Dr. Florence Comite - Groq Health & Reverse Aging For The Masses

Hey everyone, welcome to the Future of Fitness, a top-rated fitness industry podcast for over four years and running. I'm your host, Eric Malzone, and I have the absolute pleasure of talking to entrepreneurs, executives, thought leaders, and cutting-edge technology experts within the extremely fast-paced industries of fitness, wellness, and health sciences. Please stop by futurefitness.co to subscribe and get our interviews with some ways delivered straight to your inbox. Thanks for listening and on to the show. Hey friends, I couldn't be more proud and excited to announce that today's episode is powered by workout, the ultimate tool for modern fitness professionals just like you. There is one thing that fires me up: it's elevating the personal training and coaching industry. For that, the Workout app is an absolute game changer. No more promoting top brands without compensation or dealing with confusing social media links. In just a few clicks, Workout's user-friendly app lets top trainers and coaches curate and share the world's most sought-after fitness brands like Hyperice, Vega, and more. Product lines covering everything from fitness equipment to supplements and apparel. Save time and boost your earnings with generous commissions and bonuses every time your client purchases the product you already endorse. Do not wait. Maximize your income and streamline your business with store by workout. Discover more at workout.com. That's wrk.com. Just one-o, w-r-k-o-ut- go get it. All right. We are live. Dr. Florence Komite, welcome to the future of fitness. Thank you for having me. This is uh just from the previous 10 minutes we've had the opportunity to chat, uh, this is gonna be very powerful. I can tell. I mean, I'm already wishing I had three hours to ask you questions, but unfortunately I don't. So uh we're just gonna dive right in and I reversing aging. Gosh, like, you know, is there anything um more interesting to anyone who's alive than reversing aging? I mean, it's like the age-old, no pun intended, question, right? Of like, how do we slow it down? And I've had so many people in the fields of longevity and health span come on the show and I've picked their brains. And it's, you know, it sounds like you're you're really up there um as far as the pinnacle of where that could go. So I'll stop talking. We can just start with this. Can you give us um a little bit of your background, um, Florence, and then we'll go from there?

Delayed it too, Eric. It is fun chatting. I love the name of your um podcast because I think about what I do as the future of health and revealing um where you where you stand and where you're going. So, over 20 years ago, I started thinking about why, if we see changes at the cellular level in biomarkers or as we think of as labs, and we know how people are living life and what their family history is, why can't we stop disease before it gets underway? Because unfortunately, as Abby Hoffman used to say, you know, at 30, it's over. And it is true that in our 30s, that's when muscle begins to start disappearing because testosterone starts decreasing. And I had a few epiphanies around the time that said, well, if I could just stop aging and do it in a way that works with the body, I could stop diseases like diabetes, heart disease, stroke, osteoporosis, or loss of bone and fractures and shrinking. And it turns out to be true that if we could do that, I wasn't anti-aging in a way. I didn't think of aging as a disease. I thought it was a natural progression. But if we could just keep our health and extend our health span for the rest of our life, whether it's 120 or later, that would be the way to go. And that's where I started.

Wow. Uh maybe, you know, I've I've this topic has come up a couple of times of precision medicine. And I was looking at some of your profile. Can you maybe explain that term to me like I'm in eighth grade? Like what does that mean exactly?

Actually, you don't have to be in eighth grade to understand it. So there was a lot of talk over the years about personalizing medicine. And to me, as a physician, and I love taking care of people, and I do it from a research perspective because I'm trained as a clinical researcher scientist at NIH and at Yale. It it is a medicine has to be personal. How do you take care of another human who sometimes shares stories with you they don't even share with their closest lovers and friends? And you have to keep it in confidence and help them. So to me, medicine has to be personal, but precision takes it to the next level. It takes it to a deeper level of data, hard scientific data that says, hey, guess what? You're on a path to have a heart attack. I was just sitting with one of my patients who we call clients because we don't want them to be sick. And he had a heart attack before he was 50. And he was, he knew that he wasn't managing sugar real well for about 20 years, too busy working, running things, being hugely successful. And now he's reversing all of that. And so, to me, if you get data, you can assess the path we're on for the future. It's like having a crystal ball to say, this is your future in health, and this is how we're gonna stop disease from emerging because it's there. You may not recognize it in your 30s, you may think you're working hard, you're trying to figure out life, you have a family, um, whether it's a dog or a bunch of kids and dogs and other animals, and you're trying to figure out what you should do, but there's no answers that are specific to you. Most of medicine is one size fits all. And so I went about looking at it as I think of as an N of one. How do we collect all the bits and bytes that make you who you are? And then look at those numbers, look at the in some in some folks' worlds, it's a self-quantified self where you're collecting numbers, but then make it actionable. What can one do to own a reversal of aging so that disease never emerges and you keep your health for the rest of your life? That makes sense?

