Secrets To Boosting Longevity - It’s More Than You Think

The Hormone Prescription with Dr. Kyrin Dunston

Living long and living well are two essential elements for a happy, fulfilled life. But, how can midlife women achieve this? On this episode of The Hormone Prescription Podcast, Dr. Suzanne Turner reveals the secrets to boosting longevity and how it’s more than you think.

Dr. Turner is the founder of Vine Medical Associates and the VMA Residency. Double Board Certified, her thriving practice treats executives and athletes from around the world. Practicing Cellular, Longevity, and Performance Medicine, Dr. Turner has special interests and experience in bioidentical hormone therapy, metabolic medicine, neurodegenerative disease, and human performance optimization. She also has earned Advanced Certification in Endocrinology and Peptide Therapy. Dr. Turner is the leading expert in peptide therapy in the Southeast. She is an award-winning teacher of medical students, residents, and physicians while on the Faculty of Emory University. She has also served on the faculty of A4M, IPS, BioTe, SSRP, and ACAM. She has been featured on several podcasts including Super Human Radio Network, TRT Revolution, Relentless Vitality, Younique Medical, and Health Matters. Dr. Turner spends her free time with her husband and family, studying cellular medicine and Christianity, managing her urban farm, and powerlifting.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• How to understand the different approaches to longevity and health

• Why bioidentical hormone therapy is important for midlife women

• What are the implications of metabolic medicine, neurodegenerative disease, and human performance optimization

• Dr Turner's top tips for leading a long and healthy life

Don't miss this enlightening episode with Dr. Suzanne Turner as she reveals the secrets to boosting longevity – it’s more than you think! Tune in now and start living your best life today!

Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review The Hormone Prescription Podcast! We appreciate your support!

(00:00): Muscle is the currency of aging. Carl Lenore, what can you do now to boost the life in your years? Find out next.

(00:11): So the big question is, how do women over 40 like us keep weight off, have great energy, balance our hormones and our moods, feel sexy and confident and master midlife? If you're like most of us, you are not getting the answers you need and remain confused and pretty hopeless to ever feel like yourself Again. As an ob gyn, I had to discover for myself the truth about what creates a rock solid metabolism, lasting weight loss, and supercharged energy after 40, in order to lose a hundred pounds and fix my fatigue, now I'm on a mission. This podcast is designed to share the natural tools you need for impactful results and to give you clarity on the answers to your midlife metabolism challenges. Join me for tangible, natural strategies to crush the hormone imbalances you are facing and help you get unstuck from the sidelines of life. My name is Dr. Kyrin Dunston. Welcome to the Hormone Prescription Podcast.

(01:04): Everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Hormone Prescription with Dr. Kiran. Thank you so much for joining me today. You are gonna love, love, love my guest today because I love her after just talking to her for a few minutes and you're gonna hear our conversation. She, like me as a medical doctor who went from the corporate sector into enlightened medicine, is what I call a functional approach, root cause resolution approach. Her story's a little different about how she got into this, so you're gonna wanna hear that you've heard a lot of my other guests share their stories. I'm always fascinated by how people evolve their viewpoints in the world. And so you'll wanna hear hers. She has a wonderful practice in Atlanta and helps people heal and she loves to focus on longevity and she has a ginormous toolbox of modalities to help you maybe increase the years in your life, but definitely increase the life in your years.

(02:10): She's gonna talk to you about the difference between health span and lifespan and most importantly, how do you test to know what your aging status is? Are you older physiologically than you are chronologically? She's gonna tell you how to know and she's gonna share with you some of the best tools and strategies in her toolbox that you can start using today to put more life into your years. I'll tell you a little bit about her and then we'll get started. Dr. Turner is the founder of Vine Medical Associates and the VMA Residency Double Board certified. Her thriving practice treats executives and athletes from around the world practicing cellular longevity and performance medicine. Dr. Turner has special interests and experience in bioidentical hormone therapy, metabolic medicine, neurodegenerative disease, and human performance optimization. She also has earned expert in peptide therapy in the southeast and is an award-winning teacher of medical students, residents, and physicians. While the faculty of Emory University, she's also served on the faculty of a four m i p s, Biot, S S R P and Aamp. She's been featured on several podcasts including Superhuman Radio Network, T R T Revolution, relentless Vitality, unique Medical and Health Matters. Dr. Turner spends her free time with her husband and family studying cellular medicine and Christianity managing her urban farm and power lifting. Please help me welcome Dr. Suzanne Turner.

