The Menopause Show With Sue Moxley – Leslie Kenny, What Is Spermadine And Why Its Good For Us

Hi, this is Sue Moxley. We are on Women's Radio Station. If you can go on to socials and look us up, we are Women's Radio Station, abbreviated to STN, and also on YouTube and Facebook, Women's Radio Station. This is The Menopause Show, and today my lovely guest is Leslie Kenny. Are you there, Leslie? Yes, I'm here, Sue. Could you tell our listeners what it is that you do? So I am co-founder of the Oxford Longevity Project, which aims to bring the latest breakthroughs in science to help you live a longer, healthier, stronger life. And also founder and CEO of Oxford Healthspan, which has brought to market some very interesting molecules to help you age better. That have been studied at the University of Oxford. Wow, okay, sounds amazing. You actually live in Oxford, don't you? Did you go to live there for that reason? No, I fell in love with someone who had been born and raised here and came to Oxford and fell in love with the town and community and just, uh, don't think I ever want to leave, really. Oh, it is a lovely place, isn't it? It's wonderful. Yeah, it's a— they call it Disneyland for academics. I'm not an academic, but I do, I do see the resemblance to Disneyland in that way. It's just a veritable feast with all of the ideas and thinkers around town. So it's really, really good fun and great to have a topic that some people might think isn't worthy of of studying, which is aging. I've talked to a lot of Brits who say very stoically, stiff upper lip, and keep calm and carry on, embrace it. And yes, I do embrace aging, but in fact, it's very exciting to see the science coming out of Oxford, which does seem to indicate that there are things we can do to slow aging. And those of us like myself, yourself who have already gone through the menopause. You know, for us, this is, this is an exciting, an exciting coincidence because it happens just as we're getting older and looking to have an even more vibrant and vital second half to our lives than we did in the first. And so it's very exciting to bring the science to the general public. I, I think it's extremely important, and in fact, I have I don't know if you know, but I've got an aesthetics clinic. If you was in here, the ladies would be all over you. Well, I'd be more than happy to talk to them about it. So yes, to me, or do I swallow it? That's what they'll be saying. So that's it. That's a bit frugal what I just said, because that's about the way we look. But you know, that matters to some people and can, you know, get them down You know, it does matter. And, and I, I actually wonder to what extent does the way we look on the outside act as a, as an indicator? Is it a bit of a dashboard for what is happening on the inside? It's not always the case, but it can be. In education, for example, even with young people— and you as an aesthetician will know this— if you have a young person who has severe acne, that isn't just something on the outside. That's an indication of inflammation on the inside. So there are these clues that the skin will yield and the hair and the nails because these are, these are, these are areas where cellular turnover is very rapid. Yeah. And another area of rapid cellular turnover is the lining of our gut. And as we know from Professor Tim Spector and the ZOE Project, The gut is very important to, to our health, um, not only when we're young, but as we age as well, because certain vitamins like the B vitamins, important in stress, neurotransmitters like serotonin, even insulin mimetics, they are manufactured in the gut if it's healthy. And the molecule that I've brought to market, spermidine, which has a really terrible name, It can also be manufactured in the gut biome too. So as long as, you know, if someone's skin is really good, chances are high that their gut, the lining of their gut, which is only one cell thick, is probably also good. And if it has good integrity, that is an indication that things are working well in the biome. Okay. So your, your spermidine, um, does this help with Sorry, well, I'll ask you about the, the name in a minute, but does it help with, with all sorts of things like gut issues? And as you know, does it help the whole body? It does. So spermidine is a really fascinating molecule because, as you can guess from the name, it does occur in high quantities in male sperm, and that is to to protect the DNA as it is transferred to the egg, among other things. But it actually occurs in extremely high quantities in the seeds of all plants, and they need that to help with the plant survival, the seed survival. But it's also in really high quantities in human breast milk. And the reason for that is when babies are, are just born, the lining of the gut is very immature and it needs to, it has these sort of holes and they need to tighten up. Think of it as those shopping bags that are like nets. Do you know those net shopping bags that you sometimes see in the South of France? Yeah. It's, your gut lining is like that and you need to actually get those cells to link together and tighten up. And again, as I mentioned, it's only one cell thick. Imagine a bag that's only one cell thick. It's very, very thin. You do need it to be impermeable so that you don't get undigested proteins or food particles that get into the bloodstream where the body says, hey, that shouldn't be in my bloodstream. And it will start to attack it. And sometimes— This is a leaky gut then. That's leaky gut. Yes. Absolutely, you got it. And sometimes those proteins that get into our bloodstream look similar to the proteins on our thyroid, in our joints, in our skin, and give rise to autoimmune attacks such as rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto's thyroiditis, or psoriasis, eczema, these types of things. So it's really important to have that gut lining tighten up and when a mother breastfeeds her baby, the spermidine in the breast milk actually does that. It tightens up those, those junctions. And at the same time, it activates the immune cells. Probably people don't know this, but we have immune cells in our gut lining. And it kind of makes sense if you think you're introducing all these foreign objects into your body all the time, and the immune system is there to protect us. So it mounts a response based on the things that are introduced into the gut. And we know from studies done in Spain that mothers who breastfeed their babies, and we, we've all heard this, all of us who are mothers who breastfed ourselves, mothers who have breastfed have children who have lower incidence of allergies. And the reason for that is that spermidine has activated those immune cells that line the gut. Wow. So it's really important for babies and it also helps them grow. And when, when we're babies, we can actually manufacture spermidine in our tissues, in our gut biome, and then we get it from our moms from, from mother's milk. But we can also get it from food, from plants in particular. Now, as we get older, just like so many other things like testosterone, progesterone, estrogen, melatonin. All these production of all these things in our tissues just begins to decline, and those of us who've gone through menopause know that in some cases it falls off a cliff. Yeah. So spermidine production goes down as we get older, and it can also go down at an earlier stage if we expose the gut to broad-spectrum antibiotics, which will kill off the healthy bacteria in the gut that are capable of manufacturing these life-giving substances, whether they're B vitamins, serotonin, insulin mimetics, or spermidine. So as we age, it's really important to then compensate for that decrease in our tissue production and that possible decline in our gut production due to exposure to antibiotics by getting more from our food. And it won't surprise you or your listeners to know that anything fermented will have spermidine in it, right? And that, uh, that plants are good for us. We've all heard about how the Mediterranean diet is great for us. Plants are good for us. Things like shiitake mushrooms, peas. So the Scots with their mushy peas, they're on to something good there because that has a lot of spermidine. So you're a mushy pea fan? I'm a big pea fan, yeah, I love peas. Perfect, perfect, perfect. So mushrooms, peas, and what else was it? Well, you, like I said, fermented foods, and that extends to things like cheese. Interestingly enough, so cheese is a bit of a double-edged sword because some people can't eat it without, you know, they may have difficulty, too much cholesterol. Those people who, there are some parts of the population who will take in cheese and if they are what we call ApoE4, if they are more predisposed to Alzheimer's, that can be bad. But if you are not, then cheese would be a good source. And you can also get it from fermented soy. So in Japan, there is a delicacy called natto, N-A-T-T-O, and natto is full of spermidine. And it has a very particular smell. It has a very particular mouthfeel. I always say it's the Japanese equivalent of Stilton cheese. You know, either you love it or you don't. And if you've grown up with Stilton, then it's not a problem. But if you haven't, you might think, what? Yeah, exactly. It might be difficult. Yeah. I remember going to just just off the cuff here, going to a hotel in France. I was only young, about 21 or something, and I opened the little mini fridge and there was all these different cheeses and they were like tiny little pieces and I literally opened one, popped it in my mouth and it was the most disgusting thing I've ever tasted in my life. And that has stuck with me all those years. So there's cheeses out there that are Yeah, vile. So that probably had spermidine in it. So spermidine— wow, that's bad— it's a special class of, um, it's made from amino acids, and collagen is probably the most famous amino acid to your listeners. So it's a class called a polyamine, and so it's got that amine word in there like amino acid. And the other polyamines that it comes with in nature are spermine and putrescine. And putrescine, as you can guess from the name, lends that putrid smell to the cheese you just described. So bananas have very high levels, ripe bananas have very high levels of putrescine, and it's a precursor to, or a building block to spermidine and spermine, but it's also a sign that things are off and you don't necessarily want a ton of it. Okay. Is there a way to test if you're low in spermidine? Is there a way to test? Not really. So it's actually, there is, but it's not easy. You really need to be in a lab and I was I was in Japan a couple, maybe a month and a half ago, and met up with probably the world's leading scientific researcher on cellular renewal. And we talked about exactly this. How do we measure this? I want it in my home. I want one of those home test kits like you get for vitamin D, right? Wouldn't that be great? And unfortunately, we're just not there yet. So at some point, I'm sure in the next decade it will come, but we've just— sadly, we, we aren't there yet. We couldn't get the specificity that we need. It just wouldn't be reliable if we tried right now. Okay, so if you was to take supplements, like, like you have a supplement, can you overdose on them? Do you think you can have too much, or can you never have too much? Yes, it is possible to have too much, and, and that's That's where the European Food Safety