Yeah, it makes total it you explained that very well. Thank you. The thing that I'm hearing from you, which I haven't heard a lot uh out of, you know, I think I told you something like 700 interviews I've done now, is the term reversal, right? Like I've heard, you know, longevity, I've heard increasing health span, but reversal is a very powerful, strong word, right? That means we're actually we're going the other direction, right? We're we're improving things and we're we're counteracting things that we've done in the past. So when you when you use that word, I mean, is that intentional? I mean, how how how confident are you with that? Like, explain to me a bit. Great. Yeah, explain.

I set up and structure the work I started doing as a scientific study. I actually have protocols because remember, my background is in I've I've had 50 different studies before the FDA. I brought new drugs to market. I have patents, you can check that all out if you want to be bored on Wikipedia. And it's true, it's embarrassing a little bit. And um, I have studies in children and in adults, and I was lucky enough to see every decade of life and realize as people get into their 40s and beyond, we decline, but we don't have to decline. And so I structured it in such a way that I could collect it in a going forward manner, like what we think of as prospective, but then analyze it retrospectively. So I have data and data, years of data on individuals showing that their biological age is far less than their chronological age. So if you think of the fact that at 50, you are celebrating, you know, 50 years on Earth, but your chronological, your biological age, that's your chronological age, your biological age can be 30 or it could be 70. And we actually show that besides diseases and biomarkers that would put you in the diabetic range or risk of a major heart attack or stroke, you're actually as fit as you were when you were 30 or 25. And so that reversal is very specific and precise. And again, the word precision, which has become a very popular word in almost every industry, is about collecting data and figuring out who that individual is and how do you get them to a place where they feel as good as they've ever felt in life, and they stay that way until 100 or more.

Awesome.

That's really the goal.

Uh, you know, that there's a lot of different, I guess, companies testing, um, all different things that, you know, provide that chronological versus biological age metric now. How is that actually is it are you are we managing, are really measuring telomeres? Like how how is that how has that number gotten to?

In several ways. We actually have publications that looked at COVID and aging before and after in the vaccine. And we're actually working with the leader in the field. So there are many ways to assess aging, and you may be referring to David Sinclair, for example, and his startup called Tally. Again, great information, but it's not the cutting edge in the frontier of looking at biological aging. It's he he wanted to get it out there. And again, there are people who know me and know him and have invested in both of us to bring this to the market. And I'm more about making sure what we're serving up is right for each and every human being and testing in multiple ways. So, because there's nothing that is tremendously precise in medicine. In fact, I mentioned before that I'm an identical twin. And yet when I took my own blood and I divided it in half when I did blood test and sent it to the same lab, the numbers between my sister's name on a tube and my name were different. So, what we look at is trends. You cannot depend on one specific number. Um, people who are self-quantifiers begin to notice this. You can even send your own blood to the lab, and if it's run in two different ways, your cholesterol may be different. So we look at trends in folks over time, and we can tell the direction it's going. And then we start by reversing it. We look at telomeres, and for example, we use treatments, a supplement that's been around in the Chinese world for centuries, since the third century, astragalus or root of astragalus will lengthen telomeres because our telomeres, the end and caps of our DNA, also picture aging and disease, and they're related to that. And by reversing that, you're going to protect your body and your mind. But we look directly at methylated DNA and circulating DNA to get a biological age. And there's a whole variety of ways both to look at telomeres, to look at biomarkers. But probably one of the most important reasons that I feel that we're in the field is I curate for the best. I'm not interested in snake oil. I'm not interested in testing something if it doesn't really have value. It's a waste of time and money. And I want to have facts in front of me to be able to assess a person and know they're going in the right direction. So I look for tools and ways of analyzing that will make a difference and that will give us what I think of as insights and actionable interventions, whether it's changing the way you sleep, um, something that um uh Huberman uh speaks a lot about, or um, I think it's also Andrew, what's his last name? Matt Matt, uh do you know who I'm the guy who speaks on sleep a fair amount?

Oh yeah.

He's also in California. First name is Matthew. It'll come to me. And we want to have specific ways to changing the way people eat, sleep, work out. Are they doing anything to stretch? Are they doing high-intensity interval training, along with you know, resistance and uh aerobic that change the way the heart might power up? Not specific diets, but a way of eating that fits that person's makeup. So we believe in continuous glucose monitors, which I've been using since they've come to be, and marrying that to insomnia. Why is a person insomnia? Are they becoming hypoglycemic in the middle of the night? And so we actually can track all of that now. Wearables have become amazing, and we can help people make the right decisions for them at the right time.

