In this episode of the Heal Nourish Grow podcast, Dr. Chris Rhodes, a nutrition scientist, discusses his journey into the fields of longevity and fasting. He explains the significance of autophagy and shares his personal experiences with fasting.
Dr. Rhodes also introduces Mimio, a product designed to mimic the benefits of fasting at the molecular level, and discusses the clinical studies that support its efficacy. The conversation delves into the science behind Mimeo’s ingredients and their roles in promoting healthspan and longevity.
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Takeaways
- Fasting can activate longevity bio programs within our cells.
- Autophagy is a crucial process for cellular health and longevity.
- GLP-1 drugs like Ozembic may positively impact longevity pathways.
- Mimeo is designed to mimic the benefits of fasting without actual fasting.
- Clinical studies show Mimeo can improve metabolic health markers.
- The formulation of Mimeo includes powerful anti-aging molecules.
- Nicotinamide plays a key role in cellular energy and metabolism.
- Using Mimeo can enhance the benefits of shorter fasting periods.
- Maintaining a balance between mTOR activation and fasting pathways is essential for health.
Episode transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.834)
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Heal Nourish Grow Podcast. I don’t even know the name of my own podcast. It’s loving my words today. But anyway, I’m really excited about today’s guest. I’m here with Dr. Chris Rhodes and he is a nutrition scientist. I’ll let him better describe himself, but you will have heard his full bio, of course, before this, but I always like to start out, Dr. Rhodes, with just having you kind of share in your own words, what brought you into this space? What made you passionate about
working with Mimeo Health and the technology there. Like what led you to this point?
Dr. Chris Rhodes (00:32.962)
Yeah, great question. Really happy to be here, Cheryl. Thanks for having me on.
really got me interested into the longevity space, the healthy aging space, and eventually the fasting space was coming out of college. I got my BS in biochemistry from Leroy LaMaria Mount University, but like a lot of college kids didn’t really know what I wanted to do there. So to try and figure that out, took an immunology fellowship at Stanford, just kind of pouring through all the research I could get my hands on going to all these seminars, and eventually came across the longevity research.
And I thought that was so fascinating because it was this thing that used to be relegated to myth and legend, right? It was like Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth. And now it’s this very active, very rigorous area of scientific research with a ton of funding and a ton of companies and a ton of government and scientific attention on it. And it’s one of those things that helps with everything, right? If you can solve aging, then you can pretty much
also solve disease because by and large, most young folks don’t get disease. really see that aging is something that’s an underlying factor in every disease that happens. So if you can tackle these fundamental issues of aging at the cellular level and really slow that process down, then you can not only potentially enhance lifespan but also healthspan at the same time, which I think is what we’re all really going for, living our lives as well as possible and as best health as possible for as long
long as we can. When you’re in the healthy aging and longevity space, eventually you come across fasting because fasting is one of the only ways that we know of to reliably extend lifespan and health span helps to treat, prevent, or delay most major diseases. And the reason why that was so fascinating to me is because it does all of that without actually adding anything into the system, right? So it’s not this superfood or this wonder drug that’s doing all the work, but somehow fasting is
Dr. Chris Rhodes (02:36.742)
activating these dormant longevity bio programs that we already have inside of us at the cellular level, but just aren’t being activated on a daily basis, just aren’t turned on. And when that clicked for me, it actually made me mad because I was like, great, my body knows how to live to be 120 years old and in perfect health, but it’s just not doing it. And that’s what kind of catapulted me into the fasting research space. And what I was
doing for my PhD, which eventually became Mimeo.
Cheryl McColgan (03:11.586)
That’s a great background. Before we get into some of the science behind it and some of those other things, what’s going through my mind is knowing the timing from your bio and knowing a little bit about when you were in school. I would imagine that you probably had to be making some of these decisions about this when the Nobel Prize for autophagy was awarded. I believe that was 2016. That’s actually when I first ran across it. I had just found out that my dad had cancer.
