SHR #2614
DIALOGUE edit

THE PEP TALK:  Oxytocin, the most anabolic peptide

Carl Lanore: [00:00:00] Hey, welcome back to another episode of Super Human Radio. Without further delay, I bring one of my most favorite guests to have on the show, Dr. Elizabeth Yurth. 

[00:01:49]
We’re going to be talking about something that has pretty much stayed under the radar. I've been fascinated with oxytocin since a show I did that showed that rodents’ muscles responded like younger littermates to injury and recovery when they were infused with oxytocin. The show was called ‘Oxytocin Makes Old Muscles Like New Again’. I started taking very low doses (around 7 IUs) post-workout and I didn't notice a whole lot, but I took it. Then recently a guy who works for me sent me a very old study and the study implies that cattle that were given trenbolone, which is one of the harshest, strongest anabolic steroids in the world,  had all sorts of nasty, unwanted effects. The effect that it promotes that people want is it makes you shed body fat and grow muscle. That's why people put up with the side effects. It appears from this study that all of these desired effects come from the fact that trenbolone raises blood and tissue levels of oxytocin, 50 fold. They say in this study that this is most likely the reason for the great development of muscle. Talk about it. 

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth, MD:
We really used to think that that was stimulation the IGF 1 receptor that actually was the results in effect like trenbolone on muscle. This study actually suggested that is was not; it was actually the oxytocin receptor and oxytocin that was responsible for this massive muscle growth. People started doing IGF and stimulating that, but you’re wrought with all these side effects. Could we get the same effect with just using oxytocin, as the study suggests, which is significantly safer? It’s kind of a remarkable study because it really attributed what we never really thought was effective, oxytocin. Oxytocin has always been sort of thought of kind of a love hormone, right? It's actually a neuropeptide. It’s a nine amino acid peptide. It's stimulated at very high levels when you have a baby so that you can bond with your baby. It stimulates labor. We have knowledge of it from that perspective. Years ago we used a lot of oxytocin to improve sex drive in women. Then it kind of fell by the wayside. So now we may want to look at bringing this back as one of our mainstays, because it's so much safer than most other things we can do for muscle building. It's remarkable. Now there’s more recent studies; this study that was done with cattle was from 2010. We had some from 2014, 2017 showing very similar effects in almost every mammalian species. We don't really have the humans studies of course, but we have mice studies on it. It’s very impressive. 

Carl Lanore: [00:05:47]
just did a show with a scientist from Brazil who published a study that shows that oxytocin is more effective, not only at stopping osteoporosis and osteopenia, but reversing it, than estrogen or anything else. This study was profound. When we talk about the word anabolic, everybody thinks about muscle. But let's face it: bone mineralization is anabolism. Anytime you're building anything that’s made of tissue in your body, that’s anabolism. It's not exclusive to just muscle. One of the things that fascinates me is,  from an evolutionary perspective, all species have one job, and that's the perpetuation of the species. Perpetuation means having offspring. Nurturing that offspring until they are able to sustain life on their own. And when you think of the hormone that's responsible and released when we are doing things from an evolutionary perspective that is designed to further the species, it's oxytocin. When you have an orgasm, you produce oxytocin. As you pointed out, when the mother nurtures her baby, she produces oxytocin. When you hug someone, you produce oxytocin. To actually give birth, you have to have an abundance of oxytocin to spit that baby out. All of a sudden it dawned on me, oxytocin is the reward hormone for doing things that are beneficial to being a human as a species.

