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I’m excited to introduce our special guest, Latt Mansor. With a Ph.D. in physiology, Latt has delved into the fascinating field of cardiovascular health and its connection to diabetes. His exploration led him to uncover the impact of hypoxia on overall well-being.

But Latt’s journey didn’t stop there. He began diving into the realm of metabolic health, seeking to unravel the puzzle of metabolic inflexibility. In our discussions, we’ll be exploring topics such as mitochondrial function, metabolic flexibility, and the intriguing question of which diet is better for high-performance athletes.

Latt is currently working with Ketone IQ, also known as HVMN, a company that offers a product he himself has found beneficial for focus and concentration. This unique formula provides ketones, helping users achieve a state of heightened productivity for several hours without negatively impacting sleep.

What sets Latt apart is his personal connection to his work. Coming from a background where exercise and nutrition were not familiar concepts, he understands the challenges many face when trying to navigate the world of health and performance. His passion shines through as he discusses the importance of making choices that support both physical and mental well-being.

In our conversation, we’ll touch upon various aspects of health, including brain health, weight management, and overall energy levels. Latt’s insights will undoubtedly leave you with a fresh perspective on how to optimize your own health journey.

Let us delve into the fascinating world of cardiovascular health, metabolic flexibility, and the keys to unlocking your full potential.

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Resources Mentioned:

• Ketone IQ
• Podcast: Health Via Modern Nutrition
• Instagram: @lattmansor
• www.GabrielleReece.com
• @gabbyreece

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TimeStamps

• Diet & Nutrition vs Genetics [00:06:24]
• Getting Started in Exercise [00:11:33]
• The Relationship Between Hypoxia and Health [00:15:29]
• What is Hypoxic Training? [00:20:56]
• Is it Just Genetics? [00:24:06]
• The Bridge Between Science & Lifestyle [00:27:15]
• What is HVMN? [00:30:36]
• The Facts About Ketones [00:34:04]
• Ketones for Brain Injuries [01:01:14]
• How Much is Too Many Ketones? [01:04:33]
• The Real Value of Real Food [01:07:10]
• What is mTOR? [01:13:38]
• Metabolic Effects on Skin [01:19:28]
• The Effects on Mental Health [01:26:58]

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Show Transcript:

 

[00:02:34] Gabby Reece: And we threw you right into it, having, talking to some NBA players, and trying to help them figure out how to stay energized in the third quarter. Maybe we can just. Say, share your journey from Malaysia to here, to San Francisco, and to the work you’re doing now.

[00:02:54] Latt Mansor: I would love to. I was born and bred in Malaysia. I didn’t leave my country until I was 20. I left Malaysia to go to the UK to study biotechnology for my undergraduate at the University of Nottingham and at the end of my degree, I thought having a science degree was not enough because what am I going to be a lab assistant or it’s going to be very difficult.

I want to really pursue my passion in science and mind you, my late father passed away when I was 17, right before I had to choose my major to do in the university, and he always wanted me to become a medical doctor. I didn’t have that passion in me, but my whole family was guilt tripping me because they were like, this is your dad’s last dying wish.

My mentor, who was my cousin, he was the only person who told me, and I remember it until today that he said, whatever choice you make will be the right one, as long as you just pursue it with your passion and don’t look back with regret.

And I was really interested in biotechnology and genetics and the science of it. So, I did apply for biotechnology, and I completed my study, but then I was like, okay, I want to do a postgraduate, but then I’m not sure if I want to spend the next three, four, five, six years in the lab for a PhD. So, I’m just going to look for a master’s and it was really difficult because I come from a Middle-class family. So, I couldn’t even afford my undergraduate. I got a scholarship from the Malaysian government. So, I went back to them, and I said Hey, like I want you to go postgraduate. They’re like, yeah, you can, we can sponsor you, but you have to get a first-class honor, which is equivalent to a distinction here.

And then I have to get accepted into good university. And at that point I was on track, but I was not there yet. So, I worked very hard in my final year, finally got my first class honors, and then I got accepted into Columbia University for my master’s in biotechnology. And they said, okay, we’ll sponsor you.

[00:05:12] Gabby Reece: So, you were interested maybe in communication in a certain way anyway.

[00:05:15] Latt Mansor: Exactly. Because I like people. I like to be the bridge. I don’t want to spend my days facing test tubes every day. Yeah. I like to connect and talk to people like yourself and share what I’ve learned throughout my life because I grew up overweight.

I lost my dad to cardiovascular, to stroke, and he had a heart attack before that. I’ve seen my mom’s family, like a lot of them being obese and battle with diabetes. For the longest time, I thought I was going to end up the same. I thought there was like,

[00:05:49] Gabby Reece: it’s just a sentence that you can’t control.

[00:05:51] Latt Mansor: because it’s genetics.

Not until later that I learned that there are things, there are still things that I can do. I might still end up there, but there are still things that I can do. And that gives me hope and that gives me. Life that gives me fun to live life and to try things and to try and change my body composition, try, and change my lifestyle.

And I think that whole lesson, it took much longer than it needed to be. If I would have known earlier.

[00:06:24] Gabby Reece: Okay. So given all that and you talk all about lifestyle every single day, you have whether it’s food or exercise or things like that, you are combining and incorporating lifestyle in your messaging.

Even with knowing all this and knowing about epigenetics and all these things, you still think, Oh I would end up with the same. A sentence as my father, don’t you think you can, you’ve blown that out of the water for yourself by now?

[00:06:51] Latt Mansor: I think that I’m not going to completely push that away because genetic does play a role, right? It still increases your risk to a certain extent. Obviously, what you do with your life contributes to that or prevents that. My hope is that I will never need to face that ever. But at the same time, we don’t know what the future holds. What we can do is to have full control of our present and enjoy our present.

That’s all I can do. That’s why I’m not going to say that I will never face that, or neither am I going to say that I will end up being there. I say I may not, but time will tell.

[00:07:32] Gabby Reece: And isn’t your lifestyle very different than your father’s?

[00:07:35] Latt Mansor: Yes. Yes, he was a smoker as well and I did smoke for seven years. I gave up when I was 22. And that was also when I started exercising and losing like 45 pounds in four months.

[00:07:48] Gabby Reece: So, what prompted you first, that both things happening obviously there’s something natural about. Starting to exercise and giving up smoking because they don’t work out as well together. And what happened? What did you see? Who did you learn from that you thought, oh, wait a second, I’m going to go to the gym.

[00:08:05] Latt Mansor: This is a funny story. So, I was in south of France, Banyuls, it’s a small city. I was there representing my university for a course called biology in space. Once upon a time, I did want to study biology in space. I even applied to the professor in University of Autonomous Madrid to look at how biology behaves in space. And I thought it was so cool. So, I went to this course for two weeks. I know it’s random. And then there was, it was organized by the European space agency and the Russian space agency and all these experts that were there giving us like talks and lectures, one of the ladies from the Russian space agency, she saw me smoking outside the lecture before I went in and

[00:08:53] Gabby Reece: you say, did you say she was Russian? So they’re really soft with their words. Okay.

[00:08:57] Latt Mansor: And she literally looked at me before walking into the lecture hall. And she was like, stop smoking, save your money, and buy vodka. Literally, those were the words that I remember until today, and I was 22 then. And for some reason, something resonated with me, and after the lecture, I pulled her aside and I said, you seem like you have something to tell me, let’s talk. We sat down, she pulled out a paper and she started drawing the DNA structure.

She said her husband is a lung cancer oncologist. And she has seen so many lung cancer patients be where they were because of smoking. And because I was studying biotechnology and genetics, I knew exactly what she meant. And at that point, I felt like a hypocrite if I don’t stop. Because the fact that I know the science behind it, and if I still do it, I can’t get past myself. So there and then, I gave up the rest of the cigarettes, just threw it away, and went cold turkey. Granted, the first year was…

[00:10:03] Gabby Reece: Did you put on weight? Because a lot of people put on weight because snack and stuff. And food tastes better.

