Zombie Cells: The Hidden Threat Aging Your Body Fast

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If you've been doing everything right, eating clean, exercising, but somehow you're still not feeling your best, your energy's dragging, your memory is slipping, and it's frustrating because you know there's more to your potential. Well, what if the issue isn't just in your routine, but it's deep down inside your cells?

You know, you're investing in the best supplements, working out regularly, and sticking to a clean diet, But if your cells are stuck in what's called cell danger response, all the hard work might not be paying off as it should. Think of your cells like a house under renovation.

You can bring in the highest quality materials like the best supplements and clean foods, but if the workers inside the house are on lockdown because of a storm, nothing gets done. The materials just pile up unused. That's what happens when your cells are in CDR. They can't fully use the good stuff you're giving them.

Getting out of CDR, the cell danger response, is the key to unlocking your body's full potential. When your cells are no longer in protective mode, they can finally use the nutrients, hormones, and energy you're working so hard to provide. That's when everything starts to click. Your energy improves, your workouts become more efficient, and you start to feel like yourself again.

Go to beyondbloodwork.com to learn how to break free from cell danger response and make the effort pay off. Hey everyone, welcome to the Dr. Josh Axe Show. I am your host, Dr. Axe, and each and every week on this show, we dive deep into the science and principles behind how to grow in body, mind, and spirit and take your health and your life to the next level.

Hey, did you know that studies indicate that clearing even a small amount of what are called senescent cells, or zombie cells, from the body can significantly delay age-related diseases like dementia and cancer and improve physical function and lifespan.

In fact, if you've ever noticed, if you start getting age spots or your joints start feeling old, or you just start looking and feeling older than you should be, it could be because senescent cells are building up in your body.

And the good news is there's a natural way to start to clear those from the body, reduce your risk of cancer, reduce your risk of dementia, look younger, feel younger, and more. And I'm going to dive into all of that on today's episode. But before I go, make sure to subscribe to the channel and hit the notification bell so you don't miss a single episode.

All right, so here's what senescent cells are. They are cells that have stopped dividing but don't die off. Okay, so what happens is your cells will continue to divide over a period of time, sometimes up to 50 times or so. And these cells that stop dividing, they're at the end of the rope. Those are often called senescent cells or zombie cells.

And the reason why they're called zombie cells is because in a way they're dead, but they still continue to release chemicals that can be harmful to nearby cells and tissues. Now, they kind of have this paradoxical effect. They initially serve a beneficial purpose because they help to stop the proliferation of cancer cells.

However, once they accumulate, they can start driving inflammation and promote age-related conditions, including tumor growth. Now, there is a researcher, and this is what they had to say about senescent cells.

This is from the cancer research out of the UK, and they said throughout its life cycle, A normal cell will divide around 50 times before it stops, at which point it dies and gets replaced by a new cell. But not all cells die when they stop dividing. Instead, they continue to age without either dividing or dying, meaning they begin to accumulate in your tissues.

And this process is called senescence. Now, cellular senescence is not entirely bad or something to avoid. It is a defense mechanism for protection against cancer. So what happens is when your cells experience DNA damage or stress or inflammation or activation of something called oncogenes, which turns normal cells into cancerous tumor cells, they can enter a state of senescence.

We want that, okay? This prevents the cells from continuing to divide, putting a brake on tumor development. But if you accumulate too many of these and your body doesn't clear those out, that's not good. So here's the real issue: you want to have senescence; you want your cells to get to a point to where eventually they don't continue to divide or become cancerous.

However, if those just start sitting in your body and accumulating, those release toxins that cause inflammation throughout your entire body, and basically it starts to shorten your telomere length, which is one of the cardinal signs of aging. And they also, as I mentioned, they'll accumulate in the tissues.

They secrete what are known as pro-inflammatory factors, known as cytokines, and just inflame your whole body. This is where you start looking and feeling older, when these senescent cells build up in the body. And these compounds, as I mentioned, they trigger inflammation, and this leads to arthritis, diabetes, heart disease, age spots, dementia, and a number of other health disorders.