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth, MD:
You're exactly right. It's effect is interesting. For instance, in increasing bone density, it appears to work at the STEM cell level. What they found is that oxytocin stimulated the mesenchymal STEM cells. For anti-aging, what oxytocin actually seemed to do is it worked at the STEM cell level and it switched the production of STEM cells from adipocytes (fat cells basically) towards osteoblasts (the bone forming cells). Not only did you actually see an increase in osteoblasts, you would see a decrease in adipocytes, which means a decrease in fat mass. When you gave oxytocin, not only did you see increased bone density, but you saw a loss of fat. So we're seeing this very anabolic effect on muscle and bone and yet a catabolic effect on fat. It really goes back to the STEM cell level. It was interesting that he took oxytocin deficient animals who were bred with no oxytocin and they actually formed muscle cells and bone cells normally. But what happened is that as they aged a little bit, what would be the equivalent of about age 30 in humans, they rapidly lost. They were able to form those cells initially, but then the STEM cells couldn't continue along that lineage. We think what happens in humans is kind of the same; that you don't really need the oxytocin for the initial production, but you need it to sustain. Otherwise, by the age of 30, you start losing bone and muscle. Actually, it’s probably earlier in humans; it’s probably even late twenties. By putting oxytocin back in the mix during that age, you can actually keep the mesenchymal STEM cells producing more myocyte muscle cells, muscle satellite cells and more of the osteoblasts for bone. If we start looking at women who have a history of osteoporosis in their family, for instance, you'll start seeing loss of bone at a very young age, and these are women in their late twenties. If we could actually maintain that by starting low dose oxytocin in people's late twenties and early thirties, you're going to probably prevent the age-related sarcopenia muscle loss and age-related bone loss that we're seeing. A benefit is it actually is going to keep visceral fat particularly down. So it's kind of the perfect thing.

Carl Lanore: [00:10:23]
I'm experimenting with different doses of oxytocin. I've done some really massive doses of oxytocin. One dose, I had to lay down for a half hour. I couldn't get up. So oxytocin may not be dangerous, but it can make you uncomfortable if you start to use high doses. But I've learned some things when the high doses can be used and they don't feel the same. We'll talk about that later, just from personal experimentation. The other thing I want to talk about with oxytocin specifically is the heart. We know that with individuals who are undergoing heart failure, the body seems to produce, I would imagine in tissue, because it seems to concentrate oxytocin in the heart. Most people would say oxytocin is bad for the heart, but the only other time that oxytocin is highly concentrated in the heart is during the development of the fetal heart. The fetal heart has a lot of oxytocin in there and it's thought that that is part of the neonatal gene that triggers the development of a heart. If this is true, doesn't it make sense? I'm always looking for ways to turn neonatal genes back on. If we're old and we're broken, we can stop the damage from progressing. In order to reverse the damage, the original blueprint that your body used to make that tissue needs to be re-engaged. I'm a big fan of learning how to touch and trigger some of these neonatal genes. What do you think about oxytocin and its actions on genes from an epigenetic effect?

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth, MD:
Taking it back to the initial study that you read back in 2010, that is actually where they saw it exhibited some of the facts was actually in changing some of these genes expressions. So it may actually turn on some genes that are turned off very early to help regenerate tissue and help keep our STEM cells producing at a different level. It does appear to have a very significant epigenetic effect as well. When you think about the heart, also remember it is a muscle too, so you're going to sustain much better myocardial function by keeping that muscle as healthy as you keep your other muscles. So it does have a positive effect on myocardial contraction as well. If you look at somebody who's in early heart failure, for instance, or post MI, oxytocin definitely should show benefits in those patients as well. Also, I don't know if you've read some of the recent research on it for dementia. They actually have seen that it has a very significant protective effect for the brain and probably a reversal effect in mild cognitive decline or early Alzheimer's patients in terms of preservation of brain function. Maybe that has to do with some of its glucose regulatory effects. That may be part of it, because it does do that as well. There's a couple of investigational studies going on right now using it as an agent for Parkinson's and Alzheimer’s related dementia. Is that all for more of the glucose control, hypothalamic control? Or is there something more to it? It appears that there might be something more to it. It may have actually a direct effect on the hippocampus as well. When you look at a hormone that has now been acquainted from everything from attachments, we think that people who are on the spectrum for autism have an inability to respond to oxytocin very well or either lowered levels. You can't just fix autism with oxytocin, but some people will improve. It probably has to do with the receptor itself being inadequate. So if you look at it as a drug, all of our social attachment, our social development is due to this hormone. You have to think it probably has some pretty significant influence on the aging brain as well. Then you were talking about how it's such an anabolic peptide. One of our problems with everything that's super anabolic is we think about it being related to cancer. If we up-regulate everything, we actually induce cancer cell growth as well. Yet they could put oxytocin up to super physiologic levels and not ever induce cancer cells. So we now have something that is super anabolic to bone and muscle, to hippocampal function, and yet doesn't appear to have any kind of negative effects in terms of abnormal growth, which is pretty remarkable. Oxytocin in fact, was actually used in some brain tumors, craniopharyngioma, for instance, and has seen reduction in the tumor size. I'm glad you brought this back to my radar because it really appears to be something that we can use for increasing bone density and muscle mass, and for losing visceral fat, which is so hard on some men, particularly, but women as well for glucose maintenance, for brain maintenance. It doesn’t really seem to have any kind of downsides. 