There is uh there's a lot to unpack there. And I think one of my favorite things right now in health and fitness uh is this seemingly meteoric rise of the consumer desire for knowledge, right? Like you look at all these names that you've you've seen, like you've mentioned uh you know, David Sinclair and Peter Atia and Andrew Huberman and Matthew the Sleep Guy, I can't remember his name right now either. And it's really bothering me. But like all these, you know, Dr. Gabriel Lyons, like people are really into it right now. And and I'm shocked at some of the people that um I talked to, or how many people I talk to who like love Huberman, right? They just love it. They can't get enough of it. And uh obviously he's seeing a lot of benefits of that movement. When you talk about tools, like you mention continuous glucose monitoring, wearables. I presume there's some sort of DNA testing. Like, you know, give me maybe the like the basic tools that you would use across. Okay, yeah.

So in the comite version where it's bespoked and it's expensive, and but lives are changed dramatically within weeks to months, and then the process continues to unfold, and we actually see the reversal of aging by two to three years. It begins to happen sooner, but it's really evident, so evident that one of my recent clients was telling me a funny story. He's been a client for over a decade and he's a partner in a law firm, and he should have retired. So he's beyond 65. And a few of the younger people in the firm who don't know him well wanted to know why he wasn't running for CEO. And he's way beyond the age. He's about 15, 20 years beyond the age of where you can run for president, CEO. So he was quite flattered. And sometimes I have to look twice to recognize our clients because they look amazingly different. Uh, it's just incredible. Um, so where we start is by getting a CGM. Actually, after speaking to someone who's interested in going forward, we prescribe a continuous glucose monitor. Because when a person actually sees that they're eating a banana and they're or in a shake and their sugar goes up to 200 instead of instead of staying within an optimal range below 120, they're amazed and they recognize that they have to eat somewhat differently and they make choices that are smart for them because we don't want them to suffer. We don't want them to live a long life, but but not enjoy every moment of it. We want them to have the jour de vie of life. Um, and so we start with that, and at the same time, we're gonna draw blood. And the blood biomarkers are like over 100, 125 or so. And those biomarkers um are across every system in your body, from your brain to your immune system to your hormones, to your metabolism. It goes well beyond what a regular annual might do. And hence we call it a precision health analysis, the whole testing. Once we get that kind of data and we also probe at the time the blood is drawn, not when we get the results, how you're living life, how a person's living life, we can marry the choices. Have you been traveling a lot lately? How's your sleep? Were you sick recently? We can actually see a lot of that in the data now because we've collected it longitudinally in people for so long. We could see these profiles and patterns, and I'm happy to give you some examples of that purely based on what someone reports them their family history, which is a very important aspect, but it doesn't mean if somebody's adopted, we can't tell what the numbers and the lifestyle is doing. And then once we get all those numbers, we actually set up a phone call and we review it. And those numbers range from your carbohydrate metabolism to cholesterol to thyroid to growth hormone to male hormones and female hormones. And mostly we're all identical. We have the same hormones except for prostate PSA. And that's analyzed along with a questionnaire we ask our clients to fill out. And they come back in for performance testing, where we look at endurance using a VO2 max, and that translates into reversing diseases that are very common because of aging, because we can't maintain endurance. Our VO2max, which is the way our heart and lungs perform aerobically and anaerobically, speak to improvement. When you improve your VO2 max by a few points, you increase your metabolic equivalence and you reverse aging. And this is in the literature, in the New England Journal of Medicine and in Mao, for those who are interested in looking at the science of it, you can see that you reverse aging by 12% disease and morbidity, morbidity and mortality, we refer to it in health care and medicine, by 12% over 10 years. That's incredible. And that's independent of gender, whether you're male or female, and it's independent of cardiometabolic status. That is, what are your lipids and what are what's your heart, what's your sugar, and those kinds of factors. So we base our findings and our outcomes on all that data. And when we connect the dots and we integrate all these variables, we then interpret it, and then we've put into place actionable, targeted interventions for each person, and then we monitor how they respond over time. I hope that wasn't too much.

No, that there was, I mean, there's so much there, right? But it's not a simple It is. It's not a simple thing.

Um, over the years, Eric, it's become simple because patterns are detectable and visible. And we can actually, I can now tell just talking to a person, like if I did an interview of you and I got some of your story, maybe some numbers if you knew them, I'd be able to tell what profile you are in and what I might look towards to be able to get you on the healthiest track to optimize every aspect of your future health trajectory that we can. And if you want to try that either now or some other time, I'm happy to do it. I've been wanting to do it for Huberman because uh Andrew Huberman, because he follows and does testing, but I know from the testing that he does that it doesn't begin to reach what we do. Um so that that's of interest to me if you're interested.

Yeah, I uh I want to circle back to some examples on that. But the first question I want to ask you about was VO2 Max. And I think um, you know, people in the fitness industry are definitely familiar with the metric. They may not be exactly uh sure of how it works, you know, um, or how to test it. And that was my question. Is like, how is is VO2 Max testing um easily accessible now? Or how how do you go about it?