[00:10:10] Latt Mansor: Oh, there’s always that. Yeah, and food tastes better when you give up smoking. Oh, interesting. And that’s also why you probably put on weight. I didn’t because I started exercising at the same time. For the first time I exercised voluntarily. I hated it.

[00:10:25] Gabby Reece: Oh, you’d have to have like instructors that were like, okay, all the kids are going to run and that’s what you’re doing.

[00:10:30] Latt Mansor: No, that was in university. I just did it voluntarily because one of, so that was in summer in my second year, right before that, like two, three months before that I already started exercising because my housemate. Leanne, she’s a state swimming captain back in Malaysia. She’s Hey, I’ve got a beach holiday coming up. Do you want to come jog with me? I need to get in shape. I was like I don’t jog. She was like, yeah, but just, it’s like around the lake in the university it’s two kilo kilometers. It’s sure. Went with her. I was blue. I couldn’t breathe. I was dying.

And there was a couple in front of us, at least 70, 60, 70 years old, faster. They were like in shape, and they were cheering me on. I was 22. I was so embarrassed. And ever since then, I was like, I’m going to go do it every day, just out of like my pride, just so that I can say I can complete a circle and come back to my home without stopping.

[00:11:33] Gabby Reece: So, what would you say to somebody? Cause I think a lot of people, exercising is intimidating. They really want to, they just don’t know how to enter, and they don’t, it doesn’t it’s scary. It doesn’t look fun. I don’t want to hurt myself. So, what would you say? At least from your experience, it was the way the introduction, because now I see you lifting big weight and doing all this stuff.

[00:12:02] Latt Mansor: Find a friend. Yeah, do it with someone you care about, someone who cares about you, do it slowly. You don’t have to start and go zero to a hundred today. Just start with walking, go with a small jog, do one kilometer.

And what I did was because there was a lake around the university that we ran around, I aim for the next tree every day. Just one tree ahead and then I’ll walk back because I can’t run back. So, I’ll run to the eighth tree Yeah, I’ll walk back the next day. I’ll run to the ninth tree and then I’ll walk back, and I think sense of progress It’s what kept me going and I didn’t even do it because I didn’t do it to lose weight.

I did it because in spite of all that embarrassment four months later, I lost like 45 pounds without even realizing I knew I was losing weight. I didn’t know how much weight I was losing, but then I looked really like unhealthy because all I did was jogging. So, I was just losing, just doing cardio.

[00:13:09] Latt Mansor: I was like there was no muscle there. That was when I started joining the gym. To your point, that was the moment of intimidation. Oh, yeah. And there was a trainer and good thing it was a university gym. So, everyone was university students. So, it’s like less intimidating. So, you don’t see like a power lifter lifting like 300 pounds next to me, bodybuilders. A trainer, we worked there saw how hard I worked, and he just came and gave me like advice. That was my motivation, I think surround yourself with people who want to get fit, who want to be healthy, community plays a big role.

[00:13:52] Gabby Reece: Yeah, it does. You see my house. The only reason these people are over here so that we’ll keep going. We’re tired.

[00:14:01] Latt Mansor: It’s inevitable.

[00:14:03] Gabby Reece: Everyone feels tired every now and again. I think people get a misconception that you fly out of bed every day and you’re saying, I can’t wait. That’s not how it works.

So you go, you finish at Oxford and then what, tell me where your life takes you.

[00:14:17] Latt Mansor: So, at Oxford, my research study was in. cardiovascular disease and diabetes. So, I looked at type two, the metabolism of type two diabetic heart in hypoxia, which is low oxygen. Yes. The funny thing is initially I was meant to study stem cells, cardiomyocytes, how to regenerate a damaged heart with stem cells.

But when I got there, there was a change of like projects around and they were like, hey lad, do you mind if we swap your project to this project? This before I even started, I was like, you know what? It’s just meant to be because my mom’s side has high prevalence of diabetes. My late dad died of stroke and cardiovascular disease and now I’m here investigating the link between these two diseases. I was like, yes, sure, absolutely. And from there, my interest and passion towards chronic diseases screw even more. And the more I know, the one, the more I want to try it on myself as well as share the knowledge.

[00:15:29] Gabby Reece: In your studies, just going back a little bit talking about hypoxic, because as an athlete selfishly, I write, we’re always talking about hypoxic training and doing more with less air and trying to be efficient.

You saw the pool training out there that you can be, you can. Work hypoxic very well. Could you just, cause I’m really curious the relationship between hypoxia, diabetes and your heart and how all of these things, how one impacts the other, because I, this is very interesting. Yeah.

[00:15:59] Latt Mansor: So naturally in a healthy heart, so our heart is an omnivore, right? Our heart cannot stop working. So, it will chomp up any substrate, any fuel you provide it. Correct? Normally, in under pneumoxia, normal oxygen level, our heart would use about 70 percent fat and then the rest 70 to 75 percent fat and then the rest glucose, but in hypoxia, the heart switches, it switches over to glucose.

Because if you know about metabolism, then the first step of glucose metabolism is glycolysis. Glycolysis does not use oxygen to create ACP, which is an energy currency in the cell. So, the heart will switch over when it gets a signal that, hey, it’s low oxygen. But the heart still needs to go get going. So, I’m going to produce energy using glucose.

The problem is it doesn’t produce a lot of energy, right? So, you get lactic acid buildup and all of that and it will eventually go down to the Krebs cycle, the mitochondria and create more and more ATP. But that is a temporary solution. So most normal healthy heart would switch over. What we have seen in diabetic heart is metabolic inflexibility is the inflexibility of the heart to switch over to glucose. And for this study, particularly, I used a type 2 diabetic rat model. I know it sounds cruel, like we made the rats type 2 diabetic and then we’ll put them in hypoxic chamber and then we look at the heart metabolism.

So, what we’ve seen is that because of the high fat diet that we fed the rats and the inability of the rat to metabolize the other substrate as well, it stays on to fat metabolism. And as a result, oxidative damage accumulates, and their heart gets more damaged. And when we measure the reoxygenation, let’s say when we put them back into normal oxygen level, they get arrhythmia and their cardiac function decreased significantly compared to the rats which are healthy and can switch back and forth between fats and glucose.

That’s why when I talk about metabolic health is the ability of our bodies to use substrates within our bodies that we have access to depending on the situation that we are in. If you’re going for a sprint, you should be able to use glucose better because sprint is an anaerobic and you will go into hypoxic situations.

If you’re going for a long run on cardiac zone 2 level, you’ll be able to use more of your fat storage because you have time to really mobilize the fatty acids from your storage, get it into the cells, create ATP, and then fuel your run. So that’s. What we found so we looked at acute hypoxia. We look at chronic hypoxia.

So over two weeks, what happens Wait, let’s just let’s talk about that because I understand that from a training point of view. And we always talk about breathing. Everyone’s talking about breathing. In ancient cultures had a better relationship with breathing, but the nature of having a good tolerance for CO2 so that you had enough CO2 in your body to absorb oxygen from the bloodstream.

[00:19:39] Gabby Reece: But when you say hypoxia, these patients, let’s say, why are they in hypoxia? Are they scrubbing their CO2 and they’re not actually oxygenating the body? What’s going on that they’re even in that?

[00:20:00] Latt Mansor: So, in this particular research, we are looking at hypoxia as a subset of ischemia, okay? And ischemia means like a blockage of arteries so that you have lack of blood flowing into the heart. So, you have lack of substrates going in, you have lack of oxygen going in, and you have lack of wastes going out. Okay? So, it’s just a subset because height, because oxygen is so important in our bodies that the reaction, the response to the lack of oxygen is so quick that we can measure it right away. And whereas if you measure ischemia, there’s so many things, like I said, you’ve got substrate going in, substrate not going out, oxygen, there’s so many things going on. It’s hard to pinpoint what mechanism. So, the whole point of this is to outline and to investigate the exact mechanism at which why diabetic hearts behave poorer in such a situation compared to a healthy heart.

