556: The Molecule That Slows Aging and Boosts Health

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!

In this episode of the Learn True Health Podcast, Ashley James welcomes back Chris Burres of MyVitalC to explore the science of longevity, mindset, and the body’s power to heal itself. They discuss his groundbreaking molecule ESS60, its role in boosting energy, improving sleep, and reducing chronic pain, along with powerful insights from his Longevity Summit, where 55 experts revealed the top habits for living longer. Together, they dive into stem cell regeneration, nutrition, and the impact of mindset on healing, offering practical ways to protect and support your body’s natural ability to thrive at any age.

Highlights:

• ESS60 relieves chronic pain and migraines. Ashley’s husband’s severe migraine-like pain disappears within minutes after taking ESS60, showing its powerful anti-inflammatory effects.
• Mindset shapes healing and longevity. Believing the body can heal itself opens the door to recovery, while negative belief systems block transformation.
• ESS60 enhances energy, sleep, and recovery. Users report feeling more endurance, faster recovery in the gym, and better quality sleep over time.
  
• Stem cells are the body’s repair system. As we age, stem cell production declines, making regeneration slower and increasing the need to protect bone marrow health.
• Acorn preserves your own stem cells. Their ethical process extracts pluripotent stem cells from hair follicles for long-term storage instead of invasive bone marrow collection.
• Nutrition determines stem cell success. Even expensive stem cell therapy fails without proper nutrients—healthy cells require vitamins, minerals, and amino acids to thrive.
• Gluten, sugar, and processed grains harm longevity. Experts agree that removing these foods improves gut health, reduces inflammation, and boosts overall vitality.
• American wheat and flour additives cause illness. Chemicals, glyphosate, and synthetic vitamins in U.S. flour make bread intolerable for many who can eat it abroad.
• ESS60 promotes cellular repair and skin health. Ashley experienced fading rosacea and smoother skin as the antioxidant compound supported internal healing.
• Helping others heal drives true purpose. Both hosts share a mission to empower people through mindset shifts, better nutrition, and natural healing science.

Ashley James (0:00:03.876)

Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 556.

I am so excited to have Chris Burress back on the show. His website is myvitalc.com. If you go to myvitalc.com/LTH, he gives our listeners an amazing discount.

Thank you so much, by the way. The listeners who tried it and got back to me have had life-changing experiences. I personally have had a really cool experience with the purest C60 out there, and I'm excited to share it with you and the listeners.

I’ve been really looking forward to this interview. We had you on the show first back in episode 551. That wasn’t too, too long ago, but long enough — about two months or something. It gave us enough time to have a really good experience using your C60, my husband and I, and being able to judge it for ourselves.

So yes, I’m looking forward to sharing that with you. How have you been? How’s the summer? How did it treat you?

Chris Burres (0:01:18.433)

It's been absolutely amazing. We're kind of gearing up as we're heading through the end of the year. We're going to a bunch of conferences. Some we'll have booths at, others I'll just be attending.

One I feel really privileged that I can share — I'm attending as a VIP. I was invited as a VIP, and that feels amazing. So yes, gearing up for that. I love these events. They're exhausting, but I love these events because I get face-to-face time. I get to share the story again and on an individualized basis.

There's just the serendipity of life and who you meet. I'll just share this because it's amazing. I'm having this conversation — I might remember her name here in a second — with a doctor, something or other. It was a 40-minute conversation, and at some point, I mentioned a doctor that I'm using here. So not my traditional practitioner, but somebody kind of a biohacking doctor that I'm working with, Dr. Burzynski .

She goes, I went to medical school with him. It's crazy. So yes, I love those types of things and these types of events. I'm really excited about that. But I'm also excited to hear the testimonials that you've kind of alluded to.

I do love my running joke, as cheesy as it may be. I love to come back and visit with you and find out what it was like to live twice as long.

Ashley James (0:02:53.110)

That's good. I love it. I'm really excited. I didn't know that you worked with Dr. Burzynski , so I'm definitely going to be talking about that in this interview.

But yes, let me read you the testimonial. One of my listeners, her name is Kim, says, she’s on day four — meaning day four of the myvitalc.com/LTH to get your C60. I'm not very smooth at sounding like an infomercial. This is not an infomercial. But this stuff's so cool, I want everyone to try it.

So she says, I'm on day four, and my family is on day two. I guess she was the guinea pig for two days. Her family was looking at her, saying, if you drop dead, we know it's not safe to take that. So two days into her taking it, she's like, okay guys, it's safe now.

We are already blown away. I think I told you about our mold toxicity. My husband told me today that he feels like he's 15 years younger.

So remember, he's on day two of taking this — just a little five-milliliter tiny bit. It's a thimble full. Of this very high-quality olive oil mixed with as high a saturation as you can get of the C60 mixed in with the olive oil.

So he's on day two. He feels like he's 15 years younger. He has so much energy. I really feel this is a life changer for us, and I want to thank you so much for spreading awareness about it.

Then we have a little conversation about how exciting that is. I'm just scrolling down because I don't want to share her personal information, but she says, seriously, my husband called me just to tell me. I feel like I'm crying. I watched a few more interviews with Chris, but you had the best questions.

So I'm like, yes, thank you. Pat on the back. Feels good. VIP interviewer right here.

Then she said, I really appreciate how he explained the mechanism of action. It totally makes sense in our case with our toxin load. She goes, I'm going to buy a few more bottles because we're running out. We're a family of seven. She says she's very excited to see how it helps her other health issues.

Yes, so she's been on it.

Another listener who messaged me said, I also started taking the C60, and I have a few noticeable changes. This is really cool. My gut is transformed.

She had been taking it for not too long, just a few weeks. She goes, my gut is transformed. I got some kind of weird viral thing two years ago, and it has been upset ever since. So taking the C60, for whatever reason, gives you a leg up metabolically, on a cellular level. It gives you a leg up in terms of the stress load that's happening intracellularly.

She couldn’t get over that for two years because of some viral thing that hurt her. She had an upset stomach and intestines for two years. She took C60, and now it’s gone. It’s healed. It stopped being upset.

Then she goes, my sleep is insane — so well-rested. That show is really neat to listen to. That was episode 551. She says it's really neat to listen to. So if you haven’t, you should go listen to it because a stranger told you so. She sent it to all her friends and her brother as well.

She goes, I feel calmer as a rule too. She says she’s always edgy, but she feels calmer. She talks about how she has had a lot of anxiety in the past, but now she feels grounded.

She’s wondering how much of that was her overall inflammation. She says the inflammation was somewhere in her system, and the C60 is helping with it. She goes, anyway, it’s a pretty sweet biohack.

I'm like, yes, conclusion — sweet biohack. It’s life-changing. She’s sleeping better. Her anxiety is gone. The intestinal problem she’s had — her acute intestinal problem for two years — is gone.

Pretty sweet biohack. So anyway, congratulations, Chris. You’re changing people’s lives in ways that they didn’t expect. How does that feel?

Chris Burres (0:07:21.209)

Well, it feels absolutely amazing. Thank you for taking the time, having me on the podcast. Go check out that podcast 551, and then having me back on to share these testimonials.

By the way, I think when we scheduled this, I’ll be honest, I kind of knew that we would get great results, even just with you and your husband. But that your audience has given it a try and given you feedback. Before we started, we were talking about how hard it is to get positive feedback. 

Ashley James (0:07:56.698)

We have the good — people have great results — but not everyone takes the time to write you. I get this all the time. I'll have people say, oh yes, that thing you shared with me two years ago was life-changing.

I'm like, why didn’t you tell me then it was life-changing? They’ll say, life got busy. I thought about writing it, but then I didn’t. The fact that people are reaching out to me and saying, this is awesome, just means that there are so many more people who it helped, and they didn’t take the time to write.

So it's neat. It’s neat when people do that.

I’ve got a personal story of how much this has helped. Just to reiterate for those who didn’t listen to 551, it’s okay. You can listen to this one first. It’s fine.

Chris Burres (0:08:43.125)

We won’t make you go back and listen to 551. Let’s stop the podcast actually. Let’s publish this and then we’ll come back.

Ashley James (0:08:51.931)

I have tried — yes, yes, we’re gonna hold you down. No, okay, stop right now. Go back. No, you can keep listening. I give you permission. It’s okay.

So I’ve tried C60 from other companies because I didn’t know that there was only one I should be buying it from. It was the original creator of it, and then everything else was sort of this basement lab, rip-off weird thing.

So I didn’t really get results from other ones. There was one brand where I sort of felt a little bit different. But a lot of the times when I purchased it in the past, I was like, this is just interesting olive oil, basically.

I didn’t really see any difference, but I thought, well, maybe I’m not supposed to feel different. I don’t know.

So I got yours, and the first day I took it, I felt euphoric, which was interesting. I don’t expect to feel euphoric every time I take it, but it was just this very interesting — the rest of the day, almost elated.

You know how good you feel post-orgasm? The endorphins — maybe I should say post-exercise,  But those endorphins — it’s different. 

Chris Burres (0:10:00.218)

Exercise is the thing. It feels good when you stop.

Ashley James (0:10:04.624)

Yes, I feel so good now. That elated, just, yes, the endorphins.

I felt something really, really good. Something felt right in my body, if that’s the best way I could put it. I feel my sleep was deeper.

But I already have a really good sleep. I'm really protective of my sleep. I felt that it was deeper,  and that's always fun.

Here’s the big one. I definitely had more energy again, but I'm really healthy. I'm in tune with my body so well. So when I felt an uptick in energy, I thought, that's cool. When I felt all the things you said would happen, happened. Okay, so that's not the impressive part. When you said you're going to have more energy, you're going to have better sleep, I thought, yes, of course, that's what I have.

So here’s the thing. My husband, two and a half years ago, had a root canal. He had all of the mercury in his mouth taken out five, six, seven years ago. He was doing hospice care for his dad, so he was living in his dad’s room, doing 24-hour hospice care for five or six months. He had moved out from living with me and was living with his dad. I was single-moming it with our son while my husband was doing 24-hour hospice care without a break.`

It was a pretty rough time, but emotionally, he was doing really well considering. It was very healing for the two of them. They had a completion in their relationship. When his dad died, it wasn’t this super sad event. It was more of a “your suffering’s ended.” My husband was in his 50s — this was the first time, on his deathbed, that his dad said, “I love you.”

He was one of those tough guys that used to do professional cycling, and he would drink coffee instead of water because water is for weak people. This is the man. He wouldn’t say “I love you” ever, but he would show it. He’d show up to help you move. He flew across the country to help us move. He drove one of our vehicles home. He showed up and carried furniture. He would just show up. It wasn’t that he didn’t show love — he showed love in his way — but it was very difficult for him to say it.

So anyway, on his deathbed, he said, “I’m so sorry I didn’t hold you more. I’m so sorry I wasn’t…” you know what I mean? It was very cathartic. The two of them bonded. It was really cool.

Anyway, he passed away. While this is happening, my husband’s filling — from the mercury being taken out — falls out. He doesn’t think anything of it because he’s so in the middle of taking care of his dad. He thinks, okay, I’ll get this handled one day,  Well, that’s not what you’re supposed to do. This becomes a giant cavity, and it hurts.

So I’m like, okay, well, we need to get this handled. He’s scheduled for, and I didn’t know at the time how bad root canals are, but he was scheduled for a root canal with the top root canal guy — his website’s rootcanal.com — he’s the top root canal guy you can go to. Hours after my husband’s father passes, my husband is in a chair for seven hours. It was the worst experience of his life. It was more painful than his dad dying.

He had to be in a chair. He hadn’t slept in 24 or 48 hours, and they had his neck in this weird position, and they were drilling, drilling, drilling. It turns out they should have told him it needed to be an extraction, but they were try-hards. They wanted their $8,000 or whatever it was. It was botched. They ended up having to extract it anyway.

All of this — there could be some kind of dental reason — but soon after, he develops chronic, debilitating, recurring pain in his neck. We have seen every kind of specialist — of course holistic.  It was presented as the worst trigger point I’ve ever seen.

A trigger point is where a band of muscle becomes very taut, a spasm that chokes the nerve that’s innervating it, which then radiates pain to a different area. An upper trapezius trigger point goes up the neck and around the ear — a question mark shape — very classic. I’m massaging it and it’s hard and cold. I’m like, clearly this is an upper trigger point.