And I started digging around and doing all this research and came across that, you know, the fact that this had been awarded the Nobel Prize and then just started reading more about autophagy and got, went down this whole rabbit hole. But I would love it if you could share with people from a more scientific perspective, you know, autophagy kind of means self-eating. And I think most people at this point have heard that term before. But if you can maybe describe some of the mechanisms there and
just to give people background before we kind of launch into the tech.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (04:09.56)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. yeah, autophagy does mean self-eating. And what that’s actually referring to is essentially our cellular cleanup and recycling mechanisms. So cells initiate autophagy, which is this process of these little what it’s called autophagosomes, these little tiny lysosome encapsulation particle things that go around and they’ll selectively absorb and digest and break down into their component parts.
these dysfunctional proteins, dysfunctional organelles, what I like to call cell junk. They’ll take that up, they’ll break it down, and then once it’s in, it’s like considerate of parts, it’s amino acids, it’s carbohydrates, it’s fats, it’s lipids. Then your cells will take all of that and then utilize it to create new functional organelles and new proteins. So it is this process of breaking down the damaged elements of a cell and then recycling them into
new nutrients into new energy sources into new organelles and proteins. So you kind of have a refreshed new cell on the inside anyway. So that’s kind of the process of autophagy at the cellular level. What that usually ends up meaning for an organismal level is that when you have enhanced autophagy, you typically have extended lifespan and health span as well. Because if you think about it from that context of a cell is constantly cleaning itself up, it’s recycling.
its parts, it’s got a lot of metabolic efficiency that’s happening, then that allows them to function better and then that leads to overall organismal health, which then of course leads to overall organismal longevity.
Cheryl McColgan (05:53.996)
Yeah, and I think originally, of course, like most research starts, usually starts in rodents or rats, is not always totally transferable to humans. But at the time when I was digging into it, there were definitely some human studies at that point. Since this is kind of what is in your day to day, I would love to hear kind of any new things that are going on in this space as far as longevity as it relates to fasting and…
Dr. Chris Rhodes (05:58.798)
course,
Cheryl McColgan (06:19.022)
I think I’m one of the previous interviews I heard with you, I think you were actually describing a study that you guys were doing on people to kind of test out some of these theories. But anyway, just anything new and exciting in the research world that you’re seeing that kind of is informing what you’re doing now with your research.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (06:38.124)
Yeah, it’s not necessarily informing what we do now with our research, although it kind of is because it’s unavoidable, right? But like the really big thing that’s happening in the health and longevity space right now is kind of how Ozembic is impacting everything and like the other GLP-1 drugs and agonists, right? Because yes, they have great effects on weight loss, but when you’re tackling things from a metabolic perspective, metabolism and longevity are super duper linked together, right? Usually when you’re looking at the cellular
pathways that impact longevity, they are also very much related to metabolism. Whether that’s mTOR, which is like, you know, pro-growth, pro-protein kind of pathway that leads to decreased lifespan and these pro-aging effects versus like AMP kinase, which is really, really associated with anti-aging properties, but is also kind of like your body’s lipid pathway.
modifier, you get to see how Ozembic is impacting not only the weight loss portion of it, but because it’s impacting things at the metabolic level, then you also see, all right, there’s a lot of reduced disease incidence. There’s a lot of reduced disease risk because we’re tackling this cellular metabolic processing that is intimately connected with the healthy aging and longevity pathways.
Cheryl McColgan (08:05.102)
Yeah, that’s pretty exciting. And I think obviously as time goes on and more and more people are using it, there’ll certainly have to be more research around that. And I know that there’s even new like second gen GLP ones that are being worked on. and so you’re saying if I’m understanding correctly that those are having a positive effect on longevity pathways.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (08:26.82)
Correct. So the reason why it was, and it could be, you know, the GLP ones could be really good for longevity in general is that one of the main reasons for disease progression and disease risk in general is, you know, overweight, obesity, all of these like chronic metabolic problems.
that Ozembic is really helping people to avoid. So by helping to kind of re-stabilize organismal metabolism, helping people lose weight, getting a better glucose levels, insulin levels, HPUNC levels, cholesterol levels, triglyceride levels, all this fun stuff, then you’re really helping the underlying fundamental thing that’s driving a lot of this disease and this dysfunction that happens over time and helping to also, I think, slow
down the actual process of aging.
