TRY TELO-VITAL, THE ALL NATURAL TELOMERE SUPPORT SUPPLEMENT FORMULATED BY DR BILL ANDREWS FOR JUST $15 FOR NEW CUSTOMERS UNTIL 13TH SEPTEMBER HERE: https://bit.ly/TeloVital
Hello and welcome, everybody. I am very excited for this interview today. I’m here with Dr. Bill Andrews. He is the guy whose documentaries and books call him the closest man to curing ageing. He led the team that discovered human telomerase, and that discovery earned him runner-up National Inventor of the Year and a spot on Science magazine’s top 10 breakthroughs of the year.
So, Dr. Bill, thank you for your time today. I want to keep this interview really real and practical for my audience. I’m thrilled to have you here because I know that we’ve spoken a lot over the last year, or a bit longer now, I think. And I’m very excited to ask you lots and lots of questions that I know people are going to be excited to hear.
All right. Well, glad to be here.
I know that we have been given lots of questions from the community around ageing specifically, and mostly around ageing slowly, or ageing more slowly. I think it’s definitely something that’s on the top of a lot of people’s minds in terms of their vitality generally.
People tend to have a sense of, I suppose, general worry or fear, or like a blanket certainty that ageing is one thing, like it’s a one-way street for them and there’s nothing that they can do to support their body in a tangible way.
And I know, with my audience especially, a lot of women’s worth in our society is tied to being able to stay looking younger for longer, and very often their self-worth is tied to this. As they get older, it feels like it’s challenging their identity even. So, I think this is going to be a very interesting conversation in lots of different ways.
And I know that obviously our bodies are the only thing that travel with us through our entire lives. To me, it makes sense that as we age, or as we get more frail, we maybe feel more vulnerable.
There can be lots of emotions attached to that, but it can also feel quite passive, just observing yourself. Whereas I love to really think about what we can do to support the body in as many different ways as possible, because I feel like this is a very practical thing that we can do as we age.
You have spent over four decades now studying the actual clock inside ourselves that drives that ageing process. So, if anybody is the master around this, it’s you. But before we get into the science, tell me what made you so obsessed with solving ageing, basically, and why have you dedicated your entire life to it?
Well, there was no tragic event that occurred that got me going. But when I was 10 years old, my elementary school teacher sent me home with a note pinned to my shirt, and it said – that my parents read – and it said, “Your son’s very interested in science and medicine. You should nurture this.”
And so that night I was out in the front lawn of our house, and I was looking through my big telescope. A 10-year-old kid would never have a telescope like this, but I did, at Jupiter and Saturn and things like that. And my father came out and said to me, “You know, when you grow up, you should become a doctor and find a cure for ageing.”
And he said, “I don’t know why nobody’s done that yet.” And he said some things like, “Living’s the greatest thing that ever happened to us.” I now realise that there was some guy – and I can’t remember his name – who actually made that a public quote just about that time. So he was quoting somebody whose name I can’t remember right now.
But this whole idea of living is the greatest thing that ever happened to us is something that really clicked with me. And I challenge anybody to come up with something better. But I just became obsessed with it. I thought, what a great idea. You know, what a great way to spend my life, trying to come up with a cure for ageing.
I never knew it would take so long. But I can be upfront right now: the obstacle is more of the funding than the science. We know what to do. People can go watch my videos and they can see why we age and how we age. And it’s no theories; it’s all facts.
And you’ll see that when people look at why we age, we don’t have to age. It’s just an evolutionary thing that was beneficial for the survival of our species in rapidly changing environments. We don’t need that anymore. We can undo ageing. We don’t have to age. And that’s what I’m trying to work on.
And as I said, the obstacle is the funding more than knowing what to do with the science. But that’s how it got started. And I’ve been obsessed with it ever since. All through high school and college, I’ve been doing anti-ageing clubs. I’ve been building an arsenal of tools all geared towards, when I get out of school and stuff like that, I’m going to focus on curing ageing. And that’s where I’m at.
It’s just been a long road and I’m still working on it, but I know what needs to be done.
Well, that’s incredibly exciting. I think mostly for all of us, especially for you, for your life’s work. But I know that the impact and the far-reaching possibilities of what could happen for people and their bodies with this information is literally going to be life-changing.
I know, following the methods that I’ve followed from what you’ve suggested – which we’re going to speak more about in a little while – for the last 14 months, it has been completely game-changing for me and my body. So I’m excited to share this with our listeners as we carry on.
But for anybody hearing the word telomere for the first time, could you break it down for us in a very simple way? What is a telomere, and why do scientists call it the clock of ageing?
Well, it is the clock of ageing. But in order to really explain telomeres, I’ve got to go a little back in the process.
We learned back in the 1960s that human cells can only divide a certain number of times. So when we get repairs and we grow, we have cells growing. There’s actually a limit on the number of times our cells can divide, and that puts a limit on our lifespan.
But the big question was: how do cells count? How do cells know how many times they have divided and how many more times they can divide?
And believe me, there’s very few animals that have this clock. Humans, cats, dogs, horses, sheep, pig and deer are the only ones.
But I proposed back in the 1970s that there had to be something like ride tickets at an amusement park inside of our cells, because I couldn’t understand any other kind of biochemical method to explain how cells can count. So every time a cell divides, it loses a ticket.
Well, in the 1990s, I learned that these ride tickets are telomeres. They’re found at the very tips of our chromosomes. And by the way, you can pronounce them teh-lomeres or tee-lomeres. All pronunciations are correct.
But they’re found at the very tips of our chromosomes. Every time a cell divides, the telomeres get a little shorter. And not only do they put a limit on our lifespan, they also control all the changes that we see in all of us as we age, because they have all the hallmarks of what are called “enhancer sequences.”
So when enhancer sequences get changed, they change the epigenetics – the turning on and off of all the genes in our chromosomes. Every gene has a dimmer switch. They get turned on and off, and telomeres are actually what control that.
