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Even as we prioritize natural interventions in functional medicine, GLP-1 agonist drugs such as Wegovy and Ozempic offer sometimes life-changing support for those who have long struggled with resistant overweight/obesity and high blood sugar. However, there are side effects, including the risk of substantial muscle loss and sagging, aged skin (“Ozempic face” as it’s indelicately known). It’s a concern that hits home for me, considering the pivotal role we know that muscle plays in overall health and longevity.
In this New Frontiers podcast episode I welcome back Dr. Anurag Singh to unravel the complexities of these issues. We explore the interplay between metabolic health and muscle preservation, touching on everything from the mechanisms of GLP-1 agonists and their long-term effects on aging and sarcopenia, to the promising potential of dietary and lifestyle interventions to counteract negative effects. We consider the potential for one of my all-time fave postbiotic epinutrients – Urolithin A – to assist by supporting mitochondrial health and preserving/enhancing muscle quality. This timely conversation is one you won’t want to miss. Tune in and please leave us a review wherever you listen to New Frontiers. – DrKF
With the meteoric rise in the use of semaglutides and their astounding promise in metabolic health, it’s crucial to also examine and address their potential risks. Dr. Anurag Singh, Chief Medical Officer at Timeline, joins New Frontiers as we delve into the importance of preserving muscle mass while utilizing these drugs. We explore the potential side effects, particularly among older individuals, of exacerbating the aging process and heightening the risk of falls. We’ll also cover essential strategies to consider implementing with patients using these drugs such as high-protein diets, the post-biotic Urolithin A, and resistance training to counteract muscle loss and even enhance muscle quality.
In this episode of New Frontiers, learn about:
- The relationship between semaglutides and metabolic health: benefits and potential risks.
- Muscle as a key longevity organ and the repercussions of significant muscle loss in a short period of time with use of semaglutides.
- Importance of addressing cellular health, muscle health, and mitochondrial health alongside GLP-1 agonist drugs.
- Addressing inflammation as a vital aspect of preserving muscle health and overall well-being in the context of GLP-1 agonist use.
- The importance of comprehensive patient care and possible contraindications and considerations when prescribing GLP-1 agonist drugs.
- Implications of accelerated muscle loss linked to GLP-1 drugs, especially among older individuals.
- The continuum of benefits observed with Urolithin A, from addressing sarcopenia and obesity to dampening inflammation and enhancing recovery as well as exercise tolerance in elite athletes.
- The relationship between Urolithin A and the gut microbiome in the synthesis of GLP-1.
- The evolutionary perspective on obesity and microbiome health and its potential links to a compromised microbiome and inadequate GLP-1 synthesis.
- The potential of Urolithin A in enhancing mitochondrial health and muscle quality, offering promising prospects for muscle strength and endurance.
- Strategies to combat accelerated skin aging (“Ozempic face”) associated with GLP-1 agonist drugs.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – Hi, everybody. Welcome to a New Frontiers in Functional Medicine, where we are interviewing the best minds in functional medicine. And of course, today is no exception. I’m excited to be back with Dr. Anurag Singh. Let me give you his background and we’re going to jump right into what will be a very interesting conversation around GLP-1 agonists and really thinking about how to approach these with care and having some background understanding about how we can support our patients. Okay. Dr. Singh is currently Chief Medical Officer at Timeline, which develops next generation advanced nutritional products targeting improvements in mitochondrial and muscle health. With an MD in internal medicine and a PhD in immunology, his experience includes work for top consumer health and startup biotech companies. He’s authored over 40 articles in top science journals, and he’s designed and led over 50 randomized clinical trials in nutrition. His research over the past decade, across multiple clinical trials on the postbiotic Urolithin A and its health benefits related to muscle health, has led to the launch of multiple consumer products. Dr. Singh, once again, welcome to New Frontiers.