Carl Lanore: [00:16:34]
I want to talk about the glucose component because this is one of the reasons I think it's ideal to take it post-workout. There's a lot of people who use insulin or insulin energetic type compounds post-workout and then eat their meal because they want to shuttle more nutrients into the muscle. It appears, as you point out, when you take a fairly high dose, like I've taken post-workout doses as high as 50 and 75 IUs, and I have to sit in my car and wait for my head not to explode. Everybody who's tried it that I've counseled with, they were like, I got such a head rush. I thought I was having a migraine or a headache. I don't understand what it is. Is the blood pressure in the head going up? Also the heart doesn't beat faster, but it feels like it increases the stroke. All of a sudden my heart is going boom, boom, boom, boom. Like you could feel it in your heart and it'll scare you if you're not prepared for it. You'll think it's giving you a heart attack, but it's not. It goes away in a minute or so. But it's some of those effects, possibly a momentary acute hypoglycemia because it feels like it clears the blood sugar right out.

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth, MD:
It has an effect on insulin. It will lower systemic insulin, push insulin in the muscles where you want it post-workout, without having a really significant effect on gluconeogenesis or in glucose levels themselves. I don't think it's going to be a hypoglycemic effect. I do think it's that vasodilatory effect, that's probably why you get that flush. Like you feel like your ears are on fire sometimes and your face flushes. I think it probably has to do with kind of a vasodilatory effect of the oxytocin that's making you feel that way, where your blood vessels all dilate and you get this head rush and you feel like everything's kind of on fire. People who take niacin get kind of the same thing, right? That same uncomfortable feeling. I think that's the hard thing about dosing. Where do you dose it that you gain a positive benefit and you don't get all these horrible side effects? It's probably one of the reasons it's beneficial for sex too. In both men and women, that was a side effect that women would get when they used it. We used to use it as a nasal spray before sex and they would get this kind of burning in their ears, in their head. In fact, that's probably one of the signs it's actually doing its job and working, but I think if you overdose it, that effect becomes pretty predominant, where you just feel like everything is turned up. 

Carl Lanore:
I wonder if the effects that we attribute to orgasm have more to do with the release of oxytocin than the physical mechanics of having sex and climaxing?

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth, MD: [
If you think about it, that’s why they use pitocin, since it’s basically oxytocin, to stimulate contractual uterus at childbirth. The contractions and things like that is the oxytocin release; that’s causing a lot of those effects.The rush of blood and then that really kind of relaxed, good feeling afterwards. When you take oxytocin, that's another benefit is it just makes you feel kind of happy and at peace a little bit more. Terry, who some of your listeners may know is kind of a big hormone guy, talks a lot about using oxytocin ust for people who are shy. You could actually stimulate people to just be more social. He always teased that you could actually take a couple that was sort of falling out of love and have them both do oxytocin and you could actually get them to like each other again, simply by both of them doing doses of oxytocin at the same time. It's a really powerful neuropeptide hormone on our brain and our bodies and makes us feel good. So a lot of those orgasm effects probably are due to that kind of oxytocin.

Carl Lanore:
When I take that shot of oxytocin post-workout and I sit in my car, what I'm experiencing is kind of the same way you feel when you have an orgasm, like that rush, your heart is pounding.  And then all of a sudden it starts to relax and slow down. And I never thought about it before, but if you took just orgasm by itself and took it away from the act of actually having sex, that's the way that shot makes you feel. It just makes you like explode.