So we start taking him to dry needling. The acupuncturist puts in the needle — it bends the needle 90 degrees. He cannot get a needle in. We’re like, ooh. So he goes to Rolfing, massage, three or four different kinds of upper cervical chiropractors — you name it. We just go on and on. We go to all kinds of different practitioners and specialists.

I figure out that it’s obviously not a stereotypical trigger point because it keeps coming back daily. It lasts for about eight hours, sometimes six, but it’s six to eight hours. During it, he’s having migraine symptoms — auras.  Right before it, he’ll have auras. During it, he’s unable to function, his brain can’t concentrate, he can barely drive. Afterwards, he’s left completely exhausted.

I’m like, this doesn’t act like a trigger point. It was daily. Then we’d do all this work on it — massage and everything — and we could get it to be every other day. Sometimes, if he got all these practitioners, all this bodywork, it would get to be once or twice a week. But he never really had a break.

By the way, he did try actual drugs — there’s not one drug, not one level of prescription, that will turn the pain off. It won’t even touch it. So he just stopped. He’s like, I’m not going to take any meds because it’s not even touching it. Nothing would prevent it.

We’d try all these types of therapies, which add up — when you’re going to all these different types of therapies. If we could have six or seven days without it, then it would come back. We’d repeat the same thing we did last week, and then he’d get it every day.

So there was nothing we could figure out — no trigger. He would fast — he did sixteen days of fasting — and he’d still have them. We were like, okay, is it food? Is it how you move? Nothing would make it go away one hundred percent of the time.

Now we have the Vibe, which is the frequency-specific microcurrent PEMF. Sometimes that could lessen the pain or turn it off, but not all the time. Everything we used naturally — we have phototherapy patches, they’re awesome — they would help, again, but wouldn’t turn it off completely.

I kept looking to get to the root cause and stop it. This was two and a half years of constant pain. I’m saying, this is not normal. This is not normal muscle tension. This is acting like a migraine, but it starts in his neck.

It’s a migraine and a trigger point. Maybe the migraine is creating the trigger point, but it has migraine qualities. The latest doctor we’re seeing — we’re having good results now — has him down to three times a week instead of six or seven, and in less pain and for shorter periods. So we’re like, okay, we’re getting somewhere.

She’s doing all kinds of red laser therapy and a bunch of maneuvers on him. We’re thinking, there’s got to be something more neurological going on. Still can’t get to the root cause.

Okay, so in walks your C60. When you said that your wife’s migraines went down — the occurrences of her migraines went down something like 90%.  

Chris Burres (0:18:59.642)

About 13, yes, about 13 per month down to  one or two potentially every other month.

Ashley James (0:19:06.118)

Yes, that's okay. I didn’t do the math, but I was, that sounds a lot less,  So I said, is it 90%? Great, okay. So we’re actually teaching percentages of fractions in our homeschooling. I’m pretty sure my 10-year-old could have done the math there.

So anyway, he starts taking it. Now remember, we have had regular, every three days, you can’t set a clock to it. Sometimes it’s every day, sometimes every three days, sometimes it’s once a week. But most of the time it was every other day, 

So he takes the C60 and he has a few days without it. We’re, okay, that’s cool. Then he gets one and he can feel an aura kicking in, he can feel it coming on. He can feel the tension and he knows now, by now, because he’s had it thousands of times, this is the crescendo. It comes up and then it holds on, and then hours later, it lets go, but then he’s still exhausted.

So he starts feeling it coming on. And it doesn’t just start to feel on and then go away—it never stops, it just keeps going. He takes a shot, by shot I mean a thimble full of your C60.

And within 30 minutes, it’s 100% gone. And he’s looking at me, well, that was interesting. Interesting. So then I’m, well, you should—because then he goes, I’m going to take it every time I feel one. I’m, no, you should be taking it every day. He’s, we’re going to run out. I’m, I don’t care. You have mine here. I had some good results. You have mine. This is an experiment, 

So he takes it every day. He has no migraines. He has no neck thing. Then he stops taking it, because you know the experiment,  And then every time he stops taking it consistently,  Every time he gets the thing and it starts to happen, he takes the shot of it.

But there are times when we’re out, because the start of it is not predictable anymore. It used to always happen at 11 a.m. or always happen at 2 p.m. or something. But now it can happen in the middle of the night. It can happen in the afternoon.

So we’re out, so now it’s in full-blown. He comes home, takes it, makes it go away. And he’s, what, this is crazy. So most of the time he takes it every day. And if one comes on, the pain is less. He goes, I’m having an aura, but it doesn’t feel tight in my neck yet like the aura came and then went. But the rest of it didn’t happen.

He’s, whatever this is, it’s stopping somewhere along the signal of what causes this to happen for the chronic pain, the whole crescendo of the migraine and the neck pain—it’s stopping it. And I don’t know, is it getting to the root? Is it stopping it halfway along the way? I don’t know. Whatever it is, it is noticeable. Extremely noticeable.

And then the very few times he’s had a full-blown one—he’ll take the C60 and then he’ll use his other tools. The Vibe has a program for carpal tunnel, which he figured out because carpal tunnel is, well, it’s nerve entrapment. And so that’s sort of what’s going on. And he puts that on his neck and then between those two things, it goes away.

He’s like nothing used to make this go away. So I’m really excited for people in chronic pain and chronic inflammatory conditions to just see if this could give them a leg up or block the root cause.

Now, I’d love to get to the point where we’re figuring out what has shifted in his body and what we can do to completely remove it and help his body heal from it. So we’re still digging. We’re still working on it. But this has single-handedly, out of the hundreds of things we tried, been the most effective thing.

Chris Burres (0:23:28.689)

Wow. Yes. I mean, just to give a little perspective, I am a geeky scientist—but if I were the geeky scientist who went into the lab, I also go into the lab a lot, but if I were the geeky scientist who went into the lab to create a migraine-solving supplement, I'd be super proud of this. And I am super proud of it.

The position that I'm in is just very weird because I didn't go invent this to solve any sort of health concerns. By the way, I'll do an FDA disclaimer here because we're going pretty deep into the FDA's territory. But it's a very unique position. The way I describe it is people typically get into the supplement industry for one of two reasons.

The first reason is they decide to make a lot of money and they decide they're going to do it with supplements. I have no problem with people making a lot of money—that’s just not how I ended up here. The next is they have a health challenge, the health challenge of themselves or a loved one, and they solve it. And now they want to save the world. Hopefully, it doesn’t surprise you that I’m not against people saving the world—it’s just not how I ended up in this spot.

I’ve been manufacturing this wacky molecule. We call it C60, by the way. C60 is what we call C60 that’s been processed for people and pets. I’ve been manufacturing that molecule since 1991. They thought it would be toxic, put it in a toxicity study, and instead of being toxic, the test subjects lived 90% longer than the control group. Now I’m trying to be a good steward.

So the perspective is, I just can’t be more happy. I am not as disappointed as that geeky scientist if he had produced it, and we get back on our show here and you’re sharing, yes, we didn’t notice too much or we noticed a little—but wow. I mean, this lightens my heart. This is absolutely amazing.

In your story, I actually landed in a place I hadn’t thought about yet. My wife used to suffer from TMJ—that’s lockjaw. It’s a tension. One day after she started taking the product, she was, hey, my TMJ is gone. You think of TMJ as kind of a structural problem. I don’t know how this is gonna work structurally—but it’s not. It’s a muscle tension issue, typically.

So I had never kind of equated her TMJ was probably associated with her migraines. Her TMJ went away, so her migraines went away. Your husband’s neck pain—kind of associated—and they’ve gone away. The way that you just described your husband’s migraines where the aura comes in, I don’t know if we talked about this in the last podcast. I think we did, but I would get four to five migraines per year. I’ve got a spreadsheet back to 2014.

When I first started taking this product on a regular basis, I went 18 months without a single migraine. I should have had somewhere in the neighborhood of six or seven—didn’t have a single one. The next one that I had was because I went off the product, following the protocol of our sleep study that we did. That’s when I got my first migraine in 18 months. Now I’ll probably get two per year.

They look exactly like what you described—the aura comes in. That aura is just a small sliver of your vision that looks kind of kaleidoscopic. I’m sure that’s different for each individual person experiencing a migraine, but it starts for me in my peripheral, ends up in my center of vision, then it goes away. That probably takes 15 minutes.

That was a component—when I knew I was going to get a migraine in the past. Now that comes and goes. I can work through it. It’s hard to read when the kaleidoscope is in the center of your vision—it’s hard to read words through a kaleidoscope—but I could still do a podcast or have a meeting. Then it goes away. Previously, it would be two or three days that if I just tapped on my skull, it would hurt. The whole skull aches. I would say my brain hurt, and that doesn’t happen anymore.

But let’s throw out the FDA disclaimer. The FDA has not evaluated our product. It is not intended to treat, diagnose, cure, or prevent any disease. We have not done the research. These are very anecdotal. We have not done the research to say that our product addresses migraines or even—you mentioned pain—or any of this. I think it’s best from the audience’s perspective, and we need to be safe here, to just assume none of this will happen for you.

Dig into the research and we’ll certainly have a link if you’re interested in trying it afterwards.

I also wanted to touch on another thing. You were talking about one of the testimonials where they’re calmer and this stomach condition. Remember, a lot of the kind of important brain natural drugs that our body uses actually come from our stomach as it relates to the brain. So endorphins and all of these things—not all of them, but a lot of them—actually come from our gut lining.

To have this calmer gut or kind of repaired gut in some sense—and then feel calmer, it really goes hand in hand. You’ve addressed that. Some of that might be, it is a high-quality extra virgin olive oil that we use.

I don’t know if you got to compare and contrast with some of the previous products that you used. Did they leave the peppery flavor at the back of your throat when you took them, like ours does?

Ashley James (0:29:29.365)

One of them did. That’s why I was like, that was good olive oil. But was it really C60? I don’t know. Those other products, I did not really get profound results from any of them, but we tried them because we had heard the really cool stories about it, and so we wanted to try it.

But yes, there was one other brand. I’m pretty sure we bought it on Amazon or eBay, well, let’s just see. We only bought one bottle and it was, yes, it was a bit peppery, not as peppery as yours. I got to say yours definitely is very high quality.

I tried to get a family member to take it consistently and they’re, no, thank you. I don’t like the flavor. But that’s the flavor of medicine. That means it’s good for you. 

Chris Burres (0:30:24.771)

It’s kind of funny. It’s one of those things if they were to take it for some period of time and maybe even shifting to every other day, eventually, I believe their body would realize that this is good for them and then it would therefore taste good.

Ashley James (0:30:39.249)

Yes, this is why I love the flavor of kale. People are, “Ew, kale's gross.” I’m, “Yes, but my body now is programmed to like it. I love the flavor. I like the flavor.”

I know it's cool. My son loves the flavor of lemon and very, very strong. Yesterday for lunch, I just chopped up a bunch of greens and squirted fresh lemon on it, handed it to him, and he's, “Mmm.”

How many kids would be, “This is bitter, this is sour,” and my son's, “Can I just suck on a lemon?” He's, if you give kids something healthy at a young enough age, they love the flavor of it.

Anyway, same with high-quality medicinal olive oil.

Chris Burres (0:31:20.367)

I think your son and my son would probably get along. My son absolutely loves citrus. When you get it in a drink, he's, “Can I have your lime or can I have your lemon?” and he'll just eat it. He loves it.

Ashley James (0:31:32.773)

The waitress will be like, “Do you guys see anything else?” And he'll just look up to her and say, “Can I have more lime wedges, please? Just bring me all the lime wedges you have.”

Chris Burres (0:31:47.051)

My meal is not complete yet.

Well, so that's absolutely amazing. You're in this space to be involved in any way in somebody kind of with the report that you just gave of your husband. Thank you so much for sharing that with me. That's amazing.

Ashley James (0:32:02.457)

Well, so, I mean, we've been speaking very lightly and jovially, but it has transformed our lives. We were under this dark cloud of, are we going to have a pain day or not? He hasn’t been, he’s been at 50% functionality for over, it’s been about two and a half years. This has given him his quality of life back.