Oh, that's a great question. And I was just talking about it with someone at Apple who actually came in and tested our VO2 with Garmin and with an Apple Watch. And it's very close. So if you program, you have to, you have to be wearing the Apple. I'll just use the Apple Watch because you know I have one. I also have an aura on this hand. Um, I look use a lot of apps and a lot of wearables, so so do you. And it's very close within a point or two, if you actually prime your watch to do a passive VO2 where you have to walk for a certain number of weeks, maybe it's a couple of months. And as you enter more and more data, which is passive, you're not actually filling in any numbers, you can get a pretty good VO2 that you can follow if you start making changes in your own life and you want to see if that's impacting you in a positive way. So, yes. Otherwise, what it takes, we have a research level kind of uh machine here that collects data as you run on the treadmill or bike on a bicycle for those people where it's more appropriate. And it collects the data, and we have exercise physiologists who are phenomenal. And over time, as we make these changes, we see incredible movement where they'll gain three points on their VO2, which is that one metabolic equivalent, which leads to being able to say to them, listen, you've reversed aging and disease over the next death and disease actually, 10%, 12% over the next decade. So it becomes really palpable what you're doing to invest in yourself as far as health goes. And that's my dream of making this available to everybody. So the more virtual we get, the easier it is to get this kind of information and put it to use in your own life. I think it's going in that direction by leaps and bounds, as you've noticed.

Yeah, leaps and bounds. Um, I mean, gosh, and you know, even like uh I think it was Eric Caspery from Serotonin Centers. We had a conversation about, you know, what he's doing. And I always ask people, like, well, how long do you think we can live right nowadays? And his question was 140. And uh my response is always, well, I have that on your graph, by the way.

140. Yeah. What is it who said that? I want to know.

So I can Eric Casabri. Yeah.

Okay.

Um the uh give me some examples. I mean, I think all this stuff always comes together neatly when you can give an example. It's like a story, right? Of how, you know, maybe um, you know, you mentioned certain personas or certain profiles that that you follow. Like give give us one example and then we can have a deeper understanding of how all this pulls together.

So there's generalized aging, which is very common, where you hear a story that someone is fit and can do everything they want to do until their 40s. And then they begin to notice a little bit of slowing down, mostly blamed on external factors, but much of it is driven by internal factors. And that is the disease happens in their family in their 80s, 70s, 80s, 90s. And you'd be surprised how many people think 70 is old, like, oh, they died of old age at 70. I'm like, 70 is not old. 70 is probably the new 40 today, if you take care of yourself. Um, but then there's a certain pocket of people, and it's also pretty common where the story you get is my father, my mother, my grandparent, my aunt, my uncle, any combination thereof, um, had a heart attack in their 40s or died in their 60s. And there's enough of that, even in a small family, that when you see the biomarkers, we've seen over the years that people at 30 actually look like they're 50 and they're they're following in the tracks of one ancestor or the other as it comes together. Now, mind you, when we inherit genes from our family, if you're one of three sibs, you you may be completely different than your two sibs because not just the inheritance counts half from your mom and half from your dad, but the way it mixes and matches in utero and multiplies. And you may express more of your dad's immaterial genetically than your mom's. And I can go on with that. So we have a lot of folks with this early death and dying from cardiometabolic, which is pretty ubiquitous. I mean, heart disease, stroke, heart attack, Alzheimer's, it's very common. And the longer we live, the more disease we're gonna see. We don't necessarily live and stay healthy. Health declines pretty dramatically beginning in our 50s to 60s. We feel it already in our 40s. So that profile is palpable. Somebody calls the office and I talk to them about what we do, and I find out they have that story, I know they don't look very good underneath. Or if they're a 55-year-old, and this is real, Bracken Darrell, who's one of my clients, I love him to bits, and he's completely open about it. And he actually knows David Sinclair as well as me. Um, when he came in, he was in his late 50s, he was running Logitech and very active man, played with professional ball players. It's his love, basketball, full court basketball. He's now playing five to six times a week. He's in amazing shape. He's at least he's 60 now. He just uh left Logitech and he's gonna be running Vanity Fair uh VPC, born in Kentucky. But when I looked at him and heard his story, I could tell you that he was somebody that the natural course of aging is to have loss of hormones and imbalance, if you will, less than optimal, along with metabolic underpinnings that you've inherited from and expressed from your family that need to be tweaked. And he was in that category. He needed some supplementation of B's and D's, D um uh supplements, and he needed to have his testosterone addressed. And he actually responded very youthfully because we were able to help him make his own testosterone using a peptide. That's a field that my research, major research was in peptides in children and women and men. And so he's your kind of aging in amazing shape. He's the 60-year-old who now plays five days of basketball full court every week. And the only thing that goes awry is he'll pull his back, and then we have to bring him back from the edge because he'll still continue to play. Um, just an amazing man. And he believes that creativity and your ability to give back continues to grow as we age with wisdom. And so he doesn't want to lose any bit of himself. He's a wonderful man. And if you don't follow him on LinkedIn, you should, because his his what he sees in his insights, besides being a very nice man and a very astute businessman, he turned around Logitech. He's just a kind, generous soul who's just a wonderful human being. And so he's another- What's his name again? Rackin Darrell, D-A-R-R-E-L-L. Wonderful guy to follow. And then there are groups of people that have they're one of three children. Because we, because while my sweet spot for over the years is when this change begins to be be palpable at the cellular level, so you could still feel pretty good. You can even go to a reunion at 30 and like feel like you're on top of the world. But once you hit 35 to 40, that ain't happening anymore. You look around, and what usually happens because you're used to yourself is oh my God, everyone else got old. And really, we're all getting old underneath. And the change may not be visible because when you see yourself every day, you don't feel that you don't see it. You may be a little more creaky and think you'd rather have a nap than go play another round of golf, but or run after your dog or children. But the truth of the matter is we're all declining at a lower level. And so these children, which we also see now, we see people from 10 to 90s, literally in the 90s, and make a difference at every decade. Sometimes they're born of a family where there's a Mexican heritage or Sephardic Jewish, which is different than a different sect of Jews called Ashkenazi Jews. Sephardic Jews usually come from Spain, that pre-Inquisition and have settled in those areas, or they're Mediterranean around the coast, and they've inherited genes that have them become insulin resistance, literally in utero, and subsequently insatiable carb cravings. They can never lose weight. They're the children who are teenagers and say, My friends could eat whatever they want, do whatever they want, they never gain an ounce, and I look at food. And these are people that are inherently going to always have too much fat. They might have muscle, but they'll have too much fat. And they'll be different it'll it's difficult for them in life, whether women, girls, or boys. So we treat them as well. And that's a pattern. And most of these children, even if they're 10 or 15 or 20, are seen by their physicians because their parents don't know what to do. They're eating the same as their brother and sister, and they're they're gaining weight all the time and miserable. 200 pounds at 12 years of age is not fun. And if you're oblivious to it till about teenage years, fine. But after that, you know that you're struggling and you look around and you feel sad about it and depressed.

