with the difference that from the umbilical cord, they are younger stem cells and younger stem cells are traditional and also scientifically also known to be not the young one more effective than older stem cells.
That's the main difference. Right. In our interview with Dr. Gonzales was amazing. Everybody should listen to it. But to get a therapy with Dr. Gonzalez right now, you have to go to the country of Colombia.
It's not permitted to do what he does in the United States. So there's obviously major, major limitations. The audience listening right now. We also interviewed a cardiac surgeon who has a foundation and he takes fibroblast skin cells from infants with complex heart disease and he uses we talked about this Yamanaka factors into pluripotent stem cells and then he tries to grow hearts and sheets to help these children with complex disease.
And that's another route. But how did it first, you know, come upon the idea that our bone marrow, at least our red bone marrow, we're going to define that in a minute for the audience has that everybody listening right now has stem cells in their bone marrow.
Is that true? Absolutely. Not only they do, but they would not be alive if they did not. And why are they there? What are their basically not doing much until there's a need both what might activate the stem cells from our bone marrow to go do some work, an injury?
It's literally as simple as if you were to say, why do we have immune cells? Let's say we discovered immune cells five years ago. Why do we have them? And what are they doing?
And the answer will be, well, there they are since the day you're born, and if you didn't have them, you would not be alive. Today we just discovered what stem cells in the bone marrow are.
What they're doing, which we did not have a full understanding of before. And what this knowledge is basically telling us is that these stem cells are there from the day we're born.
They are the body's repair system and they are triggered any time there is anything that needs to be repaired in the body when there's an injury and in the background as we lose cells every day, the job of stem cells is to go in to replace these cells and keeping you healthy as you age.
Okay. So an injury could be you cut your finger, but an injury could be a stroke, heart attack or Parkinson's disease. Right. The whole gamut from a scratch to a full on face, face to face accent on the highway to a stroke, to a heart attack.
At any time, there's something to repair. That's what your stem cells are doing. Okay, now, until I read your book and have listened to some of your webinars, I was not really focused on red marrow and yellow marrow in our bones.
Why don't you tell the audience a little bit about that? And what happens with age. Red marrow is what makes stem cells. And so we are all born with red marrow in our bones.
But very quickly, as we age, red marrow converts into fatty marrow or yellow marrow that does not make stem cells. And when I say very quickly, by age 30, we've lost almost 90% of our red marrow.
And so that's a huge decline in our overall amount of red marrow. And that is reflected by a very similar decline in the number of stem cells in circulation.
So we have about 10% about to age 30, about 10% of the number of stem cells in circulation that we add when we were an infant. And there's a direct link between how many stem cells we have in circulation and the body's ability to repair.
So when we all discover in our thirties that we're no longer Superman or Wonder Woman, that's because of the decline in the number of stem cells in circulation.
Okay. So and does our ability to repair injury go down with age? Because of the very fact that our marrow is no longer as productive as it was when we were younger?
Correct. You know, it's a very normal process. If we look back through our evolutionary history, we evolved over the past 50,000 years with a life expectancy of 30 years of age.
We have added 50 years of age up to about 80 years of life expectancy over the past 150 years. But as a biological entity, the body has evolved with a need of only 30 years of of powerful ability to repair.
And that is reflected in that conversion of red marrow into yellow marrow. We historically did not need the ability to repair much past our thirties, so the experience of our lesser ability to repair passed 30 comes from that decline in the number of circulating stem cells, which comes from that conversion of red marrow into yellow marrow.
Wow. Okay. So lots of people are watching this reversing heart disease naturally. Some that because maybe they have heart disease, maybe they've had a heart attack, maybe they've injured their brain with a stroke or even brain trauma.
And I gave a shout out to Parkinson's, other neurologic syndromes, and all of a sudden they're wondering if they have enough stem cells to repair their body.
I mean, what did you uncover 25 years ago about natural plant products that has led you on a journey that is now resulting in the first natural stem cell stimulator that people can just take?
And I got a letter about right now about how that journey began. So I was hired in 1995 to study a plant. You may have heard of it, blue green algae from Klamath Lake, generally known as AFA, stands for Aphanizomenon flos-aquae, AFA So I was hired to study that plant and to understand how it was working in the body.
But more specifically, how could it work in the body to lead to so many different kinds of health benefits that had been seen, observed and reported benefits on liver function, pancreatic function, on the long on the heart and the brain, so many different aspects.