Cheryl McColgan (09:17.742)
So it could have the same excitement that maybe like metformin or rapamycin used to have as kind of not only being a weight loss thing, but something that can also promote longevity, it sounds like.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (09:27.456)
Right, exactly. And isn’t it funny how, you know, the best drugs that we have for longevity just also happen to affect the metabolic pathways, right? And so that’s why, that’s why like fasting is so interesting to me because fasting is of course all about affecting metabolic pathways and it does so at this enormous level. You have a, you have an entire shift in how we process food, how we, how we do cellular metabolism in a fed state.
Cheryl McColgan (09:36.799)
Yes, it is.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (09:57.422)
versus a prolonged fasting state. And that was kind of what we were studying during my PhD to actually develop the MIMEO formulation.
Cheryl McColgan (10:07.02)
Yeah, and how did you, so I’m assuming at some point, just as a personal aside before we jump into that, that you ran across this, did you experiment with this on yourself at all? So you could kind of see what would happen and how you would feel if you did some extended fasting?
Dr. Chris Rhodes (10:23.346)
yeah, definitely. So that’s, kind of got a little obsessed with it when I was, when I was at Stanford. You know, I started reading all the, reading all the papers, came across all the fasting research and I was like, that’s so amazing. At the time I was also learning how to do all of these immunological techniques to look at immune cells and their functionality and their survivability and their like reactivity, the autoimmune stimuli. So I thought to myself, well, I can fast and then I can take my blood and I can look at my
Cheryl McColgan (10:28.257)
You
Dr. Chris Rhodes (10:53.03)
and I can see what happens and I can confirm all of these amazing things that the literature says is happening. So that’s what I did. I started off small with like, right, I’ll skip breakfast, I’ll work my way up, I’ll get to a 24 hour fast, a 36 hour fast, and then beyond. And eventually I did an entire time course where I looked at what happened in my body during a 60 hour fast. And the…
I was taking my blood at all those different like time points at the zero hour, know, six hour, 12 hours, 16, 18, 24, 36, 48, 60. And you can see this progression of enhanced functionality within your, within my cells. I could see this happening. So they became, you know, less auto reactive. They became, I had much better cellular survival. They had much better stress resistance. had much better metabolic functioning.
And being able to see that in your own cells in something that you can do in just, you know, a couple of days is so powerful to like quantify itself, like scientist person, like I am. I just, I got very, I was like, this actually works for me. I’m going to do it. So I started doing this alternate day fasting regimen and I kept that up for about one and a half, two years. yeah, that like, was, it was really, really amazing. had like, I was very.
Cheryl McColgan (11:59.212)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (12:12.056)
No, well.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (12:16.966)
healthy, but at the same time, it has this big social drawback, right? Because you’re not going out to lunch with coworkers, right? You’re not having meals with your family. like when friends would ask me out on a fasting day, I would be like, okay, sure. Like, come and I’ll, you know, like awkwardly drink water while I walk. Right. And nobody wants that.
Cheryl McColgan (12:33.39)
Thank
Cheryl McColgan (12:37.655)
you
you
Dr. Chris Rhodes (12:41.604)
I got to the point where eventually my sister, we were on vacation and I was still like fasting actively. And she was like, you know, you’re going to live longer. You’re going to like, you’re going to be healthier. Right. But what is the point of living longer if you have to live less? And that was this kind of thing that was like very impactful for me. And I was like, she’s, she’s right. Like there’s, there’s gotta be a middle ground. There’s gotta be another way to do this. And so that’s again, kind of what catapulted me into developing Mimeo as a, as a fasting memetic.
because I was like, all right, is there a way that we can figure out what’s happening in the body during a fast and then recreate those effects on demand?