Yeah, yeah, it is. I was a little bit of a chubby kid growing up, so I can I can empathize with that.

Is that what got you interested in fitness?

Uh no, you know, ironically, it was uh an asthma diagnosis that I got. So my mom put me into swimming, um, which is where I kind of started to slowly blossom as an athlete. Took me forever.

That's the same story as Mel Zuckerman, by the way. His mother didn't let him work out. He's the founder of Canyon Ranch, and he wasn't allowed to do anything. So he had to figure a workaround. His mother, I think she didn't let him do anything. She was worried about him. And uh that's how he created Canyon Ranch. Yeah, it's it's ironic nothing so that's a key walker, and it should be easy, right? The opposite of sweet, you're walking. So, and that's that's Andrew Huberman's thing too. Get up in the morning and get some light and get out there and walk or see the light, see the sun to register your sleep and make sure that when you're ready to go to sleep, your brain turns in the right direction. So, yeah.

Um, Dr. peptides. So, this is an interesting topic. I've played around with them, obviously, semaglutide. Um, Ozempic is really big in the news. And I don't want to spend too much time because I want to get into Grok Health and what you're doing there and democratizing this whole research. But maybe you could give us some insights into like, let me ask what this is. How is a peptide different than a medication? Right. And how why are you optimistic about that feel?

For first of all, a peptide is a medication. So you can prescribe it, but you can prescribe it as a physician alone, you can prescribe it from compounding pharmacies, and we do when they're running out of it. And as a doctor, you can prescribe it through a regular pharmaceutical, a regular pharmaceutical house provides it, whether it's Lily or others, because it works with the body to change what's going on in the body. But generally, um, when they bring a new pharmaceutical agent to the market, you're going to be charged a lot because it costs a lot to isolate and develop it. So, semaglutide, the reason I love the field of peptides is that it works naturally with the body. It's a string of amino acids of different sizes. And one of the first peptides I ever used in people, and this goes back 30 years, is HCG. You've probably heard about it. It's sometimes referred to as the fertility drug. Um, one of the famous baseball players on the Yankee team, Alice Rodriguez, was caught using it from a clinic. And yet it increases your natural testosterone because it resembles the hormone called LH that men make and women make. Women make it for a different reason than men. In men, it triggers the release of testosterone from the testes, from a cell in the testes called the lytic cell. And that's in my book. So if you want a copy of the book, I'm happy to share it with you. Um, and that is what declines in men as they age. So HCG, which is like glutenizing hormone, allows you to make your own testosterone. And some men can use HCG a couple of injections a week, maybe two or three, until they're 80s and make their own testosterone. So you're not taking over for the body, and it's not a steroid hormone, which testosterone is. At some point, men need testosterone. To move to semiglutinide, it's made in the brain. A version of that is made in the brain. It's called a glucagon-like peptide one. It's made in the brain and it's made in your gut. And what it does is it allows you to feel satiated. And when they started that field and made it available to the public, it was a number of years ago, and I used it right at the get-go, and it was known as Bieta, because you had to take it two or three times a day before every meal. I remember using it because I try almost everything if I can. Nothing to do with a prostate, because I don't have one, but other than that, I try almost everything as a researcher. And I I realized I would go out to eat, and my brain and my gut, I my gut felt full, and my brain didn't want any of that lava cake that I could live on if I had my choice and I wasn't on semaglutide. But what I like is it works with the body. Peptides usually work with the body. Um, so does Manjaro. It's a combination of two different peptides and work even it works even better in some ways, particularly for the group of people who can't tolerate Ozempic or semaglutide too much because it causes overwhelming nausea and difficulty even eating and reflux. So there's a certain cohort of people, because I've used these agents for years and will be using them in Grok as well. Does that make sense? Or was that too much information?