Dr. Anurag Singh – Pleasure always. Thanks for having me, Kara.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – Yes, It’s always great to have you and to just kind of pick your brain on what you’re thinking about. Anybody who’s listened to my content knows that I am a huge fan of the compound Urolithin A. I think it’s an important piece of the puzzle for many of us trying to optimize wellness. And now we want to look at GLP-1. First let’s define GLP-1 agonists. But, you know, many, many, many, many individuals are using these, probably rightly so. So what are they? I’m curious – this is a little bit of a sidebar question – I’m curious of your thoughts around long-term use. But one of the pieces that we’re going to touch on is the potential for muscle loss. So, what do we know about GLP-1 drugs? Do we like them? Long term safety? Muscle loss… Okay. Go.
Dr. Anurag Singh – Sure. That’s a great question to start the discussion. GLP-1 agonists – it stands for glucagon-like peptide – basically, these are peptide-based drugs that are binding to the GLP-1 receptor in the pancreas – that’s where glucagon, which is sort of the anti-insulin hormone – so, glucagon, made by the alpha cells in the pancreas, raises your glucose levels and beta cells make insulin that keep your glucose levels down. And so, these were developed for diabetics, right? So, the primary goal in the last ten years, and that’s how long it takes to develop a drug, and their safety was documented, they were approved as drugs. In some cases, in obese individuals with diabetes as one of the primary lines of treatments by endocrinologists, in addition to other drugs like metformin, etc. What they found over the last five years in clinical studies, and perhaps also as they went into overweight or obese diabetics, was they started seeing weight loss patterns emerge, and then they ran these really long 12- to 18-month interventions.
Dr. Anurag Singh – So, the drug is called semaglutide and it’s basically the foundation of these drugs that we know as Ozempic or Wegovy, you know, there are different names around it. So, the biology is you inhibit glucagon, you boost the insulin levels, your glucose metabolism is in good shape. The other thing that these drugs do is they kind of delay gastric emptying. So that also is a secondary impact and that suppresses the appetite hormone and the appetite reward center in the brain. And so, you get this really dual effect of lowering blood glucose levels and having weight loss.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – Can I just ask you, this is not your area of focus, but just the fact that it can prompt increased insulin, then the lowering of blood sugar in diabetics. I haven’t necessarily seen that in obese individuals, nor have I read about it without diabetes, like hyperinsulinemia being a phenomenon and hypoglycemia being the fallout. And I’m just curious if you’ve come across anything on that?
Dr. Anurag Singh – No, I think what is known in the clinical trials that have come, and these are a number of studies that go by step one, step two, or, you know, sustain one to sustain- There’s a lot of well-designed randomized trials, and one of the common features that have emerged is a lot of effects linked to the GI system, sort of side effects. A lot of people have nausea as one of the most common ones. Some people have diarrhea, but nausea seems to be one of the main ones. And if you think about it from a clinician’s perspective, some of them could be linked to things like hypoglycemia, but I think people haven’t really looked into it. What they have looked into, what is the core message I think in the discussion for today, is body composition. And so, what is clear is that these are great drugs. These are perhaps the first hundred-billion-dollar drug, with millions of users. The problem is they were designed for obese individuals and diabetics, and now they’re entering mainstream, with healthy folks who are trying to take it. And that has repercussions on not just fat loss, but muscle loss.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – Well, I think across the board, whoever is taking it, it seems- So they’re clearly losing weight. That’s a consistent feature of these drugs. But muscle loss is a real occurrence with them.
Dr. Anurag Singh – So if you look at this famous publication in the New England Journal of Medicine, this famous STEP 1 trial, they looked at thousands of individuals and then they did a body composition over time in a cohort of about 140 or 150 individuals. So what they see is that you lose about 10 to 15 kilos of fat mass, but you also lose about 5 to 7 kilos of muscle mass.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – That’s incredible.
Dr. Anurag Singh – Think about the trajectory of muscle health, which is my primary area of focus. After your 30s, you’re losing between 1 to 3 kilos every ten years and that gets accelerated in your 60s and 70s. Now, with this drug that’s sustained long, in 12 to 18 months, you’re losing almost 4 to 5 times higher in a short span of a year than you’re losing in ten years in terms of muscle mass.