Cheryl McColgan (13:21.326)
So yeah, and I think that’s so brilliant because I’ve experimented with fasting a ton myself too, and I’ve actually kind of moved away from it for similar reasons as you. I still do some intermittent fasting, but the longer fast, like I had done a five day was the longest one I had ever done. And I just found it out, like the things that you mentioned, and then, you know, there’s always been a concern that maybe it promotes more muscle loss, things like that. And it’s just kind of, adds, now that I’m an older,
Dr. Chris Rhodes (13:36.045)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (13:50.488)
person and worried about keeping my muscle mass and staying strong so that I can be very functional into my older age. I’ve started to back away from it a little bit for that reason, even though there’s definitely arguments on both sides of whether that really happens. Because I think the process you described with the organelles, some people will say, well, your body’s not going to go after healthy, good tissue when there’s all this other stuff around to eat. I think it’s difficult. I’ve never seen anything convincing one way or the other where it convinced me to.
you know, keep doing it or not.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (14:21.41)
This is totally the thing and you get different effects from different
time courses of fasting, right? So like doing something like a five day fast, inevitably, inevitably, you’re going to lose a little bit of muscle along the way because if you’re not taking in food, your brain is an obligate glucose consumer. So it needs at least 50 % of its calories to come from carbohydrate and glucose specifically. even as you get into ketosis in the later stages of fasting, you know, 24 hours plus, you’re going to be
breaking down fat and the rest of your body, the rest of your organs, your muscles, your liver, all that fun stuff, they’re going to utilize the ketone bodies in order to survive. But your brain is going to at least have to utilize some of that glucose. Where that glucose is going to come from, because you’re not getting it from the diet, is from protein breakdown. Because that’s the only other pathway that we have in our body to generate glucose without getting it from food. So, you in order to keep your brain active and healthy and alive, you’re going to have to break down some protein.
and usually that’s going to come from muscles. Sometimes it’ll come from the organs themselves, which sounds, you know, like very, very terrible.
Cheryl McColgan (15:32.053)
Right.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (15:33.7)
But it’s actually okay because it’s another way that your body has this metabolic efficiency, right? Where it’s like, okay, if I don’t have a lot of food coming in, I have all these organs that take up a lot of energy, let’s just shrink them down a little bit so they don’t take up as much energy but still perform their tasks, right? But inevitably you will have some muscle breakdown at those later stages of fasting versus something like a 24-hour fast or a 36-hour fast where you’re still getting
into the true blue fasting metabolism, but you’re not so far into the process where you’re going to have significant muscle loss.
Cheryl McColgan (16:13.228)
Yeah, and I think that 36 hour is a big sweet spot. And I think I remember from one of your previous interviews that, and that’s based on my personal experience and also just things I’ve read, like you get a lot of the benefits and it’s not an extremely difficult amount of time for most people, especially if you’ve been doing it for a while. So how did you, how did you land on the fact that, you know, you started doing that, you realize all the benefits, you’re like, maybe we can make a pill out of this, right? Which is what we love to do in America.
How did that process go? What made you think that you could recreate it and kind of tap into the same pathways? There must have been something in the science that you thought, this is possible.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (16:50.38)
Yeah, so actually there wasn’t anything in the science at the time that kind of led me to think that that was possible. There were, you know, there were molecules out there already that were called Chloric Restriction Mimetics, right, that were designed or, you know, or called Chloric Restriction Mimetics because they had
Cheryl McColgan (16:53.174)
Yeah.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (17:06.378)
some kind of evidence of being able to activate a singular pathway that was associated with caloric restriction. like metformin is a very good example. Metformin is considered to be a calorie restriction pneumatic because it activates AMP kinase just like calorie restriction does. But what
no one was really doing at the time was doing that with the molecules that your body actually produces in that state, right? So it was always usually, you know, a plant compound or a drug compound or something, something like that, not trying to recreate the whole system with natural human molecules. But when we originally started, it wasn’t actually our mission to create a pill or, you know, develop Mimeo so much as it was just to, wanted to understand
what happens in the body during a fast. So what we did for that was we had 20 people come in, 10 men, 10 women to avoid a gender bias. We had them fast for 36 hours and looked at their before and after and did those same cellular functional metrics that I was doing on myself when I was at Stanford. And what we found was that when people fasted for 36 hours, there was a huge increase in their cellular functionality, just like we saw with me. They became more anti-inflammatory.