[00:20:56] Gabby Reece: Now can you just, again, because I’m just going to utilize the fact that I have you in front of me, I have a high performing athlete and they are looking to get every edge that they can and so they are… training in hypoxic states. So can you share with me not only what’s happening in their body and in their heart, but also maybe some of the best ways or the most beneficial ways to do that.

[00:21:21] Latt Mansor: So, I’ve heard about the, those hypoxic training and the restricted bands and all that. I’m, I have to say, I have to be honest, I’m not entirely versed in that area and as far as metabolism goes, I can talk a bit about that. If you are healthy and normal, and you’re working in a hypoxic environment, you are essentially also upregulating hematocrit and erythropoietin, like you’re upregulating your red blood cells.

So over time, you are essentially having a more efficient carrier system for oxygen delivery. So that’s why. So, the adaptation to hypoxia, so that again, it requires you to be able to adapt to begin with, right? If you are metabolically dysfunctional, then it will be difficult for you to, in fact, it will put you in a situation where you might go through heart attack or something, right? But if you… But let’s say, is it possible if somebody that they’re eating while they’re sleeping, they’ve, maybe they’re building up into this training, they’re just not going full bore. What’s happening with their heart? So, their heart’s just more efficient at switching over and saying, hey, whatever fuel is available, I’m good.

[00:22:50] Gabby Reece: I’m working efficiently. I’ve got enough coming in and waste going out. And that’s how their system is working. Yes. Is there a long term, like you listened to endurance athletes, there’s always a cost at the other end of that though, on the heart. Granted if you think about it, if you are in hypoxia, you don’t have enough oxygen delivered to your body.

[00:23:11] Latt Mansor: And you don’t have enough red blood cells to carry oxygen around, your heart is going to automatically work harder, right? It will pump harder, it will pump faster, it will increase heart rate to increase oxygen saturation around the body. So, what you’re looking for when you train in those situations is for your body’s adaptation so that you, your body will say like this is the new normal now, so I’m going to be able to lower my heart rate, increase my red blood cells, increase my delivery of oxygen. And then when I go back to pneumoxia, I can do it even more efficiently with lower heart rate, with my already existing red blood cell pool, and push myself further. So, I think that is the idea behind that. But obviously when it comes to the nuance of the training and the methods and the methodology, I think a lot and I think.

[00:24:06] Gabby Reece: Laird, my husband because I’ve gone bike riding with him an awful lot and I’m huffing and puffing and sweating and he slapped weights onto his bike and he’s up at the hill and down and checking on me in a regular speaking voice.

When you hear of these athletes that have very high VO2, is it just that system is working well or is there also something different in their heart?

[00:24:29] Latt Mansor: That’s a great question. Do we know? I don’t know if we know I think yes, it’s the system for sure. Yeah. But I think it’s also, it could be genetics as well. I always feel gypped on that. I know. Think about me being born in cardiovascular diabetes.

[00:24:46] Gabby Reece: But you don’t know. You might have, you could have good VO2. You don’t know.

[00:24:52] Latt Mansor: I’m just grateful I’ve got good brain. That’s it.

[00:24:56] Gabby Reece: Before, before we move off this if in talking about diabetes and having studied this and the relationship of how the heart works with that is there anything that you, as somebody who like wants to communicate to the public? If you had, could say one thing to people who maybe they are navigating being diabetic. Is there anything that you would say, Hey just a reminder of something that feels really important.

[00:25:28] Latt Mansor: I think I’ll go back to what I said that ignorance is not bliss, right? Know your body. And nowadays we have so many different technologies that you can measure. Your body’s parameters can measure your sleep. You can measure your blood sugar; you can measure continuous glucose monitor. Yeah. I see you have one on level, right? I was, yeah. Levels. Yeah. I just recently interviewed Dr. Casey means the, yeah, she’s Chief medical officer.

[00:25:52] Gabby Reece: So, you too, it’s like the happy couple meaning both people are so happy.

[00:25:56] Latt Mansor: No. In that episode, I remember she was taking Keto IQ. Yeah. We took. An hour before, and then we measured again an hour late at the end of the podcast. And she was so shocked, and we got her reaction on camera. It was so genuine and authentic because she was like, Oh my God, I’m at 1. 4 from 0. 2. Yeah. Oh yeah. And she was like, I can’t believe it. And we are, you got it on camera. So, I think we have so many things that we can use so many tools that we can use to inform us about how our bodies are doing.

Sometimes. It’s important for us to recognize our body bio signals, but sometimes if people are already in the dysfunctional state, they might not be able to recognize those signals, or their signals might be a bit misleading. Yeah. Because, for example, if you say oh, I know when I’m hungry, but then if your hormonal system is out of whack, then maybe you feel hungry when you’re not supposed to be hungry. So, I would say, know your body well, know your health state well, and then figure out what to do to optimize it because a healthy person can still optimize their health and can still optimize their performance. A not very healthy person can also optimize.

[00:27:15] Gabby Reece: So, anyone can essentially optimize, and like you said, you, in three or four months, you lost all this weight. Your body wants to be healthy. We just have to sometimes push it into the environments and help it along. And I think that people don’t… They think that, oh, they can feel good, or they can lose the weight, but it’s just putting yourself in that environment.

And what I’m interested in is like you really, again, through this process of what you’re doing, you talk a lot about lifestyle and food and movement and even things for your brain. I’m just curious if coming from such a medical and science background, it must be really interesting when you’re always trying to bridge the two because like where I come from, I’m way on the other side, right?

Like I’m all about lifestyle only, but you’re a science guy. And so, it must be interesting to find the balance for you.

[00:28:11] Latt Mansor: So, I think the difference there is that I’m not a clinical scientist. Okay. Where clinical scientists learn a lot about like intervention. They use what drugs to block what pathway to make people feel better.

I’m a basic scientist. They say basic, they call it basic scientists. But most people don’t understand. They’re like, Oh, he’s just basic, right? You’re not basic. But basic scientist means that you work on mechanism of action on cells, on animal models. So, you’re not working on humans. So, whenever you hear clinical, it means humans and basic scientists is anything else and you measure what you want to investigate in terms of mechanism of action when that happens.

So, my understanding is. How things work, my passion is wondering and working on and researching how our bodies work. So, for me to bridge from the science part to the lifestyle part was not that hard because I wasn’t focused on the intervention to begin with. I was more focused about how our bodies naturally work versus how our bodies would work if we’re sick.

[00:29:19] Gabby Reece: So, you understand the mechanisms and you were not attached to necessarily an intervention or a drug.

[00:29:24] Latt Mansor: Or a drug. Or just fixing the symptom. I’m interested in the root cause. And that’s what this mechanism of actions are, right? They’re usually where the root causes are. But most, the most important thing is that when you do a PhD, you’re so narrowed into one niche. Yeah, that it’s hard to see the big picture and myself included I was looking at the heart in hypoxia, like very specific situation here, but only after I come out that I communicate with people and talk to people and work in different industries that I realized that yes, there is a dysfunction there.

If you have diabetes, you have a higher risk of developing heart disease. And if you have a heart attack, you have higher risk of heart failure. But before you get there. There are so many things that contributes to that, like you are looking at, again, lifestyle, movement, nutrition stress, and all of that plays a big role in, in contributing to that small.

[00:30:36] Gabby Reece: It is interesting where we do, we have so much information and yet, and so we in no time before have we been able to really help ourselves, but I also think the information has made it so confusing for people. So, for people listening, a lot of people are going to know what each HVMN is, but can you, and I certainly have used it in the past.

We joked that I think in 2018, it was on my poolside nonstop. I have a friend, Elijah, that, that was like the crack of the summer. We used it all summer long. Maybe you can just explain, what the brand is, what the intention behind that with the thinking behind the brand and even we were discussing earlier the original developments with DARPA.

