Episode 72
What if I told you that you could live a longer, healthier life, improve your sleep and exercise performance, sharpen your focus and cognition, protect your nerves, and reduce inflammation all with a teaspoon a day?
Carbon nanomaterial scientist Chris Burres, the co-founder of My Vital C, joins the Strive for Great Health Podcast to discuss Carbon 60 (C60) and how this exceptional molecule is revolutionizing health and wellness.
MyVital C– Promo Code: Greathealth
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Episode Transcript
Dr. Richard Harris: [00:00:00] Join me, Dr. Richard Harris, as we strive to unlock the secret to the human body. Strive for wellness strive for great health. Follow the show on iTunes, Spotify, Google, and Android.
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And it’s so important to be able to build these healthy habits. We are about sustainability, and that’s what the courses help you walk through is lifestyle medicine sustainably. And it’s not a get-rich-quick or quick-fix scheme. This is how we set ourselves up for success now and in the future. To learn more about our lifestyle medicine offerings, head to our website, theghwellness.com, and click courses at the top, or click the link for the ultimate wellness course in the show notes.
Welcome to this episode of the Strive for Great Health Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Richard Harris. And today’s another special guest on the episode, a fellow resident of Houston and also a Tesla fan and scientist. So, of course, we nerded out almost, almost immediately for about an hour before this podcast episode, but I have Chris with My Vital C with me today. Chris, how are you doing?
Chris Burres: [00:02:39] Wonderful, Dr. Harris, thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to kind of share kind of what we shared the other day with your audience.
Dr. Richard Harris: [00:02:46] Absolutely. I think this is something that they will love because it piggybacks on the longevity episode that we already talked about. So we’re going to be talking about a really cool longevity agent, but before we get there, we always start with a story.
So, how is it that you went from a, you know, a nanoparticle scientist to someone who is very active in the holistic wellness game?
Chris Burres: [00:03:09] It wasn’t an easy journey for me in reality. So kind of my history is started a company, a carbon nanomaterial manufacturing business in 1991 with my business partner, Robert.
And we were happy, just, you know, really happy normal carbon nanomaterial scientists from 1991 until really about 2000,mid-2013. The change in 2013 happened because, in 2012, they released a publication or they published an article about research that was done on the material, one of the carbon nanomaterials that I was making, and originally they thought it would be toxic.
It’s the Buckyball, and we’ll kind of get more into that, but basically, they thought this Buckyball was going to be toxic. Instead of being toxic, those rats that they gave the, really the, My Vital C formula too, lived 90% longer than the control group. So mid-2013, we started getting phone calls about how much in a dose.
And that was a little uncomfortable for us as carbon nanomaterial scientists to kind of stomach cause in our minds are like, this material is great and solar cells and batteries, ink, and tires. It’s not something that, in general, we would recommend for human consumption, and this was despite the fact that the literature at the time was pretty clear.
Carbon 60 is really for industrial applications, and the peer-reviewed, published research that shows when it’s improperly processed is actually harmful. Whereas our material ESS60 is Carbon 60. That’s been processed for safe for human consumption, and the data even back in and mid-2013 was pretty clear that it was safe. To kind of finish the story, to answer your question, fast forward to 2017, a guy with a really big YouTube following started talking about all the benefits he was getting from taking the product on a daily basis. And our phone calls about this material and about dosage went from like one to two a week to like ten a day. And then as, as you know, we’re not only are we carbon into material scientists, we’re entrepreneurs, this was clearly an opportunity to an entrepreneurial opportunity
And all of these amazing testimonials were coming in. Like there’s actually some sort of obligation to work hard to get this to as many people as possible. So when we entered 2018, and we asked the kind of the two key questions, one is a moral question. Am I comfortable selling it? Absolutely. I take it. My wife takes it.
Really. Everybody on my team takes it. And you may even be taking it now, Dr. Harris. And then, so I am comfortable selling it. Then the next is, when you’re in the supplement industry, it’s the FDA and the FTC we’re on the same, the right side of those organizations. And so, really that was when we in earnest became that kind of supplement company.
That was really never; we didn’t realize it was in our path. And, and wasn’t something that we pursued.
Dr. Richard Harris: [00:06:03] That’s really incredible. You know, a lot of the breakthroughs in medicine happened by happy chance. And this is one of those things that, okay, we thought that this was going to be toxic and we got to figure out what we’re going to do when people start getting exposed to this and then flip side, Oh my gosh, this is something incredible, but let’s go back to that.
How did you become a carbon scientist? Cause that’s not something that most people have exposure to or see, or, you know, I’m sure you didn’t grow up as a kid saying. Hey, I want to work on carbon nano molecules. I think that would be really cool. So what led you into this area? What excited you about this area of study?
Chris Burres: [00:06:41] Well, so it’s very true. I am geeky, but I wasn’t so geeky back then that I was like aspiring to be a carbon nanomaterial scientist. Really, I always knew at a very young age that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And to be like bluntly honest, I had a picture of a Lamborghini on my wall when I was in probably middle school.
And I was like, I want one of those. Like, it’s an incredibly beautiful, sexy car. I want one of those. And this was way, way, way before the internet. And somehow I got ahold of an article that was like, how, how do you get a Lamborghini? Like what, what would one need to do if they really wanted a Lamborghini?