more antioxidant, they became more cardio protective. And to see that kind of change with a nutritional intervention over like basically just one day, right? Taking these young, healthy people and basically turning them into super people is really, really significant. You hardly ever see that happen. So we really wanted to figure out what is the difference between one state and the other that could be causing those beneficial effects to happen. So we did what’s called comprehensive
tabloid mix, basically looking at all of the small molecule components of the plasma. And what we found was that there were over 300 significant differences between a baseline state and a fasting state that could, you know, be responsible for inducing those changes. When we screened through those molecules, we were able to find around two dozen of those that had some kind of literature activity of already having these like bio activities, whether that was helping to enhance autophagy or create these
Dr. Chris Rhodes (19:23.81)
anti-inflammatory effects. And then when we screened through those molecules on our ex vivo modeling assays with the cells, we were basically able to show that there was this synergistic combination of four of them that could recreate all of these beneficial effects of fasting that we were seeing. then beyond that, because we were really interested in the longevity piece of it, we did a C. elegans lifespan extension analysis and saw that we could extend their
lifespan by 96 % just through supplementation with these four molecules. So that is ultimately what Mimeo is. It’s taking what the body naturally produces during a 36-hour fast and then just giving it back to people as a supplement. So you can recreate fasting at the molecular level and get those same benefits but without actually having to fast.
Cheryl McColgan (20:21.166)
Yeah, 96%. That’s pretty amazing. And just in case anybody out there doesn’t recognize the whole C. elegans thing, they’re worms, right? Quite often what you first do research on. so since then, I’m imagining, okay, you identified these molecules, you saw this amazing result on worms, on the C. elegans. Then did you decide, okay, we should, I mean, I’m sure you tested it out on yourself for sure, but did you do any kind of studies or?
Dr. Chris Rhodes (20:27.978)
Yeah, yeah, I’m milling nematodes.
Cheryl McColgan (20:47.65)
comparisons to fasting using the Mimeo product.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (20:52.132)
Yeah. So we, definitely looked at, um, you know, how does the lifespan extension with fasting compare to the lifespan extension with NIMEO. We were able to see that, you know, just an ordinary fasting actually had a 56 % lifespan extension from previous studies. And then that, you know, we were getting this 96 % extension with NIMEO. So that was very cool to see. We also looked at, um, like rapamycin and metformin and how those extend lifespan as well. And, know, uh, metformin can extend lifespan by around
36%, rapamycin can extend lifespan by around 19%. So when we saw that this natural combination of human molecules combined together could outperform these longevity drugs and then fasting in and of itself, we were like, OK, I think that we found something really interesting and powerful here. And then from there, we went on to do some pilot clinical studies to look at, all right.
let’s take this formulation, let’s do different dosages, let’s see how it’s absorbed, metabolized, if it appears in circulation, and if it has any short-term effects.
So in order to do that, we had people come in and ate a standardized breakfast alongside a placebo control. Then after a washout period, have those same people come back, eat that same standardized breakfast, but then with supplementation with the MIMEO formulation. And what we found there was that when people ate the breakfast with the placebo, they had this big loss of plasma functionality, which is really typical of the post-perandial state.
So you have all this metabolic chaos that’s coming into the system. You have this inflammatory effect that’s happening from taking in food. And so you get a big perturbation of the natural homeostasis. So they were pro-inflammatory in their plasma. They had less antioxidant ability. They were less cardio protective, as measured through cholesterol efflux capacity. And of course, their metabolic markers were really altered.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (22:58.688)
When they ate that same breakfast, but with supplementation with Mimeo, we found that we could not only prevent all of that loss of function that happened, but also add gains of function on top of that.
Cheryl McColgan (23:02.19)
with.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (23:13.346)
that mimicked what we saw when people were fasting. So instead of being pro-inflammatory, their plasma became anti-inflammatory and antioxidant and cardio protective. So that was kind of another big wake-up call for us where again, we’re taking a single dose and just looking at it a couple hours after ingestion and already seeing these big changes to plasma functionality and cellular functionality. And so after that, then we were like, all right.
we could actually turn this into a product and start immediately helping people and making an impact for both their metabolic health and then their longevity.