And we had no understanding for a number of years until in 2001 I came across an article, the title was Turning Blood into Brain, and it was, to my knowledge, the first study documenting how stem cells from the bone marrow could go to the to another tissue, in this case the brain, and become a brain cell.
So not only the brain we know does not regenerate. So to find that a stem cells could become a brain cell was quite amazing. But to observe that a stem cells from the bone marrow, which were known at the time, to be only precursor to blood cells, to see that these cells could go to the brain becoming a brain cells.
And then and I went to the literature and found another study talking about stem cells going to deliver and becoming liver cells and another one going to the heart and becoming heart cells.
So if it's if stem cells can become liver, heart and brain, what I thought at the time. So what, 25 years ago, what if stem cells could also become pancreas, long skin and the rest?
And it's just a matter of time for scientists to discover that that would mean that stem cells are actually likely to be the repair system of the body.
And what if we had a plant that stimulates the release of stem cells, just like you have plant that stimulates the immune system? This would be a plan that stimulates the repair system.
So they were like completely farfetched ideas and hypotheses 20 to 25 years ago. But that's all that we had with for the first time. We had a hypotheses to explain the problem that we were looking at.
So we acquired a flow cytometer to be able to count stem cells and we start to count stem cells in our own blood. Take the product, count stem cells an hour or two later.
And we very quickly discovered that this effort, this plant, was acting as a stem cell mobilizers or a stem cell release, or within about an hour of consumption, there was an increase of about 25% in the number of circulating stem cells.
And that's really opened a whole direction for me to go into this whole field of stem cell research, because my background is basically brain research.
Originally. All right. So just in case the audience isn't quite in, there is actually a lake in southern Oregon. The lake is Klamath Lake Clay. You can walk into a vitamin shop and see bottles that say Klamath Lake Blue Green Algae.
And you were working with a great company that you and I have mutual respect for. We talked about that on the phone a couple of days ago. And you discovered that a chemical in blue green algae that goes by an abbreviation, RFA, actually wakes up these dormant stem cells in their bone marrow and puts them into the bloodstream where they can do work because they're not doing much for us in the bone marrow.
Right. Well, we release them every day. This is a very natural process. We always have stem cells in our bloodstream. What aphasia that it contains enables select and blocker that basically interferes in the system that stem cells use to cling to the bone marrow environment.
So we triggered their detachment from the bone marrow. All right. Excellent. And for anybody wondering, you can't just go to Quest Lab or can't just go to LabCorp and get a blood stem cell level, correct?
Correct. It's not yet available. We're working on a method to be able to quantify stem cells in a way that is quicker and cheaper than what is available right now.
But right now, a flow cytometer is a machine that is essentially utilized in cancer treatment and cancer research. Yeah. I want to ask about some of the other plants that you discovered also shake up that bone marrow.
They put bone marrow, stem cells into our blood, endogenous stem cell mobilization, as you call it. But you talk often about a couple other things that might also release stem cells into the blood that people could do, but they're not as easy as necessarily taking a science proven supplement.
So what are the couple other things that are known to mobilize stem cells in humans? Very, very intense physical activity, things like running a marathon.
And I believe I did see work documenting that half a marathon is not enough. Just to give you an idea, we're talking about very significant and severe, intense physical activity will put more stem cells in circulation.
I believe that the mechanism of action, it's just that intense physical activity triggers a lot of micro lesions, micro tears and tissues, which are micro injuries.
So they essentially trigger the repair system and the repair process in the body. But it does severe, intense activity will put more stem cells in circulation and fasting for more than three days will also put more stem cells in circulation.
There might be other things, but as far as I know, this is the only kind of activity that we can do or things that we can do to put more stem cells in circulation.
All right. So extreme, most people listening are probably not going to complete a marathon this year every day. And they're also not going to get a bonus of stem cells daily.
And even most people listening are probably not going to complete a three day fast right now, although we have interviewed people from the EL Neutral, prolonged fasting mimicking diet group, Dr.
William Sue, who's one of the people on this summit and their very first publication, showed that the five day fasting mimicking diet did increase stem cell metabolism.
That's totally consists of what you just said. So you found that blue green algae from Klamath Lake in southern Oregon, which contains MSA, and you actually identified the mechanism.
You know, you set it quickly. But though the mechanism by which stem cells are no longer trapped in the marrow and are released. But what about sea buckthorn, berry extract?
How did you come across that? Well, the moment we documented the role of this blue green algae, to me it was clear we evolved in symbiosis with the environment.
We really need to understand and think about the repair system. STEM cells, just like you think about the immune system or the cardiovascular system or the nervous system.