Dr. Anurag Singh – The other problem is when you stop the drug, these are folks who, again, and that’s the message we want to pass on, is that diet and exercise and boosting your nutrition is very important. And so, a lot of these folks, the fat comes back because the moment you stop the drug, in about another 12 months, half of the fat is back, but the muscle doesn’t come back. And so that’s absolutely the key point to pass on.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – And just for U.S. listeners who might not have top of mind, a kilo is 2.2 pounds. It’s really substantial. It’s a huge loss.
Dr. Anurag Singh – Yeah, that would be 25 pounds of fat loss and 15 pounds of muscle mass loss in that short time. So, it’s great because you reduce your fat and of course, that has implications for energy metabolism and cardiovascular health. It’s great for cardiovascular health. But you have to also think that you’re having this side impact in a detrimental way on your muscle health-
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – Incredibly detrimental.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – How do you characterize the fallout of that much muscle loss in such a short period of time? I mean, how do we even think about it? Muscle is such a metabolically active organ. It provides us energy, it provides us stability, it helps clear the body of excess glucose, I mean, all that it does. It’s so bioactive. When you lose that much muscle, what is the fallout?
Dr. Anurag Singh – Yeah, the fallout would be, you know, if you’re a young individual, perhaps it’s not as big an impact because you still have a substantial amount of reservoir of muscle mass. If you’re in your 40s, 50s or even an older adult who is overweight on these, the fallout, for me as somebody who studied something we call sarcopenia, which is basically muscle failure with aging, is that you’re going to have 3 to 5 times accelerated aging in your muscle. And muscle is such a key longevity organ that, that you’re going to have a lot of falls in older people. You’re going to have a lot of people struggling to cross the zebra line in 15-20 seconds, because if they fall, you know, the muscle… I think people are not thinking in that direction and I think that’s where nutrition and diet and exercise becomes such a key companion for weight loss drugs.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – Right. Yeah. So, sarcopenia is, correct me if I’m wrong, it’s sort of an inflammaging-driven muscle loss. So, it’s not just, you’re losing muscle because you’re sedentary. There’s sort of an active breakdown due to inflammation. Is that correct?
Dr. Anurag Singh – That is correct. So, sarcopenia, like most chronic disorders of aging, is a multi-pronged, multifactor-driven condition. You have the gradual decline in muscle mass, but what is on top is the quality and the strength is also going down. And that is linked, as you were saying very appropriately, to muscle inflammation. So your whole body is inflamed as you’re aging.
Dr. Anurag Singh – And so that’s what these drugs are not really taking care of, is they’re not addressing the root cause. They’re just taking away the pain of being overweight and obese. So yeah, that’s what we want to highlight, is that you want to talk about cellular health. You want to talk about muscle health with aging, and you want to also keep this in mind as you take these weight loss drugs that increasing high protein in your diet, doing exercise, talking to a dietitian and nutritionist, and in parallel, thinking about your muscle quality and your mitochondrial health, which is absolutely key with other nutrients like the ones we have been working on.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – It’s extraordinary. It almost reminds me a little bit of the potential- You know, we saw the fallout with gastric bypass, the malnourishment that happened, just pretty tragic fallout. I had a number of patients that I worked with who really had evidence of, in some cases, relatively profound malnourishment because they just weren’t guided on the nutrients they needed to focus on with that very radical procedure.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – And I think you’re just underscoring how powerful the potential problem is for these GLP-1s, which are- I mean, I think people need to adhere to them, really for life, or at least for a very sustained amount of time.
Dr. Anurag Singh – Yeah, these are great drugs. As I mentioned, I think these are great drugs. And the health economic impact of lowering obesity, and as a result we will have cardiovascular health improvement implications as well, is immense. But it’s just, you know, trying to cure one thing you don’t want to create another problem.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – A very difficult problem.
Dr. Anurag Singh – I get reminded all the time with statins. There’s a lot of craze with statins. And of course, they’re great at lowering cholesterol, but in 20% of folks you start seeing muscle and mitochondrial issues. So, it’s very similar.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – Obviously, first of all, anybody prescribing these drugs or anybody taking them needs to heed the inevitable muscle loss. They need to actually really fight that concurrent loss with, as you pointed out, using protein, continuing to engage or starting to engage in active resistance training. I don’t know, maybe the drug is even contraindicated in older people who aren’t going to undergo those two interventions. Maybe it would be and I want your thought on that. But obviously we need to talk about Urolithin A and what you guys have found and mechanistically how it would be an important piece of supporting those using GLP-1 agonists.