[00:31:22] Latt Mansor: So HVMN stands for Health Via Modern Nutrition. And as it sounds like it is what it sounds like. Push for healthier lifestyle. We know that our metabolism is under attack. 88 percent of Americans are metabolically unhealthy. I’m not sure. Some people claim that it’s reaching to 90%, which is bad news.

What can we do as our part to push for better understanding, better education, better information about our health, and not just. Through our products, but through things like this HBMN podcast that I host and social media content. So that’s our sort of mission and vision. And that’s why I joined them.

I decided to join them. I think it aligns very well with my passion about helping myself, helping my family. We all start with selfish reasons, like whatever we do. It starts with your selfish reasons, with your own experience. Don’t, but how can you be connected to it if it doesn’t mean something to you?

[00:32:31] Gabby Reece: Exactly. I think that’s, I think it’s a guide. That’s normal. Yeah. So just so we’re really clear, can you define for people what metabolic health is?

[00:32:39] Latt Mansor: So metabolic health I will always connect it to metabolic flexibility. It’s the ability of our body to use the resources that we have access to. Based on certain situations we’re in, whether we’re exercising, whether we’re sleeping, whether we are in hypoxia, our body’s natural ability to up regulate and down regulate.

And know that metabolism is always in a wave fashion. It gets secreted, it goes down, it goes back up. Insulin, hormones, same thing. The goal is not pile on what is good. But rather keep what it’s, what is good within the optimal Goldilocks zone. So just because, for example, ketones are good, doesn’t mean that you have to just pound ketones one after another.

Same thing, like glucose is not inherently bad because we can, we need glucose to function, but too much glucose, too much ultra-process glucose. That’s when it’s, it gets bad. So that’s metabolic health. And then you mentioned about DARPA, about how you heard about HVMN in 2018.

So, in 2017, we brought the first exogenous ketone into the market, and I think I should explain what ketone is, right?

[00:34:04] Gabby Reece: I think we were just going to explain it all. So, it’s people under have a tool and understanding.

[00:34:10] Latt Mansor: So, ketone, a lot of people, when they hear ketones, they think of ketogenic diet. It goes deeper than that. Ketone is just a molecule and it’s not novel either. It is as ancient as the first mammal that are available, that have access to fats and can metabolize fat. That’s how old this molecule is. It is broken down from fats. And created in your liver to produce energy, but the condition at which ketones are being produced is very specific.

It needs to be low in glucose, like your body needs to be in really low glucose storage and blood glucose. And what happens if it’s not, if it’s not, then you have insulin going up when you have insulin going up. Insulin is a very powerful signaling molecule and hormones when you have insulin going up It will send signal to the liver saying that hey you have energy i.e., sugar So you don’t need to break down fat to create ketones That’s why you need to really lower your glucose to produce ketones and in modern days How we achieve that is via ketogenic diet where you restrict your diet restrict your carbs in your diet severely, or you go on intermittent fasting because then your insulin will stay low and then your body start to, or kickstart the ketogenesis process, which is ketone production.

Why would you need ketones when you have fats you can use for energy? And even if you don’t have glucose, you still have fats. The reason is because of the blood brain barrier. There is a barrier that stops big molecules from entering the brain to create energy. So, fats are very big molecules, and it cannot pass that barrier.

So, to provide the brain with energy…

[00:36:05] Gabby Reece: I just have this image of imagine a fat could penetrate your… You’d be like, it can’t get past the bouncer. Yeah, you’d just be like this. So, the ketones get broken down.

[00:36:15] Latt Mansor: So, the ketone, so ketone is a smaller molecule, smaller version of these fats molecules and get shuttled to the brain.

And recently I got interviewed by Dr. Mindy Peltz and she Described it so nicely and I’m going to steal it and I’m going to credit it to her, obviously. She explained it in an ancestral human point of view, because when you don’t have storage systems, so you don’t have ways to store food.

So, you will go out and hunt, you eat it, and then you finish it, and then you go hungry, and then you go hunt again. So, during that, that hungry period, even though you are low on resources, you still need to be focused, and you still need the physical prowess to go hunt. To go get that food. So how does that work?

That’s when you have ketones running in your body. That’s when you start using your fat storage and create ketones so that one, it gives your brain that mental clarity and focus. And two. Give you that performance boost so that you can go get the next get the food.

[00:37:21] Gabby Reece: it’s interesting I you know, you’ll the more You get into this and fasting for a long time, everybody should fast, right?

And then more studies have been done on women, I think until 2000 or I don’t know, 93 or something, studies were only done on men. And then now we’re starting to learn, oh, wait a second, if you’re a performing woman, you perform better fed. If you are a middle-aged woman, fasting, it’s what are you going to use it for?

Are you using it for a, I love the politically polite ways. Like people talk about body composition. You mean controlling your weight. Or I often say those weeks you go through and all of a sudden you get loosey goosey and you’re eating, and you think, you know what, I’m just going to fast for a day or two to pull it back in.  Because then you’re happy to eat anything, right? Yeah. So there, there’s this, but in living I live with my husband a very long time and there was something about, and I know there’s a lot of information about women, did quite a lot of hunting and we were forging and doing other things.

So, I’m not suggesting they weren’t hunting, but I often thought, I wonder. For the men, if fasting, because fasting is always good for men, was because of this thing. It’s like you go out, you go to hunt, and maybe you didn’t catch something, and you guys are all together. Guess what?

You need that energy to go again. Or maybe we had the opportunity if we were in a different space where we could at least nibble on something all the time. So, I often wondered, because we would fast in this house and Laird would thrive and I was ready to kill somebody. And I really was like, what is wrong with me?

And I was so glad there’s a Stacey Sims and Gabrielle Lyon. They’re both a little more kind of protein female focus. And listen, I think it’s a great thing, but I think people have to really understand All these nuances. So, when you talk about it from the ancestral way, I really appreciate that because I really believe we live in such a modern world and we want to separate so much from some really fundamental biological things about ourselves that the more we could be entertained and interested in that, I think we would know ourselves better.

And, anyway, so I thought about that a lot because it’s Hey, if you miss that one opportunity to kill that one animal, you can’t be too tired because you needed more energy. So, I really appreciate that.

So ketones they can penetrate the blood brain barrier. They’re very important. It’s the oldest studied diet because of epilepsy that there is more than a hundred years, right? People think, Oh, it’s a fad. It’s no, ketogenic only came by as a byproduct really of epilepsy. So I think that’s important because I personally don’t know that any fads, I think doing it smart is it shouldn’t be a fad. And I know that you can monetize it and call it something and it makes sense. But besides that, so we have this tool, like you’re saying and so what is the connection, just out of curiosity, with metabolic health and ketones or being, having, is it just that flexibility?

I can burn whatever I need in whichever situation I am.

[00:49:29] Latt Mansor: So, the area of metabolic health and ketone is still very new. So especially exogenous ketones. We haven’t had exogenous ketones for a long time.

[00:49:41] Gabby Reece: How many ketones? What are the types of ketones?

[00:49:45] Latt Mansor: So, they are, so again, so ketone as a molecule is natural.

So, there are three types of ketone bodies that our body produce. Acetoacetate, acetone, and beta hydroxybutyrate. The last one, beta hydroxybutyrate or BHB. The main primary ketone that our bodies use for energy and get circulated around because it’s the most stable. So, it, but it interchange with the other forms.

Acetone gets released through breath. So, whenever you do the ketone breath test, it’s usually measuring acetone. Acetate also comes out in urine as well. So, whenever you measure like urine test, that’s acetate blood. Blood ketone test. That’s usually measures BHB. So, let’s get that out of the way.

[00:50:29] Gabby Reece: What do you like? What do you like the blood test?

[00:50:30] Latt Mansor: Blood test is the most accurate because the other two, so acetone does not necessarily like it’s usually one, two millimolar off to your blood ketone levels and acetyl acetate it. Shifts when you are more keto adapted. So, when you are more keto adapted, you will have more BHB.

