With Christian Drapeau
Christian Drapeau is one of the leading Stem Cell scientists today. He is one of America’s best known advocates for Adult Stem Cell research and the health applications of Adult Stem Cell science. He gained recognition when his breakthrough theory gained widespread interest across the scientific and medical communities. He has been advocating for years that the role of Adult Stem Cells in the body is nothing less than its natural healing system.
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Podcast transcript:
Welcome back or be monk podcast. Dr. Pedram. Shojai happy to be here with Christian. Really interesting guy met him in a meeting in Los Angeles. A few weeks back really liked what he was doing, invited him onto the show. Really doing some innovative work around stem cells. Uh, why do I like this conversation?
Cause you don’t have to fly to Columbia and do all sorts of weird stuff. It’s about. Using the body’s intrinsic healing factors triggering them, uh, finding the botanicals that will call upon them in a really meaningful way. Enjoy the show.
Pedram Shojai: Welcome to the show. And it’s great to see you.
Christian Drapeau: My pleasure. Great to see you as well.
Pedram Shojai: So I am a fan of what you do. It’s, uh, near and dear to my heart. Like, you know, Indiana Jones, botanical medicine, going out there for really interesting, innovative things. but on a very powerful scientific thesis, which makes me happy, right?
Pedram Shojai: So I want to get into your thesis. We’ll go back to the backstory just a little bit because I actually have some history with the blue green algae that I’ll share. Um, but you’re all about stem cells, but you’re not doing this fly to Tijuana thing because you’re talking about our stem cells. And I want to start the top of our call.
Pedram Shojai: Establishing what your thesis is, and then we’re going to dance around it.
Christian Drapeau: Okay. Well, the thesis is, and again, uh, there’s the backstory of how I came to that. It was just not like a nice idea one day that I had. So there’s a real sort of research, uh, process that went behind this. But the thesis is that when, when we say stem cells for most people, it’s a treatment. You go somewhere, to get an injection of stem cells.
Christian Drapeau: And we think that these are the stem cells that really matter in your life. And in reality, in reality, reality, we’ve had stem cells in our body since the day we were born. They are the body’s repair system. Anytime we have an injury, it triggers the release of our own stem cells and our ability to repair depends on or is directly linked with the number of stem cells that we have in circulation in our bloodstream, stem cells that are ready to participate in this process of tissue repair.
Christian Drapeau: And the other layer to this, which to me is probably the most important because most people spend their life without having an injury or something to repair. Uh, it’s just to understand that the process of aging is very, very intimately linked to the fact that the number of stem cells in our bloodstream decline as we age.
Christian Drapeau: By age 30, we’ve lost 90 percent of our stem cells by age 50, like 95, 98 percent of our stem cells. It keeps going down during that process. We just don’t have enough stem cells to offset the normal process of tissue renewal, if you want. Uh, and it leads down the road to tissue malfunction, which is in the pancreas is diabetes, you know, in the long it’s COPD and so on.
Christian Drapeau: So aging and your ability to repair depends on the role of your own stem cells.
Pedram Shojai: And that’s why I have so many friends flying down to Colombia to get all these infusions and all this stuff, because everybody understands that if you get more stem cells going, you can start to offset, arguably reverse this process of aging. But now you’re talking about an internal nexus. You’re talking about something from within our own bodies that we can access to stimulate the release.
Pedram Shojai: of these stem cells. So I want to dig there a little further before we go back into history.
Christian Drapeau: Okay. So, um, I would say think of it like your immune system in today. Nobody would have a problem to understand that if you take Echinacea astragalus, I mean, there’s a slew of plants that we can take that have all been shown. To support the immune system in various ways, uh, for example, the blue green algae that I, that I started all my, my career with, uh, we documented the first thing we documented is that it triggered the release, the migration, the activation of natural killer cells.
Christian Drapeau: As an example, nobody would have a problem accepting that. We simply discovered that there are plants that will do the same thing to stem cells. It’s simply that it had never been looked at before, let’s say year 2000, 2001, when stem cells. were not a thing before. So really, these are, these are plant extract that the moment you consume them, they will support this very process in our bodies, which is the repair system.
Christian Drapeau: They will trigger the release of stem cells, uh, from the bone marrow, putting more stem cells in circulation. So it becomes, when you look at it with a little bit of distance, it becomes, you increase the number of stem cells in circulation, either through an injection Or by releasing your own stem cells in a very normal physiological matter.
Pedram Shojai: Okay, so you mentioned bone marrow, which is kind of one of the central casts of characters here, right? The bone marrow. Talk about what bone marrow and stem cells have to do with each other because from there I think this gets real interesting.
Christian Drapeau: Well, your stem cells, their primary, the primary reservoir of stem cells in the body is the bone marrow. So they’re made in the part of the bone marrow that is called the red marrow. So that is making all the stem cells were bone born with red marrow. But that red marrow shrinks as we age through a process called conversion, and it converts into yellow marrow, fatty marrow that does not make stem cells.
Christian Drapeau: And it’s that conversion. That is the reason why we have this decline in the number of circulating stem cells. So we oftentimes see the bone as a, I wouldn’t say a dead. Organ or a dead part of the body, but it looks like a piece of wood in your body. Like it’s hard calcium structure and it’s sort of inert and it’s not the case.
Christian Drapeau: The bone marrow is very, very alive. Enormous amount of vascularity, blood vessels in the bone marrow is very alive. And it’s the source of our stem cells. From there, they will go to many places in our body. What I mean by this is that they will go to the heart. They will feed. If you want to. The, the, the cardiac stem cells, they will go in the gut, intestinal stem cells in the skin, every single tissue have their own stem cells, but the reservoir that the, the, the, during your entire life is the bone marrow.
