Anti-Aging Eye Drops, Skin Cancer Cream & Bioregulator Peptides

Nick Urban [00:00:05]: What if some of the most incredible health transformation tools are actually staring us right in the face? And they’ve been around for years, decades, or in some cases even centuries, yet for some reason have largely been forgotten today. Welcome to body peak performance. I’m your host, Nick Urban, and today that is exactly what we are discussing. Our guest this week is Phil Micans. Phil has been dedicated to antiaging, preventative, and regenerative medicine for more than 30 years. He helps spread the latest international lifespan information to the public by being editor to the Aging Matters magazine. Plus he assists with many other publications and conferences. He also established the IAS group, which is an organization dedicated to finding hard to obtain supplements and health products, some of which we discuss today.

Nick Urban [00:02:08]: Ladies and gentlemen, Phil Micans.

Nick Urban [00:02:12]: Phil Micans, welcome back to the High Performance Longevity podcast.

Phil Micans [00:02:16]: Thanks, Nick. Great pleasure to be here again.

Nick Urban [00:02:19]: Yeah, we recorded an episode together. I think it was number 106 and that was a big hit. We talked about peptide bioregulators. We will reference that again in this show. But there are a lot of things we’ve discussed, just you and I offline when the cameras were not rolling and a lot of really cool stuff that I’m going to guess most people have never heard of. And will you share how that is possible, that there’s such cool things out there, such cool inventions and medical health interventions? How can these work if no one’s heard of them?

Phil Micans [00:02:58]: Right? Well, the bottom line is some people have heard of them, some countries have approved them. But if you talk about mass knowledge, like the world knows Viagra or Prozac or something like that, no, they’re nowhere near that level. And we can certainly get into some of the reasons why. In fact, I think all the things I want to mention today are effectively natural agents, and that’s one of the major stumbling blocks to getting anything promoted.

Phil Micans [00:03:48]: There are not many doctors, practicing doctors, medical doctors, what we call GPS in the UK, general practitioner who have enough time to look up the research and all the rest. Let’s be honest, most of them might go along to a few medical conferences sponsored probably by pharmaceutical companies, and then wait for the pharmaceutical reps to come in and tell them what’s new. So how can we put it that makes the world rather tainted and rather slanted into one direction. Meanwhile, there can be the most wonderful research that’s been done in different places, some of it being decades old, many decades old.

Nick Urban [00:04:55]: Are there any in particular that you like to start out with?

Phil Micans [00:05:00]: From one perspective, I’m looking at this, they reckon that presently online, and I’m just talking medicine here. I’m not talking general health, general nutrition or clinical and personal experiences, of which there’d be far, far more. But in the medical literature, it’s estimated that today, 50 million publications, 50 million articles are online, 1 million are added every year. Okay, that’s the present level, but probably somewhere between 15 and 20% is online. The rest is in the libraries of the world. And of course, that could also mean it’s different languages. It’s not all going to be English.

Phil Micans [00:06:45]: And to use a line that I’m rather proud of because I’m writing an article on this, imagine if we did that, we’d actually learn what we’ve already discovered.

Phil Micans [00:07:24]: There is one example I can give here. A man I have great respect for, Dr. Jonathan Wright, he runs a clinic in Tahoma in Washington, very big clinic. He actually found a combination of things which I’ll also come to separately, that reverse macular degeneration in people’s eyes. And it’s a combination of basically minerals and melatonin as well. At one point he actually advertised, come to my clinic and I will reverse your wet or dry macular degeneration or I’ll give you your money back. Now, that’s not a phrase you hear a lot in doctors’ offices and clinics, is it?

Phil Micans [00:08:28]: And he said, you can’t do this, you cannot give a money back guarantee. And he said, Why? And they told him it was unfair to the doctors who couldn’t.

Nick Urban [00:09:06]: When I was writing a simple article on the basics of peptide bioregulators, I read two books on it. I looked through PubMed, I looked through other sites that had research, and a lot of it was in Russian. Then I discovered there was an argument over whether or not they translated the dosages properly when they were translating the language.

Phil Micans [00:09:53]: And as you correctly say, there are nuances within languages that don’t translate well into our native languages. The word nootropics, which I think a lot of people are aware of, which generally speaking means towards the mind. But my good friend Marius Croazis, who’s a doctor and has written various books, he was saying it’s like saying the tree and the woods at the same time.

Nick Urban [00:10:40]: Can you give a quick summary of what peptide bioregulators are?