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth, MD:
People will describe that, especially with the higher doses. We kind of look at this as just like a wonder drug. We tend to be victims of our own sort of biohacking kind of, you know? Whatever it is, the next greatest and best hoping that we finally find the perfect thing to stop aging and make our muscles big. We sort of forget things along the way. Oxytocin may be one of those things that got a little bit shoved aside by stuff that may not actually be as good and may not actually be as safe. I think we need to really revisit this for ourselves and for our patients and your listeners too. I have so many women who have low bone density, low muscle mass, and it's very difficult trying to treat that and trying to get their bone density up, even using some of the really strong growth hormone secretagogues. We're not able to do that. We know that the bisphosphonates like Fosamax are horrible drugs. They create very abnormal bone that’s more prone to cancer.

Carl Lanore:
Esophageal cancer. So many women lose their jaw bone and they develop esophageal cancer. 

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth, MD:
Not infrequently in my practice I see women who have femoral neck fractures from just abnormal trabecular bone that forms. Yet we're using those like mat and here we have a super safe and actually it showed its ability to build bone was pretty dramatic. We need to really revisit this hormone and I'm glad you kind of rebranded it up in my mind.

Carl Lanore: [00:23:24]
Part of the problem is if you look up oxytocin, the first thing that comes up is the snuggle hormone or the love hormone and people are like, okay, forget that. What they fail to realize is that oxytocin is the human reward hormone. What I mean by that is when you are looking for the things in the human being that should be definite virtuous attributes, like more muscle, less fat, a great love life, clear mind, it's oxytocin does all those things. 

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth, MD:
You can get the little flushing things you talked about, but no big high risks. We're not seeing it to be a carcinogen, at least in mice, even at super high doses that you and I would never tolerate. In fact, it actually was beneficial for several cancers.

Carl Lanore: [00:24:17]
I want to talk about cortisol because everybody knows that since we're trying to focus this on the muscle building effects of oxytocin, which is really exciting. Everybody knows that cortisol is not a great thing If you're trying to build muscle because it's a catabolic hormone and oxytocin seems to crush cortisol. I want to talk about its use as a post-workout which is really where I find it to work the best. A listener on Instagram just posted “so we should be hugging people between sets and have lots of dogs and love when we work out to recover faster.” Yes, technically you're right. The people who are having a lot of sex are always very healthy; they have zero prostate cancer. When you're doing your evolutionary duty, which is procreation, your body rewards you. So let's talk about cortisol.

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth, MD:
That made me think, because now we can't hug anymore, right? We can't touch each other. We can't hug each other. We can bump elbows and that's about it. My high schooler basically sits at home all day alone now. We don't have school, they're in virtual school. So there is no human interaction. So we’re in a high stress state. Cortisol and oxytocin are kind of opposite each other. Then when cortisol gets very high and we're in this high stress, high cortisol state, and we're not hugging and we're not touching and we're not socially interacting, we’re in this very low oxytocin state. It really is now more than ever a time we need to pull out oxytocin cause we're not touching and hugging and being with each other. So maybe now more than ever, we need to really promote it. 

Carl Lanore:
I bet you're right. The lack of oxytocin is contributing to this illness.

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth, MD:
When your cortisol levels are high and you're stressed, you're more prone to illnesses. There's always a catabolic hormone. We need it. We need our stress hormone, but you've got to have a balance with oxytocin and cortisol. 

Carl Lanore:
Interestingly enough, oxytocin does push cortisol down. That's why I don't believe it's good to use first thing in the morning when your body is using cortisol to actually create the wake-up mechanism. I've found that when I've used it first thing in the morning at high doses, like 50 IUs, I want to go back to bed. I don't want to go to work. 

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth, MD:
We need cortisol and we need that spike in cortisol to get us up and going in the morning. We need cortisol sometimes when we are in these really stressful situations. You don't want to be suppressing cortisol all the time. We want suppress cortisol at very specific times. We see more high cortisol people who can't go to sleep at night and they're stressed and their minds are racing. That might be a great for those people to use a little bit of oxytocin before they go to bed at night, bring down the cortisol, help settle them, make them happier and make them more at peace. I haven't used it much to see, but it should help induce those people to be able to sleep better. That push right after workout to get you into anabolic balance. Then getting rid of the catabolic stuff before you go to bed. If you're going to be doing a public speech, you want a little cortisol on board. If you want to get up going in the morning, you want a little cortisol on board. Stress is not necessarily a bad thing. It's when stress becomes overwhelming that it becomes a bad thing. 