This has given me my husband back. This has given our son his father back. This is huge. We’re very grateful and very excited. Again, we still don’t know the root cause of his issue. It’s not that this has solved it at the root cause, but it’s been the single most effective thing we’ve tried so far. It’s given him his quality of life back.

He now has something he can go to to turn them off. Whereas before, he didn’t know if what we had would turn it off or not, or sometimes it would reduce it with all the other things we used. But this has been consistently able to turn it off and keep it away. So it’s very exciting.

Chris Burres (0:32:02.457)

So I do have one more thought in this space because you mentioned the testimonial of a stomach problem, a viral-related stomach problem. There is, even back in the 90s when this molecule was originally discovered, it was understood that it could block the AIDS virus.

So in the 90s, the AIDS epidemic was certainly, yes.

Ashley James (0:33:36.954)

Hold up. What? We did not discuss that last time. Okay.

Chris Burres (0:33:41.560)

Okay, so this is what it looks like. The molecule's very small. It's only 60 carbon atoms. I think it's about 10 angstroms, under 10 angstroms across. That turns out to be one position on the AIDS virus that the buckyball fits right into. This ESS-60 molecule fits right into it, and that blocks the replication of the AIDS virus.

There is, in fact, a patent related—I don't think it ever got pushed through—but related to using the ESS-60 molecule to prevent AIDS. That immediately throws it into some sort of potential antiviral. So again, we have to be really careful here. We're not making any claims. We're talking about some of the research that's out there. If you just do a simple search, there are a number of studies showing, in different animal models, that this molecule will interrupt viruses and cause them not to replicate.

If we're addressing that viral component in the stomach, then the stomach is healed, and then that gets back to the calmer state. You mentioned euphoria, and that could be something else in the case of your husband. Maybe some of this neck pain is one of these Epstein-Barr viruses or something that's internal. Actually, the Epstein-Barr virus is herpes, right? It's the herpes virus or one version of the herpes virus.

I can share—one of the guys in our office used to get cold sores, and I remember him walking around the office with a napkin holding onto his kind of burst cold sores on his lip. When he started taking this regularly, his symptom profile is the same thing that you just described, which is apparently when cold sores are coming on, you can feel a tingling, so you know that they're coming. He said, “I'll still feel the tingling, but they never surface and therefore never burst.”

So there's probably something there. Maybe we need to do more research on what impact it's having on different viruses, and maybe the incredibly important Epstein-Barr virus.

Ashley James (0:35:56.120)

Yes. Super interesting. My goodness. A friend of mine had chronic Epstein-Barr virus, and this was seven-ish years ago. She started doing all the things that I explored on my show — sauna, eating super clean. She went whole food plant-based, so zero processed food, made everything from scratch, and ate lots of fruits and vegetables and made smoothies and juices. Everything helped a little.

Then she got into Anthony Williams. It's a bit of a controversial subject, but Anthony Williams, he's coined Medical Medium, and God has given him information about health. It's controversial for many people, but what's really interesting is things that he has said, science has later proven to be true. He has said for many years, Epstein-Barr virus is different. If you go back and just look in his books about Epstein-Barr virus, super interesting — his perspective on it or whatever divine information has been given to him.

I just take everything with a grain of salt, but I say, I'm so open-minded my brain could fall out. But I'm also an open-minded skeptic, so I'm going to question everything. I'm just looking at it as interesting information.

My friend — and I avoided it for years because I'm, “Medium, come on, really?” But at the same time, my friend was getting healthier and healthier and healthier. He says, eat whole food plant-based, drink these herbs — it's all really good information that probably a holistic practitioner would have said anyway. He said, “Drink celery juice.” None of this is going to hurt her. And she recovered. She was gone from bedridden, completely exhausted — which people don't know, but having adrenal burnout, having adrenal exhaustion is a symptom of chronic Epstein-Barr virus.

So she did all the things, and her heart palpitations went away. She now was walking faster than her kids, and her life transformed through working on a holistic program to get Epstein-Barr virus to be dormant in her body.

So everything that she was doing was, “I'm going to help my immune system get it dormant.” Just that concept that we can support the body to get so healthy doesn't give a good terrain for the infection to thrive, right? The herpes waits, chicken pox waits for us to have the toxic load, bad pH, lack of key nutrients, living off of coffee and alcohol and sugar — just waits for us to get into a stressed-out enough state that the immune system isn't adequate enough to keep it at bay. Then it's opportunistic, so that comes up. But it can keep flaring up, so Epstein-Barr can keep flaring up in the body.

This is why I love the terrain theory versus germ theory. I like to kind of be right in the middle and go, let's say germs exist, but let's say the terrain is the most important thing. Because if your body is super healthy — that’s the terrain — then those germs can't really thrive. So that's what we see, people can shift their health so much that these viruses go dormant.

But for those who want faster results, taking the ESS60 while they're making lifestyle changes — they could have day one. They could start having results literally day one. It turned off my husband's headache day one — within 30 minutes it was gone. Within 30 minutes. So he felt it kicking in really fast, which is really interesting because it takes a while for the body to digest fat and absorb it and stuff. But he feels it faster than you'd think he should.

Why do you think that is? Why do you think people — do they start absorbing it in the mouth? Why do they feel it faster than you'd think it would take for the body to digest it? Because we really absorb fats in the small intestines.

Chris Burres (0:40:21.856)

Yes, on the other side of the stomach.

Ashley James (0:40:25.213)

Right, right. So you're thinking, in an hour, why am I feeling it within minutes? What's going on with that? Is it on a frequency level? What's going on? From science, what do you think?

Chris Burres (0:40:37.749)

Yes, my perspective is, again, it goes to how small this molecule is. So just to give a perspective, this is a mind-blowing number. Every drop of our olive oil product has more than 400 times as many of the ESS-60 molecules as you have cells in your body.

That's how small this molecule is. One drop has 400 times as many of the molecules as you have cells in your body. It's so small that, yes, I think you hit it. Are we getting some absorption in our mouth? I think so. We know that it gets into the mitochondria from peer-reviewed published research.

So the mitochondria, the powerhouse of every cell, that means it's gotten past the lipid layer of the cell, it's gotten past the lipid layer of the mitochondria, and it's actually in there in the mitochondria. So, yes, I think that this can get absorbed, and that could explain why you've got really fast results.

Ashley James (0:41:42.685)

Very cool. So we talked about your flagship product, which is the olive oil, which is personally my favorite. The olive oil, ESS-60, is at the highest saturation, so there's that. But you created other stuff. You have a face cream, which I was, really, a face cream? But I got to tell you, okay.

My grandmother had rosacea, and I guess I inherited it from her. My cheeks are always a pretty rosy color, but if you look closer, I have these broken blood vessels. I'm 45, okay? I'm not a vain person, but I'm 45 and I want to look 35. Normally, I do. I look great. I look great because I'm super healthy, because I believe healthy skin comes from the inside, from what you eat and how you live.

But I have these broken blood vessels on my cheeks. If you look close enough, you just see these red spider veins, and they're all broken, and it's not pleasant. It's not a good look. But again, I'm not vain, and I don't wear makeup a ton. But I was curious about how this would affect my skin. So I started using the cream, not every day even, because I just don't have a beauty routine. I'm just more of a splash-water-on-my-face-and-go kind of person.

But I've been using it, I'd say once every two days. Either morning or night, I'll just rub it all over my face and go. And my spider veins are gone, and the broken blood vessels are gone, and my rosacea is about half—50% less. So not bad.

I feel I have healthy skin to begin with, but also it's very moisturizing, and I really love it, and it feels very luxurious. My skin is healthier on a visual level since using it. So how does that work?

Chris Burres (0:43:51.449)

So is that the two part? Because we've got the two part–

Ashley James (0:43:55.655)

It's the purple cream.

Chris Burres (0:43:59.131)

Okay, you're not even activating it with ESS-60. You're just using the squeeze and it's really more  a blue lotion.

Ashley James (0:44:12.143)

It looks purple to me. It's purple. I’ve used the little face serum a few times. Again, I should have done it more frequently, just to go, “I’m having this interview coming up.” I should have done that. But I have put the face oil on. I did, but I think I did that less frequently than using the purple cream, because I thought that had the ESS-60 and also because it’s purple.

Chris Burres (0:44:39.510)

Well, it came in a nice-looking box. By the way, that box is brand new. I'm so proud of the team really making that happen. This is actually a two-parter. Let me talk about this process because it's kind of crazy how it all happened. We were actually reports of hair and nail improvements from just people taking the product orally, taking the olive oil orally.

I kind of equate this to your nails and hair being mostly for aesthetic purposes. If you're dealing with any challenge, Epstein-Barr, whatever the challenge is, your body's saying, “Yes, we don't need to look that good. We just need to live through tomorrow. We need to stay alive.” And so it actually starts sacrificing hair and nail growth.

When people were reporting hair and nail improvements, we thought, “Well, maybe that’s where it’s landing. It’s helping the body to manage some internal process that it needs to manage.” And now it can go, “Okay, we’re going to live tomorrow, so let’s make better hair and nails.

Then one of my business partners, she would drink out of the bottle directly, and there’d be some spillage on the side. She’d wipe it with her hands and put it on her face. She said, “Chris, this is working so well. I think we should make a face serum.” If you go back and listen to that episode 551, you’ll understand I never wanted to be in the health supplement space. We actually tried for four years. My business partner and I got together every quarter for four years and we said, “No, we don’t want to be in that industry.”

We sell to research institutions around the world where there are exacting and high standards, and the supplement industry is not that industry. So I wasn’t interested in being in the supplement space. She says we should make a face serum. I was like, “Yay, a face serum, that sounds amazing. That’s exactly what we should— I dreamed of making a face serum.”

So we make it, and we’re getting great testimonials. I don’t know if you’ve got a full one or just a sample of that—of the night serum. That would have just been one ampule of the night serum. We start getting great testimonials about that product.

Then my director of research came to me and said, “Hey Chris, I found a peptide that has 30 years of peer-reviewed published research showing skin and hair improvements. You should look at it.” So I looked at it, and I thought, “This is 30 years of skin and hair improvements. We should work to bring this product to market.”

So we brought it. It’s a peptide, we call it UTH-29, which stands for Youth 29, which is kind of cool. Originally, the 29 was for copper because that’s the copper peptide in there. But we found later from some of my wife’s friends that 29 is apparently the year all women would like to stop. That’s the ideal year. You have the right sophistication and none of the age. That’s funny how things work.

We’ve got this peptide, which is water-soluble, and then we have our ESS-60 molecule, which is oil-soluble. We could use an emulsifier and shove these two together, but I don’t like how emulsifiers sound, and if you Google them, there are no health benefits. I mean, there are actually detrimental health aspects of an emulsifier. So we kept it as a two-part.

In an ideal world, by the way, it probably is purple, because women have better color distinction than men, so I just lump it into blue, and you’re calling it purple—it probably is purple. But the intention is that you do two squirts of this UTH-29 peptide lotion and then two drops of the ESS-60 activator in the palm of your hand per squirt. Then you mix it with your fingertips, and that’s what I do every day now.

I apply that to any part of the skin that tends to show aging. This is how good the results are. There’s an organization, there’s a Dr. Yerth—I don’t know if you know her or have had the opportunity to interview her. She’s out of the Boulder Institute of Longevity. She’s amazing. I was on a call with her team, and that same team ended up coming to our booth at the A4M Longevity Fest in Las Vegas.

There’s a little bit of hyperbole, but two of the people in her group were like, “Yes, that potential to live longer, get that out of the way. Being healthy and not having migraines, get that out of the way. I’m here for your skin redo set.” They love it so much. So you might find that putting the combination together.

Ashley James (0:49:45.446)

I was doing it totally wrong. I did at first do the oil and the cream together. I didn’t realize that. I just would slather the oil on my face and slather the cream on my face, and then I’d mix it on my face instead of in my hand. I was maybe being a bit more violent than I should have.

But I’m glad you told me how to take it now because I was still doing it wrong, and I still got results. So I can’t wait to try the two pumps and the two drops, then rub it in my hands and put it on my face. I can’t wait to try that and see what happens to my skin. That’s exciting. That’s funny.