And it was; it broke it down. Pretty simple, it was like, if you want one Lamborghini, you can become a neurosurgeon. And if you want more than one, you can become an entre, a successful entrepreneur. Right. And I probably, the successful, it’s taken me a while. And I missed that piece; I was just like entrepreneurs.
So we’ll just go down that path. So I actually went to school studying mechanical engineering because really it was one of the fastest ways to kind of a higher salary that I could use to invest in whatever company. And I didn’t have a picture of what kind of company that I would be involved with.
While I was going to the University of Houston, Go Coogs. I met my business partner in physics class, and I always remember the teacher’s name cause I feel like he was destined to be a physics professor. His name was Dr. Weinstein. We met, and he was actually working at the Texas center for superconductivity, which is an organization inside of the University of Houston structure.
And, and it was actually created for Dr. Paul Chew, pretty famous in super in the superconductivity field. And so my business partner, Robert, was working with Dr. Chew separating the fullerenes, and we’ll get to that shortly, exactly what they are exactly. But he was actually isolating the materials.
And one day, Dr. Chew came in and said, Hey, you guys are young kids, this material and at the time it was selling for $6,000 a gram. Why don’t you go start a business and my business partners from an entrepreneurial background. And so he was off and running. He was like, yeah. Okay. We’re going to start this business.
And he actually had started it with another business partner. And one of the things that we had to do in the process, or really at that point, they had to do in this process to make fullerenes, and this Buckyball was actually to vaporize graphite. And graphite, it turns out, is one of the hardest materials on the planet to vaporize.
So you actually have to take two graphite roads, and you vaporize the space between them. When you have those types of temperatures, you’ve got a lot of heat that you’ve got to manage. And I was studying mechanical engineering, so they engaged me for drawings and like kind of heat design. And ultimately, the other business partner went away, and I stayed.
And so we in 1991 are the first company to deliver commercial quantities of carbon nanomaterials that still exists. Actually one, one company beat us. They didn’t make it to nine months. But yeah, we’re the first company that still exists. So that’s kind of the story of how did I become a nanomaterial scientist in a nutshell.
Dr. Richard Harris: [00:09:44] Awesome. So let’s go back to what you alluded to earlier, and that was that this was a chance kind of discovery that blew people’s minds. So let’s talk about that. How did C60 go from this industrial application you talked about into now, one of the longevity champions? I mean, this is something that a lot of people are talking about.
Everyone wants to live longer, as long as you’re living healthy, as long as you’re living well, how do we live longer and live well? And this is kind of a champion out here in this story. So let’s talk about that. How did C60 go from toxin to longevity champion?
Chris Burres: [00:10:24] Well, I think, you know, if you start at the beginning, right. This material was, was discovered at rice university in 1985 by three professors, Smalley, Kroto, and Curl. They discovered this if you’re watching, and I know this might be one of the first episodes your watching, right. If you’re watching, I’m holding up a model of this, and if you’re just listening, picture a soccer bowl, where the lines on the soccer ball represent the bonds between the carbon atoms.
You have this spherical molecule, 60 carbon atoms. It’s the first close cage molecule ever to ever be discovered. And in fact, because of this discovery of this molecule, there’s a new symbol in chemistry. We’re all familiar with the at symbol, right? It’s in our email addresses, but lanthanum @C60 means lanthanum trapped inside of it.
That the size of the cage is big enough for any atom on the periodic chart inside of it. So lanthanum at sea 60 means you’ve got lanthanum, Adam trapped, physically inside of it. It’s not covalently or ionically bonded to the exterior. They discovered it in 85.
In 1991, same year that we started the company, there’s a service that tracks the most referenced scientific papers. All 10 in 1991, all 10 of the most referenced scientific papers were actually related to buckyballs or fullerenes, which is kind of the gamut of materials that are associated with fullerenes. And so, if you think about something going viral on YouTube or viral, wherever, this was a scientific, viral, scientific discovery, and the entire scientific community was just blown away by it.
And they like through, you know, they were, they were all in on fullerenes. So not surprising that won that Nobel prize in 1996 for that discovery, a few short 11 years from actual discovery to award of the Nobel prize. So then you fast forward, it’s got all these amazing properties, right? It’s superconducting. It’s harder than a diamond.
It’ll actually turn into a diamond. It’s got six-fold symmetry. So there’s six planes across this spherical molecule where it’s symmetrical, which gives it incredible strength. In fact, you can fire it at 15,000 miles an hour at a plate of steel where most molecules will just shatter when they hit that plate of steel.
This one will just bounce back. It’s got that kind of resilience. It’s also a great electron holder and reliever releaser, which is why it’s good in batteries, was ultimately why it actually makes a good antioxidant, and we’re kind of move in that direction now. So. You’ve got this material with amazing properties.
Whenever you’ve got these amazing properties, you kind of assume that it’s going to be used everywhere. In fact, there’s another reason people assumed it was going to be everywhere. A lot of people don’t realize how important the benzene ring is to us. Right. We don’t have modern society without the benzene ring.
It’s the foundation of most medicines. It’s the foundation. If you just glance around you, if there’s plastic around, and I know there is, the foundation material, excuse me, molecule of plastic is the benzene ring. Well, actually, there are many benzene rings around the exterior of this Buckyball, right? It’s part of the lattice; it’s part of the shape of the mouth of the molecule.