Dr. Anurag Singh – The message I would say is really about muscle preservation. If you preserve your muscle in the journey of losing fat mass, then you have a winning combination. If you can proactively think about how to keep your muscle quality and muscle mass, obviously with high protein, but then think about muscle quality with the products that we have that are targeting mitochondrial health and muscle quality, that should be part of the nutrition companion that I was talking about. Clinicians need to be aware that when they’re embarking their patients on a journey of reduced weight loss with these weight loss drugs, that they also think in the future, or in parallel, what they can do with these companion products that Timeline has or other companies have on the protein side.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – Let’s talk about the evidence around muscle preservation, actually, beyond preservation. I think that you’ve demonstrated at least increased. And the mechanism, I think there’s some suggestion, and you’ll correct me or tease it out a little bit, is that it’s going really directly after that inflammaging-driven, you know, sarcopenic phenomenon-
Dr. Anurag Singh – Yeah. So, we have studied this for the last ten plus years, muscle as a longevity organ. You take a look at 70-year-olds who are active, training for ten-kilometer races or cycling regularly and you look at 70-year-olds who are overweight and sedentary, and it’s really black and white in terms of what we call mitochondrial health in their skeletal muscles. Right? More mitochondria in the active people and very poor-quality mitochondria in overweight, sedentary folks. And so if you take those folks and then you put them on this postbiotic product that we have identified, called Mitopure, which is basically Urolithin A, which is sort of a derivative from polyphenols present in our diet, what you see is that you boost the mitochondrial health in the skeletal muscle, and you not only keep the muscle mass and the muscle strength, but you actually gain in muscle quality and mitochondrial quality. And that translates to better muscle force and muscle being less fatigued in the long term.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – What have you shown in your clinical trials around this?
Dr. Anurag Singh – We have never combined it with these weight loss products-
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – Right.
Dr. Anurag Singh – But what we have done in older adults is,70-year-olds or 50-year-olds who are not obese but overweight, so on the journey to being obese, we have shown that in 2 to 4 months of regular intake, without changing physical activity levels, without changing diet, we have seen in about two months improved endurance in the muscle, meaning the muscle has more energy to keep doing a certain task. And in four months, we have seen in both these populations an increase in muscle strength by about 10%.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – And this is without an exercise prescription, correct? They’re not doing anything. You haven’t prescribed anything.
Dr. Anurag Singh – Yeah, we haven’t prescribed anything. They’re not talking to a dietitian or to change their diets.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – They’re not training.
Dr. Anurag Singh – They’re not training. But the other thing we’ve seen, back to your inflammation question, is whether it’s the older adults or the overweight fifty-year-olds, they’re all inflamed. Their C-reactive protein, which is a marker of inflammation, is off the roof and that gets dampened in addition. So, there’s a very close crosstalk between mitochondria and the immune system and we are actually exploring this. How do we get this dual effect of dampening the inflammation and boosting muscle and mitochondrial health? And we have done a trial very recently looking at athletes actually, who also get inflamed with regular training. In a training program, we have given Mitopure with exercise and compared it to exercise alone and we see better recovery.