Chris Burres (0:50:23.458)

Yes. Longevity experts prefer it over longevity.

Ashley James (0:50:27.134)

That's so interesting. So is this why you work with Dr. Burzynski ?

Chris Burres (0:50:37.562)

Oh no, so Dr. Burzynski  is an interesting story. I have a podcast called Live Beyond the Norms. So this is an interesting story. I went to my practitioner—there are a couple of interesting things here. I went to my practitioner this year, and she was, “Hey, your LDL dropped from 2023 to 2024. Good, keep that going on.” This is 2025.

The day I got my basic lipid test, I was at the Biohacking Expo in Miami. I had just gotten my results in—actually, I don’t think I had gotten them yet. I was watching Dr. Christopher Davis speak, and he’s a cardiologist and an amazing guy. He was talking about how the basic lipid profile is used. It’s not kind of useful, it’s not kind of useless—it’s absolutely useless. You need to do at least an advanced lipid profile.

He was also talking about some more advanced testing—talking about calcium scores and a clearly AI-driven engine to understand what your soft plaque blockage is. So for podcast content and also because I had elevated LP LDL, I’m going to interview him and get my own tests. In order to get this clearly scan, I had to have a local practitioner.

So I’ll kind of describe it—I didn’t want to meet Dr. Burzynski  because he’s a dude between me and the result that I want. I’m going to go back to Dr. Christopher Davis. So I went to him, and I already interviewed him. We went from me not wanting to meet him to actually interviewing him on my podcast in a very short timeframe. I think it was five minutes in, and he’s super—he’s a full, licensed, and I think board-certified medical practitioner at a minimum.

He went through medical school, residency, and then he’s also just a full-blown biohacker. So we just hit it off immediately. Yes, I ended up interviewing him about some of the cancer protocols and cancer screening tools that are out there. So that’s how I ended up meeting him.

Ashley James (0:52:52.644)

So neat. Yes, he's really, really interesting. His study around specific peptides and cancer.

Chris Burres (0:53:06.196)

This is interesting. This story gets even a little, I don't know, kind of more interesting, at least in the Houston area, because my business partner had been thinking about a Dr. Burzynski  who was cutting-edge in cancer treatments, and it's his son.

Ashley James (0:53:21.040)

Is it a different doctor that we're talking about? What? That is so cool. Yes, because I just hear Dr. Burzynski ,  I think there's only one, but of course there's two.

Chris Burres (53:20.856)

How cool is that?

Yes. And there's a Burzynski building. So I'm coming up to visit Dr. Greg Burzynski, that's the son, who again is this gatekeeper between me and a test result that I want. There's Burzynski on the building, and it's just funny that my business partner had seen him on TV here in Houston, because this is where he's based obviously, and was like, hey, we should try and figure out who this guy is and connect with him because he's doing kind of cutting-edge stuff.

Then I end up working with his son, kind of resentfully.

Ashley James (0:54:08.728)

Yes, so he figured out there's a peptide that people who, I mean, this is just a 30,000-foot view. People who don't have cancer naturally produce a lot of this peptide, and people who have cancer don't produce it. Is it that by stopping producing it, you develop cancers, or that the cancer is suppressing it? What's going on? So he'd make this peptide, put it into an IV bag, and flood someone's body with it, getting interesting results around treating cancer and the longevity aspect of peptide treatment.

He's cutting edge. He's been doing it, I think, since the 90s. I remember seeing him on talk shows, Oprah or  Donahue or whatever, in the 90s daytime talk shows, talking about peptide treatment and cancer. Super interesting.

Then I'm working with these phototherapy patches, and one of them stimulates the body to produce the same peptide, and it has all kinds of really neat effects. So I'm wondering if your UTH29 copper peptide is related in any way. That's why, because you said peptide and you said Burzynski, and I got excited. So I wanted to know if they're related.

Chris Burres (0:55:30.864)

Well, I even interviewed Dr. Greg Burzynski  about cancer, so I can see your mind's gonna go directly there. But yes, I haven't met the Dr. Burzynski  that you're talking about. I've just met his son, who's again, just a fantastic biohacker, and I will actually continue to work with him.

Ashley James (0:55:52.800)

That's cool. That's really interesting. You wrote a book, Live Longer and Better. It's so funny how this happened, this whole story. You never thought you were going to write this book. You never thought you were going to be selling this supplement. You never thought you were going to be helping women look younger.

For years, you were running a very reputable lab that helped scientists win Nobel Prizes. It's almost as if God put a path out for you that you just did not expect, but you were going with it. All the signs pointed toward this direction. Tell us about your book and about the journey of writing it.

Chris Burres (0:56:45.012)

Yes, the byline on the book is Your journey to living longer and better has never been more achievable than today. I'm super lucky that my co-author is Dr. Jerome Corsi. He is a two-time New York Times number one bestselling author. I knew at some point that I needed to write a book. I knew at some point, well, forever probably, that I'm not a writer. I do okay, but I'm not a writer. So I knew that I needed help.

It's kind of an interesting story because Dr. Corsi was taking our product. He loved the product. He had seen me in a couple of interviews. He called, got through the receptionist, and we were having a conversation. We've all had these conversations where it's just an amazing conversation. I didn't know where it was going. I didn't know if we'd be friends. I didn't know that we'd do business. But I was enjoying the conversation.

I looked up his credentials and saw that he was a two-time New York Times number one bestselling author. My selfish mind went, that's why we're talking. He's going to write my book. Then that came up, and frankly, he was just in the right transition period in his life where my book was an appropriate project for him. So we ended up writing the book.

Now, in my mind, he was going to interview me, watch some of my interviews, then go off and write a book, come back, I’d read it, and then we’d publish it. So our first kind of book writing meeting goes, “All right, Chris, so here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to write down your story, and then I’m going to edit it.” I was like, I guess I’m writing a book.

That’s when I learned I was actually going to write a book, and it was great. Basically, I took the story and wrote it down, and I do okay at that. He takes it and turns it into prose. I think that’s a fair description—certainly fairer than what I put together.

He did compliment me. I am pretty self-deprecating, and I have a good sense of humor. I don’t know if we touched on the fact that I used to do comedy improv at some point.

Ashley James (0:59:09.888)

That is so funny. That is so funny. The pictures I've seen of you, you're in a lab coat. You're a scientist. You're a scientist. You're like, “I do stand-up comedy. I'm a really good scientist and a really average author.”

Chris Burres (0:59:27.570)

Yes, average author and average comedy improv artist.

Ashley James (0:59:31.976)

Nice. Well, that's very healthy for the mind. You got to have hobbies.

Chris Burres (0:59:36.652)

Yes. I think be willing to tackle new things. It's kind of interesting. I have 15-year-old boy-girl twins, and almost every day is some sort of lecture about how you should be pushing outside of your comfort zone.

If you just sit in your comfort zone, nothing's going to happen, right? You're not going to have anything memorable happen to you. 

Ashley James (1:00:01.271)

Are they lecturing you? “Dad, you've gotta get, come on, you're boring, you gotta get out of the house, let's go. Are they the ones lecturing you? Or you're lecturing them? Get off your phones, let's go have a life.”

Chris Burres (1:00:13.947)

Well, yes, getting off your phone is certainly a big piece. It's amazing how addictive these devices are. You and I are even subject to it. We're, we've just spent an hour doom scrolling on a good day. And you're like, how did that happen? Then they grew up with it, so their little tiny minds are, why, who knows what's going to happen? 

Ashley James (1:00:38.483)

There was a guy, sorry to interrupt, there was a guy who did this self-study. He took away all the screens, which I mean, it's not possible for our work, you and me. But he took away all the screens and he did a bunch of self-tests beforehand and after. He did seven weeks with no screen kind of thing, and his memory recall went so high.

He said beforehand, now he's young, he's not super old, maybe he's in his 40s, but he said the recall he had before was as if he had dementia. He stopped doing 100% screens, and his memory recall—how they say, we're gonna read 15 words and then you're gonna do a puzzle and then you're gonna tell me back the 15 words—he had 100% of his memory recall, back after eliminating all screens.

I just wonder how much of this is dumbing us down. They've even shown parts of the brain are smaller now because we used to have to memorize how to get places. We'd have to have a map in our head and be, okay, I'm gonna turn left here and I'm gonna go right there, and reading maps with them. You'd memorize friends' phone numbers. I had everyone's phone number in my head. I even had all my credit card numbers memorized in my head.

This was back in my twenties. I could just rattle off all my debit card and, I knew how to drive everywhere. Now with GPS, people who use GPS, there are parts of the brain that are smaller now because we are relying on something else to do it for us. We're losing that part of the brain—it’s just shrinking, it’s shriveling up. And now we don’t memorize. I have two phone numbers memorized—actually, I have three phone numbers memorized in my head. That’s it.

And sometimes I have trouble with the third one. It’s crazy. That part of the brain is shrinking, and they’re showing that people—have you seen the study about, I think MIT put out a study with heavy, heavy, heavy users of AI—people who rely heavily on AI? Their brains are shrinking because they’re outsourcing their problem solving to AI. They’re outsourcing almost all their thinking.

It is shrinking the brain to not use it. So, a little tangent there, but you said you’re telling your kids, gotta do something fun and memorable—and I went down that rabbit hole.

Chris Burres (1:03:12.377)

Just one thing to add to what you were saying is, New York, London cabbies—have to memorize and understand and take a test. It's got some fancy name. They’ve looked at that same space of the brain, and it’s bigger in London cabbies.

So, with my children, here's an interesting thing that I did accidentally. I wish I could say I was brilliant and figured this out beforehand. I'm asking my daughter and my son, what was the best day you can remember? The best day ever.

And, by the way, my son struggles remembering what he did today, even if it’s a good day. So we have this practice. When we have dinner together, hey, what was your favorite part of the day? What was your second favorite part of the day? Because they would cheat and say that dinner with us was the favorite part of the day. Right. Something else exactly. So you’ve got to come up with something else.

And he would just struggle. So he definitely has a hard time recalling events. So I’m not really surprised that with some prompting, said, hey, when we conquered the VelociCoaster at Universal. And then the time that we did this crazy swing on the side of a cliff and we came off with our hands shaking because we were so terrified.

And he’s, oh yes, okay, maybe those are in the running. And then I was like, what would you do tomorrow to have the best day? And his answer is to be on his computer. But I was, you point out the fact that what you actually want to do today will never lead to the best day ever.

You can’t get to a memorable best day if you don’t change what you want to do tomorrow.

Ashley James (1:05:15.541)

Well, it's dopamine seeking. Because being on the computer, playing video games with friends, whatever, that's fast dopamine. That's eating ice cream, it’s going to give you fast sugar. So screen time is fast dopamine, easy dopamine. Whereas hiking to the top of a mountain and then scaling down the other side, that's hard. You’ve got a lot of work before you get the dopamine.

That’s why I had an expert on education and homeschooling on the show. I'm going to have him back on the show because he just published a book. His name's Daniel. He said the worst thing you can do for a younger child is give them a screen or a tablet before they learn to read.

Because reading, as you and I remember as kids, once you learned how to read, you could find a book that was super exciting, and you couldn't put it down. Your mom would be, okay, lights out now. And then you'd get out the flashlight, put it over your head, or maybe it's a comic book. But you'd be, this is so exciting, I have to see what happens in the next chapter. That was fun.

But the level of dopamine you get is sort of like the level of sugar you're going to get from a kale salad. It's a slow drip. The body has to work hard to get that carbohydrate broken down to sugar. And then, if you give a kid a tablet or whatever, some kind of screen, the dopamine is easy dopamine. It's like giving a kid ice cream. It's huge dopamine spikes.

Now, when you give them a book, the brain goes, I don't want that. That’s hard. It's hard dopamine. It's hard to get dopamine out of that. It’s only getting maybe 10% of the dopamine from the book that it would be getting from a tablet. And so kids are having delayed reading, or it’s obviously not the preferred thing.

You say to your son, what's the best day you could possibly have? And he's, being on the computer. And that’s the easy dopamine answer. That’s the addiction brain answer.