And so a lot of people hearkened it to a 3D version of benzene. And if benzene is ubiquitous in our society, then at some point, This 3D version of benzene, this Buckyball, will be ubiquitous in our society. And if it is, then we got to know if it’s dangerous or not. Now it turns out benzene is actually a known toxin and a known carcinogen.
So they just kind of assumed that this 3D version of benzine is going to be toxic, carcinogenic, just a reasonable assumption. So that’s why they did this initial study. In fact, they had done a lot of studies before this kind of pinnacle 90% extension of life study, where they took the raw powder, and they would inject it subcutaneously, or they’d have rats inhale it.
And in all of these cases, as long as the material was processed properly, the rats would just excrete it out. This was the first study. This is the Paris rat study was the first time that they actually dissolve the buckyballs in olive oil. In this case, it was olive oil and really in any oil. And then gave it to the rats, to the test subjects and, and, and one of the beliefs is why it had such an impact is because when you’re dealing with the powder, it’s known that buckyballs are not water-soluble.
Right? So a lot of what our body intakes is water-soluble. We are better at processing water-soluble things typically than oil-soluble things. And so that’s why those, you know when you just would consume the powder, you would just excrete it out. It really wouldn’t get processed into your system very much.
Now you dissolve it in olive oil, and you end up that dissolution process actually ends up giving you individual Buckyball molecules, right. Or if you’re going to consume it, we call that ESS60 molecules. So you’ve got these individual molecules like one individual molecule is obviously going to be significantly more bioavailable than any crystal that you might consume.
Right? So they did that. Those rats lived 90% longer. It’s also important to note. So a typical Wister rat lives 32 months, and they die with a known amount of tumors. And for every day, they live the tumor mass that’s typically in their body increases. Despite the fact that the My Vital C rats lived 90% longer out to 62 months.
None of them have had any tumors. So that’s really important. A lot of people get really excited, and they should, but a lot of people take a jump that they shouldn’t take. I’m like, Oh, it’s a cure for cancer. No, like that’s no like let’s be scientifically accurate here. There’s a big difference between managing a metastasized cancer.
Right. And trying to cure one and then being a cancer, preventative we’re aware of things like exercise, eating healthy, good sleep as cancer preventatives. This particular result and that study kind of indicates that it’s likely that this ESS60 molecule in olive oil has a good cancer preventative properties.
So that study gets published in 2012 to kind of share how conservative we were in 2013. And people started saying, Hey, how much in a dose? We actually added not for human consumption to our labeling, right? We’re conservative nanomaterial scientists. It’s for ink and batteries and solar cells. Right.
Not for human consumption. And again, despite the fact that the literature was clear, as long as you processed it properly, it was fine. Fast forward to 2017, a YouTuber starts talking about how, how the benefits he’s getting, and really now we’re thrown or thrust into this market. And I like to share in my mind, there’s really two ways that people become a supplement person.
Right. I think typically, somebody says they want to be wealthy, and they want to sell supplements to do it. And I have no problem with people being wealthy. It’s just not how I ended up being a supplement guy, the other, and I think this is more typical is they’ve got like the mental health challenges themselves, or maybe have a loved one, and they go out and do research, and they solve these problems.
And then now they want to save the world. Hopefully, it doesn’t surprise you. I’m not against people saving the world. It’s just not how I ended up here. Right. I’ve been manufacturing this Buckyball, right? The soccer-shaped molecules since 1991, they throw it in this toxicity study that’s published in 2012.
And then now, like I’m a supplement guy and I’m just trying to kind of be a good shepherd in this environment, which is, you know, we can have interesting conversations about the supplement industry. And we did when we got together about the nature of the supplement industry,
Dr. Richard Harris: [00:18:25] Right. And that’s actually going to be question number four because we had a really good conversation about that.
And you put a really interesting question forward that we’re going to talk about. But we’ve already alluded to some of these things about now; what are the benefits of, and then why don’t you share a couple of testimonials that you’ve gotten from people who are using this product?
Chris Burres: [00:18:47] Absolutely. So really, when those first people, right after kind of mid-2013, started calling, and what they were looking to mimic is like, if these rats lived 90% longer than.
This is the current best-researched way to well; I don’t want to say best-researched; I want to be very specific here. It’s the best research result for longevity that exists, right? There are other ways to live longer. One of them, which is very well-researched, is calorie restriction. You can get if you cut your calorie consumption by 30%; they’ve done research in multiple animal models.
You can extend your life by 30%. I kind of call that the starve for yourself one-third to death diet, and not too many people are signing up for that. I think it needs a little marketing spin, but you compare that like that’s a 30% extension of life with pretty unfavorable requirements, right? A 30% reduction in calorie consumption to the result of really, to My Vital C formula, which was a 90% extension of life.
And really, it’s, you’re taking an oil with ESS60 dissolved in it. So this was really good research. That’s why they were first taking this, this molecule. They’re like, Hey, let me kind of recreate this. And then they started giving us feedback, right? So when you look at something that’s on the market and really, we didn’t have any literature that was saying what you should expect.
Like you should expect that you’re going to take this oil and know that there’s this study. And really shouldn’t have, like whatever you expect, there’s nothing that supports it other than a study. Right. But they started reporting things to us, and we started going, okay, well, let’s look at those things, and we’re actually starting some, some research.
And we can talk about that here in a second, for me, any testimonial that we share. Really, I can always trace it back to the individual who gave me the testimonial. So if I have a customer who calls me and says, my uncle had this experience, that’s never a testimonial that I will share. It’s very important for me to kind of have that conversation, to have that relationship with the individuals.
