551: C60: The Molecule Changing Longevity

Experience the benefits of ESS60 for better sleep, energy, and longevity—get yours now at myvitalc.com/LTH with code truehealth for a special discount!

Get ready for a mind-blowing dive into the world of longevity, mitochondrial health, and the most powerful antioxidant you've likely never heard of—ESS60. In this episode, I sit down with Chris Burres, co-founder of MyVitalC and the longest-standing manufacturer of Carbon 60, to explore how this Nobel Prize-winning molecule helped rats live 90% longer, improve sleep, reduce inflammation, and potentially support both pets and people in living better, longer lives. Don’t miss this science-packed episode—and grab your exclusive listener discount at myvitalc.com/LTH with code truehealth.

Highlights:

• C60 has the single longest proven lifespan extension in mammals. In a landmark peer-reviewed study, rats given ESS60 lived 90% longer than the control group, making it the most significant longevity result ever recorded in mammals.
• The original C60 molecule was discovered serendipitously and won a Nobel Prize. Discovered in 1985 by scientists at Rice University, its unique soccer ball-shaped structure eventually earned them the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
• Chris Burres and his team have been manufacturing C60 since 1991. They are the oldest and longest-standing manufacturer and distributor of Carbon 60 (C60), providing materials for research years before it became popular in the health industry.
• ESS60 is safe for human consumption and more than just an industrial molecule. Although originally used in inks, tires, and batteries, ESS60 has been refined and tested for non-toxicity and health benefits, distinguishing it from industrial-grade C60.
• The product may help reduce inflammation and oxidative stress. Studies show ESS60 is up to 172 times more powerful than vitamin C as an antioxidant, and may positively affect inflammation markers like HSCRP.
• Some other products claiming to be C60 are misleading or low quality. Chris’s lab tested 22 market products and found all but one had woefully low concentrations or weren’t actual C60, prompting them to offer free replacements to educate consumers.
• ESS60 may offer both mental clarity and better sleep. One of the most consistent testimonials is increased focus and energy during the day followed by improved sleep quality at night, even when taken in the morning.
• ESS60 potentially supports cancer prevention—not treatment. In the lifespan study, rats not only lived longer but also developed no tumors, suggesting cancer preventative properties—not a cure—worth further exploration.
• The manufacturing process is scientifically rigorous and solvent-tested. Each batch is tested for purity, solvent residue, and oxidation, using nitrogen-sealed environments and third-party labs to ensure product safety.
• ESS60 is even being explored for benefits in pets and elderly care. With customer stories and patents emerging around use in animals and older adults, the product is gaining traction for its broad potential applications in health support.

Intro:

Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. 

This is episode 551.

Ashley James (0:00:14.682)

I am so excited for today's guest. We have with us Chris Burres from myvitalc.com. You can go to myvitalc.com/LTH, because Chris is giving us a great discount.

Thank you so much for doing that, Chris. People are like, discount for what? What are you talking about?

I'm really excited to jump into today's interview because for years I've wanted to do an episode on this topic. I finally found the right expert. I was waiting to find one.

Chris, you are the expert I've been waiting for. Thank you for coming on the show and teaching us about C60.

Not just C60—because there's so much. I don't want to say controversy—but buyer beware. You discovered a specific type that is the purest and best type.

I'm very excited to jump into this discussion today.

Welcome to the show.

Chris Burres (0:01:11.276)

Ashley, thank you so much for having me. It's very cool. A lot of people that I connect with have never even heard of C60.

When they share with me that they have heard of C60, the thing I want to share is how proud I am, because me and my business partner and I are the oldest and longest manufacturer and distributor of C60, or Carbon 60, on the planet.

We've been manufacturing it since 1991. So when you say you found the right guy to interview, I humbly agree with you.

Ashley James (0:01:41.552)

My gosh, 1991. Okay. I learned about it seven years ago, and I thought I was an early adopter. Boy, was I wrong.

Chris Burres (0:01:54.000)

Yes, 1990, what, 30, what is that, 34 years now?

Ashley James (0:01:57.102)

Very cool. How I learned about it was through Cliff High. I think there are a lot of people that listen to Cliff High who learned about it. I don't listen to him all the time. I just think sometimes he's interesting. Sometimes I disagree with him. Sometimes he's really spot on.

He discovered C60, and he told some really interesting stories of the discovery of it, and that he knew a few people who used it in conjunction with all the holistic things they were doing to no longer have cancer in their body. He decided to also utilize it, and he's here seven years later.

I think there's something to say about that, but he knows several people who have also lived longer, overcoming very unfavorable diseases that could potentially have been fatal.

Whether or not that was the C60—you get enough people who say, “I was diagnosed with terminal cancer and I decided to do this, this, this, and this,” and they all have something in common like C60, and they are all still here—our ears perk up and we go, “That's interesting. I wonder why.”

I definitely want to get into the studies, the science, and also the story of discovery of how they discovered C60, because I think it's fascinating. Since you are the expert, I'll hand over the mic to you.

Chris Burres (0:03:13.984)

Excellent. I have written a book called Live Longer and Better, which is the story of C60— its discovery, its evolution into the health space, and really some of my learnings as I've jumped in as a longevity expert.

The molecule was discovered in 1985 at Rice University here in Houston, Texas. That's where our lab is based. The guys who discovered the molecule—the three scientists won the Nobel Prize for that discovery in 1996. They discovered it in '85, published a paper in Nature magazine, one of the most, if not the most, prestigious scientific publications on the planet, and then in 1996 won the Nobel Prize for that discovery.

As we've  already touched on, my business partner and I started manufacturing it in 1991—full five years before they won the Nobel Prize. We've been this front row seat of watching this molecule become a Nobel Prize-winning molecule, get into some amazing industrial applications, and then into the health space.

I'm not a very braggadocious person, but I am comfortable with this appropriate dance saying we were delivering commercial quantities of carbon nanomaterials of this specific carbon material for five years before they won the Nobel Prize. It's not unreasonable to think that because we were delivering these quantities of carbon-60 to researchers, they could actually do scientific studies with them and they could understand how amazing the molecule is. That is part of the reason that those three scientists—Dr. Smalley, Dr. Curl, and Dr. Kroto—actually won the Nobel Prize. I'm extremely proud in this space.

What is the molecule? The best way to picture it—there's a book called The Most Beautiful Molecule, which is entirely about one molecule. I'm not sure many molecules have entire books written about them, especially with the title The Most Beautiful Molecule. The best way to picture it is if you imagine a soccer ball, the classic soccer ball, and imagine that the lines on the soccer ball represent the bonds between the carbon atoms. You have a spherical molecule of 60 carbon atoms in the shape of a soccer ball.

The molecule is absolutely amazing. I describe it as performing as well or better than the current best material in almost every application. It makes better inks, better batteries, better tires, better photocells.

This is where people get a little nervous. We're on the Learn True Health podcast, and health and batteries, tires, and photocells typically don't interact. In fact, you probably have biohackers listening, but this is probably true: no one in your audience woke up this morning, looked at their car, and thought about what part of their car battery they should be taking on a daily basis for their health. Again, you have some biohackers, so there might be one or two.

It's an industrial molecule. This is  nerve-wracking when you say inks, batteries, tires, and photocells. The story gets a little bit worse at first.

On the exterior of the soccer ball molecule, there is a shape that is the same shape as benzene, and it's almost the same chemical formula as benzene. It's the six carbons. Benzene has hydrogens on the ends of each carbon, so it's six carbons and six hydrogens.

Now, benzene is ubiquitous in our society. We do not have modern society without the benzene ring. To have this as evidence, look around you in this moment and notice everything that is plastic and imagine it gone, because the foundational molecule is the benzene ring. Many medications have benzene as the foundational molecule—including aspirin, many detergents. We don't have modern society without the benzene ring, and it is absolutely ubiquitous. It's everywhere.

There is something about benzene that's not so good—which is when it's all by itself, it is known to be toxic and known to be a carcinogen. You look at this soccer ball-shaped molecule. It's got 20 of these, almost equivalent to benzene rings on the exterior. The scientists just assumed that this molecule would be toxic.

They put it in a toxicity study. In that study, they gave Wistar rats—that was the test subjects—well, really there are three groups. One of them was given water. That's the control group. The next group was given olive oil,  a semi-control group. The last group was given olive oil—and now I'll start to make a distinction, and we'll explain it here in a second. When we start thinking about consuming this for people and pets, I start to call it ESS60, which stands for Elemental Safe Spheres. We got the spheres. They're safe. The element is carbon. There are 60 of them.

The final group—they gave the olive oil with ESS60 in it. Instead of being toxic, the test subjects that they gave the olive oil with ESS60 in it lived 90% longer than the control group.

That is the single longest longevity experimental result on mammals. It's peer-reviewed, published research. I'm again super proud to share that our lab provided the material, and our lab is actually mentioned in that original study.

So that's the long and short. I know there's so much that we can dive into given that piece.

Ashley James (0:09:00.972)

Correct me if I'm wrong. Did they first create this molecule thinking that they could make a lubricant?

Chris Burres (0:09:15.778)

Interestingly, as with so many amazing scientific discoveries—this is Nobel Prize-winning at the end of the day—it was discovered serendipitously.

There’s so many stories. When you get into science—and I studied engineering, I've been a scientist as far back as I can remember—I’ve always had this feeling that science is black or white. It just happens, and it happens because of hard effort. I never really thought about luck and creativity going into science. That was just my limited understanding of how much luck and how much creativity actually goes into it.

Dr. Harold Kroto, who actually got knighted—so at some point in his life, he's passed now—Sir Harold Kroto, is an astrophysicist out of the UK. He's looking into space, and he sees a spectrum that he can't identify. I  think there's a little magic involved in just looking at some wavelength that's coming from space and identifying what molecules created that wavelength. I think that's amazing. He sees this one spectrum and doesn't know what it is. He suspects that it's carbon.

Here at Rice University in Houston, Dr. Richard Smalley has a piece of equipment that's pretty fantastic. This piece of equipment— you take a sample, shine a laser at the sample, and it vaporizes that sample. Then a puff of inert gas will take that vapor into a mass spectrometer. Then it'll tell you the exact makeup of the molecules that were in that vapor.

Harold Kroto thinks that this setup is reminiscent of what's going on in space. It's in a vacuum. There's no oxygen. There's very little gas at all except for this puff of inert gas that's taking it into the mass spectrometer. Harold Kroto thinks, hey, we could probably use this piece of equipment to recreate whatever this molecule is that's out in space that's creating the spectrum. He comes to visit Richard Smalley at Rice University and says, “Hey, I’d love to throw carbon in this machine.”

The first trip, Richard Smalley rebukes him. He says, “Listen, carbon's boring. Carbon's everywhere. It's super boring. I'm doing sexy things with titanium and exotic alloys. There's no way I'm going to throw boring carbon into my piece of equipment.”

Harold Kroto goes back to the UK. He gets another trip over to Houston and visits Richard Smalley again. He asks, “Hey, can we throw carbon in?” Again, Richard Smalley says, “I've moved on to different alloys, but they're still so much sexier than carbon. We're not putting this in my fancy machine. Carbon's just so boring.”

He goes back to the UK. Finally, on the third trip, he comes back and asks Richard Smalley. This is the nice twist in the story—Richard Smalley again says no. One of Richard Smalley's grad students actually pulls Dr. Kroto aside and says, “Listen, I'm going to come in over the weekend. I'll throw your boring old carbon in and we'll see what comes up.”

I'm not sure the grad student was really expecting much, but he was able to put carbon in. As you think about this carbon vapor going into the mass spectrometer, it's ostensibly making sheets of graphene. Individual sheets of graphene.

For whatever reason, on the mass spectrometer, there's a little peak at 60 and a little peak at 70. If you're a scientist who's  familiar with this situation, you would ask yourself, why would I have a flat sheet of carbon, a predominance of them at 60 versus 59 or 61? If it's just a flat sheet, there's no energy value in having 60 over 59 or 61.

He's actually able to tweak the equipment and increase the peaks at 60 and 70. He brings this data to the team on Monday.

By the way,  a fun side note—IBM had the exact same data one year prior. They wrote it off as an anomaly. This is the difference—this is the creativity. This is looking at it with an open mind, the  situation that science ultimately is.

They're trying to figure out this 60—why would 60 happen? They're doing all sorts of things. They're trying to figure it out. Actually, in the Houston Chronicle, we still have an article that talks about Richard Smalley finally putting all of these pieces together. It's the soccer ball-shaped thing. It's the eureka moment where the ball drops and it's bouncing in this amazing discovery, and then they quickly push it to publish.