And I'd say, a little plug for my book. I wrote the book Addicted to Wellness, and it's all about using the brain—the addictive part of the brain—to turn it on its head and be, okay, now we're going to be craving kale. What can we do to start using that part of us that drives and motivates us to go do the scroll for an hour or stare at screens, because it's easy dopamine, and then how to start craving things that aren't as easy dopamine, but you start associating it with positive reward. Then you actually start getting higher dopamine levels from healthier things.

So there’s a way you can use your brain to do that. That’s my book, Addicted to Wellness. So, a little plug there.

I love this rabbit hole. I forget how we got here in this conversation, but I love it, I love it.

Why do you call it ESS60 and not C60?

Chris Burres (1:08:08.894)

Yes, so the way we think about it is C60 is for industrial applications. There is peer-reviewed published research that proves if you improperly process it, it's harmful. ESS60 is C60 that's been processed for people and pets. The ESS stands for Elemental Safe Spheres. It’s a spherical molecule, it’s one element, they are safe, and there are 60 of those carbon atoms in there.

A big part of why we ended up doing it is if you go back and listen to episode 551, we talked about how, when we finally decided to get into the market as a supplement company, part of what drove us is we're a lab. We're the oldest and longest manufacturers and distributors of this molecule on the planet.

I had found an article that said 50% of the supplements on the market—and this is supplements in general, not specifically in this space—didn't have in them what they said they had in them. As we were considering coming into the market, really, as our customers were twisting our arm to get us into the market, we looked back and thought, that’s going to happen in the C60 space. And it actually has.

You’ve reported that you tried another C60 product. It was a good olive oil, that’s great, but you didn't really notice anything on it. We tested 22 of the products in the C60 space, and my description—other than one other company at the time, and I don't know if this is still true—was that the concentrations in the product were woefully low. Not only that, there are products in the C60 space that literally have zero C60 in them.

So people are going to hear the podcast, they'll Google C60, maybe they will find us, maybe they won't. They go to C60, and then they get a product that doesn't have C60 in it. Then they're like, “Oh, I tried that C60 stuff. It didn’t work.” The reality is, you tried the wrong stuff.

By talking about ESS60, we really do keep consumers safe in a couple of ways. ESS60, again, is processed for people and pets. In terms of concentration, we're the oldest and longest manufacturer of the molecule on the planet. We have the lab, the HPLC, the equipment—we have everything you would need to be able to make an extremely high-quality product.

Ashley James (1:10:42.436)

You had mentioned that this is not evaluated by the FDA. I think it's important to point out that the FDA does not approve or have any kind of regulatory authority—they don't regulate supplements. So it's not that you're specifically not approved and everyone else is. It’s that the FDA is food and drug, and that’s their wheelhouse. It’s not food, drug, and supplements.

It’s the wild, wild west out there, but we don’t want regulation. Yes, we need to be responsible consumers, but we don’t want a government agency that is very much in bed with the pharmaceutical industry to come in and regulate the supplement world. The pharmaceutical world doesn’t want homeopathy, doesn’t want supplements, doesn’t want you to have access to things that keep you healthy.

I know that sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it is 100% true. There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that if we gave the FDA that level of control, we would lose really, really great products like this one. That would be a big shame.

So it’s not that it’s not evaluated by the FDA in the sense that they’ve looked at it and said no. The FDA doesn’t go and evaluate supplements and say, this one’s good, this one’s bad. There have been cases where they’ll remove certain supplements from the market because they were dangerous—high-dose herbs or something.

We have to have respect for herbal medicine. Homeopathy is 100% safe; it’s very, very safe. But herbal medicine isn’t always safe. You have to make sure you’re taking the right dose, the right plant. You want to work with an expert—work with a doctor or a naturopath or an herbalist.

But your supplement is carbon. It’s something that we are made of. It’s not some weird foreign thing. We’re made of carbon. The magic of it, as I understand, is the shape of the carbon. That’s why it’s so cool.

It’s in olive oil—again, proven to be healthy in the right type of olive oil and the way it’s contained. Olive oil exposed to heat, sunlight, and oxygen becomes rancid, and then you’re consuming free radicals. That’s not great.

You’re using medicinal-level olive oil. You talked about episode 551 and the extent you go to maintain the quality of the olive oil the entire time while it’s being fully saturated with the ESS60.

Chris Burres (1:13:28.688)

Yes, I think, well, there are a couple of things to touch on there. The FDA, I think, has really landed in the right space. I’ll tell you this—as I was transitioning from being the Chief Scientist of a carbon nanomaterial manufacturing business to being the Chief Scientist of a health supplement company, things changed, and I was trying to figure out what that space looked like.

I found a statement on the FDA’s website, and I took a screenshot because I thought, they’re going to take this down soon—there’s no way this is true. It said that the FDA does not require you to prove that a supplement is safe before you bring it to market. That doesn't sound like what you think is happening, right? And I think that’s some of what you were trying to address.

When I started to really dig in and think about it, it’s actually the right decision. If you think there’s an infinite number of potential supplements. Let’s say Ashley comes up with her version of a supplement that’s 10% vitamin D and 90% vitamin E, and I switch it up and change the concentrations. Now we have two different supplements, and the FDA doesn’t have the budget to evaluate these supplements and figure out if they’re safe. 

What the FDA does require is proper reporting. So, we are required by the FDA—if we have any customers report a severe side effect we have to report that to the FDA. I can share that we haven’t had to report anything to the FDA because we haven’t had anybody with severe side effects.

We have had people come in and ask things like, “Hey, it’s leaving this peppery flavor at the back of my throat—is it rancid?” No, that’s actually a high-quality extra virgin olive oil. And some people, if they’re not used to consuming a typical serving, is about a teaspoon of our product, which is a teaspoon of olive oil with as much of that ESS60 molecule as we can get to dissolve. If you are not used to consuming oils it will loosen your stool for a couple of days. But other than that, we haven’t really had to report.

I will tell you, we’ve had a couple of people come in and make some serious claims, and then we’ll look into it and wait a minute—you ordered the product a year ago, and I think you just want money. A year ago you ordered the product and not enough to use for a year. Now you’re coming back saying your health has been horrible all this time. That’s not what happened. They’re making some kind of money grab or I don’t even know exactly what they’re doing. 

We always do our due diligence. We’ll say, “Hey, provide us with the medical records associated with this,” because that’s something we would have to turn into the FDA if we were going to report it. Of course, those never materialize. So, we’ve had I think two instances where someone reported something, but when we dug in, there was no evidence—nothing was actually going on. They’re doing some sort of money grab.

By the way, if we were to have a serious side effect and we reported it to the FDA, they don’t shut us down immediately. We all know that somebody’s going to at some point take our product and take something else, and honestly this “something else” causes the problem and they blame our product. We still have to report it to the FDA as long as we get the medical records. The FDA is aware that just because someone reports one bad thing, two bad things—a statistically insignificant number—you have to report but they don’t necessarily take action until it looks like it’s a chronic problem.

Ashley James (1:17:17.890)

Right. Right. And I'm glad that that system is in place. I think that is fair because there have been a handful of supplements in the past that ended up hurting people. Maybe the people misused them, took some diet pills, and that’s not great. Maybe those individual herbs taken at a small dose are OK, but they took them at too high a dose—whatever the supplement was. I'm glad that we have a reporting system that would be ethical, responsible, and then let the public know and remove things that could hurt us. So that's good.

But the FDA doesn't go into each supplement company and look at their manufacturing process or their labs and their tech. It’s each company we hope tries to produce a product that is clean and pure. But as we know, most aren't.

So, Lead Safe Mama— I don't love how she does certain things. I've talked about this before. She will take screenshots of conversations with practitioners where she's arguing with them and then publish it, and then kind of go after their character. I don't love that. I think everything should be in the light.

She gets crowdfunding. People say, “Hey, can you check my kid’s chewable vitamins?” She’ll get crowdfunding for that, and then she goes and sends it to a third party and they test for lead and other heavy metals. Then she’ll publish it. If it’s clean, she publishes it and everyone celebrates that brand. If it’s not clean, she publishes it and then reports it to the company. The company either says, “I’m going to stick my lawyers on you,” and then she publishes that conversation.

Yes, this is where it gets spicy—if you want health drama, go follow Lead Safe Mama.

She actually blocked me on Facebook because I very politely said, “Hey, you could have handled this better.” She really was nasty to a doctor who I've interviewed and become friends with—an upstanding gentleman in the health space, a wonderful person. He was saying, “Well, the lab test you used wasn’t accurate. I use these labs, and I’ll show you the results.” He was trying to have a conversation, and she tried to say some nasty things and drag his name through the mud.

I just said, “Listen, you’re going about this the wrong way because you two could become advocates together.” I really do know this guy, and he would work with her if she just didn’t come at him attacking him. But she’s doing this in a way that gets her followers because she’s being dramatic. So she blocked me. I’m like, wow. Okay, so you don’t want to have an open conversation.

But I do still love what she’s doing because she’s bringing awareness to just how many supplements out there are full of lead, cadmium, and arsenic—a ton of heavy metals. And some of the companies turn around and go, “My gosh, we had no idea. We are so sorry. Please help us. We want to clean this up. We're going to go back to our manufacturers,” or whatever. Then she helps them, and they do retesting because she’ll randomly be retesting them, and then they’re clean.

So there are brands that have gone and worked with her, and she has become this self-taught expert in cleaning up supplements–and also foods—she’ll test foods, packaged foods. 

The amount that has unsafe levels of metals. She says there is zero—there is not a safe level of lead. Just so you are aware, there’s not a safe level. It’s not, “Well, it’s only this much lead.” No, there’s no safe level. You shouldn’t have lead in your food or your kid’s supplements. And the amount of heavy metals that are in processed food and supplements over the counter—most of them over the counter—is really scary.

Anyway, having said that, how do you ensure purity and that your stuff doesn’t have heavy metals? What kind of testing do you do to ensure that? And do you publish the findings? I know we talked a little bit about this, but I want to go a bit deeper to squelch any concerns around the safety of your product.

Chris Burres (1:21:36.839)

Well, there's a little concern, and interestingly, it comes from the olive oil. Olive oil is a natural product, and different batches of a natural product will have different amounts of anything. So as batches come in, test that and send that off for heavy metal testing. That’s just one of our basic standard processes.

When we looked at the products that were on the market in the C60 space, the thing that we found that was probably the most concerning actually didn’t go through the expense and look for heavy metals or whatever. We were just looking, “Hey, the thing that you absolutely have easy control over is concentration,” because you should be able to test it.

I think what happens is people in that space don’t own a lab. So when you start thinking about a company that doesn’t own the lab, it’s a line item expense to get a test done. They’re heavily incentivized to not test repeatedly. They just assume, day one normally looks like this, day 10 normally looks like this.

We own the lab — a lab that does testing for the concentration of the ESS-60 molecules. So we’re testing multiple times through the course of a batch. We’re not just testing at the end.

I’ll say one of the things — I’m pretty altruistic. I don’t like to talk bad about the industry in general. I don’t want to call out anybody because I think what happens is I call them out, they try and call us out, and then the consumer says, “I don’t trust that industry at all, so I’m just not even going to try anything.” So I’m pretty altruistic.

I think one of the reasons that their concentrations were so low is because, in the original study — this was out of the University of Paris — they used an Erlenmeyer flask. Now, that’s that kind of triangular-shaped flask, this smaller one-liter flask typically, or at least that’s what’s used in this case. And then a magnetic stirrer, so you’re stirring the olive oil or the avocado oil or the MCT oil with the added ESS-60 powder, and you’re stirring that and it typically took two weeks to reach saturation.

By the way, if you were to wake up today and say, “I want to make a lot of money off of a supplement,” you probably wouldn’t choose this one for the reason that it actually takes three weeks of mixing in order to reach peak concentration.

But how do we know that, and why is that different than the two weeks? Well, when you go from a one-liter Erlenmeyer flask to much bigger vessels — right, so we’re dealing with hundred-liter vessels — at that point, the fluid dynamics are different. That powder sitting in that vessel sits differently.

We just found, because we’re testing multiple times as we’re going up to these bigger vessels, that it takes three weeks to reach full saturation. Whereas companies that don’t have the in-house testing and frankly probably aren’t doing proper testing at the end of the process, they’re looking at it and going, “Well, it took two weeks in the Erlenmeyer flask. That’s actually in the publication, in the paper out of the University of Paris.”