And there's a great quote from the Mayo Clinic researcher, her name is Jennifer Saint-Sauveur. And here's what she says. She says, we know people age at different rates and that a person's chronological age doesn't always match their biological age.

She said, we found that a group of diverse proteins secreted by zombie cells can serve as biomarkers of senescence and can predict health outcomes in older adults. Because here's what's happening. If your body is producing all of these, if your senescent cells are producing all of these chemicals that are inflammatory, Uh, you age, you age faster.

And so that's one of the biomarkers, if you've heard, that you can get blood work done to be able to tell what your biological age is versus your chronological age. This is where, for instance, I'm 43 and I might, um, you know, I could have the health of a 60-year-old or of a 33-year-old.

And so when I did this, I did a test and was about 10 years younger, um, according to my biological age versus my chronological age. But you've also seen people, right, who are in their, let's call it in their 40s, and they look like they're in their 60s. I mean, that happens. And a big part of the cause of that is cellular senescence.

So if you want to turn back the clock, if you want to age more slowly and promote longevity, one of the key things you have to do is clear senescent cells from your body. And as I was mentioning earlier, senescent cells secrete inflammatory compounds. Now, there's actually a term for this. It's called SASP, which stands for senescent-associated secretory phenotype. Okay, SASP.

And these SASPs include inflammatory cytokines, growth factors, proteases, which can affect nearby cells. So again, these senescent cells release these factors that then inflame and age other cells around it.

It's kind of like, imagine this, you walk into a room and there are a group of people you consider these toxic people, and you spend time around them and they make you feel bad about yourself. They hurt your self-esteem. They degrade you over time. That's what this is like. You have all of these cells secreting toxins, okay? And it's making the other cells around them sick.

And so what you wanna do is you want to clear those people out of your life. We wanna clear, clear these senescent cells out of the body, or it's gonna cause toxicity, cause you to age more quickly. The other thing that these SASP factors do is they recruit immune cells.

And these immune— basically, it sends your immune system into overdrive and trying to clear out senescent cells that may potentially turn cancerous. But if it goes too far into overdrive, this causes inflammation and could even, to a degree, maybe even be related to autoimmune illness.

Now, one of the type of cells you want to have more of in your body, and you want to be released to a certain degree, not too much, but they're called natural killer cells. And there are certain types of T cells that actually remove senescent cells from your body.

And so you want to be eating foods, you want to be taking supplements and doing lifestyle activities that help activate these natural killer cells in the body. And there are many ways to do that. One of the ways you may be familiar with is drinking green tea. This is why the cancer rates in Japan are so low.

This is why their longevity is the highest in the world, is that green tea is one of the supplements and herbs I'll cover in a minute that has an amazing ability to activate these natural killer cells to remove senescent cells from the body.

I want to dive into some research around cellular senescence and Alzheimer's disease and using a combination of a drug and a supplement at clearing out these senescent cells and treating Alzheimer's. Now, I want to be upfront about this. I typically am not a fan of conventional medications unless you're in a state of an emergency.

And I tend to go try with patients to go 100% fully natural, unless again, there's an emergency. And so when I give this research, I am not promoting some of these senolytic drugs. I'm more so promoting these supplements, which I think you can go all supplement and no drug and probably get better benefits or equal benefits without any side effects.

But, uh, we'll, we'll dive into the research here. And basically the, the theory around this is, and the, the belief is aging is the leading risk factor for Alzheimer's disease. And if we can start slowing that aging process or fight aging at the same time as fighting Alzheimer's, you will then also help improve Alzheimer's symptoms.

And there's research conducted at Wake Forest University, their, their school of medicine. And they successfully conducted a phase 1 clinical trial designed to clear senescent cells from Alzheimer's patients. Now, the drug they used was called Dasanti, and the supplement was called quercetin. Now, you're probably familiar with quercetin. I've talked about it on the show continually.