So that's the actual discovery.

The grad student who came in that weekend—his name’s Heath—he doesn't have a Nobel Prize. It's Smalley, Curl, and Kroto who have the Nobel Prize.

What an interesting story and again, serendipity, which happens in so many scientific discoveries.

Ashley James (0:14:35.885)

After discovering it, who goes, “Okay, what can we do with this? How can we apply this?” Does someone take that torch up and start going, “Where can this exist? Can it be in the industry?” I heard the story about them trying to make a better lubricant.

Chris Burres (0:15:00.491)

Yes, the very next thing, one, they're trying to figure out how we can make macroscopic quantities? Because you can think about the puff of gas that's coming off of a laser vaporization is not enough material to work with.

So there's a number of years, about five years, where they don't know how to manufacture this in bulk. It's Huffman and Cratchmer who actually put together the way to vaporize too.

Here's one of the reasons, and the material is still expensive today, and this is why. The best way to manufacture it at this point is you take two graphite rods and you vaporize them. You put a temperature between those graphite rods that is the same as the sun in order to vaporize graphite. It has to be the same as the sun because graphite is one of the hardest materials on the planet to vaporize.

Not only does it have to be at the temperature of the sun, it also has to be at a reduced atmosphere, so a slight vacuum, and devoid of oxygen. Any oxygen will kill the reaction.

So Huffman and Kratchmer are the first to do this in a chamber, play around with the variables, and realize that you can't have any oxygen. I think that was pretty early on, but also realize that you get the highest concentration of a collection of molecules called fullerenes.

Let me talk about that for a second.

This soccer ball-shaped molecule is discovered and it's also discovered with 70, which is a little bit more rugby-shaped. It turns out there's a whole collection of molecules—carbon 60, carbon 70, carbon 76, carbon 84 on up. They just get bigger and it's all in multiples of two, but not every even number works because you're dealing with the shapes on the panels on the exterior of that soccer ball as a model.

Those they decide to call fullerenes. The reason they decided to call them fullerenes is after a guy named Buckminster Fuller. He is a futurist and the guy who brought to prominence the geodesic dome. Now, the geodesic dome is in fact the same shape as the soccer ball.

We would be familiar—if you've ever been to Epcot Center, you've got that dome, that Epcot dome is a geodesic dome. I always  picture when I'm at the beach. Every now and then you see these geodesic domes. Buckminster Fuller brought that particular shape to prominence. He didn't invent it, but he brought it to prominence.

In part of the story, Richard Smalley and Robert Curl at one point were at the—I think it was the Toronto World Fair—and they actually had a big giant geodesic dome there. So, in homage to Buckminster Fuller, they call this collection of molecules fullerenes.

Then carbon-60 is affectionately known as the buckyball because it's ball-shaped and Buckminster Fuller.

Now we're trying to make macroscopic quantities. In the interim, there's a lot of calculations on chemistry that are very accurate.

You need to be very careful. You can go read a paper that says this molecule is going to do XYZ, and that's not always the case. You can have inklings of what's going to happen. Even back before they were making macroscopic quantities of this material, they understood that it could probably hold up to six negatively charged particles on the exterior of the cage.

They knew that it would have great strength. In fact, it's got sixfold symmetry. There's six planes through which this molecule has symmetry, which gives it incredible strength.

In fact, you can fire it at 15,000 miles per hour at a plate of steel. Most molecules will just shred apart. The C60 molecule—I  picture it like a ball  compressing and then bouncing back. It's incredibly resilient.

They knew that if they could get their hands on macroscopic quantities, it would be amazing.

As I mentioned, once they did, it performs as well or better than the current best material—better in inks, batteries, tires, and photocells.

Now, from a lubricant perspective, your mind immediately goes to a ball bearing, like, hey, I've got this little tiny ball. It's 10 nanometers across. It's just hard to imagine how small this is.

So if I've got a bunch of balls, then I should be able to use them like ball bearings. One of the problems—it actually doesn't turn out to work that well—is because when you zoom in to the most mirrored surface that you've ever seen, there are cracks in that surface.

There's deep crevasses. We could even say Grand Canyon-size things compared to when you zoom in enough. These little buckyballs sit way down at the bottom. It's  like dropping one geodesic dome into the Grand Canyon and thinking that's going to help from some sort of lubrication perspective.

It actually doesn't work that well there. There are other  fullerenic materials that do well for lubrication, but yes, that particular one hasn't panned out.

Ashley James (0:20:30.627)

The story that I heard—please fill in the gaps or correct me where I'm wrong—is that they fed C60 to mice or rats in order to see what the toxicity was so they could use it in industry. Because before they would use it in industry, they would need to know, is this harmful to humans? Does it immediately kill animals?

Instead of it killing the animals, they ended up living. They know how long lab rats live—let's say a year or something—they just know this. They ended up living many, many years longer.

Also, then wasn't there a scientist who had rats with—or mice with—cancer and then gave it to them and saw some really interesting results?

Chris Burres (0:21:23.163)

Yes, so there's pieces of what you're saying that are actually all tied together into the same study. They did, because of this benzene shape on the exterior of the cage, think it would be toxic. They also, because it makes great inks, batteries, tires, and photocells, thought that man would be working with it on a regular basis. So you need to understand the toxicity level. How protected do we need to be if we're working on it? Do I need a Tyvek suit? Does it need to be a clean room? Can I just pick up gobs of it in my hand and throw it into some paint, or what does that look like in order to be safe?

Yes, they did this study. Now it was on Wistar rats, and Wistar rats are a unique readily researched rat. I'll talk about  a cancer implication there, but that's all part of the same study. Something to note is when you're going into a toxicity study, you don't just give a little bit to the rats and see if they feel unwell. Your goal is to understand: is there a toxic level?

They really gave these rats almost as much oil as they could have—olive oil with as much of the ESS-60 molecule as they could get to dissolve into the olive oil. They didn't die. All of the control rats—remember there was one group that was given water, that's the control group—all of them were dead at about 32 months. That's the typical lifespan of a Wistar rat.

With the olive oil rats, they lived 30% longer. One takeaway from this study—and certainly Dr. Steven Gundry and Brian Johnson are heavily promoting olive oil—I would second that, and this study certainly supports that. There was a 30% extension of life in these Wistar rats.

Then, with the ESS-60 rats, a full 90% extension.

What a Wistar rat's life looks like, and  related to cancer, is that a typical Wistar rat lives out to 32 months and has a known amount of tumor mass in its body. The longer it lives, the more tumor mass it has in its body. Even though the ESS-60 rats lived out to 62 months—ostensibly they should have had twice as much tumor mass in their body—none of them had any tumors.

This is a pretty profound result. I've told that story and a lot of people will say, “My God, cure for cancer.”

My response is no. Then I follow that with another no. Hold your horses. There is a huge difference between dealing with a cancer that has metastasized and actually being a cancer preventative.

We know things as simple as good nutrition, good sleep, and good exercise can be cancer preventatives. That piece of the story does suggest that we've got good cancer prevention aspects of this molecule.

I'll share a couple of things. There are patents related to the molecule as cancer treatments for pets. That’s now—a patent doesn't mean it works. It just means somebody has decided to patent it.

There is one other study that I think is pretty profound. It's a petri dish study. This is  the lowest level of study. To get from a petri dish into an animal model is almost night and day, but this is pretty profound.

You take a petri dish of healthy cells and cancer cells, and you introduce an anti-cancer agent. Now that is a poison. You're hoping to poison the cancer cells before you poison the healthy cells. If you do that in the presence of the ESS-60 molecule, there is increased efficacy against the cancer cells and protective effects for the healthy cells. More cancer cells die and less healthy cells die in the presence of ESS-60.

The reality is this is going to be something that's going to be researched a lot more as time goes on.

Ashley James (0:25:29.499)

The concern that I think old school oncologists have is that if you're taking a supplement to support your health—an antioxidant supplement—that you're nullifying it somehow, nullifying chemo and radiation, because that would support the cancer. We don't want to do anything to support the cancer. I've even heard oncologists say, “Don't even eat fruit. Don't even eat healthy food.”

It's so ludicrous to think that we shouldn't be trying to keep the healthy cells alive while helping the body beat the unhealthy cells or remove the unhealthy cells.

I love that petri dish study showing that it could be protective of the healthy cells, but doesn't necessarily protect the cells we want to remove.

Going back to that rat study, there's three groups—just to clarify, three groups. One had water. One had just regular olive oil. And one had olive oil mixed with as high concentration of the carbon-60 mixed in. Those rats lived an incredibly long life.

Didn't the scientists go, okay, enough is enough, and ended up killing the rats himself? He didn't wait for them to die naturally?

Chris Burres (0:26:53.241)

Well, he waited for all of them. By the way, this is the perfect opportunity to get in. I'm excited to share we've actually published with the lead researcher of that study. Not only is our lab mentioned in the study and our lab provided the material, but we've actually continued on to do research with him—Dr. Fathi Musa.

I love to give credit to them because if anything was ever true, when all of the control group in a toxicity study are dead and all of the “toxic rats”are still alive, it's not toxic. If anything is ever true, that's a fact. All normal rats are dead. All “rats given a toxic material are still alive.” We can be pretty assured that it's not toxic.

Kudos to them because they continued to do another—in this case—30 months of animal husbandry to keep these rats alive and get this amazing result. That's absolutely amazing.

Now, they only euthanized one. They were doing animal husbandry. All of the rats are finally dead except for the last one. The last two rats in the ESS60 group—one of them dies and they're like, okay, it's time to publish. They humanely euthanized the final rat, put together the research, and published this in mid-2012.

So he didn't kill them all. He just killed one of them.

Ashley James (0:28:28.517)

Okay. IIt would be interesting to know how long could that rat have lived. They lived—what’d you say—90% longer than their known lifespan?

Chris Burres (0:28:40.316)

Yes. It's crazy. No, when you say the single longest longevity experimental results on mammals in history, and it's peer-reviewed, published research, your ears perk up. It's a long—it's a mouthful—but your ears perk up. You're like, is that really the single longest?

The next best way to live longer that's got research is calorie restriction. If you reduce your calorie consumption by 30%, you can extend your life by 30%. This is done in multiple animal models, so this is basically rock solid.

I call that the Starve Yourself One-Third to Death Diet. Nobody signs up for that diet. I don't know. Maybe they need a marketing team to relabel the Starve Yourself One-Third to Death Diet. That's the next best way to live longer.

Ashley James (0:29:32.722)

Tell us about other studies that have come out since then or other clinical findings as you progress. You said you've been doing this for 34 years.

Chris Burres (0:29:47.598)

The supplement industry is challenged and at some point I'd like to get into our journey. Because my business partner and I legitimately tried not to get into the supplement industry for more than four years. The industry is challenged. One thing that seems to be true of supplement companies is they tend not to do research. When they do research, they tend not to publish that research.

We are actually doing research. We are actually publishing research. About two months ago, we cut a $150,000 check for even more research as we're  trying to advance this molecule, I think, into the position that it really deserves to be in. When you start thinking about human trials, we have lots of customers and the product is safe and it's on the market according to  the legal process.

There aren't many human trials. I would say one of the very few is just an ad hoc study that we have done and to share that process. Before the pandemic, I was in contact with Benjamin Smarr. He's out of the University of California, San Diego, and he happened to be an Oura Ring consultant. Oura Ring, one of the better sleep track markers on the market.

Our most consistent testimonial is people take the product in the morning, they report mental focus and energy during the day, and then better sleep that night. As I'm trying to figure out what's going on as the chief scientist of a new supplement company. At one point I'm the chief scientist of a carbon nanomaterial company. Great. Ironically that's much easier than being the chief scientist of a supplement company.

I'm trying to figure out what's going on and why we might be getting these benefits, why these rats might have lived longer in the first place. We really did land on sleep. If you can improve your sleep, you can improve your mental, physical, and emotional wellbeing. So because of that, I was looking for this opportunity to start some sort of research connected with Benjamin Smarr.

We started this study where we were really ad hoc. So let's see if we can get people together or they'll end up being a crossover study. Then pandemic hits and it turns out the Oura Ring is actually pretty good at identifying COVID.

So you can imagine he disappeared and I've really  lost touch with him. We continued with this study and here's what that study looks like. It's a crossover. For 10 days prior to the participants taking the product, they answered four survey questions. How good was your sleep? How restless was your sleep? How quickly did you fall asleep? How did you feel the next morning?