Carl Lanore: [00:29:13]
Your body produces cortisol to suppress inflammation. If you're into any anti-inflammatory environment for your body, then you want cortisol at the appropriate times when it's going to reduce inflammation.

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth, MD:
I think when you get a steroid injection, that's what it is. When you go to your doctor and they decide to put a steroid injection in your knee, they're increasing cortisol to reduce inflammation. Cortisol does have some great anti-inflammatory effects, but it has to be in balance. There's this very delicate balance between oxytocin and cortisol. In fact they found interestingly in people who had a really stressful situation, like a bad accident or some horrible, traumatic, violent event, that if they actually had too much oxytocin so it didn't create enough of a stress response right after the trauma, then they actually were more likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder. So there's an appropriate response to actually have cortisol as well. So if you had somebody who had a really traumatic event you actually want them to go through a little bit of a stress period. You wouldn't want to throw a bunch of oxytocin just to make them feel good. There's value to going through that. Everything so delicately balanced in the body, and when you throw anything way out of whack, you start screwing something else up.

Carl Lanore: [00:30:58]
Let's talk about two things. There's two different ways to deliver oxytocin. You can do it intranasally, which actually may be better for sleep because it gets to the brain to a greater degree. I just use 20 units of oxytocin right at bedtime. I take it when I'm done looking at books and stuff like that. I give myself that shot. I experience that rapid heart rate for a couple seconds. Then it literally puts me to sleep. I've experimented with not using oxytocin and I don't get the same level of deep sleep at night. What do you think about sleep? 

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth, MD:
The dosing is so variable and not really well-defined and fortunately there are people like you who are willing to experiment on themselves, but it is a little bit tough. We would use it as a nasal spray for women for improving sex drive and we would use about 20 IUs of it. As a nasal spray it's not as well absorbed as it is sub Q. I do think it might have some better cognitive effects and brain effects as a nasal spray. You can use it as a troche too. They do make a sublingual version of it as well, but that's pretty poorly absorbed. For those people who don't want to do a nasal spray or want to do an injection, sub Q is probably still going to be the best bang for your buck in terms of gain absorption. This hormone’s got a short half-life in your body. It's really the downstream effects that you're getting that are causing some of the benefits. So I think it's going to be probably around 20. Some people may need a little bit more than that. What you can do with oxytocin too, is do a small, low dose every day because we also think it's a circadian regulator. So by doing a small dose every single day, maybe dinner time or late evening when your cortisol should be dropping down and just doing that on a daily basis, like 20 units every day at the same time helped restore circadian rhythm and helped sleep that way. Even using that dose after your workouts on a regular basis, you may see it help induce sleep as well, just because of it's circadian regulation. I gave a whole talk on circadian rhythm and its importance, and this may be one of our big circadian regulators.

Carl Lanore:
If I were to take 50 units of oxytocin on an off day, around the same time I'm usually done with training, it would give me a huge head rush, heartbeat would just pound away, and I would feel it for a little while. But if I do that same dose at that same time in the day, ut after a crushing workout, I don't feel it as much. In fact, there's been days where I've taken 50 IUs and I questioned if it was really 50 IUs because I was like, man, I don't feel that. But what I always feel is about an hour to an hour and a half after training, I have this same strange sensation of being completely relaxed. I've actually gone back to the gym and trained a second time. One day I thought, I feel like I could train again after about an hour and a half after that shot. Keep the keep in mind, the shot has a lot of other stuff in it, and I'm going to text it to you later Dr. Yurth. I've gone back and trained a second time with the same volume of work and the same intensity. I thought this may be one of the greatest recovery drugs in the world. 

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth, MD:
It's really good for muscle recovery. Sometimes some of those effects are the downstream metabolic effects. That's that relaxation you get later on.When you speak about muscle recovery, you know it actually really repairs muscles really rapidly, too. There's a study in mice where when you damage the muscle in mice who were older, the equivalent of a 30 year old human, and it didn't repair at all. When they gave them oxytocin they had very rapid repair and that's probably it's effects on the mesenchymal STEM cells. So you're going to have a lot less muscle injury or those of you who are suffering from torn hamstrings, things like that, where you have this kind of chronic muscle tendon injury. This may be another repair peptide that we can actually use along with some of the other ones that we use.

