The Science Behind Joint and Cartilidge Repair

Kiran Krishnan (0:00)

What was so exciting about the two trials that we did is that we saw that you can actually rebuild the cartilage even after they've been bone on bone for years. We were actually regenerating the cartilage, bringing the tissue back in 65, 70 years.

Dave Asprey (0:15)

But the thing that's plagued me the most, when I was 14, I went to the doctor and he said, Dave, you have arthritis in your knees, the leg that's had three knee surgeries. I'd like to keep from needing a fourth.

Kiran Krishnan (0:25)

But what happened to you at 14 tends to happen to the vast majority, over 90% of adults, once they hit 30 and above. So there aren't vessels that go right into the cartilage, providing it with blood and growth factors and all that stuff. There's a type of cell whose whole job is to rebuild the cartilage. What happens when it gets bathed in inflammation, so not only is it not repairing the cartilage anymore, it's actively degrading it.

Dave Asprey (0:49)

And then all of a sudden you get younger, you feel better, you look better, you move better, and the things that used to hurt just stop hurting.

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Your guest today is Kiran Krishnan, who's a research microbiologist and a guy who does a fantastic job of making really hard science, something that you can digest. And he's only started a few health supplement companies over the last 20 years, including Microbiome Labs, which is a very high-end probiotic kind of company. And he's a co-founder partner in three other companies, lots of published research in journals and things like that. So we're gonna talk about how this all actually works for your longevity and for your performance and your gut. And some of this is about healing stuff. Other parts of it are about taking things that are actually not sick, but making them epic, right? And then maybe even reversing aging. So we're gonna go into all of that stuff, including muscles and joints and what those do both when you're young and when you're old. So Kiran, you're a microbiologist who knows a lot about the biome and now you're talking about muscle and joints, why?

Kiran Krishnan (3:41)

Yeah, great question and great to be here, Dave.

So I'm a systems biology focus researcher, right? And so one of the reasons why I got into the microbiome side of things was because the microbiome plays a role in virtually every physiological aspect of our body, the functionality of virtually every organ. And as a result, I also end up getting into other organ systems and other parts of our physiology as a tangent on work that I'm doing at the microbiome. Then you start to see problems that need to be fixed elsewhere, right? So as I was working on, leaky gut was a big part of my research work and resolving leaky gut and all that. And we've published papers and shown that we can do that. And then you start to looking, you start to look at chronic low-grade inflammation and the impact it has throughout the body. And one of the areas that we came across was that in joints, it's such an active process and progressive process that occurs in virtually every adult over the age of 30 And then at the same time, you start to see that, okay, one of the root causes of the joint dysfunction is a vascular dysfunction. Then you go, wait a minute. So are people also experiencing progressive vascular dysfunction? And as it turns out, we absolutely are, right? So then that's how through those connections, I ended up getting pulled into these other areas where there are big problems to solve and we need solutions for them.