By the way, super proud to share our lab provided the material to that original study — the study that turned this molecule into a health supplement. Our lab is actually mentioned in that peer-reviewed, published paper.

But in that paper, they used two weeks to mix it. Now they’re saying, “Well, just because we’re still mixing it, we’re going to mix it for two weeks, and we’re going to throw it in a bottle and send it out.” Not that they shouldn’t do a better job, but I try to assume that they’re not doing anything on purpose.

Ashley James (1:25:34.581)

I encourage people to go back and listen to episode 551, because I don't want to repeat too much of it, but it was really cool — you telling the whole story of C60 and ESS-60 and your lab and the process of how to make it, and the fact that the lab rats lived 90 years — or sorry, 90% longer. 

Chris Burres (1:25:58.189)

That's an expensive study. 

Ashley James (1:26:00.595)

Can you imagine 90 years? They're still living to this day and for the next 40 years. 

Chris Burres (1:26:05.871)

They're actually AI programmers now.

Ashley James (1:26:08.677)

So great. And also tumor free. These rats, which naturally produce tumors as part of their, I don't know, just the way that they've been bred for labs — they also were tumor free. That's where you insert your “we're not trying to cure cancer, this is anecdotal” or whatever FDA little blurb there that you did back in 551.

But it's just interesting that mice and rats, which normally produce lots of tumors — when you give them this substance, they don't produce them and they also live super longer than they normally do. In labs, typically, because we use—I am not the scientist, you're the scientist—but scientists who use these types of rats and these types of mice know exactly how long they typically live. So it was just so incredibly cool.

And that's why it all got started. That's the focus. That's why people went, wait a second, this made people's necks turn. Especially the “I want to know how did the biohackers figure this out?” Are there people that are just scanning the internet for weird, obscure studies? Because this study was around industrial—whether it was safe to use in industrial lubricants and stuff. It was not in any way being considered for the health space.

Have you ever figured out how this topic jumped into the health space? Who figured that out?

Chris Burres (1:27:49.489)

I mean, it was a toxicity study. The scientist who ran the study assumed that the molecule would be toxic because there are 20 of the benzene ring shapes on the exterior of the cage. Benzene is, although it's ubiquitous in our society—the foundational molecule of plastics and a lot of medications are the benzene ring—when it's on its own, it's known to be toxic and known to be carcinogenic. There are 20 of those shapes on the exterior of this soccer ball-shaped cage.

They assumed it would be toxic. No, I joke, it's this wacky group, wacky, crazy group of people called biohackers, which I can say affectionately now, because I am a biohacker, who called us up and said, “Hey, that stuff that the rats lived 90% longer—how much should we be taking?”

If you go back and listen to the previous podcast, my response was, “That stuff that we sell to research institutions around the world to put into inks, batteries, tires, and photocells—you probably shouldn't take any of that.” We added “not for human consumption” to our labeling.

So it really is just this wacky situation. Yes, people are scouring the literature and looking for results. I think if some other result came out on some other molecule where the test subjects lived 90% longer—mammals lived 90% longer—then yes, whoever’s manufacturing that molecule would start to get phone calls from crazy, wacky biohackers who want to start it right away.

Ashley James (1:29:23.765)

Now, when you say animals living 90% longer, I think how many people have a beloved dog or cat that they would love to live longer. Genetically, dogs should live longer than 13 or 14 years. I think dogs should be living at least 20. I've had a cat live to 20. I've had another cat live to 18.

That's pretty cool. I had a friend who had a cat live to 26, but it's possible. It's possible you could have your cat live longer, your dog live longer. So you created a supplement for animals, which is the same stuff you give humans, but then you add some kind of liver flavor or fish flavor so the animals will actually eat it and want it. “Hey, it's a treat.”

Can you share results that you've received from pet owners? We talk about going there because the FDA is maybe okay with you talking about that since we're not talking about humans.

Chris Burres (1:30:26.501)

It's interesting — you still have to be careful. We'll maybe do a little bit of FDA dancing. One of my favorite testimonials, we probably mentioned this last time, so I won't go into the whole testimonial, but one of our largest distributors here in Houston, Gwen, she originally bought the product for her dog and had no intention of ever taking the product. She noticed such a profound difference in her dog — she has a Shih Tzu — that she then decided to start taking the product.

One of the pieces that I love about pet testimonials is the fact that there is no placebo effect with pets. If you're listening to this, you might, and should frankly, be thinking about the placebo effect because it does in fact affect everything. It affects medications. It affects your response to foods you eat. It affects everything. So it is a consideration. It is just not a consideration for pets.

She noticed this profound difference. We actually have a couple of pets that we talk about from time to time that are cats in their 18 and 20. So one 18-year-old cat, one 20-year-old cat. One of the CEOs of one of my companies — his cat was ill. They don't know exactly what was wrong with it. They had taken it to all sorts of vets, this is crazy, the vets were, “Hey, we should do this test.” And my CEO — his name’s Matt — was, “Hey, so if the result is positive, what do we do?” The cat’s going to die. “And if the result is negative?” “I don’t know, it looks like your cat’s going to die.”

So he said, “Well, why don’t we not spend the money on the test?” He ended up calling our office, and we gave him a couple of bottles. This was probably five years ago. That cat is still with us, and the vets had written the cat off.

There’s another one that I really like, also from the source. There’s a Kyle Zagradowski — he is the CEO of OsteoStrong. I don’t know if you’ve heard of OsteoStrong. It’s a bone density company. Their focus is to increase bone density with a kind of isometric, high-weight isometric hold. So because it’s isometric, you can’t hurt yourself, but it is high weight — so you load up your bones. Fascinating technology.

He’s in the health and wellness space, and I had interviewed him and sent him a care package. His son had brought home these two pugs. One of them was the runt, and actually something was severely wrong with the pug. It had tremors, was dizzy all the time, and could barely eat. He took it to the vet. The vet said, “This pug is not going to make it.”

My product arrived on his doorstep, I think, on day three after the pug was brought home. He started giving him triple servings, and his testimonial — which is actually available on Google from Kyle — says the dog was 80% better within a week. They had said that it was water on the brain. I don’t have anything to support that — again, not making any claims — but the vet said, “I would chalk this up as almost miraculous,” because of the dramatic difference in such an extreme situation.

And I loved what Kyle said to end that testimonial: “Chris, I will never not take your product.”

Ashley James (1:34:02.777)

You reminded me of the story of your buddy who does ultra marathons, and I did notice more endurance in the gym, as did my husband. I was, but I acted, yes, it's supposed to do that. You're supposed to recover faster and feel you are invincible in the gym. That’s why I didn’t bring it up as one of my tests, because I was, yes, he said it was going to happen. So, of course, this is going to happen.

But yes, I definitely felt that. It was really neat — just doing one thing and then feeling it in these different areas of life. It’s pretty cool.

In 551, we talked about how it works in the cell. Have you had any more studies? I know it’s only been two months since we had you last on the show, but is there any more science around it that we haven’t discussed yet in this episode — the last episode — that you could bring to light? Or anything, a new perspective on seeing and understanding why it works, how it works?

Chris Burres (1:35:16.529)

Well, I mean, the short answer is not really. We're kicking off with the help of an organization to start collecting clinical trial data, so clinical-level quality trial data for an HSCRP. Actually, our conversation today, I've written down migraines, so I will put together a migraine study because we have just gotten that.

So many times, it's not just your husband. It's not just me. It's not just my wife. So many times we get that feedback, and what a powerful thing. Migraines just really, really suck, right? You're talking two and a half years of half a life. I want to talk about it, because you mentioned quality of life, and I took a note there. So I will be adding migraine to our current studies that we're working on, which are sleep-related, HSCRP-related, which is the inflammatory marker, and then also we're doing one on wrinkles and skin quality. We're going to add a migraine study to that, so I'm excited about that.

The quality of life one — so you mentioned this is a dramatic impact for your husband. We have a testimonial related that sounds very similar on a different aspect, which was a lady who was having problems sleeping, and she gave us a testimonial video. She almost cried twice in this video as she was sharing this testimonial. She said, I tried everything. I went to every expert I could. I couldn’t get sleep. I wasn’t sleeping. And finally, I’m sleeping.

The way she said it was the way you shared your story today reminded me of her sharing this. She goes, my significant other is getting to know me again. Because if you’re not getting sleep, you’re not the same person. If you’re struggling with these migraines, you’re not the same person that you are when you’re not struggling with that sleep or that migraine. I don’t know. I’m so lucky that I get to, in some way, be responsible for these amazing testimonials.

Ashley James (1:37:29.865)

I love it. That is so cool. Before we hit the record, that you had just completed a longevity summit?

Chris Burres (1:37:40.737)

Yes, so I did a longevity summit. This was part of my, I don't know, do things that sound like the right thing to do that I have no idea how to do. I'll share this. 

Going into the summit, if you had said four months before I even started the summit, “Hey, Chris, here's what I'm going to need you to do. I'm going to need you to interview 55 experts in the longevity space, and it needs to include Ben Greenfield, Dave Asprey, Dr. Steven Gundry, and then a bunch of others that I hadn't even heard of at the time that are also amazing,” I would have said, “I'm the kind of person who likes to shoot a trajectory of success, and so I'm going to say no to that project because I don't see how I get from where I am to where I'm going.”

At the time, there was this organization called Health Means that helped me put that event on. They were like, “So Chris, here's what we're going to need.” Their initial kind of presentation was you can be a sponsor and a speaker. I was like, “Yes, I'll do that.” For certain events that they're running, you can just sponsor. I thought, “I don't know about that.” Then I asked, “Well, how do I host it?” I've just always believed if you're that person in the front of the classroom or in front of the conference room, then that's where you have the most impact. They said, “Yes, here's the price point and here's what it is.” I thought, “Okay, I need to get out of my comfort zone and do this.”

The first conversation was, “You need to interview between 35 and 40 people in this longevity space.” I literally thought in my head, “Wow, I'm pretty sure I could do 25. Hopefully, they won't be that angry with me.” Right? Because once you go down the path—what are they going to do? We're not going to do the summit because you only got 25? I ended up interviewing 55 experts in longevity. Again, Dave Asprey, Ben Greenfield, Steven Gundry—amazing how that all came together.

There are two really cool conclusions that came out of it. I do some things serendipitously, not knowing what the kind of profound value is going to be down the road. I asked each and every one of these 55 experts, “What are two to three protocols, habits, mindsets—let's call them shortcuts—because everybody likes shortcuts—for longevity and a long health span that you would share?” I asked them all this and aggregated the data.

The data came out like this. Of course, you have to kind of interpret and interpolate what they're saying. The key ones were sleep, exercise, mindset, and socialization was much, much lower. So we’ll just look at sleep, exercise, diet, and mindset. 33% mentioned sleep, 52% mentioned exercise, 52% mentioned diet, and 46% mentioned mindset. My mind immediately went to only 33% mentioned sleep. I felt maybe they got it wrong because we know how important sleep is for your mental, physical, and emotional well-being.

These are the things you kind of need to sit on and ruminate on. Then I realized they did get it wrong, but for a different reason. Mindset wasn’t the most important thing, and I think mindset is the most important thing. Here's the reality: if you know you need to put your device down or even charge it outside of your room or go to sleep at 10 o'clock or whatever the exact time is for your chronotype, but you're not willing to do it, you don't have the mindset to do it. It's not going to happen.

If you know you need to exercise differently or more or less even, and you don't have the right mindset, you're not going to do it. Of course, with diet, if you need to make changes and you don't have the right mindset, then that's the problem. So I think mindset is, in fact, the most important thing, and it's the thing a lot of people do talk about it—but I think we need to be talking about it more. How do you ultimately change your mindset? That was one aspect.

The other that I think was kind of cool is I went into the longevity summit thinking about what are the silver bullets. I kind of pictured two silver bullets. One of the silver bullets was the pill that you would take so that you could live forever or a lot longer. It won't surprise you, I did not find this silver bullet.

But the other one was, what is the silver bullet that's going to kill us? What is the silver bullet that is this big impediment to us living significantly longer and potentially living forever? What I found was pretty fascinating. It was stem cells.