(03:42): Hi Kyrin. Thank you so much for having me on today. I'm really excited to get to talk with you.

(03:46): Yes, I'm very excited to talk with you. We both were in Atlanta probably at the same time, but I never had the pleasure of meeting you. We have colleagues and friends in common and I love what you're doing and what you offer women. So let's dive into talking about longevity for women and what's involved with that. But first I wanna start because you are also traditionally trained physician, right? Yes. If you could share with everyone kind of your journey from what I call corporate medicine Yes. To enlightened Medicine. What happened there?

(04:24): Well, actually I think it was mostly patient driven. So the practice that I started, I had probably half and half men and women and several of the women came to me and said, Hey, will you write these bio identical hormones? And I said, I don't know what that is, but okay. So I wrote for their hormone therapy and the the compounding pharmacist called me up and said, Hey, we love that you're writing for these but you clearly don't know what you're doing.

(04:52): . And they said, well, can we send you to a class? So they sent me to this little quick weekend course on biodentical hormones and it was really just a very skim introductory course called get Out of Line. It was about how do you stop following the person in front of you and really be the leader in what you're doing? So I just got all of a sudden this hunger for learning about hormones and learning other ways. I've heard you talk about your toolbox got bigger or you added things to your toolbox and that really is how I feel about it. I'd gotten a bunch of people better, but there were several that were just hanging on and not quite continuing to do well. And so having this whole new thing where I could help patients with both, with adding in hormones and then as I went on, adding more things, the whole perspective of this not being disease centered, but being cellular or organ centered and how do we manipulate the way that the body responds to its environment?

(05:54): It was a completely different way of thinking about medicine. I think I just continued. So then I found the American Academy of the anti-Aging and regenerative medicine like you and spent many years learning layer after layer after layer of complexity, adding things to my toolbox learning from other people. I think we spend a lot of time learning now, speaking with people like you, with other friends that really help us to learn other ways. We've just added ozone therapy and neurotherapy to our practice, which have been huge benefits. So there's so many things we can do for that patient that's just not getting better and oh, okay, well then maybe this is a matter of looking at how your cells process energy, how your cells speak to one another or communicate how your nervous system controls the way that your organs work. So it's been a fun journey.

(06:47): Yes, it is. And I love that you learned out from a wanting more place. So many of us learned from disasters and then when we couldn't find answers we had to seek elsewhere. So it's very inspiring to hear your story and I want to talk a little bit about longevity. There have been some experts in the more mainstream medical field who have said, no, you can't really impact longevity except don't smoke, don't drink too much, and kind of the usual party line that everyone hears. You know, eat the sad diet, exercise more, right? All the things we hear, but there really is so much more that you can do to impact longevity. So how did you become interested in

(07:38): That? I think it's because the patients, again, it's the patients who came to me and said, how do we make sure it really, the specific patients are the ones who are the entrepreneurs or the head of household or the family member who says, I want to, I've seen my mother much like you. I've seen my mother or my father go through this horrible end of their life that they, I didn't want them to go through. How do I keep myself from getting there And I have, they have a passion about something they're doing. Like maybe they own a coffee company or maybe they own a skincare line and they love what they're doing and they're passionate about helping people in that way and they wanna be able to continue to do that. So when my patients come to me and tell me those stories, it really inspires me to provide them that opportunity to continue to be so, I see myself as one of their team members in helping them to be able to continue to pursue their passion as long as possible.

(08:34): I'm not necessarily talking about increasing their number of days or years, although that is something that everyone's rushing to, to, to find the research for and maybe probably has been doing for, has been for years. I'm really talking about changing the shape of your health span from a long oval type shape into a square so that you increase your health, you stay at that lovely, improved health all the way until you're ready to pass and then you go so that there isn't this sort of long drawn out disease state at the end of life that we continue to see. I would hope that you would be able to continue to do things that you're passionate about, speaking in front of audiences and teaching about hormones until right up until the day before you pass and that that you would not have that long drawn out, prolonged ending. So when I'm talking about longevity, I'm really talking about longevity of health span. Although the research is out there and currently being done on improving the length of life, I feel like if my length of life is, if my life is not full of health then I don't really want the extra length of life.