Super simple. We collected 10 days of data before they tried the product, 10 days of data while they were on the product, 10 days of data while they were off the product, and then 10 days of data back on the product.

Ashley James (0:32:52.813)

When you say data, do you mean the Oura Ring data as well or just them self-reporting? 

Chris Burres (0:32:59.898)

Just self-reporting. We've actually gotten a lot more sophisticated and are working to get more people through it. This is a new space for me. I did not realize there were standardized questionnaires that you can use that the Institute of Health recognizes as a good source of information about people's sleep. We're working on those studies now.

In this particular study, it's only 10, we only got 10 people through this so far—100% of those 10 people reported improvements when they were on the product. We're in the middle of doing what I call an ad hoc, and we'll be taking this one to a clinical trial, I'm pretty sure. What's called an ad hoc, a HSCRP ad hoc, just meaning what people can we recruit? We're looking for, we've got a network of practitioners. They may have people who have elevated HSCRP and we're working to get them into the study.

Now the story behind that is pretty fascinating. We had a booth at A4M, so that's the American Anti-Aging Academy, and they have an event called Longevity Fest, and it's in Vegas. This Dr. Lane Young came up to me and he said this, and as soon as he said it, I said, you have to say it again, let me record it. I actually have a recording of it, and I had a conversation with him back at the biohacking conversation. He walked up and he said,

Chris, I don't care if you're male, female, pre-surgery, post-surgery, cardiovascular disease, otherwise healthy. If you have elevated HSCRP—and I'll talk about that in a second—your product brings it down into normal ranges in four to eight weeks.

In his particular situation, he was talking about a client that he wasn't actually aid with his protocols, able to move the dial on who was at nine and brought them down to 0.9. Anything under one is considered normal in four to eight weeks. Now, HSCRP stands for High Sensitivity C-Reactive Protein, and it is an inflammatory marker.

The FDA is very particular about how you speak about chronic inflammation, and I'm sure I'll jump into that at some point, but we can talk about positive impacts on inflammatory markers.

So that has launched us into practitioners in our network. If you have somebody who's got an elevated HSCRP and you're not able to move the needle on it, then let us know and we'll get them involved in this study.

Now I do want to share it because the—yes.

Ashley James (0:35:34.671)

That's going to be so cool. Please come back to the show after you've published that. 

Chris Burres (0:35:40.747)

Yes, honestly, it's so exciting. It's expensive. It's so exciting to be doing the hard work and really the hard work that a lot of supplement companies don't do.

Ashley James (0:35:55.083)

Very exciting. I just want to stop here and say, I have purchased C60, because I didn't know where to get it from—eBay, Amazon. Yes, until now. No, seriously. I looked into it and it was Chris Hyde would talk about it and there are guys making it in their garage. They turn their garage into a laboratory and it's like, can we trust the quality?

This is the thing with the supplement industry—it is buyer beware. We don't want it to be a regulated industry because then Big Pharma takes over and then we really lose. We lose so many great supplements if that were to happen.

We don't want regulation, but we do have to then, as a consumer, we have to question everything, do our own research. You go around and really look into and investigate different companies. Then even when you trust one company, you have to keep an eye on them because sometimes they get bought out by another company and then the quality goes down.

I've seen it happen before in the supplement industry. I have taken C60. I bought it from people I was like, I don't know. This seems shady—almost like a street drug deal. Did you make this in your basement?

I'm going to admit—I have never tried your C60, but the C60s I have tried, I can't wait to try yours to compare. There's been some where I didn't feel anything and I'm like, that was probably fake C60. People sell it on Amazon or eBay, maybe it's just fake. They put a bit of some black powder—charcoal in olive oil—and sold it to me. It's C60? 

Chris Burres (0:38:00.212)

Well, let me jump in here. Because you said so many things that are valuable to touch on. One, I agree with you with the FDA. I want the FDA involved to some degree. I'll never forget. I've got my new hat. I'm now the chief scientist of a supplement company. I've got to figure out what hoops do we have to jump through? How do we do this responsibly?

I'll never forget when I was on the FDA website and I found a statement and I literally took a screenshot because I thought there's no way this is going to stay up here. This must be some sort of error. I want a screenshot of it. It said that the FDA does not require you to prove that a supplement is safe before you bring it to the market. I thought this can't be right. I have to imagine that even a lot of your listeners are like, that doesn't make sense. I thought the FDA was keeping an eye on these things.

Yes, but their role is different. One, in order to even follow the new traditional supplement guideline, there are some restrictions. If you think about the Herculean task of proving that supplements are safe before you bring them to the market, there's just no way to have an organization that big.

Let me give you an example. Ashley, we could be competitive formulators and you could put together a 10% vitamin D and a 90% vitamin E, and I could do the reverse. These are in fact two different supplements. There's an infinite number of these combinations, and there is no budget. There is no task force big enough to be able to approve all of these before they go to the market.

I'm with you. I want access to these things—even other than mine—because I want to optimize things as soon as I can, as soon as we have some sense that they're good and safe. I'm glad you brought that up because I tend to agree with you and agree in general.

You mentioned a black powder. Part of the reason we created ESS60. There are actually four C60 products that I would not consume. One of them I've actually done videos about, and I am a big believer that negative marketing is bad for the industry. I try very hard not to do it. This particular video—he doesn't have C60 in the product—and so I was more comfortable doing the video because even though he claims to be in the C60 space, he is in fact not in the C60 space. I happily put that product, put a video out, and that's out there.

Global Healing, a company that's based here in Houston. I think he's got a big following. He sells a product and the whole literature on the page for this supercharged C60 is about all the benefits that have been recognized in the scientific literature about C60. Then at the very bottom, he admits he's selling what are called nano onions.

If you think about a C60 ball, and then you can think about a slightly bigger ball encompassing it, you've got this onion, these layers. Then you chop it in half. These are nano onions. They are not C60. In fact, if you have any C60 in there, it's lucky because you had 120—a ball that was 120—and you cut it in half. Half of it is C60, but it is in fact not the shape of C60.

To get in there and describe all the benefits of C60 and then sell something that is not—and more concerning—there is absolutely zero toxicity data on nano onions. These have never been consumed in any sort of rat study or any sort of other study. This should not be on the market.

I can share with you—a good friend of ours actually was a grad student of Dr. Smalley here in Houston at Rice. He takes nano onions and puts them in oil because they improve oil, but there's no toxicity data. That's two.

There's one other group. This is just so frustrating. The little Listerine strips that you can use to freshen your breath? How small they are and they melt? There's a company that sells a C60 product that is a Listerine strip, which doesn't sound that crazy until you understand the industry looks at a proper serving as being one teaspoon, which is the same as five mils.

How many Listerine strips does it take to make a teaspoon? I think the whole package would be fair. They're taking this C60 and having the experience you described, and this is my frustration—people are going to order these C60 Listerine strips, they're going to try them, and they're going to go, “meh,” and they're going to tell their friends, “I tried that C60 stuff, it didn't work.” Well, no, yes, you didn't try it. That is my frustration.

Then last little piece to touch on—you might have a question and then I'll talk about my opinion of Amazon.

Ashley James (0:43:34.733)

Well, I was just going to say that I have tried it several times, bought it because I didn't know about your company. Bought it from a few places. I had a friend recommend he tried this one. I think it is legit. Some of the time I didn't notice anything, but there was one—I don't even remember which one, because this was seven years ago—there was one where I took it and I felt more energy and I was like, wow, that's different.

I noticed a buzzing in my body. I’m very—I want to say sensitive—but I'm very in tune. I'm like, this is different. There's something and I could feel it. I was like, this is cool. We were feeding it to our cats and, hey, our cats lived really long. Lived to 18, one lived to 20. I wish I’d known about it sooner.

I felt something and I thought that was really interesting. I don't want to say shady the industry is—but just that people were popping up because Cliff High and other people were talking about how exciting C60 is. There's a lot of guys going, hey, I can make a quick buck. I can say there's C60 in this bottle of oil with carbon powder in it. Anyone could just say you're selling C60.

Whereas you—you're legit. You're the OG. So I'm very, very excited to learn from you about this. I definitely want to get into the mechanism of action and how it works in the body. I also have this burning question, which is: does this exist in nature?

Before you answer that, I know you had a final point to say.

Chris Burres (0:45:19.545)

Yes, well, just to wrap up the industry—our policy, and this is on a case-by-case basis—we tested 22 of the products in the market. We found all but one. Of course, ours was good, but all but one other brand was woefully low in concentration.

We do have a policy that if you send us your bottle—we don't want it to be empty—we’lll do the thing. We will replace it for free.

Ashley James (0:45:48.757)

Sorry, send you which bottle? A bottle of someone else's?

Chris Burres (0:45:55.363)

The old bottle of somebody else's, because this is how strongly we feel about what a high-quality product we have. We just have very little doubt that people are going to stay on our product after that.

Ashley James (0:46:10.769)

On behalf of the C60 industry, I apologize for the fraudulent C60 you bought. Please don't blame this. C60 is wonderful. Here, I'll give you a free bottle. I love you, Chris. That's the thing I would do. That's so cool of you.

Chris Burres (0:46:30.905)

Thank you. I'll be honest—it took us a while to get to this point. My whole journey with this molecule is as skeptical as probably the most skeptical person in your audience. 

Interesting, when you finally got the one, you had some good experience on it, you're in tune. I want to believe I'm enlightened and in tune with my body.

I just have too many examples where that's not true. I answered the question wrong. “Do you have pain when you walk in the morning?” was a question. I said, “No, I don't.” He pushed the question further and he's like, “Actually, I limp until I get warmed up.” I'm not as in tune as I would like to be. I'm not really having experiences.

We have some percentage of our customers—and I'll tell some examples down the road—where they didn’t really notice anything, but when they stop taking it, they're like, “Now I see what I'm missing.” So it can be subtle.

That's the other challenge. You get this other product and if you dig into the research, there’s a lot of people who will share, “Hey, it can be subtle.” Think about sleep—our most consistent testimonial—unless you're Brian Johnson, you're getting an extra 30 minutes or an hour or less of sleep per night. If you start taking something and that just becomes 30 minutes more of sleep per night consistently, or even just deeper sleep—which is actually our more consistent testimonial—are you going to attribute it to that thing you took? So it can be pretty subtle.

Yes, and in terms of Amazon, the way I describe it is just be careful on Amazon. Unfortunately, in the supplement industry, you need to do the research on the company, on the founders. Get some sense of comfort with them.

I always ask, what does a five-star review on Amazon mean about a supplement? About a cell phone, it means it works. About, I don't know, a cell phone charger—it works. About a supplement, I always joke, it just means that Amazon harassed that customer enough and they didn’t die before they left the review. It's pretty brutal. 

Ashley James (0:49:00.456)

Because if you die, you're not leaving the bad review that you did.

Chris Burres (0:49:03.616)

Exactly. Your family’s not going back and saying, “Hey, this may not be related, but we thought we would share.”

By the way, it's the cell phone's fault anyway. Think about what a five-star review of, say, a vitamin C means. I think we can agree that they don't have an HPLC and they didn't crush it up and make sure it was ascorbic acid. That didn't happen. I think we can agree they don't have a lab scale and they didn't make sure that every tablet was one gram.

In reality, they probably didn't even count if there were 90 or 95 or 85 tablets in the jar. It literally just means they got harassed until they left a five-star review. Be very wary when you're on Amazon assuming the reviews.

We are on Amazon. Some people like the convenience. By the way, our shipping doesn't equal or beat them over weekends. We actually had somebody place an order at 7 p.m. on a Friday and sent us a note at 9 a.m. on a Monday and was like, why isn't it here yet?

Because Amazon has spoiled everyone. We're not Amazon, and we went home for the weekend. It'll be there in two days.

Ashley James (0:50:19.552)

That’s funny. 

Does this exist in nature?

Chris Burres (0:50:27.358)

Yes, it does exist in nature, and everyone in your audience has been exposed to it. It exists in really large quantities. It turns out that Sir Harold Kroto is right that the spectrum out in space was massive amounts of carbon-60.

Ashley James (0:50:43.897)

Out in space, there's lots of antioxidants floating around.

Chris Burres (0:50:48.703)

Yes, if the vacuum didn't kill you—you could have some benefits. We can actually talk about the antioxidants a little bit too. I'm sure I'll get to that.

If you collect the soot from a candle—so you usually do that by putting a cold steel plate over the candle—then that deep dark soot has parts per million or parts per billion of what we would call the ESS60 molecule.

