Do You Need a Detox If Your Liver Already Detoxes You?

Nick Urban [00:00:01]:
You’re listening to High Performance Longevity, the show exploring a better path to optimal health for those daring to live as an outlier in a world of averages. I’m your host, Nick Urban, bioharmonizer, performance coach, and lifelong student of both modern science and ancestral wisdom. Each week, we decode the tools, tactics, and timeless principles to help you optimize your mind, body, and performance. Performance span, things you won’t find on Google or in your AI tool of choice. From cutting-edge biohacks to grounded lifestyle practices, you’ll walk away with actionable insights to look, feel, and perform at your best across all of life’s domains. Your liver and kidneys already detox you every minute of every day. So why is there a whole aisle of detox products? Today we’re getting into what those organs handle well, where modern exposure outpaces them, and what belongs in a real protocol versus a fad. Dr.

Nick Urban [00:01:12]:
Greg Kelly has spent years formulating supplements, written books, and before that, he wrote dozens of papers on nutrition and stress. Greg, welcome back.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:01:22]:
Thanks for having me again. What a pleasure, Nick.

Nick Urban [00:01:25]:
Yeah, pleasure is mine. So let’s start with this, the obvious pushback. Since your liver and kidneys and organs are already detoxing you constantly, what’s the rationale for including a product to help that?

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:01:38]:
So there’s been at this point many different studies that have looked at what would be termed bioaccumulation, basically the amount of different chemical compounds that are accumulating. Largely it’s in our fat tissue, but they can be measured in blood as well. And 100% of those studies show that we’re losing the game, that humans are becoming further and further behind in terms of the number and amounts of different compounds that are accumulating in our body. So the way I would explain it to the listeners is our liver and kidneys were designed for a world we don’t live in anymore. They were designed to metabolize waste products of metabolism, plant polyphenols and things like that. And we are now exposed to… we actually looked into it at Qualia to try to find out if there was any list anywhere of all the different chemical compounds that humans are exposed to. It looks like, one, there’s no universal list, but there would be in excess of 350,000. Most of them aren’t even… about a third are proprietary.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:02:42]:
What the actual compound is can’t even be found out. Just the most common ones we know because of exposures causing such problems historically, DDT, PCBs, bisphenols, things like that, are just a small splash in the bucket. But when scientists look for these in our bodies, no one escapes without having them. There was even a study that they looked at cord blood in newborn infants, and all the compounds that they looked at were found in newborns that hadn’t been exposed to anything yet in theory or had a single breath.

Nick Urban [00:03:18]:
What’s striking me about this is you’re mentioning certain things, certain classes Organophosphates, say glyphosate, PCBs, stuff like that. Each of those individually, we’re starting to understand what they can do. And perhaps those are some of the more problematic of them. But when you have thousands or hundreds of thousands of different chemicals, there’s also gonna be like second-order interactions between them. And it seems impossible to study to begin with, to understand the unique exposure profile, the exposome that you’re going to have based on your life experience.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:03:54]:
Completely true. And the way toxicology would normally work is they’ll look at one thing in isolation, and then they’ll find the dose that it might be harmful, and often then say, okay, this is way more than you would be expected to have. We take, like, as an example, I think of the canaries in the coal mine. Back in the late ’90s, I worked for Thorne right out of naturopathic school and went to a lot of conferences on their behalf. One of the main ones that they would go to was an environmental medicine show that I got an opportunity to be at several different years. And in that, many of those clinicians were treating people with severe chemical sensitivities and would have viewed them as the canaries in the coal mine. For whatever reason, their exposure was so great or the capacity to get rid of things was so limited, or that combination, that they became very, very seriously ill. Most of us exposed to chemicals don’t get there, but instead, it’s… I think of it as one of many forms of stress.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:04:58]:
And while there’s many different now chemicals that are interacting, they’re also interacting with the other types of stress that we have. And it’s that combination of things that just wears us down and outpaces our capacities. Are resilient, so to speak.

Nick Urban [00:05:12]:
Yeah, because I was thinking about that. You have the chemical stressors that we’re mainly going to discuss, but then you also have the… I guess you could consider mold a chemical stressor as well, but then you have electromagnetism. And all of these, they interact in a way, and it’s no longer just the single isolated or family of substances in isolation. It’s a multifactorial, broad landscape.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:05:36]:
Yeah. When I work with patients, and I put this in my book, Shapeshift, but growing up in the ’60s, my siblings and I got a game. It was probably 1967 or something called The Last Straw. It was a plastic camel, for the people listening, and there was a bucket on either side. And 2 teams, you’d spin a straw, a color wheel, maybe it landed on red, you’d add 1 red straw. The other team would spin, maybe it’s green, they would put a green straw. And at some point, the straws would accumulate in your basket and the other’s, and the back would collapse. And I’ve always thought of that for this multiple stressor problem, right? We all have a certain degree of resilience we come into the world with.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:06:15]:
We can build some of that through hormetic stresses, some of the things your audience listeners are doing to become more resilient. And then we all have certain straws in our basket. You just mentioned some, right? EMF, 5G, all these chemicals we’ll talk about, maybe financial stress. And what often seemed to happen is when health collapsed, my patients were really good at identifying the last straw. Like, you know, this happened because, you know, like I was, you know, like sprayed with DDT, we’ll just say, right? But the truth was that was in the context of a basket that already had a bunch of other things. And it’s that total load that ultimately matters. ‘Cause stress, you know, in a real realistic way, is maybe the single most important determinant. There’s Hallmarks of Aging, I know you know, I’m sure many of your listeners, but there’s also something called Hallmarks of Health created by the same authors, and stress resilience would be one of the 3 biggies for that.