(09:46): I totally agree , we don't wanna live in a disease state and currently so many of us once we pass 50 are in a disease state. I think it's over 50% of us are on five or more medications after the age of 50, which represents chronic disease management and all the risks that chronic disease carries. So increasing our health span, and I know some of you listening are thinking, you know, Dr. Kyrin, my health is a mess right now and I'm in midlife metabolic mayhem. Or I, you know, I can't lose the weight and I can't sleep. I'm not worrying about increasing my health span. But actually the same tools that Dr. Suzanne and I are gonna talk about are will also help you get out of midlife metabolic mayhem and correct and reverse disease and improve your overall quality of health. So you definitely wanna listen cuz she's gonna share some tools with you that we haven't talked about on the podcast before and I think you're gonna wanna hear this, I have to ask you first, you have this wonderful quote on your Instagram and I love your Instagram cuz it really shows who you are and your life.

(10:58): So everybody, you definitely wanna check it out. We'll give the link at the end that muscle is the currency of aging. Muscle is the currency of aging. Can you talk about what that means?

(11:11): I have to confess, I stole that from a friend Carl Leor who's a wonderful podcaster as well. This is about, we have to realize that the exercising muscle, it's not just that your doctor's telling you to exercise. Wow. Wow. That's true. Okay, I know about that. This is actually, we know that the exercising or the contracting muscle secretes signals that tell the rest of your body, this is a young person begin to unfold the D N A unfold, the protein processing that in a way that is much more youthful. So an exercising muscle will communicate to the rest of the body that this is a young person and that youthful things need to be happening. So even if you are unable to exercise, there are other things that we can do to help with that. There's a relatively new device called M sculpt that works on helping people who are unable to exercise.

(12:06): Now it's marketed for weight loss, but what's exciting about this device is it's able to help with people who are unable to exercise or have injuries to actually as behave as though they were exercising. So it gives that same release of youthful signals that you get. I think most people are able to do some form of activity and even if you are, you know, walking to your mailbox standing up or sitting down at your desk, I tell my 96 year old patients that one of the things they can do is just standing up and sitting down from their dining room chair. Just getting that kind of activity is going to be beneficial for your overall health because your muscles as they move and contract are sending signals to the rest of your body to be more youthful and to produce proteins in a more youthful manner.

(12:54): So then all the things that happen with age where we collect more junk in our more trash in our cells where we damage the cells to the point where they become like zombie cells, all of those things are less likely to happen because of the signals that our cells are getting from the exercising muscle. So there's a reason to exercise this, not just my doctor says I need to exercise or I'm trying to lose weight. Although both of those usually are present. The biggest reason is because of this youthful communication that an exercising muscle will give you.

(13:28):Where are women getting it wrong over 40 with maintaining or building muscle mass? How are we getting it wrong with our hormones with the exercises we're doing or not doing? Why do we struggle with losing muscle mass? Cuz that's a huge problem for women. So where do, yeah,

(13:47): I love the new, it's one of the hashtags I love. It's it's strong, not skinny. I love that because it's, it moves the focus away from being very, very thin to being very, very healthy. And the idea that one of the things I hear my patients say a lot is, I don't want to do any weight training because I'm afraid I'm going to be too bulky. And that makes me a little bit sad because I think it's one of the easiest, fastest way for women over 40 to lose weight. And so patients that I can finally convince, okay, you don't need to be in the gym, do on the treadmill for 45 minutes every single day. You can do a hit exercise program that's just 15 really probably we can get away with four to five minutes of high intensity interval cardio and the rest of the time you can do some weight training because that's where we get our fat burning.

(14:39): Again, that's where we tell ourselves to choose to burn fat as an energy source. If is in that 70% maximum heart rate range, it's not in killing yourself on the treadmill, it's in that lovely 70% max heart rate range, which we usually will get with a good weight training program. Now I definitely recommend people use a trainer, especially if you've just started doing weight training. I have been doing this for several years and I still use a trainer because I wanna make sure I don't injure myself. So injury is a little bit worse of course. So I would rather not have that. I want longevity of my ability to exercise as well. So I have someone who guides me through the things that I do in the gym, the way women are because we don't have a lot of testosterone and particularly as we approach menopause or in that midlife mayhem, we will deplete ourselves of testosterone.