Authority has come in, and they have said that you shouldn't take more than 6 milligrams of food-derived supplemental spermidine per day. Right. There are synthetics out there on the market, and they haven't been tested in humans yet, so we don't know whether they are safe or effective. It's a little bit like selenomide. But because supplements are unregulated, nobody's really taken a stand there. And I just have steered clear of the synthetics. It's a little bit like, you know, for me, the difference between bioidentical hormone replacement therapy and, you know, the old Premarin version. What do you think about that, by the way? What do I think about bioidentical HRT? Versus HRT. Yeah, I'm really interested to know what you think about that. Well, definitely, definitely prefer it. Yeah. Let me just explain to the listeners, just in case there's someone that doesn't know, bioidentical hormones, which I'm on myself, actually, they are basically— we do it, we do a blood test or saliva test or something and we see the levels of our hormones and then we have a compound made up for ourselves, that's especially for us. So like bespoke hormones, that's, that's bioidentical. Well, that's not actually the bioidentical hormone, but that's how we, we measure to get what we need. So maybe you could tell me what you think. Personally, I am a big advocate of BHRT. Yeah, it's very protective of women's brains, hearts, and bones. And women have twice the likelihood of getting Alzheimer's and dementia than men do. Some researchers have linked it back to midlife lack of sleep. You know, right before the menopause, our levels of progesterone decline, and we need progesterone to get really good sleep. And it's just at that time when we are dealing with stroppy teenagers. Yeah. And we might have elderly parents who need our help, and we have household duties, and we may have a job as well. And it's all of these responsibilities that we continue to place on our shoulders that then increase another hormone called cortisol. And cortisol, we do need some. It allows us to stand up and basically face challenges. It's part of our fight, flight, or freeze response. But if it's chronically elevated, that leads to inflammation. But cortisol is importantly made out of progesterone. So if we are constantly stressed and we have a lot of cortisol, we rob our bodies of our already dwindling supplies of progesterone. That happens as we go towards menopause. And then guess what? We're exhausted at night. We're desperate for sleep, but we can't sleep. And then you create this, you know, this sort of spiral where you become even more tired in the morning and have more sugar. Morning. Easy that we can't sleep because of the cortisol flowing around our bodies. Yes, it's cortisol. It's cortisol instead of progesterone. Yeah. And, um, you know, another thing that raises cortisol is looking at the blue light that your mobile phone will emit at night or staying up late on, on a laptop or any kind of blue light emitting digital device. Um, that raises cortisol and our body produces cortisol in response to the blue spectrum light in sunlight. So once the sun rises, our body says, "Right, you better be alert because there could be, there could be a lion or a tiger out there." So it elevates cortisol in the morning so we can face whatever danger might be there, whether it's, you know, an angry elephant or an angry boss or a stroppy teenager. An angry husband. An angry husband, that's right, that's right. And then around 4 o'clock, a little timer goes off and says, "Start making melatonin." And if we, if we continue to expose our eyes to blue light instead of red light, which is what dusk would be like, then the body continues to think that it's still daylight, and there might still be a tiger chasing after us. So it says, "Oh, daylight still, that means tigers. Okay, keep the cortisol up." And the longer we keep the cortisol up, the less, you know, the less chance we have of making melatonin, but we also eat up our progesterone stores. And progesterone is so important for sleep. The hours between 10 PM and 2 AM are when we get a very special kind of sleep. It's called deep sleep. And I'm sure all your listeners know about the lymphatic system because we are always trying to, you know, skin brush and do things there to— get rid of the cellulite— stimulate. Yep, to get rid of the cellulite. Exactly. Well, guess what? We have a kind of cellulite in our brains too. And these tau tangles and beta amyloids, they need to be flushed out. And we have a system in there, not the lymphatic system, but the glymphatic system. So with a G in front. And the glymphatic system, discovered by a woman, by the way, that only goes into action when we have deep sleep. So it is those hours between 10 and 2. It's very important for clearing out waste. Literally, the compartments of the brain, they shrink, and cerebral spinal fluid flows between these different compartments of the brain, washing out all of these, all of this rubbish, basically. And if we don't get that kind of deep sleep, Some scientists believe that this sets us women up for an increased chance of Alzheimer's and dementia 20 years later. Wow. So very, very important, HRT, in my opinion, to continue to get good sleep. Dr. Dale Bredesen is a really famous professor at UCLA Med School in Los Angeles, where I'm from. He is the only person who's been able to document in a scientific journal the reversal of Alzheimer's, its early stage. He, you know, has said to me privately that he thinks all women should be on it. Now, there are definitely going to be listeners who have a history of breast cancer or ovarian cancer, uterine, cancer in their families and they have been told not to go on