Nick Urban [00:07:16]:
Nice. I have to look into the Hallmarks of Health more. So when the organs are exposed to things, I am now in an environment, there’s more chemicals than I can tolerate, Normally the body would be able to adapt and it would be able to ramp up certain processes so that it can eliminate those chemicals and issues more effectively. That can only happen to a certain degree, and it probably varies between individuals, but as we add more things into the environment, more chemicals, eventually there’s a point at which that outstrips our body’s ability to handle them. What would you say is actually occurring? Internally, like when we’re exposed to more and more.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:07:57]:
Yeah, so I think that’s really accurate. There’s also, at least the way that we would think of it at Qualia, is there’s different categories of things that would be in this, let’s just say, things that need to be detoxified to be eliminated from the body. Some would go through what would be classically called phase 1, phase 2 biotransformation in the liver. What that means is these are typically fat-soluble compounds that in order to eliminate, something needs to be done to metabolize them. Typically, it’s making them more water-soluble so that they can be excreted in the urine through the kidneys, or also put into the bile and then moved into the colon where they can go out through our stool. That’s biotransformation. Those compounds in general, we’re probably exposed to more than the capacity we would have evolved to have. Then there’s other things that… there’s some forever chemicals that never go through phase 1 and phase 2 detoxification.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:08:57]:
Maybe they’re bound to albumin in the blood, in the circulation, and go to the kidneys, and then the kidneys are trying to do their best to strip them out and not recirculate them. We know from research, as an example, on intense dieting, that a lot of fat-soluble toxins accumulate in adipose tissue, fat tissue. And when we do something to mobilize fat, we’re losing… whether maybe it’s… I’m not aware of GLP-1s ever being studied for this, but weight loss diets definitely have been many times. We mobilize more than we have the capacity to get rid of. There’s certain other things, maybe, you know, we’re pumping gas and we’re inhaling some fumes that would be in that, right? So those are more now the lungs involved instead of the liver. So these different categories almost have different systems, but the common themes are we need to move things from where they are to where they can be metabolized, which is circulation and lymphatic drainage. We need to support the organs that then metabolize them, the liver, the kidneys. We need to do things to make sure that they don’t get recirculated.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:10:07]:
So binders. We need to do things to make sure things that end up in the stool actually then pass out of the body. So, you know, the old nature paths didn’t understand biochemistry. My teachers had never heard of phase 1 and phase 2 because that was something that emerged in the ’90s. But they knew that if they did these tonic herbs, these things like, you know, GI herbs and liver herbs and things to improve like BioFlow, that good things tended to happen over time with their patients. So, you know, a lot of what I’ve focused on isn’t trying to like figure out every step in the body, deal with every chemical compound. There’s just too many unknowns. But how do we make these systems work better in a holistic way?

Nick Urban [00:10:54]:
Yeah. Before we get into more of the science and the formulations and everything, what do you personally do for For your own detox, is there anything in your routine that would surprise people?

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:11:05]:
I don’t think so, but the… and this would go back to when I went to the environmental medicine conferences, to when I actually had an environmental medicine class in naturopathic school. The single most important thing, like step one, is always reduce exposure, right? So that’s huge, right? And I think we… inadvertently often create lots of exposures that aren’t necessary. So like a general rule of thumb is anything that’s not like a flower or from nature that has a strong smell, that’s a chemical smell, right? So it’s a little straw, but it’s maybe an unnecessary one, you know, the air fresheners or things like that. And so most of what I would do, it would be what I would think of as reduce exposure bucket. Just, you know, be prudent about things like, don’t heat things in plastic and don’t buy a lot of canned foods, right? Because the cans, to prevent them from rusting, have some kind of a resin that’s now leaching into the foods. So, the common sense things I’m sure most of your listeners know, like shop on the periphery of stores for food and minimize processed food and control what we can control. And then, I’m a big believer in not getting neurotic about the rest. I think being neurotic is another straw and maybe a bigger one sometimes than the things we’re worried about.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:12:27]:
So that would be, if there was anything, that would be it, that I’m different. The straws that I don’t have a big say on, I don’t worry about. I just focus on the ones that I know I can impact and then feel like I can trust my body if it has the right support to keep me healthy. And it’s done a really great job so far.

Nick Urban [00:12:47]:
I love that strategy too, because it’s one of those things that even if you have the best, most fancy designer ingredients, you have the plasmapheresis treatments, you have all this stuff, but you’re not changing your environment, which is exposing you to the, all the chemicals over and over again, you’re not gonna experience the full benefits. And you may detoxify successfully, but probably you’ll be fighting an uphill battle versus cutting things, especially things that You can swap, like, say, a clean detergent or a chemical-laden detergent with something that’s a little cleaner. It has little cost, it has little inconvenience. You still have the clean whatever it is, and you just minimize one more exposure.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:13:28]:
That’s always rule one of any, um, anyone that’s ever… that I’ve ever known that deals a lot with detox in a practical sense for patients. Reduce exposure is always step one before you decide on the step 2, 3, 4, etc.

Nick Urban [00:13:43]:
Okay, so then after the step 1, after you’ve already reduced exposure, what generally comes next?

