Transcript of How This Simple Test Could Add Years to Your Life | Panos DSH #1223

And see if you have some mouth morphology that may be creating, maybe giving rise to sleep apnea. There's a lot of integrative dentists nowadays that understand the interconnection between how your teeth are evolving and the likelihood of developing sleep apnea. Evaluating overall the morphology of your mouth and nose is super important.

All right, guys. Got Panos here from Panoe. We're We're going to talk about the importance of breathing today. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me, Kelly.

Yeah. So I just did one of your tests, and it was a seven-minute test. Could you explain what happened?

Yeah, absolutely. So Penoe is a seven to 10-minute breath analysis test. You put a You ask on, you breathe normally. And what the device does is that it analyzes how much oxygen you are consuming and how much carbon dioxide you're producing. And this is one of the most fundamental processes in the human body, because oxygen Oxygen has to be delivered to the cells for metabolism to happen. Metabolism is the process by which your cells will use oxygen to break down nutrients, that is the fats and carbs you get from the food that you eat to release the energy that your body needs to survive, thrive, and do whatever daily functions you do. If you think about it, every single major system and organ in our physiology developed to specifically support this You have lungs to absorb oxygen. You have a heart and a circulatory system to pump it. You have mitochondria to use it, and then you have a nervous system to coordinate all of that. And so breath analysis, which is a test we did, is actually the only assessment known to science that can reliably assess all of that process. A 10-minute test produces 23 biomarkers.

And through these 23 biomarkers, by collectively analyzing them, we can paint the picture of how efficiently your lungs, your heart, your cells, your metabolism, and your nervous system are working. And some of these biomarkers are quite famous, like view to max test or resting metabolic rate test. That's why a lot of people tend to know this assessment as a view to max test or a resting metabolic rate test. But there's a lot more to it as you just saw from the test that we did. And so, for example, this test is the only one that can tell you how efficiently you burn fats and carbs and how many fats and carbs your body is burning. It's also a test that can very reliably identify your biological age because VU2max, according to the American Heart Association, is one of the best indicators for how long and well someone is going to live. So overall, it's an assessment that has been around for about 100 years up until we came along. It was very much in the sidelines for many reasons. We can talk about that. But it is because of the fact that it looks into so many different areas of physiology, an assessment that has very established clinical utility in the world of cardiology, in the world of pulmonology, endocrinology, sports science, and nutrition science.

Yeah, I just learned the importance of lifting weights, man. Yeah. We're going to throw up my results on the screen, but basically my age was four years above my real age, so I got some work to do. And I thought I was pretty healthy. Yeah. That was pretty interesting.

People like you that are typically healthy may have gone through certain health stuffs in the past, but they don't really know if there's any residual damage or things they need to be concerned about when it comes to things of the past, tend to have lingering issues that may be impacting what we call the oxygen flow through the body at that particular point in time. And although that may not be a clinically relevant thing and may not be considered a disease, if you were to go to the doctor, it is something that long term can present certain issues and evolve into some chronic disease or no major health event. So there's actually a lot of people out there that would be generally considered fit, but there is stuff to work on, and that stuff stuff isn't just superficial. It is something that would be considered important to deal with because 10 years or 20 years down the road, it may end up being something considerable. I would say, because we've done hundreds of thousands of tests up until now as a company. One of the most important things that people have as a problem that they're unaware of is some anatomical issue with their breathing apparatus.

And I use the term breathing apparatus because it's not just the lungs, but it's the diafragments, the respiratory muscles, it's the nose, it's the mouth, the entire chain that enables oxygen to be absorbed. There's a lot of people that develop mouth abnormalities that may lead to sleep apnea. And because that is mild at that point, it's not something that is clinically relevant. We have a lot of people that we test that have some deviated septum that is obstructing them from breathing from their nose. And not breathing from your nose is going to put you in this constant state of slight increase in sympathetic activation. Because of the neuroendocrine system in our body that can cause your hormones to go out of whack and then long term, if you have that for 10 years, that may evolve into some issue. The other The big thing that is now gaining a lot of attention in the clinical world is that if you have some breathing issue that is causing you to have lower than normal CO₂ levels in the blood because of how important CO₂ is in delivering oxygen across the body that may end up evolving long term into some neuroinflammation in the brain, and then neuroinflammation gives rise to neurodegeneration.