to HRT. Yeah. Completely understand that. Yeah. There are— it is worth knowing, and not saying that this is any kind of advice at all, you should always get advice from your medical doctor, but just speaking to you as a friend, Sue, I would want you to know that there are ways to mitigate the risk of the, you know, the estradiol that we take in HRT from turning into the cancer-causing estrogen. And there are things that, that you can take, other supplements that act as detoxifiers, and, you know, I've mentioned them before. Glutathione is one of my favorites. It's the body's master antioxidant, And it helps with, it helps with gray hair even. And how do they take that, or where does that come from? Well, you can get glutathione in, in things like avocados. Okay. And, you know, our food, any kind of sulfur-rich vegetable will be good for that. So broccoli, cauliflower, any leafy green. So we're told to have leafy greens, but, you know, nobody told me, oh, this might help you with your gray hair. If somebody had said that earlier, I might have taken more notice, right? So these have important detoxifying molecules in them. So it's not just glutathione. N-acetylcysteine is another one, calcium D-glucarate, and one called DIM, D-I-M. But you need to speak to your, you know, to your healthcare practitioner about these, but there are things that can be done. And HRT also, though, has, has, it has heart protective effects. And cardiovascular disease, we women, we experience it in a very different way to men, and we don't have necessarily the same the same shoulder pain that, you know, classically men are told, "Oh, if you get shoulder pain, you know, in your left shoulder, then you know you're about to have a heart attack." It can manifest differently in women, and it is a big killer of women. And then bone health, osteoporosis, is a very big problem for women, and HRT is linked with, with helping there. Spermidine has a role too in helping in supporting bone health though as well. And there have been some interesting studies done in mice who had their ovaries taken out. So they were basically thrown into menopause. And I do feel really sorry for, you know, it's basically taking Minnie Mouse, like a couple of Minnie Mouses, taking their ovaries out, forcing them into menopause. Sad. I don't know why I'm laughing. It's really sad. Yeah. And, and then, you know, they have a control group and they can see the control group gets osteoporosis. And then they have the, the treatment group and they give the treatment group high spermidine content chow. And that group has less osteoporosis, much less than the, than the other. Now that's a mouse study. It's not a human study. But there was a human study done in Korea, and it does seem to— it does seem to help with bone health in women post-menopause. So those are, you know, I would always recommend HRT, assuming that your doctor feels you're a good candidate for it. And then, you know, a spermidine-rich diet, and then if necessary, supplementation to support the body in protecting against osteoporosis. Oh, that was weird. I was just going to say to you, what do you, you know, what do you recommend? And then you just kind of recommended everything. It's like, what went into your head? Just going back to what you said about sleep, you know, the hours that are important are between 10 and 2. Well, if it's just not possible to sleep those hours, you know, say you have a job that's, you know, night work or something like that, or you can't get to bed till 12. I'm just curious, I mean, is it those particular hours or is it just the body clock? So you've touched on a few important concepts. One is, is deep sleep ring-fenced in particular hours? And the other is the circadian clock, so the body's clock. So yes, we do. The body has its own internal clock known as the circadian clock, circadian rhythm. It started— it starts every single morning when you expose your eyes to sunlight. And here at the University of Oxford, we have a professor, Russell Foster, who discovered the photoreceptors in the eye that have nothing to do with sight. They're only there to identify whether there's light or dark. It's so interesting, right? And that is— it acts like a— it's like a timer, you know, like a kitchen timer, and says, right, okay, we're gonna start 8 hours until we need to start producing melatonin to get ready for sleep. So say 8 o'clock, you expose yourself to daylight, that little kitchen timer goes on, and you have cortisol produced in the body in response to the light. 4 o'clock, as dusk falls, your body wants to produce melatonin for sleep and doesn't want to use up your progesterone to make more cortisol. You may, however, have to override it. Let's say let's say that you work in a supermarket, at a 24-hour supermarket, and you're exposed to fluorescent lights, which have very high blue light content. That is going to override your little kitchen timer and going to say, "Oh no, we're just going to keep resetting, resetting, resetting," and you keep prolonging, pushing off production of melatonin. And you keep robbing your body of progesterone to make more of that cortisol, and that will leave you chronically inflamed. So basically you're saying that it's really unfortunate for people that, you know, don't kind of live in the daylight hours. Um, yeah, yeah, it's really unfortunate. Well, how about people in Iceland or something where they get you know, 2 hours of daylight or a day or something? How do they get on? Well, our natural inclination is to then hibernate, right? We'd sleep more. And then look at the skin, the skin tone of those individuals. They're very fair, very pale, so that they can better take in any light at all. And that's— that's