In this interview, Dr. Kevin Conners speaks with Alan Cash from Terra Biological about the benefits of using oxaloacetate, a compound that mimics calorie restriction. Terra Biological conducted research showing that animals given oxaloacetate lived 25% to 50% longer, as it activates molecular pathways involved in calorie restriction. In addition, women who took oxaloacetate reported a reduction in PMS symptoms, particularly emotional symptoms. This effect is attributed to oxaloacetate balancing blood sugar levels and preventing glucose shortage in the brain.
The conversation then shifts to the use of oxaloacetate in addressing chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and long COVID fatigue. Clinical trials conducted by Terra Biological showed that oxaloacetate supplementation led to a decrease in fatigue levels for individuals with these conditions. Oxaloacetate helps normalize energy production in cells, reversing the inefficient energy production through fermentation seen in the Warburg effect. This normalization of metabolism has promising results in reducing fatigue in individuals who have struggled with it for years.
The conversation emphasizes the significance of oxaloacetate in addressing various health issues related to energy production and metabolism. It has been shown to alleviate PMS symptoms, improve energy levels, and reduce fatigue in chronic conditions. The potential of oxaloacetate as a health strategy is underscored, particularly in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic where many individuals are experiencing persistent fatigue and seeking solutions to recover their energy levels.
Alan Cash discusses the benefits of his supplement called benaGene, which contains high dosage oxaloacetate. He mentions the recommended dosage for chronic fatigue syndrome patients and acknowledges positive feedback for using these products for various conditions like long haul COVID, chronic Lyme disease, West Nile, and chronic mold issues. Ongoing clinical trials for other fatigue-related diseases are also mentioned. benaGene and Oxaloacetate CFS are available at shop.ConnersClinic.com
We hope you enjoy this episode!
Resources on Oxaloacetate
Kreb’s Cycle, or Citric Acid Cycle
Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD)
Pictorial Review of Glutamate Excitotoxicity (American Journal of Neuroradiology)
Gluctamate oxaloacetate transaminase (GOT)
About Alan Cash
Alan Cash serves as founder and chief science officer at Terra Biological. Researching into the molecular and genomic mechanisms of aging and the effects of calorie restriction on aging, Mr. Cash developed unique molecular methods and compounds to mimic calorie restriction and extend lifespan in laboratory animals. Mr. Cash has an MS in physics from the University of Oklahoma. As an entrepreneur Mr. Cash has gained recognition and awards from the White House, INC 500 business, Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, Deloitte and Touche Technology Fast 50, and Top 100 Hotfirm.
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Transcript
Dr. Kevin Conners
Hello, everybody. This is Dr. Kevin Conners. Welcome to another episode of Conners Clinic Live. I have a special guest, Alan Cash, with us from Terra Biological. He is how I found out about your company. Alan was, I don’t know, maybe 10, 12 years ago, your benaGene product, which you’ll talk about what oxaloacetate is, and I’ll let you get into the scientific ins and outs of it. We’ve just found it to be a great product for our members. A lot of our members are taking it. And I thought, last time I placed an order with you, I just crossed my mind. I was like, I’ve never had you on our podcast. So I got to let you introduce yourself and your company, and we’ll just have a chat.
Alan Cash
I’m Alan Cash with Terra Biological. We started this company back in 2006 when we started examining the use of oxaloacetate as a method to mimic calorie restriction. And when we did this at UCSD through the Williams Laboratory, David Williams is now up at UCLA. And what we saw is when we gave oxaloacetate to small animals, short lived animals, they lived anywhere from 25 % to 50 % longer. And there just aren’t a lot of things that do that. The reason we were able to do that is we were following the molecular pathways that are involved in calorie restriction and primarily looking at ANPK activation. So your genes are pretty much the same all the time. Your DNA doesn’t change all that much. But depending upon the environment, what you eat, the stresses that you’re under, your current health, and medications that you take, your genes can turn on or turn off. Your DNA can turn on new proteins and express those proteins throughout your body. And one of the things that calorie restriction does is it turns on about 10 % of your genome to make different proteins. And we found these proteins to be very beneficial to health.
One of the ways that throughout the animal kingdom that we can get animals to live longer, to have less inflammation, to have less chronic disease is with calorie restriction. So being able to turn on the same process in your body may be a very good health strategy. And this is what we originally set out to do with our product, benaGene, which is oxaloacetate capsules. So we introduced those back in 2009 after quite a bit of testing and notifications to the FDA of a new dietary ingredient, oxaloacetate. And since then, we’ve gotten just a ton of great feedback. One of the things that we saw is women who were taking benaGene through their doctor reported that their symptoms of PMS just went away. And being a guy, I didn’t realize how important that was. But these women quickly gave me the notice that it was there.
Dr. Kevin Conners
First of all, I’ll interrupt you. Are you married, Alan?
Alan Cash
Yes, I am. And I had no idea.
Dr. Kevin Conners
Your wife had bad issues with that, ever?