Carl Lanore: [00:35:38]
I think the pre-bed shot may be one of the most important for an anti-aging standpoint because that's when DNA is replicated, when you sleep. That's why it's so important not to eat three hours before sleep - so your body can do the things that it's supposed to do and use energy for that. I have to believe that that shot I take before bed may not be doing as much for my workout recovery and muscle building, which I am seeing dramatic changes in my musculature in the past three weeks, but three weeks is too short. I'm not going to be a douche and go, give me six months with it because don't forget I'm 62. By the way, I'm on the lowest dose of testosterone I've ever been on. 180 milligrams a week, sub Q. 90 and 90, I do it twice a week. So it's not the testosterone, I can tell you that. A listener says ,“should this be cycled to prevent attenuation or preventing the body's natural oxytocin production?” Since it's got a six minute half-life, unless you're taking an infusion continuously, I don't think it's going to interrupt anything. 

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth, MD:
I don't think you're going to see that because our bodies naturally decline in production. That would be like saying, should you start cycling testosterone in your older years? Our body's production is just not going to pick back up. The kind of doses we're using with the short half-life, I don't think you're going to see that. I think probably you need to look at it more as staying on a maintenance dose of it on a more consistent basis because your body does not start making more. We know that as you age, you make less oxytocin than when you were younger. So I actually think this is something I'm going to sort of stay on on, at least a small kind of regulatory dose, because it looks like it may be a pretty big. You look at old people and most of them, even if they're exercising, they’re just not building muscle. Even if I have them on testosterone. That's because their STEM cells aren't really just making new muscle cells. Testosterone can enlarge those muscle cells, but you've got to make more and this is a way to do it.

Carl Lanore: [00:38:48]
So the nice thing about oxytocin is you can go to your physician and get it prescribed. It's not like the DEA and WADA and all this other stuff. There's a lot of reasons that doctors prescribe oxytocin. If one of the byproducts is you get leaner and more muscular, good on you, right? 

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth, MD:
Yes, this is an FDA approved drug. It's a hormone we utilize in medicine, largely in labor and delivery. They're utilizing it a lot in these autism spectrum disorders. It is perfectly legal and FDA approved. Probably not many doctors know much about prescribing it, but again, high safety, legal, easy to use. If you don't want to do subcutaneous injections, we know there's effects from it from intranasal delivery, probably just need to use a little bit more, with every benefit that you can think of. I think we have to really look at this in some depth and figure out exactly what the best dose is, and I think it's going to be a little different depending on what your goals are.

Carl Lanore:
Also each person's sensitivity to it.

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth, MD:
What are your receptors like? I think age too. The older you are, you’re probably going to need more, just because your own production is going to be less. One of the things that's interesting is you have a lot of people who don't start thinking about age until they get to be our age. I think unfortunately what we're trying to encourage at my office, we’re trying to get out the message to these 20 and 30 year olds that you’ve got to start thinking about stuff then, because actually that's when your body's actually starting to decline. I know you kind of feel invincible in your twenties, but that's actually when things start going awry. We can start preventing some of that stuff early on. So I encourage people. Things like this that are really safe, that maybe you do want to start looking at using low doses, starting at a pretty young age. We're getting younger and younger people in here, even for things like testosterone therapy. We know that all these young men have low testosterone. So here's another one we probably want to start looking at, throwing into the mix. 

Carl Lanore: [00:41:41]
I agree with you a thousand percent. Anther listener said “I know oxytocin is part of your stack. Do you think it would have the same effects by itself?” No. I have growth secretagogues. I have Frank growth hormone in there. I have BPC, I have thymosin. That injection I take is leveraging what the oxytocin is bringing to the party. Now, can you use oxytocin by itself? Absolutely. Will you see benefits from oxytocin by itself? Absolutely. Keep in mind, this stack I use is very expensive. I don't even want to think about what every injection costs me, because I may think to myself I can’t do that anymore. The reality is that oxytocin by itself has already shown that it can be anabolic, that it can be lipolytic, that it has genetic downstream effects that are beneficial to the aging body. So if you can't put the stack together, don't worry about it. At least use the oxytocin. I think oxytocin is a fantastic place to start because there's a lot less than negative stigma about using oxytocin. As soon as you say growth hormone or growth hormone secretegogue or thymosin beta 4 its like, Oh, now you're on a dark side. But oxytocin, yeah, they gave my wife Pitocin to bring on labor. I know what that is. So I think if you don't have the stack, starting with oxytocin is definitely great. 