So, you have less S2O acetate. So, some people measure their S2O acetate. They’re like I was in ketosis last week. Now I can’t get into ketosis because your body is producing more BHB and circulating more BHB. So that molecule itself is not novel. It’s a great molecule. It’s a great source of fuel. And there are multiple ways to get ketones into your body. Keto diet, fasting and exogenous ketones.

So, let’s talk about exogenous ketones. Exogenous ketones mean it’s an external source where you directly consume ketones, and this has been around for less than 10 years. Initially you have MCT oil, I know Laird and I were talking about MCT and coconut oil, so those are fats, but it has high ketogenic properties where, if you take them, it has high probability and higher conversion rate to BHB. That’s why they are called like highly ketogenic fatty acids medium triglycerides.

And then in 2017, we brought the first ketone ester into the market. So HVMN brought ketone ester.

[00:52:00] Gabby Reece: Who found, did somebody, how’d they find it? How they came about is very different from what we understood about keto diet and epilepsy. It was, it started when DARPA from the U S military wanted to look for a, an efficient fuel that can fuel the military for long and demanding mission.

[00:52:21] Latt Mansor: And we know the three macronutrients. protein, fats, and glucose. What else can we do to produce or provide fuel to these military personnel? And about 1 in 20 years ago with NIH, Dr. Richard Veach, he did a lot of studies around this, and they finally came out with exogenous ketones. And ketone ester was the product of it because it manages to deliver ketones into the body at a high level at just one dose versus taking straight BHB because if you, they are also BHB free acid that you can take, but because it’s acid acidic, it gives you heartburn and it gives you like acid reflux and you can’t take too much of it because of that. And as a result, you can’t get the ketone levels in the optimal level. So what ketone ester is…

[00:53:12] Gabby Reece: It must have been fun if you were the group that had to test that. I tried that.

[00:53:16] Latt Mansor: Oh, you did? Yeah, it wasn’t fun. So, ketone ester is BHB bound with R13 butanediol. In the, in an ester bond, that’s why it’s called ketone mono ester. But nowadays we have ketone diester. So, you have acetoacetate, two acetoacetate bound with a butanediol. You have two C6 molecules, C6 are medium chain triglycerides, right? So similar to like coconut oil bound with butanediol. They all have like bounds with butanediol to create the ester bond.

[00:53:54] Gabby Reece: And what’s the, what is the, when you say the ester bond, why do we need to have that?

[00:53:55] Latt Mansor: So that’s for the delivery into the body and bypassing that GI issue that, that pure BHB has. But the problem is by nature, the ester bond has a very bitter flavor. Sure. We got a 6 million contract with the military DOD right now using ketone ester to improve cognitive and physical performance in hypoxia.

So higher altitude, we simulate high altitude and all of that. And we saw great results, but one of the tasks was to improve the flavor. And we worked with Monell Research Center based in Philadelphia. They are like, they are the sensory olfactory experts in flavor development. And they tried everything, natural sweeteners, artificial sweeteners, dairy, nothing worked. In fact, the ketone ester blunts the sweetness from all these sweeteners. They tried; I believe seven times sugar of what’s in Coke. And four times what, four times sucralose that’s in Diet Coke. It in the placebo people with just the sweeteners they’ll rank sugar, like they’ll rank sweetness as the main taste.

[00:55:11] Latt Mansor: As soon as you put ketone ester, the bitter goes up and that sweetness actually goes out. So, no benefit because you’ve got all that sweetener and you still got this taste. Yeah. So, the original product that was. That you did with DARPA was it that there was a ketone ester?

And it was also very expensive was about 20. It was 25 grams for about 33 to 40 dollars all right, and in two last year early last year we came up with ketone IQ and the active ingredient in ketone IQ is just half of what ketone ester was, Rn3 butanediol. We found that Rn3 butanediol is easier to flavor, so it tastes a little bit better.

Granted, it still doesn’t taste like juice. Two, it’s cheaper to manufacture. And three, because Rn3 butanediol does not directly go into your blood as BHB, it gets filtered out. By your liver and your liver converts it to BHP, your liver has signal from the rest of your body. So, if you already have a lot of energy, it will convert it slower.

So, it doesn’t spike your blood BHP to a very high level. So earlier on, we talked about metabolism needs to be in this optimal level. Before this, we found that, okay, ketone is good. So, ketone ester is able to push your blood ketone levels to a very high level. So that’s, that must be great. But then later on in 2021, there was a study by McCarthy et al.

They looked at athletes with ketone ester having higher cardiorespiratory stress biomarkers because it lowered the pH of the blood. It increases the acidity because BHB can also be converted to be hydroxybutyric acid. And as a result, they have higher breathing rate, heart rate to expel carbon dioxide to neutralize the blood.

And even though in that study, they didn’t decrease the performance of these athletes, they sure did increase the rate of perceived exertion, meaning that you feel like you’re working out harder without the benefit of the performance.

[00:57:18] Gabby Reece: Imagine that like you’re taking a shot of ketones and all of a sudden, you’re because your body couldn’t regulate through the liver.

[00:57:27] Latt Mansor: Half of it, because half of it is the BHB. It gets broken down in your gut the ester bond gets broken down in your gut, BHB goes directly into your blood and increase your BHB, and then the BDO still goes to your liver.

[00:57:38] Gabby Reece: I see. It, so in, after this study and the original product did have a very specific flavor. That’s a very nice way to put it. Yeah. At that point, honestly, if you’re doing things for performance or for something, it’s take it on the chin, the fact that it’s available. But so, then you decided for not, I want to, I don’t want to use the word stability, but to change the formula to get this other. More even what the body needs at that moment. Is that right?

[00:58:15] Latt Mansor: I think that’s exactly right. And I think it’s a learning process for everyone. Sure. And it’s a matter of transparency of the data and science and integrity. Because we could easily say, hey push this data aside and it’s it still works.

There are still studies that show that it improved performance. Cherry picked those and kept selling Ketone ester at a higher price. But we chose to do this instead and run more studies now. And now more and more researchers. I’m so happy in the past year and a half, all the seeds that we planted.

Now coming back to us because all these researchers they finally see the value of KetoneIQ in all these different areas We’re looking at TBI. We’re looking at cardiovascular disease Grant just went out with University in Aarhus, Denmark looking at heart failure patients 250 patients for 30 days on KetoneIQ.

We’re gonna find out early next year if we get the grant Traumatic Brain Injury with Naval Health Research Center. We’ll find out also end of this year or early next year. We are running a study with like other brain centers. And it’s just great to know that I can live with my conscience knowing that we change our formula, we change based on the data.

Because I’m not going to lie, a while ago, I was bothered because one of the running coaches on his like social media, commented, and he used like really strong negative words on how disgusting we are marketing our product that we change our formula and we shove the old product under the bus and we are like going back on our words.

I said, the other option is cherry pick and pretend the new data didn’t happen. I would rather say that, hey, what we understood about this was not fully accurate. You can still, and don’t get me wrong, if there are certain therapeutic uses where you need to get that ketone level so high, three to five millimolar, I would say by all means use ketone ester because ketone IQ cannot get you past 2.5 millimolar, at least in our studies.

[01:00:23] Gabby Reece: Do you have, is there an example where you’d want that, that go crazy. Maybe like some, cancer research treatments?

[01:00:29] Latt Mansor: I, yeah I honestly don’t know anything that you need that high of a level. And as we learn more about keto metabolism, now that more and more researchers are picking up that this is.

First of all, safe, obviously. And second of all, beneficial. Now they’re all running these separate studies. We’re not paying for them. In fact, some of them, they buy directly from us. They’re giving us business and we have no control over that data. And I would love to see all that data because then we have no conflict of interest.

They’re not biased. They are running it for their own hospitals and for their own patients.

[01:01:14] Gabby Reece: So, what if you were mentioning even for brain injury or things like that. So, tell me how this works for a patient like that.

[01:01:26] Latt Mansor: Sure. So, as I mentioned earlier, ketones when it’s in your body, they’ve shown that it’s preferentially being taken up by the brain and the heart especially.