Alan Cash
Well, like I said, I have three daughters that I involved in through that issue. And certainly, it’s helped my family. And what we saw is when we gave oxaloacetate to women with emotional PMS as opposed to the physical symptoms. There are a lot of things on the market for physical PMS, like the swelling, the bloating, the aches and pains, that type of thing, acne. But there’s almost nothing on the market for emotional symptoms such as sadness, irritability, anger, important things that affect their relationships and their ability to get along with others. And what they were reporting back to me is that when these symptoms went away, I mean, one woman put it very succinctly to me. She said, since I was 13 years old, I’ve had to hide from my work colleagues, from my husband, from my children for three days every month. Because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have those things anymore.
Dr. Kevin Conners
Wow.
Alan Cash
This is the first time I’m 36 years old. This is the first time all of those things just went away. And what we did, tracked it to a really unusual set of circumstances. Oxaloacetate goes into the stomach and then goes to the liver, and it allows the processing of fatty acids into glucose so that you can feed your heart and your brain during times of shortage. And when we look at women with extreme mood swings in PMS using functional MRI, and this was done up at UCLA, what we see is in the Cerebellum, which is in the back of the brain, sometimes it’s referred to the primitive part of the brain or the animal part of the brain. But what we see is during that time period where this emotions just go all over the place is the need for huge amounts of glucose in that area of the brain. It’s a genetic thing, and it seems to affect between 30 and 40 % of the women that are out there. And if you don’t get that glucose, that’s when there’s a problem. And it’s the same thing for men. They call it being hangry.
I experience it myself when I haven’t… I missed a meal and all of a sudden something irritates me, I’m hungry, I’m irritable. It’s a common response, not just with women. So what we saw is the oxaloacetate balances the blood sugar, enabling these women to avoid the shortage of glucose. And it’s interesting. This is why these women seek out chocolate. They seek out carbohydrates, chips and any pasta, anything to give them a rush of sugar. The problem with carbohydrates is that you then get an insulin surge and your glucose levels crater in about 30 minutes and it makes the problem worse. And so what we see with oxaloacetate is it increases something called the NAD to NADH ratio in the cells. This activates a signaling molecule called the AMP protein activated kinase or AMPK. An AMPK then works with the nucleus to put out certain proteins that help stabilize blood sugar all the time. It also works in the liver to allow the process processing of fatty acids to glucose so that in times of shortage, again, you can feed your heart and you feed your brain. And this has made the problem so much better.
We did a clinical trial. The double blinded, placebo controlled, crossover trial, gold standard. We saw amazing results. And we saw more than a 50 % drop in sadness. We saw a 50 % drop in anxiety, in related stress. We even saw a 48 % reduction in suicidal ideation, which is obviously this product is going to save some lives. And so that’s one thing that’s jubulence. And then as a run on from this, we got reports back from our customer base, Hey, I’m not fatigued anymore. Hey, I have a lot more energy. And this makes sense for a variety of standards. So we wondered if higher doses of oxaloacetate could help in various fatigue states, for instance, in chronic fatigue or in long COVID fatigue. And we just finished a clinical trial in both long COVID and chronic fatigue syndrome. And some of these people with chronic fatigue syndrome had had CFS for up to 30 years. Once you get it, it’s very hard to get rid of it. These are people that aren’t just tired. If they do any exercise at all, it exhausts them. Walking to the mail box and back may put them in bed for a week.
Very serious. And I wasn’t aware that this was even going on. But apparently, the Center for Disease Control states that there are about 2.5 million people just in the US with chronic fatigue syndrome.
Dr. Kevin Conners
Serious chronic fatigue syndrome like you’re talking about.
Alan Cash
Serious chronic fatigue syndrome. Serious fatigue.
Dr. Kevin Conners
So do you think the mechanism of action with chronic fatigue is about the glucose balancing?
Alan Cash
We think it’s a variety of things, and it’s really a complex situation. What we believe and what others believe based on the papers that have been published is that it’s how you produce the energy. So in your cell, you’ve got your cell and you’ve got your nucleus. And then there are these little organells called mitochondria, which are like the power plants of your cells. You put in sugar, which is the fuel that fuels mitochondria. The mitochondria burn the fuel with oxygen, and they make ATP, which is the energy currency that allows your cells to do all the things that it does. Now, in people with chronic fatigue syndrome, their energy production is less from the mitochondria and more from something called fermentation. In the cytosol, the glucose, the sugar turns into pyruvate. And then that pyruvate is fermented without oxygen into lactate, which is a common product of milk. And this lactate then is exported out of the cell and feeds other cells that can use it for energy. But it’s a very inefficient process, and it leads to a lot of free radicals. These are little compounds that are charged, and they seek to end that charge, and they end up attaching to various proteins and other parts of the cell, and it causes problems.
It can even damage your DNA.
Dr. Kevin Conners
So this is what is referred to my listeners as the Warburg effect.
Alan Cash
Exactly.
Dr. Kevin Conners
And this could be a cause and fuel for other serious diseases that we don’t want to mention.