So this telomere is central to everything. Now, there’s a lot of other things that cause ageing, and I guess we’ll come to that later. But that explains the answer to the question that you just asked, I think. And did I leave anything out there?
No, I mean that sounds great. I love how simple you make it sound for something that’s obviously decades in the making. So thank you for the work that you’ve done to explain that so concisely. Yeah, thank you.
We’re going to keep digging into this because I’ve got so many more questions. Anybody who watches my videos or is in my programs knows that I share a lot about the support that you can give your body and your fascia through fascia release. But I also share things that you can do to support your body from the inside out, so that you’re nourishing your body and it can basically perform better for you. Not perform – that’s a weird word – but respond is probably a better word for you.
So, things like hydration and detox obviously I talk about a lot, because that supports the body in reducing inflammation. But when it comes to the actual cells themselves, what can be done in terms of supporting those cells, in your opinion, on a cellular level, to help keep down toxins, oxidative stress, those bits?
Well, reducing wear and tear is the biggest thing. But we have certain rates of wear and tear that we can’t get below.
For instance, the best example is blood flowing through your blood vessels. That causes wear and tear on the cells that line the blood vessels. They’re called endothelial cells. Well, you can’t reduce the wear and tear of those cells without reducing the blood flow. And if you reduce the blood flow, you’re going to die.
So, we have to have a certain amount of blood flow, which is going to cause a certain amount of wear and tear on our endothelial cells. And as a result, when those cells die, other cells have to divide to replace those cells, and that causes telomere shortening.
So after a while the telomeres get so short that these cells can no longer be replaced, and that’s what causes the ageing. So anything – but you can do a lot of things to accelerate that wear and tear besides the flow of blood.
So, toxins, free radicals, inflammation – everything. Sugar is a really good example of something that accelerates oxidative stress and inflammation. All these things cause accelerated wear and tear and, as a result, we age faster.
Now, when we do the math on telomere biology for somebody that has the perfect lifestyle and the perfect genetics, we find out that because of things like the rate of blood flowing through your vessels and other – kidneys and liver and things like that – we have this theoretical maximum lifespan of 125 years. We can’t live longer than that.
But we all accelerate our ageing by doing poor lifestyle choices. And some of us have poor genetics, which is hard to deal with, but it causes accelerated wear and tear. But so many things – the toxins and the free radicals and everything like that – that actually accelerate that, you can have full control over.
So the more you reduce those kinds of things, the more you reduce your wear and tear, the longer your blood vessels and every organ and other tissue – every tissue in your body – is going to survive, and you’ll live longer.
But nobody’s ever really lived to be 120, even, because we all accelerate our wear and tear. There is an example of a woman, Jeanne Calment, who apparently lived to be 122, but we now know that her daughter assumed her place to avoid inheritance tax and it wasn’t even likely Jeanne Calment who died at that age; it was her daughter.
So, nobody’s lived to be 120, but I’m hoping from the research that I’m doing, plus one of the products we’re going to talk about today, we’re going to have some people living a lot longer than 125 because it’s compensating for the wear and tear.
I love that idea. I really love that idea. And I know, as I said, I’ve been following along with what you’ve suggested for the last 14 months and I can definitely feel the difference myself in my own body.
I’m going to talk a little bit about fascia, just because obviously my audience mostly wants to know about fascia. So, on a cellular basis, the cells that build and repair fascia and collagen – the fibroblasts – only have so many times that they can divide as well, like every other cell in the body, before they slow down. And that division limit is connected to the telomere length. Correct?
You’ve kind of already covered that slightly, but I just want to draw that connection piece there so that people can understand that supporting your cells – every cell, including the things that make up your fascia and your collagen – will have a powerful impact.
So, if somebody wants their connective tissue, their skin, their general structure to keep renewing itself rather than breaking down, what would this product that we’re going to talk about in a moment mean for them? Like, the power of what is possible just on a cellular level, with what you’ve seen?
I know that I’m kind of jumping between two questions here, because there’s a fascinating relationship also that we’ve seen with telomeres and mitochondria. So that’s like the energy that comes in the cells as well. So, if you can kind of – there’s a few malformed questions there for you – but if you could speak to just the cell division one more time, and why the telomere piece is so important with how the cells divide, and if you could explain the relationship perhaps with telomeres and mitochondria.
Okay. Well, first of all, let me say there’s a lot of people, especially women, that make a really big mistake with their skin, and that’s that they will do what’s called microdermabrasion, laser treatments, acid treatments. They all kill your skin cells.
Yeah.
And they’re designed to, because what people learned a long time ago is that when you kill your skin cells and you cause other cells to divide to replace those skin cells, you look younger. Okay? But looks are deceiving. Okay? You aren’t really younger. You’re actually older.
And this is why a lot of movie stars – older movie stars, or longer-lived movie stars, I don’t like the word old – longer-lived movie stars have prune faces, or sometimes called skeleton faces, because they’ve used up all their telomeres. They’ve used up all the ride tickets that I mentioned before.
And so you don’t want to do anything to accelerate skin ageing. Make certain you use sunscreen and things like that to reduce the rate of the skin decline. But any kind of toxin, anything that induces inflammation, oxidative stress – all these things are going to accelerate that. So reducing it as much as possible to keep the telomeres from shortening as much as possible. And that’s the clock. So you can accelerate that clock, and I’m working on trying to find ways to slow down that clock.
Yeah, I love that. I know that I agree with you 100% with the damageing of the skin cells. It makes no sense to me whatsoever and actually is very harmful, I think, to your body and its ability to repair itself.
You asked me about mitochondria too.
Yes, I did.
So mitochondria are the powerhouse of our cells. Okay. That’s where all the energy is – they’re like a small organism inside of our cells that generate all the power that we use.