(15:33): And so it's actually testosterone and the way you train that will build a bulk of your muscle. It's pretty difficult for women to build bulk. They really have to eat a lot and they have to do exercises in a particular way in order to bulk even at that. Most of the women who you see that are that bulky kind of bodybuilder look, those women usually have, they have given themselves some sort of hormonal treatment, not, not like menopausal hormones but additional hormones that will allow them to be that size. Otherwise women are less likely to grow what we should see to hypertrophy or thicken the muscles. Like you talk about bulky, what we instead will see is more definition of the muscle because you're burning the fat around the muscle, so you're maintaining your muscle mass, you're burning the fat around the muscle to be used for that muscle to contract. So typically I recommend that women over 40 really put the majority of their energy in exercise toward muscle, toward lifting weight, some sort of resistance exercise.

(16:39): Okay. Yes. And I find that maybe it's post Jane Fonda aerobic exercise era when people say exercise, like we have in our minds says women over 40, oh Jane Fonda, right? But I think it's time that we changed that visual and I don't have a visual representation of who represents probably Deborah Atkinson , you know, flipping 50. She talks about that all the time. And you don't need more aerobics, you need more resistance training. You mentioned testosterone and that's something that I'm very passionate about because you know, the official corporate medical statement summary on testosterone use in women is basically no. And it's so vital for our brain function neurotransmitters, our bone mass, our muscle. Can you talk about the importance of getting your testosterone tested and treated?

(17:37): Yes, over our lifetime, even including in our twenties, testosterone is one of the greatest hormones that's produced and I mean greatest in volume of hormones that's produced by women's bodies, which doesn't seem to be, that doesn't make a lot of sense in our minds, but this is the reason why it's so frustrating. So I just competed in a power lifting competition and I was required to come off of my testosterone in order to com do that competition. I think this is a travesty because this, I'm gonna spend the next several months dealing with my midlife mayhem again as I cover the loss of testosterone and coming back, getting back on it again. And I don't take a huge dose of testosterone. I'm, I'm really just at a moderate appropriate dose because without it, my testosterone, of course I'm 50, my testosterone is very low with testosterone, I sleep better, I'm more calm. Things around me don't bother me. And that's the case with most of my patients. Much like you I'm sure is that they're able to sleep better at night. I tell women things like socks on the floor don't bother you .

(18:46): And it's because if you think about it, your husband doesn't, it doesn't bother him. When he sees socks on the floor, he walks right past it. It's because our minds are so diffusely aware. If you're familiar with the work of Allison Armstrong, we have such diffuse awareness when we're in that estrogen cycle and if we are on testosterone, it really helps with bringing some focus to our activities in our day. So I'm a big fan of testosterone and again, not in a, an overdose or super physiologic dosing, but in a necessary for functioning to day-to-day. The dose I take is about one 10th or one 15th. The dose of that I give my husband, it's a way smaller dose, but it's perfect in just what I need in order to function properly in on day-to-day.

(19:31): Right. And I love that you brought up Alison Armstrong. I'll just say a little bit about her for everybody listening. She's basically, I guess a woman's dating coach, but she really is very clear about the different psychological profiles that is related to hormones for men and women and how we function differently because of the our hormonal milieu. And so I love that you shared that about our brain because testosterone is super important for that dopamine and the focus and the drive and not only our muscles and our bones, but it's very important. All right, so what else is important when we're looking at increasing our health span?

(20:15): I think several things are important. One of the ways that muscle also works. And so this is, it's, I'm gonna tie this into what we just talked about is by increasing the ability of your cells to produce protein and increasing the ability of the cells to produce energy. So I hear a lot of women that are in that midlife mayhem talk about being fatigued. So one of the things that we can use, there's a old drug that was found on Easter Island that is sort of like an old antibiotic, although it functions differently than that. It's F D A approved for use for kidney transplant patients and that's in a fairly high dose. When we use this in a much lower dose, we can find that that we are able to turn off the go, go, go, go, go mi mindset of ourselves and turn on the rest and repair mindset of ourselves.