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:13:48]:
Yeah, so I… then I think it’s what we would have put together in the Qualia Detox, a really well-thought-out thing that’s supporting these different things that are often neglected. So like lymphatic drainage seems like it’s having a day again, and it’s well deserved, right? It’s maybe been one of the most neglected areas of health and something that the old herbalists, the naturopaths would have felt super strongly. that needed support. Liver seems to get a fair amount of support, but needs it. I think some of the things that are done try to micromanage the liver, where often the old-timers would have done, you know, like your dandelion roots and burdock roots and cloves and some of these things. And just, you know, their practical experience was that these things worked. Well, we can talk a little bit more about a branded clove extract later. Maybe, and that has a really good study on aldehyde metabolism and boosting glutathione.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:14:42]:
That, you know, BioFlow and making sure the stool, and then I think binders, often binders are given in isolation, but binders I think are a critical part of this whole system approach because otherwise what can happen, and this was a, I think it was a study I wrote about in Shapeshift years ago. But it was from around 2000. And they measured what happened when people went on a weight loss diet to, I think it was about 25 to 30 fat-soluble chemical compounds. And what they noticed first, that every participant had at least 19 of them stored in their fat tissue. When they lost weight, they all went up in circulation. At the time when I first came across this study 25, 26 years ago, it was framed something along the lines of to alarmingly high levels in circulation, high enough that they were concerned that mobilizing them was way more damaging than had they just been stored more safely in fat tissue. Because once they’re in circulation, now they could potentially harm the brain and other more sensitive tissues. And then they watched what happened over time as people went from, you know, transitioned from the weight loss phase to trying to keep it off with diet and exercise, which is usually not super successful.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:16:08]:
And what they found is that these compounds were actually more concentrated at the end of the study than they were at the beginning. So, the general sense for the readers is mobilizing them didn’t get them out of the body. It just recirculated them from a place of relatively more safety to places of less safety, and then reconcentrated them after. And so at the end of the study, the concentrations of these chemical compounds were actually more concentrated in fat tissue. So one of the reasons is that without binders, without something to grab hold of these things in the digestive tract, it’s just super easy to, you know, have the liver biotransfer them, you know, put out in bile, go into the stool, and then just get reabsorbed. So that binder thing is, again, you’ll find binders, but usually not woven into a whole protocol that’s supporting the liver and these other systems as well.

Nick Urban [00:17:04]:
There’s levels to this. There’s a really basic where I’m just going to do one monotherapy. I’m going to just take what’s sometimes called the poor man’s detox. I’m going to take a bunch of cilantro, I think it is, or I can take a bunch of activated charcoal. I can just sauna really intensely. I can work out and Break down fat cells and perhaps I’ll detox there. You already mentioned why that’s a bad idea to do that, to just have that one layer. The next part above that I’ve heard called like the push-catch approach, where I think you’re doing the aggravation, the agitation, you’re, and then you’re binding and then you’re… actually, I’ll give you the reins.

Nick Urban [00:17:45]:
You can take over and explain what it is.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:17:47]:
Yeah. So at least when I would think of a push-catch, you’re then trying intentionally something to mobilize. So maybe that’s like a sauna as an example, or maybe it’s like some kind of a juice fast or something for a few days. And then you’re doing a binder to try to now catch those things that are being mobilized and presumably ending up in the stool. The thing there is that we’re maybe not doing enough to support the liver and bile flow and other things to optimize that maybe it’s enough. But that would be a much more prudent approach than not having the catch part, as an example. But I tend to think the best general approach is to support the system that allows things to get to the liver. So circulation, venous blood flow, lymphatic drainage as the start.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:18:39]:
Let’s make sure that we’re getting things to where they can be be worked on and metabolized. And then making sure that we’re supporting the liver and allowing it to do a better job to keep pace with what’s now arriving there. And then making sure that we’re doing things to support both kidneys, cranberry being like a basic example, a really good kidney herb that was in all of the old detoxes that I would have learned from my mentors. And then things for bioflow, like artichoke would be an example of a really great Classic liver herb that was always thought of as a bile flow agent and has that. And then we want, once they get into the stool, that’s where the binders take effect. The binders aren’t really working in the blood. They’re working for the things that make it into the stool so it can catch them, glom onto them, and make sure that they pass out of the body. And then the last piece is that we want things to pass out of the body, right? So we want to make sure that we’re doing things for stool regularity.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:19:36]:
So all those things are important. And I’m sure some of the listeners struggle with stool regularity or stool bulk and things like that. And so while that’s an ongoing issue, you’re not going to detoxify as well as you would if you were having better stool regularity during the push-catch approach you mentioned.

Nick Urban [00:19:54]:
I know we can’t make medical claims, but when something is supporting an organ or a system, what exactly is it doing? Is it increasing the antioxidant defenses to mop up any issues? Is it increasing… Some like energy to that organ system. What’s happening?

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:20:09]:
It really depends on the ingredient. So I mentioned clove and a branded extract called Clovinol. So the thing that got me excited for that, one of the things that we were doing at Qualia when we were looking at studies for this, since this is a 2-day protocol, is we wanted to see if there were studies that showed what happened after a single dose or a couple doses instead of over, let’s just say, a month. And this clovenol extract was given with like a pretty heavy alcohol challenge. So alcohols then turned into aldehydes. It’s the aldehydes that are actually more damaging than the alcohol. And then aldehydes then have to be then eliminated, turned into something that is water soluble, right? Glutathione being something that does that. So What this found is that the amount of acetaldehyde, like a byproduct of alcohol, was much lower when you gave this clove extract and that glutathione and other antioxidant enzymes were much higher.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:21:12]:
That would map somewhat to both phase 1 and phase 2 were supported in a really balanced way. Alcohol is not the only thing that creates acetaldehyde. Aldehydes, formaldehyde would have been something in… Alcohol. When I was doing anatomy, the corpse would have been soaked in formaldehyde, as an example. But aldehydes are a ubiquitous byproduct of many of the compounds that would be exposures in our diet. That would have a really specific mechanism. That would be a known one. Something like, let’s just say the old traditional liver herbs like a burdock root, a dandelion root, Those have never really been studied for what they do.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:21:55]:
What we would know is that those just provide really great nutritional support for the liver. And that the goal isn’t trying to figure out how to micromanage every… like the cytochrome P450 system, which is the majority of phase 1, is hundreds of enzymes. And there’s polymorphisms. So for people that don’t know that word, some of those differ depending on the genes that we inherit. Many of them change based based on epigenetics, so our diet, lifestyle, and environment, and other things, and they all interact. So, you know, things like that where there’s so many moving parts, there’s just no way that we could figure out what’s going to happen, even generally speaking, for the population, never mind for an individual. So, you know, my sense… and Qualia has always been a complex systems science company… that, you know, we’re not about thinking that we can, you know, figure out every mechanism and step. It’s kind of like a fool’s gold.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:22:55]:
What we’re about is figuring out, okay, how does the system work and how can we support that? And so what we’re trying to do really is figure out, okay, there’s these different ways things might be eliminated from the body. How do we collectively or comprehensively support all of those in a way that makes sense and that maps to what would be known?