But it turns out that 95% of all the components of a mitochondria are encoded by our nuclear chromosomes, and our nuclear chromosomes are the ones with the telomeres, and the telomeres control the production – or expression, it’s called expression – of the genes that make the mitochondria.
So there are ways – I mean, people will start getting what are called dysfunctional mitochondria. They quit working for one reason or another. It’s possibly due from oxidative stress damages or something like that. And our body has a way of getting rid of those dysfunctional mitochondria. But then we also have to have those mitochondria replaced.
And by the way, when people have a decreased rate of getting rid of these dysfunctional mitochondria, there are products like something called urolithin a, that will actually help your body get rid of these mitochondria.
But there’s the other side of the coin. When you get rid of your dysfunctional mitochondria, you have to create new mitochondria, which is called mitochondrial biogenesis. And in order to create the new mitochondria, replace that, you have to keep your telomeres long because to make a mitochondria, you need the genes that produce the components of the mitochondria on your nuclear chromosomes. You need those turned on. And when the telomeres get short, those turn off.
So, telomeres play a really big role in maintaining your mitochondria too.
So that’s the relationship of, like, if someone feels tired or foggy or they feel like they’ve slowed down, it’s not just getting older, it’s really about what’s happening with their telomeres.
Everything comes back to the telomeres. You know, there are videos I have on my website where I talk about how every disease, including AIDS, the common cold, cancer, all of them come down to how short your telomeres are. And I always say bad things happen when telomeres get short. Nothing bad happens when telomeres are long.
Yeah, we want to look after them. So, just so that the audience knows, and it’s a privilege to have you here for a number of different reasons, I always enjoy our conversations. But you are also a named inventor on 50-plus US patents on telomerase, and your research has led you to create an all-natural product called Telovital that can support the human body to create telomerase itself, a telomerase rich environment. And the implications of this are obviously very powerful.
Again, as somebody myself who has followed this protocol for the last 14 months, I can attest to that. But could you tell us the story of why, out of thousands of plant extracts you and your team tested, what led you to the handful that made it into this formula? And what makes Telovital different from any other anti-ageing supplement on the shelf?
Telovital induces the expression of the telomerase gene. Okay. And so telomerase is an enzyme that actually re-lengthens telomeres.
Now, why we don’t have it always turned on in all of our cells – people would have to go listen to my videos on why we age, because we shut that gene off because it helped our species survive rapidly changing environments. And it would take me an hour to explain that, but it’s really clear on my videos.
But it turns out that if every time a human cell divided, the telomeres did get shorter – how is it that our children are born with longer telomeres than we have when they come from our cell division?
So, our primordial germ cells – I also call them our reproductive cells – they divide and something’s going on in those cells that either re-lengthens the telomeres or prevents them from shortening. So back in the 1990s, that’s what I was doing. I was trying to find out what was going on in that.
So we compared reproductive cells to normal cells and we discovered this enzyme called telomerase. And telomerase re-lengthens our telomeres.
So in our reproductive cells, it’s like a tug-of-war. When a reproductive cell divides, the telomeres get shorter. Then telomerase comes in and re-lengthens it. Cell divides again, telomeres get shorter. Telomerase comes in and re-lengthens it. So it’s a tie in our tug-of-war. Our telomeres don’t get any shorter.
And so when our children are still a single-cell embryo, their telomeres are the maximum length that telomeres can be. And then they don’t start having telomeres shorten until their cells start to divide.
So if I think of it like ride tickets at an amusement park, a single-cell embryo has 100 ride tickets at the tips of their chromosomes. And that’s not an exact approximation; that’s actually pretty accurate. And so when that cell divides, each of the daughter cells have 99 cell divisions, and then on and on and on. When you’re born, you have 50 ride tickets left. And then when you run out of ride tickets, you die.
But this enzyme – telomerase could prevent all that – if we could start producing it in all of our cells. But the fact that our reproductive cells produce this enzyme called telomerase says that all the genes—all the cells in our body contain the gene; the gene’s just shut off. And it’s dumb that it’s shut off.
A lot of people think that it’s shut off to prevent us from getting cancer, but the exact opposite is true. And I would refer people to videos to watch on that because there’s a lot of videos I have on the role of telomeres and cancer. Keeping telomeres long prevents cancer. Telomerase expression in cells prevents cancer.
But yeah, so I’ve been searching for ways of inducing the telomerase gene to turn on in all of our cells. I’ve also invented things called telomerase gene therapy, which is a way that we’ve gotten our proof of concept and a way we’ve been able to do some pre-clinical studies, which is where we put the gene for telomerase inside of a virus. Okay. And then we infect human cells, or whatever kind of cells, with this virus, and it inserts the telomerase gene in there at such a potent rate that it produces a lot of telomerase to therefore make telomeres longer.
And we have shown by doing this, we can turn human cells – fibroblast cells, like you mentioned – in a Petri dish. We can convert them from old to young in every way imaginable, every method of measurement you can imagine.
We also did this with human skin grown on the backs of mice. We showed that by using gene therapy to deliver the telomerase gene to those skin cells, those cells not only stopped ageing, they became younger in every way imaginable.
And then, when I mentioned the list of animals that do age by – do have telomeres shortening, notice I didn’t mention rodents. Mice and rats and rabbits, they do not age like humans do.
So what we did is we engineered mice to make them so they did age by telomere shortening. Then, when we turned on the telomerase gene inside these mice, they became younger in every way imaginable.
Now, they still had their normal ageing process. We adjusted the telomere length so they would die of old age at two years, when a mouse normally lives three years. So, at two years we turned on the telomerase gene. We saw these mice become younger in every way imaginable, including memories coming back. Dementia was reversed – which is saying dementia is not the loss of memory; it’s just loss of access to the memory. The memory is still there. Lengthening telomeres is going to restore that memory.
But these mice still died at three. Okay. They’re not still living immortal and stuff like that because they still have their normal ageing process, which is oxidative stress and mitochondrial dysfunction.