(21:10): Those two aspects of how we see and use energy in ourselves need to be in a really good balance, the calm down, rest and relax as well as the go-go, let's build, let's grow, let's develop. We want that, but we also want the rest and relax. It needs to be in this good balance. Much like we've probably talked about with the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. Those all exist, those dichotomies exist at the cellular level. So one of the things that it's drug is called rapamycin. It's used in much, much smaller doses and there are some really interesting studies about it improving the longevity and the number of years of mice and sea elegance, which is a worm that has very similar D n A to ours as opposed to dogs that don't have similar the for using animals for research rats or mice.

(22:03): And the sea elegance has a very similar d n A to us so we can use those to study and rapamycin, because it's been around for a long time, it's been used for many, many years treating kidney transplant patients. We're using this in really, really tiny infrequent doses for every once in a while to give your cells a rep and a chance to recover from all the things we do in a day. So that also sort of, so rapamycin is one option, but we also use that rolls over into the idea of how important sleep is. So one of the things that's the tenant of health for me is going to bed at eight 30. And the reason this is important is because during sleep, this is when your brain opens up what we call the glymphatic drainage system. This is sort of the trash or the sewer system of the brain.

(22:52): It's closed during the day and at night while you're sleeping. It opens up as long as the body's not doing anything like digesting food. So this is one of the reasons why your Dr. May say for you to wait at least two hours from eating to going to bed because that gives your body time to handle the food and then it can focus on that recovery and repair. During sleep is when that glymphatic drainage system opens up, all the trash can be cleared away. The immune cells can take the trash, bundle it up, put it out into the glymphatic to be moved away. The systems can be all things can be filed away like where they're supposed to be in the brain and the next morning you can wake up refreshed because all of that was able to happen. So in our patients who aren't sleeping, we need to be really focused and helping them to make that a priority, not only as far as setting aside the amount of time that's necessary, but also in providing them ways to help them with sleep.

(23:52): That list is very, very long, but getting adequate number of hours of sleep and the research is around seven to nine hours per night and then also getting enough of the kinds of sleep we need. So the same thing happens during sleep on a nightly basis in the brain. That can happen during the day with using something like rapamycin. The other interesting thing is doing a 12 hour fast overnight. And that's probably the only thing that's been proven in humans to promote longevity is calorie restriction. This is really hard to do long-term, so it's not something that we, that we definitely recommend for everyone, but one of the things I do recommend for everyone is a 12 hour overnight fast. This is, it seems like 12 hours overnight. That seems like it would be easy. Well if you eat dinner at six o'clock at night and don't eat anything again until six o'clock in the morning, that sounds pretty easy.

(24:46): But most of my patients have a hard time getting that 12 hours in. What's interesting is if you fast for that 12 hours, we know that the brain will begin to produce a protein or a fat rather called butyrate and butyrate is used by the cells as an alternate fuel source and it triggers that same response as the rapamycin does to help the body with that process of autophagy or rest and relaxation. So an overnight fast of 12 hours is cheaper than getting rapamycin of course, and is a really simple way that everyone at home can be involved in their own longevity is by setting aside that time not only for adequate rest but also for fasting overnight

(25:30): Regarding fasting because it's very popular right now all kinds of fast dry, fast wet, fast water, fast juice fast. But intermittent fasting is a huge topic and there's several best selling books on it. What about longer intervals of fasting? What is the research saying about that?

(25:50): It's, I think the research is still up in the air and what really works in the research is fasting in the morning and is early, I'm sorry, is is evening fasting, which is much more difficult for most people to do. Most people don't mind fasting in the morning, but they have a really hard time fasting in the evening and as we just talked about, it runs right into your ability of your body to rest and and recuperate and especially the brain to repair the things it needs to overnight if you're bumping that up too close to your sleep time. So I really encourage people if they can, to push that fasting window up against their dinnertime and make that dinnertime be earlier in the evening. Then you get that full 12 hours of overnight sleep, I mean of overnight fasting for the brain to be able to begin producing butyrate so that it can cause all the healing that the cells need through that time when it's produced.

