Taurine is often associated with energy drinks and pre-workout supplements, although ironically, it is not a stimulant and may have the opposite effect. While taurine is not considered an essential nutrient for adults, as our bodies can produce it from other amino acids, recent evidence suggests that it offers numerous health benefits. These includ…

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, "The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul." But we now know that your eyes may also provide a remarkably accurate measure of the true age of your body.Indeed, perhaps more accurate than the number of years that you've been alive (i.e., your chronological age). How can this be?Well, it has been known for some time …

In our previous interview with Dr. Kapahi, we discussed his work examining how advanced glycation end products (also known as AGEs) drive the aging process. Since we last spoke, Pankaj has been hard at work trying to identify compounds that can rein in the deleterious impact of AGEs, primarily by lowering levels of methylglyoxal. Methylglyoxal is f…

On this episode of humanOS Radio, I speak with Lynda Frassetto. Lynda is a Professor Emeritus of Medicine in the Division of Nephrology at UCSF. During her research career, she and her colleagues investigated regulation of acid-base balance in both healthy and older people, as well as dietary influences on acid-base balance. In particular, she has …

On this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks with Paul Spagnuolo. Dr. Spagnuolo has a PhD in Applied Health Sciences from the University of Waterloo, and is currently a Professor at the Department of Food Science at the University of Guelph in Ontario Canada. His lab has been focused on identifying and developing nutraceuticals as novel therapeutic…

On this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks with Brad Dieter. Brad has a PhD in Exercise Physiology from the University of Idaho, and did further training in biomedical research examining how metabolism and inflammation regulate molecular mechanisms of disease. He is a scientist, a coach, an entrepreneur, a writer, and a speaker, so he wears a lot…

Within our gut resides a vast ecosystem that guides countless facets of health and performance. Emerging research shows that your gut microbiota may impact many different and seemingly unrelated aspects of health and bodily function, including appetite and body weight regulation, lifespan, mood, cognition, and even athletic performance.We also know…

In this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks with Jennifer Goldschmied. Jennifer has a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Michigan, and is currently faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research explores how altering aspects of sleep can produce changes in mood and emotional regulation, particularly in those with major de…

The market for dietary supplements to enhance sports performance has exploded in recent years. In fact, you may have tried some of these supplements yourself to improve your workouts. Many common supplements, like caffeine, have been studied in the context of immediate performance enhancement, and are used with that goal in mind. But the effect of …

When you hear the word superfood, what do you think of? Probably kale. Goji berries. Green tea. Turmeric. Countless others.But what about mushrooms? Mushrooms have historically not held a prominent place among the list of superfoods. But if you take a closer look, I think you’ll find that the humble mushroom actually has a lot going for it.A single…

In this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan welcomes Dr. Jamie Zeitzer back to the show. Jamie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, as well as at the VA Aging Clinical Research Center at Stanford. In our previous interview, we discussed his research on light and timing of biological rhy…

In this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks with Julie Andersen. Julie has a Ph.D in neurobiological chemistry from UCLA, and subsequently did her post-doctoral fellowship in the department of neurology at Harvard. Presently, she is a professor and researcher at the Buck Institute, an independent biomedical research institute that is dedicated to …

On the surface, sleep looks like a colossal waste of time. Think about it. We spend about a third of our lives lying down with our eyes closed...basically doing nothing!It’s easy to see why high-achieving people throughout history - like Thomas Edison and Benjamin Franklin - aspired to get by with less of it.Even today, people who are trying to max…

For much of our history as a species, the threat of chronic food shortage and malnutrition has loomed over us. Fortunately, due to global economies and remarkable advances in technology and agriculture, most of us living today in industrialized countries will probably never need to worry about starvation. But ironically, we now must battle the cons…

Have you ever wondered what your great-great-grandparents would think of the world today - and how we live - if they were transported here via a time machine?Our lives have changed drastically in too many different ways to recount here (and most of these changes are, arguably, pretty great to be honest). But for those of us who study health and hum…

Why do so many people struggle to stick to a healthy lifestyle?Health-related goals are largely the product of long term modifications to how we live. And we generally don’t see an immediate payoff from these individual choices, at least not in the moment. To paraphrase James Clear, it is only after your efforts have compounded over time that you s…

All of us have heard the aphorism, “Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food.” This maxim, of course, is usually attributed to ancient Greek physician Hippocrates. However, if you’ve ever spent time looking at health-related content on Twitter and Instagram, you’ll realize that conflating diet and medicine is a modern phenomenon. We like …