So we have been focusing on trying to find safe ways. We don’t want to use a virus to treat all of this. I mean, we can do it. There are clinical studies – other people have clinical studies – on trying to use viruses to do gene therapy to lengthen telomeres, but there’s a lot of side effects. It’s risky. I only recommend it for people who have no other choice of surviving. They’ve been given six months to live; this is a solution, but it does cause some problems.
So those clinical studies are underway, but that’s not what I’m in business for. That gene therapy is just a proof of concept. I want to have a pill that everybody can take and it costs like nothing. Okay, I’d love to drop it from airplanes so that people can take it. It’ll be just as effective as the gene therapies and lengthen their telomeres.
So we are dealing with this tug-of-war. Okay, right now in all the cells of our body besides our reproductive cells, it’s a one-sided tug-of-war. Our cells divide, telomeres get shorter. They divide again, telomeres get shorter. They divide again, telomeres get shorter. There’s nobody on this side at all.
So we have been testing hundreds and thousands and millions, actually, of chemicals, nutraceuticals, plant extracts, all kinds of molecules. Sometimes it’s to learn about the structure – what regulates the genes – but nutraceuticals are our primary focus because they don’t require FDA approval.
But we have discovered, out of 600,000 different fractions of plant extracts – and I say fractions because we can’t use a whole plant extract because there’s way too many molecules. There’s typically 200,000 different types of molecules in any plant extract. And there’s probably a trillion total number of molecules inside of any plant extract.
And when you have that many molecules, you’re always going to find activators and inhibitors. So you have to fractionate the plant extracts into smaller groups of chemicals. We’ve tested – when I say chemicals, I mean nutraceuticals are chemicals, okay? They’re just natural.
So we break it down into, like, take a typical plant extract and break it down into 30 different fractions. We’ve tested 600,000 different fractions using our high-throughput robotic screening assays, and we found 50 that actually do induce the production of telomerase inside of our cells to lengthen telomeres.
Now, we haven’t won the tug-of-war, and that’s really important to say. But we have reduced it. So we have a bunch of people in the tug-of-war – unless, of course, there’s no people inside of ourselves – but think of it: people pulling to shorten telomeres. Now we’re adding people to lengthen. We’re not winning the tug-of-war yet, but we sure are slowing down the shortening.
And that’s why I think that people taking Telovital are probably going to exceed this 125-year theoretical maximum because they’re slowing down the telomere shortening. They’re not slowing down the wear and tear just from telomeres, but they are slowing down the effects of wear and tear on the telomeres.
So we can now have more cell divisions to replace those endothelial cells that line the blood vessels so that our blood vessels can last longer. But that’s true for kidneys and everything. So that’s what we’re doing with Telovital.
So the very top, most potent five nutraceutical fractions of nutraceuticals that we have discovered are in this product called Telovital. And icing on the cake is that – I mean, I don’t normally believe in anecdotal data – but we are actually seeing age reversal in a lot of the older people and a lot of people that have some severe health problems.
And we were wondering, why is this happening? Well, it’s well published recently that even using gene therapy to do this, when you produce low levels of telomerase, the telomeres still shorten at a shorter rate, but the shortest telomeres actually lengthen.
And so there’s several publications. People can go to the scientific peer-reviewed literature and see telomerase preferentially lengthens the shortest telomere. And so we believe this is what’s actually happening. And we’ve tested this ourselves using gene therapy in the lab here: that low levels of telomerase – when I say low, I don’t mean really low, but I mean not enough to win the tug-of-war – the lower levels actually lengthen the shortest telomeres.
So you win the tug-of-war with the shortest telomeres. That’s probably why we’re seeing some of these 90-year-olds and 80-year-olds having absolutely undeniable age-reversal effects. I’m talking about a 95-year-old woman using a walker all the time, now dancing. When you talk to her, she’s the most enthusiastic person you’ve ever met. I mean, she just won’t stop talking. Her hair colour is coming back, things like that.
This is something that can only be explained by the shortest telomeres being lengthened because of her age being longer lived. She has a lot of critically short telomeres. But we’ve seen this in some other people that have had cancer and had chemotherapy, which tremendously accelerates ageing. We’ve seen the same thing happen in these people, where these people came back. They were disasters. Their life – they couldn’t do anything. They’ve come back.
Okay. So it’s incredible hearing this. Can I ask a question, just because we haven’t spoken about this yet, but at what stage does the enzyme telomerase start to reduce in the body? Like, at what kind of age typically do we expect to see that in people?
Because I know, just for me personally, I haven’t had cancers or any of those pieces, but I had a lot of people saying to me, “Oh my God, have you started getting Botox or whatever?” And it’s not. It’s just my skin’s looking brighter and more vibrant because I’m helping it from the inside out.
Yeah. Well, I think I understood your question. Let me – if I didn’t answer, if my answer isn’t right, go ahead and ask the question again.
But we turn off the telomerase gene in our cells before we’re even a single-cell embryo. So let’s just say it’s at the single-cell embryo. The sperm and the eggs, they do not produce telomerase. Okay? So they fertilise the cell and that cell now has what is essentially 100 ride tickets at the tips of the chromosomes, but there’s no telomerase in that single-cell embryo that starts dividing. So the telomeres get shorter and shorter.
Then, when the embryo is about eight cells in size, one of those cells starts producing telomerase. That cell becomes our primordial germ cell line that is going to be eventually used to produce our babies. Okay. So the other cells just keep it off because –
So it’s literally just that cell.
Yeah. So the other cells have to have it off so that we do get eliminated after we raise our young because that provides an advantage to the species surviving. As I said, people have got to go listen to my videos to hear more. But yeah, does that answer your question? Did I understand your question correct?
Yeah, that makes sense. I think I’m just wondering, there are obvious things for ageing that people see, like their hair starts to go grey or they go through menopause or perimenopause begins. I’m just wondering if there’s any correlation between a reduction in telomerase there?