Alan Cash
Yeah. So Otto Warburg, back in the 1930s, was a German scientist, brilliant bio chemist, and he found the Warburg effect primarily by studying cancer cells. And he felt that the Warburg effect was one of the primary things we see in cancer, at least in solid tumor cancer. And so we see this in cancer cells, but we also see this in chronic fatigue syndrome patients. Now, we’ve been doing a lot of work with Houston Methodist looking at oxaloacetate as it goes into the cell. And what happens… And one of the things we use to look at that is Glioblastoma cells, which is brain cancer cells. And we’ve been able to show that oxaloacetate, when you expose the cells to oxaloacetate, the cell brings in the oxaloacetate and it reverses the Warburg effect. So instead of putting out all this lactate and then feeding other parts of the cells that need the lactate to grow in a non oxygen environment, oxaloacetate pushes these cells back towards normal conditioning, which is really a huge thing right now.
Dr. Kevin Conners
So then they’re not using lactic acid as their fuel source anymore. One of the things that we’ve been researching, there’s a gene called the HIF1 gene that is what converts lactic acid into the pyruvic acid to get it into the Krebs cycle. And we found that our members that have a lot of defects on that gene are more prone to the Warburg effect with feeding cancer, feeding chronic fatigue, other diseases. So that’s where oxaloacetate is really the huge beneficial piece to that puzzle.
Yeah.
Alan Cash
And there’s been some published work showing that hypoxia inducible factor 1, HIF1, is actually blocked by oxaloacetate.
Dr. Kevin Conners
Yeah. Pretty cool stuff, right?
Alan Cash
So this all interweaves together, which makes it more complicated, of course. But we’re using this oxaloacetate now to help people with fatigue, to turn their energy system, which has been pushed into the wrong direction, push it back towards normal. We call it normalization of metabolism. And when we do that, we see people that have had fatigue for 30 years. All of a sudden, after six weeks of taking high doses of oxaloacetate, we see their fatigue at least 25% less. We see people who have had long COVID, who haven’t been in this alternate energy state for as long, we see their fatigue levels drop by up to 48% in six weeks. And it’s so necessary at this time. I mean, if you look at the numbers of people who have gotten COVID, and then look at the number people who are still experiencing events from COVID, it’s crazy. It’s like we’ve got the zombie apocalypse out there. These people are having trouble at work. They’re having trouble driving, which makes it dangerous for all of us. And they’re wondering, what can I do to get over this? And one of the things that we’ve looking at is how this chronic fatigue from COVID turns into chronic fatigue syndrome after six months.
And they get stuck in this. And so we’re able to have a medical food. So you have to work with your doctor for this because it’s very high dosage oxaloacetate. Our benaGene product gives 100 milligrams of oxaloacetate per capsule. Our medical food gives 500 milligrams and suggests that you need to take two to six of these a day. So you’re looking at 2,000 to 3,000 milligrams a day on average that these patients are taking for six weeks in order to get it into the cells and reprogram those cells into a different energy profile.
Dr. Kevin Conners
It is amazing. We have been selling a lot of your products, as you know. We have had just a lot of good feedback. You talk about long haul COVID being a piece to this cause, but there are so many cause. You think of chronic Lyme disease, to West Nile, to other chronic mold issues. People can’t even put their finger on what was the cause. They just have these horrible fatigue symptoms now that quite honestly, so many doctors haven’t believed them. And they’ve been labeled as hypochondriacs and their family has disowned them. Their lives have just been extremely disrupted. And it all has to do with the ability to produce energy the way we’re supposed to produce energy in an efficient way and being able to live your life.
Alan Cash
Yeah. I heard from one patient that had And by the way, I need to qualify all this. I am not a medical doctor. I’m a physicist. That’s why I’m looking at energy. But don’t take anything I say as medical advice. Our benaGene product is a nutritional supplement. It’s meant to keep healthy people healthy, which it does quite well. Our medical food is for people with chronic fatigue syndrome. You work with your doctor on that because it’s higher dosage. And we don’t have a drug form of oxaloacetate available yet. We are in clinical trials right now for cancer related fatigue at UCLA. We’re doing clinical trial work there. We’re doing glioblastoma with the Mayo Clinic, and we’re doing other fatigue related diseases like ALS, less at the University of Kansas, but none of that is available yet. That’s all in the future. And hopefully, the trials continue to provide us with encouraging results. But for right now, if you have chronic fatigue syndrome, or if your long COVID has gone more than six months and are now in the chronic fatigue syndrome category, we have something for you. And it’s important to get the word out about that.
Dr. Kevin Conners
Yeah. Well, I thank you for your work. I thank you for coming on today. We’ll have you back. I really want to have you back when some of these other trials get through and that we can legally talk about some other serious diseases as well. So in the meantime, you can find Mr. Cash’s products, the benaGene and the Oxaloacetate CFS on our store, and contact us if you have questions about those. Thank you again, Alan. Appreciate all you’re doing.
Alan Cash
Thank you so much. And looking forward to our continued relationship.
Dr. Kevin Conners
Absolutely.
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NOTE: All of the above statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This and any product(s) discussed are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
Dustin has been passionate about holistic health since he met his wife, Dr Mallory Ranem (Conners) 20 years ago. As the Digital Media Manager, he coordinates content across Conners Clinic’s large online presence, including written, video, and audio.
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