And then I share my own testimonials. It’s also important for me to say that the FDA hasn’t evaluated our product; it’s not intended to treat, diagnose, cure, or prevent any disease. Any testimonial that I share, you may have vastly different results. Just know that in my case, I played soccer for 25 years.
I had a left knee pain that bothered me from the point that I quit soccer until really 2018. When I started taking my formula in earnest, really almost on a daily basis, it took me a while to like, get it part of my routine, that knee pain is gone. I also, I am really that geeky scientist. I have a spreadsheet, the spreadsheet goes back to 2014, and I was tracking my migraines.
I was trying very hard to figure out like, What was causing my migraines so that those migraines, you know, that I could stop it. What are you going to? Did I stay up too late? Did I drink too much? Did I exercise too much? What, what was causing them? I would get four to five migraines per year in 2018. When I started taking the product regularly.
Again, no migraines. You couple that with my wife’s story. And I always remember my wife, she gets migraines, once a month she used to get nine-plus migraines a month, and I always remember nine because there’s some medicine that her doctor would prescribe, but he would only give her nine of them.
So any migraine past the ninth, she would actually have to just suffer through. And she did; when she started taking the My Vital C formula on a regular basis, she went down to one migraine, one once a month, or once every other month. And so it’s a pretty impactful results. If you are subject to migraines, you can, you can appreciate the positive value that that has.
And if we want to share others, our most consistent testimonial, and I can share something about sleep, but is that people take the product in the morning. They’ve report mental focus and energy during the day and then better sleep that night. And I think it’s really important to share that the really only two other things, at least that I’m aware of, that you can do in the morning and positively impact your sleep at night.
One of them is exercise. If you exercise in the morning. As opposed to not exercising in the morning, it will impact your sleep. And the other is actually just to get your circadian rhythm in line, right? That rhythm that keeps you active when the sun rises and then starts slowing you down and preparing for sleep as it sets.
If you just get exposure to sunlight early in the morning, that can positively impact your sleep. Other than that, I’m not aware of too many things that, that have that impact. Yeah,
Dr. Richard Harris: [00:23:21] Absolutely. We talked about that in our sleep podcast that you want to get sunlight early in the morning and get exercise early in the morning.
That doesn’t mean you have to hit the gym, just take a walk in the morning, and you’ll see your sleep improve. You know, it’s really interesting when I started digging into the research on C60, and it’s a really powerful antioxidant, you know, a hundred, 200, maybe 300 times more potent than vitamin C, vitamin E.
And because, like you talked about, it has six free spaces to pick up electrons or free radicals. And we’ve talked about these before on the podcast. These are molecules that aren’t whole, and when they aren’t whole, what they do is they try to make themselves whole and how they make themselves whole, as they pull electrons from our proteins and other, our DNA, that kind of thing.
And so what happens is you get DNA damage. You get cell membrane damage; you get damage to all kinds of vital aspects of the cell. And this leads to a process where the cell eventually kills itself because it can’t function normally. And if your cells are killing themselves, guess what? That organ is not working properly.
You don’t want that on an uncontrolled basis. And so that’s what antioxidants do they prevent this damage from occurring. And this has six free spaces. To do that to, to help offset that oxidative stress, that damage. And so it’s a really powerful antioxidant; there’s data that shows it’s anti-microbial, there’s some data that shows it gets into the bacterial walls and disrupts them.
So bacteria can’t function properly. There’s data with HIV that it prevents maturing of HIV. So the HIV then when he infects a cell, and then it releases other viral particles, the viral particles are immature, and then it can’t infect another cell. There’s evidence on influenza. There’s evidence that, and this is really cool, that those reactive oxygen species that I talked about they’re generated in our mitochondria, our mitochondria, our energy-producing parts of ourselves. And we make some of these things. When we make energy, it’s just a by-product of using oxygen to make energy. And we have ways of dealing with that. But if you’re full of a lot of stress, a lot of toxins eating fried foods, if you’re not getting exercise, all the things that we talk about in this podcast, you have more oxidative stress.
And so this actually has been shown to get into the mitochondria where that is happening. So it’s working directly where we’re getting that source of stress. That’s really cool. There’s some evidence that it helps with cartilage formation. There’s a type of cell called chondrocytes, and these cells make cartilage.
We’ve talked about collagen before on the podcast. It’s been shown to increase college and increase the matrix that collagen attaches to. It’s also been shown to help with osteoporosis, has been shown to help with bone formation. Osteoporosis is a really big problem here in this country. 25% of women above the age of 60 experience osteoporosis, which increases our risk of falls.
And that has a high rate of death. After a fall it’s like 30% chance that you’ll die from complications after like a hip fracture or a femur fracture. And there’s also evidence that this is an antitumor molecule as well. And we already alluded to that on the podcast, is that because of its antioxidant effects, there are some tumors that aren’t able to function in that regard.
And one of the things I wanted to mention is we can’t think of cancer as a homogeneous, meaning all the same disease cancer is so different. Even if you have, even if, let’s say you have breast cancer, another person has breast cancer, your cancers could be completely different. And we know that some cancers don’t do well with antioxidants.
