763: Bioregulator Peptides – Mother Nature’s Ultimate Rejuvenation Hack With Nathalie Niddam

Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.

Hello, and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com. And today I am back with Nat Niddam to talk more about peptides and specifically bioregulator peptides, which are Mother Nature’s ultimate rejuvenation hack. And if you don’t already follow Nat, you definitely should. She is a podcast host and longevity biohacker. And she specifically goes deep on the topic of peptides and their potential for longevity, longevity, boundless energy, vibrant health, and so much more. And in this episode, we talk specifically about what bioregulator peptides are and how they’re different from other peptides. And Nat is such a joy to talk to you. I always learn a lot from her. So let’s join her and dive in. Nathalie, welcome back. Thanks for being here again.

Nathalie: Thank you so much. This is so exciting. It was so fun the first time. So this is going to be awesome. Thanks for having me back.

Katie: I will link to our first episode. If you guys haven’t listened, that’ll be in the show notes at wellnessmama.com. We got to go deep on the topic of peptides. And today we’re going to build on that conversation in a little bit different of a direction in talking about bioregulator peptides, which I’m guessing that might be a new term for some people listening. So to start off, can you define what bioregulator peptides are?

Nathalie: 100%. So bioregulator peptides, like peptides, are small proteins. It’s just that the bioregulators are only two to four amino acids long. So for people who didn’t listen to the first episode, a peptide by definition is 50 amino acids long or less. A bioregulator is only two to four amino acids long. And so whereas when we were talking about the peptides, we talked about them as signaling molecules and sometimes influencing genes, the bioregulator peptide really only acts as an epigenetic switch. So it is so tiny that it can cross the cellular membrane, it crosses the nuclear membrane, so into the nucleus of the cell, and that’s where your DNA lives. And that’s where that little bioregulator peptide can bind to the DNA and upregulate the production of specific proteins.

Katie: That’s so fascinating. And so I guess from there, the question began, because I think the epigenetic conversation has gotten so big in recent times. We mapped the human genome and it was all about genetics for a while. And then we realized, oh, there’s more to the story than just the genes that we’re born with. And now I feel like epigenetics is becoming a huge but often misunderstood topic. So when it comes to bioregulator proteins or peptides, how do these work within the body and how are they different than, for instance, the peptides we talked about in our first episode?

Nathalie: So the bioregulator, so again, you know, these are native to the body. And what’s interesting about bioregulators is they are actually found in every life form. They’re found in bugs. They’re found in insects. Like they’re found in birds and bees and animals and plants and people. And these are really these little compounds that kind of run the show. And they determine, they basically determine the production of different proteins. And so this whole area of bioregulator peptides was really, was discovered and developed by a doctor in Russia who sadly just passed away actually a couple of weeks ago. And his name is Dr. Vladimir Khavinson. And they, he figured out that in each organ, an organ system, they’re very specific of these little proteins that seem to be able to trigger the production of proteins within that organ or tissue that helps it to regenerate. So it’s almost like regenerating the tread on your tires.

When we were talking about those other peptides, we were talking about them really initiating cascades. So the other peptides we were talking about, the longer chain peptides, in many ways sometimes are much more immediate in their action. Whereas the bioregulator peptide, because you’re giving the body a signal to create new tissue or new cells or whatever the case may be, it’s not something that people are typically going to feel right away. It’s going to be more of a long game.

Katie: What would be some examples of bioregulator peptides versus like BPC that we talked about or GHK and others we mentioned in the first episode?

Nathalie: Yeah. So interestingly enough, GHK, there are a lot of people would say that that is kind of like the orphan bioregulator. It should have been a bioregulator because it’s only three amino acids long and it does very much epigenetically flip switches on and off in the DNA. But to go back to the other bioregulators that we talk about, one of the most well-known would be the pineal gland bioregulator. And one thing about bioregulators, remember we talked about how the names of those other peptides were really kind of like an alphabet soup. So naming of bioregulator peptides is a bit like going to Ikea. So every peptide has at least three names depending on what form it’s in. And they don’t really mean much to most of us.

So for example, the pineal gland bioregulator goes by Epitalon. Which is the name that was given to the synthetic form of this bioregulator, which I’ll explain in a minute. Then it has another name called Endoluten, which is the trademark name for the form of this bioregulator that is an extract from actual pineal gland that’s been refined and turned into an oral supplement. And then finally, it has a third name, which is Epithalamin. And that is the extract from pineal gland that’s been prepared for an intramuscular injection. That form is actually not available, at least not readily available outside of Russia. Because as you can imagine, it’s problematic. It’s animal tissue and it’s been prepared and then it’s in a vial, has to be injected intramuscularly. It’s a whole big deal.