On this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan welcomes Aly Orady - founder and CEO of Tonal - to the show. Aly’s story is an all too common example of the price of success in the modern world. Aly was excelling professionally, but in the process his health was falling apart. He was overweight, and had developed type 2 diabetes and sleep apnea. And he was o…

Light is essential to life as we know it. Plants rely upon sunlight to generate chemical energy, which is stored in their tissues and fuels various life processes. In turn, animals like us convert the energy from the food that we eat into mechanical energy. Given its fundamental role in our biology, perhaps it makes sense that specific types of lig…

Insomnia is a uniquely vexing medical problem. It is the most common sleep-related issue, thought to affect around 10-40% of the population in the US. So it is a challenge that affects a whole lot of us.Yet despite its prevalence, treatments for the condition are lackluster at best. Why is this the case? Perhaps because it remains poorly understood…

On this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan welcomes Nicola Bondonno to the show. Her research has been examining the effects of bioactive compounds occurring naturally in plant-based foods and beverages, and how they are linked to the cardiovascular health benefits associated with a plant-rich diet.It has become axiomatic that fruits and vegetables are …

On this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan welcomes Daniel Gartenberg to the show. Dan has dedicated his life to helping people sleep better (a calling that we here at humanOS can certainly relate to). Daniel has a Ph.D in Human Factors and Applied Cognition from George Mason University, and is an adjunct assistant professor at Penn State University. He…

In this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks with Sander Kooijman. Sander is a post-doctoral researcher at Leiden University Medical Center, where he is investigating brown adipose tissue activation as a therapeutic target to attenuate obesity, type 2 diabetes, and atherosclerosis in humans.He and his colleagues recently published a paper examining…

In this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks with Pamela Maher. Dr. Maher has a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of British Columbia. She was formerly an associate professor at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. In 2004, she moved to her current position as a research scientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.Her rese…

In this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks with Javier Gonzalez. Dr. Gonzalez is a professor at the Department for Health at the University of Bath in the UK. He and his colleagues recently published a hypothesis suggesting that carbohydrate availability plays a key role in the regulation of energy balance, and explains both why exercise increase…

We live in an era of unprecedented access to information. Technology has endowed us with the ability to immediately retrieve whatever we want to see or whatever we want to read, just by tapping on a screen a few times. Perhaps even more importantly, we have never had so much immediate access to one another, even when we are very far away. In turn, …

In this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks with Scott Byrne. Scott is a professor at the University of Sydney School of Medicine. He is a cellular immunologist who is studying how the ultraviolet part of the solar spectrum activates regulatory pathways that result in immune suppression and tolerance. When Scott and his team were investigating ski…

On this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan welcomes Pankaj Kapahi to the show. Pankaj is a professor at the Buck Institute, an independent biomedical research institute that is devoted solely to research on aging. He and his team have begun to investigate the role of advanced glycation end products (also known as AGEs) in the aging process. Advanced gly…

On this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks with Dan Siegel. Dr. Siegel is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, and is the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA. He is a pioneer in a field known as interpersonal neurobiology (sometimes referred to as relational neuroscience). Interperso…

Why do we sleep? This is a question that has bedeviled researchers for decades. But we think one major reason may be to facilitate DNA repair. In this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks with Lior Appelbaum. Dr. Appelbaum and colleagues have performed some elegant studies elucidating the molecular mechanisms that underlie sleep, using zebrafish as…

On this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan welcomes Ben Miller to the show. Ben is a principal investigator in the aging and metabolism research program at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. In his study, Miller and his team randomly assigned 53 participants to consume either placebo or metformin for 12-weeks, while completing a supervised aerobi…

On this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks with Richard Lin. Like all too many of us, Richard became personally invested in his health when he developed a problem that failed to respond to conventional medical interventions. He eventually realized that a disruption in the gut microbiota was the likely cause of his illness. This inspired him to st…

We associate getting older with a loss of energy. On the molecular level, this is quite literally true, because one of the hallmarks of aging is mitochondrial dysfunction. Mitochondria are often referred to as “the powerhouse of the cell,” because they convert nutrients from the food we eat into usable energy, in the form of ATP. But as we age, mit…

We tend to think of age in terms of the number of years we have been alive - meaning our chronological age. But the year that you were born is not necessarily an accurate measure of your health or your life expectancy. We are coming to realize that a better predictor is your biological age - and that can be quite different from your chronological a…

