Zombie Cells - Welcoming a Dignified Demise

In this podcast, Dr. Rodney and Karen tackle a fascinating topic - zombie cells. Cell death, often referred to as apoptosis, serves as a vital mechanism, enabling robust cells to supplant those that falter in efficiency. Moreover, it plays a crucial role in thwarting the insidious growth of cancer cells, safeguarding your precious lifespan.

As the sands of time slip through our fingers, these pesky cells multiply. They possess the power to weaken your immune defenses and emit signals like cytokines. This cascade of effects ushers in a decline in vitality, hastening the aging process by elevating the risk of infections and grave ailments.

The bottom line is that you want to get rid of them but not all at once. Listen to learn more about what you can do to take your Stance for Health.

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Transcript

Karen Wirth: Welcome to Stance for Health. I'm here with Dr. Rodney and we are so excited to talk about a topic you might not have heard about. It's called zombie cells. Now, before you start walking all stiff like a zombie, we want to explain a little bit what zombie cells are. In fact, you know, just a little bit of trivia here. My brother actually did special effects on the Walking Dead, and so the zombies have a special place in our family just because it was a great season for him and he got awards and everything for it. But that's not what we're talking about. Back to Stance for Health.

So, Doc, would you please explain what zombie cells are?

Dr. Rodney: Well, there's a cell process of division that multiplies itself.

And all cells that we. We used to think that all cells, or at least I did anyway, all cells have an infinite life. Knowing that they're zombie cells, but how, like how they got to be zombie cells was a mystery to me. It's that they stop dividing. In other words, they. They stop multiplying. Right?

But they don't die.

Right? So what?

Yeah, so what is that? And so then it begs the question, do they serve a purpose? And don't, don't rush to. To judgment that they must be bad if they're called zombie cells, because some of them are actually depending on what kind of  protein they are high in, can actually be helpful moving forward.

Karen Wirth: So if you basically have a rotten cell next to a healthy cell, I say rotten cell. A zombie cell. They could even infect that by emitting inflammatory chemicals, like putting a piece of moldy fruit in a bowl.

The interesting thing about cell death is it even has an elegant word.

Remind me that word.

Dr. Rodney: Apoptosis.

Karen Wirth: Apoptosis.

Dr. Rodney: Yeah.

Karen Wirth: So cell death is part of life autophagy.

Dr. Rodney: Your body's tending to eat itself the right way.

Karen Wirth: So the cell divides and multiplies between 40 and 60 times, and then it reaches a state of self destruction. It's important for health because it allows new and healthy cells to replace the older, less efficient ones.

And it also can prevent cancer cells from growing and eliminates other cells that can threaten survival. So there is a purpose for this apoptosis. But what happens then if you have too many of the zombie cells, you.

Dr. Rodney: Get inflammation, you get generic inflammation and you're more prone to common diseases.

Karen Wirth: One would think your immune response is dampened.

Dr. Rodney: Yeah. Probably stiffer, more painful.

Karen Wirth: So pro inflammatory signals. We heard this word a lot back during the shutdown. Cytokines.

Dr. Rodney: Right.

Karen Wirth: Chemokines and proteases.

Dr. Rodney: Yeah, proteases, Proteases.

Karen Wirth: Thank you. So cytokines, basically when something is. Is wrong, you fall down and you hurt your knee. So the cytokines, are they the ones that come to the rescue?

Dr. Rodney: Yeah. And all cytokines aren't created equal. Some cytokines are. You know, they're designed to speed up the healing process, but they do go haywire. We've talked about how they go haywire in other episodes before, but that's the, the key is that sometimes that doesn't resolve.

It doesn't know when to shut it off. So we need to pro resolve or find a way to help the body resolve. And that's what your primary reason for talking about this today is.

How do we get these zombie cells to get rid of the wrong ones and, and keep the good ones? Because we're going to have them.

Karen Wirth: Exactly. And many times these zombie cells, basically what they're doing is there can be at the root causes of arthritis, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's, bone loss and more. And especially because of that, wound healing also.

Tell us more about that.

Dr. Rodney: So there's a distinction between the types of. We'll call them what's, what's senescent.