Now, stem cells are the repair mechanism of our body. A lot of people realize that we're sloughing off skin cells all day. We know we're losing hair. A lot of people maybe don't realize that our muscles—every muscle cell in our body—is replenished every three months, and each tissue in our bodies (except for the brain) has this kind of replacement profile. What it gets replaced with is actually stem cells—these pluripotent stem cells that can become any cells.

They're floating around your body saying, “This muscle cell or this liver cell or this kidney cell needs to be replaced.” Boom—it becomes that cell and replaces it. Now, why is this a silver bullet of death? That sounds very ominous, but I think it's appropriate. The silver bullet of death is that the stem cells come from our red bone marrow, and our red bone marrow shrinks as we age.

For instance, the longest-lived human was Jeanne Calment. She died at 122, interestingly. She quit smoking after her vision was so bad that she couldn't light her cigarette. So she was not the model of health and still lived to 122. They had identified that all of her cells had come from one kind of stem cell collection. So she was down to one source of stem cells. When you run out of stem cells, it's kind of like if you don't have any way to repair your car, the writing is on the wall. That car is going to stop working. The timeframe may be a little bit longer, a little bit shorter, but it's going to stop working. So that is what I think is the biggest silver bullet.

Now, I think there are solutions already that aren't being implemented and could actually work, which is: you pull these stem cells out of our body, grow them—which is illegal to do in the United States (you can probably grow them, but you can't put them back in)—and then some sort of dialysis situation where you're getting constant injections of stem cells so that those stem cells can run around and replenish the cells in your body that need to be replenished.

Those were the key conclusions from my longevity summit.

Ashley James (1:45:19.149)

Really interesting. So I have something cool to share with you, and that is go listen to episode 517 of my podcast with David Schmidt. I've been using his technology personally and then also with over 250 of my clients for the last three years. It's either three or coming up on four, I can't remember. I have to go back and look, but it's been long enough—getting super great results.

He has a technology that stimulates your body to produce healthy new tissue. One of the mechanisms is that it encourages the body to make its cells in that way. The FDA doesn’t like people talking about stem cells. Believe it or not, in the last year or so. The thing that your body does naturally—make stem cells. The FDA has now decided it is regulating that industry.

So if you were to take a supplement that's known to stimulate stem cells or use a frequency technology that's known to stimulate your body's own stem cells, you're not taking stem cells from someone else, yet the FDA has decided that it can regulate that industry. So I'm just dancing around, but David does talk about that he has studies proving it, and he’s published them. He has 80 studies, and some of them are specifically on stimulating your body's own stem cell production.

I have been successfully using this with my clients, getting really cool results. So that's something to look into—episode 517. There are ways to help your body's own stem cell production, so you don't have to take it from someone else.

A few years ago, I interviewed a doctor—this was maybe seven years ago. I interviewed a doctor on episode 108. So that was definitely a few years ago. What I liked about that episode, episode 108, is he explained so well what a stem cell is. He's a doctor, a surgeon—his living is collecting stem cells and injecting them into your knee or your hip. Let's say you have arthritis, he injects them into it.

Back then it was $10,000. Now it's probably $60,000. And where are you getting the stem cells from? He talked about the efficacy of where you're getting the stem cells from. Before the age of about between 24 and 26, you could derive them from your own body, from adipose tissue. They'd suck out some fat, isolate the stem cells, and then inject them into, let's say, your knee because you injured it.

But after the age of between 24 and 26, you have to get them from someone else because you don't naturally have an abundance just hanging out in your adipose tissue for them to culture or concentrate. Then that becomes the ethical issue. Are we getting it from unborn babies? Are we getting it from the mother's placenta? Where are we getting this from? So, other people basically.

People who have these injected into, let's say, arthritic knees, the knee heals amazingly well. People who are in car accidents and have severe brain injury and then use stem cells have incredible recovery—really interesting recovery, far beyond what the doctors would think would happen. It's the cells the body uses to rapidly repair tissue, no matter what the tissue is, it seems to work.

But I asked a question, and I remember this point all the way back in episode 108. I said, “That's interesting. The person—let’s say you take someone who drinks beer and eats McDonald’s and they're undernourished, the stereotypical American diet—lacking key nutrients, missing vitamins and minerals, the body is not full of what it needs. If he went and got the $40,000 stem cell treatment, where you're injecting new cells into him, would he repair? Would he heal?”

The doctor said, “No, he will have very poor outcomes because the stem cells need nutrition to become healthy cells.” As you said, a silver bullet, and I agree. Stem cells are absolutely vital to understanding our own body—to protect your body, to produce stem cells as much and as long and as often as you can for the rest of your life. I think that's really important.

We should stop doing the things that hurt our body's own stem cell production. What hurts our bone marrow? We should stop doing that. Dr. Joel Wallach says eating gluten grains significantly negatively impacts your bone marrow production. He goes into why—because of how it affects vasculature. He has a really interesting theory about that. So it's like, okay, there are certain foods and nutrition—making sure you're full up on all the vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids. You’re just full of everything you should be.

Don’t do everything you shouldn’t do. You should sleep. Protect your body's ability to produce these things. But if you were to go get stem cells from someone else and have them injected into you, in order to have the best outcomes, you first have to nutrify your body. And then, funny enough, when you nutrify your body, how much actually heals anyway? So I thought that was pretty interesting.

Chris Burres (1:51:09.207)

Have you heard of Acorn? 

Ashley James (1:51:12.637)

You mean eating acorns from a tree? 

Chris Burres (1:51:15.643)

No. So Acorn is a genetics company, and what they do is they actually pluck hairs because your hair follicles have pluripotent stem cells in them. 

So we had this process done. I'm about to interview the CEO of the company, I've actually interviewed their marketing guy who is unbelievably knowledgeable. It's just impressive. His name is Dave. So they plucked hairs out, and now they've got stem cells.

By the way, the next best way to get stem cells is by sticking a needle into your hip bone and extracting stem cells. So you've got pluck hair, or we've got hip bone extraction.

Right now, they can't do much with them due to the restrictions here in the United States, but the sooner you can store your stem cells in terms of age, the better. Minor banked like 170 bucks a year or something to bank them. It can be expensive to pull them out, but I'm sure they would do something special for you. I'd be happy to introduce you to them.

Ashley James (1:52:33.092)

I mean, I'm just interested in all of this. But if we can protect and stimulate our own production, even into our senior years, it would be the cheapest way to do it. But interesting, if you're someone who is worried about arthritis, for example, and you want to have that stem cell treatment one day, then culturing your own would probably be the most ethical. Maybe not the most financially doable for everyone, but glad they're finding alternatives to the lesser ethical ways of getting stem cells.

So you talked about mindset, and I love the examples you brought up. One thing, or just said a different way, I see this a lot. People who will take on a diagnosis—“I have diabetes” or “I have cancer, God forbid”—but, or “I have this.” It becomes something they have, it becomes themselves, it becomes their identity. They have a belief system that is true, this is unshakable, this is the truth. That mindset blocks people.

Imagine you're holding a giant, I don't know, disease in front of you. You're holding a giant ostrich egg right in front of your face. You're saying, “This is my disease.” I met with a woman the other day who’s having her gallbladder out. I was at Taekwondo with my son, and one of my best friends said, “Can you please tell my friend what you told me about gallbladders?”

I said to her, people who are in the wrong mindset, they are not receptive to what I have to say, but I will share this because I think it's my duty to make sure people are aware. So I said, it might not go well. I’m very polite, tiptoeing, but I say, “Hey, I overheard you talking about that you're getting your gallbladder removed. I just want you to know, because I've dealt with this in the space for over 10 years and have had hundreds of clients come to me who've had their gallbladders taken out, and it makes them sicker and sicker and sicker five, ten years down the road.”

Someone can come to me, never tell me they've had their gallbladder removed, start telling me their symptoms, and I'm like, “When did you have your gallbladder removed?” And they’ll say, “How did you know?” And I’ll say, “Back in 2012?” And they’ll say, “Yes.” It’s because this is what happens to people who've had their gallbladder removed. It’s predictable. This should be a crime—surgeons don’t tell their patients that when they remove the gallbladder, they should be on a bile supplement for the rest of their life.

Surgeons say, “Well, that appendage wasn't really necessary anyway. We hook up the drip of bile into your small intestine, and that's adequate enough. We didn't really need this gallbladder in the first place to help emulsify fat.” So if you can't emulsify fat adequately because now you don't have enough bile to do it, because you don't have a gallbladder storing the bile up, then you're not emulsifying. If you're not emulsifying, you're not digesting. If you're not digesting, you're not absorbing. Now you become more and more deficient in key healthy fats, and it also just disrupts a lot of other stuff in the gut.

So I just let her know, “Hey, just so you know.” I wasn’t even going up to her saying, “Don’t get the surgery.” I was just saying, “Just so you know, there are ways you can, in some cases, actually help the body get so healthy you may not require this.” And she goes, “Well, I'm getting the surgery because I have fatty liver.” And I’m like, “Just so you know, non-alcoholic fatty liver is reversible.”

She got super angry at me, just very indignant, red in the face. I was trying to be gentle, tiptoeing, saying, “I could give you some information to look at.” And she just said, “I've had this for so long.” So this is the mindset. Imagine you're holding your disease, and it becomes your identity, and you start protecting it. “No, this is my problem. The doctor told me this. The doctor said I have to have a drug for the rest of my life or I have to have the surgery.”

They hold it up to their face, and if you hold it so close to your face, you cannot see. You're not even going to allow yourself to see anything to the contrary. If you have a belief like, “Because my mother had insomnia, my grandmother had insomnia, I will have insomnia. Everyone in my family has this. Every man in my family died of a heart attack. Because this happened, this means it's going to happen to me.”

If you have a belief that you will have a disease, or you do have a disease, and you won’t even entertain any activity that could help you out of that situation—it’s the hardest thing to do, to see our own blind spots. It’s so easy to point out someone else’s, but the hardest is to see our own.

If you find yourself going, “Well, my doctor said…” If you catch yourself saying that, then you are doing this. You are having the mindset. Or if you say, “Well, everyone in my family blah blah,” or, “It’s because I am 57,” or, “It’s because I am a woman,” or, “It’s because of my age, race, sex, whatever.” If you have any of those terms come out of your mouth, that’s a clear sign that the next thing you’re about to say is your blind spot—it’s your mindset.

The mindset you need—and this is the mindset—and when you shift into it, you see the world in an entirely different way: “My body has a God-given ability to heal itself. My body can heal itself. I heal. My body is healing every minute of every day, and my body can heal.” I need to figure out what I am doing and what I’m eating, living, sleeping, exercise, diet—what am I doing that is inhibiting my ability to heal myself? What can I do to support and enhance my ability to heal itself?

Your body wants to heal. I’ve seen people heal from things that no one else thought they could heal from, let alone themselves, because they decided to take on this mindset. When you believe your body can heal itself, now you finally open up to possibility, and then you take actions towards doing it. But if you believe you can’t, like that woman—she’s not even open.

Then I Googled, just for fun. This is Google. This is mainstream medicine Google. I just typed “how to reverse non-alcoholic fatty liver” and scrolled, and it’s bullet point after bullet point, study after study proving it. I’ve helped my clients do it. I’m kind of fringe. Sometimes my holistic space is fringe compared to the drug, cut, and poison modern monopoly method of medicine.

The fact that we can heal the body and then someone is unwilling to even see it—that's the mindset. So your body can heal.

I love that you pointed out that is the number one thing, and the reason why those guys didn’t talk about it is because they live, breathe, and eat it. This mindset is so ubiquitous with every part of their being. Honestly, you and I should say the key thing to your human survival is the fact that you’re breathing the air you’re breathing. If we took the air out of this room, you wouldn’t be alive in three minutes. But we take it for granted.

We take the fact that we have oxygen and nitrogen and the wonderful mix of air that we breathe. We take this for granted. But that’s the number one key to our longevity—the fact that we have air in this room every day. Their mindset is the air you breathe. It’s so part of them.