So, the measure of blood going in, blood going out, ketones get taken out independent of other substrates. So, they’ll still be taking up the other substrates like glucose and fats and all of that. But at the same time, ketones, if they’re there, they’re like Bring it in. And in the brain, when people have concussion or traumatic brain injury, we publish a paper in this.

If you search Lattman, so TBI ketones, I believe it’s in 2021, the potential mechanism of traumatic brain injury and as an extension neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer’s, because if you look closely, there are a lot of similar hallmarks between brain injury and. Alzheimer’s, for example. It’s the deficiency and inability of the brain to metabolize glucose.

So, when someone has a traumatic brain injury or concussion within 48 hours, what we have observed is that it upregulates glucose metabolism, hyper metabolism. It sucks in all the glucose for either energy or for mitigation of the damage. So, it makes sense, right? But past that, within the week, or months after they have seen a lowered glucose metabolism.

And in fact, some of the cases they saw an increase in lactate metabolism. So, for other substrates taking over and long term as well the deficiency in glucose metabolism or the deficit in energy caused by that increased their risk of getting neurodegenerative diseases. And even before they developed that.

That those diseases, the deficit in energy is what causing brain fog coordination, memory loss and all that stuff, right? It’s essentially you are not sustaining your brain energy demand because ketone is a source of fuel. It is taken preferentially up by the brain. It uses a different pathway than the glucose pathway because it goes through, goes into the cell via a different transporter, monocarboxylate transporter versus glucose transporter.

If there is a dysfunction or malfunction in the glucose pathway, it is not affected. So, providing ketones in those situations, you are essentially providing an alternate path for your brain to really create the energy and use the energy. So, if you are going to your destination, there is a roadblock, there is traffic jam, you got to find an alternate, alternative path.

And that’s exactly what ketone is doing for you in these situations, because If you look at it acutely within the 48 hours where you are upregulating glucose so much, you can provide that extra energy, right? And then if you look at the long term where the brain is not using glucose efficiently, you can still provide that energy to really compensate for that deficit.

[01:04:33] Gabby Reece: Do you, is there, so if somebody takes too many ketones, they just breathe it out or pee it out. Is that pretty much it? There’s no real. What’s going to happen?

[01:04:42] Latt Mansor: There was no real side effect of overdosing because it’s like having glucose. If you overdose a glucose, you just feel sick, right?

You just throw up. Do know that it has 70 calories. One shot of this has 70 calories, so you can over pile your number of calories. So, you might just force your body to increase storage, essentially. You’d have to be motivated to have a bunch of those.

[01:05:10] Gabby Reece: So, if I’m let’s talk about householders and athletes. So, if I’m a householder I’m going to have a busy day. I have a presentation. I’m feeling a little out of it. I’m going to work out in 30, in 20 minutes. Is this the way I use?

[01:05:33] Latt Mansor: So, the way I explain it, the easiest way is whatever activity that uses your brain power, you will benefit from it. So, if you’re using it for performance, you’ll still use your brain, right? You use your coordination. You’ve got to focus. If you’re going out for a ride, going out for a run, you have to be alert of your surroundings, your balance. You still use your brain. If you’re using it for your homework, you’re doing an exam, you’re doing a podcast, I still use my brain, especially my brain. And if I’m being asked difficult questions, I got to be really on point and have the memory recall to recall all the information that I know. So, I will use. There’s half an hour before I do such activities.

[01:06:18] Gabby Reece: Do you is there a, let’s say we’re not signing or, and we’re not exercising, so we’re not in high cardiovascular, so we’re not really rolling this out so quickly. How long would the effects last?

[01:06:31] Latt Mansor: It lasts a few hours, a good few hours. So, if I am just sedentary, and let’s say if my, it’s my rest day, I’m not working out today. I would take one before a podcast and that should last me until the end of my workday. And if I feel like, oh, I’m low on energy and I’m still trying to concentrate or meet friends for dinner or whatever, I’ll take another shot.

[01:06:53] Gabby Reece: And not crush your sleep, which I like. Exactly.

[01:06:56] Latt Mansor: I love that. Yeah. It does not negatively impact your sleep because it’s not a stimulant. And a lot of people, they ask, how can you have a product that gives you energy? But also gives you a calming effect.

[01:07:10] Gabby Reece: You hear a lot of people talk about this when people say, oh, I became a vegetarian. Yeah. Or other people say, I’m paleo, or I’m keto. I’m doing a keto diet. We, I think the general consensus is they’re all feeling better because they’re just eating real food.

[01:07:25] Latt Mansor: They’re eating real food. And another point is the switch of diet. Because the switch of the diet it basically, have you heard of the term hormesis?

Yeah, of course. Hormesis, where you are producing stress to your body that is enough for your body to adapt, but not too much that you break your body, right? So whenever someone changes their diet, they’re increasing their diversity of the microbiome and the gut health and all of that and eating real food, like you said.

Eliminating processed foods, they start to feel better. And I think there is a lot, that’s why I always tell people I don’t condone like fully excluding one particular group, food groups, unless you’re doing it for therapeutic uses where you have specific use cases where you have to eliminate certain food out of allergy or whatever, right?

But otherwise, like having a diverse group of food, like obviously the proportion and the ratio has to be right. And I recently created a video about the scam of a pyramid of the food pyramid. They still have it in the books in school.

[01:08:37] Gabby Reece: Yeah, they do. Nutritional pyramid. It’s unbelievable. Isn’t it great?

[01:08:41] Latt Mansor: You know what? My friend, he was like, I’ve got a conspiracy theory. I think nowadays they’re going to start pushing. They’re going to start push for the start pushing for meats and fixing that pyramid, but not because of the reason we know it’s because of all these rich people are having shares in the fake meat industry.

[01:09:02] Gabby Reece: Oh, I’m well aware of it. And the lab. You mean like James Cameron who has pea protein and I have no problem saying it because that’s on him. Yeah. And they do game changers, and they tell partial truths. They don’t and I’m all for it. People should eat however it works best for them, but they don’t tell the whole truth.

And then by the way, those. Oh, don’t get me started. Go on. No, the oils in the fake meats and the scientific project that is these meats that smell that is not meat but smells like bacon, the stuff that’s in there I don’t, and that’s what I, it gets, this is one of my hopes of this show is, I don’t want, I’m not here to politicize any way of eating any…

I don’t see any way to do this because I think it’s a distraction from people figuring out what works best for you, but there’s no getting around real food’s better than everything. And then work from there. I don’t personally understand how we’ve made that even tribalism at its highest level.

And I think it’s an unnecessary distraction that keeps people from let’s break bread however we, we can and want to together. But this thing about what, and what they’re doing to that, to the meat is radical.

[01:10:18] Latt Mansor: That’s a great point. When you talk about tribalism, I always feel like it’s always us and them.

And it’s always you have to pick a camp. I’m not picking. You don’t have to. And I know it’s not sexy on social media. But at the end of the day, why can’t we just be like normal human beings who all want to live healthy and choose real whole foods? And that’s it. Yeah. And really strive for the transparency of the data out there.

[01:10:49] Gabby Reece: I think we’re there trying to mask us up again. All of that, it’s like transparency is out the door. That’s why I always encourage people, listen, be your own advocate. That’s why I want to learn from people close to it. And then I think if we really pay attention, we know it feels good to us. And do that. And something might feel good for a while and then maybe it stops feeling good. And then you say, maybe I’m eating too much meat. I’d like to. To have three days a week, I only have vegetables or maybe, you know what, I’ve been a vegetarian for 10 years, but I’ve gone to see a doctor and maybe I’m getting I’m thinking of being pregnant.

I need to add a little bit of animal protein, high quality. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s like you’re saying, even changing formulas, we have to be able to take new information and say, oh, you know what? I’ve got to change this a little bit. So, it, I think it it’s a very unnecessary feud when we should be all fighting collectively together to have the best food system that we can.