Nick Urban [00:23:15]:
In what magnitude of effect do nutrition and supplements have on the detoxification process compared to something like, say, exercise or sauna?

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:23:25]:
So sauna, the way… so I think at least when I was more going to the environmental medicine conferences and being taught by people that were big proponents of it, they would have always used sauna but typically used what would have been termed as low-temperature sauna. So think of like the temperature of a sauna. They believed… and there was one of my teachers was named Walter Crinnion. He was a naturopath that at one point ran the environmental medicine program at what’s now Sonoran University in Tempe, Arizona. It was Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine when I went through the first class there. But Walter had measured what was excreted, low temperature versus high temperature. saunas and low temperature, the residue is more oily. And high temperature, it’s more like electrolytes and water.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:24:17]:
And so the goal was the low temperature because that did something. The way that I would have thought about it is the high temperature was more of a stress response, like we had to sweat.

Nick Urban [00:24:28]:
Yeah.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:24:28]:
Right. To counter it, right? So we lost a lot of fluids where the low temperature was, and I think 140 below is what he would have put as the range for low temperature, was a much more sustained mobilizing things that were stored in fat tissue. And so what was excreted then through the skin was different in those 2 situations. So, you know, and then saunas have been used as part of what would be the… maybe one of the more studied protocols for detoxification. And it’s the L. Ron Hubbard one that they would have used flushing niacin and saunas as an example. And in that, I don’t remember them ever like dictating the temperature of the sauna, but they were using the crazy high amounts of flushing niacin to mobilize things from adipose tissue. So the key thing is if you’re using sauna, you want to do it in a way that’s more mobilizing things from fat tissue.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:25:21]:
And I would default to what, you know, these teachers that actually measured things believed, which was you didn’t have to do the heroic high temperatures. You just wanted to do like a lower temperature but more sustained.

Nick Urban [00:25:33]:
With that classic sauna detox protocol, when you’re taking a high-dose niacin and then going into the sauna, that sounds like you’re getting the mobilization, but is there a binding?

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:25:43]:
No, there wasn’t. But it’s still… like most of the studies that I saw were a very small number of people. But one, you know, back, probably it was from 15 to 20 years ago, was on first responders for 9/11. It was one of the things that had been studied for them. So it does help. All of these things I think can help. So it’s not that the Qualia detox is the only… like, this is the only way. No, there’s other ways.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:26:15]:
My advice would be just to be prudent and be more measured. Within naturopathic medicine, we would have philosophically had something called a healing crisis. The idea would have been to do things to move something that was a chronic issue to something more acute. But healing crisis can be really unpleasant and often unnecessary. It’s often an indicator that we did too much too fast and dumped too many things maybe that were stored more safely to where they were now maybe at more of a risk to our health.

Nick Urban [00:26:53]:
Well, I actually want to explore that with you too, because is symptomology a good approach to knowing if a detoxification strategy is working? Like you could imagine after intense exercise, you might be fatigued. You might have like a headache or something. You might have lethargy, a lot of different things that may or may not indicate that you’re detoxifying something. Likewise, after a sauna session, you sweat a bunch, you might be again dehydrated. Can you use these things to determine if you are under a toxic burden that requires more detoxification?

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:27:33]:
And I think this started in and around that mid to late ’90s. So the Institute of Functional Medicine… so I guess for history, so phase 1 and phase 2 detox became a thing around when I was a naturopathic student, which was ’93 through ’96. Largely, it was pioneered by Jeff Bland, super influential figure in the functional medicine world, and then productized by Metagenics at the time with a product called UltraClear, which was like a protein shake that had some nutrients in it. And what that led to eventually was the Institute of Functional Medicine became a thing, and then they developed their own questionnaire. that would be a multiple symptom type of questionnaire that would have then taught people going through their program to use to get a sense whether someone might benefit from detoxification. And what that symptom questionnaire would do, like, imagine it for listeners, it has multiple what would be systems in the body. So the mind as an example, and would ask questions about maybe, you know, a sense of fatigue or brain fog, not the exact questions, but you get the point, energy. maybe GI and some common GI symptoms, and then multiple different systems.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:28:50]:
And the higher the score, the more likely that some type of chemical burden was contributing significantly to that. So there would have been ranges set, like below this range, like probably don’t need a detox. Above this one, suspicion gets a lot higher. Above this one, almost a certainty that you would. So for listeners, you don’t necessarily need to do that. But when there’s a lot of these low-level things that can be caused by many different things like too much exercise maybe, or lack of sleep, so fatigue being one of these nonspecific, you have fatigue and brain fog and now GI symptoms. And when you start to see these things mount, then for sure there’s now an indication that the system’s under a lot more pressure than it’s able to resourcefully deal with. And that one of, again, we can kind of almost without any debate, say, like, are chemicals contributing to that? For sure, right? They’re in all of us, right? They’re accumulating more and more each year in all of us.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:29:50]:
Are they contributing to your individual symptoms? Hard to tell, but they’re probably at least a straw that’s better off supported.

Nick Urban [00:29:58]:
Yeah. I’m surprised that you guys got into the detoxification supplement space because it’s one of those areas where if people have actually tried… first of all, people don’t believe that detoxification is even necessary beyond what we already do naturally, which I think… hope we’ve dispelled that myth already. But then if they have tried it, they probably have tried a product, and if it wasn’t well thought out, they might have had those symptoms. It might have put them into a healing crisis, and therefore there’s like an association with detoxification and feeling bad after

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:30:34]:
Yeah, it’s, you know, one of the problems with language is often like a word means such… like the word natural as an example, right? Like, what does that mean? Like, where a word like a dozen, you and I exactly know, like, oh, a dozen eggs, right? And so detoxification, cleanses, that’s one of those things. There’s, you know, it’s… so there are terms that are used to describe a lot of different strategies. So that being said, one of the things at Qualia is that we like to make products that we want to take, that we like. We’ll scan something and be like, oh, there’s, you know, there’s like this category we think isn’t well thought out. Do we think we can do something better? Do we want to take something that doesn’t really exist? And that’s a big driver for us, more so than the marketability. The marketability is super important for our marketing wing, but I’m in product, right? I’m in science. And so, we’re just driven by a different thing. And so, that would be it, that we were dissatisfied with the solutions out there and really thought that, you know, that we could put our expertise together and create a product that we would want to take and want to offer the world.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:31:46]:
And then whether marketing succeeds in selling it or not is a completely different conversation. And I want to see it succeed. I think it’s a fantastic product. I want to be able to take it for a while. But my role is really to make the product that we would want to take.