It's one of the top supplements for supporting, uh, long COVID symptoms. It's a supplement that's probably the top natural compound for seasonal allergies. It has numerous anti-inflammatory benefits. So quercetin is found in things like the skin of apples and in citrus and onions, it's in very, very high amounts. And so it's a natural compound where Dasanti's a drug.

Now in the study, the drug Dasanti, which was originally approved for cancer treatment, was combined with quercetin. In the study, 5 participants aged 65 or older with early-stage Alzheimer's disease took the drug combination orally for 2 consecutive days, followed by a 2-week break. This cycle was repeated over 12 weeks. So you see, these drugs were not taken every day.

The drug and the supplement were taken in higher doses for 2 days with 12 days off. And after the 12-week period of time, the findings were this: the treatment appeared to be safe and well tolerated with no significant changes in brain function and no memory loss. And so it sort of halted the continued symptoms of Alzheimer's. And the results also suggested that the therapy reduce amyloid.

It's a protein linked to Alzheimer's in the brain and lower inflammation in the blood. Now, we know generally that's what quercetin does, is it reduces inflammation in the blood. This is why it was used for long COVID, is quercetin is known as supporting, um, when your blood cells start to get sticky, it helps with sort of breaking that up.

And that's why it was so effective against long COVID, is long COVID and COVID itself, one of the issues is it affects the blood causes— this is also what's linked to myocarditis, right? Is it's causing the blood to get sticky and become, and become, uh, not move as much, be more, uh, not as viscous as we want it to be. And so quercetin, we know by itself helps with this.

So from this study, we don't know, it might have just been the quercetin helping out. We don't know if the drug helped at all, but we do know the quercetin has that, in that, that benefit of inflammation in the blood. Now there was another study published in the Journal of Aging Research On the effect of clearing senescent cells and improving your lifespan.

Now, this study was done on both young and old mice, so it was an animal study. And in the study, when an even smaller number of senescent cells were transplanted into young mice, it caused significant physical decline and a spread of senescence to even healthy tissue. So remember, that's one of the big things with senescent cells is they will spread.

It's like, again, think about one toxic person in a group that can cause other people to become toxic. The same things happen with your cells. So if you have these bad cells in your body, we've got to get them out. Now, the same combination of drug Dasanti and supplement quercetin were used in this study. And here's what they found.

In older mice, intermittent treatment with these senolytics not only improved physical function, but also increased lifespan by 36% and reduce the risk of death by 35%. That's— that is an incredibly big, uh, jump in terms of lifespan. And so that's— this is a really, really promising study. Again, it's done on animals.

It was a lower-scale study, but it's still encouraging, looking at the benefits of clearing senescent cells from the body. And there's also research out of the UK, new studies showing that removing senescent immune cells could significantly reduce lung cancer burden and improve survival. So you have senescent cells.

You also have this process in the body called immunosenescence, where your body is clearing out senescent cells that affect the immune system and thereby reducing your cancer risk. And so this could also be a form of natural cancer treatment in the future as well. And the good news is there are supplements There are foods, there are lifestyle factors that can help you do this.

Now, the first thing you want to be really conscious of if you want to clear senescent cells from the body is upgrade your diet. You want to add in specific foods, typically those that are very high in a type of antioxidant called polyphenols. Okay. These tend to be the antioxidants that live in the skin of berries and fruit. Uh, certain vegetables, certain things like nuts and seeds.

But really, when you look at fruits like dark— like blackberries and pomegranates and blueberries— when you're looking at that thing that give that— that give them their pigment, uh, even olives, uh, different forms of tea— these polyphenols reduce oxidative stress, reduce inflammation, and help clear senescent cells from the body.

Now, probably the most popular natural senolytics include quercetin, fisetin, Piper longum, and curcumin, which is a compound found in turmeric. Those are the most popular senolytics today, but there are many others— herbs, spices, superfoods, and lifestyle practices— that will help clear senescent cells from the body. Everyone, Dr. Josh Axe here.

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That's coldture.com, C-O-L-D-T-U-R-E.com. And don't forget to use the code Axe to save $200 today. Now, some of the best sources, I wanna hit on quercetin here first. Quercetin is very high in onions, okay? Probably of all the foods that's high in quercetin, onions are the highest. Also apples, especially with their skins on, berries like blueberries and blackberries.