Pedram Shojai: So when does red marrow start to go yellow and is that a process that can be softened, offset? Like where, when does that kind of accelerated transition happen?
Christian Drapeau: Uh, it, it’s very interesting to see that. In spite of all the science that we have on stem cells, that part has not very well studied, has not been very well studied. We have the data, it’s in the scientific, it’s in textbooks of medicine. So it’s well known yet very poorly studied. So what we know is that we’re born with red marrow in all of our bones.
Christian Drapeau: Uh, but very early in life, the red marrow starts to, to shrink, goes to the extremities. And then by age 15, you’re left pretty much with like Like the, the, the, the, the higher quarters, if you want, of your bone, you’ve lost about 50, you’ve lost about 50 percent of your stem cells by age 30, roughly 90 percent of your stem cells.
Christian Drapeau: It’s a process that is just a natural process. Um, I’m working with a, uh, with a scientist here where. Trying to fund, uh, a, uh, a project here to start to, to dig into that science to better understand that phenomenon that has not been well studied and see what we can do to, uh, to slow down this process of, of conversion or even reverse that conversion.
Christian Drapeau: What can we do that will do this? And I, I do believe that once we find something that can achieve that, it’s probably going to be the greatest discovery in longevity medicine.
Pedram Shojai: 100%. Now that said, you got what you got and you got what’s left. And so the ability to trigger what red marrow you have, let’s say you start at age 30 or start at age 70 doing this, how much is there? Is it finite? Does it replenish? Like how much can we tap into these stem cells in the red marrow depending on
Christian Drapeau: Yeah, it’s, it’s unlimited, meaning you, you will have your stem cells during, for your entire life. Uh, the best way from an analogy to understand what it is, it’s almost like you’re born with, you know, you have a well, and, uh, if you have, let’s say, 10 feet of water in your well, you take 10 buckets out, come back 15 minutes later, you’ve got 10 feet of water in your well.
Christian Drapeau: Uh, take a hundred buckets, wait half an hour, you have a hundred buckets. You have 10 feet of water in your well, take 2000 buckets and just give yourself 23 hours and you’ll have the same amount of water in your well. So your bone marrow is a little bit like this. So you’re born with, let’s say, 100 wells and then you lose wells as you age.
Christian Drapeau: But the wells that you’re left with, are still as productive as they were. So as you read marrow shrink, it’s still producing stem cells. That’s why we have stem cells every day in our bloodstream. That’s why if you have an injury in your fifties, you’re still healing. You’re not healing as well. And as quickly as when you were 15 or 20, but you’re still healing.
Christian Drapeau: Fine. So it’s because you still have stem cells in your bloodstream. So that comes from that red marrow that is shrinking. What we’re doing with these plant extract is that we make that bone marrow release more of its stem cells. And within a matter of, I mean, not even a day within a matter of hours, this is still, it goes back to where it was before.
Christian Drapeau: So it’s pretty much an unlimited source shrinking, but unlimited source while you tap into it.
Pedram Shojai: Amazing. Okay. So I want to come back to this because there’s some really interesting, uh, provocative notions to, you know, what, what this means for aging. Right. Um, but, um, You started looking at blue green algae very specifically out of a particular lake in Oregon. I knew of this product back in the nineties.
Pedram Shojai: I actually took the product and I swore by it. I was like, man, I just feel better. And the people who did all had a very similar story. They’re like, you know, they start talking about it. Like it’s some sort of miracle, you know, miracle substance. And so that’s always either, True or suspect immediately when, when I hear that.
Pedram Shojai: And so I’m like, is this really good marketing or what is this stuff? Um, I took it, I swore by it. Um, I didn’t understand what it was doing, but then the company brought you on to very specifically. Get that understanding so share with us what you found there because that was the first I think of Many that you then went on to discover
Christian Drapeau: Correct. So I was hired by the company to do exactly what you just described, to document uh, how this plant Blue Green Algae was working in the body, the mechanisms of actions, active compounds, uh, all the science so that they can use that science to support any kind of the claims that they would make about this product.
Christian Drapeau: And, and what you just described there, the sort of, uh, Feel good. Like people taking this product with generally speaking, feel good. We discovered that it is a natural source of phenyl ethylamine known in chemistry as the molecule of love. Anytime you do something like you do a sculpting, a sculpture, you do some, you do painting and you’re absorbed into what you’re doing.
Christian Drapeau: You’re not hungry. Uh, the, the noise around you is not bothering you. The financial problems that you have, you’re not thinking about them right now. tomorrow, they’ll be back. But right now you’re just fine. You’re brought, your brain is making PA. So the blue green knowledge was, was bringing that experience in people.
Christian Drapeau: This kind of really feel good experience. But beyond that, uh, we had people reversing or I came across people reversing, uh, multiple sclerosis, severe emphysema, heart disease, diabetes, liver failure, Parkings and Alzheimer’s and some of these cases were very significant. Uh, at first it’s 20, 30, but then when it becomes, you know, a hundred cases and I, I get to know some of these people at some point, it was impossible for me to just brush that off as being just like, Crazy stories and testimonials, uh, and some of them I really could not deny.
Christian Drapeau: So we tried to start to understand what was the thing that this product was doing to lead to so many different kinds of health benefits. And for a number of years, we had really no. Understanding or explanation. We were doing studies. We got great data, but nothing that really explained the phenomenon until one day I came across an article.