But basically what happened was that, once they identified that these bioregulators exist in, let’s say, be it a kidney or in the heart or in the lung or the pancreas or the pineal gland, now they were working with extracts originally. And eventually their work took them down to the point where they were able to identify in many cases that exact two to four amino acid chain that was triggering the greatest impact on that tissue or gland. And that two to four amino acid chain can be resynthesized in a lab. And so now we get to the synthetic bioregulator. And that’s what the Epitalon is, for example. And so the synthetic bioregulator can be administered either by subcutaneous injection or most, if not all of them, are also available by sublingual spray. And the reason for that is because they’re so tiny that they can be absorbed through the membrane under the tongue that is very, very rich in blood vessels. And so in that way, it can get into the bloodstream without having to puncture skin and find its target without having to go through digestion.

Katie: That’s fascinating. And it’s also, I always, oral health is kind of a pet research topic for me. And I always remind people of that and the importance of maintaining a healthy oral microbiome, because if you have even just bacteria imbalance or toxins within the mouth, those can enter the body so rapidly, which is why things like peptides and drugs can be so effective just put in the mouth because of that. But it’s something to be aware of as we, you know, be aware of and make sure our oral microbiome is healthy as well.

So these are also, it seems like they can come in different forms than the peptides we talked about in the first one, and that there’s a myriad of uses for them. Are there any natural sources of these? Like, are these ones we can potentially get from food? Or are there ways to sort of upregulate these epigenetic things through factors within our daily control, like diet and lifestyle?

Nathalie: Yeah, so I don’t know of any ways, you know, it’s interesting because definitely things like sauna and exercise, for example, can upregulate your production of your endogenous production of growth hormone and certain other hormones. I don’t know of any lifestyle habits that can upregulate the production of bioregulator peptides specifically, but if you think about where they come from, which is tissues, glands, and organs of animals. And you think about an ancestral diet where people would have eaten those tissues, glands, and organs. So for example, eating heart, eating liver, eating thymus glands, eating kidneys, eating a lot of those parts that we in modern day tend to shun, there would be bioregulator peptide in those foods.

And taking it a step further for people who, because it’s so hard to get your hands on those foods now, you can think about either from a supplement perspective, things like ancestral supplements where they’ve taken organs, they’ve desiccated and dried them, ground them up and put them in a capsule. It’s not going to be necessarily as high concentration of the bioregulator, but I believe that there’s going to be bioregulator in there. And similarly in desiccated organ supplements that are made, like I think there’s a brand, I can’t remember the name of it, but there’s a couple of professional supplement brands that make very high-quality desiccated organ supplements. So for example, thyroid or adrenal. And again, you’re going to get at least some bioregulator in those.

The tricky thing in those ones is that you’re going to get lots of other tissue from that gland. And whereas the thyroid bioregulator can be given to someone who’s either hypo- or hyperthyroid because they’re only going to get the bioregulator with desiccated thyroid, we can’t necessarily give it to the person who’s hyperthyroid because it’s going to push them over the line. So, which brings up a really interesting point about the bioregulators. And that is that the way that they work is they try to restore homeostasis in the body. So they’re trying to bring the body back into balance. They’re not necessarily trying to push the body into a super physiologic state.

Katie: That makes sense. And I mean, I say often on here that at the end of the day, we are each our own primary healthcare provider and that the best data comes from our own bodies and our own experimentation. And I know peptides is a whole new field for a lot of people in that journey of experimentation. Where can we even begin to learn about what might be the ones that would benefit us the most and begin to experiment with things like bioregulator peptides?

Nathalie: So, I mean, there’s, there’s, I’ve recorded a number of podcast episodes on bioregulators with other, with experts in the field. So we can definitely, I can even give you a list of those episode numbers if that’s helpful to your audience and we can put them into the show notes. I talk about them a lot in my membership community on Mighty Networks. There’s not, there are a couple of, there’s one book called The Peptide Revolution, which is, you can definitely tell by the front cover what country it comes from. But it’s available by, through a vendor in the UK. Again, we can put this in the show notes. They also sell the oral bioregulators, both the biologic extracts and the synthetics. And they sell that little book as well. And it’s a great little, it’s almost like a Dick and Jane book about bioregulator peptides. It kind of goes through the major ones, explains a little bit about what they do, talks a little bit about some of the research behind them. So it’ll give people kind of, again, a footing in the space.

Katie: Are there any that are typically recommended for specific use cases? So you mentioned some like thyroid potentially helpful ones. Are there like categories of bioregulators that are specifically helpful for people going through certain experiences of symptoms or disarray in the body?