Phil Micans [00:11:02]: Indeed, Nick, and I would say this is one of the wow factors. The Soviets discovered that short chain peptides, these are very small links of amino acids. A peptide is made up of amino acids and a bioregulator, which is a term that’s been given by Professor Vladimir Khavinson, who’s the lead researcher behind all of this. And they are basically peptides made up of two, three or four amino acids. So they’re particularly small, but they’re not all bioregulators. What they discovered was that commercially available today there are 21, although actually if you look at the literature, it was probably approaching 50. They are gene switches. So if you stop and think about that for a moment, it’s a hidden message within food.

Phil Micans [00:12:38]: And the Russians and the Soviets, originally it was a Soviet military secret. They reserved it for their troops, their cosmonauts and their Olympic teams. But since Perestroika, this stuff has been in the open and today the oral versions, and they work orally. Anybody that knows about peptides knows that most of them don’t work well orally because their chains are too long. But these ones work orally and with all the evidence, all the backup, their food supplements in the Russian countries. They’re sold as food supplements. They’re incredibly safe. There are various, it’s a long list, 21, but you’ve got things like heart and liver and kidney and pineal and testes and ovaries.

Phil Micans [00:14:14]: And the incredible thing that most people can’t get their heads around is the word bioregulator, because what the same peptide can do with that specific gene is activate it or silence it. So, for example, let’s take the thyroid gland in the neck. A lot of people, they have a weak thyroid. If you take the thyroid peptide, it will actually, through the gene, encourage the thyroid. But here’s the crazy thing. If you were one of the rarer persons who is producing too much thyroid hormones, it will silence the gene. And it bioregulates. Think of it like an adaptogen.

Phil Micans [00:15:45]: And it may also help to explain why in Russia, Professor Khavinson has spoken of this openly, saying it’s been dosed over 100 million times in millions of people. Because remember, folks, this has been happening over 40 years. This wasn’t discovered last week. They haven’t seen any serious side effects. And it could help to explain that you don’t appear to be able to overdose.

Nick Urban [00:16:18]: And I think that normal peptides tend to be among the safer class of therapeutics. But then bioregulators are even a notch above that.

Nick Urban [00:17:10]: And I think a natural source of some of these bioregulators, again in much smaller doses than if you took a dedicated supplement, would be in the respective organ. So say if I ate liver then I’d be getting a small dose of the liver bioregulators in some form.

Phil Micans [00:17:25]: Absolutely. It goes back even to the work of people like Weston Price, who made discoveries in native tribes around the world. And they ate the necks of the animals. In fact our forebears would have wasted nothing. You’d had the meat and of course it wasn’t that long ago when people ate the organ meats. And Weston Price in his studies showed that the tribes who are eating the necks of animals didn’t have any thyroid problems.

Nick Urban [00:19:36]: Well, let’s talk more about the visual system now because you briefly mentioned to me about some of these cool products and the information behind them. I’m interested to hear what they are, how they work and if there is any research or anecdotes that you’ve heard about each of them.

Phil Micans [00:19:56]: I’ve got two visuals to talk about today. I’ll mention the one first that I’ve already alluded to, which is for macular degeneration. Macular degeneration is basically a breakdown on the retina in the eye, the back of the eye. And there are two forms. One is called dry, which is much more prevalent. Probably 80% of the people who have macular degeneration are dry. And generally it starts dry, which kind of means it’s not bleeding, literally, it’s dry and then you get wet. Where is a bigger problem.

Phil Micans [00:22:36]: So in this study in China, 100 patients, 110 eyes, some had dry, some had wet. What they gave everybody was very simple. They gave them, every night, three milligrams of melatonin, 50 milligrams of zinc, and 50 micrograms of selenium. It was actually all put into one pill. Nothing else. Within three months, there were already significant improvements in both wet and dry. They did it for six months. At the end of six months, 99% of the people no longer had wet or dry macular degeneration. The other 10% had made improvements. What side effects were there? People had better sleep, more energy, and felt less depressed.

Nick Urban [00:25:47]: Would you stick with that long term after the six months, or would you do it and then stop?

Phil Micans [00:25:53]: I see no reason not to. In fact, there is a strong argument for us older people, because if we start now talking about antiaging, or shall we call it preventative medicine, I’m a strong advocate for melatonin.

Nick Urban [00:26:22]: Melatonin is very misunderstood. There are some people who experience a paradoxical melatonin effect where after three or 5 hours, they wake up wide awake, and it doesn’t work the way it does for most people.