Yeah, it is. Uh, you know, and Ozempic and uh, you know, all the the semaglutides out there are obviously gaining a lot of news and attention right now as um, you know, position. I think people have you formed an opinion on it yet?

Absolutely. Yeah, I think it's great, it's miraculous. However, in isolation, it's not great because if you take it and you do nothing else, like you're and you don't do resistance exercises, you don't eat enough protein, and you don't protect your muscle, you're gonna go downhill. You'll lose fat and muscle, and more sometimes muscle than fat. And then what happens when you stop it or you can't get it anymore? So it needs to be a system. When I look at a human being, I look at their system, and we're very complex. So in isolation, just to do ozempic, sure you might have some gains in terms of muscle loss and fat loss, but you don't want to lose muscle because muscle loss or sarcopenia is probably the most dangerous part of aging. It's what, and you know what it is because you've seen, I'm sure, you've spoken to people who have cancer and are wasting away or have um AIDS, the same thing. That's loss of muscle and subsequently loss of fat. And when you lose muscle, you can't protect your body either from vacillations in sugar or COVID or infections because muscle helps to protect us and it burns energy at a higher rate and it continues to burn even when we don't, when we're sleeping and we're not even walking. So there's a lot of complexity to the human body and mind that isn't well understood. And a quick fix like a New Year's resolution just doesn't cut it for 99% of us. There may be a few lucky one percenters. I have a couple of them who have amazing genes, and even if they age, I got a call from one of my patients years ago who was skiing down in Tahoe. He's from New York, but he took his whole family's five sons to Tahoe and he called me and he said he beat all five sons down the mountain. And I knew he was still drinking, and I knew he was still eating, and he never exercised, and he had the kind of body that just he could gain that, you know, that traction. But in the end, it'll still catch up with you. Recently, he showed up here with chest pain and a little bit of nausea, and it turned out that he had an irregular rhythm called atrial flutter, and he needed to go to the hospital. Drinking was not helping him, so he's finally woken up to some of the things he needs to control a little bit. But each one of us has that kind of story.

Yeah, drinking's my uh that's the one I really enjoy that I I can't seem to quite.

Ozempic helps with that. So does Manjaro.

That's what I've heard.

I just got an email from someone who's very well known, and he's been a long-standing client. He used to go to Mayo, I have his whole family, and he's like, Thank you, thank you, thank you. And it wasn't easy at the beginning with this gentleman. And um, he said, I think it's the Ozempic, because he was definitely fell into the category of being an alcoholic and actually lost his son because of that disease. Um, at a and it was quite sad. Um, and he said, I'm not drinking, and you know, I eat food in moderation because he also had a sweet tooth. It's very hard if you have that makeup, and my husband does actually. He he has addictive genes and there's alcoholism in his family. He has to put notes on, you know, bottles to say, Don't drink me, you know, and he's been phenomenally good. And Manjaro has really helped him. It's it's like an amazing change, both in satiation and in cutting down on drinking. And and then yet there are other stories. I have somebody who's who you'd recognize, he's somebody who's very private, he's very well known, um, he's on TV all the time, and he works very, very, very hard, like harder than most. And his go-to relaxation was sharing a bottle of wine with his wife at night. I wasn't gonna take that away from him. Yet when you looked at his biomarkers, and this was in 2010, I remember the numbers, he was already close to being a diabetic, yet he was chiseled. So, one misconception is that you have to be obese to be a diabetic. You do not. So he was chiseled because he worked out like a fiend, he ate right, he did everything except that bottle of wine was his go-to. Let me relax. And he traveled extensively too because of the work he did. And he called me one year because we would see people twice a year after they did were doing great and the process was continuing, and he said, You'll never believe it, but I finally started cutting down on my wine and cut it out. I wanted to see what would happen, and his diabetes went away completely. And we had isolated it to the wine because wine is sugar, and if you're sensitive to it in a particular way, it can undermine your health. And some for some people, it's better to do tequila than wine or vodka than wine, but always have protein before your wine, okay? And he was then titrating it, and he found that when he went back up to have like let uh let half of what he was drinking, the numbers would directly correlate. So he learned to stay where in the zone he wanted to, but also live life the way he wanted to. And so you might find it fun to, I don't know who your physician is, or you can sign up for Grok in the future. Um, and those are stories. I have a lot of those stories, obviously. So stop me because you want to end this podcast at some point.