Nathalie: Yeah, so the way that you want to think about the bioregulators is like, it’s an array of very specific compounds that are going to positively influence the functioning of and the regeneration of your tissues and organs. So for example, for someone who has heart issues, there is a heart bioregulator. There’s also a blood vessel bioregulator. What we know about the pineal gland bioregulator is not only is it very famous because it activates an enzyme called Telomerase, which helps to restore the telomeres on the ends of your DNA, which in and of itself is a great thing because it means your DNA can replicate more often or for longer, but it also helps to normalize melatonin. It also has great impacts on the immune system. And it also has this kind of like an overview in positive balancing impact on the endocrine system.

So very often we will use the pineal gland bioregulator as part of a stack of compounds when we’re dealing with anything. So for the, going back to our heart issue, if the person’s problem is with the heart and let’s say there’s high blood pressure involved or some kind of vascular issue involved, then we might use the bioregulator for the heart and the blood vessels. And let’s say this person also maybe has some issues with their kidneys. We might weave the kidney bioregulator in there as well. So what we’re, and now these will be supportive. So these are not standalone going to like, this is going to regenerate your heart and your blood vessels and you’re good to go. But these are ways to support the body in healing those tissues as you’re applying other modalities to kind of drive healing. And let’s not forget removing whatever the, the issues are that are driving the problem in the first place.

In sexual health, for example, there’s an ovarian bioregulator. And if we’re going to try and, you know, support the ovaries, we’d be probably crazy not to also pay some attention to the adrenal glands, the thyroid gland. We’re always going to look at the blood vessel bioregulator because we always want to make sure that there’s really good supply of blood and removal of waste products from whatever tissues we’re supporting. We might also think about the pineal gland bioregulator, right? Because of that big hormonal balancing effect. So, you know, there’s 21 different bioregulators and I can try and rattle, I mean, I’ve already named a few of them, but you’ve also got bioregulators for the bone marrow, for the liver, for the pancreas, for muscles, for the central nervous system, which confusingly is called pinealon. Even though people think, well, pinealon should be the pineal gland. And it’s like, yeah, it should, but it’s not. So, you know, there’s bioregulators for the eyes. I’m sure I’m missing a whole bunch of them, but we’ve probably covered a few of them already.

Katie: And because this is a somewhat new area of, I would say, like longevity, biohacking, and even just understanding, is this an area where you would say someone definitely wants to work with a practitioner who knows what they’re doing? Or are there people experimenting with this on their own? I know in our first episode, we talked about certain peptides have gotten very difficult to get with some FDA changes. Is this something you probably don’t want to just like cowboy science yourself? Or are there good resources for that?

Nathalie: So, I mean, you know, you get both kinds of people, right? You get people who, I mean, I’m always amazed at people’s capacity for research, people who are in a completely different field, and all of a sudden they become the uber researcher and I’m like, wow, you’re amazing. And then we’ve got other, the most people could probably benefit from at least some guidance, right? Because, and you know, the interesting thing about the bioregulators, I would say, is that because they tend to be more balancing in their effect, they do have a fairly high safety profile, as far as we know. Now, there’s 40 years of research behind these things and a lot of it on humans.

But the challenge is that a lot of the published research is still in Russian. So there’s still a lot of stuff we don’t necessarily have access to. But everything that I’ve read says that, you know, again, if someone has active cancer, you’re going to want to be mindful that you don’t want to be flipping switches. You don’t know what they’re going to do, right? You have to be exceptionally careful. But for people who, let’s say someone who says, look, I’m over the age of 50, and I feel like I want to give my body some support on an annual basis, that person, we might say, listen, you know, we could all benefit probably from a 30-day protocol of the pineal gland bioregulator, the blood vessel bioregulator, and the thymus gland bioregulator. Because what we’ve done is we’ve addressed kind of like this whole, the pineal gland control center. We’ve helped out with the immune system through the thymus gland. And we’re ensuring that the circulatory system is also getting a little bit of rejuvenation.

But, you know, moving on from there, you might do it once a year or you might do it twice a year, depending on your state of health and how aggressive you want to be. And then if you know that you’ve got certain issues, specific issues, then you might hone in on those systems and weave those in. Do those like for another month or two. So, you know, like I’ve guided a bunch, a lot of people kind of in helping them to understand how you might build yourself a program kind of thing. But when it comes down to therapeutic use, because people have specific health issues, that’s when we start looking for the physicians and the practitioners that are kind of working in those areas and have some experience in weaving these bioregulators in with other modalities to really guide healing.

Katie: Do you view this as something that hopefully over the next decade or decades will be actually a part of medicine and more widely accessible? I know we’re in kind of a tough point for that now, but given the potential and all the things you’ve talked about, it seems like this could be something that would be incredibly helpful to humans. Is this something that you see hopefully eventually being more integrated into normal models of care?