Christian Drapeau: The title was turning blood into brain. It was documenting stem cells going from the bone marrow to the brain and becoming brain cell. So you have to go back in 2001. This was early 2001. You have to go back at that time when stem cells are only known to be precursors to blood cells. And you might be surprised that today in med school.
Christian Drapeau: Still, this is what is being taught to med students. I’m not saying that they’re not saying that these stem cells can do more than just blood cells, but it’s an exception. They’re still presented as being your precursors to your blood cells. Uh, and, uh, and of all cells, the brain we know is an organ that does not repair.
Christian Drapeau: So to see an article documenting stem cells going from the bone marrow to the brain and becoming a brain cell, I thought was pretty cool. pretty impressive. So I was intrigued. So I went to the local medical library to look at what else I could find. I found another article documenting stem cells going to the liver and to the heart and doing the same thing, becoming liver cells and heart cells.
Christian Drapeau: So I thought, go back 20 years ago, I thought if stem cells can become cells of the heart, liver, and brain, why not pancreas, skin, lung, and the rest? Makes no sense that it would become those three and not the rest. So let’s assume it’s just a matter of time. scientists will discover that they can become everything.
Christian Drapeau: That would mean that they are the repair system of the body. How do you see a stem cell going to the brain, the heart and the liver and becoming these tissues without this being its function in some ways? So we published an article in the journal medical hypothesis suggesting stem cells are the repair system of the body.
Christian Drapeau: And in the back of my mind, what if that plant works by putting more stem cells in circulation? It would just explain what we had seen in the in the years prior. Thank you. Which is, you put more stem cells in circulation, they are the repair system, so they will go repair the pancreas of the diabetic, the lung of the emphysema patient, the liver of the person with liver failure, the brain of the Parkinson, and so on.
Christian Drapeau: And that’s the kind of results that we had. So, we acquired a flow cytometer, which is a machine to count stem cells, uh, pretty expensive at the time, but we went in the lab and we started on our cells, we would take a blood sample, Take this blue green algae, take another blood sample an hour, two, three hours later, and then count how many stem cells were in circulation.
Christian Drapeau: And then very quickly we discovered the phenomenon. This plant was acting as a stem cell mobilizer. And that’s when I dropped pretty much everything that I was doing and dove really deep into stem cell science, which I have done now for the past 23 years.
Pedram Shojai: So there’s something inside of this obviously has multiple functions because it also makes you feel good on a different mechanism But there’s something inside this blue green algae in particular at this time that mobilized the stem cells Inside of the person taking them and then those stem cells would release from the red marrow you And then replenish in the red marrow so that you can Remobilize or just continually mobilize day after day.
Pedram Shojai: Is that how it started?
Christian Drapeau: Yeah, that’s correct. So when, when we discovered this, the first response. So again, we’re in 2001, the first response by the scientific community, by any colleague with whom I would share that data, uh, would be, it’s probably an artifact. It’s probably not meaning anything until you understand the mechanisms of action and can identify the bioactive, uh, behind this benefits, then it’s really not meaning anything.
Christian Drapeau: And even there, Uh, we, you need to have a, a proof of concept and maybe more stem cells is bad for you. Maybe it will give you cancer. So these were kind of the, the, the, the response that I would get. So, so we had to go and find and identify the active compounds. I’ll skip the science here, but we discovered that it contains a glycoprotein that is an L selectin blocker.
Christian Drapeau: So by blocking L selectin, uh, basically it, it interferes. with the mechanism of adhesion of stem cells in the bone marrow. So they basically detach from the bone marrow and they get entrained in the bloodstream. So that’s how that, that ingredient works. Now we’ve discovered other plant extracts that have other mechanisms of action.
Christian Drapeau: Uh, but essentially this blue green algae, it contains an L selectin blocker.
Pedram Shojai: Okay, let’s talk about the the plants before we come back to the healing benefits at this point You’re like, holy crap This blue green algae actually does the thing that gives these people all these results and explains You know to a certain extent the dementia the alzheimer’s the emphysema and all these things So at that point how do you go about looking for Brothers, sisters, cousins of this plant extract and how do you start looking at this?
Pedram Shojai: You know the millions and millions of herbs and botanicals out there like how do you start that search?
Christian Drapeau: So, the moment we identified the benefit of that plant, how it was working, mechanisms of action, then we had to do the proof of concept, the patents, you know, all of that. Once all of this was done, the thing that had been in my mind for, for, since the early discovery, if you want, of the effect of AFA, is that we evolved in symbiosis with the environment.
Christian Drapeau: It’s not possible that there’s only one plant having this effect. In my mind, that was not something Exceptional. It was just something that I’d never been observed. So it has to be present in the entire natural kingdom. Like there has to be other plants. So we applied the same process. How did we discover AFA?
Christian Drapeau: It was a plant that was associated with many kinds of health benefits. So what other plants has been associated with many kinds of health benefits? So we thought very quickly of medicinal mushroom. Goji berry associated with longevity. Um, uh, seaweeds, uh, adaptogens, those kinds of compounds. So we tested a number of them and they all have an effect on stem cells, not always releasing stem cells.
Christian Drapeau: Some of them, uh, to our surprise, because at first when we saw it, we didn’t believe what we were seeing. And it took a while to finally discover the mechanisms of the mechanism of action behind it. But some of these polysaccharide like Goji berry. Mushrooms trigger the migration of stem cells out of the blood into tissues.
Christian Drapeau: So as you release them from the bone marrow, it’s good to be able to then push them into the tissues. But the real big discoveries in terms of stem cell mobilizers is when I had a chance to go into remote areas of the world. I had a chance to meet pharmacists and, and Indiana Jones, you know, of, of, of different parts of the world going and searching for these plants.