So there's a very strong correlation behind how we breathe and likelihood of developing neurodegenerative conditions. To your point earlier, there's a lot of people out there that think they're healthy, but once we dive and we double click into the components of the oxygen chain, your lungs, your heart and your cells, we uncover certain things that, as I said, may not be relevant now and may not be life-deplicating now, but 10 years or 20 years down the road may very well be.

Yeah, I think that's what happened in my case. I had some nasty bronchitis during the pandemic, and I actually just found out I'm allergic to penicillium now because they put me on so many antibiotics growing up. So, yeah, you got to take these tests. They're really important. You mentioned a few things earlier. I did want to ask this first, though. Since you've done hundreds of thousands of tests, I'm curious which athletes had the best result, which sport.

As expected, sports that have a lot of cardio and endurance component in them will typically yield athletes that score better in their view to max. But what's also very important for people to understand is that every type of exercise is going to impact your biology differently. If you're looking to have great mitochondrial function and great fat burn efficiency, doing endurance and zone 2 training and steady-state cardio is going to be your best bet. But if you want to have a high metabolism, lifting weights is going to be better. You may run into an endurance athlete that has incredible view to max, very good fat burn efficiency because they do a ton of cardio and a ton of steady-state, low intensity cardio. But that person may not have a great metabolic rate because as a matter of fact, doing a lot of cardio will suppress your metabolic rate. Because your body Body is being asked to cover large distances. And so it is becoming more economical because it's trying to conserve energy. And so on the flip side of things, you can run into bodybuilding athletes that have great metabolic rates because they have huge muscles.

And the muscle composition is such that enables them to burn more. The type of training you do will also impact the type of muscle that you end up developing. But these people will end up having not great fat burn efficiencies. So to your point earlier, yeah, every type of sport is going to optimize your biology in one particular area, but it's very difficult to have the super well-rounded, perfect athlete that is almost optimal in all different areas. What I've observed is that, at least in the world of triathlon and highrox, now that is becoming a very big trend.

What's high Rocks?

High Rocks is a new type of competition, like Sparton Racing or like CrossFit. People do a combination of resistance training competition with an endurance component to it. And so what we are seeing is that people are now more cognizant of the fact that there's different areas in their biology, and so they should never hyper optimize for one area because that will most likely leave another area deficient. If you're a professional athlete, and that's your job, and you need to hyper optimize in one specific area, so be it. But if you're doing it for longevity, if you're doing it for fun, and then at some point in time, you expect that you're going to give up this sport in the sense that you're not going to be training as much, then it's very important to keep in mind that you should never leave any the area underdeveloped because diet can hurt you down the road. For example, endurance athletes that were great at fat burn efficiency and VL2 max when they were endurance athletes and ended up having a very low metabolism because they became very efficient and ended up conserving energy during movement, when they give up the tens of hours of training during the week, they may end up gaining weight because they have a lower metabolism.

That's just an example to show that there's always a balance that you need to strike. And testing to see how you're faring in all these areas is obviously hyper, very important.

Yeah. You see that with athletes that retire, they quickly put on weight, some of them, right? Basketball players, runners. Yeah, that's super interesting. You mentioned the mouth breathing earlier. Have you seen this mouth taping trend?

Yeah. A lot of people are understanding now that the way you breathe is such an important contributor to so many different areas of your health. I mentioned a few earlier. If you hyperventilate, you blow off too much CO₂ that reduces whole body excisionation. If you breathe with your mouth, you automatically upregulate sympathetic activation, downregulate parasympathetic activation. For our listeners, sympathetic, fight or flight, parasympathetic, rest, chill, recover. You obviously want to be in the parasympathetic sympathetic as much as possible. The reason why breathing is going to so profoundly impact the activation of the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system is because the way the nervous system is connected on your lungs. You have the sympathetic connected on the upper part of the lungs and then the parasympathetic, the lower part of the lungs. That's why when you're a belly breather, you engage the diaphragm and you take deep breaths, you're activating the parasympathetic system. Whereas when you're a chest breather, you're this hectic, anxious breather that is in many times a factor of mouth breathing, you will activate the sympathetic system. And so for all these reasons and more, you need to breathe as much as possible from your nose.

