Intelligent Medicine Radio Show for July 11, Part 1: Internal Visceral Fat May Accelerate Brain Aging

Dr. Ronald Hoffman (0:00)

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SPEAKER_3 (1:03)

Welcome to Intelligent Medicine, America's foremost program on health, medicine, and nutrition, featuring the latest on both conventional and alternative therapies. Now, here's Dr. Ronald Hoffman.

Dr. Ronald Hoffman (1:16)

Welcome to Intelligent Medicine. I'm your host, Dr. Ronald Hoffman. Intelligent Medicine, a program about the best of high tech and the best of natural therapies. Putting those together for you is my remit each weekend here on Intelligent Medicine. You'll be part of the discussion, get into the conversation, pose a question, share an opinion. 877-726-8255.

And we've got some interesting questions and comments to tackle today. And a lot of stories that I want to share with you, breaking down some of the important health news stories of the week, is my job here on Intelligent Medicine.

I also want to give a big shout out to WMOHAM in Cincinnati, a brand new affiliate, a radio affiliate for Intelligent Medicine. We have, I think, 90 or 100 affiliates across the country. And if you can listen on the terrestrial radio, great. If not, there's a workaround. You can listen via a handy Listen Live button that's available at drhoffman.com.

Our program is heard normally Saturdays from noon to 2 p.m. Eastern time.

But if you can't catch it on your local radio station, just listen online. So, a big shout out to WMOHA. And there is an old TV show about a radio station in Cincinnati, a legacy radio station in Cincinnati. I won't give the call letters because it's a competing radio station. But it's nice to break into that important market in Cincinnati, Ohio. So, hello, Ohioans.

877-726-8255 is our number. And last week, we talked about creatine. And creatine used to be the province of muscle heads, right? Guys who were lifting weights and trying to get shredded and build big muscles. And indeed, it is something that has some bona fides in terms of building muscles. But also, more importantly, for people who are not just interested in their physiques, it may stave off sarcopenia, the wasting process that afflicts everyone as they age. We lose muscle mass and lean body mass. And yes, we can do resistance exercises. Resistance exercise coupled with creatine is something that can help stave off that process and help keep us not just muscle balance, but also metabolically fit, because muscle plays an important role in governing our metabolism. And there are brain benefits. And last week, I talked about yet another brain benefit of creatine. Evidence suggests that it may enhance brain energy metabolism and be helpful for depression. And it suggested that it's not a stand-alone treatment. It may have a modest impact on mood. But it might help to boost the efficacy of conventional antidepressants, making them work faster and more comprehensively. So that was last week. And not a week has gone by.

Yet another benefit to creatine. And I must say that I've had my morning creatine. I mix it into a shake with protein powder and things like anti-factor and mitopur and collagen and it's a variety of ingredients. And so it turns out, you ready for this? Creatine doesn't just build muscle. It may also help fight cancer. According to a UCLA study, the study suggests that the popular supplement creatine may help supercharge the immune system's fight against cancer. I'm reading from Science Daily, a source of science news. They say, scientists have discovered that creatine may strengthen one of the immune system's most important cancer fighting pathways by energizing, we're going to get a little sciency here, dendritic cells that activate killer T cells. The promising results could eventually help make immunotherapy more effective.

All right, so their angle is that this is something that could be used in conjunction with immunotherapy, new form of cancer treatment. It used to be you had your choice, surgery, chemo, radiation. That was the whole ballgame. Now we have immunotherapy, which is designed to boost the immune system's response to cancers. And it has shown remarkable success, particularly in certain cancers like melanoma, for example, very, very positive results. Not every cancer responds to immunotherapy, but more and more we're using and refining immunotherapy to target various cancers. Well, they say here, immunotherapy has shown remarkable promise, but it really works for a subset of patients. And one of the reasons for that is that if you got a crappy immune system, the immunotherapy has less to work with. So if you use creatine to boost the immune system's potential, they say that makes creatine a promising supplement to holistically support the immune response that modern immunotherapies depend on. And they also say, well, maybe you could help the vaccines work better. You know, take creatine to make a vaccine work better. I think that they're missing the boat on this. This is just a disease application. They're saying, you know, typically like medical researchers, they're saying, well, we can combine this with immunotherapy and make the immunotherapy work better. But just imagine if, and this is still a big if because they need to do more research on humans, if creatine can boost immunity in general, wouldn't that be a boon to people who are trying to prevent cancer or prevent acquisition of viral or bacterial diseases?