Christian Drapeau: And one of them was in Madagascar. In one of their trip in Madagascar, Um, because I had, I asked that question to these, to these colleagues. I said, when you’re traveling, is there a plant that the healers told you this is good for everything? And, uh, and she told me that when she was in Madagascar, their guide and translator told them on the last day of their trip, um, they, they went through, uh, on the way back to the airport, they stop in a small market and they scoop a whole bag of these black beads that looked like sort of black, uh, tapioca.
Christian Drapeau: Sort of. And they said, that’s what you need to use a study that, but what do you do as a scientist when you’re told to study that, you know, you study it for what? So it didn’t mean anything to them. So, uh, so they kept it in their freezer for five years and that’s when I met them. So they send me some of these little beads, we tested them and we saw the biggest response that we have seen so far.
Christian Drapeau: Uh, so then I start to inquire what it was and it is one species of aloe. So of this 65 species of aloe. That they have in Madagascar, there’s only one that they use. It’s called aloe macroclata, and they use it to make a product called Vahona, which is used for all kinds of health issues, health issues, old age.
Christian Drapeau: Um, and, uh, so we went there, uh, we made our own extract to, we tested our own extract and today is the strongest ingredient that we have, that we have, uh, developed that we have discovered because it was not available, large scale, that ingredient had to be. Literally, we had to develop the harvesting of it, the whole processing of it.
Christian Drapeau: So now it’s one of our exclusive ingredients. So that was one. Uh, another one was sea buckthorn berry from the Tibetan plateau. As I’m looking into Chinese pharmacopoeia, what plant has been associated with many kinds of benefits? We have things like astragalus. Um, there are a few of them. But I happened to ask a number of people with that expertise in China and they all pointed to Sibucton berry.
Christian Drapeau: So when I started to dive into this ingredient and see what I could find, I found it’s, it’s, it’s significant use in Chinese medicine, Tibetan medicine, Mongolian medicine for problems of the long, the hard cardiovascular system, pancreas, and to help accelerate the recovery. bone fractures and injury to the skin.
Christian Drapeau: So when you look at this spectrum of benefits, it’s, it’s heavily suggesting an effect on stem cells. So we derived an ingredients. I went to, to the Tibetan plateau. I met with a farm. We derived an ingredient from sea buckthorn berry. We tested it in the lab and we saw a significant release of, of stem cells.
Christian Drapeau: We add, then we have Panax norigensin. We have an extract from seaweeds. coming from Patagonia. Uh, so these are like the main ingredients now that we have, uh, that, that we have in our product.
Pedram Shojai: So you had mentioned that there is the release of stem cells, but then there’s also the For lack of a better term active transport of these kind of free floating stem cells from the bloodstream into the tissue You know in Chinese medicine There’s always kind of like the the the the guiding herbs then there’s the you know Kind of the principal herbs and all that.
Pedram Shojai: So are you now? Formulating in different ways to get the maximum benefit. So it’s not just enough to kick up the stem cells You got to make sure that you know, the trucks pull into the dock
Christian Drapeau: Correct. When we tested that the first ingredient was medicinal mushrooms. So we’re testing cordyceps, uh, shiitake, lion’s mane, those kinds of mushroom. And we see the same thing with all of them. Um, the, the initial, there’s an initial drop in the number of circulating stem cells of about like 20, 25 percent with very quickly within, let’s say, two weeks, 30 minutes.
Christian Drapeau: And at first, you know, scientists or people who work in the lab will recognize, you know what I’m going to talk about when you see this response, but you’re expecting to see an increase. Then the first reaction is okay. My equipment is dirty. This is contaminated. So let’s clean the machine. Uh, then we get the same data.
Christian Drapeau: So we changed all the antibodies. Uh, then we got the same data. We changed all the regions, uh, that we’re using in, in, in, in, in all this, this clinical work. And at some point we have to realize this looks like it’s a real response. So as we start to dive into this response to better understand it, we discovered that these polysaccharides increase the density of a specific receptor at the surface of stem cells.
Christian Drapeau: that respond to the SOS molecule released by an injured tissue. So these stem cells now are much more reactive and responsive to this call from the tissues. So they disappear from the blood. So the moment that we all, that we realized and understood that that, that’s what, the, the blood is, The process was, then I started to combine these ingredients together.
Christian Drapeau: I put my mobilizers, putting more stem cells in circulation, blended with the migrators for lack of a better term, because what we want is we want to drive these stem cells and tissues. So yes, so I’m blending those together. And the moment that I started to blend Then it was clear like the, the doctors that I was working with came back and telling me, Christian, this product is working as much stronger than what we had before.
Christian Drapeau: So, so it’s been a refined process of refinement over the years to the product that we have today. But to answer your question, that’s what we’re doing today. We blend these two phenomenon together.
Pedram Shojai: Makes perfect sense. So you mentioned SOS. You mentioned, uh, signaling from cells saying, Hey, come to me. Um, and, That seems to be a lot louder of a signal in most chronically inflamed bodies. Uh, we live in a world where inflammation is just kind of out of control. So we have this runaway inflammation from the diets and the toxins and all this kind of stuff.
Pedram Shojai: So how does the body decide? Is it the loudest signal that wins? How, who gets the stem cell love in systems that are just in so much disarray?
Christian Drapeau: Yeah, it is the strongest signal, uh, which then, you know, going back to what you’re talking about with, with a chronic, an area with chronic inflammation. The problem is if you have, if you have more than one area with chronic inflammation, which in most people past 50, You have that, uh, you can deal with it.