So you want to surround yourself—and I love that you gathered this from the Longevity Summit—because you want to surround yourself with people whose mindset is the air they breathe. Their mindset of health and healing is something they don’t even think about because it’s them. It’s part of them.

Then when you look at them from the outside perspective, you go, “No, no, no, your mindset is the number one thing driving you to heal and be healthier.” I’ve seen 70-year-olds and 80-year-olds turn their lives around. Instead of listening to their doctor—who says, “Okay, well now you need a wheelchair, now you need to go get wheeled off and go die in the corner somewhere, turn to dust”—they defied their doctors and started doing CrossFit.

At any age, you can turn your life around. You can heal. This is another thing that really makes MDs angry—you can heal arthritis. You can heal bone-on-bone arthritis. Your body can heal at any age. MDs are angry about that. I don’t know why. They’ll say, “No, you can’t heal. You need a replacement.” It’s not true. Your body can heal.

Now again, we have to bring in the nutrition, bring in the right exercise, the right mindset, the right nutrition. But your body can heal, and that’s the number one thing. So I know I went on my rant—you pushed a button in me, Chris. You pushed the button. It’s a good button. That’s my button.

I think that’s my number one goal in life. If I could help people transform their mindset, they’re going to go find this information. Our job is to show them, is to help do that paradigm shift, show them it’s possible, and then they’re going to run with it.

But yes, mindset. I love it. I love it. That’s so cool. Are there any “aha” moments that you got from the Longevity Summit beyond this really helpful breakdown of what they said? Was there anything really neat that was worth sharing?

Chris Burres (2:02:53.007)

No, I’ll tell you this. I'm sure you bump into this. One of the things that seems to be extremely consistent is to get off of gluten—really get off of wheat and grains. Probably get off of dairy, definitely get off of sugar. Alcohol probably didn’t come up that much. I think that almost goes without saying.

But that was so consistent in people with their own healing journeys or the healing journeys of others, that probably no matter where you sit today, it’s a good idea to stop eating bread—at least certainly bread here in the United States. I think there’s some debate about how much of the problem is caused by glyphosate specifically, but pesticides in general.

Ashley James (2:03:45.683)

Did they talk about that they fortify it with these? They say, “We're putting B vitamins back into it,” but it turns out to be the synthetic form of folic acid that blocks your ability to uptake folate? So it's actually causing, on an intracellular level, more nutrient deficiency. Did they talk about what they fortify bread with?

They also put things in that they don’t have to declare if it’s considered “industry standard.” You said glyphosate — also bromine or bromide, anti-caking agents, those kinds of things? We all blame the gluten. I don’t think gluten’s super healthy, but people who are incredibly gluten sensitive go to Europe and they can eat the bread there. What are we doing in America?

What is it in Europe versus North America? What are we doing to our flour that makes it so different? I met a woman who said, “I end up in the hospital when I eat bread here in America.” She’s from Europe. She goes, “I go to Europe, I eat pastries all day long. I just go to Paris — yum, yum, yum — eat them up. But if I come here, I end up in the hospital because something in the bread here makes me incredibly sick.” How interesting is that?

I have a friend who for years thought she was gluten sensitive. It turns out because of her MTHFR, she cannot handle the synthetic B vitamins that they fortify in most flours. So what is it? Is it the gluten? Is it the glyphosate? Is it the bromine? Is it the B vitamins — the artificial, synthetic, bad stuff vitamins they call vitamins? Or is it a combination of all of it?

But yes, I love that going gluten-free or grain-free is so freeing. The brain fog goes away. Everything gets better. The body just works better when you remove them. Just like taking alcohol away — it’s like, “Wow, I don’t feel crappy in the morning. Wow, this is amazing.”

Did any of those guys try your ESS60? Did any of them say that they tried it or did it?

Chris Burres (2:06:03.347)

Yes, well, certainly a number of them — some of them, actually one of them is one of my top three. I’ve got to keep his privacy, but one of the top three. I know that Dave Asprey has talked about the molecule on occasion. I'm actually going to be on his podcast talking about our product at the beginning of next year, so I'm pretty excited about that.

Greenfield has also talked about it, so I’m working to coordinate being on that podcast. There are cutting-edge biohackers who are constantly absorbing information and are fairly aware, but I'll share that when I go to a biohacking conference and I’m in a target-rich environment, only about 30% of people have ever even heard of it.

So yes, we have a lot of work to do. Yes.

Ashley James (2:06:58.883)

Really? Fascinating. Well, there's more work to be done then. I want you to get hooked up with Tony Robbins. He’s a super mega biohacker. I think it’d be really neat — you and Tony. Man, I want to see that interview. So I'm putting that out in my future. It's already there. It's already there. I'm looking forward to it.

All right. That sounds cool. Man, you're rubbing shoulders with the big wigs, dude. This is cool.

Here I am talking to you. Look, you've been rubbing shoulders with the elite celebrities of the holistic world, and that's fun. I love it. Awesome.

Chris Burres (2:07:33.219)

I am about to interview Dr. Pompa. I don't know if he's on your radar. Yes, that's kind of cool. He's absolutely interested in our product and potentially doing a project together with it. Yes, exciting things going on.

Ashley James (2:07:50.955)

Very nice, very nice. Cool.

Well, I want to have you back after you've published these studies for sure. You're talking about doing these studies, and you're saying you're going to do migraine, and I definitely, definitely want to unpack that. I'm really looking forward to seeing the results.

We need to uptick that number. It should be 90% of people in the longevity space who have heard of or used your product, not 30%. So we've got more work to do, Chris. We've got to get this out there.

Listeners can go to myvitalc.com/LTH, and you give us a great discount, thank you. You said in episode 551, the best price—scroll all the way down until you find what says auto ship. Sign up for the auto ship, get the olive oil, the olive oil one, sign up for the ship. You have amazing five-star customer service. They can cancel; they don't have to stay on the auto ship if they don’t want to, but it gives them the biggest discount.

Between my coupon code that you gave all of us and getting on auto ship, those two combined give you the best discount. Then if you want to stay on it, stay on it—you still get the best price. If you don't, you get to cancel it, and you got the best price. You stand behind your product, which is another thing I am very happy about.

You stand 100% behind your product. So I encourage listeners to go check it out. They can also go to the show notes of today's podcast, LearnTrueHealth.com, or wherever you listen from. You can just click on details of this episode, and you'll see the link to myvitalc.com/LTH, as in Learn True Health.

Chris, this is exciting. The fact that you gave my husband a tremendous chunk of the quality of his life back—I'm looking forward to seeing what happens over the next few months. Does this continue to transform it? Does his problem go away completely? What's going to happen?

But the fact is, out of everything we've done, it's been the number one most effective thing. So I'm eternally grateful. Thank you. Thank you for what you do, and thank you for taking on the challenge when everyone said, “Please make a supplement out of this,” and you finally did, in the most ethical and safe way possible.

So thank you for everything you do. Is there anything you would like to say to wrap up today's interview?

Chris Burres (2:10:17.551)

Well, just thank you so much for having me. Thank you for helping me spread the word about this. The research behind it, the story, which is in that book Live Longer and Better. I have a charity piece that I want to share about the book.

You can find the book Live Longer and Better on Amazon. It's $19.95. It's also available on our website with this charity piece. So, do go to that link, myvitalc.com/LTH, grab that coupon code, go to the menu structure, and find the book. The book is available for $19.95 on our website.

For 10 extra dollars, I will autograph that book for you, and 100% of that $10 fee goes to Operation Underground Railroad. You may remember that movie The Sound of Freedom, an amazing movie about a horrible topic, which is child sex trafficking, and which should be off of our planet yesterday.

So 100% of that signature fee goes directly to Operation Underground Railroad.

Ashley James (2:11:19.357)

That is so cool. Well, thank you. Thank you just for bringing awareness to that. I actually know a local teenager that was saved from that industry, and it hits home. You think about that, you think that's somewhere far away, you think that that's something that happens in other countries to other people, not in your backyard.

It happens everywhere. It's happening to too many. Even if I'm the one person, it's too many, right? But it's happening to too many children and teenagers, and it's not all right. I love that you're bringing awareness to that and helping raise funds for that. So thank you for that.

It was so awesome having you back on the show. Can't wait to have you back. This has been great.

Chris Burres (2:12:10.363)

Yes. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Two hours goes by way too fast with you. So thank you again so much for having me.

Outro:

I hope you enjoyed today's interview with Chris. Since I recorded this, I've had even greater experiences with the ESS-60. You can go to myvitalc.com/LTH. That's M-Y-V-I-T-A-L-C as in the letter C, dot com slash LTH, as in Learn True Health. There Chris gives you an awesome discount, and we talked about in our first interview in episode 551, Chris gave us a little hint as to how we can get the best discount.

First of all, get the coupon code that's listed on the top of the page myvitalc.com/LTH. Then scroll all the way down to where you find the auto ship. Sign up for the auto ship, use the coupon code, and sign up for the auto ship at the same time. You can cancel the auto ship anytime you want, but if you get on auto ship for your first order, it gives you the deepest discount. So that's what I want for you.

He also talks about how it's money-back guaranteed. If you take a whole bottle and, for whatever reason, you're like, “I want my money back,” you can go to him. He's really awesome about that. He also talks about how, if you've bought C60 from someone else, you can reach out to him. He has in the past taken bottles from other people and then said, “Here, let me just take that off your hands, take a free bottle of mine and try it in comparison,” because his stuff is the real deal—and there are so many fake ones out there.

My husband and I personally experienced that. What's really neat is just by taking this alone, it turns off the chronic pain episodes, these migraine-like episodes that my husband experiences. Even yesterday, he took some during an episode—it immediately turned it off. And I mean by immediately, within minutes. It just melted away, whereas normally it lasts for hours and hours. He's had this happen so many times, over and over again, that we see it's the only thing that has been able to just kick this pain to the curb.

But not only that—you experience more energy, vitality, better sleep, better recovery when you go in and push yourself. How neat is that? This helps on so many levels—it is a powerful antioxidant. There’s so much to dive into, and we’re just beginning to scratch the surface. Make sure you go back and listen to episode 551 if you haven’t; it really complements this episode.

I’m glad you listened. Go and check it out—myvitalc.com/LTH—and please reach out to me. Let me know how this went for you. Let me know after some time. Reach out to me and you can email me at ashley@learntruehealth.com, or you can join our Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group. I would absolutely love to hear how this worked for you.

Be sure to get on my newsletter. Go to learntruehealth.com and jump on the newsletter. It's right there on the homepage. I'd love for you to jump in. I think it's at the bottom—sometimes at the top, sometimes at the bottom. Just look at the whole front page; you'll find it there. You want to be there because I've got something really exciting coming up, and I'm going to be announcing it to my listeners who are on the newsletter first. So, if you want that information first, get on the newsletter.

You’ll also receive one-third of my book for free, plus a whole series of emails leading you to the foundations of health that I’ve uncovered through working with people for over 20 years, as well as over 500 interviews with holistic health experts. I boil down thousands of hours of amazing information into concise emails for you to go down these wonderful rabbit holes, and each email is going to help transform your life—which you get for free. So jump on the newsletter. It's a brand-new newsletter, so if you think you've joined my newsletter in the past, it's a new newsletter—you’re going to have to jump on again by going to learntruehealth.com. Put your email in there and good things will happen.

Awesome—have yourself a fantastic rest of your day. Please reach out if you ever have questions. I'm here to help. I also work with people and I coach people. If you're struggling on a mental, emotional, or physical level and you're stuck and want some direction, I have some great resources and would love to help you.

You can even sign up for a free talk with me. Go to the top of my webpage, learntruehealth.com, and select Work with Ashley James. You can sign up to talk to me for free, and I can see if we’re a good fit for each other—if you want to hire me, or if I can just point you in some direction. You don’t even have to hire me—just talk to me for a few minutes. Sometimes I just help people get unstuck. It’s a gift, and I’ve been doing it for over 20 years. So if you ever feel like you’re stuck, just reach out. I’d love to help.

Get Connected with Chris Burres!

Facebook

Instagram

TikTok

YouTube

Book by Chris Burres

Live Longer and Better: Your Journey to Living Longer and Better Has Never Been More Achievable Than Today

---

---

Order High-Quality Supplements

Visit Our YouTube Channel