Nick Urban [00:32:02]:
One thing that I think you guys have pioneered is the concept of not taking every supplement every single day. It’s like most supplements, you just take them and you just keep taking them indefinitely. You take, I think your senolytic product was the first one that was a hit and run dosing protocol where you only take it 2 days per month. And that’s that you’re done with your senolytic. And then this follows something similar. And the way you guys laid it out, it’s very easy to grasp, to understand. You have the 4 different steps and you have different formulas throughout. Like, walk me through how you came up with that and why you chose this approach rather than taking small doses or potentially medium-sized doses every single day.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:32:43]:
Yeah. So, um, for a few different reasons. One, a lot of the, a lot of the compounds that are stored, let’s just say the ones in fat tissue, are in somewhat of a dynamic equilibrium between that and what’s in circulation in the blood, as an example. And so if all of a sudden now… our goal is, I guess, for lack of a better way, to allow people to win at least a few days a month. Because right now, in general, we’re all losing every day, every month, or over the course of the month. Yeah. And so then the question is, what’s a way that’s accessible to a lot of people? We think these intermittent protocols, one, yes, they are. What we’ve found with Qualia Senolytic is, I guess, stepping back first, something can be a senolytic compound like fisetin, which you’ll find in Qualia Senolytic, but it has to be a high enough concentration to actually have a senolytic effect.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:33:41]:
And the way, since we’ve talked about saunas, I’ll use sauna as an example. You could go in a sauna, but if it was set to 80 degrees, you’re not saunaying, right? And so it’s the same, like the amount, the dose, like these things matter, the concentration of something. So the right range for a sauna, if you wanted to use it for, let’s just say, you know, post-workout or to build up a sweat, might be high temperature. You know, maybe to optimize mobilizing things from fat tissue might be that more low temperature range. I mentioned. So what’s the dial set to is super important. So to me, it would be more important to set the dial appropriately for a few days than at a low amount that’s subtherapeutic every day, which would be the more normative thing that you would see in the market. Right.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:34:26]:
Let’s put a bunch of these liver herbs together as an example and do them maybe in a proprietary blend or in low amounts and hope for the best. It’s just not That’s not how we would think at Qualia, that the dose always is super important. And then intermittent senolytics would be a good example. Like, the approach is the best combination of risk and reward, which is why the hit-and-run approach started even before we adopted it for Qualia Senolytic. And I think for mobilizing, transforming, catching, and eliminating toxins, a hit-and-run approach is also the best, like, combination of risk and reward, right? When we do something in a continuous way, one, we tend to always adapt to it. So what that means is, like, Clovinol as an example, I know it does that over a day. It probably still does the same thing over 2 days because the system hasn’t had time to adapt. Do I know it will be doing the same thing over a month or 2 months? Probably not.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:35:29]:
Like, the most common thing with adaptation is what it used to do, it stops doing. Think of caffeine. Most listeners probably know caffeine. If you want to get the best response from caffeine, stop doing caffeine for a couple of weeks and then do caffeine. It’s like magic. Yeah. But you do it every day, every day, and either you need more and more or it has diminishing effects. And so I tend to think for many of the things, and since me and other people I think of smarter than me, like Daniel Schmachtenberger, one of our founders, adaptation is just part of that complex science mindset.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:36:08]:
You always think in terms of adaptation. So we think it’s way better to do these things for small durations where we’re certain what’s happening. And if then you want, after a shorter break, instead of maybe doing Qualia 2-day detox once a month, do it twice a month or every weekend. Yeah. But build in like that intermittent, like do it for a few days, take some kind of a recovery, the same way you would do with exercise. I was a nitwit when I was an officer in the Navy in my 20s. I thought if I went to the gym every day and lifted weights for 2 hours, it would be a lot better than if I went 3 days and lifted for 1 hour. So needless to say, I’m about 150 to 160 pounds.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:36:50]:
I’m not a big guy. But I remember over a 6-month time with a buddy, I was doing my way and gained 2 pounds or so of muscle. He was doing his way and gained like 25 pounds. And one of us was doing the rest and recovery intermittent thing and the other not so much. So like in these, we tend to just so underappreciate the doing and then the recovering from doing. And often it’s the recovering from doing where the magic happens. Yeah.

Nick Urban [00:37:19]:
Yeah. I like that approach applied to nutrition and supplementation as well. Are there any ingredients you see people outside of the senolytics and these detox ingredients, people using daily when instead they should pulse them or use them intermittently?

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:37:36]:
I mean, I think there’s… it’s really just a mindset. So I think that I would tend to think things that are more adaptogenic in nature. like your ginsengs, ashwagandhas, those things, my brain just automatically defaults to like, oh, I’ll do those during the week and then take the weekends off like I would for maybe exercise. Caffeine, I build in multiple times a year. Usually it’s a de-escalation protocol for caffeine. So I’ll start by… Qualia Mind has some caffeine in it. So I’ll usually start by just reducing the amount and then the next week I’ll go off that and then the third week I’ll just drop all caffeine for a week and then I’ll reintroduce. So I’ll usually do that once a quarter, at the least amount once every half year just to kind of reset.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:38:29]:
And I generally just think that’s a much more prudent way to go about it. Just like with a well-crafted exercise routine, I would take a deloading week Periodically, right?