Well, there’s almost certainly – we’ve now connected the – was – remember, they don’t produce any telomerase, so it has nothing to do with telomerase, but it does have to do with telomere length.
And so everybody’s different. Some people are going to be affected by short telomeres differently than others. But a lot of the things like hair loss and some of the other things you mentioned aren’t completely controlled by telomeres.
So let’s talk about hair loss. If you’re a guy and your mother’s father was bald, there’s a good chance you inherited a gene that gives you hair loss, male-pattern baldness. Now that has nothing to do with telomeres. But there’s a lot of people that lose their hair because of short telomeres, and they’re the people that are seeing their hair coming back from taking something like Telovital or doing whatever they can to lengthen their telomeres or at least prevent the accelerated rate of telomere shortening.
I know I’ve definitely seen that with my partner, who’s been taking it for the last 14 months, the same as me. His hair colour has started to come back and his hair has started to grow back as well. So that’s definitely – I know it’s not the case for everybody – but it’s fascinating to observe.
And that’s just kind of icing on the cake because the main thing is that he just has a lot more energy. He feels more like himself, as do I.
But, so, let’s talk a little bit more about Telovital. So I’ve been working with Touchstone Essentials – I’m going to just hold the bottle up of Telovital.
I’ve been working with Touchstone Essentials now for the last 14 years because I have a similar obsession with quality. You’ve got one too. That’s what I love.
I take three capsules a day, every day.
Yeah, that is amazing. Same. That’s what I take too. How did you end up working with Touchstone, and what made you decide to be exclusive with them in the natural supplement space?
Well, I’ve never actually pursued looking for a company to market discoveries that we’ve made. In the past, I’ve just waited. They call me up and they ask if they can put some of our discoveries into their products so that they can sell a product.
And so, when I first started – probably the first time anybody called me and asked me that was probably 2008, 2009 – I said, “Sure.” But the thing that I didn’t like was they made false claims. They would put these ingredients in the product, actually. So it even goes back before then, because there’s some products that have been on the market that I invented back in the 1990s, and they actually got put on the market probably in about 2008, 2009.
But they all make false claims, and that would actually upset me so much that I – because I speak at medical conferences all the time – I would actually show their data and show how they’re actually – and I wouldn’t call them lying. I would say they’re misinterpreting their own data, and I explained why.
Well, then I started getting cease-and-desist letters and things like that from these companies, and my lawyer would tell me I’m an idiot for getting on stage and saying something against the product. And I just got disillusioned.
The company – this one company that was selling a product that was put on the market around 2010 – I got really disillusioned because they started making false claims and they started wanting me to, and I refused to.
And so when they finally stopped selling it, only because the profit margin wasn’t high enough – even though it was their number one-selling product – they weren’t making enough profit per bottle, so they discontinued it.
Okay. Well, I said to myself, there’s no way I’m ever going to do this again. My only purpose in life is to find a cure for ageing that I want to drop from airplanes to cure everybody’s ageing, make everybody’s lives happier and healthier, and that’s it.
Then one day I get a call from Eddie Stone, who’s the head of Touchstone Essentials. I assume the Stone, Touchstone and Eddie Stone, the Stones are connected there.
Definitely.
He calls me and he says, “Do you have anything – We want to make a telomere-lengthening product. We want to provide one. Do you have anything that we could license from you?”
And I said, “You know, I’m kind of upset with everything. Everybody’s going to make false claims and – excuse me, we’ve got smoke. We’ve got fires here in Reno, Nevada, so I’m a little bit -”
Oh, bless you.
And I said, “I’m really disappointed that this previous company quit selling it just because the profit margin wasn’t high enough.”
Well, Eddie said the exact right things. I mean, he says, “I do not care about profit margins. I want to make people happier and healthier and – And I would never ever make false claims.”
So all of a sudden I thought, “My God, I can’t believe somebody in the nutraceutical field says such a thing,” because everybody in the nutraceutical field is in the field because it’s easy to get products and make money, even if you’re deceiving all your clients and stuff like that.
But here’s somebody saying the exact opposite. And he’s in the nutraceutical field because it’s healthy and safe. And he told me about how he goes to these extreme efforts to make the toxins and heavy metals and things like that inside the products at the lowest levels possible, even lower than Proposition 65 of California, which is considered really tough. His products are all safer.
I just thought, “Oh my God, where’s this guy been all my life?”
[Laughter.]
So, I went ahead and agreed to license and take another chance, but I’m not going to go with anybody else. So it took a long time.
Now, he’s not making as much money as most nutraceuticals would like because he’s spending so much money to make it safe and stuff like that. The ingredients are expensive. His profit margin isn’t high enough, but he’s really proud that his company’s providing this product.
I can’t believe – I do what’s called critical meta-analysis of peer-reviewed studies all the time, which is really where I study products better than anybody else, and I have been blown away with all the products from Touchstone Essentials, not just Telovital. They are all – I mean, I take them all. I got products here, one after another, sitting all around. I take them.
I’m the same. I’ve got all the same ones here as well. It’s just sat here on the desk. You’re such an example of this.
Touchstone Essentials is unique. They’re unlike any other company and I have enjoyed working with them now for over two years. Never ever make any false claims. Never complained about the fact that they’re not making billions of dollars, because they’re spending so much to make it and they’re trying to keep the cost down too.
That’s the other thing I say. It doesn’t – they’re spending a lot of money to make it safe, but they’re not putting it back on the clients. The bottles – these are no more expensive than all the other companies that I consider charlatans that are making false claims. The products are no more expensive than those other products.
So, yeah. I don’t know what else to say. I’m just a very big fan of Touchstone Essentials and I believe in them.
I am right there with you with it, and I am thrilled that you’re working with them because you have made one little pill that people can take and start that process for their bodies. But I love most also that you really live what you’re talking about. This is more than just research to you.