Kale and other green leafy vegetables, broccoli and cruciferous vegetables. These tend to be the foods highest in quercetin, which have great benefits for clearing senescent cells. Now, fisetin is another popular one. This is a compound found in strawberries, apples, persimmons, lotus root, onions.

Again, you can see here apples and onions, these are amazing superfoods because they have both quercetin and fisetin. And then Piper longum, this is found in long pepper. This is a close relative to black pepper that's used in traditional Indian and Southeast Asian cooking. In fact, this sort of long pepper was used very frequently in Ayurvedic medicine.

And then curcumin, which of course the best place to find that would be turmeric. And I do want to mention, there are so many other herbs and spices we could, we could hit on here. I have a few others I want to hit on in a minute. But turmeric is great. So is galangal. Galangal has tremendous benefits at clearing out senescent cells from the body as well.

There's a tea I like to recommend for people with digestive issues. It's called pukka tea, and it's an ancient Ayurvedic recipe. It's a blend of ginger, turmeric, and galangal together. If you've got joint pain, if you've got digestive issues, if you want to clear senescent cells, it's a great herbal tea to do on a regular basis.

Some other foods that can help clear senescent cells: foods that are rich in omega-3 fatty acids, especially walnuts, flaxseeds, salmon, mackerel, and sardines, uh, and other herbs that we'll get into here in a second. So I want to dive a little bit deeper into these supplements and compounds and how they clear senescent cells from the body. The first is fisetin.

Uh, it has been shown in animal studies to improve the lifespan of the animal, specifically with mice. And so it does this by clearing senescent cells directly out of the body.

And one of the things you'll notice here as I dive into this Some of these herbs and foods, they will clear senescent cells directly, and some of them will reduce oxidative stress or inflammation or have another effect on the body that then gives the body more of a chance to clear up senescent cells on its own. So it indirectly helps clear senescent cells.

But fisetin is one that really more directly clears senescent cells from the body. The other, as I mentioned, is Quercetin, maybe the most powerful and science-backed on the list. It's known for its antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. Again, great for reducing cellular senescence. And then curcumin, as we mentioned, it's an antioxidant, it's an anti-inflammatory.

One study suggested that it works by promoting autophagy and apoptosis, so programmed cell death.

So the way that curcumin works at cellular senescence is promoting autophagy, where your body naturally starts to clean up more of those senescent cells and gets rid of them directly, but also through programming those cancerous cells to die and allowing them to die off on its own, which will help clear senescent cells.

And this is also why I love the blend of turmeric and black pepper, or turmeric and long pepper, as we talked about earlier. Long pepper, uh, the— this blend that was used in Ayurvedic medicine Turmeric is great for reducing inflammation, but also clearing senescent cells from the body.

And typically when you're taking a turmeric supplement, you want to take it with either ginger or long pepper or black pepper or all 3, as which was done in Ayurvedic medicine, in order to support cellular senescence. Now, another herb that I love for anti-aging and for removing senescent cells from the body is green tea.

It could be matcha green tea, it could be sencha, but some form of green tea. Green tea contains a compound called EGCG, which stands for epigallocatechin, and it is a potent polyphenol. And you'll notice when you dive deep into the science behind most of these foods is a good majority, majority of the foods that help clear senescent cells have polyphenols in them.

It's a type of antioxidant And that has also anti-inflammatory properties. So there's a lot of studies around this. And as I mentioned previously, Japan, or an area of Japan in Okinawa, has the longest lifespan in the world, and they're some of the biggest green tea consumers on the planet.

And when you look at their diet, it's very high in a lot of these senolytic foods, which is why they're aging more slowly than a lot of other people. I remember I read a book years ago. The book was called The Okinawan Diet. And they went and they compared men in their 60s and 70s in Okinawa, Japan, and they came over to North America and compared the, the men there.