Nick Urban [00:38:39]:
Yeah. Yeah. I’ve taken that approach. I use that for caffeine as well. I take quarterly or at least semi-annually breaks for a couple weeks. And I think it’s important to actually enjoy the coffee, the caffeine, the whole ritual, but also the biological effects it’s having. So, I’m with you on that one. Now, for this detox product specifically, I mentioned that you have 4 steps.

Nick Urban [00:39:02]:
How did you guys come up with those Like, why the 4 steps and those time periods, like from an empty stomach to around meals? Where did those come from?

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:39:10]:
Yeah, so step 1 would be things like Lymphoselect, which is a sweet clover extract, horse chestnut, nattokinase. It has a whole bunch of things that are focused on circulation and lymphatic drainage. The idea being, let’s start at the beginning of the day to support that so that we can start to bring things to these organs of elimination. So that would be step 1. It can be done with food, without food, but it would be, you know, what would show up there is the morning stack. Step 2 is a combination largely of what would be the classical herbs, newer things like the Clovinol that I mentioned, that support liver function, bile flow, kidney function, and then stool formation and regularity. And that’s, we would call that the with meals. And it’s 8 capsules.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:40:02]:
It can be done all in one meal. I would… when I take Qualia 2-Day Detox, I take them all with lunch. But it could also be broken up and taken with lunch and with dinner if someone would rather do that and have 4 and 4. So that would be step 2. Step 3 then is the binder stack. And if we take binders with food, they’re going to now also bind some of the things that are in the meal, maybe some of the nutrition. It would be an unknown. Are they binding active things in some of these plant extracts that we’re trying to have do some beneficial job? So our sense is, since binders are really trying to work on the stool to prevent some things from recirculation, give an opportunity to digest the meal a little bit, and then take the binder stack away from food.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:40:51]:
Binders can bind onto medications. as well. Something like activated charcoal is a really general binder. It binds a wide range of things. Chitosan, which is either from mushrooms or from shells, it’s like a fibrous type thing that’s in shellfish, right, the hard outer shell. There was a human study on that, that it bound basically plastic residues. in foods. And then another study where it was combined with chlorophyllin, like a derivative of chlorophyll that you’d find in plants, and that combination also bound those.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:41:31]:
So the way to take binders, we think, is best a bit away from meals. So that can be 2 hours after a meal, maybe an hour before, but just kind of make sure we’re not at least disrupting the nutrition that’s in the meal. Right. And then the last piece, what we would say step 4, is because starting a handful of or more years ago, scientists discovered the brain had its own cleansing system called not the lymphatic system, but the glymphatic system, like lymph. And that’s most active during deep sleep. So that first wave of deep sleep that we would get, not too long after we go to sleep. So the the better that deep sleep phase, the more of that glymphatic system cleansing we’ll have. And so we think, you know, we started as a nootropic company and Qualia still really thinks heavily about supporting the brain.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:42:24]:
So we wanted to have something that supported that. And there’s not a lot of ingredients in that, but we were really intrigued with a new rice protein extract called Peptasleep. We did quite a bit of N-of-1s on it. They’re still working on getting their study published, but we had some early access to see at least some of the major results. But what I saw, you know, just in Oura Ring or other, you know, wearable tracking is that sometimes people had amazing changes when I had them take PeptaSleep for a few days to a week. They weren’t always as sustained over time, right? Adaptation again. But where, you know, again, this protocol isn’t sustained over time. It’s repeated over time intermittently.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:43:07]:
And then we added GABA, which there’s reason to believe that the GABA system is super important during that glymphatic phase, as well as a celery extract that has a compound in it that was one of the few that we could find that actually had been studied preclinically in animals to have an impact on glymphatic

Nick Urban [00:43:29]:
Yeah, I was going to ask you why celery extract. And it’s because it doesn’t seem like there’s that many things that can impact glymphatics.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:43:36]:
Yeah, it’s just such a new area that it’s not received much attention. The main connection so far is just the deep sleep. So for listeners, anything that you’re doing to improve deep sleep is going to, over time, for sure, be thought to help quite a bit with glymphatic drainage.

Nick Urban [00:43:52]:
As a formulator, how do you and how does Qualia think of the idea of multi-ingredient blends? Obviously, I know you guys are a fan of them cuz you use multi-ingredient blends, but for when you have say 38 ingredients in a stack, then it’s likely that someone’s not gonna respond really well to one of them or more, and they’re gonna respond amazingly to other ones. Does that concern you at all?

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:44:18]:
Yeah. And it’s one of the reasons that we always make prototypes and do some kind of a study before we decide to make something to, to essentially move it to the market. And we… I think this probably came up when we spoke the last time, but, you know, the nootropa community has always had the your mileage may vary, right, as one of its sayings. And at Qualia, we tend to partition things into 4 groups that for most interventions, you know, exercise, we could say as an example, like my buddy, you know, weightlifting over those 6 months was a super responder. I was a responder, so something happened. Maybe someone else, nothing would have happened. They wouldn’t be a non-responder and maybe someone else got hurt. They were a negative responder.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:45:04]:
We always at Qualia drop people into those 4 buckets. Our general sense is we can’t make something that everyone on the planet is going to be a super responder and a responder to. That there’s going to be some people because of biochemical individuality, past history, you name it, that no matter how well we, you know, think we created something, that maybe it’s not going to work for them. And it’s part of the reason we do the 100-day money-back guarantee, because we know that there’s going to be some people that one of our products may not have worked for them. It’s just the lay of the land. We’re not, I would say, delusional about that, like a lot of other things that I’ve run into. And so what we look for when we design a study is like, In this case, we would have recruited people. We’d have used that questionnaire that I mentioned.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:45:55]:
We would have had people take 2 different cycles of the Qualia 2-Day Detox. So do it for 2 days, take a break, do it 2 more days, and then measured how the group did. So we would then statistically look at how the group did, but we’re then looking at how each individual did as well, kind of the distribution of things. And we don’t release a product unless we’re comfortable that in general it worked well, like it was significant when we apply stats to it, but that for the majority of people, that they start to fall into what we would think of as a super responder, a good responder, in terms of, like, in this case, how their questionnaires changed and how they felt when they took it. So that would be how we would handle it internally, that we come up with, like, what Daniel Schmachtenberger would say as our working hypothesis, but then we test it before we decide to bring it into the world.