Obviously, in conditions of high exercise intensity, it becomes impossible. But for the most part, especially, obviously during our sleep, we need to be nose breathing. It's understandable that people are trying to achieve that through mouth breathing. Breathwork is going to be a very, very important ally if you have breathing abnormalities and you want to fix them. Then what I always like to tell people whenever we see someone that has breathing abnormalities, pay a visit to the doctor, see if you have a deviated septum, see if you have some mouth morphology that may be creating, may be giving rise to sleep apnea. There's a lot of integrative dentists nowadays that understand the interconnection between how your teeth are evolving and the likelihood of developing sleep apnea. So evaluating overall the morphology of your mouth and nose is super important. Because there's cases where you have a deviated septum. And no matter how much mouth tape you're going to be doing, the nostril is blocked. We need to unblock it.

How common are deviated septums?

Fairly common. There's people that have had accidents, There's many reasons that can lead to something like that. Yeah.

I know sleep apnea and sleeping issues overall are getting pretty common, too. Very calm. And a lot of it has to do with breathing, right?

Yeah. There's a very big comorbidity with the fact that we are chewing food that is a lot softer than what it used to be. James Nestor, in his book about breathing, talks about that a lot, and it is so true. The fact that we're not consuming food that is natural is also certainly a contributor to the fact that we are seeing this sleep apnea epidemic, that because of this strong comorbidity with neurodegenerative diseases, ultimately, I think we're going to see a very big rise in, unfortunately, neurodegenerative conditions down the road for our generation, which we haven't yet seen. Right now, we're just seeing the first wave of symptoms, which is sleep apnea, but there are, as I said, second and third order effects that will unavoidably start to occur down the road.

That's scary, man. That's scary. I know. Is that a big reason why you started this company?

So how we started as a company, it's so interesting. So I personally have no background in I did my first degree in mechanical engineering. That was back in Greece, came to the US, did my graduate degree at Stanford. That was in engineering again. I went into big tech. I was working in enterprise data centers and then Oracle for a little bit. And then my co founder, Apostolos, he's my first friend in life, actually. We met first year, first day of elementary school. That's awesome. So we've known each other since the age of six. So we went through elementary, middle school, high school together, also undergrad. I was in the mechanical engineering school. He was doing applied physics and math. He then went on to Cambridge, UK, to do his PhD on sensing technologies. And when he was there, he discovered the amazing world of breath analysis. Breath analysis is at the same time such an old but also such a new field. Old because this type of breath analysis called cardiometabolic testing has been around for about 100 years. And he was like, this is such an important thing. Why isn't everyone doing it, at least as part of their annual physical.

I always wanted to do something of my own, and I found that that was a very interesting idea, and we started working on that together. As As I said, we were the first company to create a device that provides this assessment in an easy and practical way for the average clinic. That made the test a lot easier. But then the other problem that we uncovered as we made the test easier is that the analysis, the interpretation, and also the prescription based on the information coming out of the test was also a very big issue. Because as I said, this test had been around for about 100 years, but it remained at the sidelines for decades, despite the fact that if you look at the clinical literature, there's so much information to establish it as a very, very important assessment And so to address that, we made the hardware cheaper, more practical, more affordable. But then we also built the entire ecosystem of services and software to streamline the process for analyzing the data and then providing wellness prescription, nutrition training, bioptimization, so that clinics don't have to hire an entire team of experts to be able to analyze the information, because the The reality is that there's so much information coming out of your breathing and the time requirements and the certification and the skills and expertise required to analyze all the data pretty much made it cost prohibitive for the average clinic.

That makes sense. That's probably why they didn't adopt it on a mass scale, right? Because growing up, I was never taught to do this type of test. No one ever brought it up. Exactly.

And even like, Varsity athletes or professional athletes haven't even done the test. It's crazy. Wow.

Now they probably are.

Now there's obviously a big trend, and it's very important that people like Peter Attia, Andrew Huberman, and so many others are talking about the value of Utrecht max. But it was because the hardware was very expensive and practical and also analyzing data was also very difficult and costly that kept that from entering mainstream adoption. And because we made it easy for the average health provider, we now have places like Equinox doing it. We now have resorts like Four Seasons doing it, restore, hyper wellness, people in the longevity space, also people in the weight loss space. So we Out of the people that we test, I would say, the vast majority of people are actually the average person who just wants to stay healthy and live as long as possible and as good as possible in terms of quality.