Christian Drapeau: You, you, you learn to live with it. You can even, it can even not affect your life, but you can pick it up in your bloodstream as a form of systemic inflammation. Uh, when you have that, then you get the, the, let’s call it noise. It’s noise in your bloodstream. So your signal to noise ratio, is not as high as it could be.
Christian Drapeau: So now stem cells get sort of, uh, uh, I wouldn’t say fooled, but too much noise in your bloodstream. So then your stem cells are not as capable to find the area where they really need to go and repair in these areas of chronic inflammation, oftentimes suffer from other chronic conditions. other problems as well, consequences long term information, which is poor capillary circulation.
Christian Drapeau: So now you’ve got your stem cells that have a problem identifying where they need to go, but when they find themselves in that area, they don’t have like full, full open circulation. So that area, Then not only of the problem there, but the problem seems to isolate that area from the ability to repair
Pedram Shojai: So this, I mean, look, you know, you got gut inflammation, your knees are a little achy, you hurt your shoulder, your elbow hurts from tennis, uh, you start taking this. I mean, arguably, because the thesis also, you know, points to or alludes to the fact that this is kind of an unlimited well, arguably, if you just keep doing this and batting down the inflammation.
Pedram Shojai: You take away the source of inflammation, everything starts to heal, but then if you’re like, Hey, look, I want to do this for my elbow in particular. Is there a way to target the therapy?
Christian Drapeau: the way to target the therapy. If you want to focus one specific area, you just need to like stack it with other technologies. So for example, uh, one that has quite a bit of literature about it is pulse electromagnetic frequencies. So PMF works really well. Uh, so you have these devices that you can put, you know, these, these sort of a ring that are going to really.
Christian Drapeau: Uh, target one specific area and it’s going to do a number of things. It’s going to increase blood flow. It’s going to increase actual stem cell migration. I mean, if you apply this and you take stem cells and you test their ability to migrate, they migrate better once they are in the tissue. Pulse electromagnetic frequencies has been documented to stimulate the differentiation of stems, the proliferation of stem cells first, and then their differentiation into tendon, ligaments, bone, chondrocytes, and so on.
Christian Drapeau: So there’s really a boost, uh, to attract stem cells to that area and boost the repair of, of many components in the joint. So for joints specifically, this is one approach. Uh, red lights are also going to be an approach. Red light will also increase, uh, will also include increase, um, blood circulation. And to an extent, if you use, if you use more of a, of, of a deep infrared that will, that will go a little bit deeper in your tissues, some of these wavelengths have been shown to be able to activate forms of stem cells.
Christian Drapeau: So as you put more of them in circulation, you can also activate them in that area. So red lights, Uh, or simply like good old warm, uh, how do you call that in English? Uh, like a poultice, like, uh, like
Pedram Shojai: He packs. Sure.
Christian Drapeau: eat packs, uh, eat packs in an area. It’s going to, uh, to dilate your blood vessels and it’s going to give a greater chance for stem cells to have access to the blood vasculature in that area.
Christian Drapeau: So things like this, or increase the signal to that area. So you increase the signal to noise ratios. You’re telling me it’s your knee that I would say. Take these plants that will put more stem cells in circulation and go take a walk, squat, do something that will make, I wouldn’t say the pain flare up, but, but just for you to feel it because feeling it means now it’s signaling.
Christian Drapeau: And that’s what you want to do. You just want these areas to signal more or increase the blood flow in these areas.
I hope you’re enjoying the show. Just taking a quick break to say, check out the urban monk academy. Go to my website, the urban monk.com. I have a number of practices from ancient antiquity that very specifically do much of this, that use guided intention using the consciousness and the awareness to bring healing factors to certain areas. Very similar to the mechanisms we’re talking about here.
Uh, on top of that, there are the mirror washing classic and the mirror. Uh, 10 in Washington classic. There are some practices very specifically around this before anyone even understood this conversation is the one that, uh, the ancient Chinese Taoists were having. Uh, doing that in conjunction with what we’re talking about here, I think is a win, I’m a big fan of what you’re listening to here.
Enjoy the show and I’ll see you in the academy.
Pedram Shojai: So, targeting the area through, I mean, like there’s a million ways to target an area. You put your hand on something, it’ll call, you know, call your attention to it, um, helps with orthopedic things. Uh, let’s talk about the elephant in the room, which is cortisol levels and stress and how those impact this and whether or not they get in the way of this mechanism.
Christian Drapeau: Yeah. Uh, very little work has been done in this area, but what has been worked clearly clearly shows that stem cells are affected by stress and more specifically stress hormones. So the kind of studies that were done are like you put a rat, you take a blood sample, uh, and then you isolate the stem cells and you test their ability to proliferate and migrate into tissues.
Christian Drapeau: Now you take that rat, put it into a pool. They’re, they don’t like water. So it’s extremely stressful. Then you take the animal out of the water and take another blood sample. And now look at the ability of these stem cells to proliferate and migrate. And it’s significantly decreased. So, and if, but if, if you remove the adrenal glands and to do the same process, and now it’s not affected.
Christian Drapeau: So it is really stress hormones, cortisol. That is going to affect, uh, stem cell, uh, migration and, uh, and the proliferation. But on, on your question before, there’s something that is important. It’s tied to, it’s tying to distress as well. That is important to add is that there’s, there’s, to my knowledge, there’s no science that has been put into this.