And one of the things they looked at was their testosterone levels. And the testosterone levels of the men in the United States and Canada were much, much lower. In fact, the men in their 20s and 30s sometimes had lower on average testosterone than men in their 60s 70s in Okinawa, Japan. That's mind-blowing if you think about it.

But a big reason is, is the diet that's followed in Okinawa, Japan, which is very high in green tea. Now, another ancient Asian herb that's so incredible at— for clearing senescent cells is ginseng, and specifically Panax ginseng or red ginseng. They have something called ginsenosides And these are compounds that slow the aging process.

They act as adaptogens, but they reduce senescent cells in the body. And ginseng is widely used for its anti-aging and longevity properties in ancient Asian medicine. Another compound— this is not an herb, but it's a compound found in grapes and berries called resveratrol. We typically hear this in regards to red wine, but it's also found in the skins of, of blueberries.

This is another type of a polyphenol that's been shown to activate certain longevity pathways such as SIRT1, which helps clear senescent cells from the body. Another favorite herb of mine is astragalus. This was used in Chinese medicine for lengthening telomeres and for reducing cellular senescence.

And so we know that astragalus does that by acting as an adaptogen for the immune system and the digestive system in clearing out these senescent cells. And this is one I really like if you have an autoimmune disease, if you have digestive issues, or you just feel like your immune system is weak.

Taking astragalus on a regular basis is great for anti-aging, for immune function, for a number of health issues. And then as I mentioned earlier, long pepper— doing more spicy foods such as ginger, long pepper, black pepper, also help kill senescent cells, and they do this by reducing oxidative stress on the body, which helps get rid of those. And then last one here, milk thistle.

Milk thistle contains silymarin, which is known to support liver detoxification. Now, some studies on this are really powerful. It actually shows that milk thistle supports liver regeneration, can actually help regenerate your liver tissue. So it has a lot of benefits, but part of it, it helps your liver In that area of the body, detoxify and cleanse your body of these senescent cells.

Actually, one more I do want to hit on, ginkgo biloba. This is probably the best one to be taking if you're also concerned with dementia or any sort of brain issues.

If you have brain fog, if you have mental clarity issues, poor memory, or you want to prevent or fight Alzheimer's disease or any form of dementia, ginkgo biloba is probably the top herb you could be using on a regular basis in terms of what it does for clearing senescent cells and oxidative stress, specifically on nerve tissue and the brain.

Now, another thing doesn't have to do with food, but it has to do with not eating food, or at least having a smaller eating window, and that is fasting. One of the top ways throughout history people have cleared senescent cells from the body is through a process called autophagy, which can be most activated by fasting.

And during fasting, the body's energy sources become limited, which triggers autophagy, where your body says, well, okay, I don't have to spend all this energy detoxifying or digesting food or just dealing with— generally dealing with the food and digestive process. So it has this extra energy now to start to clean up and clear itself of these senescent cells.

Now, I do want to mention the way that I recommend people fast, and that is by doing about a 10-hour window. To where you're still getting 3 solid meals in a day. And I want you to do this because I don't want you to have muscle wasting. One of the biggest things you need to preserve in order to age more slowly is your muscle.

So the way that this could work is you eat breakfast around 8 AM, and then you eat lunch around 1, and then you eat again at 5. Okay, you're eating there within a 10-hour window, and you're fasting 14 hours of the day.

But, but then on top of that, I do recommend doing actual fasts Maybe one day a week, and so that's where maybe you you wait to eat until three o'clock, and you eat again at seven p.m. or something like that. So you could eat two smaller meals that are closer, or just two meals a day, or just do one meal and you fast the rest of the day and you just eat dinner. Okay, that that's an option as well.

This is something the early church did. This is something a lot of Jews throughout history have done. A lot of people that are spiritually aware and want to honor God with their bodies fasted and. Focused on God during that time. And so I think that that is a great practice that also supports cellular senescence.

And by doing it just one day a week or seasonally and not every day, such as intermittent fasting where you're only eating a couple times a day and not getting the calories you need to preserve muscle, you still are able to do it one day a week and still build muscle, preserve muscle if you're doing it just that single day a week or seasonally instead.