You’re still running ultramarathons deep into your 70s, and you’re obviously taking all the products, which must be supporting you in that process as well. And one of the things that obviously changes a lot with age and that can affect how you look and feel and function is the decrease in bone density.
Do you feel like supporting your cells has helped you to keep your joints and your bones healthy, and to be able to continue to enjoy the level of exercise that you love? Because that’s extraordinary that you’re able to do that.
Absolutely. I mean, as long as I can remember I’ve known that we have to decrease inflammation, decrease oxidative stress, decrease toxins, all these kinds of things. And so I have led that kind of lifestyle.
But it’s also psychological and it’s mental. So things like stress – psychological stress – accelerate ageing. So, you know, I’m a keynote speaker at yoga meditation conferences where I explain, I show data, I show people that do yoga every day have longer telomeres than their friends their same age that don’t do yoga because they are decreasing the rate of the telomere shortening.
People think, “Oh, they must be producing telomerase.” They’re not producing any telomerase. The only way to produce telomerase is with Telovital.
And let me just say there are other products that claim to lengthen telomeres, but they don’t produce telomerase and therefore they are not lengthening telomeres. They’re just causing a redistribution of cells in the body, but they’re actually accelerating telomere shortening in the long run. I can come back with that and explain in more details.
But yoga, meditation, running, exercise – it doesn’t have to be running – kayaking, bicycling, hiking, all these things are just as good. They have what’s called a Goldilocks effect. And when I talk about the Goldilocks effect, I’m talking about intensity of exercise, not how much exercise.
Exercising all the time is good for you. It teaches your body to reduce inflammation and reduce oxidative stress. But when you’re an occasional exerciser, let’s say you run every two weeks and then you go out and run, you build a tremendous amount of inflammation and things like that that accelerate your ageing, accelerate the wear and tear because your body thinks your joints are being attacked by something.
And so it’s sending all these immune cells to your joints to fight whatever is attacking it. And that’s what the swelling is. Swelling is all from all these immune cells migrating to your joints. There’s other things that cause swelling too, but they’re migrating to the joints to fight and there’s nobody to fight. But that inflammation causes accelerated ageing.
Also, the inflammation is the cause of injuries. When a runner is running too hard or something like that and they injure a knee really bad or something like that, it’s often caused because of all those cells getting to that joint and increasing the risk of injury because they’re getting in the way of the joints.
So I’ve learned all my life to run, keep it fun, and keep it consistent. I’m a big believer in exercising every single day. Keep it fun.
I mean, when I first started running ultramarathons, when I got to a point where, “Oh my God, I can’t go any further,” I would stop. I wouldn’t push myself to go to the finish line. I would save it for the next ultramarathon. And then I’d find I’d get better and better and better. And then suddenly running 100 miles became easy. Okay. It became fun. It became, “I can’t wait for the race to start,” just because of all the adventure that I’m going to have in the race.
And then when I’m 90 miles into the race, I’m thinking, “Oh my God, I only have 10 miles to go. I don’t want to finish. I wish this would last forever.” I mean, people can get into that state by focusing on staying at the bottom of this Goldilocks effect.
Okay, so no exercise causes a lot of oxidative stress and inflammation. Too much intensity in your exercises causes oxidative stress and inflammation. But in the middle, it does not. It actually – and I’ve done blood work from runners, before, during and after races, to verify this.
Yeah, so there’s so many things that you can do to slow down the rate of your ageing, and that’s what I do. And that’s why I’m 74 right now. I’m still running ultramarathons.
Right now, if people go to a website on running streaks – if you just type “running streaks” into a Google search, you’ll find this site that keeps track of how many consecutive days people have been running. I’m over six years without missing a single day.
Wow.
That’s only because April 9th, 2020, I forgot to run. So I had to start all over again. But I run every single day. I actually work in the gym every single day. Instead of doing three sets every other day, I do one set every day.
Which – there’s no studies, absolutely not a single peer-reviewed study showing that you shouldn’t do weights, lift weights every single day. Okay? It’s all rumours. Actually, most of the data is suggesting that just keep it light, keep it fun every day, is actually a lot better than doing it every other day.
And I believe that when you do it every day, it gets you into a streak. And once you have a streak going, it’s hard to break that streak because you get really depressed when you think, “Oh my God, my streak just ended because I forgot to exercise today. Now I got to start over at zero.” And there’s psychological effects there too.
Yeah, I do all those things. I actually have an identical twin brother who doesn’t do all those things. Thirty years ago, photographs of us 30 years ago, we can’t tell each other apart. But now we can. Because I’ve been reducing the rate of my ageing and he hasn’t. And now we look significantly different.
Wow. Gosh. I mean, that’s incredible. And I agree with you with the consistency of movement. I know that’s what we see a lot with the research that I’ve been looking into with fascia. One of the very key things is movement, and that’s a perfect example that you’re sharing there with the difference between you and your brother. Bless him.
I’m hoping he’s taking some leaves out of your book because you’re a great example of this.
He is the biggest fan of Telovital on the planet.
That’s amazing. I am so happy to hear that.
And he is doing everything right now. He just went through a long period of time where he didn’t, and I’m hoping to be able to reverse all those things.
But we need to continue our research. If people listening to this, if they want to see a product that is a lot stronger than even Telovital, that actually reverses all of our ageing in everybody’s age, they need to find funding to fund this research because that’s the only obstacle.
I mentioned at the beginning, funding is the only obstacle. We know exactly what to do. We just need the funding to get this research done. And people can help if, especially if they want to see their ageing reversed. That’s the way to do it.
And believe me, every penny that comes in here goes to research, okay, to get this research done.
I want to circle back just for a moment with what you mentioned before about a lot of false claims that are out there, because there are a lot of things that we’re seeing in the media and in social media around longevity, and there’s claims being made mostly about mice, and you’ve already touched on the fact that rodents are different to how we age. I’m wondering if you could speak to any of those that are out there at the moment. I’m sure you’re familiar with them.