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth, MD:
I agree with that. You know, Carl's one of those, he pulls out all stops. He's pretty aggressive with the stuff he does. Oxytocin has a huge safety profile, is legal, FDA approved, easy to obtain, has no downsides. I think it's going to have huge benefits. I don't know how old you are. You're a younger person, right? Where you really just need that little kind of added boost to build that muscle and lose some fat, I think it has a huge benefit just in and of itself. Of course, when you can put all this stuff together, great, but that isn't really feasible for a lot of people. It’s time-consuming, it's expensive. It's a lot of injections. You have to know how to time everything appropriately. Here's something that's pretty easy to do. A little bit before you go to bed and do some after your workouts. It's not that expensive and it’s safe and easy. 

Carl Lanore: [00:44:14] A viewer on Youtube asks “is oxytocin naturally occurring in any foods and is IV or oral preferable?”. I'll let you answer both of those. 

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth, MD:
It actually doesn't really occur in any foods. You can't eat oxytocin. So IV dosing, you can get a big, massive dose, but that's what we do for inducing labor. It's a big, huge IV dose. You probably could use a smaller amount and do an IV, but the way we want to use it, post-workout or before bed, things like that, probably your best bet is going to be a subcutaneous dose or intra-nasal delivery. It's just not quite as effective. There are things like foods that will raise oxytocin. Smelling chocolate chip cookies, but that has more to do with a brain effect. I've seen that some casinos have scents like chocolate chip cookies, just subtly and by raising oxytocin, they make people nicer and more generous. Some great studies show that if you give people oxytocin and then ask them to donate money, 90% of them will. It just makes us nicer to each other and friendlier to each other, maybe to an excess. But you can't really eat it from any kind of foods.

Carl Lanore:
Because it's a protein, basically. Your stomach will just treat it like any other protein and dissolve it, break it down. 

[00:45:28]
So let's talk about the future. These are the studies I would love to see. Does injected oxytocin have a greater effect of all the desired, beneficial attributes that we're looking at post coitus? Of course when you have an orgasm, your body seems to be primed to use oxytocin. I wonder if giving a dose after an orgasm has greater benefits than just taking a dose on its own. The other thing is I would love to understand from some of these rodent models, what the human equivalent would be. Now, some of them, you can’t. They infuse them with a very large dose of oxytocin. It was like 15 IUs every 10 minutes or something ridiculous like that, where you and I would just pass out and lay there. We wouldn't feel anything, who cares about if muscles are getting better. But couldn't we triangulate at least what a starting dose would be? If we started to look at the molar equivalents in blood, because if we knew the molar equivalents and then can give a human a shot and go, Oh, here's where it went. I think we need to try to triangulate and find out what the optimal dose is.  You don't want to take more than you have to because of the cost.

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth, MD:
One of the big research areas with oxytocin has been in the autism spectrum disorders beause it definitely seems to be having some benefit there. They've done some kind of dosing studies there and they use it more as a nasal spray and done some dosing of coma States, but we've not really seen them for muscle building or bone building. So we don't see those dosing equivalent studies. It really does need to be done in humans because here we have something that's really safe and could be so hugely beneficial, but we don't really know exactly how to use it. So we do need to start seeing some of those studies done. The problem is it's not probably financially all that beneficial to anybody. 

Carl Lanore:
Nobody cares about us. Maybe we can raise money in the audience and we can do our own study. That would be fun. I'm happy to be a Wistar rat. I'll do the doses. So in summary, to come full circle, it appears that the strongest and harshest anabolic steroid in the world that many athletes use is trenbolone and trenbolone appears to build its muscle and burn its fat by upregulating oxytocin, 50 fold. That could also be some of the problems with high blood pressure, not that oxytocin lowers blood pressure, but let's face it, if you are like 50 times the normal levels, it could have the opposite effect on a variety of systems. The bottom line is bodybuilders and athletes need to start looking at oxytocin and finding their own sweet spot with it and watching their results, because this is a much safer way to get a lot of the same effects of this harsh anabolic steroid, at least to this study. A link to the full study will be there for all of you who want to go and read it for yourself. This is profound. This study is old. This study was pretty much overlooked. When I started fooling around with much higher doses, I can tell you I am feeling and seeing things in just a few short weeks.