Karen Wirth: Uh huh.

Dr. Rodney: Sense.

Karen Wirth: I'm just using zombie because it's easier to.

Dr. Rodney: I know but.

Karen Wirth: And it only has two syllables but.

Dr. Rodney: But in the, in the case where we'll call one of them, we'll call P.

P21 the zombie cell and P16 the senescent cell. They're both the same. Same thing, but one is more inflammatory than the other. And one of them helps you get over wounds faster, which is P16.

Karen Wirth: So if the zombie cells aren't good to have, why don't we just get rid of all of them then?

Dr. Rodney: Yeah, I mean that, that's like cutting off your nose despite your face. Really.

Karen Wirth: Can you explain that a little bit better? Why that would be.

Dr. Rodney: The cool thing is that you do have a built in way to, to impart healing to your body.

When a cell has reached its maturity and it has not.

Karen Wirth: It's finally like the bees. You know, they say the, the old bees, they just don't even go back to the hive. They just go out and, and, and die gracefully. So that's part of what we're looking.

Dr. Rodney: And. Or retire in a way.

Karen Wirth: Yeah, they retire. And when zombie cells were completely eliminated, they found that injuries actually healed much more slowly.

Dr. Rodney: Yes, that's it. So that's the, that's the P16 influence of that senescent cell versus the P21, which in general is considered a zombie cell.

Karen Wirth: The 16 one that you mentioned actually stimulates stem cells. So they start growing and start the repair process.

Dr. Rodney: I just got a really good metaphor.

So we go to this, this, this club, and this club happens to have all kinds of exercise equipment. It's got sauna, it's got whirlpool, it's got, it's got pool. It's basically for people over 50.

Karen Wirth: Right.

Dr. Rodney: 50 years. And there are a lot of people that are retired there, and there are a lot of people that are still working there. Think of it like this. If you've got somebody that's retired, that's, that's kind, considerate,

helpful,

positive. And then you have the, which is the P16. And then you have the P21s.

Oh, that are negative.

Karen Wirth: We've got a new saying for when we come out of the sauna. So in the sauna, there's lots of discussions and we go as often as possible because this is one of the ways you get rid of excess toxins, Right.

Is by sitting in the sauna 20 minutes. We try to do it three or four times a week, but there are some interesting discussions in there. And you have some P21s in there, don't you?

Dr. Rodney: Yeah. And I tell you, it's almost enough to try to figure out which days they come and then not what time.

Karen Wirth: Of day they come.

Dr. Rodney: However, it's, it's enough to, to make note. That's the metaphor for what we're talking about in a way.

Karen Wirth: How do zombie cells develop? What produces them?

Dr. Rodney: They're predominantly found from the sun. In other words, too much sun exposure.

We'll say omega 6 exposure, which is seed oil exposure. Therefore, obviously good nutrient deficiency or omega 3 deficiency to.

Karen Wirth: Or diet fast food, which has tons of the omega sixes that are heated up.

Dr. Rodney: Our bodies tend to rust anyway.

Karen Wirth: Yes.

Dr. Rodney: But when they're rusting faster than your body can. There's antioxidants, there's anti rust. When that's happening faster than your body can deal with it, that's when zombie p21 cells develop.

Karen Wirth: And, and you have those diseases like we talked about before. Smoking, even secondhand smoke can be part of it. Radiation, chemotherapy,

viruses, bacteria, just basically the things that we kind of hit it.

Dr. Rodney: You kind of threw a zinger in there. How's that? It's because in some cases we have things that are interventions that actually produce the very thing that we're trying to eliminate.

Yes, right. We're not bad mouthing chemotherapy. We're just saying it's a fact that does tend to increase oxidative stress. It does tend to increase exactly the predominance of P21.

Karen Wirth: Right.

So if we're looking at this, we've already said we don't want to get rid of them all at once because there are drugs that can remove all, or at least most of the zombie cells.

And that's what happens so often is that, okay?

research comes out with something like this isn't good for you, so we're going to eliminate all of it. And that's why they found that it actually hindered the healing.

What happens is when you eliminate all of them,

it's not good.

Dr. Rodney: Right.