Cheryl McColgan (23:49.038)
Yeah, when it’s, mean, just one day, that’s amazing. Have you seen anything else as far as maybe either from your personal experience or studies of using it for a longer period of time, maybe things that you’ve observed or blood markers that changed kind of in a more permanent way for lack of a better way to ask that.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (24:06.218)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we did partner up with Mount Sinai to do some case studies there looking at longer term supplementation with the MIMIA formulation. And what we found was that eight weeks of supplementation, we could improve a lot of
know, these plasma blood marker metrics so we could include improved glucose levels, HbA1c levels, insulin levels, triglyceride levels, HDL, LDL ratio, and then actual total cholesterol levels as well, which is really great. And then we were also looking at biological age and found that we reduced biological age by two and a half years in just those eight weeks of supplementation. So that’s kind of, the big clinical
data that we have right now. We’re also currently doing a larger randomized double-blind placebo-controlled study looking at that same time course, eight weeks of supplementation in healthy overweight people with elevated HbA1c.
Cheryl McColgan (25:09.836)
Very cool. so where my brain’s going now, this may or may not make total sense, but I’m thinking about, you mentioned the mTOR pathway, which is kind of a growth and possibly longevity shortener. I mean, I’ve heard some conversations on that. You know, a lot of people like to argue for vegan or vegetarian, kind of use that pathway as a way to say that, you know, you’re activating it constantly when you’re eating meat. And so maybe that’s not so good. Or on the other hand, your body,
absolutely needs a certain amount of protein to maintain the muscle and all the processes. they’re always kind of, know, mTOR and AMPK, at least in my basic understand, they’re always kind of like balancing each other out a little bit or going back and forth between them. But I guess where my brain is going with this, so if you’re a person that is regularly strength training, and so you’re purposely trying to stomp on the mTOR and create growth, would taking something like this, because we talked about how the fasting could possibly, you know, impact that in some ways, is any concern around
Mimeo shutting off the ability for growth, that makes sense. I mean, I think you kind of know where I’m going with this, but.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (26:12.14)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I totally understand what you’re saying. And I would say that you don’t have to worry about it at all, to be honest, because the molecules in MIMU aren’t going to shut down.
muscle growth so much as they are going to promote these beneficial things at the same time. So that’s kind of the homeostasis and the balance that we’re trying to restore to the system. So when you think about what a typical western diet looks like, we’re almost constantly in a fed state because you have your three meals a day plus snacks.
And it takes around, you know, four to six hours after a meal for your body to properly digest everything, utilize it, incorporate it into cells and return back to its like natural homeostasis. But, you know, we eat almost every three hours, right? As part of a Western diet. So we’re never really coming out of that postprandial state. So you kind of have constant stimulation of mTOR and IGF-1 and insulin and glucose and all of these, you know, pro-aging metabolic pathways.
What Mimeo is really trying to do is to activate the fasting pathways at the same time to kind of restore this balance and this homeostasis that you wouldn’t otherwise experience during a day of eating. So it’s not that we’re tamping down mTOR, we’re just also co-activating the fasting pathways to give it a little bit more balance and to provide those beneficial effects.
Cheryl McColgan (27:37.283)
Yeah.
makes sense and that’s exactly the answer I was hoping to hear. Sometimes it’s dangerous when you have a little bit of understanding of some things but not the deeper level because in my mind that kind of means like oh well maybe that would counteract the other one but yeah I was hoping that that was
Dr. Chris Rhodes (27:56.034)
Yeah, what’s funny is that usually what we hear with people who are on Mimeo, especially older men, is that it actually really helps them with their strength training. They feel stronger, they can hit PRs better. One of the reasons why our
main investor invested in us was because he was trying out Mimeo. He had a cycling trip that he was going to do with his buddies and they had run this course before and he had been like they were in a race and he took Mimeo the day of the the day of the cycling trip, set a personal record for the actual course, said like he didn’t even have the soreness afterwards, beat out all of his buddies and he was like okay cool I’m hooked and then we had
Cheryl McColgan (28:32.214)
Done.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (28:34.244)
Exactly. We had Ben Greenfield too, who was like, you know, trying it out to see whether or not he liked it and found that he gained like eight pounds of muscle during the time that he was on Mimeo. So like not only is it not preventing muscle growth, it seems to be helping athletic performance.
