#405 Spending 100 Days Underwater, Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy and Telomeres - Joseph Dituri PhD

Joseph Dituri (0:00)

200 days is the length of time it's gonna take us to get to Mars. So if we're not thinking that we better figure out what happens to a human in an isolated, confined, extreme environment before we go 200 days to Mars, we're not thinking at all. All these hallmarks of aging, if we can just start clipping it, trimming it back and making it better, you give yourself the better opportunity to survive. If you're doing that, that means you're multiplying your life of yourself by one third.

Siim Land (0:26)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast. I'm your host, Siim Land, and our guest today is Dr. Joseph Dituri. Joseph broke the world record for spending 100 days in an underwater port. He's got a PhD in biomedical engineering, and he's a researcher of hyperbaric oxygen therapy. In this episode, we're gonna talk about Joseph's trip underwater and how it increased his telomere length by 20%. We'll also talk about the proposed health benefits of hyperbaric medicine.

Joseph, welcome to the show.

Joseph Dituri (0:53)

Hey, thank you for having me.

Siim Land (0:55)

Yeah, I'm excited to have you on the show.

And you recently became quite popular on media for having broken the world record for spending the most days undersea. So it's a really fascinating experiment that you did. And there's also a lot of interesting science behind that experiment. So I'm really excited to talk with you today.

Joseph Dituri (1:19)

Oh yeah, 100%. We had a good time doing it and we did science. So we tried to make science cool.

Siim Land (1:26)

Sounds good.

Well, I guess we can begin by, maybe you can give an overview of, many people might not have heard about the experiment. So what did you do? And what was the significant thing about it?

Joseph Dituri (1:39)

So as you know, I have a PhD in biomedical engineering. So I'm a clinical researcher sort of a guy.

And what we wanted to do is figure out what happens to a human being when you leave it in an isolated, confined, extreme environment for a long period of time. We chose underwater. There are many reasons why, but we'll get into those later. But what I wanted to do was that biomedical research sort of stuff. So while I was down there for 100 days, we said, hey, listen, we're gonna check blood, saliva, urine, electrocardiograms, electroencephalograms, pulmonary function tests to the scale that hasn't been done since C-Lab days. So that's the kind of level of research that we wanted to do.

What happens to a human when you leave them there, right? So we wanted to figure that out. Why 100 days? Well, 100 days is just a mark. Everybody's like, well, you just wanted to break the world record. I said, no, I really shorted myself by 100 days because I wanted to stay for 200 days. 200 days is the length of time it's gonna take us to get to Mars. So if we're not thinking that we better figure out what happens to a human in an isolated, confined, extreme environment before we go 200 days to Mars, we're not thinking at all, right? So that's what I wanted to do by and large. But I just, I couldn't afford to stay 200 days, to be honest with you, because we paid out of the International Bank of Joe and some graciousness of a non-profit corporate.

And the second thing we wanted to do is we want to take kids and show them that science can be cool.

Not that I'm cool per se, but that you can do science in cool environments. It's not all about beakers and white lab coats and microscopes and boring, right? So if you get out in the wild and do research in the environment, it can be better. And the third reason and final reason is we wanted to talk to everybody in the underwater realm, from astronauts to aquanauts to marine scientists to microbiologists to sponge doctors, for crying out loud, and find out what makes them tick and why they want to take care of the marine environment and why it's so important to us and protect, preserve, and now rejuvenate our marine environment. So those are the three main things that we did while we were down there. We had a whole lot of fun, so.

Siim Land (3:57)

Yeah, must have been a fun, like a hundred, you were alone there, right, for a hundred days.

Joseph Dituri (4:02)

By and large, I was alone. People came to visit, but by and large.

Siim Land (4:08)

Yeah, that's very interesting. So you would say that being underwater mimics some of the same environment as you would like travel to Mars in space or what?