Nick Urban [00:46:46]:
Actual science. Nice. One thing I’ve noticed about Qualia since I first came across you guys is that you guys tend to use a lot of the premium ingredients. For people who don’t know, you can get a lot of range in quality, and in that range in quality for the same ingredient, a different extract, the price can vary tremendously. And in this one alone, you guys have 32 ingredients, and I think it’s 11 different branded trademarked ingredients. How do you decide whether it’s worth the extra cost and for which ingredients specifically?

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:47:22]:
Yeah, so what we’ll do, um, I’ll take Qualia Mind as an example. Um, Qualia Mind would also have about 30 ingredients in it. We would have… so what we would do as a team, and I, I lead the team, um, but we’ll say like as nootropics, you know, there’s maybe I’ll just say 100 different nootropic compounds we could have used. So, we would have got the research on all those clinical studies. We would rank higher, but we would have read the studies, evaluated that within our shared database for each of those ingredients. We would probably have a really comprehensive research brief where we would have dissected every human study for sure, rated it for our concerns of, let’s just say, fraud or adulteration. For, you know, not what they say in the abstract, but, you know, what they… what we decide, you know, based on, you know, actually evaluating the results happen in the study. And then the end result of that is an ingredient for a use case.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:48:23]:
We’ll just say in this case, maybe for stool regularity would have a weighting from 1 to 5. 1 would be LOL, I can’t believe anyone that read this research would pay a penny for this, never mind like 5 would be, okay, this really looks like it’s doing what it says it would do. We’re really convinced this was a good study or studies. So, as a nootropic, as an example, there’s very few 5s. Caffeine would be one. What caffeine is supposed to do, caffeine does study after study. There ends up often being a lot of 2s and 3s. And so, a branded ingredient that’s a 5, we would probably want to include that.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:49:01]:
Right? Even though it’s expensive, it’s a great value. It’s doing what it’s supposed to. You know, for maybe a branded ingredient that’s a 3, that’s not going to represent a good value, right? That would mean, you know, the way I would have trained my people under me to think of that is it’s not nothing, but it’s not great, right? So there’s not the value. So that’s it. Like everything gets weighed through like our internal filters. And then the ultimate goal is like, how can we build the best product available for that? Again, that we would want to take, right? Because like the end result of this whole process should be that I’m excited to take something and the people working with me are as well. And so that ends up usually being that there’s a combination of some branded ingredients and some that aren’t. And then there’s like things that you might know that your listeners would be aghast at that Like bromelain.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:49:55]:
Bromelain is in this as an example. Bromelain, there’s no branded bromelains on the market that I’ve ever come across. It’s all generic. Bromelain is usually in studies quantified by its gelatin dissolving units. Basically, its ability to dissolve certain types of proteins. But one of the things with bromelain is there’s different strengths. There would be higher GDU, like 2,400 GDU. as an example.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:50:23]:
A study may be 600 GDU. So this is one of the things that annoys me about what’s required by law at this point. So one way to get to 600 GDU would be a really crude extract that natively would be 600 GDU is what it would spec out at. Another would be to take a 2,400 GDU and just cut it with maltodextrin, You know, like put a quarter bromelain and 3 quarters maltodextrin, and now the whole blend is going to, you know, spec out to that same amount, right? Just math. So that would be the composition piece. So the spec often doesn’t give the composition. That’s another document that would give that. So it would, on the spec, show up as 600 GDU.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:51:13]:
And you could label 100 milligrams of that as 100 milligrams of bromelain, even though technically it’s 25 milligrams of bromelain and 75 milligrams of the filler, right? So things like… it starts to get… yeah, there’s like quality is not just what’s on the label, right? There’s these other pieces. And so… and a lot of brands are doing a great job, right? But there’s certainly ways to cut corners. And so at the end of the day, it’s part of the reason you get what you pay for. These more reputable brands on Amazon cost more. It would invariably be a strong clue of poor quality when it seems like something’s a really great price compared to like a more reputable brand.

Nick Urban [00:52:00]:
Yeah, yeah, that’s a good, a good test. When you were doing your research, were there any popular 1 out of 5 pretty much useless ingredients in the detox space that you chose to avoid?

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:52:15]:
You know, I… so the answer would be yes, but it’s been a while. Like, so we would have originally… right now, for listeners, as we’re talking, it’s early October. We worked on this project more than a year ago. Like, our ingredient research phase started about more than a year and a half ago, and we would have already been in our study phase At this point. So, so the answer would be yes, but it’s… we’ve moved on to so many new projects since then. I don’t remember what some of those were and I don’t want to misrepresent something.

Nick Urban [00:52:48]:
Okay. Yeah. Well, if you do come across them, let me know at some point. I’m always curious about that. And I feel like every week I’m seeing new detoxification trends on social media and cleanses of different types, and they all promise to transform your life and you’re becoming more glowing and radiant as a result of it. And it seems to me that a lot of them are more marketing than, than substance.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:53:16]:
Yeah, I would, I would tend to think the same. Um, like, um, yeah, anyways, they’re like, it’s, it would be super common That, you know, for listeners, so one of the things in my role is that suppliers constantly are sending me sell sheets with things that they’re claiming, right, that their studies showed, or taking me out to, you know, coffee or lunch to convince me to buy their ingredient. And I used to be less kind about it. I used to be much more direct, where now I understand they’re just trying to do their job as well. They’re not scientists. But it’s one of the… like, we actually read the studies and There’s certain suppliers that I know what they say and what I’m going to agree with are not even remotely close, just because of the history, right, of reading many of the studies. And that’s unfortunate. And the other sad thing is often abstracts really… an abstract would be the summary of a study for listeners… often misportray what the the results are.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:54:24]:
So, um, so you like, it’s always, um, like many things, right? Um, that, that we need to do our own work or trust someone else has done it for us.

