#323 Reverse Biological Age by 3 Years in 8 Weeks - Dr Kara Fitzgerald

Kara Fitzgerald (0:00)

I know that in the aging journey, we see these changes to epigenetics that underpin morbidity and mortality. These changes to DNA methylation patterns really seem to drive the chronic diseases of aging, and they seem to drive aging itself.

Siim Land (0:16)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and our guest today is Dr. Kara Fitzgerald. Dr. Kara is an naturopathic doctor and an author. She was one of the authors of a 2021 study that showed for the first time biological age reversal in humans. She also has a book called Younger You. This episode is brought to you by Bon Charge, formerly known as BluBlox. My favorite light and sleep optimization company, BluBlox, has rebranded themselves as Bon Charge. They're now involved with a huge range of evidence-based products to improve your wellness and life in every way. Their extensive range of premium wellness products helps you to sleep better, perform better, have more energy, recover faster, balance your hormones and reduce inflammation.

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Dr. Kara, welcome to the show.

Kara Fitzgerald (1:27)

It's great to be with you today.

Siim Land (1:29)

Like last year when you had this published study where you showed the inhumans you were able to reverse biological age by over three years, I actually did a video as well about talking about it. And yeah, I think it is quite a pretty important study in that sense. It's actually one of the first ones, if I'm not mistaken, where it has been shown to actually reverse the biological age in humans.

So maybe let's start off, you know, maybe give a brief overview about the study and what did you discover and how did you do it?

Kara Fitzgerald (2:02)

Yes, absolutely. Well, thanks. Thank you. Thanks for your interest in my work and thanks for publishing a video on it. That's very cool.

You know, we were the first randomized control trial and the first using a multimodal diet and lifestyle intervention. So a lot of lot of firsts for this and it got us a great deal of attention, you know, globally, hence my conversation with you now.

It was, so I want to, I just want to say, so when we were designing our study, there were no human studies at that time showing reversal or reduction in biological age. It wasn't thought to be possible. And this was just 2018 when we launched our trial. So things are moving very fast in this world. And I want to say, so why did we even think we could? I don't think at the time we were designing our study, that we necessarily thought we were going to reverse bioage. It just hadn't been published on. In fact, Horvath, who developed the clock, didn't think that it was possible at that time. I mean, he's on records saying it.

But I did have confidence. I actually had a lot of confidence, perhaps cavalierly, so that we would change epigenetic expression, that we would change DNA methylation patterns for the better. So I thought that we could do that, and that was what we wanted to look at. I know that in the aging journey, we see these changes to epigenetics that underpin morbidity and mortality. These changes to DNA methylation patterns really seem to drive the chronic diseases of aging, and they seem to drive aging itself. So we went into our study with those expectations, and I still have to publish on those data. We, in fact, did change DNA methylation much more broadly than just simply the bioage clock. So that's how we started the journey, and then, of course, our first publication, as you know, was this extraordinary finding that, as compared to controlled, we reversed bioage by over three years. We, it was an eight-week study, which hasn't been done either. Most of these human trials now are longer, like there's a rapamycin trial going on now, and I think, if I believe it's, I think it's six months in Australia. But most studies are longer.

We used a diet that we'll talk about in detail. We wanted people to sleep well. We wanted them to meditate briefly a couple times per day. We wanted them to exercise. We had them take a probiotic, and we had them take a greens powder. And they worked with our nutrition team importantly. They met with the nutrition coaches weekly. And I think our adherence numbers speak to the influence of that contact. You know, it kept them on track.