We know that some cancers do very well with antioxidants. We know some cancers; it’s better to get pro-oxidants in them to help destroy the cancer cells; other cancers not. And so we’re still figuring that out in that regard, but the overwhelming thought process right now is it’s better to have antioxidants to prevent the development of cancer cells, to prevent the inflammation and the oxidative stress that leads to the development of cancer cells through repeated cell damage. So I think that it’s really cool that all of this is happening. With one molecule, and I’ve been taking it for, I think about five days now.
And I’ve noticed through my sleep data that I am getting a little bit more recovery, actually. I didn’t mention this to you when we met previously that my sciatica had flared up big time. And that’s because somehow I pulled my back, picking up the remote. I don’t know, you know, things that happen when you get close to 40. Literally picking up the remote off the ground and pull my back.
So my sciatica has been flared up like crazy the last couple of weeks. And so four days into the product. I’m not having any sciatic pain whatsoever. And it usually takes me a very intensive regimen of daily stretching using my PEMF device, using CBD. You know, I have a very intense regimen to help get that under control when it flares up, and now it feels great.
So I can definitely see some difference in using the product myself. And I’ve taken a lot of different products that, you know, I try a lot of different things, but the data is showing me that this is working. And then also my own personal experience is showing me this is working as well.
Chris Burres: [00:28:46] I am so lucky. Right? Cause, cause I’m not supposed to be the supplement guy. Right. And there’s a couple benefits of that. And I’m just so lucky because I get to give this product to people like you. And you’re like, Oh, you know, I didn’t realize right. You didn’t share with me that you’re sciatica was; it was flaring up.
And then you come back, and you tell me that it’s done these beneficial things to you. That’s that I’m just so lucky in that regard. I want to add, so, so you’ve done a lot more, frankly, a lot more research than most of the I go on podcasts fairly regularly. And so you just gave me a litany of stuff that I’ve obviously read, but you know, haven’t kind of cemented it in my mind.
One of the interesting things, with regard to cancer, As you take, and this is a this is in vitro, right? If you take in, in a Petri dish, right? Healthy cells and cancer cells, and you introduce an anti-cancer agent, right. Which is always a poison of some kind; the goal is to poison the cancer before the healthy cells.
In the presence of this ESS 60 molecule, when you introduce that agent, it increases the efficacy against the cancer cells. And actually has protective effects for the healthy cells. Now, this is, this is not normal. Like this is not the normal kind of response. Usually, if you’re going to increase the efficacy of the cancer cell, you’re also going to kill off more of the healthy cells.
So there are some pretty profound, and you’ve listed a lot of them. They’re potentials that this is going to have towards human health. And it really, if you think about it, something that has the longest longevity result ever, right. A 90% extension of life. And if, actually, if we, if humans live 90% longer, our average age, average age will be about 152.
Right? So, so I’ve always had, for whatever reason in my head, I wanted to live to 125. And really was like, that was, that was in my mind. And I think in the minds of a lot, going to be a really painful existence because our mindset is well kind of to share with you, you, and your audience.
I talk about this research kind of regularly, and people are like, well, yeah, but you know, why would you want to live longer? Which is a little crazy to me because I always wanted to live to 125, but I get it. And I, and I then asked them the question. So if you have the same mental capacity that you do today, and you have the same physical capacity that you do today, would you then want to live longer?
And most people at that point say yes, because, because we don’t really have an ability right now to grasp that you can live longer and not be infirmed. Right? Like our, our mindset is to live longer means to live infirmed. And so what they’re hearing when I asked the question or talk about living longer, I was like, how much longer would you like to live infirmed?
And, and I think in general, the question is like not, not much longer, like, let me take care of my will, and then we can be done with it is, you know, obviously depending on how informed they are, I think this mind shift, there’s a mindset shift that’s going to be coming where we start thinking in terms of I can live longer.
I can be, I mean, take the Superbowl. Yesterday, right? Like the oldest quarterback versus the youngest quarterback, and he’s the oldest to ever play in a Superbowl and win, right. He’s outside of an age like my dad would have never thought that he could play; he played football, that he could have been a quarterback at 40.
Right. I just, there’s just no way. And our entire mindset’s changing about age and, and what older age looks like?
Dr. Richard Harris: [00:32:19] Absolutely. You know, we talked about this in one of the first episodes on the podcast is that aging is not synonymous with disease. Although most people think it is. It’s not it’s.
What do you do when you’re in your twenties, thirties, and forties, because what you do in your twenties, thirties, and forties is going to determine the quality of life you have in your fifties, sixties, and seventies. And I really want to get it to people, especially here in the US, that disease is not the norm.
It’s not what’s supposed to happen. And there are ways, innovative means that we can even do things that we never thought were even possible years ago. And like we talked about when we met, it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that we are able to stop the aging process sometime in the next 15, 30 years.
And that’s even a conservative estimate that we’ll be able to stop the aging process. And then, at some point, maybe even reverse the aging process because there are animals that can do that. Like the immortal jellyfish, it can reverse its biological age. It can go from fully adult back to embryo stage and then go back to an adult when it senses the environment is better.
It literally does not die. It only dies if something kills it, it doesn’t die on its own.
Chris Burres: [00:33:33] Of natural causes. Yeah.
Dr. Richard Harris: [00:33:34] Right. Yeah. It could be something that humans actually unlock. And we think that it’s something that we are going to unlock. But even so even you can still be a fully functional 90-year-old living a great life, traveling the world.