Christian Drapeau: However, the whole physiological machinery exists to also guide these stem cells with your mind. What I mean by this is that if you block. Neuropenephrine transmission by using blockers of, of norepinephrine, you will not have stem cell mobilization from the bone marrow. If you use compounds known to trigger the release of stem cells from the bone marrow, while you’re putting the animal or the person on these blockers, you don’t get the release of stem cells.
Christian Drapeau: So there’s a nervous component. There’s a central nervous system component to stem cell release, which is, is known, but nobody really has documented it. Uh, so number one, number two, your stem cells have receptors for almost all the main neurotransmitters. And we also know that there are nerve terminals in pretty much all the fine vasculature of the body.
Christian Drapeau: So that means there is the machinery for your brain To basically support stem cell mobilization in your bloodstream and then call stem cells to specific areas when they are actually circulating into the area where you need repair to call them to migrate in that area. We have the nervous system to do this.
Christian Drapeau: So it makes me think of the people who have. you know, sat for hours and hours, months, you know, to help, for example, reconnect the spinal cord, uh, through visualization. And they succeed, like people regain mobility in this approach. So I’m thinking that there’s another way to direct stem cells to an area, and it’s just really calming the mind, calming the stress, and through proper visualization, just drive the stem cells where we would like to go.
Christian Drapeau: It is a thing that has not really been talked about a lot.
Pedram Shojai: So if you are one of my urban monks listening to this, uh, level two of the Dowton pie, um, very specifically does this where you’re visualizing the body part, bringing light to the body part. This is effect. This is straight from the Taoist canon is you focus your, your awareness on a body part. And then the more you focus there, the more healing factors can be drawn to that.
Pedram Shojai: It’s kind of on the thesis of kind of energy healing. Uh, but there’s also a classic, um, Which, you know, you’ve inspired me to re record, I’ve done years ago, called the marrow washing classic from the Shaolin tradition, where very specifically they compress energy into the bone marrow for extreme health benefits, you know, thousands of years ago.
Pedram Shojai: How they tapped into this, Lord knows, but this is, you know, this thesis isn’t new. Us understanding what the heck this is, you know, and how it’s working is profound and really, really welcome. What I just heard though is that you can try to trigger this as much as you want, but if you’re really stressed out, you’re going to have much less efficacy because cortisol is going to block the ability for these stem cells to do their thing.
Pedram Shojai: So de stressing or at least taking things to kind of blunt cortisol seem to be something that would be an important part of this algo, given that everyone listening to this has some degree of stress in their life.
Christian Drapeau: Yeah. You know, when I, when I give a lecture on this topic, I oftentimes start with a video that I find like so impressive. It’s a group of scientists, a group of Doris Taylor. They took the heart of a mouse and they digested the heart with digestive enzymes to the point that after I think 12 hours, all that they’re left with is the connective tissue of the heart.
Christian Drapeau: the collagen of the heart, but that collagen still retains the trace that it was a heart. So they take stem cells from that same animal, and then they simply lay the stem cells on that collagen. And within a matter of a week or two, they have a beating heart in the test tube. So, so the raw power of stem cells.
Christian Drapeau: It’s absolutely phenomenal. Uh, I would ask you and I would ask anybody, when do you think we can build a new heart in the, in the lab? A functional new heart. People will say, I don’t know, 30, 50 years from now, if we can do this. It, we can do this today. Like, meaning our stem cells can do it. So why is it that we develop heart problems?
Christian Drapeau: Why is it that our stem cells are not doing that in the body? So there are reasons, one of them, we talked about it, which is, which is the decline in the number of stem cells. There’s not enough in the body to go and reach the heart and do that. But I am certain that other reasons are what we’re talking about right now.
Christian Drapeau: We are, we’re. Incidentally, not willfully, incidentally creating obstacles for these stem cells by letting chronic inflammation develop by maintaining. I mean, who today in the world is not living every day with a form of stress. So we live in an area with stress, which suppresses the role of these stem cells in the body.
Christian Drapeau: Then there’s our environmental toxin, alcohol, smoking cigarettes. uh, secondary smoking. All of this was shown to suppress stem cells as well. So we’re doing a lot of things that sort of suppress this raw regenerative power of stem cells.
Pedram Shojai: This idea that we can now tap into it, I don’t know if you guys have kind of worked out the, uh, the numbers on this, but like, does it take two days in your forties but then four days in your fifties and a week to replenish in your sixties and seventies if you have less red marrow? Like if you start at a certain age, do you have to slow down your release just because the well isn’t as deep?
Pedram Shojai: Or can you go just, As much gung ho, because there’s still enough stem cells inside of whatever marrow is left to get all the same benefits.
Christian Drapeau: There’s plenty. So what you’re describing there is not the limitation. The limitation is that we, we quantify in order to quantify What we observe in people in terms of increasing the number of stem cells, we need to normalize it on the baseline number of stem cells for each individual. So we have an increase of roughly about 80 to a hundred percent increase in the number of circulating stem cells.
Christian Drapeau: You may have in your thirties, probably 20, 25 million stem cells, and, but you probably have in your fifties, probably. Five to 10 million stem cells in circulation. So, so if you’re in your 60s and you’ll see you have 5 million, then you will have an extra 5 million stem cells in circulation. Uh, if you are in your 30s, it’s probably an extra 20 million that you put in your circulation.
Christian Drapeau: So, regardless at the age that you, where you are, you will To release those stem cells and the impact will be less mathematically speaking when you are older. So based on this, I thought when I started originally I thought below 20, nobody, it will make, it won’t make a difference because, because people have plenty of stem cells beyond 80 years.