(26:46): Okay, alright. I want us continue on tools to improve longevity, but I wanted to ask you about how do people know how old their body thinks they are? I mean sure we have a chronological age, but for some of us, and I've seen some inventories where people can do answer questions about their health and then it spits out kind of what their, and I forget what Eric Braverman calls it, their true age and your, you can find out does your, is your body functioning at an older age or a younger age or your age appropriate? Where are you? But there's some clinical tests that can be used, correct?

(27:27): Yes. So I think the simplest way for us to look at that is there's a couple of simple markers that are probably on everyone's last lab test. They're not going to give you a specific age, but it is something for you to monitor over time and it's again, something probably everyone's had done on their most recent lab tests. If you look on your complete metabolic panel, one of the tests that's on there is called an albumin. The goal for albumin is for the level to be four and a half or greater. If you're four and a half or if you're less than four and a half, your risk of aging and your risk of mortality from all causes goes up. So I just encourage people to watch their albumin level. We wanna see that it's either staying the same or improving and that's a general good marker of how well your health overall is.

(28:20): The second easy simple marker is in your complete blood cell count and that is a lymphocyte count. We want that lymphocyte count to be greater than 35. When you, as we age, one of the things that causes us aging is that your immune system declines in its ability to function optimally. We know that this has happened with our most recent virus that's gone through and most of the people who were unable to tolerate that were people who were elderly or over 75 80. And part of that is because their immune system is also aging. One of the ways we can look at that is looking at the lymphocyte count, which is look is one of your immune cells and we want that level to be greater than 35. A less than 35 is concerning that you will not be able to fight off viruses or cancer should the two of them come your way.

(29:12): And so those are two things you can monitor generally in every lab test. Now a little bit more specific are two different tests and one is called a beta-glucan assay. This can let us know whether or not you also gives you an approximation of what your age is because we accumulate this as we age. There are specific labs that do this. The second one is called true age and it is an epigenetic test, which means you know, you have, you know about people who have genetic variations in their D N A from birth and they have changes that make them more susceptible to things like down syndrome for example. Well those various genes and all of our genes will change the way they are expressed based on what's happening in your environment. So a more appropriate environmentally induced aging marker is this epigenetic test. They're looking for specific changes on specific pieces of D N A that are more common with aging and they can give you both a rate of aging as well as an proposed current age based on all the patients they've had do the test.

(30:25): And so there are several companies that do a test like this. I use one called True Age, there are lots of others. And they look at your epigenetics to see whether you are how quickly you are approaching aging. I really am concerned about the rate of aging. So for every one year of age, how many years older are you? And I'd like to see that number be one or less so that you are not continuing aging. And again, one of the ways we can fix that is what we've already talked about with contracting muscle and adequate sleep and overnight fasting.

(31:00): All right. Where are we with telomere length at this point clinically? What are your thoughts on that?

(31:06): So what's interesting is telomere length, it tends to be associated with aging. We know that again with the most recent virus that people lost a good bit of telomere length. The jury is still out whether extending telomeres will affect your longevity in the long run. So we are still looking at that research to see whether or not there is a benefit. We know that a shorter telomere length is associated with a shorter lifespan, but it's not necessarily correlated with a lengthening of that. Telomere is not necessarily corded with a lengthening of lifespan. So again, the jury is still out. There are several companies that have products that are beneficial in lengthening T telomeres and I am not convinced of the information yet. It's the jury is still out about whether that telomere lengthening will extend lifespan.

(32:00): Right. And just for anyone who doesn't know whatt mirrors are, they're kind of like the binding on your end of your shoelaces that you have on all strands of D N A that kind of holds it together and they shorten over your lifespan and like Dr. Suzanne was saying, you're at increased risk for certain diseases when they're shorter. So that's what telomeres are. Alright, so we're working out at the gym doing, getting our muscle mass, we're doing resistance training, we're sleeping, we're doing a 12 hour fast. What other things have been shown or clinically

(32:38): Proven to help us improve our health spans? There was a big study that was done called the trim study that's probably the most significant one that's out there. And it was done with growth hormone, growth hormone and the, the study was intended to see whether or not growth hormone would improve lifespan and giving people growth hormone would improve their lifespan. Well one of the side effects of growth hormone is increase in blood sugar. So they also gave those patients metformin to cut counteract the increase in blood sugar from the growth hormone. The other thing that growth hormone is known to do is increase cortisol or stress hormone. Who needs that? So they gave those people D H E A to help counteract this, the ef, the growth hormone side effect of raising cortisol. So the study was done with growth hormone, D H E A and D and metformin.