Cheryl McColgan (28:51.662)
Yeah, I would imagine like the anti-inflammatory part of it would be useful because, you know, possibly getting rid of some muscle soreness or just making your body feel more ready to train could be a huge benefit.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (29:02.402)
Right, and then you have the NAD element to it as well. So the nicotinamide that’s in the formulation is helping to kind of stabilize cellular energy and put you more in that, you know, that fasted state where you can generate a lot of clean energy throughout the day.
Cheryl McColgan (29:18.892)
Yeah, very cool. Well, I think I think you’ve done an amazing job of really explaining how it works and some of the mechanisms involved without going too deep into the science of it. But is there anything that we didn’t talk about yet that you really just want to share with people about MIMIO or about the science behind it or about fasting? Just anything that we haven’t touched on that could be of interest to people.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (29:40.996)
Sure, yeah, I mean, don’t think that we’ve actually listed the ingredients in the formulation.
Cheryl McColgan (29:45.23)
There we go. That would be a good idea. An idea, apparently.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (29:50.254)
Four molecules that we identified from the data set were nicotinamide, spermidine, palmitoyl ethanolamide, PEA, and oleoil ethanolamide, OEA. And all of those things are kind of combining together to help more holistically recreate this bio program of fasting, activating these complementary pathways and producing these synergistic effects that are greater than the sum of their parts. But individually, they’re also big powerhouse anti-aging molecules
So we were talking about nicotinamide, is a broad spectrum NAD plus precursor. It’s actually the thing that your body will make nicotinamide riboside and NMN and NAD from. So you kind of get all of those pathways and all those benefits just from this one starting molecule, which is great. And then NAD plus is more or less how your body or how your cells sense their energy status.
there’s this thing called the NAD plus NADH ratio. If you have more NAD plus, then that’s a signal to your cells that there’s not a lot of energy around. So we should modify our cellular metabolism, modify our DNA methylation patterns, modify our protein transcription and translation to be more of this like fasting system. So the big axis that we’re looking at there is like the NAD plus CERT system. And of course, CERTs are, CERTuins are really
associated with healthy aging and prolonged lifespan. And so that’s kind of helping to put the cell in this state where it’s like really receptive to receiving these other fasting signals from the other molecules. So helping to kind of potentiate what everybody else is doing. And below that we have spermidine. Spermidine is a really well-known autophagy activator. So that’s kind of where you’re getting this like pro-autophagy effect from
from fasting in the memetic is Bermudians coming in and helping to promote that process.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (31:52.426)
and palmitoyl ethanolamide, PEA, is a really interesting molecule. It’s involved in the endocannabinoid system. It helps to stimulate CB1, CB2 receptors. So it’s kind of like your body’s natural CBD almost. It has cognition enhancing effects. It has mood elevation effects, but then also these really powerful anti-inflammatory effects as well, especially on neuroprotection and neuroinflammation. So it also has these cool elements of pain relief to it as well.
COX1 and 2 inhibitors, so not only like your body’s natural CBD, but also like your body’s natural ibuprofen. So those are like the big effects from the PEA, and discomfort relief, know, achy joints, muscles, things like that.