Christian Drapeau: People don’t have enough stem cells. You know, you get two pennies in your pocket. If I doubled that, you got four pennies. It’s not going to change your life. But everything that I have seen over the past 23 years has not panned out. Like it’s not what I have seen. Everything that I have seen, I can summarize it by saying, At any point in your life, if you give your body the opportunity to put more stem cells in circulation, these stem cells will participate in this natural process of tissue repair.
Christian Drapeau: We’ve had people in their eighties and their nineties getting very, very significant results. So it’s really just a matter, just put more in circulation. They are your repair system. Your body will find a way to use them.
Pedram Shojai: That’s really encouraging that you know given the the chronic health crisis that we face in the entire Western world When you start talking about tissue repair is going to go to the first tissue of opportunity I mean the problem is you know, your average patient is Diabetic has some form of mild heart disease and maybe some COPD Is it just, again, the squeakiest wheel gets the grease, do they all get a little bit, like how, how do you see these kind of multi diagnoses patients getting better, and how does it stage?
Christian Drapeau: I mean, I cannot have a, a documented answer to your question. I cannot just, I, I simply can have an answer based on the available science, which would be to say, yes, they will go where they’re called, uh, the strongest. Actually, it’s not true. When you release them, they’re not like, they don’t sense where they’re called in the body.
Christian Drapeau: They circulate everywhere. But when they pass into the fine capillaries of a tissue, you. that is in need of repair, local signaling will then trigger the migration out of that tissue. So as your stem cells are circulating for an hour or two or three into your entire blood circulation, over time, they’re called to go into these tissues with different level of efficiency, which is coupled then to also their ability to circulate in these areas.
Christian Drapeau: I think Hypothesis at this point, but I think that when people have chronic condition, everybody release stem cells every day. You don’t release enough to fully repair, but at the same time, over time, you should be able to repair. I believe that a lot of these chronic condition develop because locally there’s a, there’s inflammation and there’s a, there’s a, There’s a condition, a set of conditions that set in into this tissue that reduces the overall capillary efficiency.
Christian Drapeau: So stem cells cannot, really don’t have real access to these tissues. So, so that’s why we need to also increase blood flow into these areas. But they will indeed, they will go everywhere in the body and then they will migrate in various tissues. So when we see people with comorbidities or a series of problems, um, They will normally describe that things are slowly improving.
Christian Drapeau: They may notice it. Well, let’s put it this way. There’s also added to all of this. There’s the awareness that we have. If you’re short of breath, um, you can notice that you’re less short of breath, more than let’s say your knee pain if you’re not really going out for a walk because you’re out of breath when you walk.
Christian Drapeau: So, so it depends on how you use your body as well. So your use of your body, the, the, the, the awareness that you have of the problem, maintain also where you see the benefits first, but yes, people will, will essentially document various types of benefits that are, that are improving over time.
Pedram Shojai: You mentioned capillaries, microcapillary circulation. How much does exercise play into this? Is that part of a protocol? Do you use blood movers? Like how do you make sure the blood is getting the stem cells where they need to be?
Christian Drapeau: Well, exercise is huge. And that’s probably one of the reason why. Uh, exercise is good for so many aspects of human health, uh, it’s because it does push the blood into all the fine capillaries in the body simply by, by necessity and blood pressure. Uh, but, but we use, so I’ve developed a product that is specifically aimed at increasing, uh, blood circulation, uh, which is basically tapping into four aspects of capillary health.
Christian Drapeau: One is natokinase, So you make the blood more fluid because stem cells, when they get into a small capillary entrainment has a lot to do with it. If, uh, if your blood is, is kind of stuck into a thicker blood filled with fibrin, then you don’t have entrainment or speed if you want. So your stem cells don’t go into capillaries as easily.
Christian Drapeau: So simply better emo dynamics. Then you want to open and dilate these blood vessels. So nitric oxide technology or, or nitric oxide producers, then you need to have a capillaries that can extend very well. And that is all the collagen and connective tissue around capillaries. So all the bioflavonoids go to cola, ginkgo biloba.
Christian Drapeau: These are the kind of extract that have been documented to help this microcirculation. Cistentia also does the same thing. And, uh, and then we add to this, capula, uh, polysaccharides that help rebuild the glycocalyx, which is the protective layer on stem cell, sorry, on the capillaries that help cells circulate better in these, in these tissues.
Christian Drapeau: So, so you can use these different compounds to help the circulation of stem cells, but exercise is definitely one of them. Sana, red lights, all of these will support that, that capillary circulation. I
Pedram Shojai: Have you looked at any of the age clocks with this work? I know you’re, you’re just getting some momentum on this, but you know, from Horvath all the way to true age, any of these things, are you getting any of these studies done yet?
Christian Drapeau: have not, maybe I should, it’s not a resistance, it’s just as a thought process, What is a marker? A marker is because longevity, if you look at the term, is a very vague term. What is longevity? You will experience longevity in 30, 40 years, 60 years from now. So today is a concept. Uh, if you get a cold, you do something for your cold, you see it right away.
Christian Drapeau: But if you do something for longevity, you don’t know if it has any impact. So in order to see if we have an impact, we’re looking at markers. And I think that this Enthusiasm conceptually to look at these markers to me, my belief is I think that it puts a, how could I say, an overemphasis on markers to give them a meaning that they don’t really have.
Christian Drapeau: And what I mean by this is that I was at a lecture. This was in May in, in Portugal. It was on longevity. Somebody presented. A study in which they show that people that had like sudden trauma, like a car accident, for example, a heart attack, things like this, their markers showed that they aged 20 years, sorry, 10 years overnight.