Phil Micans [00:26:44]: You’ve hit the nail right on the head. This is where we get into what used to be called chrono geriatrics, which is the timing of things. And again, coming back to Dr. Jonathan Wright, he always says if things are going wrong and we’re not copying nature, we’re either using the wrong molecule, the wrong dose, or the wrong timing.

Phil Micans [00:28:28]: So, coming back to melatonin, one of the great things that Walter and his team did was they looked at the natural pulsatile release of melatonin. Now, melatonin is very unique because it’s not in us in daylight, but it comes out in us when we go into darkness. Walter once described the pineal gland to me, which is the primary source of melatonin. He once said to me, consider it the conductor of the endocrine system.

Phil Micans [00:30:07]: What Walter and his team realized is the natural night peak of melatonin is between 1 AM and 3 AM. That’s probably why it’s there. The most important hours to be asleep. So by taking MZS between 9 PM and 11 PM, you are putting that melatonin into your blood between 1 AM and 3 AM.

Phil Micans [00:31:07]: You do not need to go to bed. It is not necessary to go to bed. A lot of people say light entering the eye destroys melatonin. That’s true, that’s absolutely true. But it only destroys endogenously produced, in other words, naturally produced melatonin. If you’ve just thrown a tablet into your stomach, it will not stop that at all.

Nick Urban [00:31:46]: And then the other question I had with that is the decision to only include a couple of minerals, zinc and selenium. What about copper to balance the zinc to copper ratio?

Phil Micans [00:31:59]: There are many other things you can get into, but on a simplistic level, Jonathan Wright used to give a multitude of different minerals by injection. But he found that the patients who were already suffering with macular degeneration were in the bottom quartile of mineral balance. So he found in many cases they needed that boost that could only be provided by injections.

Phil Micans [00:33:10]: If we stay in the visual field, there’s another big one. And really weirdly, this is going to be Russian research again. And it originated in the early, very early 2000s from a place called the Helmholtz Institute in Moscow, who gave the world cataract surgery all those years ago. They realized back in the 90s that with the world getting older, although cataract surgery is very effective and also is the safest form of surgery known, in 2% of cases, there are complications. They were not going to have enough trained surgeons by 2050 to deal with the numbers of people.

Phil Micans [00:35:00]: And the bottom line was, they found that another dipeptide, two amino acids called carnosine, seems to be a natural protectant within the eye. Specifically, it is an antiglycation agent. What happens, you imagine the lens is in the middle of your eye and it’s surrounded by this liquid, which is called the aqueous humor. With glycation, the crystallines within the lens become impaired and they become clouded, and they can go from white to yellow to even brown. So the main product, the original product, was called Can C. And it’s two drops twice a day. And the human clinical studies, the biggest one was 48 people, have shown that if used over five to six months, 89% of the people will improve their eyesight.

Phil Micans [00:37:04]: It can lower intraocular pressure of the eye. So what happens is these glycated proteins, they exist in other parts of the eye. One is called the Schlemm canal, and it’s literally the valve that puts things back into the blood. The theory is that these glycated proteins can also block the Schlemm canal. Think of it as a clogged drain. That can lead to the pressure of the eye building up because the wastes are not being removed properly, which could be part of glaucoma.

Phil Micans [00:38:36]: More dramatically than that are people who suffer with dry eyes. Dry eyes is literally where the tears, because we think, well, I’m not crying. They’re happening all the time. The eye is putting a fluid on itself all the time. You got lacrimal ducts. We think the same thing’s happening. They get blocked by these glycated proteins. So when they’re reduced and removed, more fluid comes back on the eye.

Nick Urban [00:39:34]: The way Can-C works is it helps prevent glycation, which, to summarize, when you spike your blood sugar, you cause a lot of downstream issues. The stickiness of the sugar wreaks havoc around the body and especially in the eyes. You can actually see this yourself. If you go out and eat a really sugary meal and you try and do something later that requires very precise vision, you can actually see your vision get worse an hour, 2 hours after a high sugar meal.

Nick Urban [00:42:07]: That’s fairly comprehensive for the visual system. We got two different things to look into there. And then on the auditory side for hearing, I know there’s another wow factor there.

Phil Micans [00:42:18]: Again, this is one from my favorite doc, Dr. Jonathan Wright. 1940s research rediscovered by his university students. And what it was is a hormone called aldosterone, and it’s produced in the adrenal glands. The normal use for it is to help with salt balance in the blood. And even sometimes it has a role in people’s balance.