Cheryl McColgan (32:28.8)
Cool.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (32:38.37)
And then finally we have oleoil ethanolamide, OEA, that is involved in the gut brain access and is actually produced by the body during prolonged periods of fasting as a way to suppress appetite. So what happens with most people when they do prolonged fasting is that they eventually stop feeling hunger. And OEA, that elevation is kind of the reason behind that. So it’s operating in gut brain access to kind of stimulate, or sorry, suppress appetite, decrease
and stimulate satiety as well. But it’s also a PPAR-alpha activator, so helping to promote lipid metabolism and fat breakdown while sparing muscle cells at the same time. So all of these four things together are, you know, having broad spectrum.
effects on your cellular system or total body system and helping to kind of like give you not only those benefits when you’re eating, but also
Cheryl McColgan (33:29.496)
Thank
Cheryl McColgan (33:34.868)
Awesome.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (33:38.69)
to enhance shorter term fasts that you might be doing and kind of make them easier, right? The hunger suppression elements of the OEA with the mood enhancement and cognitive enhancement of the PEA and the energy side from the nicotinamide can really help people get through fasting a lot easier and accelerate their benefits.
Cheryl McColgan (33:58.606)
Yeah, that’s amazing. So would you in fact then recommend people do occasional fast still when they’re using this? It just kind of like you mentioned, it makes it easier. Are there additional effects on top of what it’s already doing if you fast in addition to taking the pills?
Dr. Chris Rhodes (34:14.914)
Yeah, that’s a question. We definitely say that Mimeo can be used as a fasting mimetic or as a fasting enhancer. That’s how I use Mimeo. So I still do like one meal a day, kind of like a 24 hour fasting cycle, because that’s what I find works really well with my lifestyle. But I like to take Mimeo in the morning as a way to, you know, just really get over, get over that initial hunger hump throughout the day.
Um, so I find it really helpful there. And then if anyone’s doing a fast, that’s less than 36 hours, the MIMEO formulation was designed to mimic the benefits of a 36 hour fast. So you can kind of, you know, help to accelerate your benefits there. Like specifically autophagy is a great example. Um, you know, you don’t really kick off autophagy in a fasting timeline until at least 24 hours without food. And in some cases we’ve seen, you know, 48 hours.
72 hours is how long it takes to really get to that maximal level of autophagy within the system. So if you’re doing fasts are shorter than that, this can really help to boost your fasting benefits at the same time. And the added bonus is that the molecules themselves will be a bit more effective because like we talked about before, when you’re taking them with food, we’re kind of like balancing out head pathways, whereas when you take them with your fasting,
you’re really just helping to enhance the activation of those beneficial effects.
Cheryl McColgan (35:41.868)
Yeah, love that. mean, this is making me, obviously I’ve known about your product for a while and I test out a lot of different products, right? As part of what I do for my job. So sometimes it’s like a little bit of a, you know, just money thing, really. You got to pick and choose your battles.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (35:56.654)
yeah, that’s true. Yeah, that’s so cool. There’s so much cool stuff out there. It’s hard to choose what’s right.
Cheryl McColgan (36:02.382)
But I would say just having heard again, and I said I’d heard you interviewed before, but the way that you put it today, I’m like, okay, I feel like this is something I can’t live without. So yes, you are. Okay, well, Dr. Rhodes, I just want to thank you again so much for joining us today. If anybody does want to check out the product, I do have a link for you guys attached to my website. So tealnursh.org.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (36:10.276)
There we go, I’m doing my job.
Cheryl McColgan (36:25.994)
And yeah, can read more. I looked at it again today, you can read more about the science and just kind of about the team, Dr. Chris Rhodes and a couple other doctors on the team and some other great people. So any where, if people want to find you personally or follow the work of MIMIO or any research or anything like that, are there any additional ways they can follow you besides the website or is that really the best way?
Dr. Chris Rhodes (36:47.714)
Yeah, the website for the Mimeo information, definitely get on our newsletter. You’ll get all of the latest stuff from us and then tips and tricks specifically for me. I also have a TikTok account. It’s at thatnutritiondoctor. So if you want to watch me scream about nutrition into my bathroom mirror, that’s a great place to do it.
Cheryl McColgan (37:10.156)
Yes, I can’t wait. I’ll link that in the show notes and everybody be sure that you go follow Chris on TikTok and read all about the fun and cool stuff they’re doing over at MIMEA. So thanks again, Dr. Rose. really appreciate it.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (37:21.624)
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. It was such a great time.