If you do the things to take care of yourself. And I think that’s so important. And one of the other things about cancer that you, that I read. Is that there are clinical trials going on or having trials going on using this agent with chemotherapy for that exact reason, to help it kill the cancer cells and not the healthy cells because it does affect some of the ways that cancer cells are able to trick the immune system or trick cells into getting rid of the chemotherapy agent.
So there’s something called efflux pump that cancer cells really upregulate because they want to make sure that they’re, nothing’s coming into it’s toxic to them. And so what happens is in these cancer cells, the C 60 actually decreases the ability of the cancer cells to pump things out of the cell.
And so, the chemotherapy is able to work better. I think that’s a really cool fact that it’s helping to kill the cancer cells and save the good cells because that’s exactly what you, what you want. And a lot of times that. Well, one of the things that’s changed in modern medicine is that we don’t give nearly as high doses of chemotherapy and some indications we wait on chemotherapy because we realized more people were dying from the chemotherapy than from whatever stage of the cancer, like prostate cancer.
That’s why prostate cancer a lot of times, it’s a watch and wait approach because we realized more people were dying from the chemo than they were from the prostate cancer. Cause it usually affects older people, but that’s a topic for another day. I should do a whole podcast on, on cancer because it’s really an interesting, from a scientific perspective disease state, because it’s not one disease, it’s several hundred or thousand different diseases, but let’s get back on the, on the supplement topic because you said something really interesting when we met.
And it was the Amazon rating system doesn’t work for supplements. And I thought that was a really profound, simple statement that encompasses so much of the supplement industry. So let’s talk about that. Why doesn’t the Amazon rating system work for supplements?
Chris Burres: [00:35:49] Yeah. Well, first, the Amazon rating system is actually phenomenal, right?
Like if you’re going to go buy a cell phone and you can see a rating, and you can see like what’s bad, and maybe you’re like me, I go to the really bad, you know, what is the one-star listing of people really angry. And, and very often that’s like, it didn’t arrive on time, you know, irrelevant to, you know, irrelevant reviews when it comes to a cell phone or whatever.
But when you look at and this, this whole thought process came because we actually have a lab, and we actually have HPLCs, and we’re actually working on procuring a mass spec so that we can get even more information about some of the directions that we’re going to go in and in terms of supplementation and, and, and so we’re thinking about, well, what does it mean if somebody gives, say vitamin C five stars on, on Amazon.
Right. And I mean, the one that we know it doesn’t mean is that this person took this vitamin C tablet, and they weighed it and made sure it was exactly one gram or more. Right. And then that they took it, and they throw it in an HPLC, and they confirmed that it was ascorbic acid. Now we know that didn’t happen.
Really. All we know is, well, they looked about the right size tablets. If they bothered to count them, there were 90 of them, and they were delivered on time. Right. So it’s not; the rating system in Amazon feels, especially as it relates to supplements, feels like people saying this is a quality supplement.
Right. But the people who are rating them don’t have the equipment to let you know that it’s a quality supplement. I can tell you, there are supplements on Amazon that I’ve looked at that do not have what they say they have in them and still have five-star ratings. So you gotta be really careful in this environment.
And I don’t, it’s not that I think like, Oh if it’s on Amazon, don’t buy it. I think. If, if it’s on Amazon, that’s okay. We’re on Amazon because we just want to be easy for our customers to get to, but make sure you don’t just go to Amazon and buy whatever has five stars and is the cheapest because you’re, you’re, you’re not the five stars don’t mean what you think, like what our instinct says they mean. Make sure you do the background research. Maybe you ultimately do buy it from Amazon, and maybe it is even the cheapest, but make sure you go back and do research on the company and like how old is the company? And if, frankly, if the company is only on Amazon and they don’t have a website, they’re probably not like committed to this.
Like I know some of the people who have competed in the C60 space, their products are only available on Amazon. Cause they’re not like, they’re not going to be around for the long haul, and what they’re really putting into their products and what they’re really delivering, we just don’t know. Make sure that they have their own website.
Make sure they have a physical location. Just know that in the supplement industry, it’s very easy to like get somebody to co-pack it and then sell it and not, you know, not be responsible for the testing that you really should be like in our case. So here’s a good example. Well, let’s talk about pedigree first.
So in 1991, we delivered our first commercial quantities of carbon nanomaterials, and we’ve sold only to research institutions around the world, really from 91 until about mid-2013, when this kind of publication came out in this transition happened. And what’s true when you sell to research institutions.
And again, this is internationally is they get like one gram of our carbon 60 for industrial purposes, and they actually give it to a research associate, or they give it to a grad student. And then they go back, and they know how to test it, and they fire it up on their HPLC, and they make sure that what we sold them, that we did sell them what we said, we sold them.
Right. And cause if they don’t, they’ve actually just tested it, and they’re going to send it back. So, so from 91 to 2013, like we had to sell the highest quality. We just at least had to sell what we were saying, which was the highest quality available material around. And then you look in 2000 and 12, 2013, the study comes out, and people start selling, and they don’t have the equipment to test it.
And they’re also selling to a customer base. And we know that we know with some examples that they didn’t have the equipment to test it. And actually didn’t send it out to get tested. And I can talk to you about that in a second, but basically, they’ve never sold to a customer base that could take their product and test it and confirm that it is what it is.
Right. So our pedigree is this kind of deep scientific Integrity, and that’s carried over into our supplements. So as an example, one of in the C60 space, there’s a company that has focused originally; they’ve kind of shifted now, but focus on MCT. We sell three oils, right? We sell olive oil, MCT oil, and avocado oil.