Christian Drapeau: Sit with that data. Now, your body, your, your body aged 20, 10 years overnight. I think that your markers simply showed the stress in your body. And the concept of seeing you’ve aged overnight is a completely a conceptual understanding. We have not aged overnight. So, so I think there’s a reliance that is too great on these markers.
Christian Drapeau: I don’t want to get into that discussion, but my answer to your question is simply to say, When we look at these markers, you don’t necessarily experience the benefit. You just saw a test results on the, on a piece of paper. When I use the plants that I’m using to release stem cells, I have quadriplegics getting mobility.
Christian Drapeau: I have severe people and severe congestive heart failure reversing completely. I have people with Parkinson revising, reversing. I mean the results that we see on the health is so impressive by tapping into the repair system. My approach was. Why am I going to document this on the, on the marker that I just see the benefit on paper?
Christian Drapeau: If a quadriplegics can get mobility, I felt that it was a much stronger data. But, but I agree with you, the market has moved right now. There’s a real push for these markers. There could be, there could be a play here of just looking at what it could do on markers. But, but it has never been really into my sort of investigative thought process.
Pedram Shojai: Yeah. Listen, I appreciate that. And I appreciate your candor and honesty about it. I think, look, you, you’re documenting something real that’s happening. You’re healing people or people are healing themselves with this mechanism. And that is, More than enough to spend the next two, three decades really chasing this and trying to figure out, you know, how better to leverage this mechanism.
Pedram Shojai: Uh, and in, in all candor, there’s a lot of people in longevity space that are selling bullshit. Um, and so there’s, there’s just a lot of bullshit out there. A lot of people, you know, fall for this, you know, I want to live forever crap and, and, you know, go to all these conferences and do weird things. Uh, a lot of it isn’t scientifically anchored.
Pedram Shojai: A lot of it. is really pseudoscience at the very best. And so I appreciate the fact that that scoreboard might not even be able to read the score on this thing. So how do people begin? Is there a tiptoe way in? Is it all in? Like how do you recommend for your average listener to begin on these protocols?
Christian Drapeau: Um, yeah, I, I think it’s all in, um, there is a, there is a type of individuals that will, that may experience at time a little bit of a, an experiential worsening of their condition. And these are people with things like fibromyalgia, arthritis, like, like pain associated to like joint pain, fascia pain, that kind of stuff.
Christian Drapeau: Uh, it’s not uncommon to have these people. I would say maybe. 20, 30 percent of the time. They will say that they first have what feel like a worsening of their condition. Um, and I can tell you like across the board, if these people continue with the protocol, give it just 10, 14 days and they will start to experience great benefits.
Christian Drapeau: It is part of the healing process. I don’t know if I would call it a healing crisis because quite frankly, I cannot explain it. Um, but I’ve heard this many times. Yeah. Uh, and if people just plow through it, they will get benefit and, and I’m not saying plow through it, like go through the pain, reduce the amount, take one capsule a day for, for, you know, for the time that, that this experience is there and I go through it more smoothly, more softly, but, but don’t stop, go through it.
Christian Drapeau: It’s not negative. It feels like a negative experience, but it’s not negative outside of that. Yeah. There’s no real, there’s no real problem. People can joke and go and plow through it. If somebody is more sensitive to dietary supplements. through their own experience. Start slowly, take one capsule for day or two, then go to two, then go to two twice a day.
Christian Drapeau: In our clinical trials, we do two capsules three times a day. This is the stem region release. Two capsules three times a day, sending three waves of these stem cells during the day. And that’s the protocol with which we have seen so far pretty good results.
Pedram Shojai: Amazing. Um, I know that you put together a bundle for my listeners and viewers. So we’ll put a link wherever people are experiencing this. But if someone wants to check out the company, check out the products, outside of all that, where do they go?
Christian Drapeau: stemregen. co. So stemregen. co. So the product initially was these plants that trigger stem cell release, stemregen release. And then the two additional product that they will see on the website is the product that I briefly described to increase capillary flow. And the other one is a blend of plant extract that sort of, uh, that helps.
Christian Drapeau: Tame down inflammation from all the different pathways of inflammation. Uh, so you release stem cells and you sort of open the path for them to see where to go and be able to circulate to go there. So that’s the package, what we call the
Pedram Shojai: Love it. Love it. I’m going to do the protocol myself. Uh, I will report back to my audience. I’m always like being a guinea pig when something makes sense and I’ll report back as well. But, uh, do it with me folks. Let’s, um, let’s heal our bodies. I really, I really understand. all of this just feels right. And, um, I’ve looked at his book and his science, uh, he’s doing great work.
Pedram Shojai: And so I think that this is something well worth looking into. And you know, look, if you feel better and your body’s healed and your body’s doing better, all things improve. So, uh, Christian, thank you so much for the work that you’ve done really nice chatting with you. And I look forward to following up with you again, once I’ve gone through the protocol, just to report back.
Christian Drapeau: looking forward to it. Thank you.
Pedram Shojai: Thank you.
All right. That’s a wrap. Hope you enjoyed it. I really did. I think that this has a lot to it. Uh, personally doing a regimen, uh, started already and, uh, we’ll report back. I will put a link to wherever you’re seeing this. Uh, just go to the urban monk.com/podcast. I’ll put it under this episode, uh, for a bundle.
He’s going to put together with a discount for my audience. So if you’re going to get it, get it there, you’ll get a discount. Might as well. Uh, and then we are in talks to maybe do some collaborations where I teach some of the qigong and the guided visualization stuff. That comes from my side of the universe, uh, along with this, to see if we could capacitate and make it even Mo better.
So hope you enjoyed. Let me know what you think. I’ll see you next time.