We have literally all been exposed to it, just not in the quantities necessary to put into a supplement.

I've already described the extremely challenging process of manufacturing the molecule. Real quick, you're vaporizing these graphite rods. You create what's called a fullerenic soot, because it has some amount of fullerenes in it. That amount on a good day is 10%.

You have 90% carbon garbage and 10% fullerenic soot. Of that 10% fullerenic soot, about 80% to 90% of that is C60. We would consider that for industrial applications.

Then after you refine that and bring it to a high concentration and remove the solvents necessary to do that, you end up with what we would call ESS60.

Ashley James (0:52:06.179)

You're mentioning solvents and things that are concerning when we're putting stuff in our body. How do you test for purity to make sure there aren't any solvents or chemicals or carbon garbage—as you put it, that we know we're not also ingesting those things?

Chris Burres (0:52:33.661)

One is we've actually only refined our process since that original study. We've had some people claim that they're making a carbon 60 using zero solvents. I’ve done videos on this. I could go into the details. It is in the realm of scientific possibility. It is not a feasible production process to put in any sort of consumer product.

There's too much waste. It's extremely, and it's hard for me to emphasize how impractical this is. I think these companies believe that by going through what's called a sublimation process, that they're absolving themselves from the fact that it was at one point exposed to solvents.

That is absolutely not true. Like I said, I've done videos on this. I could go into it, but it's a sidetrack down people who make a lesser quality of a product.

The reality is solvents are used regularly. Anytime you're thinking about some sort of plant extract in the holistic medicine aisle at HEB or whatever grocery store, those are typically extracted with solvents. So the health and nutrition industry is very comfortable working with solvents. When people say, “Hey, their product might have some solvents left and ours doesn't,” which I think is actually a false claim—even if that were true, our product was used in a study where the rats lived 90% longer than the control group. What are you really trying to accomplish?

Ashley James (0:54:16.673)

And they genetically always create tumors of their body, and these ones didn't. That is cool. That's wild.

So I guess, just for those who are listening and they're concerned or put off from the mention of solvents, I know you probably patented processes you can't exactly go into sharing, but what safeguards are done—either testing afterwards, or what is done to know that this is clean and safe to consume?

Chris Burres (0:54:49.149)

Yes, so we do a batch-by-batch process. Here's the reality. We actually do a batch-by-batch process on our ESS-60. We're actually sending that off to a lab—that's not a piece of equipment that we have resident—to look at what are the volatile compounds in there. Those would be any residual solvents.

Those, in full transparency, are typically one, below detectable limits, or barely in detectable limits. When I say barely in detectable limits, I know that might make you nervous. That turns out to be 10,000 times lower than the EPA's acceptable amount in drinking water. We would really want zero, but we're scientists, and it's hard for us to speak in zero or a lot. We speak in really small fractions.

And again, 10,000 times lower than what the EPA allows. And again, throw it into a study with the Wistar rats—the Wistar rats lived 90% longer. They are not suffering from toxic solvents.

Ashley James (0:56:06.355)

I love it. OK. You test every batch. It's very, very clean according to the EPA standards.

Chris Burres (0:56:18.631)

I want to touch on the “test every batch” because a lot of companies will claim this, and I think that's good—and hopefully they are in fact doing it. We actually have the equipment to test it here. We're more diligent. People can get nervous. You're testing? No, we do also do third-party testing.

The advantage that in-house testing gives us is it's not a line item. Every time you send out a test, if you don't have the equipment, it's $150 to $300 for that test. So you're like, ah, we got to save money, we got to be an efficient company. Those are smart things, but it suffers in this area where we're just like, hey, go inject this, see what it looks like.

I think that's manifested. I mentioned we tested 22 of the products in the market, and they're woefully low in concentration. I think the reason—and I'm very altruistic—I think these companies are trying to do the right thing. In the original study, they mixed the product in an Erlenmeyer flask. Now, that's that kind of triangular-shaped flask. They had a little magnetic stirrer and they mixed it for two weeks. That's when they got to the max concentration of the ESS-60 molecule in the olive oil.

That's what everybody was doing. We're doing it, confirming our concentration. Then as we grow as a company, you start mixing in bigger and bigger volumes. We're doing 100-liter batches now. That two weeks is no longer two weeks, it's actually three weeks.

The way we find this out is we're actually testing multiple times in the batch. As the batch is being produced, we understand when it's reached peak concentration. In reality, we're scientists. There's an asymptotic curve. You get within that bandwidth of that peak concentration.

We found that because of the fluid dynamics, you've got this powder in there and the oil. Because of the fluid dynamics, it takes three weeks. I believe that a lot of the companies that are low in concentration don't have that testing protocol and just are doing two weeks and putting the product on the market. Because that's what they did in the original study, which again, altruistically is nice—scientifically not the best decision.

Ashley James (0:58:34.367)

What do you do for those three weeks to prevent the oil from oxidizing?

Chris Burres (0:58:41.703)

Excellent question. It is in a sealed stainless steel container. It's got a nitrogen buffer gas at the top because in reality, this is spinning really, really quickly. There's actually a full vortex almost through the whole hundred liters. If it were exposed to oxygen, it would actually be folding in oxygen—not an ideal scenario.

So we've got nitrogen buffer gas tubes all over our production facility.

Ashley James (0:59:09.109)

That's wonderful because just consuming oil that's been exposed to oxygen for three weeks while spinning? You'd be consuming rancid oil that would actually be causing oxidative damage. You'd be creating more stress on the body as a result, more inflammation on the body as a result.

That's why a lot of doctors I interview say don't use cooking oil at all. Never use cooking oil because oil that you buy in the store has been exposed to oxygen from the get-go, from the production facility. So you're actually consuming rancid oil. Then cooking further would cause more oxidative stress on the body.

One sure way to decrease oxidative stress is to not eat fried foods, not use cooking oils at all.

I love that you said nitrogen chamber and making sure there's no oxygen there because that would completely go against the health benefits of it.

I love that you guys are so diligently checking and figuring out the maximum saturation. That's really cool. 

Chris Burres (1:00:15.645)

Just to talk about oxidation for a minute. A typical olive oil has a shelf life of three years. When we bottle it, we actually put 18 months on it. We're conservative in that perspective.

There is good evidence that the presence of the ESS-60 molecule has protective effects for the oil also. So while it's in the container, there are protective effects for the oil due to the ESS-60 molecule.

Ashley James (1:00:44.521)

Yes, I was thinking about that. The C60 itself being an antioxidant, which we definitely want to eventually get into talking about, would help counteract that. Is there anything more about the process of producing it that you wanted to let us know about?

Chris Burres (1:01:07.727)

No, I think it's good. Maybe now's the time—this is maybe fun. We talk science, maybe we can talk a little bit of story and about our journey. This is fun.

This study came out in mid-2012. The rats have lived 90% longer. About mid-2013—Cliff High was really about 2017—about 2013, we started getting these phone calls from this crazy, wacky group of people called biohackers.

I can say that now affectionately because I'm a biohacker. They're like, “Hey, we saw those rats live longer. How much should we be taking?” Now, you have to picture this: ultra-conservative carbon nanomaterial scientist hats that my business partner and I were wearing. Also think about what we were hearing in the question. Because the question to us was, “Hey, that stuff that you sell to research institutions around the world to put into inks, batteries, tires, and photocells—how much of that stuff should I be consuming on a daily basis?”

Our response was, “We think the answer should be zero.” We actually added not for human consumption to our labeling in mid-2013. Think about that. From 1991 all the way to mid-2013, we didn't have not for human consumption on our labeling because there were no crazy, wacky biohackers involved yet. We add it.

I also want to be clear: the literature was clear that it was safe. At this point, the rats had lived 90% longer. If anything’s true, it’s not toxic. We’re conservative carbon nanomaterial scientists. We were actually getting together every quarter and deciding—based on this next part of the story.

We’re getting two to three calls per week. The calls sound like this: “Hey, Chris, my knee pain is gone.” I'm like, “You mean the knee pain of your rat?” Because it literally says not for human consumption on the labeling. They're like, “Yes, yes, yes! Hey, if my rat weighs 275 pounds and does HIIT training on Tuesdays and Thursdays, should they maybe be doubling doses on Tuesdays and Thursdays?” We know what’s going on.

We were only comfortable with it because it was clear in the literature that it was safe, but still—conservative carbon nanomaterial scientists. Every quarter we're getting together: “Do we want to get into this supplement industry?” We've already touched on it. It's a challenged industry. It's extremely different than delivering commercial quantities of carbon nanomaterials to research institutions around the world.

They get our little black powder. They give it to a grad student or a research associate. They put it in an HPLC because they know how to do this. They confirm that we shipped them what we sold them. We've already talked about the consumer nature of the supplement industry. They're not testing anything. They don't have the HPLC.

This is an industry that, just quarter after quarter, we decide not to get into. In the middle of this, I found a research paper that said 50% of the supplements that this particular research group had purchased off the market—general supplements—50% of them did not have in them what they said they had in them. This was just confirmation: this is not something we want to get into. It’s not in our pedigree. It’s not in our bones.

Then finally, it was literally Cliff High talking about it. When he started talking about it—literally—he is the dude. When he started talking about all the benefits he was getting taking it on a daily basis, and then all the science and sharing all the stories, our phone went from ringing two to three times a week to ten times a day.

We looked back. So now at that quarterly meeting in the conference room—it’s actually behind me—in that quarterly meeting, we’re assessing things differently. This is an entrepreneurial opportunity bigger than we realized. If you think back to that paper that I had found where 50% of the supplements on the market don’t have in them what they say they have in them—that’s going to happen in this space.

We’re the oldest and longest manufacturer and distributor of this molecule. We have the production process. We have the equipment. We have the scientific knowledge. We know how to work with material. We probably should get into the industry—not just for entrepreneurial, that’s obvious—but also just to keep the consumer safe.

So in 2017, the end of 2017, we asked ourselves two questions. The first question was a moral question: Are we comfortable selling this?

I take it. My wife takes it. Obviously, my business partner takes it. Everybody on our team here actually takes it. By the way, that’s not a requirement to work here. It’s not “clock in and take your shot.” They have access to the research—and probably more importantly, they have access to the testimonials of people calling into customer service, which we do handle here. And our customer service team has a thousand five-star reviews on Google. They’re amazing.

Yes, we’re comfortable selling it. I take it. My wife takes it. Everybody on the team takes it.

Then the next is the legal piece: the FDA and the FTC. We’re crossing the T’s, we’re dotting the I’s, and that’s when we really started bringing this to market and where my role shifted as the chief scientist to understand where this sits in the space of longevity, where it sits in the space of supplements in general.

Then now we could potentially start talking about the potential methods of action.

Ashley James (1:07:01.615)

Yes, mechanism action. Awesome. Let's talk about it.

Chris Burres (1:07:06.091)

As I mentioned, the first place that I landed was on sleep. If you improve sleep, you improve your mental, physical, and emotional well-being.

Our product is really unique. Our most consistent testimonial is: you take the product in the morning, you report mental focus and energy during the day, and then you have better sleep that night.

You've been doing this, what, nine years? Have you had an interview with somebody talking about something they could take in the morning and then positively impact sleep that night?

Ashley James (1:07:37.697)

Very rare, but there are things you could do. You could get up in the morning, go outside, and direct sunlight to get your circadian rhythm back in check. There's certain things you could do in the morning that would positively impact your sleep.

Drink less caffeine in the morning. Or drinking less caffeine in general would improve your sleep. Getting outside would improve your sleep.

I can't think of a specific supplement that if you take in the morning, other than if you're deficient. If you're deficient in magnesium, taking it anytime, getting your magnesium up would help. But that's because you were deficient.

Magnesium doesn't treat sleep. The deficiency causes sleep problems, and by increasing your magnesium, you're solving that problem in the body. Now you're going to get normal sleep, which to you feels like an improvement.

That's the only thing I could think of.

Chris Burres (1:08:33.178)

One person once mentioned to me Ashwagandha, and then I had a conversation with an Ayurvedic practitioner and they’re like, “Well, you take it in the morning actually for focus and energy, but then you actually have to take it again at night and it can help you sleep.” It's a very unique process, and we'll talk into what we think it's doing in the mitochondria, which is why we think we have this benefit. So the first place we landed was sleep.