It's really important data. I could see why insurance companies wouldn't want to cover this because it's pretty preventative. Once you can see that data, you can map out what you want to do next.

Yeah, totally. At first principle, you should expect that payers would cover something like that, but that's It's a totally different discussion. The insurance industry is focused on so many different things. Intrinsically, it's not financially motivated to prevent conditions because at the end of the day, if health care costs go up, When health expenses go up, premiums go up, so they're basically passing on the cost to the consumer. But whenever you have this coexistence of the payers also being providers providers and also having the entire stack of health services under one roof, then obviously you start to see a lot more motivation towards prevention. And that's a great tool for preventative medicine.

That makes sense. Since you've done so many tests, have you plugged in the results into some AI software to see any trends?

Yeah. I mean, as I said earlier, one of the most interesting things that we see as time goes by is that things, limitations related to people's breathing is the number one thing. And then also we start to see very interesting trends behind the personalization of the nutrition, the training prescription that yields the best results for every individual. We test and obviously retest people. And in between, we take care of their nutrition and their training and their bio optimization so we can start to determine what works and what doesn't for every individual. And obviously, what works most effectively is what people are looking for.

Have you seen pretty good results with that? Yeah. And is it pretty personal or is there a one-set formula?

So there's obviously basic things that apply to everyone. So, yeah, you need to do weight training, you need to do cardio training, you need to interval training. But then you start to see a lot of benefits and a lot of greater results whenever you personalize the amount, for example, of resistance, cardio and interval training that every person should do.

Got it. I saw on my results, it said to do cryo, red light, hyperbaric oxygen. Yeah.

So something else that we do as a company that is very important for the clinics we work with is we can take all of their bioptimization services, plug them in our software, and we can provide a curated list of bioptimization services that the client should undergo based on their limitations and obviously based on what is available in the practice. And that is becoming a very powerful upselling tool for our clinics because it bridges the gap between what could I do in your clinic and what should I do based on the limitations that are personal to me.

I'm a big fan of the hyperbaric.

Out of the bioethimization services that you will find out there, so your cryos, your red light, hyperbaric oxygen exposure is probably one of the most well studied ones and the one that has shown very significant and powerful impacts pretty much across the board when it comes to healing from wounds, healing from injuries, but then also in many cases, brain injuries, neurodegenerative conditions and so on and so forth. I mean, the mechanism behind hyperbaric oxygen is very fundamental. You're increasing pressure. And so the chances and the amount of oxygen that you plug into the cells is much greater. And because oxygen is such an important thing for healing, you're basically speeding up the healing process across the body. That's why it is something so powerful.

Yeah. Certain athletes will go to higher altitudes to train harder, right?

Yeah, that's a different mechanism than hyperbaric oxygen exposure. This is basically exposing your body to a condition of lower pressure. But hyperbaric oxygen is increasing the pressure. And because you increase the pressure, you force more oxygen into the cell. And as I said, because more oxygen means more healing, then you speed up the healing process wherever that is needed.

Yeah, that makes sense. I'm big on saunas, too.

You know, sauna, like Very big on saunas as well. And then also combining it with cold plunge, this combination of cold and hot exposure. We've known it for millennia now, if you go to Pompei, one of the first things you see is the ancient Roman baths, which had cold exposure and hot exposure. Wow.

That's cool, man.

We've known that for a long time, and it's very important that people are now gravitating towards all of these things. You're seeing like saunas and cold plunge in the entire gamut of income spectrum. You have the bathhouses in New York, but then you also have Rasha and Bania and more affordable options. It's obviously a big trend and looks like a lot of people are taking these things a lot more seriously because they can very much have an impact in your biology. Obviously, the four pillars for longevity, as I like to think of them, would be to move well, eat well, sleep or recover well, love and be loved. We should never forget about the fourth one, such an important thing. But then you can have all of these additional services like hyperbaric, sauna, cold exposure, and so on that can very much supercharge the impact that nutrition and I love that.

Yeah, people focus on the wrong things first, right? Yeah. Some people love the biohacking stuff, and they eat like crap.

Yes, obviously. As I like to say, it always starts under the squad rack. We need to start under the squad rack, but obviously, there's a lot more besides that that we can do to be smarter and ultimately get the biggest bang out of all the time and the commitment and the effort that we're putting behind our longevity, right?