Each of them with as much of the ESS60 molecule that we can dissolve in it, it turns out that in olive oil, you can get about 0.8 milligrams per milliliter and avocado 0.6. And then in MCT, somewhere between 0.3 and 0.35, this other company that was focused on selling C60 in MCT oil, their original labeling said 0.8 milligrams per milliliter.
Basically, all they did was use the same protocol, which was take your C60 powder, stick it at an MCT and mix it for two weeks. And they just assumed that would be point. They didn’t even bother to weigh what came out of it. They didn’t use kind of any science in this process, and they just called it 0.8 milligrams per milliliter.
They’ve since changed their labeling, probably because they saw a video that I did about what the actual concentration available concentration is, the maximum concentration in MCT is. So, so it’s important that you kind of do the research and understand the company behind the scenes and what they can do.
So what we learned is, as we went from a smaller batch in that original Paris rat study, they did mix it for two weeks, and they did get a concentration of 0.8 milligrams per milliliter. But as you increase the volume that you’re mixing in, there’s fluid dynamic issues that come up, and it actually takes longer than two weeks to maximize the concentration.
Well, we actually just take our samples and go over to our HPLC and test our current concentration. And we know when it’s actually saturated because we do all of that in-house, other companies just don’t.
Dr. Richard Harris: [00:42:09] Yeah. That’s something that I look for whenever I’m reviewing a supplement is; what is the passion of the person making the supplement?
Are they driven by science? Because I am driven by science. I’m a holistic doc, but I’m not just pulling stuff out of my head or, you know, my opinion; everything I say is backed by science. I’m meticulous about the science because I love science. And so that was one of the first things I feel I got from you was that you were someone who just loves science, and the act of being a scientist is what gets you out of bed.
In the morning, answering these questions, figuring out these, these problems, making solutions, and then as a benefit, you get to help people while doing it. And that’s something that is, is, is amazing. You know, you’re helping people with your passion. And when we talked, we talked about something that you were doing with or running a study with Oura Ring. You know, I’m, I’m wearing one right now.
My wife lets me use it as my wedding band, which is super cool that she lets me use this a our wedding band. Cause I mean, we both sit there, and we’ll nerd out on our data together and be like, Hey, what’s your recovery number today? Oh, what’s your HRV today. And then we’ll just like talk about it.
But yeah. So you’re doing a study. So you’re, you’re putting your money where your mouth is. You’re saying, okay, I’ve got this product. And I think it’s going to make a difference in this tangible hard data. So what’s going on with that study with Oura Ring.
Chris Burres: [00:43:35] So, so really what we’re looking for, and I’ll talk about another study, is kind of what people are reporting to us.
How can we test it? Right. So I ended up in contact with this consultant for Oura Ring. His name’s Benjamin; he’s actually an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego. And again, he’s a consultant for Oura Ring. So once people give permission, he’s actually able to access the data.
You’re ordering data behind the scenes. You’re nerdy like me. You’ve probably, you can log in and get a lot more data. And I don’t know if you’ve done that, but if you just log into the interface, there’s a ton more data. That other, you know, more than what just comes on the app, that’s on your phone, which is pretty, it’s quite a lot of data.
So really, we’re kind of getting authorization from people. And the protocol for the study was to collect 10 days of data. And really, what we’re looking for is, Hey, what’s your interpretation of your sleep for these 10 days? Before taking the product and then 10 days taking the product and then 10 days back off the product.
And then 10 days back on the product again. And we want the survey data really Benjamin was like, we need the survey data because we want you to kind of notice something and let us know, give us some feedback. Because then we can go in and get all of the data and kind of confirm whatever the observations were in the individuals.
So that was started, you know, we, we actually got that started, started having conversations late 2019, of course, 2020. And COVID, that slowed everything down, but particularly this the study, because it turns out Oura Ring has the capability to identify COVID even kind of pre symptom and sometimes in asymptomatic cases.
And, and I don’t know to what accuracy, right. I’m sure that they’re working on it, but with that, just the knowledge that it’s COVID relevant, Benjamin, our contact, has been inundated with like press calls and conversations and obviously COVID data. And so that’s really got sidetracked. What we’ve decided to do is let’s keep this at least the survey piece of this moving forward.
We’ve got, I think it’s like four, maybe five people who have already gone through the 10 days off, 10 days on 10 days off, 10 days on, and the data’s pretty consistent. Like from the baseline to the end of the 10 days on, again, there’s an increase in the questions that we’re asking them are like, please rate the quality of your sleep.
How quickly did you fall asleep? How restless was your sleep? And then just, how did you feel the next day? And that data is consistently increasing from that baseline to the second time that they’re on the product. And so that’s one of the areas that we’re, you know, literally like one of my pictures of the supplement industry is that people were staying away from doing the research.
Right? Because if it’s believed that this supplement does this thing, then supplement companies more, we’re more comfortable just saying, okay, well let’s have everyone believe it because our sales are good. Well, people believe it. If we actually do the research, then we might find out that it doesn’t no; the research doesn’t support what people believe.
And so they just stay away to, supplement companies tend to stay away from that research. So I’m like, I’m about the research customers are telling us. They’re sleeping better. Let’s do a sleep study. At another, in early 2019 doctor from Tampa, Florida called and said, Hey, I’m thinking about doing this little DNA age study, and we’re going to use your product.