Nick Urban [00:54:36]:
It’s tricky. It gives the supplement industry a bad reputation and it’s not necessarily because the formulators, the manufacturers, the ingredient suppliers that have bad nefarious intentions. It’s just like the way things are done is not in a way that’s conducive to getting consumers the best results unless you have the right people in place. And then perhaps that is more likely, but there’s no guarantee of that currently.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:55:00]:
Yeah, I think there’s been big advancements like, you know, GMP, right? General, like, good manufacturing practices were something that didn’t exist or that wasn’t enforced when I would have worked for Thorne in the late ’90s. Thorne would have been one of the few, like, really high-quality manufacturers back then. You know, now that would be standard. But even within manufacturers, there’s, you know, there’s, let’s just say, the Bentleys, and then there’s the Yugos. All right,

Nick Urban [00:55:35]:
Dr. Greg, when people use a thorough detoxification protocol and program, say the ones that you guys developed, what can they expect to see on the other side of it? In this case, it’s not a huge protocol, it’s not a 6-month protocol, but like after the first 2 days and then when they repeat it again, what would they actually notice in terms of difference in their life?

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:55:58]:
Yeah, to answer that, I would think let’s divide into 2 different groups of people. So one, we’ll call the smoke detector group, right? So I would be in that, probably you’re in it, right? We don’t have anything, any target. We just want to make sure that we’re changing the battery of our smoke detector before there’s a problem. We’re doing this to help support us to make sure that we’re doing a better job supporting these systems that are super important for us to remain healthy. For that group, which I would imagine is probably most of your listeners, I wouldn’t expect them to notice very much at all. They’re probably at least either below the threshold where these are causing an overt problem or not high enough above it that they’re going to notice anything after 2 days or multiple cycles. But the goal is to keep the… going back to that analogy, like the bucket as empty as possible. So for that group, I think of that like with Qualia Senolytic, often we wouldn’t see anything.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:57:03]:
But often things that even in that group, low level, these more general things, digestive issues or… cognitive things, or sometimes skin, you know, energy can improve. So it’s not that nothing can, it’s just not as expected. What we saw in our study in people that scored a lot higher on these symptom questionnaires we used, then we would have seen bigger changes. And often they noticed within… again, like our study was 2 cycles of the Qualia 2-day detox… they would have noticed and commented and said things like, oh, like, I can’t wait to buy this product. Wow, I just had all these changes happen. And again, then it would be so individual depending on what that system that’s most taxed is. But again, like the areas we most commonly saw were cognition, digestion, and general energy. And then what would fit into that, like joints and connective tissue.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:58:02]:
Think of like that, you know, like inflammationy thing from working out. And for someone

Nick Urban [00:58:09]:
who’s already healthy, say they’re in the smoke detector group, would they see changes in their biomarkers, say like their HRV or resting heart rate or other things related to perhaps not just recovery but anything?

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:58:23]:
So that’s a great question. It’s not something we’ve measured or that I know of anyone else has measured. HRV can be really challenging to move the needle on. So I don’t know. I would love to be able to answer, but I don’t know. But some biomarkers potentially, there are blood tests through Quest as an example that measures forever chemicals. That’s something that someone could look at if they were inclined. But these are because there’s just so many compounds doing so many different things, investing a lot in blood work generally unless it’s to do like a really specific targeted detox protocol.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:59:03]:
So let’s say, you know, someone’s gonna do like a lead or mercury thing under a doctor’s supervision, then it would make more sense. And I, you know, then you would want to see biomarkers change.

Nick Urban [00:59:14]:
Yeah. Well, this has been great. If people want to connect with you to check out Qualia and your 2-day detox, where do you wanna send them?

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:59:23]:
Yeah, so the best place is qualialife.com. We do have a blog there where we go through some of our thoughts of why we chose every single ingredient, the amount that we included. So for the people that we just superficially touched on that, but there would be a really in-depth blog there. And then, you know, we’ve put in additional content on some of the, like a longer piece on some of these ingredients as well. And we’ll be doing more over time. Instagram is by far the best place to follow us still currently. We’re just still really, I guess, starting to get into our stride with TikTok. We were a really slow adopter.

Dr. Greg Kelly [00:59:59]:
of that. But Instagram would be another really great way.

Nick Urban [01:00:03]:
Cool. And if you guys want to check it out, they set up a code for me. Code URBAN will save you 15% on your order. Dr. Greg, any final words for folks that have made it this far?

Dr. Greg Kelly [01:00:15]:
No, I would just say, as you mentioned, detox can be, for some people, a loaded word, but that it is a system, as we talked about earlier, that we know as a whole humans are struggling to keep pace with the world that we live in. And whether it’s Qualia 2-Day Detox, you know, or some other strategy that you choose. I would just encourage people that might have been turned off by, you know, some of the overpromises to, at a minimum, integrate things like saunas, you know, some, you know, more evidence-based approach to supporting these systems. I think over time you’ll find you’re really better served if you don’t neglect this really important part of your health.

Nick Urban [01:00:59]:
At the very least, you can… we can all, when our conventional toxic product… products run out, switch to a cleaner, more hopefully less chemical-laden version or less toxic chemical-laden version.

Dr. Greg Kelly [01:01:13]:
Absolutely.

Nick Urban [01:01:14]:
Well, Dr. Greg, thanks for joining the podcast today.

Dr. Greg Kelly [01:01:16]:
You’re welcome. Thank you. And thank you to all the listeners today.

Nick Urban [01:01:21]:
Thanks for tuning in to High Performance Longevity. If you got value today, the best way to support the show is to leave a review or share it with someone who’s ready to upgrade their healthspan. You can find all the episodes, show notes, and resources mentioned at outliyr.com. Until next time, stay energized, stay bioharmonized, and be an outlier.