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth, MD:
I'm super excited to start pulling this into my practice more or using it myself more. It's something that does everything: improves my bone, improves my brain, improves my muscle, helps me lose fat. It is almost too good to be true. I was so excited to do this show and I told everyone you should listen to this because this is something we need to really be looking at a lot more depth. 

Carl Lanore: [00:49:22]
Most of the things that we use for performance enhancement, women are left out because most of them have very angiogenic side effects and this is something that women can do. This is exciting stuff. I want to thank you for having the courage to come on the show and talk about this. People don't get it, that muscle makes you live longer.

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth, MD:
It’s as important as having financial reserves. You've got to have muscle reserves. If you look at what happens as people age, that loss of muscle, the huge cause of death and inactivity and fractures and everything else.

Carl Lanore:
The website is bolderlongevity.com if you would like to retain and work with Dr. Yurth. You actually have a license to practice in quite a lot of states. That's where you can get started. Thanks for being here today Dr. Yurth, see you later.

[00:50:49]
I don't know that I can do justice to what I really want to say about this discussion. Back in May of this year, I explained to the audience that you can't hide from this COVID virus. You can't wait it out. I predicted it in that show, you can go back to five one for the second hour Virology 101. We can't wait this virus out. What I said was if we were able to stay in our homes for a year, not even venture out, no contact at all with other people. No need to safe distance, literally hide in our homes for a year. As soon as we came back out, this virus would start running through the population. People thought I was crazy for saying this. I had a lot of people email me and say, that's not true. We're saving lives, blah, blah, blah. What people fail to understand is: this virus is going to hurt us. It's going to infect us. It's going to make us sick until we develop herd immunity. That's the fact that has always been a fact. There isn't a virologist who will tell you if we could just shut the country down for a year, no contact, that this virus would just go away. No, they'll tell you that as soon as people start to circulate again and move around, this virus would come right back out again. So we've had a complete shutdown and now we're gently starting to open things up again and the virus is spiking. The last thing we should do is shut everything down again. Really what we should do is the most vulnerable people should stay in their homes, wear their masks, stay away from big crowds, and the rest of us who are within the 99.9% of people who won't die from this, it's going to be like getting the flu or anything else. We should go about our lives. If we continue to just shut down every time there's a spike, all we're doing is prolonging the inevitable. We're going to take a virus that will take in a year and a half to run through the population where to make it five years to run the population. I'm positive of this. Ask anybody who studies viruses. I said that on May 4th. I said we can't wait this virus out. Now everybody's going crazy because there's this spike. I told you, we can't wait this virus out. I predicted once we locked down again, it's going to drop. Then the governors would say, Oh, it's safe to go out now. Then as soon as we start going out it's going to rise. We need to stop this nonsense. I'll tell you where it starts. Vote for people who aren't stupid; that think that they can make this virus go away through policies and politics. The only thing that's going to make this virus go away is human adaptation. Like the Spanish flu is gone. We don't have a vaccine for it. Why? Because it ran through the population. It hurt a lot of people. Then a lot of people didn't get hurt. And this virus right now looks like it's 99.9% nonlethal to anybody under the age of 70 here. The issue here is science. I keep hearing people say, well, we trust science. We believe in science. If you really believe in science, then you would know that we can't wait this virus out. So what do we do? We open everything back up, sensibly people with robust health, get back to work, do the things that they do, children with robust health, get back to work, do what they do, go to school. People who are sick and worried about dying from this, you stay home, you wear masks, you quarantine, you do those things. The rest of us are going to be fine. I now know 18 people who got it and got better. Some of them didn't even have symptoms. We can't wait this virus out. Politicians were telling you that we can, I don't know what to say. They're stupid. They're uninformed. They're saying this purposefully for whatever reason. We can't wait this virus out. 

I will see you Monday with more Super Human Radio. Please share the show about oxytocin. I'm telling you this stuff is going to prove to be a very, very popular drug amongst bodybuilders I predict. See you next week.