Then the next was: what does the medical community think about aging? How does it land with it? They don't all agree. A lot of them tend to think of it as an oxidation and an inflammation process. When you think about oxidation, there are ad hoc studies on the web that show our formula to be 172 times more powerful than vitamin C. There's peer-reviewed, published research that shows it to be 125 times more powerful than vitamin C.

I'm in Texas, so we’d like to put a big old check mark on the antioxidant. When it comes to inflammation—and I think I alluded to this earlier—the FDA is very particular in how you speak about inflammation because the FDA equates talking about chronic inflammation with the diseases of inflammation, which are also the diseases of aging: arthritis, Alzheimer's, cardiovascular diseases, cancers.

If I come here and I say, “Hey, we address chronic inflammation,” what the FDA actually hears is me claiming, “I cure cancer, Alzheimer's, cardiovascular disease.” Obviously not making those claims. We have to be really careful. So much more research needs to go into those particular areas to prove that up and be able to make those claims. What the FDA will allow us to say is that we address inflammation associated with exercise-induced inflammation.

We've all had a tough workout, maybe just walked longer one day than normal, and felt that inflammation in our body. The FDA allows us to say that we address that inflammation. I'm going to go ahead and throw in some kind of cool studies that I've gone through that are related to inflammation.

By the way, about a year and a half, maybe two years ago, there was a publication released on beagles and the inflammatory status of beagles and how the product— I think in this case it was in grapeseed oil, usually it's in olive oil—but in this case, it was in grapeseed oil, and how the product reduced the inflammation in beagles, the HSCRP in beagles.

In my case, there was a health optimization summit in Austin and we had a booth. Next to us was a group who does ESR—Erythrocyte Sedimentation Rate. He's got this piece of equipment, super cool by the way. It's a $300 piece of equipment, and then for $10 per test, you can actually have the results in 30 minutes.

What ESR is you take a drop or two of blood and put it in a capillary tube, and then you hold that capillary tube vertically. The rate at which the blood cells separate from the plasma is an indication of your inflammatory state.

I took this test, and he has an age component—a biological age. My result was that I was 20+ years younger than my actual chronological age. I'm pretty happy with this.

The next test that I took: GlycanAge. You may be familiar with GlycanAge. It's looking at glycans and how they attach to different molecules in your blood. It’s unidirectional—it goes one direction as you age. So they make a biological age test out of it. It's also a very good indicator of inflammatory status.

That particular study, when I took it, had me—I think it was—34 years younger biologically than my chronological age. I also like that test.

Now the next test I don't like as much. I do like the direction. I took my DNA age and when I was 51, it had me at 59. You can, Ashley, you can imagine that was a little disappointing. I'm doing all the things. How am I—whatever—eight years older than my chronological age?

Here's the cool part. Three years later, when I was 54, it had me at 58. In the span of three years, I had decreased my biological age by one year. I don't like the numbers, but I do like the direction.

By the way, if you're following the Rejuvenation Olympics, these are the repeated biological tests that Brian Johnson is on, and many other biohackers and longevity experts.

That would have put me—I think—by far in first place. Most of the results on the Rejuvenation Olympics now are like, “for every year that passes, I’m aging 0.6 years or 0.5 years.” In this case, I actually aged negative 0.33 years over the course of those three years.

Ashley James (1:13:57.420)

That's so much fun. I love it. I love it. I did one once and my biological age was a few years younger than my chronological age. Then this really famous health guru published his studies and he was biologically one year older than his chronological age. We were about the same age and I was, my gosh. He was shocked. He's like, I'm doing all the things. He was expecting it to be a little better.

Yes, you say over time, it's better to do these tests over time. Also we can't put 100% of our faith into lab tests. Labs, we don't know, are they calibrating their machines? Did they accidentally mix up our test tubes with someone else? There's a lot of variables. We don't want to put 100% of our faith into labs.

Also if you really, really are shocked by a lab, maybe go get the same lab from a different company and just double check. You always want to double check when it comes to health. Even if it's your car, if the mechanic is like, it'll be $5,000 for this, you're like, I think I'm getting a second opinion because the second opinion is going to probably save me $5,000.

Just always, always question and don't put 100% of your faith into those. At the same time, it can be really fun over time. I did this one little hacky. I wouldn't say I'm a biohacker, but I really appreciate what I learned from biohackers. Then I implement what I can into my life. I think I do a lot more than most people. I'm a label reader and I'll say no to a lot of foods because every single thing that goes in your mouth is either building you up or breaking you down. We just have to be really cautious of that.

I made one change. I was doing my labs every three months last year and I made one change and I cut my triglycerides in half. I'm like, dang, that wasn't even that hard to do. That wasn't even that bad. It's pretty wild when you're watching your labs. Again, we don't want to say that we always believe what the labs are because it can differentiate depending on what day it is, what time it is, and also what lab you're going to.

Just looking at it as a general idea, looking at your labs and then over time, looking at the trend: is something trending in the wrong direction or is something trending in the right direction? Then go, okay, I'm going to keep doing that good behavior because I'm seeing it in the labs.

Most importantly is checking in with our body. I've got a symptom inventory checklist in my book. Addicted to Wellness is the name of my book. I've got this symptom inventory checklist and I guide people through how to do it. When anyone works with me as a client, I give it to them as well. I firmly believe we should do it once a month, just a once a month check-in. You can check in with yourself daily and weekly, but once a month you write down all the symptoms you could think about that you've had this last month and there's prompts that help you.

Then you grade them frequency, duration, and intensity. How many times a week or a day or a month, and how long did it last? For example, a headache lasted four hours. Then intensity would be a one out of ten. Certain symptoms you can't give a one out of ten. It's either you have it or you don't. If it's a pain, it's a five or it's a two.

If you do this every month as you are making health changes, for example, adding this, MyVitalC, to your life, then you score again. You don't look at what you wrote last month. You do a fresh one. Then when you finish it, then you compare it to the month before and the month before that. You'll be surprised. My clients are always shocked because at first they'll tell me, I'm like, how'd you do this month? They're like, well, I don't know, maybe a little bit improved, I don't think anything really changed. I'm like, okay, let's do your symptom inventory checklist. Then afterwards: oh my gosh, we cut the list in half. A half.

I once had a client—this is the biggest success story I've had since 2011. I worked with clients since 2005, but since 2011, it's been in the health focus. From 2005 to 2011, I was helping people to eliminate anxiety and doing emotional work and mental work and neuro-linguistic programming and timeline therapy. Since 2011, I have had one client who had 26 pages back to back. He wrote out his symptoms. He was in really rough shape. In my first month of making some foundational health changes, we got it down to about half a page.

It was wild. Most people will come to me and they'll fill out between one and two pages of symptoms. If we really dig in, and if you've come to me with half a page of symptoms, then we just see them decrease and decrease and increase. Because we're making these changes that work. It works for everyone. Because this is how the body works. It's not cookie cutter.

If you're dehydrated, 100% of people benefit from drinking enough water. There are certain things that are just foundationally cookie cutter. So making sure that we've got that covered, a lot of stuff just drops off. It's a symptom inventory checklist, and it's worth investing in yourself to do it monthly. Just like labs are something good to just look at and just have as a marker, have to remind us, because we can catch disease pretty early and then go in the opposite direction of that. Your body is speaking to you.

I've been taught by my mentors in naturopathic medicine how to hear the symptoms of the body and discern what that means. You can too. When you go to an MD, they're reductionistic in their thinking. One MD will send you to a GI specialist, the other will send you to a neurologist, and one will send you to a gastroenterologist. It could all be the same problem. The root cause could all actually be from the same thing, but they are not seeing it because they reduce you into your parts. You're a machine.

Whereas in holistic medicine, we're looking at the body as a whole, listening to the symptoms and going, oh, these symptoms, even though they're coming from different areas, they're all speaking the same thing. They're pointing to the same thing. That's why the symptom inventory checklist really helps. Because we forget. When a problem goes away, we forget.

I have had two  listeners who've listened to the show multiple times have heard me say this because it just shocks me. I've had two clients who literally forgot they ever had migraines. When they came to me, they suffered from migraines. After three to six months of changing their lifestyle and their diet, they completely forgot the reason—one of the reasons why they came to me. One of their biggest health complaints had been, just six months before, debilitating migraines. I had to remind them. We had to go back and show them. They were like, oh my gosh, I haven't had one in so long. I forgot I ever had them.

We do that. I could say, what did you eat last Tuesday and how did you feel after that meal? You're like, I don't remember what I had for dinner last night. We don't remember how we feel. So if we start taking a new supplement, or changing—I'm going to go to bed an hour earlier, or just do something generally healthier for us. I'm going to drink two cups of water when I wake up first thing in the morning and go outside, or just making these simple changes.

We'll hear a podcast and make a change. Then a week later, we stop doing it because we're not really tracking. We don't really get that the long-term benefit built us up so much. I've had clients who every year their whole family gets sick all winter long—they catch every cold and flu. Then they work with me and they're like, oh my gosh, none of us took sick days off. I can't believe it. Our kids never had to miss school or whatever.

They just realized that after six months to a year of making these simple changes, that was the metric. “I looked and I have all my sick days. I didn't need to take any off. My kids weren't absent from school.”

Whereas the last five years we were. These things you don't feel on a day-to-day basis. You don't get how important the health changes are because it's not something you feel. You look and you go, that is measurable. A third person can come in and observe and go, wow, whatever you're doing is working.

I love the symptom inventory checklist because you will forget how crappy you felt before your health change, before this new health habit you took on. That's why I love my book because it's all about getting in tune with your body and then tracking it over time. There are 33 health habits that build up your foundation of health in my book. I didn't mean for this to be a little commercial for my book. I wish I could give a copy of my book for free to everyone. If I was a millionaire, I'd be in the street just handing it out.

My husband, for fun, because we bought a case of my books when it came out, went around to those little libraries in communities—just a box in a neighborhood. My husband went around and put my book in those. We go for walks in my neighborhood and we walk by a bunch of these little libraries that look like a mailbox, but you open it and you see books inside. It's like, take a book or leave a book or whatever. He would go around and leave them.

Then he'd come back the next day and go for a walk and they'd be gone. He's like, yes, we helped someone. This is so exciting.

You can buy my book because it's easy and it's all laid out there. I guide you through it. Addicted to Wellness is the book. You can get it on Amazon. You can go on my website, learntruehealth.com, but you could also just open an Excel spreadsheet. It's easier if you do my process because I prompt you, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Track your symptoms every month as you make health changes and you will be—everyone is—surprised. Everyone goes, wow, that got better, and they didn't know it because at the moment you can't compare how you felt a month ago.

I love that you did this thing where you questioned people and got that feedback. Even though it's just 10 people, that's where studies begin. We have to get a small cross-section to go, is it even worth investing in 100 people or a thousand people—a bigger study? What you got is literally a hundred percent of success rates. This is viable to now invest in a bigger study.

Chris Burres (1:25:44.230)

Yes, and that's exactly what we're doing. You said so many things there that resonate as we maybe talk about benefits people have shared with our product. Migraines is one of them. As you're talking about people who have forgotten migraines, I tend to tell the story regularly, so I don't forget about it.

I certainly fit into the category, in the example I gave earlier, where do my feet hurt when I wake up and not realizing it because it's just how they feel in the morning. We, even with our packages, actually have little trackers where you can track sleep and how you feel. It's very rudimentary. It's not nearly as complex as what you're describing. Although it's not complex, it's just not as in-depth is probably the right answer.

Because sometimes these things can be very subtle, and sometimes humans are flawed in their ability to look back and see if some changes have been made. I really think one of the challenges with biological age testing is that some people go into it—this one said I was 59 when I was 51—and think, I'm going to die sooner.

I don't think that's what those are. I think they are this really good qualitative tool for understanding: are you making progress? Are you going in the wrong direction?

Ashley James (1:27:10.706)

Yes, don't judge the first result. It's more over time—get this test over and over and see if you're trending in the right direction.

Chris Burres (1:27:18.382)

Yes. It will tell you—are the things that you're doing the right things. You brought up migraines. Maybe now we can start talking about the deep-down theory that we've landed on for our molecule.

Ashley James (1:27:34.258)

Yes, because after that rat study, I'm sure people were scratching their head going, what is this doing in the body that it's preventing—that's elongating life, but also preventing the rats' natural tumor production? This is wild. What is going on inside the body? What do we think the mechanism of action is?

Chris Burres (1:27:57.594)

Our current theory is the—by the way, people scratching their head trying to figure out what's going on—nobody was doing that more than me, because that was actually literally my job. Our current theory, we call it the BOSS theory: buffering oxidative stress system. I'm going to get a little sciencey. I have a fun analogy to pull this all together.