important. It's important for vitamin D production as well, which is important for the immune system. So there are ways that the body has adapted from an evolutionary standpoint to better adapt to lower light so that, you know, people who are very fair in Scandinavia or Ireland, of course here in the UK as well. But generally, we do want to get deep sleep in that window. And people who do not— who actually work, do shift work, and are not in rhythm with the light-dark clock that our body wants to be in sync with, with. They do have higher incidence of diabetes. They do have higher incidence of cancer. Uh, really, they should be paid a lot more because it is a risk to your health. Yeah. And, uh, you know, they've done studies in university students, so these are young people, not people our age or older, and university students who are starved of sleep, uh, for just a few days become diabetic. Wow. So it's really important to get sleep and, uh, to not rob Peter to pay Paul. And that's what happens if you constantly expose yourself to this blue spectrum light and you make cortisol and you rob your progesterone stores. So it just makes supplementation with progesterone as we get older more important for us women because of the fact that we need to get our, we need to get our deep sleep. Now, one interesting thing about spermidine is that it appears to help time shift. And, you know, we haven't done a clinical trial in humans, but there have been studies in— there have been studies in mice and there have been studies in cells. And we can see that you can influence some of these— you can influence the circadian clock by taking spermidine right before bed. And so we've had customers who have— they wear these, you know, they wear Fitbits or Oura Rings, these wearable tracking devices that are, you know, they're everywhere now. And they will measure your deep sleep window. And we had a woman named Zora Benhamou in Spain. She's a gerontologist and she was doing a course in Los Angeles. And this was during COVID And the lectures began at midnight and went on until 3:00 AM. And she she was worried that she wouldn't get her deep sleep. But she took, um, Primidine, our spermidine product, right before she went to bed. And she could show that over the 3-week course that that class went on, she always consistently got 2 hours of deep sleep throughout, which is a strange thing and really shouldn't happen. So it's something that I would love to follow up with, with a clinical you know, with some clinical trials just to, just to see if in fact this can be done. Because that would be, that would be quite transformative for everything from jet lag to shift work, right? Oh, it would, absolutely. I mean, yeah, I can't— I, I haven't got a Fitbit at the moment, but I would look at my sleep on my Fitbit, and my, my deep sleep was always quite short, you know, like sometimes just 20 minutes or, you know, never more than an hour. It doesn't sound like that's enough, really. Well, it would be— my rule of thumb, and bear in mind that the devices have variants in how they measure, and I know there have been studies done at Stanford on this to determine which one is sort of better. They're not quite as precise as they ought to be, but they're good proxies. Um, I like to get 90 minutes of deep sleep a night. I think that's, that's good. And an hour and a half. Yeah. And same with, same with rapid eye movement or REM sleep, which is when we dream and consolidate all the learning that we had the day before. Yeah. You know, come up with creative solutions to stroppy teenagers. Yeah. I said that's when all the weird stuff happens in the REM. Exactly, exactly. That's usually when I'm flying or, you know, I'm on another planet or something. Yeah, that's when you accidentally hit your husband in the face because you're having wild dreams and stuff, that kind of thing. But, um, and not those kind of wild dreams either. So, um, you're revealing too much. Yeah, I know, sorry. That's— you can't help it. So you, you had some illnesses yourself, didn't you? And you kind of cured yourself with, with this Spermidine, is that correct? Or was it other product, you know, was it other healthy eating or something? That it was a combination, right? It was a combination of things. So, so I'm 58 now, and at age 39 I was diagnosed diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. And I went to the doctor because I just felt pain in my hands when I turned faucets or tried to turn doorknobs or use scissors. I just couldn't do it anymore. It was really beginning to have an impact on my quality of life. Keyboard, of course, too, that was, that was really hard to use. And, and so I went to the doctor saying it feels like what I imagine arthritis would be. Initially I thought it was carpal tunnel, but then it just went to all of my fingers. So she did the test and, uh, normally you get a call from the nurse to say, your results are back, they're fine, you're done for a year, right? Yeah. So I get the call and instead of the nurse, I get the doctor who says, Can you please come in? I need to have a word with you, which is never good. Yeah. So I go in and she says, well, you were right, gold star. You were right. You got, you've got rheumatoid arthritis. And I said, okay, so what do I do for that? She gave me a box of syringes with little diabetic needles on them and said, we'll teach you how to inject yourself, but these are prefilled. Syringes and you, you've got to inject yourself to suppress your immune system. 