Nathalie: Yeah, I hope so. You know, I think that we have a lot to, and you know, in some ways, maybe it already is. If you look at traditional Chinese medicine, they use a lot of organs in their medicine. And they probably, even though they may not call them bioregulator peptides, I think they already access them and probably maybe less so in Ayurveda because Ayurveda is so steeped in plants and not so much in animal tissues.

But in conventional medicine, you know, I think, as you say, you know, we seem to be at a bit of a choke point right now. And I’m hoping that coming out of it, we’re going to get smarter and we’re going to be able to get our arms around more things and kind of really explore how do these things, how can these things fit in? You know, we can’t throw allopathic medicine completely out the window, like it saves lives every single day. But I think that if we can learn from these modalities and help people to stay healthier and not get sick in the first place, in addition to all the lifestyle and all the dietary, all the other things that we talk about every single day, then I think we will certainly end up being happier and healthier for it. So hopefully it becomes systemic, but if it doesn’t, then hopefully people, more and more people kind of get on this bandwagon. And I do think this is the kind of things, especially the bioregulators, that individuals can learn to weave into their own, what’s the word I’m looking for, their own routines. And kind of support their bodies that way.

Katie: Yeah, I’m with you on that. I hope it becomes a both/and and that this becomes more accessible and part of the model. And at the end of the day with us each being our own primary healthcare provider, I feel like the more we can learn about tools like this, it can be so helpful. And also knowing statistics like that over 90% of people have at least one marker of metabolic dysfunction tells me the good news here with chronic disease is that there’s actually much more within our ability to affect change than we used to previously think when we were more in the line with the genetics only model. And so there’s so much that we can do.

And on that note, I know we’ve talked mostly about peptides in our conversations, but you have such wide-reaching knowledge on so many topics. I’d love to just briefly touch on are there any other be it lifestyle diet, any other sort of things that would be in that biohacking category that you would recommend to people as starting points to help just support the body in its natural processes?

Nathalie: Yeah, I mean, loads. Like you, I mean, we’re, we’re exposed to so many things, right? So, but I do think that, and not to be boring about this, so please bear with me here. But I think that addressing the foundations is the most powerful thing that we can do. And that is to, you know, to make sure we’re getting quality sleep, to make sure that we’re eating a solid diet. And, and, you know, that can be different for different people. So I’m not going to sit here. I, you know, I have my own opinions on diet. There’s many different ways to skin this cat. You really have to find what your body needs at this time. And I think that the more open-minded we can be about diet and understand that what works for us today may not work for us tomorrow, the better off we’ll be. The idea of movement, getting out in nature, reducing our exposure to a lot of non-native EMF and screen and artificial lights at the wrong time of day. All of those things are critical. But, you know, if you want to get me talking about the technology that I get really excited about, we’re going to be here really long time. You know, I’ve got, like, I’ve got my katsu bands on the floor over there. I’ve got a vibration plate downstairs. I’ve, you know, like, I just think there’s, we are at such an exciting time. There are so many really interesting tools at our disposal that I do think that we’re, you know, even things like red light and near infrared light devices, for those of us who live in big cities and can’t get out in nature regularly, they can really help to, they can just help us to reconnect with certain aspects of nature that’s very hard for us to kind of connect with.

Katie: Yeah, I love to see that trend happening of the more we learn, the more we return to nature. And I think those simple free things like circadian alignment and getting morning sunlight and hydrating and just eating the way nature intended. Those are those foundational things that make all of these other things we’ve talked about that much more effective because we have a stronger foundation to build on. And it helps us ward off some of the things that would be potentially ripple effects of just having those poor lifestyle habits. So I love that the more we learn, the more we go back to simplicity. I know you also have a tremendous amount of resources available online, and I’ll make sure there are links in the show notes for these. But can you let people know where to find you? I know I enjoy following you on Instagram and learning from you, but where can people find you and keep learning?

Nathalie: Thank you. So there’s the podcast, which is the Biohacking Superhuman Performance podcast. And then also natniddam.com is my website. And that’s where you’ll also be able to learn about my private membership community on Mighty Networks called BSP Community. And there’s a little tab at the top of the page on the homepage of the website that’ll kind of take you to so you can learn about it. On Facebook, I’m not there as much these days, but I have the Optimizing Superhuman Performance group. And as you said, Instagram is probably of all the social media platforms is the one where I’m the most active and that’s @NathalieNiddam.

Katie: And again, those will all be linked at wellnessmama.com for all of you guys who are listening on the go. You are such a joy to talk to. Thank you so much for this conversation today. I hope we get to have many more in the future. But for today, thank you for your time. I’m so grateful you were here.

Nathalie: Oh, thank you so much, Katie. It’s such an honor to be here. And I’m so thrilled we got to connect in person and then again like this. And I just know we will, our paths will cross again many times.

Katie: Definitely. And thanks as always to all of you for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of The Wellness Mama Podcast.

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