Well, I have a policy of not talking about products, especially when I’m criticising them. So I’m not going to mention any names.
That’s fine.
But you can – and I’m the inventor of some of them. It’s just that the marketers have exaggerated them beyond galore.
So the analogy that I like is: if you fire your dumbest employees in your company, the average IQ of your company increases without anybody getting any smarter. The same is true as if you hired a bunch of geniuses for your company. The average IQ of your company increases without anybody getting any smarter.
Well, when people measure ageing, they usually do it in our blood. Whether they’re measuring telomere lengths or DNA methylation or IgG glycosylation or any of these biomarkers of ageing, they’re doing it from our blood.
So if you take a product that is at all toxic, even slightly toxic, it’s going to preferentially kill the cells in your blood that have the shortest telomeres. We don’t – every cell in your blood does not have the same telomeres. There’s a whole bell curve length of telomere lengths in your blood because it depends on how many times each cell has divided before it got to where it is. So you have this whole distribution.
It’s well published that cells with critically short telomeres – not necessarily even critical; the shorter your telomeres, the more sensitive the cell is to toxins. So if your product is at all toxic, it’s going to preferentially kill the cells in your blood with the shortest telomeres.
As a result, just like in this company, the average length of the telomeres in the cells that remain are going to be longer, but nobody got any lengthened. In fact, now those killed cells have to be replaced from cells in your bone marrow, and they’re replaced by cell division in bone marrow and other places – by the way. They get replaced by cell division and infiltrating the blood.
As a result of that cell division, your whole body got average telomere length shorter because of that cell division of producing more red blood cells to replace those toxic ones.
Same with if you have a product that induces any kind of immune reaction, an inflammatory response or something like that. That’s going to induce, again, cells in your blood – in your bone marrow, sorry, and elsewhere, lymph nodes, everything like that – to start dividing. Thymus, things, spleen, a whole bunch of different things – you’re going to induce cells to start dividing in those things I just mentioned.
Even if you’re 90 years old, you have cells in those organs that have long telomeres because they haven’t divided very many times. You’re inducing those cells to divide to mount an immune response. Those cells infiltrate the blood because that’s where your immune lymphatic system and the blood – where the cells move around to go fight diseases.
Again, you are adding cells to your blood that have longer telomeres, and so the average length of your telomeres is increasing, but it requires cell division. So don’t believe anybody’s data when they show you that before you take their product your telomeres are one length; after you take their products your telomeres are longer, because they’re only measuring them in blood and it does not mean they got lengthened. It actually means it’s accelerated your ageing.
So you’ve got to ask these companies, do they have any data demonstrating that their product induces production of telomerase in our cells? Because telomerase is the only way ever discovered to lengthen telomeres in normal human cells.
Wow.
And they’ll come, “Oh yeah, we have data,” and they’ll show again the before-and-after on the telomere length. This does not mean they got lengthened. There’s a redistribution of cells from the bone marrow and things like that, and the ageing actually got accelerated.
But I test everything. Okay. And I always say – and then I let all these companies know if their products produce telomerase or not. And the ones that do, actually, they put my name on their site. They say Bill Andrews’ seal of approval, Sierra Sciences’ seal of approval. If you don’t see that, walk away. Okay?
Because there’s no company that I haven’t told that to. Every single company that provides these things, and when I say their product doesn’t do it, they don’t say anything. They just keep selling their product. And I’m just surprised at how aggressive they get to try to promote the product and how upset they get when they see that I am speaking at a conference that they are trying to promote their product at.
I’ve had some of these people come to me and say, “You destroyed me,” because of my presentation. I wouldn’t talk about their products, but I would explain how to know. And then people would go to their booths and ask those questions. They couldn’t answer the questions, so people would walk away.
Oh, wow. Yeah. So how would somebody who does take Telovital – I mean, I know what my personal experience was, which was very fast – but for a woman, and I’m just saying women because everybody can take this and everybody should take this, but most of my audience are female.
But supporting – how long would you typically wait to see a response from taking something like Telovital by making these small, consistent daily choices? What’s the realistic thing that you would start to notice in, say, energy or skin or strength? Is it days, weeks, months? What’s the typical amount? I’m going to take one while you’re talking about it.
Let me just precede that with: inside of our body, we have cells of all different lengths. Okay? So we’re not just one telomere length throughout our body.
So when you have some organ or tissue or something like that that’s failing, even if you’re 30 years old, that organ tissue that’s failing probably has critically short telomeres. So how long will it take before you can re-lengthen those critically short telomeres to a length that will not cause the problems?
And that is pretty much, from talking to people – and this is all anecdotal; we have studies underway but no results yet – it’s about three weeks. Okay. So people are seeing vision getting better after three weeks. They’re seeing hair come back after three weeks. They’re seeing endurance improving after three weeks.
My biggest – you know, I talk about how I run these ultramarathons and I keep it fun and consistent. So I never go out to win, you know, I just go out to finish.
But there was a race in Salt Lake City on the island called Antelope Island, where suddenly I’m flying. Okay, I am so far ahead of everybody. I finished in ninth place overall out of like 200 runners. I’ve never been in the top 10. I never won my age group or nothing like that. And here I did this all.
And I’m thinking – and by the way, I’m passing all these fast runners that know me because I run more races than they even do. I used to hold the world record for the most races run in a year.
But I’d go running by them going like this, “I don’t know what’s going on.” But I was going to slow down. So I finished. I’m driving back to Reno, Nevada, from Salt Lake City to Reno, and all of a sudden it dawned on me. It’s because I’m lengthening my telomeres – my critically short telomeres that I have somewhere in my body. I don’t know where, but that’s what made the difference, and it affected my endurance. And so that was three weeks.
But I’ve talked to other athletes, things like that, that are taking products that lengthen telomeres, like Telovital. And there was also that previous product that isn’t for sale anymore because the profit margin wasn’t high enough.