Karen Wirth: And so let's look at what we want to do as for our health. And we are about functional medicine.

Dr. Rodney: And this is kind of a non sequitur in a way, but it's similar. It's a little bit like sometimes when before we found out what certain muscles of the spine were for, if we saw intrinsic muscles during surgery that seemed to get in the way of the surgery itself or didn't seem to serve a purpose.

The muscles known as paraspinal muscles are also sensory muscles that actually help power the nervous system. Right.

So wherever you. Which is oftentimes, which I often wonder, okay, are we to eliminate all things that are in the area that seem extraneous to us?

Right.

And that's what this is saying is it may not be extraneous altogether,

especially if you can delineate between the. Between the two, the. The sentient versus the zombie.

Karen Wirth: Yeah.

Dr. Rodney: Okay.

Karen Wirth: And so if you're taking the senolytics, which is the medicine, they'd say take breaks. But we want to use a holistic way of what can we do to get rid of zombie cells?

Because I think that's really, that's what.

Dr. Rodney: This boils down to. We're talking about making your Cells age gracefully or. And in the case of autophagy, where your body comes along and says, oh, it's time for you to go it billing being willing to give up and.

Karen Wirth: Also trust, give up the ghost to the cell ghost, your body will know and be intuitive. Trusting that your body knows which of These is a P16 and which is a P21, which is a good one and which one isn't.

Dr. Rodney: And that is so cool that you say that. Because exercise myokines actually help in cell to cell and organ to organ communication.

Karen Wirth: I love it.

Dr. Rodney: Meaning that when you exercise, your body has a greater, especially certain types of exercise. When it's moderate in, in the moderate realm, your body has a tendency then to better communicate with itself.

Karen Wirth: I love that.

Dr. Rodney: Me too.

Karen Wirth: Trusting our body that if we give it the right environment, the right fuel, the right movement, the right water, the right head space and a hope,

a feeling of hope that we can trust our body, that we're going to be okay, that our body will know what to do. And we know that this is true for us because the last five years we have completely changed the way that we eat.

And we are feeling so much better. It has been a reverse aging process for both of us.

And part of that is just eating real food, eliminating all processed foods, and making sure that we aren't eating the refined sugar and the refined fats.

And because we know what those are going to do to us, we know that they're going to have an effect and that I had never thought about it about zombie cells,

but it truly is something that we do. We do another thing.

Intermittent fasting. Talk about that, Doc.

Dr. Rodney: Well, intermittent fasting, it sounds like, you know, eat three days, skip a day,

eat for, you know, a solid two or three months and then fast for a week. No, that's not what intermittent fasting is. It's actually taking a 24 hour period and, and feeding only during a certain.

Karen Wirth: Amount of time in the 168 window.

Dr. Rodney: Basically, we skip the first meal, which is kind of a cheat because we're actually consuming fat, not eating fat. That sounds really gross.

Karen Wirth: You're right.

Dr. Rodney: Sounds like, hey, let's break some tallow.

Karen Wirth: Hey. Might not be bad.

Dr. Rodney: But the point is that we're not eating like sugar rich food before for breakfast or we're not eating protein rich meals. We're just having coffee with mct, which is easily converted straight into energy without using the pancreas and setting up the whole digestive tract, which means we don't actually eat until 11.

And so our next Time to eat, ideally would be 4, 30 or 5, but we sometimes wait, wait till 6, but then we don't do it again for the next day.

That's intermittent fasting. That's our version of it. Some actually close that gap even more.

Karen Wirth: And what's so good about it is it promotes autophagy. Tell us more about what is autophagy.

Dr. Rodney: Well, autophagy is something that we alluded to earlier. It's the body's tendency to properly eat or digest or eliminate cells of the P21 status that are dead, that no longer serve, that are taking up space without actually contributing.

Karen Wirth: And that's the same thing that exercise works on, too, is that getting rid of the cell breakdown and recycling the useful materials. And it helps with maintain healthy cells. So movement.

We've already talked about that.

Dr. Rodney: Yes. Myokines. Myokines meaning myo, meaning muscle.

Karen Wirth: And then there are certain supplements that are very good that help with this process. Quercetin, which is an antioxidant flavonoid.

