Navdeep Chandel, Ph.D.: metabolism, mitochondria, and metformin in health and disease

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top-performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
Hi everybody, welcome to today's episode of The Drive. My guest today is my good friend Navdeep, or Nav, as we like to call him, Chandel.
Nav is a professor of medicine and cell and molecular biology at Northwestern in Chicago, which is where I actually met him to do this interview.
Some of you may recall that name because Nav is one of the cast of characters that I went to Easter Island with in the fall of 2016, the other being David Sabatini and Tim Ferriss. And we actually spoke about this stuff at length on a podcast that Tim recorded while we were on Easter Island. Nav's real area of expertise is in the mitochondria and in metabolism. And in fact, he wrote a book called Navigating Metabolism, no pun intended, in 2015, which I highly recommend for anybody, especially people who A, want to understand this stuff and B, don't want to have to buy 17 textbooks and get into every unearthly detail. In fact, this book was written more for a general audience than a very specific audience, and I have a copy of it and love it. In this episode, we talk about a bunch of stuff, but we talk about what got Nav interested in the mitochondria. We get into ROS, or reactive oxygen species, something that I think many of you will have heard of. And then we talk about some really nuanced stuff, like this stuff about mitochondria being actual signaling organelles and ROS maybe being beneficial for that signaling. In other words, we get into this idea that reactive oxygen species may not be all bad. It might not be a black-white thing, which anyone who listens to this podcast realize we love to explore things that aren't just binary.
We talk about antioxidants and whether they're harmful or not harmful. And I suspect that a lot of people will have a point of view on that. And we get into mitochondrial DNA, which in and of itself is super interesting because some of you may already know this, and if you don't, that's fine. You'll learn it on this episode. But the mitochondria have their own DNA, distinct from the cell. And that DNA is of bacterial origin. It's also transmitted to us maternally. So there's a whole bunch of weird stuff going on genetically with the mitochondria that makes it super interesting.
We get into a little bit of a discussion around cortisol. Nav is super interested in the role of cortisol in health. And then we talk, of course, about metformin. And I suspect that for some people listening to this, that's the only thing they're gonna care about because these days everybody's asking me about metformin, which means it's front and center on a lot of people's minds with respect to longevity. Now, we don't even go as deep as we could on metformin. I'm saving that for another guest that's in the queue, who I'm not gonna even say too much about that, but there's a lot more coming on metformin. This, however, will be a great primer for that because you'll certainly understand how metformin works and how it may play a role in longevity. We talk about the role of the mitochondria in cancer. And again, we take a different view here from what you will have heard from other guests potentially. We talk about NAD and NAD precursors. And that, again, is another thing that people, I think, are pretty excited about. At the end, somehow Nav jujitsu's me and turns the tables on me and asks me the, so what should I eat question, which anybody who knows me knows. I can't stand being asked that question, but because it's Nav, I humored him a little bit.
Before we jump into that, please keep in mind, we have an email list. Every Sunday morning, I send out an email and that email has a whole bunch of stuff in it. It's usually pretty short though, but it's basically something I've read that's interesting, that pertains to longevity, science, lipidology, performance, or just something that really interests me beyond those things. Keep in mind, we put, I would say, an ungodly amount of effort into preparing show notes. And when I say we, I'm using that term very liberally. I actually do none of that, but I have a team that does that, and that is spearheaded by Travis and Bob. So the people who do spend time on those show notes always come back to us with feedback like, this is freaking awesome. Please keep doing this. And our intention is to keep doing that. So give us a reason to keep doing that by going and checking them out, especially when it comes to understanding some of the technical stuff that we talk about here and getting some of the references. And lastly, if you are digging this podcast, please head over to Apple Podcast Reviews and leave us a review, especially if it's positive, but if it's negative, at least have the courtesy to give us some constructive feedback so we can improve upon whatever it is you don't like. So without anything further to add, please welcome Nav Chandel.