We know from peer-reviewed published research that this ESS60, this soccer ball-shaped molecule, gets into the mitochondria. I think I mentioned earlier that we know from way back in the '90s when it was discovered that it can hold up to six negatively charged particles on the exterior of the cage.

How that manifests, we think, in this BOSS theory is—a brief refresh—the mitochondria is the powerhouse of every cell. There's between 50 and 5,000 mitochondria in every cell in your body, except for your blood cells, which have zero, and your brain and neurons, which have two million. It's amazing how much energy our nervous system uses relative to our other systems.

Any power source—the mitochondria is the power source—there is a negative byproduct. You think about your car going down the road, it has exhaust. You think about a power plant, it's got smoke coming out of the smokestack. In the case of mitochondria, you've got reactive oxygen species.

I like to think about these like little bumper cars running around, rusting everything they slam into, causing oxidative stress, oxidative damage, and ultimately inflammaging. That's a fun word: the confluence of inflammation and aging. That's where—so internal to the mitochondria, you actually have the antioxidants glutathione and melatonin to manage those reactive oxygen species.

What happens when you stress a mitochondria? The first question is: how do you stress a mitochondria? I like to joke, you live in modern society. There are so many stresses around, you are stressing your mitochondria. If you're doing the right things, you should be doing some HIIT training. You should be doing some strength training. If you go on an airplane, you get more exposure to EMF radiation. It can be a tough conversation with a loved one, a tough email—there is stress everywhere.

When you stress your mitochondria, you actually increase the number of reactive oxygen species and you overwhelm the resident glutathione and melatonin. That's where we think the ESS60 molecule comes in. Again, we know from peer-reviewed published research it gets into the mitochondria. We believe that what it does is it holds on to those reactive oxygen species so they can't do any damage until that glutathione replenishes the melatonin and the glutathione to manage those reactive oxygen species appropriately.

I've got a fun analogy. Maybe you would agree that I believe all biological analogies should start with Mardi Gras. A lot of biology happens at Mardi Gras, so why not?

It's the end of Mardi Gras and you're on Bourbon Street and you've got these drunk reactive oxygen species causing oxidative stress, oxidative damage—painting cars, smashing windows, all that stuff. You've got to New Orleans Police Department—the glutathione and the melatonin—who come onto Bourbon Street, they handcuff themselves to those reactive oxygen species and get them off of Bourbon Street.

What does the New Orleans Police Department do when they get overwhelmed? They actually take those reactive oxygen species and they stick them in a paddy wagon. They attach them to the ESS60 molecule so they can't do any damage. Then when the New Orleans Police Department replenishes the glutathione, replenishes the melatonin, then they're able to handcuff themselves to those reactive oxygen species and get them off of Bourbon Street.

That's why we say that this ESS60 molecule is the BOSS: a buffering oxidative stress system.

The summary of that is we believe we're reducing the negative impact of stressed mitochondria. If you reduce the impact of stressed mitochondria, you should have head-to-toe testimonials in every body system. We certainly do have that.

Ashley James (1:32:18.648)

Especially neurological and degenerative I imagined.

Chris Burres (1:32:25.142)

Let's jump into migraines right away because you mentioned it already. I'm going to be sharing some experiences. I'll throw in the FDA disclaimer. The FDA has not evaluated our product. It is not intended to treat, diagnose, cure, or prevent any disease.

As I share anecdotes, I always like to share: just assume this isn't going to happen for you. If you dig into the research and if you listen to this podcast and it resonates with you, we do have a link. You'll be able to find it and you can go from there and do some testing yourself.

In my case, I really am this geeky scientist. I have a spreadsheet that goes back to 2014 of me tracking my migraines. I'd get four to five migraines per year. I was tracking them, trying to stop them. If you've never had them, I can assure you they really, really suck. So I'm trying to track them, figure out what's going on.

When I started taking our product on a regular basis in 2018, I didn't get a single migraine—I think it was for about 18 months. Actually, the first migraine I got after that time period was when I went off of the product to join the sleep study. I told you the sleep study is a crossover and you go off of it for 10 days. That 10 days that I went off of it, I got a migraine.

I'll share—I get one or two per year, but the difference between what they are and what they were: now I'll get an aura. I get this little piece in my field of vision that looks like a kaleidoscope. It'll start on the side of my vision, go to the middle. Lasts about 15, maybe 20 minutes. I can literally work through it.

Most migraine sufferers, when they're experiencing a migraine—and this was true of me—need to go to a dark room, it needs to be cold, there can be no sound, there can be no light. I'm literally able to work through the migraines now. I also like to couple that—my experience—with my wife. My wife used to get nine plus migraines per month.

I remember the number nine because she had a medication and they would only give her nine per month. So she actually got around 13. She would just have to suffer through those additional four without this medication.

She's my spouse, so it took me a while to convince her to try my product. What do you know about supplements? You're a carbon nanomaterial scientist. I don't necessarily blame her, even, but I finally got her to try the product and she went down from that nine plus to one or two a month or even every other month.

So yes, if you're talking about reducing the negative impact of stressed mitochondria, and every brain cell has two million mitochondria, then you're having this really positive impact.

Ashley James (1:35:20.424)

My gosh, I love it. I love it so much. What about SOD? Does it help? Do we think it helps increase SOD or work with SOD? The superoxide dismutase.

Chris Burres (1:35:38.700)

Yes, so I just had an interview with Dr. Nayan Patel. He's got a glutathione product on the market and a book called The Glutathione Revolution. As I was reading the first two chapters of his book, talking about glutathione in the mitochondria and how it reacts, and how actually vitamin C will replenish glutathione, I'm about to have a conversation with him.

Just a freestyle—hey, how might there be synergies between ESS60 and glutathione? Maybe it's taking a role of vitamin C, et cetera. I haven't really looked at SOD, but I do have a different model because I think this might explain it. I'm trying to think, let me first talk about.

We've got an extreme case. If we want to talk about stressing mitochondria, my friend Anthony Kunkel—he's a two-time US ultrarunning champion. If anybody stresses mitochondria, he does. At any given point, he's running 200 miles a week. He's won a US championship at 50 miles and he's won a US championship at 50K, which is 62 miles.

My first conversation with him was fascinating. He said, “Chris, I was taking one serving of the formula. I didn't really notice anything.” I joke, like all good biohackers, “I tripled the serving.” By the way, don’t triple everything. The first thing that pops to my mind—if you're playing around with rapamycin, do not triple it.

He tripled it and he said, “I was blown away. I believe that your product could be the difference between somebody having running as a hobby and running as a career.” He went on to say, “I don't think your product speeds exercise recovery. I believe it prevents damage in the first place.”

The reason I say that he said that is because on the last five miles of a 50-mile run—by the way, that's a phrase I will only ever hear from Anthony, ever—on the last five miles of a 50-mile run, where strength and stability were previously a problem—they are no longer a problem.

I mapped this out in my mind with this analogy. The reality is: stress is good for us. If we don't have stress, we will just turn into an amoeba blob. If you have any doubts about that, think about astronauts. Astronauts, when they come back from space from even relatively short trips, their bone density has decreased, their immune system is compromised just by this reduction in the stress of gravity.

I picture our physiology as this beautiful prairie with prairie grasses and flowers flowing in the wind. The gentle rain is the stress—this positive, good stress that we need. What happens when you do something like Anthony Kunkel—run 30 miles in a day? I picture it like this deep dark cloud over the prairie, pouring down rain, a stream of water onto the prairie.

What's that going to do? That's going to damage, it's going to impinge on the prairie and create this hole—this mud pit. That's where I like to picture the ESS60 molecule coming in between the cloud and the prairie and acting like a sponge, holding on to that stress.

Now it's important to note, if you don't manage that deep dark cloud, eventually the sponge will fill up and it'll start pouring on the prairie again. This is a buffer, not an absolute solution.

Then when that cloud goes away—when he's finished his 30-mile run—you can picture gently squeezing the sponge across the prairie. So now you've gotten away without doing the actual damage.

In comparison with SOD, I think as you utilize it and deplete it, that's when you have this challenge with reactive oxygen species—that they start to do damage. That's where we believe the ESS60 molecule comes in and acts as that buffer, holding on to that stream of water until you can move past that stress point.

Then now your body can replenish glutathione, melatonin, and SOD, and actually manage those reactive oxygen species.

Ashley James (1:40:07.452)

For those who didn't take biology in college, your cell has powerhouses called mitochondria. It produces ATP, which is cellular energy. Like a car, it has exhaust. The exhaust is damaging the body. The body has molecules that it produces—glutathione, SOD, melatonin—to come in and mop it up.

But because we live in a world where we're not living optimally, we're pushing ourselves to the max. The mitochondria are creating more exhaust than we're able to catch up and keep up to. It's possible that we're not living a lifestyle and eating healthy enough to produce adequate amounts of melatonin and SOD and all the other antioxidants in the body.

We are not maybe consuming enough vitamin C, for example, because we're not eating. Our plate isn't filled with the rainbow. Then even if it is, are we getting it from—is it really fresh? Was it grown in mineral-rich soil? Was it even grown in soil? Does it have minerals? It could be hydroponically grown. Most people aren't. They're not getting adequate nutrition. Even if they are, they're like, well, I don't really go to the gym. I don't really stress myself out.

Just daily living is producing these reactive oxygen species, which then is damaging us from the inside out. Inside ourselves is aging or “inflammaging”—I love that term. Damaging ourselves from the inside at the cellular level because we're not doing what we need to do in our lifestyle to produce enough antioxidants to squelch the flames.

So the C60 comes around and holds it in prison basically—holds the bad guys in prison so they can't do the damage in the first place. Then hold them there until the body can mop it up.

Are we concerned about a buildup of C60 since you're saying it’s apparently crossing the blood-brain barrier? It's getting inside our cells. If it's getting inside our cells, does it naturally leave the body or does it accumulate? Are we concerned about that?

Chris Burres (01:42:52.791)

Yes, well, yes, you should be concerned about that. The research suggests that it's excreted after about 10 days.

We also have some really good parallels. I mentioned some clients will not come back to us and say, “Hey, I want to cancel my subscription. I haven’t really noticed anything.” I literally had one—it was about two weeks ago. I canceled it because I didn’t notice anything. Then, as soon as I stopped taking it, at about the 10-day point, I realized what I was missing and I will never stop taking your product.

That’s the thing I’ll share. My business coach, the way he describes it is: for 50 years, he needed the alarm clock. Once he started taking the formula, he wakes up before the alarm clock. He's a business coach. He’s got late nights, he’s got dinners, mixers, whatever. None of that really matters. He wakes up before the alarm clock. When I don’t get him any product, at about the 10-day point, he’s like, “Hey—” he sends me a text, “I’m needing my alarm clock again,” which is code for he needs another supply.

Yes, data suggests that it’s excreted in 10 days.

Ashley James (1:44:02.890)

I'm just going to play the devil's advocate here because I am also skeptical, but I'm a big open-minded skeptic.

I'm thinking to myself, what if it stays in the cell and then it mops up? It gets full?

You stop taking it and it gets full of all the free radicals.

Those free radicals get mopped up and it holds onto them?

Then they run out?

It's held it. I'm just thinking about what proves that it clears the body. It doesn't accumulate or cause a negative impact in the long term.

Because what if it stays there and I guess the cells naturally turn over anyway. You see what I mean?

Chris Burres (1:45:01.026)

Yes, that's some of it. Natural cell turnover.

Even in these studies, and these are animal studies, they're tracking how much of the molecule is coming out in the feces, and they're mapping to the amount that was given to the animal models and saying that the research suggests it's out in 10 days. That's one piece.

Ashley James (1:45:24.162)

Got it. Then it's processed by the liver, if it's coming out through the feces.

Chris Burres (1:45:28.950)

Yes, 100%. It turns out, so this is extremely fascinating because we haven't even gotten to why olive oil.

If you were to hold this black powder—because it's carbon, it's a black powder, it's a crystalline powder—like sugar crystals or salt crystals, just black. If it's ESS-60, you can consume it safely and excrete it because it's not water soluble, but it's not very bioavailable because it's not water soluble.

That's the reason we dissolve it in olive oil. Once you dissolve it, you get it down to these individual soccer ball molecules, these individual ESS-60 molecules. Now it's basically infinitely more bioavailable than the crystals, but it's still not water soluble.