And you can find it in vegetables and teas because it helps with inflammatory response.

Dr. Rodney: Resveratrol.

Karen Wirth: Yes. But it doesn't give you an excuse to go out and drink a bunch of wine because it would take like, a gallon. Yeah, a gallon to get the amount.

Dr. Rodney: Which, you know, kind of reverses the purpose. You know, excess alcohol is one of the reasons why we have P21 zombie cells.

Karen Wirth: There you go. Curcumin is very important. You find it in turmeric, and it so helps the body flush out these zombie cells and also helps with inflammatory issues.

Dr. Rodney: D3. Yeah, and not just any D. Right. We got to get the right kind of D.

And that is very simply getting at peak sunlight and then without the complication of really going into a ton of detail with the. With omega sixes, you can get good skin exposure of the sun without burning if you do it the right way.

And. And you get your vitamin D through sun exposure. But you can supplement, too.

Karen Wirth: And the laser,

a red light laser that stimulates cellular activity, actually increases tissue regeneration. So it penetrates into the cell, to the organelle, to the mitochondria, and it gives it the ability to be healed enough to get its energy.

So it's like that. You said get out in the sun. That's really important. We just want to get laser on people so they can get it in their system. Because just like the sun creates within the body the vitamin D, the laser also gets in there and begins to work on those cells.

Dr. Rodney: And I have a hunch and I'm not trying to steal any of your thunder.

Karen Wirth: Oh, steal away the.

Dr. Rodney: The hunch that I have. The theory that I have or the hypothesis that I have is that. Is that the laser is systemic, like vitamin D, and it's. It's actually helping convert.

Helping your body get more ATP made so that it can convert it to energy. Adp.

Karen Wirth: Yes.

Dr. Rodney: In the cell. So that will actually help normalize physiology.

Karen Wirth: Yes, it will.

Dr. Rodney: Which means it's helping the body do more of this and to know what we're talking about.

Karen Wirth: Which zombie cells? Yes.

Dr. Rodney: Yes.

Karen Wirth: That's not the word.

Dr. Rodney: No, I like it. I like it.

Karen Wirth: Apoptosis is a noun, and I just created a noun.

Dr. Rodney: Spoken like a researcher.

Karen Wirth: What the laser is doing, it promotes angiogenesis, and I had to look that word up. And that means improvement of blood flow. So think about it. If the laser is on those cells, there's a better blood flow, and it's also going to modulate the.

The cell death, the apoptosis. So that is all so exciting,

because I think the other thing, the final point is that we need to look forward to aging.

Dr. Rodney: Yeah.

Karen Wirth: How long do you want to live?

Dr. Rodney: How long? You're asking me?

Karen Wirth: Yes. I put you on the spot.

Dr. Rodney: I do. I want to live to 120 because I feel like it's achievable. And I also feel like it's something that we can do so gracefully and then just practically jump into the coffin or jump into the.

Karen Wirth: Jump into the bed, into the incinerator.

Dr. Rodney: I don't know.

Karen Wirth: You wake up in heaven and you don't have to leave a sick body. It is possible to just go to heaven like Moses did, and he's our example. That's part of Y 120.

Here's the thing. It's a lifestyle. Think about his life.

It's about all those things we talked about, but just that view towards aging. We have a health partner who's half that age and was feeling like her purpose for. For life would never be fulfilled.

And was. Was even taking antidepressants because of that. And now she's beginning to feel better. Not only that, but also to believe that the body has a chance to heal, but you've got to give it the right environment.

Dr. Rodney: Absolutely.

Karen Wirth: And let's keep those zombie cells, those. Those P16s going. Right.

Dr. Rodney: Yeah.

Karen Wirth: Because we do not want to have a zombie apocalypse in our bodies where they all just are gone.

And then, you know,

it just so. It makes me think about my dad saying, if you can't see two extremes. From where you're at, you're one of them.

Our bodies can heal themselves. This is the power of hope in healing. And so this has been another fun podcast, hasn't it? I love talking to this man. As you can tell, we've got a good relationship going.

We grow, we learn, and we want you to take your stance for health.

Dr. Rodney: Thanks for listening.