There are many plants you want to support you in your nervous system. Caffeine, for example, is one such molecule. So there are plants that will affect the repair system.
So how do we find them? So to me, the question was simple let's go back and look in the plants that have been documented historically to be associated with a broad variety of health benefits, that means that's probably a plant that works essentially at the core by releasing stem cells.
So when you release stem cells, stem cells will go into the pancreas of the diabetic, the heart of the heart patient, the long of the emphysema patient and so on.
So these plans should be associated with many, many kinds of benefits. So as I started to look at these plants, sometimes they're known, sometimes they're less known.
But one that I quickly came across was Suboxone very utilized in Mongolian medicine and Tibetan medicine, Chinese medicine for a disease of the law on lung cancer, disease of the heart, cardiovascular problem, diabetes, liver issues, digestive issues, and to help accelerate the repair from injuries from bone or bone fracture.
So when you look at the spread of the of the benefits, the thought was maybe this plant works by stimulating stem cell release. So I went into on the Tibetan plateau, met with a form that is harvesting these these berries derived an extract from seaborne berry tested it in the lab and we saw a very significant increase in the number of circulating stem cells within about two or 3 hours after consumption.
So that is another ingredient. Wow. And then you identified that there was an aloe called STEM, Glow or Mac or a macro clodagh. That's another plant. That's plant number three.
That had a huge impact on releasing stem cells in the bone marrow, right? Yeah. That's probably the most like the coolest plant, if I can say, because it was associated with Wood, a pretty extensive project.
It's an aloe that is used. It comes from Madagascar. It's the only place really where where I wouldn't say where it exists, but where it grows in quantities and where it is utilized.
So in Madagascar they have this product called the HONA that has been done for centuries and Varona is used for all kinds of health issues, old age, to continue to be strong and healthy as people in their sixties, seventies, eighties are working in the field.
And so I had a chance to, to, to, to get some of this Verona, their little black pellets. And at the time, I did not even know what it was. I was given these black pellets and I was told what they're doing in Madagascar.
So we consume them. We tested our stem cells and we saw the strongest response that we have seen. So far. So as we started to dig into this product, we learned that it was this very specific one species of aloe called aloe macrolides in Madagascar, but it does not really exist on the marketplace.
So we had to develop a co-op of harvesters. It is a protected species in Madagascar, so it can only be harvested by Malagasy people. So we have a network of harvesters.
We've developed the system of collection, the production. So now we have that ingredient available. And the reason to do all of this is that it was the most potent ingredient that we have studied so far.
So it is one of the ingredients that we use crazy. And in case anybody wants to write it down, adds ven bho and a from Madagascar. And then without going in great detail, you have a seaweed, a brown seaweed extract, a ginseng extract and a beta glucan.
So you created a supplement that put six powerful elements together and you brought it out about how long ago did you bring this plant based stem cell or at least powerhouse out that a person could purchase it?
So STEM region was developed in 2016, but it continued to evolved until probably about like 2019 as I was testing the product with different colleagues and different markets in Europe and Asia until we finalized a formula that we have today.
So that formula has been in the United States for about three years. Okay, very good. And I'll just show people that are wondering and let me make sure that I do this correctly, because sometimes Zoom is a blurry, blurry little beast when you do that.
But there is a box called STEM margin and I know you won't be able to read it. You wonderful audience. But there's the six ingredients we ran through three in detail, three just mentioned, and it was capsules in there and it says take 2 to 4 a day and I know that there are instances you've told me where people might even take more.
So, you know, just a number one. I'm sure you take it yourself. Of course, every day. Any observations are you came into this healthy and you're just doing it to maintain your health?
I'm doing this just to maintain my health. Yeah. Mm hmm. Very good. That's, you know. Because because the part that is important also to understand here is that while stem cells repair at the same time, stem cells also replace the cells that are being lost.
You know, when you do a study where you do an injury and in that in an animal, for example, and then they look at how stem cells release from the bone marrow go into that injury.
If they keep some of these animals alive for a number of months later, you realize that stem cells from the bone marrow have gone everywhere in the body, predominantly in a short in the short amount of time after the injury, they go to the injury.
But outside of that, over time, they go everywhere in the body just to constantly replace the cells that are being lost. So studies in animal and also observations in humans, they're telling us that we have and these are just approximation here, but a new liver every two, three years, a new skin every month, half of a new heart every 25 years.
So this idea that the hard matures when we are kids and then we are left with the heart that we have, studies are clear right now. The heart itself continues to renew itself during the entire life of an individual.