So that's the way I recommend most people do fasting is in that way. Also, I want to say that fasting can influence the body's hormonal system, specifically by reducing insulin and increasing levels of human growth hormone known as HGH. And these changes also activate your cellular repair pathways and senescent cell reduction. Fasting also reduces oxidative stress and inflammation.

Both which are 2 of the primary factors that cause your body to accumulate senescent cells in the first place. Last few things here. Exercise. Exercise has been shown to help clear senescent cells and reduce the burden of cellular senescence. And so, and ideally, let me say this as well, it's doing exercise where you're not injuring yourself. Do you hear me?

Doing exercise where you're not injuring yourself. So if you're doing CrossFit or marathon training or triathlon training where you're putting on a lot of distance all the time, you're— you can age your joints, you can cause inflammation in your body.

Anything that's going to really disrupt the gut microbiome, which very, very long-distance cardio will do, and then also things where you're tearing up your joints can. Okay, so I don't recommend those forms of exercise for anti-aging.

I recommend doing strength Training in good form, typically ideally functional movements using large muscle groups like your legs and butt and back, combined with some cardiovascular activity, doing maybe 1 to 2 days a week of VO2 max training.

We're doing some HIIT work, and that might be, you know, 1 minute on, 1 minute off, or it could be 2 to 3 minutes on, 2 to 3 minutes off, but doing something like that. Where you are going hard and going easy and you're building up your cardiovascular system. You can do this on a Peloton, on a treadmill, in the pool, whatever your joints can handle and joint-friendly.

That's what you want to do is so you could do that and then combine that with some walking and maybe a day or one day a week of steady-state cardio. That's the sort of plan that's going to be the most helpful.

And I also do think there are benefits of doing things like barre classes and yoga and Pilates, those forms of core training where you're focused on lengthening lengthening muscle groups as well. That's also great for longevity because you're supporting muscle health in that way as well. So those are some forms of exercise to consider.

And then also, studies have shown that the, the sports that lengthen your life the most are, number one, are racket sports like tennis, badminton, and pickleball. In addition, doing things like cycling and swimming have also been shown to be great for Increasing lifespan.

So in a nutshell, remember this: if you want to reduce senescent cells— which, remember, senescent cells are connected to aging— if you feel like you are aging faster than you want, you, you look older than you want, you feel older than you want to, maybe you also want to prevent diseases like cancer and dementia, um, you've got to activate your body's ability to clear senescent cells.

And you're going to do that primarily, number one, through diet. Consume a lot of foods high in polyphenols. That's going to be a lot of herbal teas like green tea and ginger and turmeric tea. It's going to be doing a lot of dark-colored berries and fruits like blueberries and grapes and eating foods like apples. It's getting more omega-3 fatty acids in your diet.

It's going to be doing fasting, but not too long of fasting. Shorter fasting, about a 10-hour fasting window with maybe 1 day a week or seasonal longer fasts. And then it's going to be also taking certain supplements like quercetin, like green tea, like astragalus, like ginkgo biloba, right? Those— fisetin, long pepper, turmeric— those also are going to support cellular senescence.

And then exercising in the right way that's really friendly to the body, that's going to promote longevity. If you can do all of those things, it's really going to support cellular senescence and clearing those senescent cells in a really powerful way. And one of my goals on this show is to help you age as slowly as possible.

And you're going to see a lot more episodes coming out on longevity, going through even more in depth the best vitamins, herbs, supplements, lifestyle factors to add years to your life and life to your years.

So thanks for tuning in here to the Dr. Josh Axe Show, where every week we explore the science and principles behind how to grow physically, Mentally, spiritually, and take your health and your life to the next level. Again, let's go out there and clear senescent cells from our body. And also make sure to subscribe, like, and share this episode.

Just so you know, I am so grateful for all of you that are on mission with me, and you're taking your life and your health to the next level, which is having a positive impact on other people. Thanks so much. I'll see you on the next episode.