Your body's using it with the lipid that it's gotten into the body with, getting through the lipid layers of the cells, even into the mitochondria. Then when it's done, it's going out through the feces. It never transitions to a water-soluble version.

Ashley James (1:46:28.226)

Carbon is so interesting. I interviewed Dr. J. Davidson a few years ago and this isn't C60 by any means, but he uses different carbons—to mop up the waste from dying parasites. He has a whole parasite protocol and I decided to take it. He sent me a kit and I decided to take it.

It's very strict. All day long, you're taking a certain herb or something. Obviously you're always going to be on an empty stomach, so you just have to really time your meals and this whole thing. Then in between, you take four or five of these large capsules of this carbon, which is activated carbon, but it's a special activated carbon.

He explains that the body absorbs something like only 30% of it, which is a lot compared to others, and it helps to neutralize those really nasty chemicals left behind from dying and dead parasites. I didn't even know I had parasites, but I'm like, I lived here long enough, I ate enough sushi, I probably got something—might as well do it.

For the first few days, I was totally fine, didn't feel any problems, I was doing great. Then one day I got super busy, had a lot of friends come over, and I took the herbs. These herbs, I've taken them in the past. I know I'm not having a bad reaction or anything, but I took the herbs and I forgot to do the carbon.

The next morning I woke up feeling like I was dying. I was so sick. Then I realized, I forgot the carbon the next day. So I took a bunch of it and drank some water and chilled out.

Chris Burres (1:48:24.051)

Was it approximately three times as much? I tripled the serving.

Ashley James (1:48:28.727)

Yes, literally handfuls. I was like, I’ve got to get this because I felt death turned over. Then I slowly started to feel better. Then, eventually that day, I got back to feeling 100 percent. I was like, this really does do something. He explained that it mops up the parasite toxins. That was how I knew this thing works.

I've had only a handful of times where I’ve had a feeling—maybe food poisoning or feeling like I'm just not 100 percent. I'll take some of that supplement, which again is just carbon, activated charcoal thing. It actually really helps. I’m like, wow, that’s really interesting. Just carbon in general— and I know C60 is very different from, you said, even C59? It’s going to be very different because of the structure when it comes to the chemistry and how it interacts with your body.

It's fun to think about that we could play around with different carbons just as medicine. As a side note, my husband's grandfather was a professor at Caltech along with Einstein. Einstein came over for dinner and they knew each other, and it was really cool.

They didn't work on the same projects, but he invented a medicine that the whole family uses and it’s carbon-based. There are different carbons in it and silver in it and everything. It'll cure a sore throat in two seconds. The whole family never used antibiotics because of his little invention. He never sold it. It was just for friends and family.

Just how cool—you can really geek out on how neat carbon is as a medicine.

Chris Burres (1:50:27.863)

I want to take this to even another level. Because one of the things that is true about almost every form of carbon is the molecules, the structures are too big to cross the gut barrier. The magic that this is doing is actually in your intestinal tract.

We did a brief study. We took some of the leftover products, which were still fullerene-rich, relatively speaking. Gave them to the University of Houston Mechanical Engineering Department, and they came back and said that this sample is as good or better than activated charcoal. Now, if you extrapolate that and say, this ESS60 molecule—it's carbon. It's got certainly some activated carbon-like attributes.

But it's actually able to get into your system. Is it actually binding with things that are in your system that can't be tackled by activated charcoal unless you get into that liver and bile loop? You’re right. It's really fascinating.

Ashley James (1:51:37.615)

I love it. Yours, we know because it's the way it's dissolved in olive oil. You were going to say why olive oil, but it needs to be fat soluble in order to be absorbed and utilized by the body.

There are other oils out there. I appreciate that you stick to the original study because the original study showed that just olive oil alone—this has to be quality olive oil. It can't be olive oil that's been exposed to oxygen, heat, and sunlight. There are medicinal properties in olive.

Honestly, you could just go eat olives and you'd be getting even more benefit because you'd be getting the minerals and the fiber and the phytonutrients. Olives are healthy, and everything in moderation. All of olives are healthy. It has to be dissolved, and you have it dissolved in the maximum amount of saturation in olive oil for it to get inside the body, past the gut barrier, so that our body can utilize it.

Awesome. Was there anything more that you were going to touch on when it comes to how it acts as an antioxidant or have we well established the theory?

Chris Burres (1:53:00.691)

Well, one, I want to close the loop on. We talked about the Petri dish with the cancer cells and the healthy cells and why might that have happened. We know that the mitochondria of cancer cells operate differently than the mitochondria of healthy cells. So that's where my current theory lands—we've got this BOSS theory. It's reducing the negative impact of stressed mitochondria.

Introducing a poison is a way to stress mitochondria, but it actually functions differently. The energy source is different. I think that's part of what's going on in that Petri dish. You talked about being concerned with antioxidants during cancer protocols. Your doctors would say, “Hey, eat Twinkies, don't eat fruit.” Not my recommendation—a humorous extra.

So the reality is that the ESS60 molecule is a selective antioxidant, because the same is actually true if you're a bodybuilder or if you're doing these things that require a hormetic response. The bodybuilders will lift weights—and everybody should be lifting heavy things to maintain their muscle mass. Your goal is to break down the muscle and then have this hormetic response of growth or strengthening.

It's well documented that too many antioxidants will stop that. Just like you'll have a negative impact on cancer treatment. But that's not true of things like hydrogen—a selective antioxidant—and this ESS60 molecule. Because remember when we discussed what it can hold on the exterior of the cage, it's negatively charged particles. It's not positively charged particles.

There's some chemical stuff you can do, but it turns out that when you're in a mitochondria, it's producing both negative and positively charged reactive oxygen species. It turns out that the negatively charged ones are the ones that do more damage and less signaling. We know that we need these reactive oxygen species to run around and do signaling, saying, “Hey, we've got muscles over here that need to be attended to.”

It turns out that the positively charged ones do less damage and more signaling. So this is that selective antioxidant piece of the molecule.

Ashley James (01:55:40.738)

My gosh, that's so cool. My brain is just exploding with excitement. This is really, really interesting. It's mitigating the unhealthy stress while not even touching the healthy stress. That's heaven. That's what a perfect balance. That's so cool.

Chris Burres (1:55:55.855)

Again, if that's what we're doing, we should have head-to-toe testimonials. In fact, we do.

Ashley James (1:56:00.791)

All right, let's get into it. Let's talk about the testimonials.

Chris Burres (1:56:04.527)

One of my favorites, because it includes arguably the worst testimonial about a supplement ever, is there's a lady, Gwen, here in town, and she's the largest distributor of our product in Houston. She originally purchased the product for her dog. She has a Pekingese, and she had no intent on taking the product.

She orders the product for her dog, notices such a profound difference in her dog, and I have to pause here.

Because we've been talking for almost two hours here. Still, people should have their radars up. This is new. This is fantastic. Is placebo going on here? By the way, I will tell you, it just occurs with everything you ever take.

When you're taking that statin that works, when you're taking that vitamin C to get over the cold that works — the placebo is, in fact, everywhere. One place that it is not is with pets.

This and babies. With pets, there's, ironically, they're not smart enough to know that they got the dropper and so they're supposed to be more youthful that day. They just act the way they feel.

Gwen noticed such a profound difference in her dog, she starts taking the product. I actually recorded a video with her and she said, “Chris, if you had asked me at the three-month mark if I'd noticed anything, my first response would have been no. I would have just said, ‘Haven't really noticed anything.’”

I slowed down and I took stock of my life. I was working a little bit later. I was waking up earlier. I was never a morning person. And then arguably the worst testimonial about a supplement ever, I cleaned my garage. 

You probably pushed it off for a bit of time before you actually got to it. So yes, it's funny, and we don't use it in marketing material, but it does mean something. It's a bigger task. It's a task potentially with some emotional baggage in the garage. So ultimately, it does mean something.

I think what drives it is, I'll give you my sleep testimonial.

I have to embarrassingly admit that I used to take two naps before noon on Saturdays and Sundays. What that would look like—my wife and I have twins. When they were younger, they wanted to wake up and watch cartoons, so I would go down, I would lay down on the couch, and they would physically sit on top of me while I'm taking my first nap.

Somebody pointed out, that's a really good parenting technique, because if they get up to mess with anything, they'll wake you up.

I took the first nap, and then we would go downstairs for breakfast, come back up, resume the position, and I literally would take two. If we were out of town or if we had something to do, obviously I wasn't taking naps, but I would every Saturday and Sunday, take two naps before noon.

Then when I started taking the product regularly which took a little while, because I'm like you were talking about, I took the herbs and not the carbon—that’s me. I'm not great. My compliance on medical or wellness efforts is not that great.

But when I started taking the product more regularly, they were young at the time, they're 15 now — but they were young at the time, we would get into the same position. I'm going to take my nap. I just wouldn't. I just wasn't tired.

And that's the kind of thing that would drive you to go clean your garage.

Ashley James (1:59:47.025)

That is such a great testimonial, you might not necessarily notice you feel better, but then you start doing stuff.

I've had a few clients come back to me and be like, I've been in more pain, I'm worse off. I'm like, okay, and this is usually early on, I'm like, okay, before we started working together, before these changes, what did your life look like? I sat on the couch all day or whatever. They weren't really active.

I'm like, okay, and what did you do this weekend?

I went for a hike, I gardened, I ran around with my grandkids. I'm like, so you mean to tell me that you've made these health changes in the last two weeks that we've been working together, and you went from completely sedentary to doing a five-mile hike with your family, and now you're coming back to me complaining you're in pain and you're more exhausted?

I'm like, you just were motivated to accomplish more than you have in a very long time.

A lot of times people don't do that little check-in and go, the health changes are actually making me feel so good. I am now able to do so much more, because we don't necessarily feel more energy. We just are more alert and then we have endurance so that we just don't get exhausted easily.

That is a true sign of health — going in the trending in the right direction. I love it.

Chris Burres (2:01:10.727)

Yes, and I think what you described again points to the importance of tracking.

It's very easy to go, I would love to believe again that I'm very mindful and in tune, but the data says that I am not. I actually need to write things down.

Ashley James (2:01:31.339)

It's been really cool having you on the show and I just want to keep having you here. I know it's been two hours and I just want to just keep geeking out. I'd love to have you back on the show, especially after these studies have been published.

I want to make sure listeners know they can go to myvitalc.com/LTH as in Learn True Health. Of course the link is going to be in the show notes of today's podcast.

You're giving a discount to my listeners for trying their first bottle. Thank you so much for giving a discount.

Then you also have your book and we'll make sure that the link to your book is available. You do do a donation to charity. Do you want to let us know about that as well?

Chris Burres (2:02:16.430)

Well, yes, let me provide a little bit of guidance. When you go to myvitalc.com/LTH, we do actually sell an olive oil, avocado oil, and MCT oil.

Before I jump into this—my routine daily now, and by the way, because I've already admitted I'm not good at this. When I finally got it as part of my coffee routine, that's when I started taking it on a daily basis. Prior to that, actually, I could get to two or three in the afternoon.

If I thought that I needed a cup of coffee or a nap, I could always look back and I hadn't taken the product that day.

What I do now is I do a bulletproof coffee thing. That's supposed to be high quality coffee, some ghee, and then some MCT. I actually removed the ghee. It's purified butter. I don't like the flavor that much. I also don't want those calories, but I do do our MCT, about a teaspoon and a half in our coffee.

While that's blending, I'll take about a teaspoon and a half of our olive oil. I don't think we covered this exactly.

Ashley James (2:03:18.836)

You got a habit stacking there because while you're making your coffee, you take your supplement. That's great.

My husband used to, while he was making coffee, do floor exercises until the coffee was finished brewing. This is back when we had a coffee pot. Habit stacking is great. Take something you normally do. If you brush your teeth, you could put your bottle, let's say, beside your toothbrush. You always remember to brush your teeth, at least you should, twice a day and scrape your tongue. Then you could even maybe do some oil pulling and then swallow it when you're done if you wanted to. Just have whatever you want to remember to do attached to either before, during, or after an activity you always do. That's called habit stacking.

I do that. I have to say a caveat. Some people cannot do Bulletproof coffee. We see elevated liver markers in some of my clients when they increase their fats that much. So we want to just keep it in check because sometimes people go really nuts with the Bulletproof coffee and go excessive amounts. Then they don't feel it's excessive, but we see their liver gets really stressed out from it, and we don't want to do that.

If you're doing Bulletproof coffee, less is more and watch your liver markers would be my biggest advice.