'Cause it's really overactive. And I said, isn't an overactive immune system a good thing? Like, doesn't this help fight cancer? Yeah. And she said, no, actually what's happening is your body is, it's gone, your immune cells have gone rogue and they're basically attacking your joints. And I said, okay, well, I'll take these immune suppressants. And then she said, but unfortunately you have something else and you're, and she mentioned a bunch of technical words, cytokines, tumor necrosis alpha, C-reactive protein, technical words that I did not understand. She said, these are all elevated, they're sky high and you have lupus. I had no idea what that was. I know, Sue, you were diagnosed with lupus when you were young. Oh, absolutely crazy that was. It was because to this day I don't really understand what happened. I went to— I had something wrong with my back and I went to a physiotherapist and he said to me, you've got a butterfly rash on your face. 'Which I did, but I just thought it was— I don't know, maybe I was— because it used to get worse if I had alcohol or hot food.' And he said, 'Maybe you should go and get tested because that can be a sign of things.' And yes, so I did. I went and had blood tests and yes, they said I had lupus, but it was very mild. And I just needed to keep an eye on it. And if I decided I wanted to get pregnant, I should let them know because it can be a problem in pregnancy. And I think I said to you, I didn't really know how serious it can be because I really used to look at Google in those days. I was just so terrified. And you know, now if you— if someone says something, you're straight on the computer computer, aren't you? And you've got all this, you know, information. Whereas then I didn't really know what lupus was. They told me not to drink fresh orange juice, which was a bizarre thing. It used to be my favorite. I stopped eating it. I think they told me to stop eating cheese as well. And then 6 months later— yeah, 6 months later, I went for another blood test and my blood came back normal. So whatever. You were very fortunate. That's wonderful news. Yeah. So is that possible for it just to right itself like that? I suppose it must be. Happened to me. Well, I would say in your case, yes. I certainly hoped that I had anything from a false positive to a mild case, but the doctor told me that I didn't have a mild case, unfortunately. And that's when she told me about these chemical, these biomarkers, which I had never heard of before and could hardly pronounce and said that these were indicators of an immune system gone rogue. And she said, "There's no cure for this." To which I said, one, could this be a false positive? And two, you know, this is really inconvenient because I'm doing my fifth IVF right now and I'm using donor eggs. Oh. And I really can't afford to do this right now. It's been very hard to line everything up. And, um, and she, she looked at me and she said, I wouldn't bother. You have a good 5 years left. And That was— would you have met? So, wouldn't bother, wouldn't bother with the IVF. She said, I wouldn't bother with the IVF. We have a good 5 years left. I mean, it was implied she meant the IVF. And so that, I think, when a person in a position of authority tells you something, you can either believe it or you can be a bit counterculture like me. You can rebel against it and question it. And there's a great writer in the US, a writer of self-help books, Brené Brown, and she's got this, this question you're always to ask yourself when somebody presents you with something negative, which is is that really true? And that's what I, what I said to the, you know, what I said to myself, is that really true? Is it really true? Do I really have only this much time left? And is it really true that there's nothing that can be done for this? So I started researching and I came across a, at that time, relatively novel treatment called intravenous immunoglobulin. It's a lot of words. Its short name is IVIG, I-V-I-G, and they were transfusions or, you know, IVs. I did 2 of them. They cost about $12,000 each. And what they do is they, instead of suppressing the immune system, they balance it. Okay. Yeah. At the same time that I did this, I completely changed my diet. I got rid of any kind of immune triggers, no dairy, no gluten. I was making my own almond milk, you know, I was eating tons of plants, which will have had a lot of spermidine, and definitely no alcohol, definitely no smoking, no drugs. No nothing, clean living, optimizing sleep, getting movement in, just the basics, right? Yeah. And when I went back, similar to you, it was within 6 months, we tested it again and the doctor said, well, look at that, you don't have this anymore. Not only did I not have lupus, but I didn't have the RA. Now that was a much bigger deal because I'd already been put on these horrible drugs, which they were horrible for me. I'm a Southern California, and we are in bikinis all the time. And when you have to inject your belly, you get track marks, you get these bruises, and they hurt, um, they feel unnatural, you begin to resent them, they look bad, and I'm not past a little bit of vanity, so I was thrilled that I didn't have to do this. But I've calculated that the amount of money I've to save myself or my insurer from paying, because it's $5,000 US for immune suppressants like Humira or Enbrel that I was on. That's, you know, it was over $1 million US that I would've spent or my insurer would've spent. And it was $24,000 to do the IVIG. So I think that my takeaway was we patients, have a lot more power than we give ourselves credit for. We can do a lot. We do. We need to just try. Even a little something is better than nothing. I'll take any comparative gain, but we need to, we need to realize that our bodies are capable of healing, whether it's spontaneous as it was in your case, or whether it is supported by diet and lifestyle changes or a novel therapy