Absolutely. Does Panoui have a big presence in Greece, back home, where you're from?

Yes. So we have a big team in terms of our development team or manufacturing, and then some operations functions are based in Greece. All of our business development and sales is done here in the United States, and we have a facility in Boston. We're thinking of opening one in Miami soon. But then we also have customers in Greece. As I said, we sell a lot into the hospitality space. We have some pretty big resorts that we work with in Greece, but our main focus is the US market. We sell to clinics and businesses in the health space. It can be anything from high-end fitness all the way up to primary care and specialty care, obviously very big in integrative medicine. And if someone wants to get tested, we have a locator we're going to share with you and it can be public. So if you want to-Put in a description. For consumers that want to get tested, we can send them to one of our trusted affiliates.

I love it, dude. I've been to 20 countries. Greece has been my favorite. Nice. Yeah. Where did you go in Greece? I went to Crete. Athens was okay. I love Crete.

Which part of Crete?

I couldn't tell you. I was a kid, but it was by the water. I'm sure everywhere, it's Crete's by the water. Crete is by the water.

Crete was actually one of the longevity hotspots of the world.

Really? Yeah. I didn't know that.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of people think about the five blue zones, Costa Rica, Sardinia, Icaria in Greece, Okinawa, and then Loma Linda, California. These were the five that were most popularized through the documentary that's on Netflix recently. But there were many other blue zones in the past. I think Crete ceased to be late '70s, early '80s. And obviously, it has to do with the intrusion and invasion of the Western way of living, which is the same reason why, if you look at all of the five blue zones, four of them are about to completely fade away, with the exception of...

Which one would you say? I would guess the one in Japan.

Loma Linda, California. What? Yes, sir. And you know why that is? It's because people there are are already in the midst of the Western type, the very unhealthy Western living lifestyle. And they have taken a very conscious decision to say no to all of the things that make Western lifestyle unhealthy. And they're very conscious and mindful of what they need to do to remain healthy. Whereas the remaining four blue zones do not didn't really have exposure to all of this unhealthy lifestyle. And so they're oblivious to what works, what doesn't. They obviously have a lot of their traditions. They're now fading away. And that's why you start to see this gradual decline in these other blue zones.

Wow. I didn't know that. So they're going to be going away soon.

Unfortunately, we hope through this longevity movement to achieve I believe is that our world becomes a blue zone, right? Why should it be that only a few select locations around the world only have this privilege of getting to 100? Loma Linda, California, I think, is probably the best example that you can be very much in the midst of in the very center of unhealthy living. But if you make certain decisions about your lifestyle, you way train, you have powerful, strong community, close relations to people. If you're going to focus on healthy nutrition that is predominantly whole food, plant-based, then inevitably, you're going to have a very positive impact in your longevity.

Yeah. I think that community aspect is often overlooked. There's a lot of people in the health space that just focus on numbers and analytics.

Yeah. There's a very strong bi-directional relationship between the fourth pillar, the love and be loved, and the remaining three. We cannot Don't expect that humans will become robots and they will eat perfectly, train perfectly, and then sleep perfectly when they're not loved and they don't have anyone to love. When the fourth pillar goes away, then obviously you start to see people neglecting their training, neglecting taking care of themselves in whatever way that is important. And so there's obviously a lot of direct biological impact act that emotional well-being has on our biology. But then it's the second and third order effect, which is you take away the love component, and then all of a sudden, you don't eat as well, you don't train, you don't sleep as well. So there's that as well.

Yeah. Well, Pan, what's next for you? Where could people learn more about Panoui and keep up with you, man?

So certainly follow us on Instagram, Panoui Analytics. Visit our website, panoui. Com, pnoe. Com. Something for people to know, Pnoe stands for breath in Greek, and breath analysis is what we do, and we look forward to bringing breath analysis to the world.

Yeah. I highly recommend taking the test, guys. I learned a lot today. I can't wait to start improving, and I'll probably retest in six months.

Absolutely. Yeah. And we look forward to seeing you in Miami.

Yeah. I'll be there for F1. So maybe I could retest there. Yeah. That'd be good. Perfect. Start waiting. Awesome. Check them out, guys. See you next time..