But if we have lost 90% of our stem cells by age 30, there's a point in our lives where we lose that balance. So taking it every day as a healthy person to me is just to make sure that I give my body every day.
This ability to fully renew every day as I age. Now, a lot of the audience favors a plant based approach to life just by the nature of our topic. And Dr.
Joel Furman and myself are both plant based and I always love a supplement that's not in a gelatin capsule because gelatin generally comes from beef or pig.
And this is in a vegetarian capsule. Vegan, correct. Although thank you for doing that. Plus, of course, the actual contents are six plant derived substances.
So anybody wondering and is available. What is the website that one would go read about. Stem region dot seo. God SEO now. Dot com dot SEO. That's correct.
Very, very good. And just to give a shout out, maybe somebody is intrigued and we'll go study your Web site because of what we've discussed. But maybe somebody is in an optimal health.
What would be two or three, four examples of sort of an ideal candidate to add STEM or Jenko into their program? I mean, given what we've talked about so far in this in this short exchange, understanding that any time okay, let me put it this way.
What is diabetes is not having enough cells making insulin. If your pancreas renews every 4 to 6 years, but past age 30, you don't have enough stem cells to fully replace.
The cells are being lost in in a person's condition. The pancreas is more stressed. That's where the problem shows up. And in the same way, that's where the problem can show up in the heart, in the person with a series of risk factor, genetics, whatever, the whole package of what a person is, maybe the heart is the weak spot.
These are the organs that will suffer the most out of a deficiency in stem cells, or this decline in the number of circulating stem cells, putting more stem cells in circulation just gives more stem cells to be able to go and do what stem cells do, which is to repair all these different organs and tissues.
So we have a study now done on congestive heart failure. We have one that we're starting in Parkinson. We have a series of studies starting on colitis and different kinds of conditions in humans and in animals also to be able to document mechanisms, mechanisms of action.
But essentially the answer is anything that's broken has been repairing since the day you were born with stem cells. When we put more in circulation, we just enhance this, this, this ability of the body to repair.
So it could be about anything that's broken. Okay. And a lot of people have bad hips, bad back, bad shoulders, you know, joints. That's certainly common even though that's not the focus of our summing here.
But I think people are intrigued. I've also just want to give a shout out. You're very creative on social media. Is that predominately Instagram where you've been posting.
Both Instagram and Tik Tok? So I've been doing quite a bit of video on both. Yep. And I'm, I'm starting. I'm not I'm not, I'm not a social media addiction either.
But but I'm starting to do it. I'm absent from TikTok, but where I'm Instagram with people find you what are the names? STEM cell Christian I just thought that most people would not spell correctly.
Dropout So stem cell. Christian Very good. And I think the company also has a in correct STEM region. That's going to chat a little bit more as we've been studying this absolutely fascinating topic about endogenous stem cell mobilization.
That's a mouthful for most people, but literally releasing stem cells from your bone marrow more than would have occurred and using plants to stimulate it.
But absolutely. You're sure it's not a t bone steak that stimulates is something that. I've been tried. I got another, you know, piece of ammunition there to debate my carnivore and paleo, as we're always discussing by you, right at the end of our general discussion a moment ago, you brought up and I don't want you to go where you know, it's uncomfortable, but you brought up congestive heart failure and I brought up clinical trials that you're working with clinicians, medical doctors and the like to at least test the waters that we can actually measure improvement in congestive heart failure is a serious disorder.
Usually with a weakened heart, typically from a heart attack, it's something else. So what might you hope to see using STEM region in the six plant based stem cell?
Releasing factors in a patient with congestive heart failure? What would be the ideal kind of measurement response? Well, the reason why we're doing that study on congestive heart failure, it's a blend of different things.
And number one, it's just the number of times where we have had reports of people getting benefits with these kinds of conditions with the heart. We published in 2012 the case of one individual with a after a series of heart attacks with a ejection fraction of 13%, which I'm sure you know, you don't want to live you don't live very well with with an ejection fraction of 13%.
He was put on a heart transplant list and within a matter of just a month or two of taking a product that I had back then at in that time. And and he was removed from it from the heart transplant list because his is heart was essentially normal for a 65 year old.
And we have had a number of these cases over the years. And there are cases that, quite frankly, if I was asked before in the early days when I started this whole journey with plant based stem cell mobilizers, I would not have picked up those kinds of conditions.
These are hard ones to to have an impact on things like Parkinson's or congestive heart failure. But it's the conditions on which we did have some cases.