(33:31): So this is one of the places where the hype around metformin began. Metformin has some benefits in, this is what I was getting to. Metformin has some benefits in improving lifespan in animal studies. The concern I have with metformin is its mechanism of action. Number one, its mechanism of action is at the mitochondria or the energy generating level. This interferes with the ability of cytochrome one, which is one of the little things that helps your mitochondria to make energy. It interferes with that function. So I don't want any of my mitochondria to be fun to be messed with. I get concerned when I see that when I hear about mitochondria because mitochondrial dysfunction is one of the causes of aging. So it just doesn't jive in my mind to use metformin, although there's a lot of research out there that's very interesting and ongoing about using metformin for longevity.

(34:26): It just makes me nervous because of its mechanism of action. The second thing that metformin does, mechanism of action-wise is affects your microbiome. Which if you have a terrible microbiome might be a good idea if you have a great microbiome. I don't wanna mess with my microbiome. I think our intestines speak volumes to our entire bodies. I think the food that we put in tells the microbiome to be what it is and it will send signals back to our body to be more youthful, to be more energetic, to be more calm. All the things. I listened to your last podcast about anxiety and she was right on about the microbiome really affecting our anxiety. So I get concerned about, about messing with the microbiome if we don't have to. So metformin is a little concerning to me. The study was done with growth hormone and last I understood they were actually looking at using an a peptide called liraglutide, which does not have the glucose raising or the cortisol raising effects of me of growth hormone. So I'm interested to see the research on that. That's still pending lilu most people are probably familiar with it as as Victoza or Saxenda, which are, which is used for weight loss.

(35:37): Okay, awesome. All right, so what other tools are available? You mentioned peptides, you are an expert in peptides, you have all book coming out on this topic. What we've covered a little bit of that on the podcast, but can you speak to peptides that might specifically improve health span?

(35:57): It's one of the things I think is really interesting and helpful because of how they work. I think there's two in particular that would be beneficial and there's several of them probably that would be helpful. But let's just talk about two, I think thymus and alpha one, which is comes from your thymus thymus gland and can help to rebalance the way your immune system functions. When we get a vaccine, when we have an autoimmune disease, our immune system is really shifted over to one side where it's primarily focused on making antibodies. We don't want our immune system to be focused in that direction because then it's unable to fight things like viruses and cancer. And this is an oversimplification of the way our immune system works. But there, if we're talking about in binary language, that's really what we're looking at. So if it's busy making antibodies, it's not gonna be busy making things, what we call natural killer cells that can fight off bacteria, I'm sorry, viruses and cancer.

(36:53): Oh, I'd love for it to be more balanced. And one of the ways we can do that is using this peptide that's naturally occurring in the thymus gland. It's depleted in patients we know that have things like rheumatoid arthritis, MS for example. And so we love having that extra ability to give ourselves depleted thymus and alpha one if we are able to find it. That's a little bit of trouble right now. I like it because it works on that immunosenescence or the aging of the immune system that occurs as we age. The thymus gland, which is where your T-cells come from. Everybody's familiar with this conver you, I couldn't have had this conversation several years ago cuz no one would know what we were talking about, but right. The recent virus we have all this, people are familiar with these terms. You are a thymus gland where your T-cells come from gets replaced with fat as we age.

(37:42): And so that's part of the problem with aging is your immune system's unable to fight off things that used to be able to. So if we can give you something like thymus and alpha, we stimulate your baby T-cells to become cells that can fight things off, then we have this better balance. So I think thymus and alpha would definitely fall in my toolbox of anti-aging. The second thing would be to use a growth hormone secretagogue. The reason why I like the instead of growth hormone itself is because they're increasing the ability of your body to produce its own growth hormone. Again, as we age, we know we hit that midlife mayhem and we deplete our bodies not only of testosterone melatonin, estrogen, progesterone, but also growth hormone. And so if we can allow our bodies just to make the amount of growth hormone that it would've made in our twenties and thirties, that it would na you won't overdose on the growth hormone because you're not giving yourself actual growth hormone.

