Protecting Your Long-Term Metabolic Health

Healthy Aging

Let’s Get Metabolic

The countdown is on until Simon & Schuster’s March 25th release of The Longevity Nutrient. This book tracks our 20-year scientific journey – starting with an unexpected discovery of C15:0’s health benefits while helping dolphins – which has culminated in a movement to improve global health. And dare we say, humanity?

In this series of Science Says!, we provide a behind-the-scenes science peek relevant to each of the book’s chapters – from surprising dolphin discoveries to longevity molecule must-haves, from how essential fatty acids are discovered to the many ways C15:0 works, from how a newly found nutritional deficiency accelerates aging to how fixing and optimizing our C15:0 levels can slow aging to help us live healthier, longer.

This week, let’s talk about how research teams throughout the world are helping us gain a deeper understanding of how C15:0 protects our metabolic health.

I’m definitely looking to optimize my metabolism… but what is metabolism, exactly?

Metabolism involves chemical changes in our cells and bodies that enable us to live. So, having a healthy metabolism is important. This includes processes in which your body utilizes or stores the energy (and other stuff) that we eat. As we get older, these processes don’t work as well, resulting in many of the pain points of aging, including poorer insulin and glucose control.

A global metabolic crisis.

Beyond aging, the world is going through a metabolic crisis – at all ages. While there have been many hypotheses to explain why, our paper in Metabolites explains how nutritional C15:0 deficiencies cause Cellular Fragility Syndrome, which may be impairing metabolism in as many as 1 in 3 of us.

So, how does C15:0 help support our metabolism?

It ends up, as an essential fatty acid, that C15:0 supports our metabolism in many ways. For example:

• Activating PPARɑ/δ. Our early studies revealed that C15:0 activates PPARɑ/δ. Which may not seem that exciting, until one learns that PPARs (pronounced pee-pars) are big-time orchestrators of our metabolism and immune system.
• Activating AMPK. Fu et al. showed that pure C15:0 activates AMPK. This is a big deal because AMPK is a core mechanism of helping our cells maintain healthy glucose control. Metformin works by activating AMPK, and this pathway also sits at the heart of the Human Longevity Pathway.
• Activating AKT. Insulin helps our cells store glucose so that blood sugar doesn’t run amok and damage tissues. In their series of studies, Bishop et al. demonstrated that C15:0 activated AKT and enabled healthy cell glucose storage – even in the absence of insulin. Better yet, C15:0 also improved insulin sensitivity, giving it a one-two punch of glucose control.
• Stopping ferroptosis. Ferroptosis is a new form of cell death that involves fragile cell membranes, abnormal iron metabolism, and lipid peroxidation. In turn, ferroptosis negatively affects our overall metabolism. As described in our Metabolism publication, pure C15:0 has been proven to treat Cellular Fragility Syndrome and reverse all core components of ferroptosis.

Thus, C15:0 has multiple mechanisms that directly support metabolism, specifically glucose and insulin control.

That’s great. But do all those mechanisms translate into something that matters to me?

They do! Numerous studies have shown that pure C15:0 directly helped to support healthy glucose, cholesterol, and liver enzyme levels in models with suboptimal metabolism compared to controls. Additionally, numerous studies-of-studies have consistently shown that people with higher C15:0 levels have healthier long-term metabolism.

Hungry for more science? Well, a deep dive into the studies and metabolic health benefits of C15:0 are provided in The Longevity Nutrient.