So we wanted to be able to document this and provide some sort of data on what is the the extent of the improvement that we could see. So we started a study about two years ago on congestive heart failure.
It was affected in part by COVID. But in any case, we have restarted that study. It's ongoing and we basically tested the effect of STEM region on patients with at least two years of stable, chronic congestive heart failure with ejection fraction less than 43 and then so far in that study, we have ten patients that have gone through right now.
And out of these ten, we have basically ten of them that have normal cardiac function. After six months. Now they are taking a significant dose, which is two capsules three times a day.
So that study is ongoing. We're doing another one on Parkinson with the very similar protocol and then we'll study. We'll continue with other types of degenerative diseases, not so much to prove.
I want to be clear, not to prove STEM region is a remedy for congestive heart failure. That's not the point at all. The point is to show stem region is a plan base a blend of of of of plants that trigger the release of your own stem cells, giving back your body its innate ability to repair.
And as an example of what your stem cells can do, let's see what they do when we talk when we talk about heart repair, let's see what they can do. When we talk about brain repair in different conditions with the conclusion really being to show look at really the amazing capability of the of the body's innate ability to repair.
That is really the aim of those studies. Right. Wow. So really, really exciting stuff. And hopefully we'll actually see your study, you know, presented and then published in the medical journal.
So you can take all these incredible concepts just emerging and actually show people that there's, you know, think of the implications of congestive heart failure and seeing the ejection fraction rise and the need for medication go down and probably the quality of lights go up and maybe the very quantity your life go up, too.
So very, very helpful. We just need a little bit more data on what about stem cells in general and aging and any speculation. If you could do a study on aging, what you'd find?
It's a really good question. My expectation if we do a study on aging is that we might not necessarily extend life, although if a life is cut short because of a degeneration of a How could I say an organ that is essential for life.
Then, of course, if you remove that degeneration, then you could extend life. But let's say put that aside. I think the main thing that we're going to achieve with Stem cells, at least endogenous mobilization of stem cells, is that we're going to increase quality of life within our lifespan for the simple reason that we we provide a daily supply of new stem cells that are going to repair their tissues.
Let me answer in a different way. This understanding of disease formation, because we lose stem cells, the red marrow converting into yellow marrow, the decline in number of stem cells, meaning that there's a point in our life where we don't have enough stem cells to offset cellular loss.
From that point on, we start to develop a deficit and it is that deficit in some tissues that lead to a view of the disease formation based on the decline in the number of stem cells is something that I published in 2013 as just as a new understanding and new hypotheses.
And in that article I was saying there's a way to test if that is true, we can go and count the number of stem cells in people who have developed a whole slew of age related diseases and compare the number of stem cells in the circulation of these individuals with normal, healthy people of the same age.
And by now, many of these studies have been published, probably about 50 of those. And if you count the number of stem cells in people with erectile dysfunction, atherosclerosis, heart disease, COPD, diabetes, liver failure, kidney failure, Alzheimer's, Parkinson, lupus, arthritis and the list keeps growing.
All these people have on average, 50% or less than the number of stem cells that you find in a healthy person of the same age. So there's a direct link here.
The fact that we don't have enough stem cells every day is because is the cause of not repairing and allowing the development of the dysfunction that shows up down the road.
So now coming back to your question with the role of stem cells in longevity, if every day you put more stem cells in circulation and you add another day in your life where you don't have that deficit and the tissue is not accumulating a deficit, then basically the next two, three decades that we have to live our lives with a much higher performance, physiologically speaking, which means higher quality of life.
In that way, I think stem cells can really make an absolutely enormous difference in quality of life as we age. But we will have to see if it really changes longevity because your red marrow continues to convert into yellow marrow.
So that will not change. There's a point where we we run out of stem cells today. We don't experience this as a condition because we normally die of a dysfunction of an organ before you run out of stem cells.
So but if we really maintain organs during our entire life, we might experience death down the road. So for now, I would say increase in quality of life.
I want all right. Well, I think everybody will agree this has been fascinating. And it's not just theoretical. We're talking about people can actually grab the stem region that go and start on the product.
And, you know, it's not there's no embryos in here. There's no stem cell in here. It's just herbal plants that have been studied and fascinating 25 year journey from Klamath Lake, Oregon to worldwide.
So thank you for your time and this is an exciting topic. I will say I am taking the product now and I have it in my clinic. I'm totally excited. I read your book, I read your website, I read every YouTube that you've graded this link to your website and the original papers, and it's super exciting.
So I hope people really understand what a revolution this is in health care. Thank you so much, sir. Thank you so much.