like intravenous immunoglobulin. There are so many things that the body is capable of, and we, we must explore them together with our doctors, or we must at least try to meet our doctors halfway. So that was my takeaway. Absolutely right. It isn't, it isn't just, you know, one. I mean, for example, I kind of studied, um, CBD oil for a while, and you know, you hear, you hear wonderful things about that, and it can be very negative as well. People are— they get all the wrong impression of it, thinking, are you going to be high? Or— but you know, it's— there's alternatives out there, and I think you're absolutely right, you should explore them and you know, have an open mind to other things. Because, well, like, like what happened to you, that is so amazing. And me, my body just decided to right itself. They were like, they couldn't believe it. Well, whatever you had, because obviously the, the white cells and the red cells, it's all to do with them fighting each other, isn't it? I think, yes. And what happened, it's now right itself. There, there is a doctor at Harvard who has written a book on cases of spontaneous healing, which is incredible. Obviously it doesn't happen in everyone, but the fact that it exists at all is an indication of the body's desire to heal. It's my theory that it is much easier for for the body to be in balance, to be at its balance point, than to be out of balance and inflamed or ill. The body will always try to get back to that, that center point, that place of balance where everything is working optimally. As we get older, there are things we need to do to help it, and that could be the basics, like making sure we get into bed at a decent hour, getting some movement, having a community of good people around us, you know, no toxic thoughts and people, good food. But also there are things that the body will need that it will have trouble making. These can range from hormones to amino acids, to things like spermidine. So we just need to do a little bit of research, again always working with our doctors, and just try to, to assist the body do what it already innately knows how to do, but just helps it stay in balance. Yeah, well, I'm definitely not going to look at my mobile tonight in bed. Because you've completely— Bravo! No, I'm serious. I'm like, now all I can think of is blue light, blue light. You know, this is not good. And you know, my best friend always used to say to me, don't look at your mobile before you go to bed because you think, I'll just have one little look, and then, and then you start reading your emails and it's like midnight. And you shouldn't be doing that, should you? You really shouldn't. No. It's the thin edge of the wedge, and any of us who are moms, we see it in our children. It's just, it's a rabbit hole, you know. You look, you take a little peek, and then 2 hours later you sort of think, oh, what just happened? What happened? Where did that time go? I just wasted it looking at Daft videos or something. But, um, so did you have your children in the end? Did you have— I did. I adopted And because I just couldn't deal with the uncertainty, you know, you go through 5 IVFs, you do donor eggs, you're sort of, you've had it. And financially you've had it too. Yeah. And, and then when I was 43, I fell pregnant naturally. Wow. And that was actually when they realized, a doctor in the UK realized that I had not only had rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, but I had previously had Hashimoto's and I had destroyed my thyroid. I had almost no thyroid left. And as a result, if you don't have enough thyroid hormone, you're going to have a heck of a time getting pregnant. And if you get pregnant, you're very unlikely to be able to maintain that pregnancy. You may suffer miscarriage upon miscarriage. And if you do carry full term, there is a very high chance there will be something neurologically wrong with the baby. So, uh, I was very grateful to have found that doctor. He said, in a couple of, you know, in a couple of weeks, you're going to be— your hormones are going to be perfect again. If you don't want any more kids, take precautions. I laughed, didn't take precautions, and boom, 3 weeks later, pregnant. Wow. I think the body wants to be balanced. Yeah, that's amazing. And that was when you was 43? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I delivered when she was— when I was 43. So yeah, and I think that's a whole nother topic, and we're kind of at the end of time, but I do feel like thyroid health in Great Britain could be better. I do. Could— we could be better. Yeah. And this— we don't have selenium in the soil. That's what allows us to convert the base hormone, which is called T4. It's like a Lego, and it helps it turn it into the bioactive thyroid hormone T3, which is basically like a Lego car. We need selenium, and there is no selenium in Great Britain. In the soil. So if we buy local, if we eat everything local, we get no selenium. It's very hard to make the conversion. And for some of us, it's really difficult to make that conversion genetically. And I have that genetic defect, um, which means I don't convert easily. And so I need to get both thyroid hormones. That's another thing that it would be a whole nother episode, but thyroid hormone super important for women to feel vibrant and vital after menopause because it's one of those hormones that will fall off a cliff as well. And it leads to brain fog. It governs thyroid hormones, govern metabolism, so it can lead to weight gain, you know, midlife muffin top, and it can lead to hair loss. It can lead to premature hair graying. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think you're right. Um, I just think, you know, the world's so fast and crazy and there's so much going on that we neglect our health, and it should be our number one priority, really, shouldn't it? Because without it, we, we have nothing, or we're just going to struggle every day. So yeah, it's good that you're putting it out there about how important it is to look after yourself, and amazing that that you healed yourself? I mean, well, do you think it was the lifestyle that changed, or do you think it was that infusion that you had that cured? I think it was both. I think it was both. And, you know, the studies on intravenous immunoglobulin are pretty compelling with autoimmune conditions. And it's just doctors and patients don't know about it, even though it's been around for over 20 years. Um, has even been used in cases of, uh, in some countries it's used for, for mental health conditions like bipolar psychosis, because some people say that that is a kind of autoimmune disease where you have these immune these sort of immune storms in the brain. So yeah, I do credit it. So again, I'm certainly not against modern medicine. I'm for it. But I also think that our food is more powerful than we give it credit for. And also our bodies, if we again can just Give them the right environment and the building blocks they need to make those substances and the gut biome, right? It's a little pharmacy inside of us. If we just feed it with fiber, the right kind of fiber and a variety of fiber, it will start producing the most amazing vitamins and neurotransmitters and even insulin mimetics and spermidine for us. Wow. Okay, well, Leslie, where can, um, could you tell everyone where you can get your products, um, your supplements? How do they get them if they would want to try spermidine for their health? Sure. Um, yes, you can get it just where Carol Vorderman gets it, uh, OxfordHealthSpan.com. So that's span at the end, just like the span of a bridge. And Um, and then— which is good, so— yeah, she loves it, which is nice. Um, and the, the other thing I would say for people who are looking for more information is, um, I'm co-founder of the Oxford Longevity Project, which is a nonprofit to really just get some of these breakthrough science ideas out to the lay public and to kind of break it down into Vocabulary that everybody can understand. And we've got a conference coming up in Oxford at Keble College, one of the Oxford colleges, on Saturday the 8th of July. It's an all-day conference and you can get tickets. It's on Eventbrite. It's called the Smart Aging Summit. And, you know, we'll have celebrity doctors there talking about what celebrities like Carol and others are doing to look good as they get older. We've got, you know, doctor talking about Ozempic, you know, some of these weight loss drugs that are now in the news. And we've got some great examples of older people. Sir Christopher Ball, who's 87 and who's still running on a regular basis, but also is a Guinness World Record holder for most marathons run in the shortest days after the age of 70. So it's going to be a fun, fun full day. So people can come to that. Okay. And then if not, could you just say your website again? Because I think I might have talked over you. So no problem. That's Oxford Healthspan, S-P-A-N at the end, OxfordHealthspan.com. And we sell primidine, spermidine supplements there. Okay, you was going to tell me before we go how that was called. Why is it called spermidine? So, so Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who was a Dutch, a 17th century Dutch biologist, discovered how to use, how to polish glass to make a microscope. And in his little study, he thought, "Ah, this is great. This, you know, magnifies everything. What can I put under there?" And after he was done putting hair, nails, fabric underneath, like any boy, what did he decide to put under there? Well, I'll just put my bodily fluids there. Naturally. Naturally. Boys and their toys. He naturally put semen some, uh, you know, some ejaculate, and when it dried, he noticed that there were crystals there, and he didn't know what they were called, but he decided to call them spermine. And then a few hundred years later, another crystal was discovered, and it was called spermidine. So even though it occurs in high quantities in plants and high quantities in human breast milk, Um, nobody else got credit but the boys and their toys. Well, at least you don't forget it, I suppose. I mean, it's kind of unforgettable, but hard for some people to say. Yeah, yeah, it is a bit, it's a bit strange, but, um, I'm okay. I don't mind. It sticks in my mind now, so I get it. But, um, well, it's been lovely to, to talk to you, uh, Leslie. And do you miss America? Sometimes. I, I'm very fond of Great Britain though, and now I'm a naturalized citizen here. I think they— there's so much good about Great Britain, and in particular I appreciate that there are no guns. Yes, no school shootings, which there are almost daily school shootings in the U.S., so I'm very, very happy Happy to be here. I miss the sunshine, but I don't miss the guns. Yeah, okay, well, that's a really good— that's a really good thing to end on, I think. So yes, if anyone is interested in trying Spermidine, go over to Leslie's website. I think I'm definitely going to try. You know, and then in about 6 months you'll see me looking 20 years younger and I won't have to use the Botox anymore. So anyway, so I'm going to say goodbye there. And this is Women's Radio Station on lots of different platforms out there, but we'll put a link underneath. And remember to catch us on social media. And this is The Menopause Show, and I'm Sue Moxley, and it was lovely talking to Leslie today, and hopefully you'll come on again. Okay, bye-bye. Thank you. Bye, Sue.