Yeah. No, gosh. I I I I mean, hey, I I got time, so it's up to you. But the um I want to get to Grok Health because I think that's you know an important piece of what you're doing. I mean, all of this this lifetime of of research and and expertise and and testing and everything you've done. Um, and as we described, I'm such a big fan of things that take what would, I don't know, I have no idea how much your services cost, but I'm sure you know your services and things of that elk are expensive, right? I mean, and rightfully so. It's not um it's it's not a cheap endeavor. The but the democratization of that level of knowledge through technology is what gets me most excited. Gets it gets me most excited. So explain to me what Grok is and and how you're you're tackling that.

Okay. So, in a simple word, Grok is an app that takes the most essential and compelling pieces of what we've begun to see here over and over again. Because I consider Komite an end of one living lab. We get to test our heart's desire because it's a bespoke program and it is expensive. It's north of 100,000 a year for some people, although we have deals we make when it's whole families, because I tend to get clans and families. Once somebody sees they're doing well, they do well. That's why I've never really marketed, although I did write that book uh 10 years ago. Um, and Grok is going to bring it down. Now, it's not as low as I hope it will be in the future, because to me, everyone should have the ability to transform and own their own future health to live life to the fullest. So Grok right now is a fraction of that. It's about 10%. So it's about 10,000 a year. Um we're first offering it to companies, and we've already launched a couple of companies on the West Coast. Well, they're all over, but their origins are on the West Coast in Silicon Valley, because the people in those companies have seen the drastic changes in a positive way of several of the individuals who have come through Grok, uh, come through Komite, sorry about that. And so, but the hope is that at some point it'll be far less, particularly when we start to go direct to consumer. And we're beginning to do that slowly because we have a big wait list. If you go to grok.com, you can sign up on the wait list, but there are multiple thousands on it, because we can't deliver on that yet. We're waiting to really get the people we need and the technology more automated, but it's already available all through the app. And um as JTPR knows, I don't know who your connection was there, it might have been Kennedy. Um, selectively, we're gonna include some media in the in the app as well to test it and to see where it brings them. You may be an expert at what you do, so we may have very little to offer you, but I have yet to meet somebody who has a perfect metabolic system, perfect hormones, perfect life where everything adds up to optimal. I haven't seen that yet. And so it's because it's inevitable. Aging is inevitable, but losing your health is not. And owning optimal health is a gift and for everyone, and I believe everyone deserves it. And that's why I did grok.

And maybe you could walk me through, um, Dr. Like what is the client experience with grok? And for people looking up, it's G, I mean, it'll be all over this podcast, but G-R-O-Q.

So do you know what that word means? Because it actually, the real word comes from G-R-O-K. It's funny because most people do in California. It means understanding with intuition and empathy. And it comes out of the science, I'm a big science fiction. So it comes from the science fiction, um, it comes from the science fiction world of um uh Richard Ro Robert Heinlein, who wrote Stranger in a Strange Land. And um Grok is like an understanding of what's going on. At first I called it Quanti ohm, which is quant and ohm numbers and quantifying it, right? And ohm like genome, microbiome. The way you walk through it is you request the app, the app gets sent to you by text. You sign in through text. On Android, you sign directly into it. On iOS, you have to sign through test flight because it's not yet openly available on Apple. And then you get prescribed a CGM. And you can get prescribed that CGM even before you sign in and start and pay anything because I want people to experience that. Then blood work gets drawn. And the blood work right now, we're doing the blood work at our three sites, Comite sites in headquartered in New York and also in Palo Alto as well as in Miami Beach. And we look at the way your body handles sugar. We do something called an oral glucose tolerance test. We do an in-depth dive to your lipids, in addition to those 125 biomarkers I mentioned earlier. And that's really to glean the most insight we can get so that we can get you jump started. You answer a few questions, it takes about 10 minutes. You upload any medications into the medicine cabinet and supplements you're taking, and you give us some answers about the way you live life, how you exercise, what your energy is like, the food you eat, and your family history to the extent you know it. But just very generic, like is anything run in your family? And then we ask you about grandparents, parents, and siblings. It's getting more, it gets deeper and deeper because we want to collect more and more to be more and more precise, but that's enough to get people jump started. And then that data is interpreted. And because we're not fully automated yet, you actually get access to comite clinicians. We call it bracket comite to interpret through a telemedicine hour call about a month within a month of getting the blood tests and testing. And once you get that, we start you on insight. Actually, insights and interventions start day one, two, or three because the CGM alone tells us what's going on in your body far beyond what you've seen in some of the startups. I love these startups that use the CGM, but they're limited because all they can tell you is what your sugar does in response to what you do. But actionable interventions and understanding medicine and the human being, which is quite complex and the work we've done over the last half a dozen years with the CGM. I actually imported the first group of CGMs from Israel, and I used it in my practice because I was so excited about how people could see things at the time they're actually doing it. Like think about the difference. You get your bloods drawn, and then a few weeks later, a month later, you go back to the doctor. But what meaning that doesn't really have meaning in a vacuum. Whereas seeing a number change when you eat a mixed meal or you just have walnuts and then you follow it by a glass of wine, you can learn so much about what might drive you because you'll make you stop and think and say, gosh, I don't want my sugar to go to 200. What do I do to stop that? And so it's been very, it's been a very exciting journey.