I’m like, okay, that’s fine. And I think, you know, he sells some of our product out of his office. So we sent him a couple extra bottles and, and I didn’t even think much of it. And then he called later, like in October of 20, really October of 2019, and was really excited about, no 2020, October of 2020, and was really excited about the result he got.
So basically, and it was just two participants. So the, you know, this is all, take it with a grain of salt. He had two middle-aged ladies, they took a DNA age test, and the brand is actually DNAge. They took it on day zero, and then six months later, they took another one. This whole DNA age stuff is really about aggregating data.
And so I was kind of digging into like, what are the protocols, like, what are they actually doing when they’re identifying your DNA age? And what I came to understand is the hope is in these situations, is that. Okay. I wait six months, and I do that six-month test. I’m hoping that I only age five months in that six months.
Right. So that I’ve slowed the aging process down. Well, it turned out in this case, the ladies, one of them reverted their age by, I think about 1.6 and the other one, about 2.8 years. Right? So not that they just aged only five months in six months. They actually, their DNA age reverted. So he’s really excited.
He wanted to switch to a new age and different age tests called True Age by true diagnostics. We’ve already got four through it. Actually, I need to reach out to him and say like, Hey, what’s the status? I think that blood has already been drawn and sent off to True Age. So we’re just waiting for that result.
And that’s really, really exciting. And that’s one of the ways that we’re moving things forward. And probably the most, the most important one is typically, you know, the scientific process works this way. Usually, there’s anecdotal information. So some people like dismiss anecdotal information outright, but it’s actually started part of the scientific process from this anecdotal information.
We create a hypothesis. Then we do a test. And in this case, they gave it to the rats. They thought it was toxic. You get a result. It wasn’t toxic. The rats lived 90% longer. And then, the next step in the scientific process is that another lab needs to recreate those results. Right. Nobody’s done that. So this was published again in 2012.
And so we’ve already started, and we’ve identified the organization that we’re going to use to do this study. And we’re right now doing kind of the preliminary toxicity studies that are required to get into their program. And we’re already doing that. So we’re going to do our own five-plus-year toxicity study on Wistar rats ourselves.
And that’ll be the reproduction of that original result. And so, yeah, we’re very much about putting our money where our mouth is.
Dr. Richard Harris: [00:49:42] That’s awesome. I’ll be on the lookout for the results of that study as well, because you know, you know me, I love studies. So if people are interested in the product, where do they go to find the product?
You said it was on Amazon, your website, and if they want to follow you where, and they find all this information.
Chris Burres: [00:49:59] Well, Amazon is a little bit more expensive. Just the pricing is that way to kind of cover the Amazon costs. So you can actually get the product by going to, we made a URL for your audience, right?
And that URL, if you go to myvitalc.com/greathealth. Then they’re going to come to a nice landing page. They’ll kind of see your podcast mentioned at the top there. What I recommend is you can go and get one bottle, or we have a 30, exactly 30 day supply and kind of many servings.
It’s a, it’s really convenient. But if you go on subscription, you can save 25%. You can cancel your subscription at any time. Our team is not like trained to talk to you out of, you know, canceling your subscription. Just take advantage of that discount. Also, if you use a coupon code, great health, then you’ll get $15 off of your initial purchase.
Dr. Richard Harris: [00:50:53] Awesome. Well, thank you for that. I’ll have all that information in the show notes. Is there anything else you want to say before we bring this episode to a close, Chris?
Chris Burres: [00:51:01] One difference about me, right? So this doesn’t work for everyone. I’m very happy. Like every time I get a report like yours, Dr. Harris, I’m excited because, you know, it’s good.
Like I’m actually helping somebody, or my product is actually helping somebody, but I am a little different. Like, I’m not a guy who went in the back, and I’m not Louis Pasteur, who kind of figured out this process that’s going to save humanity. And then I bring it out front, and somebody says, Oh, it didn’t really work for me.
Yeah. Again, I’ve been making the powder since 91. The test result happened in 2012. It’s actually interesting. They used our powder, and my company’s actually referenced in that original research. So that’s exciting. And then, then now, I’m kind of thrust in the supplement market. So I’m just about collecting data.
If it works for you. Great. I want to hear your story. If it doesn’t work for you. Great. I want to hear your story cause it’s, you know, I don’t think that there’s any one thing that is what everybody needs. I think we had a conversation about how people react differently to different foods and, you know, blood glucose levels and all this stuff. Like everybody is different, and we’re just going to collecting more and more information.
Dr. Richard Harris: [00:52:03] Absolutely. And sometimes, it is a trial and error. We’re not at the phase yet. There’s a lot of stuff we can test and see and say; this might be better for you, but there’s some things that we can’t. And so that’s why I’m a huge fan of having something that you can track data like the Oura Ring.
And see objective measures of how stuff is working for you. And that’s why I run everything through this now, but I want to thank you, Chris, for coming on the podcast. There’s a lot of great information. Thank you for providing that for my audience, and I want to thank you for everything that you do and your relentless drive to help other people and to follow where the science leads. So thank you for that.
Chris Burres: [00:52:43] Thank you, Dr. Harris, for having me. This was great.
Dr. Richard Harris: [00:52:46] And to all my listeners, as usual, thank you for listening to the Strive for Great Health Podcast, and have a blessed day.
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