But Telovital, every ingredient in Telovital is now more potent than the strongest ingredient in that product. And that product was even showing these three-week effects. So three weeks is what I say.
But it’s not going to work for everybody. It depends on why you’re having the problem. Is it because of telomere shortening? Yes, you’ll see it, I believe it. But not if it’s due to something else.
I love that it’s so unique to each person. And I think that’s one of the things that makes it – like, I often say, if I had to only take one thing, I would literally only take this because it’s something that helps everywhere in my system.
And I know for me, it happened in stages, my improvements. There was a specific improvement after a few weeks, and there was another improvement after a few months, and then once I hit it, like just before a year, there was another improvement. And I just feel stronger.
And recently I flew a trip that I would often do, but normally I’d have to have a lot of recovery time around it, and I noticed that I’m just so much more robust. My recovery time was minimal. And I really believe for me it was because of taking the Telovital. I don’t know why. I don’t know why the specifics of that is true, but I know that it’s a reality.
And so I’m going to ask, like, why should we take Telovital over a long period of time? Even slightly tongue in cheek, because it’s something that I’m going to continue to take. But in your opinion, why is it important to have long-term use of this product?
Okay. So we did a study a long time ago using gene therapy. And this study was really only in human cells grown in Petri dishes, but I think it’s for real. I mean, it’s going to be real in our bodies too.
We found that when we turned on the telomerase gene to different levels, telomeres got longer and longer and longer. So if you turn it to a low level, it got to a certain length and stopped, and then maintained at that level. If we had another cell line that produced even more telomerase, those telomeres stopped and maintained at a longer level, and then more.
So there’s a big correlation between how much telomerase you produce and the length. And let me just go on a tangent here. I believe that telomeres are actually rolled up like a ball of yarn and the tip of the telomere is in the middle of that ball of yarn. And so when the ball of yarn is big, it’s hard for telomerase to get access to that tip to lengthen.
So when you have short telomeres it’s easier to lengthen, but then all of a sudden the ball of yarn gets too big and the telomerase can’t get to that tip anymore, and so it stops at that length, but it maintains it at that length.
If you turn the telomerase gene off, then all the telomeres start shortening again. Okay?
So now, since we aren’t winning the tug-of-war yet with Telovital, but we will if we can get all the funding we need – and our plan has it, we can have something potent enough to lengthen all the telomeres in one to three years if we had sufficient funding.
But right now, it’s shortening. If you’re taking Telovital and you’re lengthening your critically short telomeres, they’re going to stop at a certain length. If you quit taking Telovital, they’re going to start shortening again, and they’re probably going to get back to critically short in a very quick, fast time. So you want to be constantly taking Telovital to maintain that length.
It’s also very likely – and because we’ve seen this in vitro, in Petri dishes – we don’t see the gradual increase, and they get lengthened right away. So when you take Telovital, you are probably lengthening your critically short telomeres right away to that certain length and then maintaining them. It just takes three weeks for your cells to undergo all the changes that you then see the benefits of having the longer telomeres.
Well, I believe that there’s a chance that Telovital re-lengthens your telomeres in hours, okay, maybe even minutes, okay, and then maintains it at that length.
But, so, you want to continually take Telovital to maintain that length. And, you know, it says on the bottle to take one capsule per day, but I started taking three capsules a day.
And the one capsule a day is based on in vitro studies because we found that the amount in that is what allows us to have the best telomere lengths in human cells in vitro, in a Petri dish. But that doesn’t take into account bioavailability, and we don’t even know what the – since each fraction that’s in there, a fraction of nutraceuticals, has 30,000 different molecules, we don’t know what the molecule is that’s actually turning the gene on. So we have no way of measuring its bioavailability, how well it’s getting into the blood.
But I have noticed that even though I’m exceeding what in vitro data says to three capsules a day, I am seeing way better benefits than I was with just one capsule a day. And it’s probably because bioavailability isn’t 100%. And now I’m getting up to where the stuff that gets into the blood is the amount that we’re seeing in our in vitro experiment.
So there’s all these kinds of things going on. But yeah, we want to – so I think three capsules a day is probably – I can’t really say that because it’s a claim and the bottle says take one capsule a day, but I feel like my taking three capsules a day is actually bringing me to that point of maintaining the telomeres at even a longer length than one capsule a day does.
Well, I just want to thank you because you’ve literally distilled your decades of research into a single capsule, into a single product. And Touchstone, who are the people who run this company, have very, very, very kindly given us a limited-time-only special offer so that you can feel this shift for yourself if you’re interested.
So if you head to https://bit.ly/TeloVital, and we will pop the link below and in my bio for your discount. And that’s going to be live and it’s only going to be for seven days.
And the discount is a huge one. So if you want to try this for yourself, you can get it for as little as $15 for first-time customers only who select the auto-ship at the checkout. And it comes with a full 30-day money-back guarantee. So every penny is protected.
And if it fails or it feels like it’s not the right fit for your body, I doubt that that’s ever going to be the case because I feel fantastic on it and everyone I’ve ever seen take this is the same. But there’s truly nothing for you to risk, is all I’m trying to say.
And I just want to thank you, Dr. Andrews, for your time and for your research into all of this. And I hope we can have many more conversations about this because it really is just such an exciting – not just concept – it’s an exciting reality that’s continuing to evolve, and that we have a privilege of being able to experience as well now in that single capsule.
So thank you again.
Yeah. You know what? The best is yet to come. I’m anxious to get this research continued faster so that we can get better next-generation Telovital. And believe me, after everything I’ve learned about Touchstone Essentials, I am not going to any other company to get these products on the market.
And my goal isn’t to get them on the market. That’s Touchstone Essentials. But my goal is to invent them, discover them, and then license them to Touchstone so that they can put them on the market.
But thank you. I enjoyed this. It was a lot of fun.
Me too. Thank you.