Chris Burres (2:04:39.718)

Because you brought up liver, I do have to throw in this. In that original study, they had one extra piece where a separate set of rats—water, olive oil, and olive oil with ESS-60—were injected with carbon tetrachloride. This is an oxidative agent that attacks the liver. They were trying to look at the antioxidant capability of the molecule.

They allowed some certain time, I think it was about 24 hours, to pass after the injection. They humanely euthanized the rats and dissected them and looked at the livers. The water rats did not recover. The olive oil rats recovered some—again, supporting “consume more olive oil.” The ESS-60 rats, their livers almost completely recovered. Again, managing that oxidative stress in the liver is pretty amazing, at least in that particular study.

Yes, so I did pull out the ghee. I think it's too much, certainly too much for me. So a teaspoon and a half of MCT and a teaspoon and a half of olive oil. If you're looking for, hey, what should I take? Again, our dosing is one teaspoon of olive oil. This will taste like a high-quality extra virgin olive oil, because that's exactly what it is. It's got as much of the ESS-60 molecule in it.

If you're thinking about olive oil, avocado oil, or MCT oil and wondering which one you should start with, we always recommend the olive oil for two reasons. The first is we're a science-based organization, and almost all of the research is in olive oil. Then second, there's a higher concentration of the ESS-60 molecule in the olive oil. You get about 0.8 milligrams per milliliter in the olive oil, 0.6 in avocado oil, and then 0.3 in MCT oil. We do recommend the olive oil.

We also do offer, in addition to the coupon code for your audience that'll get them $15 off, a 25% discount on subscription. Even if you're just like, “Hey, I'm going to try one bottle,” go ahead and go on subscription. As I mentioned earlier, our customer service department has a thousand five-star reviews on Google. They're not trained to talk you out of canceling your subscription. You can send an email, you can call—whatever—and cancel it. But take advantage of that discount.

Honestly, most people just stay on subscription.

Then the book piece. I do have my book. It's called Live Longer and Better. It's available on Amazon for $20, and you can buy it on our website for $20. It's not on that landing page. Again, go to myvitalc.com/LTH, get the coupon code. You can go to the menu structure, find the book. The book is also $20 on our website, but for an extra $10, I will autograph that book for you and 100% of that $10 goes to Operation Underground Railroad.

You may remember the movie The Sound of Freedom, which was a great movie about a horrible topic—and that's child sex trafficking, which obviously should be off of our planet yesterday. Operation Underground Railroad is doing a fantastic job.

In my opinion, I actually got a chance to see him speak at an event the week before the movie came out. So it just moved me to do that.

I'll add one other thing—on the landing page, we do have a freebie. I've done lots of interviews—not nearly as many as you, Ashley. I did a longevity summit where I interviewed 55 experts in longevity, including Dave Asprey, Ben Greenfield, Steven Gundry. I compiled 15 top biohacks. That is a freebie that you can get at that landing page. Just need your email address.

Ashley James (2:08:24.190)

Awesome. The first thing is go to myvitalc.com/LTH and try the subscription so you get the discount that you're giving. Then go grab your book and then sign up for your email list so you can get those. There's lots of cool stuff, basically.

I'm going to make sure—the links are there in the show notes of today's interview at LearnTrueHealth.com.

Chris, it's been really cool having you on the show. This bottle—and you're offering it in different forms, like you said—I'm definitely going to try your olive oil for sure. I'm very excited.

Medicinal olive oil after you take it, should make your throat tickle. It should be like you start trying to clear your throat. It should have this tickly sensation, it's almost a numbing tickly sensation. That's when you know  you've got that medicinal compound. That's why you got a good one. 

Chris Burres (2:09:28.963)

I call it a peppery flavor. You may have been to an Italian restaurant where they'll put the olive oil and then they'll crack pepper in it. They're actually trying to make that olive oil taste more expensive.

Ashley James (2:09:40.439)

No, give me the good stuff bring out the good stuff don't give me the don't give you that cheap stuff

Chris Burres (2:09:48.515)

I don't need cracked pepper. I'll share this. You do not need cracked pepper in our olive oil.

Ashley James (2:09:52.451)

It'll taste peppery to begin with. That's cool.  If I took a dose that you recommend as an adult, how long does that bottle last?

Chris Burres (2:10:02.257)

The bottle is 120 mL. It's at 24 days if you're taking the full teaspoon or full 5 mL. You can back off just a little and that'll be fine and stretch it to a full 30 days.

I'll tell you, I've been going through our orders. We just switched to Shopify, so it's been a little bit of work lately. A little bit more work lately. It's always a little bit of work. Just noticing how many people are ordering the 240 mL bottle. They're double bottles and even two at a time.

It's just amazing. We have customers who have ordered 151 times. We've been in business since 1990—since 2019—selling this product through this website. They're ordering multiple products per month for the entire time we've been in business.

Ashley James (2:10:54.793)

Wow. It'd be neat to interview them.

Chris Burres (2:10:58.529)

Yes, as I'm seeing them, I'm like, one, I'm flagging them because I want to do a social media post about it. Then two, yes, have conversations with them.

Ashley James (2:11:07.935)

No, you should totally do a series. Maybe offer them a case of product or something. Offer them something. You should totally interview them because I'd love to hear their stories. These people have been ordering for years. What's going on? They're probably giving it to all their animals, their friends, their family. I know people who will invest in their animals—their dogs and cats. They'll invest in their animals before they'll invest in themselves. Same with children—we'll invest in our children before we'll invest in ourselves.

So even just to extend the life of your pet, which would in turn mean saving you in vet bills, but just to extend the life of your pet and also, I'm thinking of our elderly people we're taking care of—our grandmas and grandpas, and our mother-in-laws and father-in-laws, and moms and dads. I'm thinking about the older people in my life that I want to give a bottle to and see how it will in turn help them. It gets me excited.

Chris Burres (2:12:07.477)

We actually do have pet versions too. We have a dog version and a cat version. It's really just our olive oil—our high-quality olive oil product—with a little bit of bacon essence for the dogs and a little bit of salmon essence for the dogs.

I already mentioned one pet testimonial. It's, again, there's no placebo with pets. It's fascinating. It actually reminded me—there's a guy, Kiles Zagradowski. He's the CEO and one of the founders of OsteoStrong. That's an organization helping people build bone density. It's at least across the U.S. and probably global, certainly into some other nations.

His son bring home the runt of a litter, and the dog had water on its brain. It was shaking all the time, could barely eat. Took it to the vet. They're like, this is not going to make it.

My product showed up three days after the dog showed up. He was triple-serving the dog. The dog, at the time he wrote—and this is a review that's on Google—he wrote, yes, the dog's 80% better. When I took it back to the vet, the vet was like, this is miraculous.

What Kyle, who's in the health and wellness industry, said was, “Chris, I will never not take your product.”

It's amazing.

Ashley James (2:13:30.953)

That's so cool. Chris I’m very excited to publish this and get this information out there, especially because I do know some of my listeners who have come to me and we've chatted about C60. They were buying it from shady places on the internet, going, I hear, I've seen the studies, I've heard the stories, but we didn't have a place to buy it that was trustworthy—and now we do.

Thank you. I'm excited to get my bottle, and I'll let the listeners know how it's going for me, especially in our Facebook group—the Learn True Health Facebook group—where we all jam and share. We've got thousands of listeners there in that group, and we all ask questions and answer questions and share with each other. I'll be sure to definitely share my journey there as well. Myvitalc.com/LTH gets you that discount.

I am also going to sign up. I'm going to do what you said, because I looked at it and I was like, bigger discount with the autoship. Don't mind if I do. I'll be doing that because you said, please cancel if you don't like it. You're standing behind your product. I think that's great. You've got great customer service. I appreciate you and all you do.

Please come back on the show, especially after you publish those studies, because I can't wait to jam with you again and learn more.

Chris Burres (2:14:52.088)

Ashley, thank you so much for having me. You asked some great questions. This was a great journey. I enjoyed spending this. It went so fast. Two hours and 15 minutes with you is amazing.

Ashley James (2:15:02.091)

I know. I'm like, man, can I do a three-hour? I don't know. We'll just have to have you back. Thanks so much.

Chris Burres (2:15:11.445)

I think we could have. Thank you, Ashley.

Outro:

I hope you enjoyed today's interview with Chris. This is certainly an interesting topic, and anything we can do to support the optimal function of our mitochondria, of our cells, to extend not only the length of our life but the quality of our life. The quality of each and everyday and I love that just something simple like adding this natural supplement can drastically improve our health in the now, the quality of our life in the now and for years to come—especially with our pets and elderly family members, just think of all the people. Our furry children, our furry animal children, and our regular children and just everyone that we love in our life—could be supported by this Pure C60.

You can go to myvitalc.com/LTH for the special coupon code that he is giving listeners. I'm just so happy that we can provide a discount that allows you to enjoy a bottle and see how it works for you.

I want you to come to our Facebook group and share your experience with it, or you can email me: support@learntruehealth.com. But go to myvitalc.com/LTH, grab yourself a bottle and, like he said, even if you don't intend to be on subscription, scroll halfway down the page to the area where it says subscribe and save. You save something between $40 and $60 additional in addition to the coupon. If you go on subscribe and save, then you can cancel. You can call them up—they have a five-star rating—and you can call up and cancel the subscription. He wants you to get that biggest discount.

In looking at his sales, he says most people actually stay on subscription because they notice a difference, and because it makes such a big difference—which is exciting. We only want to do these things if they work, and he stands behind his product.

That's another thing—I only align myself with companies that make a difference, that are backed by science, that really will help you and that, hopefully, give us a discount too. Also, they have some kind of money-back guarantee or some kind of guarantee, because if a company doesn't stand behind their product, that's a red flag for me. So I love that he does.

If you want, you can go to the description in wherever you're listening from. Just go to the show notes and the link is right there: myvitalc.com/LTH gets you right there to the coupon code. You're going to have to look at it. It tells you the coupon code because it's a picture—I think it's just so that it can hide from the bots. But you just go and look at the coupon code, and then from there you can use that coupon code when you're purchasing.

Right now, the coupon code is truehealth—all one word. So go to myvitalc.com/LTH, and use that coupon code and give it a shot. Let me know how it goes.

I want to hear from you. I want to hear your results. I'm going to have Chris on the show again in about two months. That'll give my family and me some time to be on this version of C60. I've never been on his version before, which is the purest in the world, and to experience it for ourselves. Then we're going to dive deeper into the science and into the studies and take this episode to the next level. That's going to happen in two months. So you could be on this journey with us—grab yourself a bottle or two and let me know how it goes for you.

You can also send in your questions to me, because I'm going to have him back on the show. If you have any questions for Chris, please feel free to email them to me: support@learntruehealth.com.

Or you can come into the Facebook group—the Learn True Health Facebook group—and shoot me a question right there. Just say, “Hey, these are my questions for Chris.” It's a great community. We have thousands of listeners in there, and we're asking questions and answering questions and helping each other. Just today, there's a woman asking about water filters. We often talk about things like that—those real-life things like what kind of water filter do you use, what do you recommend for this kind of supplement or this kind of problem—and people are sharing all the time. It's great because it's a wonderful holistic community.

A lot of my guests are in the Facebook group too and answer questions as well. So come, join that sense of community where we can all focus on our holistic health together by going to the Learn True Health Facebook group.

You go to learntruehealth.com/group—that forwards you there. Learntruehealth.com/group.

Then, of course, join my newsletter. I have a brand new newsletter. I've spent months working on it, creating articles that help build your health up no matter where you are in your health journey. It's designed to take your health to the next level. I also give you a part of my book for free when you do that.

You can go to learntruehealth.com/free. That's learntruehealth.com/free to get on my newsletter—my brand new newsletter. I'd love to see you there and share everything that can support your body's ability to heal itself so you can achieve and learn true health.

Thank you so much for sharing this episode with those you care about, and thank you so much for listening. In this day and age, to have optimal health, we can't just wait to get sick and go to the doctor. We have to educate ourselves, and this podcast is designed to support us in this way. By sharing these episodes with those you care about, we're helping to end needless suffering.

The more you share, the more we are helping others—and you don't even know what kind of ripple effect it'll have, like that domino effect. You share it with this one person, that one person shares it with another person, and then, all of a sudden, it's been an answer to a prayer. So please continue to share my episodes with those you care about, because we are making such a significant difference in people's lives by bringing them the health answers they've been looking for.

Look forward to more amazing episodes to come. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.

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