[01:11:50] Latt Mansor: So well said. I don’t know how else to say it. You know what’s the best quality that humans have over say animals? Our adaptation, our adaptability. We can adapt so fast and so quick. And we have that IQ to help us disseminate information and then adapt to it. So, use it. It’s your superpower.

And again, like you are the PhD of your own body. Nobody knows your body better than yourself. So, at the end of the day, your choice on what you want to put into your body. And you are the monitor of what comes out in terms of the biofeedback.

[01:12:27] Gabby Reece: Yeah. And I think a lot of us don’t, we’re so busy, we’re on our phone. And my other favorite thing is the metric. Laird and I talk about this a lot, and I appreciate people using measurement as a source of motivation, but sometimes maybe just sit for a second and after you eat, be like, how do I feel? Do I feel tired? Did this food give me energy? How’s my stomach? How’s, what’s going on?

And I think sometimes we’re always like, oh my brain says or my thing. It’s like, how do you feel? I don’t, I hope that we don’t lose a little bit of that. And I think the more I have this conversation, I often say I really, and I can oversimplify it, that Metabolic function, mitochondrial sort of efficiency, chronic inflammation, community and purpose, and insulin sensitivity.

If we can manage those sorts of few things that we’re in, that we’re in pretty good shape at least we have a shot to be in the conversation. It shows up over and over, but the ability to stay insulin sensitive, it’s like, could we, and I appreciate you’re wearing a glucose monitor, but still one step back from that is, Staying insulin sensitive, end of story.

[01:13:38] Gabby Reece: And I think your point is really important. MTOR. Yes. I just want you to talk about it and define it. Cause I think a lot of people don’t know.

[01:13:49] Latt Mansor: Yeah, mTOR it’s just a black hole essentially for even scientists like me, let alone somebody who is not into science. It does so many things and people are claiming, oh, mTOR is good. mTOR is bad. mTOR is good. mTOR is bad. High mTOR is better. No, high mTOR is worse. And it’s just so many things that mTOR. MTOR is just a signaling pathway that is essential in energy metabolism. You have to look at it that way. And if it’s a energy metabolism pathway, it can go either way up or down. But think about this.

Your body does not always need energy. Your body does not always consume energy and your body doesn’t always use up energy. So MTOR would go up and down depending on the activity. That you are doing, for example, in longevity studies, they saw mTOR being down regulated and they’re like, oh, mTor, you don’t want to up regulate it and you live longer.

But then in exercise mTOR being increased because it’s helpful for protein synthesis and a study have shown with ketones and carbon and protein, you increase leucine mediated mTOR activation. So, it helps with recovery. And if you think about it, having some muscle mass, especially in elderly, it’s super helpful because it stops sarcopenia.

It prevents fall when you can’t support your own exoskeleton. How about that about longevity? Do you need mTOR or do you not? So, I think that is why a lot of people have misconception and everyone wants to look at metabolism as a straight line, as a linear process where it… Okay. One is good. One is bad.

Same thing with glucose. Same thing with fat, like not same thing with inflammation, right? A lot of people think about inflammation. They’re like, oh inflammation is bad nowadays. Even doctors nowadays I think recently I saw a social media content a doctor said that he needs to start referring inflammation to chronic and acute inflammation because acute inflammation is our natural defense mechanism where our bodies would react to infection, any form of dysfunction, and we have a fever is to essentially battle whatever invasion that is within our bodies, but then chronic inflammation is where it turns bad because You are breaking down your biological system so much that it’s trying to fix it via upregulating inflammation.

It becomes a vicious cycle where you keep doing whatever you’re doing to damage your body and the inflammation keeps cycling up to fix that. And over time that inflammation just breaks down your system. The system just breaks down and therefore the manifestation of diseases and symptoms. I, I don’t know if I fully answer the question.

[01:17:05] Gabby Reece: Yeah, because I always hear people talking about mTOR, so I thought, okay, let’s get a little bit into it. And I appreciate that everybody wants either the magic pill or it’s one way or the other, but it’s what state are you in and what do you need and what don’t you need? And so, I think it’s important to understand that there’s a lot of nuances when it comes to this.

[01:17:24] Latt Mansor: And I think that the question. that people should ask is not whether or not mTOR is good for you. It’s whether or not are you able to upregulate and downregulate mTOR at the right time for the right purposes.

[01:17:41] Gabby Reece: So, for example, you’re saying like, hey, if you’ve trained hard and you need to recover, then you need to be able to upregulate it. And if you’re not doing anything or resting, but see, that’s different because resting could be in a recovery state. So, what do I know? All right. Exactly. All right. It’s an interesting thing I think about this too, to add it to that, which is, I might even have best practices, but if I’m not managing my stress well, when it’s in there and you can feel it and it’s like people it’s all those variables.

And I think even if we eat well and we try to get to bed and we exercise, if we aren’t mitigating stress, whether it’s emotional or other, I don’t, I think it’s something. Stress might be the worst. Because it creeps up. Yes. And so, it’s an interesting thing when you’re, even when you do the right things.

If you’re really paying attention, it’s oh man, that stress will really get you. So, I think it’s important too to have those conversations because those are usually then other things. It’s not just the level of pace and hectic and how our life is. I think the stress becomes unmanageable when we have all these unfinished things in our life, unfinished, unresolved conversations or what have you.

You talked about skin, the importance. of skin health and on our inflammation levels. I had never really heard listen, I like nice skin, we talk about it this way, but I had not heard, and of course I know it’s the largest organ on the body, but I had not heard that as far as the importance of it for inflammation levels.

[01:19:28] Latt Mansor: I think… Just think of it like another organ that can manifest as an effect of a dysfunction within the body, except… It’s an organ that is external, so you can see it, whereas the other organs say liver, you can’t see it until you measure your blood. So skin is something that you can see on the outsides.

And as we know, our bodies react accordingly based on what’s happening inside, what’s what we’re putting in and how we’re working out on it. So, it’s a great storyteller of how the state of our bodies is and just this morning I saw a friend of mine sent me a reel of a doctor talking about papilloma and which are these like black skin tags that has like under your armpit and all that.

Apparently, it’s a sign of insulin resistance. I didn’t know that. I, and I haven’t looked into it.

[01:20:29] Gabby Reece: No, but I’ve heard that too.

[01:20:30] Latt Mansor: Yeah. Like same thing. So, it’s a form of dysfunction that is manifesting on the outer level to give you that signal and whatever you see that’s happening to you that you don’t think it’s right.

It’s probably not. It’s probably something that’s happening beneath those layers. That you need to take note of, and I’m always scared of that as well. Like I’m always like very conscious about, okay, what are the signs I’m seeing? Okay. If I have these rashes, I was having like for a few months, I was like, I don’t know what was it.

I went to the dermatologist. They’re like, Oh, it’s nothing. I’m like, okay. And then it just went away. They’ll give you a cream.

[01:21:07] Gabby Reece: They did. Yeah. But maybe it’s something internal.

[01:21:11] Latt Mansor: Yeah. And then it just went away. I don’t know. Like I tried like trial and error, like excluding some, excluding dairy, excluding this other food groups.

It worked. And then it came back, and I was like, Oh, I don’t even know what, like I’m running out of ideas how to isolate this. And then suddenly I went on holiday in Malaysia. Oh, you relaxed.

[01:21:35] Gabby Reece: Oh, stressed. Your skin got better. I know my skin. And also, it’s very, when I drink water, it’s humid.

[01:21:40] Latt Mansor: Very humid and it’s also very humid there.

I should start telling my company that it’s I have this like disease. It has to this. I need holiday. I need to go on a holiday.

[01:21:51] Gabby Reece: My teenage daughter. I’m not joking. I don’t know. You obviously wouldn’t know this cause you’re busy and a smart person, but there’s a thing like a Stanley.

It’s a cup now that they’re all walking around with. It’s like this big as a dumbbell. Have you seen this? TikTok, the power of TikTok. So, these girls have these. They’re huge glass things with a lid. It’s not a water bottle though. Okay. It’s different, but it’s the same. It’s called a Stanley and it has this, and it’s huge.