In this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks with John Newman. Dr. Newman is a geriatrician (a physician who specializes in the care of older people) at UCSF, as well as a professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. He is chief investigator at the Newman Lab, where he is exploring ways to harness metabolic signals to promote health and r…

Why do we age? The fundamental causes of aging at the molecular level are relatively well established. But the question of why aging happens in the first place is a more challenging one, one which has bedeviled evolutionary biologists and philosophers for years.You might think, intuitively, that the process of natural selection would gradually elim…

For the vast majority of human history, our species lived hunter-gatherer lifestyles. We can therefore learn much about how humans probably once lived by studying preindustrial societies. Research on preindustrial societies has consistently shown that these people have exemplary metabolic health. And when we consider that modern humans are succumbi…

Do smartphones really affect the timing and quality of your sleep? In this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks with Dr. Jeanne Duffy from Harvard Medical School on her most recent research investigating this question.โดย Dan Pardi, PhD

Stress is something we all experience all too frequently. The effects of different stressors accumulate, and when the resultant load is excessive, we are at increased risk of a range of diseases. So, to avoid the amount of stress we experience exceeding our bodies’ capacities to cope, it would be useful to have a way to monitor how we’re responding…

Nutrition is perhaps the most emotionally charged of all of the applied sciences. It’s not hard to see why. For one thing, all of us eat, meaning that every single one of us is personally invested in this topic, and we interact with it all the time. We all develop a sense of expertise, in a way that we might not for something a bit more removed fro…

In this podcast, Greg Potter speaks with James Hewitt, who has a particular interest in how people can achieve sustainable high performance. In addition to his role as Chief Innovation Officer at Hintsa Performance, James is doing a PhD at Loughborough University, where his research focuses on how workers’ lifestyle and work patterns influence thei…

Brain injury is more pervasive and problematic than many people think. Every day, about 150 people die from traumatic brain injury-related deaths in the US alone, and whether you participate in a contact sport, work in the military, or simply travel on roads, you may at some point suffer the kind of event that incites brain injury. The problem is t…

Whether you want to look great at the beach, perform better at sports, or ward off disease, it’s important to optimize your protein intake. This brings us to the latest episode of humanOS Radio, in which Dan speaks with Professor Stu Phillips from McMaster University. Tune in to find out more!โดย Dan Pardi, PhD

Aging is arguably the leading risk factor for chronic diseases in the modern world. We have historically thought of aging as an inexorable decline of function, driven by the passage of time - something that we simply have to accept, and that cannot be changed.But what if aging were actually a modifiable risk factor? Your chronological age, meaning …

Why is it so hard for us to make healthy lifestyle changes - even when we have the knowledge to do better? Most of us have a list of things we would like to change. Maybe you’d like to lose thirty pounds, or be able to do fifty pushups, or run a marathon. But each of these comes with a long list of associated behaviors - many of which aren’t intrin…

Why do we need to sleep? Part of what makes sleep so fascinating, as a field of research, is that it is such an enigma. Sleep is a profoundly vulnerable state, leaving us at the mercy of predators and the environment, and unable to defend ourselves or our possessions. It's also largely unproductive. Yet we spend about a third of our life in slumber…

All of us know that lack of sleep impairs cognitive performance. But we are now realizing that sleep quality, and how long that you spend in deeper restorative sleep, also plays an important role in brain function.Today on humanOS Radio, Dan talks to Kristine Wilckens. Kristine is an assistant professor in the Sleep and Chronobiology Center in the …

The subject of alcohol and health is complex. There is evidence that alcohol can be health-promoting, but more recent evidence has suggested it isn't healthy for humans in any amount. The ancient Greeks only drank their wine diluted. They believed that only barbarians would drink unmixed or undiluted wine as it would bring out a type of behavior th…

About 40% of people worldwide will get lower back pain at some point in life, and on any given day roughly 12% of adults are experiencing lower back pain. This crippling condition strongly influences quality of life, often affecting relationships with loved ones, impairing performance at work, and leading to substantial costs – not only healthcare …

Perhaps you want to feel great about how you look at the beach. Maybe you play a sport in which it’s important to be powerful and strong relative to your weight. Or you might simply be interested in continuing to function well as years pass by. Whatever your goals are, you should be interested in the mass and quality of your muscle tissue.In this e…