Yeah, I love it. I I know um I know you're busy and I'm kind of butting up on time with you, but I I just I guess I have two more questions um for you.

The first one is answering questions. You might have to see.

Oh, yeah, this is great. I I can I have selfishly, I have so many more questions for you. Uh Dr.

Clinton, it's just VR's all about. So just check that out with Kennedy.

Good. Um how long, if we play our cards, right? Right? Kind of like that question like how long do you think we can live?

For positively, most of us can live beyond 100. In fact, there's so many of us living beyond 100 that today's show on channel four used to wish people happy birthday, and there are too many people now living beyond 100. Mostly the great generation, but beginning to see baby boomers as well. But I believe that full life expectancy, if we're able to create that path, can even go to 140, 150 ultimately. And who knows beyond that. I think with replacement joints and organs, I think that the future is wide open. So I'm excited about it. But you want to be in great shape, right? You want to enjoy whatever you do, whether it's skiing or bungee jumping or running around after your great-great-grandchildren. That would be my goal.

Yeah, awesome. And last question, and this is what I ask everybody in just the spirit of collaboration uh across, you know, the fitness and health community. But how can we help you, Doctor? Like what do you need right now?

Wow, what a great question. I need people to want to know the truth about their health so that they can live life to the fullest. So maybe you can get word out about Grock ultimately that will probably not launch openly until the beginning of next year, but selectively, probably by the fourth quarter. We just have to have the resources to be able to do it right. Kind of, I kind of liken it to like a New York Times article about a fantastic mom and pop restaurant that then gets flooded because they get great reviews, but the kitchen can't keep up and they have to shut down. And so I don't want that to happen. This is too valuable. So if you can help by getting the word out that complex medical issues are going to be able to be addressed virtually and you're gonna get access to top-notch clinicians through the Grok app, that would be a blessing. I would really appreciate it.

Awesome. I love it. And then I guess I I lied. One more question. Where would you like people to go online if they want to reach out and connect or if they want them to check anything out specifically? Where do you send it?

You can go to grokhealth.com, g-o-q, h-e-a-l-t-h dot com, and sign up on a wait list. The the the site is going to be under construction soon because it we started this over two years ago. I started raising money to be able to build the app about for around COVID, right before COVID. Not a great time, but that's what it was. And um, and then follow us on social media um at GrocHealth, at Comite Center, both Facebook, Instagram. That would be fantastic. If you really want to understand the dynamic of what we do medicinally speaking, like if you're a geek, then read about it on KomiteMD.com. That's the website which spells out the whole background and why we look through what lenses we look and what that means.

Lovely. I love it. Well, congratulations on such an amazing career so far. I mean, it's and it seems like you have a pretty clear vision of how you want to take all this experience and knowledge and uh and and understanding and leverage it at a at a at scale. And that that's exciting to me. I think that's you know, um, personalization at scale to me is one of the coolest things that we have going on.

Using who you are.

Yes.

And your word democratization fits it perfectly. It's the democratization of access. This shouldn't just be for people who can afford a high-priced tag. I come from an immigrant family. My brother and sister are both doctors. My parents were immigrants in this country, and giving back is something that's very important to all of us. And doing it with compassion and caring and love is what makes a difference. Have making sure people have hope that they can take care of themselves because there's just not enough clinicians to make that difference.

Yeah, love it. That just got me emotional. Well, thank you so much for joining. It's it's been an absolute pleasure. I would love to you know get you back on a year and get an update on everything, Groc. And uh yeah, I I I I respect what you're doing. So thank you for joining me, ladies and gentlemen. Dr. Komate.

Thank you so much. It was so much fun, really. I really loved it.

Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Menace. If you did, I'm gonna ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way. We really appreciate it. Number one, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it, iTunes, Spotify, Castbox, whatever it may be. Number two, please leave us a favorable review. Number three, share. Put it on social media, talk about it to your friends, send it in a text message, whatever it may be. Please share this episode because we put a lot of work into it. We want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more or get in touch with me, simply go to the futurofitness.co. You can subscribe to our newsletter there, or you can simply get in touch with me as I love to hear from our listeners. So thank you so much. This is Eric Malzone, and this is the future of fitness. Have a great day.