And so, she’s now, one of my daughters is drinking all this water and she’s my skin, I bet you my looking good and I was like, what a novel idea you’re hydrated, and your skin looks better. Anyway, in finishing up, if you, because again, I think you do approach this scientifically and compassionately if you were going to invite people if they wanted to explore just even if they’re thinking about stepping up their certain aspects of their lifestyle or they already are, but they may be, you’ve you’re a person who’s turned it up Justin’s turned it up. I’m ready to turn it down.

What does that look like? What’s the invitation from someone like you coming through all of your experiences? To people that maybe haven’t gotten the chance yet to feel.

[01:23:20] Latt Mansor: Baby steps is important. Take one step at a time. If you really want to change, just half a step is enough. And reach out. Reach out to people that may be able to provide help. And reach out to you. Reach out to, to me. I answer my DMS. I’ve got people DMing me. It’s Okay, calm down with that.

[01:23:42] Gabby Reece: I’m already overwhelmed.

[01:23:51] Latt Mansor: I got people ask me like I’ve done this fasting. I’ve done this ketone. What do you think? And I’ll give them my opinion, not medical advice, but my opinion. But I think one aspect of very important thing, and you mentioned it what if they’re isolated? The community thing is super motivated when it comes to healthy lifestyle. Don’t think about doing it for yourself. Think for a second, you are doing it for people around you. You’re doing it for the people who loves you, who love you, for the people that you love. And you’re doing it. As a pioneer, especially if you’re around people who are unhealthy, as somebody that they can look up to and that they, that can be a positive influence.

I think that’s what my brother and I did for my mom. Cause. We grew up in the family and all of us like overweight and we started gymming. We started eating healthy. And suddenly my mom was like, oh, I can’t cook like four cups of rice anymore. I have to cook a cup and a half because they’re not going to eat it.

And then she ate less like carbs, and she ate more meat and yeah. Coming from that culture as well, my mom was like, oh, we always talk about if you get older, don’t eat as much meat have more vegetarian. It’s like my mom’s side, Buddhists as well. They’re like very vegetarian. And I talked about like importance of muscle mass, important of importance of like just supporting yourself when you are growing old and you, all these bones getting fragile, and you don’t want to fall and puncture your organs.

And then she understands and then she adjusts accordingly. As I think that’s the big point of it. And I’m training now with a guy called Jay Ferruggia based in Miami. And I interviewed him on HVMN podcast, and I asked him, this is like, when you’re not motivated, when you are like, how do you get motivated?

And that was his answer. It’s a modified version of his answer, but essentially, he said, do it for someone else, not do it for yourself for once. Yeah, think of yourself at once. And that’s a beautiful thought because now you get that health and aesthetics as side effect. You’re not even trying, but then everyone else around you they’re like, oh, they noticed something.

And then they’re like, oh, I want to be healthy too. I want to live like you, or that sort of, that’s what gets me. Like I’ve got friends who I play video games and I have friends who I. Met maybe once or twice across the country across other continents that you know that we’re still in touch just talking online But they’re like, oh I see the work you’ve done and I’m like working out hard and I’m doing this I’m doing that and I feel honored and at the same time it works both ways because on the days that I feel like I’m Lazy, and I’m like, I don’t want to gym today.

I’m like, what would they say? What would they do? They would say get your lazy ass up.

[01:26:58] Gabby Reece: Yeah, it’s so true. I and speaking of video games, you, you said that there was five ways to preserve your gosh, you have done your mental health. And I really was like, oh, he just added, he’s acting like he’s official, but it was learning an instrument dancing.

Yes. You like to boogie, don’t you? I dabbled. I dabbled in ballroom Latin. At the beginning of my PhD, I thought ballroom Latin. Yeah. I was, you got a lot of secrets. It’s ballroom Latin. Are you catching that, Justin? Okay. Like I said I need to. Show up. I need to be unique so that HBMN will hire me, and they can’t replace me.

[01:27:42] Latt Mansor: Or I need to be unique so that I can get accepted into Oxford because they can’t just hire, just get another straight A’s.

[01:27:48] Gabby Reece: It’s not the costumes. It’s it was like three years in my PhD. I was like, I’m going to pick up something, a skill, right? I was like, so I had three, three things, three choices.

[01:28:01] Latt Mansor: I was rowing.

[01:28:03] Gabby Reece: Oh, you’re not built for rowing, and you seem too nice for debate.

[01:28:07] Latt Mansor: So, I was a debater back in high school. I was like, I appreciate your point of view, but no, that’s true. But then a lot of these. People get into debate in university. They’re lawyers. They got like serious. So, the last one I’m like, you know what? I’ve always liked watching dancing. I never thought I could because I was overweight and I was always conscious I’m like the last thing people want to see is see my fat ass shaking it, you know So I never thought about it. But at that time during my PhD, I already lost all those weights I already started to live healthy, and I was like, you know what?

[01:28:40] Gabby Reece: Why not now? I’ll do it. How was your natural rhythm? Pretty good. Gotta be.

[01:28:44] Latt Mansor: I auditioned for the university team, and I got into the beginner’s team representing the university for national level, like university circuits, granted, they always, granted, they always have lack of males, right? So, we got in all males who audition got in.

So, it’s not like I was like good at it, but then I got really into it. I met my best friend, Naomi. She was like ballroom, and I was like Latin, and we push each other like the same thing like community You have the university team I was competing like in the varsity match and got a half blue for it, which is like the sports award, okay for university and I was like, wow me getting a sports award. Yeah, I hated exercise back You know, in the university,

[01:29:31] Gabby Reece: but it’s a sports word for ballroom Latin. Yes. Okay. Cause it’s a down sport. Calm down.

It’s called down sport. I think it’s amazing. But you share that in the conversation around brain health, cognitive function, Alzheimer’s, its dancing, pick up an instrument, pick up a language, lifting weights. And I thought you threw this one in, but you just mentioned it. Immersive. Immersive.

[01:30:00] Latt Mansor: Video games. Video games.

[01:30:01] Gabby Reece: It is. Yeah. So, I just want to put that out for people thinking about that.

[01:30:06] Latt Mansor: Zoom into her face as she says that.

[01:30:07] Gabby Reece: No, but listen, they say it’s also social. So, there’s that aspect. Will you remind everybody where they can find you? And if they want to talk to you about their ketone situation.

[01:30:20] Latt Mansor: If I end up having a hundred DMs, I’m going to be like, Kathy.

[01:30:24] Gabby Reece: No, but just remind, just and this doesn’t, people can order this online.

[01:30:27] Latt Mansor: Yes. You can order it from Amazon. You can order it from HVMN. com. And for you who are listening, if you go to hvmn.com forward slash Gabby, G A B B Y, you can get 30 percent off. Booyah.

[01:30:42] Gabby Reece: Yeah. So, will you direct people how they can see you directly? Because you, you do put a lot of videos up with a lot of content and information. So, if they just want to go down some little rabbit holes and check some other lifestyle things out, they can.

[01:30:54] Latt Mansor: You can find me at LATMANSOR, L A T M A N S O R on all social media, most active on Instagram, TikTok trying to. I know and at HVMN as well on all social media, so you can follow us and comment and ask questions and some of them they’ll troll, and I’ll troll back. I’m like, hey, that’s what social media is.

One thing I’m learning right now is like not to take things seriously on social media when I get a bad comment or when I get people like, calm down, sit down or you don’t know your stuff or what do you know? And I’m like, you know what?

[01:31:34] Gabby Reece: Close it. It’s a video game.

[01:31:37] Latt Mansor: Just think of it as a video game. Exactly. And my life goes on and I’m happy with my life and that’s it. That’s the most important.

[01:31:43] Gabby Reece: Thank you for your time. A lot. I really appreciate it.

[01:31:45] Latt Mansor: It has been an honor to be here. It’s an amazing conversation. I enjoyed it thoroughly. Thank you.

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About Latt Mansor