September 30, 2018

Preventing Chronic Disease

AMA, Alzheimer’s, podcast rec, and NAD rec

Spoiler alert: Not sure taking NAD precursors orally is doing much beyond enriching the companies that make them.

Read Time < 1 minute

Just finished recording an AMA (#3) and a podcast with Richard Isaacson this week. For the AMA, we broke out the camcorder, so we’ll see how the video turns out in addition to the audio. Lots of good questions addressed. (Submit questions here if you have one.)

Richard is an Alzheimer’s disease (AD) specialist and the director of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell. We covered the role of APOE in AD, why we think the prevalence of AD is higher in females, and what people can do to reduce the risk of AD, among other important topics. Expect this one out around October.

Killing some time in the airport I listened to Sam Harris’s Waking Up podcast with guest Jonathan Haidt (#137 – Safe Space). It is informative (and upsetting) on a number of levels. Here are few:

  • Approach to helping our kids be less fragile
  • How social media is crushing nuance
  • Tragedy of what happened to Mary Spellman
  • The growing hostility to free speech among young adults

Lastly, I read a paper (behind a paywall, unfortunately) in Cell by Josh Rabinowitz and colleagues on NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) flux that was well-done and revealing (and freakin’ long—took a few hours to read). This is 100% going to be a future podcast topic for folks interested in NAD, NR (nicotinamide riboside), and the supplements they show up in (Basis, Tru Niagen). Spoiler alert: Not sure taking NAD precursors orally is doing much beyond enriching the companies that make them.

– Peter

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  1. I’m completely confused about your belief regarding NAD precursors. In a recent podcast, I thought I heard that NAD/NAD precursors via IV is nonsense. Now “AMA, Alzheimer’s, podcast rec, and NAD rec”, but you seem to think that NAD generally has a mitochondrial benefit.

  2. I loved the podcast about zone 2 exercise and comparison of metabollic function in various populations. I would be curious where you would find the zone 2 threshold in persons who are not diabetic but not actively taking part in routine exercise to see how that population may be placed between the weekend warriors and the diabetics. Since they are likely lower in the mitochondria numbers due to lack of exercise, I would imagine they would be close to the diabetic population in how quickly they convert to glucose use?

  3. I am considering another 3-day fast to re-boot my immune system prior to returning to the office following isolation due to COVID-19. However, I read the attached article indicating greater sickness and cytokine storm in mice challenged by a viral mimic following a protocol of alternate day fasting. Since cytokine storm seems to play a key role in COVID-19, do you recommend avoiding a 3-day fast at this time? Thanks.
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6478699/

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