Phil Micans [00:43:31]: They discovered from 1940s research that patients who were having trouble hearing, who had no physical damage to their ear were given aldosterone, regained their hearing. One interesting side note, covered by a guy called Dr. Rich Lippman, he thinks there are two hormones that are very predominant in hearing. One is aldosterone for the volume, and the other is IGF one or insulin like growth factor for the detail.

Phil Micans [00:44:43]: When they gave these patients some aldosterone, they were giving them approximately 125 micrograms orally, that within a few days, their hearings returned to a near normal state. There has been a liquid aldosterone made. It’s called Aldo-Pro. Originally designed for sublingual use until a bunch of docs say, what if it’s eardrops? What happens is over several hours, the hearing is improved.

Phil Micans [00:45:54]: It turns out it’s a signaling molecule. So the little hairs inside our inner ears are obviously vibrating with the air movements. But it’s the signal from those to the hearing center in the brain, and aldosterone appears to be part of that signaling.

Nick Urban [00:46:20]: How would you recommend going about addressing this deficiency? Are there things we can do so that we produce more aldosterone on our own?

Phil Micans [00:46:47]: The one thing I remember was licorice. He was saying there were ingredients in licorice that were very good. I would look at melatonin as a general addresser. I think it would be worth thinking about the adrenal peptide bioregulators. And of course, there is aldosterone itself.

Phil Micans [00:48:10]: This last one I’d like to tell you about. His name is Dr. Bill Cham. When he was a young man, he walked around his island and he noticed that horses and cows would sometimes rub themselves up against this local plant, which they call the devil’s apple, but is actually a relation to eggplant. He asked the local farmers, why do the animals do this? And their reply was, they get lesions on their skin, and they instinctively rub themselves up against this plant.

Phil Micans [00:49:00]: He spent 20 years researching and what he discovered was an ingredient within this plant called solasodin glycosides. Those lesions were cancer, skin cancer. They are what’s known as squamous cell carcinomas and basal cell carcinomas. It’s 100% effective in removing basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas. It’s a cream, and you put it on twice a day.

Phil Micans [00:50:02]: They can start as what’s known as keratosis, which is called a sunspot. It gets rid of those in days. 80,000 patient cases documented. They know exactly how it works. What it does, turns out that cancer cells coat themselves with a rhamnose coating that is not present on a healthy cell. It removes this rhamnose coating. And the moment it removes that coating, the immune system says, ah, you’re a non-self cell, and the natural process of apoptosis takes place. The cream is called BEC5 Curaderm, named after the inventor Bill Edward Cham.

Nick Urban [00:50:56]: Phil, this has been a blast. If people want to connect with you to follow your work, to subscribe to your magazine, how can they get a hold of you?

Phil Micans [00:51:25]: The magazine, we have published all these stories I’ve spoken about today, and folks can download them for free, or they can pay us $10 and have one delivered to their door. And that website is called AgingMatters.com. And if you want even more detail on even more subjects, our main website which has existed since 1996 is Antiaging-Systems.com.

Nick Urban [00:52:10]: Phil, a couple more rapid fire questions for you before we part ways today. First of all, what unusual substance or nootropic or vitamin or supplement have you used today or recently?

Phil Micans [00:52:25]: I’m just about to start experimenting with a supplement that increases stem cell activity. I’m pretty focused on the work of Bill Faloon, who’s the owner of the Life Extension Foundation. He has the Age Reversal Network. He’s got this idea which he calls the Stairstep approach to biological age control. And each step is a biochemical pathway. So we’ve got things like mTOR, autophagy, AMPK, senescence. And then how do you address that?

Nick Urban [00:54:09]: What’s your system for discovering some of these wow factors?

Phil Micans [00:54:24]: Really old fashioned. There’s only a handful of us that actually do the R and D. It’s mainly connections. Imagine after 30 years, I have got to know a lot of people. Standing on the shoulders of giants is very true. So it’s talking and knowing some really interesting people and meeting with them and sharing with them.

Nick Urban [00:55:15]: Are there any other parting words or thoughts you’d like to leave listeners with today?

Phil Micans [00:55:23]: Be happy. And one thing I found as I got older is don’t worry.

Nick Urban [00:55:37]: Well, Phil, it’s been a pleasure hosting you again for round two today. Thanks for spending the time today and sharing these different breakthroughs with us.

Phil Micans [00:55:51]: You’re welcome, Nick. Always a pleasure. Look forward to the next one.

Nick Urban [00:55:54]: Until next time. I’m Nick Urban here with Phil Micans signing out from the High Performance Longevity podcast. Have a great week and be an outlier.