(38:40): You're giving yourself an it's, they're usually analogs of growth hormone releasing hormone, which is also naturally produced by the brain. We know that these are associated with improvement in longevity, especially in animal studies. And so this is one of my favorites to help to put people on for improving their longevity. And we can follow that again with a true h test and see how they're chronologically versus biologically improving in their age. So those would probably be my number one. And number two, anti-aging. If we're talking about appearance as aging, one of my favorites is using the copper peptides. And so growth GH HK is the amino acid sequence that it's called. Most of the peptides have a letter and number name on them because they're, they're still in research use. And so G H K has a copper p attached to it, so it's blue when you see it.

(39:31): You may see several skincare lines that have a G H K that have a blue coloration to them and these can really help to restore the skin. They have been compared against re A and vitamin C with better than re A and vitamin C outcomes in the research. So very interesting anti-aging for the skin. What's very interesting recently is I've been recommending these topically for people to use for hair loss and we've had several patients lose their hair in this most recent pandemic. And if they use this on their scalp with a derma roller, we do it a couple times a week. Many of these patients will, we're seeing some really amazing results with restoration of hair. And this is not even using p R P, it's just using the, the DRO and the the medical grade J H K C U serum.

(40:25): Awesome. Yeah, this is so much good information and I know you could go on probably listing things. I'm thinking, oh, we didn't even talk about oxygen therapies, but I'm gonna tell everyone they just need to read your book , where you're gonna talk about a lot of this. And I thank you so much for joining us. I want everybody listening to really hear that you can improve the quality of your health throughout your life. Juries is not in yet on whether we can actually increase our years, but we can certainly increase the life and the years that we do have. So where can everybody find out more about you?

(41:08): My website is Vine as in grapevine medical.com on Instagram at Dr. S Turner, d r s Turner. I'm on Facebook, vine Medical on Facebook. That's the best places.

(41:21): And talk a little bit about your book. What are they gonna find there?

(41:24): So it's pretty exciting. I'm about halfway through. We're expecting it to be published in November. It is about how to restore your youthful self, recognizing yourself in the mirror again, there I am. And particularly with use the use of peptides.

(41:42): Awesome. Well we look forward to that. And thank you for the wisdom and information that you've shared. Thank you for your passion and for your willingness to get out of line. I too started with Dr. Taylor and for everyone listening, Dr. Taylor Eldridge Taylor used to run a program called Get Out of Line for physicians who really recogniz that particularly as women in medical weren't being served properly. And he started by teaching other doctors about natural hormone therapy and then expanded. And then both Dr. Suzanne and I went onto the A four M residency, as she said, or fellowship. So thank you so much for your bravery. A lot of people lay, people don't realize how brave it is for doctors like you to get out of line and say no to the drug and surgery paradigm and walk this path. It's very courageous and I thank you for doing it. I'm so grateful that you just said yes and that you continue on this path. Thank you.

(42:46): Thank you Dr. Ki. I appreciate you so much

(42:48): And thank you all for listening to another episode of The Hormone Prescription with Dr. Kiran. I know that you loved the information that Dr. Suzanne shared and that you two appreciate her path and are looking forward to her book. So definitely check out her website, check her out on social media, subscribe to her channels so that you can be one of the first to know when her book is available. And I hope that you learn something today that you can implement in your life to change your health and transform your life to what you deserve it to be. I will see you again on next week's episode. Until then, peace, love, and hormones

(43:27): Y'all. Thank you so much for listening. I know that incredible vitality occurs for women over 40 when we learn to speak hormone and balance these vital regulators to create the health and the life that we deserve. If you're enjoying this podcast, I'd love it if you'd give me a review and subscribe. It really does help this podcast out so much. You can visit the hormone prescription.com where we have some free gifts for you, and you can sign up to have a hormone evaluation with me on the podcast to gain clarity into your personal situation. Until next time, remember, take small steps each day to balance your hormones and watch the wonderful changes in your health that begin to unfold for you. Talk to you soon.

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