Dr. Anurag Singh – We see, again, less inflammation and less exertion needed. So it works even if you give exercise. And my thinking today, is that in this sort of obese population that is in the weight loss, they are definitely inflamed. We know that. Their mitochondria are not in good shape. And so, what makes sense to do nutritionally, in addition to of course, exercise and a high protein diet, is to take products like Timeline’s Mitopure, because you’re going to hit on both these things that, you know, the biology is gone a bit awry in these folks.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – It’s just so extraordinary to me. I always love to talk to you and hear what you’re up to and your commitment to the science and evolving it, and just really drilling down into what’s happening. But it’s this continuum where Urolithin A is efficacious. So, you are sarcopenic and obese, and you can take it as a standalone intervention and it can reduce that inflammatory driven sarcopenia and increase muscle mass without moving. There’s no exercise prescription in those studies. I mean that’s crazy.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – You know, it’s just now you’ve shown this improvement because you’re going right to the mechanism of breakdown which is, I think, this inflammatory phenomenon and the poor mitochondrial quality. But then the continuum is you’re using them in these elite athletes who are arguably overtraining and driving inflammation from the other side and damaging mitochondria from sort of the equal and opposite mechanism and showing benefit in recovery, and exercise tolerance, and all of those things as well. So, it’s just this continuum here, which I think is interesting and cool and it’s important. This conversation, you know, I’m thinking of my mom who pushes back on doing resistance training. She’s in great shape, she’s very healthy at 83, but she likes to stretch. That’s her thing. And she argues with me that stretching is the most important, not weightlifting. She needs to be on it.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – But really, it’s important for all of us. And going back to points you and I have talked about before, probably most of us used to make this. We evolved with the information from Urolithin A sort of driving mitochondrial health. But you and I have talked about the fact, and that’s why mechanistically we all probably need to be taking Urolithin A if we’re not making it, and we can test that through you, because we evolved with this really important information. But now we’ve lost it, you know, we don’t make it efficiently. We don’t have this, and we see the fallout. But I think that must be why it has such far reaching effects.
Dr. Anurag Singh – And it’s just not our research, Kara. I think there’s a study, maybe we talked about in the past, but there’s a Spanish group that is, you know, we’ve discovered the benefits and the direct effects on mitochondria of this molecule.
Dr. Anurag Singh – But they were more interested in the gut microbiome evolution in overweight people and how a certain percentage of people have the right gut microbiome to make this postbiotic molecule, Urolithin A, while 60-70% of the folks don’t have it. And then they even looked in overweight or obese individuals and they found, obviously, the gut microbiome is very different in these individuals. But they found that the ones making it, even if you were overweight, they had better muscle quality and they had more resistance to developing cardiovascular incidences and diseases compared to those who couldn’t naturally make Urolithin A. So, this a publication that doesn’t get talked about and highlighted as it came from a small academic research group out of Spain.
Dr. Anurag Singh – But I think it’s a very important piece of the puzzle that, as you were saying, that we all have this evolutionarily. A lot of us have lost the capability. And who knows – again, back to the conversation on these GLP-1 drugs – who knows what the effect these are having on the gut microbiome. And we know there’s a gut-muscle axis as well, and there’s a gut-skin axis as well. I think only 5 to 10 years down the road we will get more data and more research being done. Right now, it’s a buzzword. But, yeah, it’s just to remind listeners that, yeah, think about your muscle, think about your muscle quality and mitochondrial health.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – Yeah, it seems like it’s absolutely indicated to those of us supporting individuals on the GLP-1 agonists or those of us prescribing them, we do want to be thinking about the muscle fallout. As I was preparing for our conversation today, I was thinking about how we make GLP-1 in the L-cells in the gut, and we make them at the behest of Akkermansia, Clostridium butyricum, probably other players, but those two have been characterized. We make GLP-1 at the direction of a healthy microbiome.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – And so it occurred to me, we know that Urolithin A, there’s evidence out there in animals and humans that Urolithin A itself can stimulate production of some of these bugs that produce GLP-1. And, it just makes me wonder, you know, going back to the evolutionary conversation, why are there so many of us who are obese now? We have this damaged microbiome, many of us are likely not even producing, or not able to sustain adequate synthesis of GLP-1, and so therefore we’re not adequately satiated, and we continue to eat. But Urolithin A may be influencing GLP-1 from this direction as well. I just think that would be kind of a fun study to look at.
Dr. Anurag Singh – It would be. And we haven’t done that yet, but we have looked at what changes happen in the gut microbiome of people, just like you were mentioning, that are, as I say, blessed to make this molecule.
Dr. Anurag Singh – And you’re right, absolutely spot on. They have more Akkermansia, they have more of these diverse and healthy bugs in our GI tract so research needs to be done. What we have looked at and we are looking at, and there are pre-clinical studies with Urolithin A looking at glucose metabolism, the effect if you did a glucose tolerance test in a high-fat fed animal, for example, what would be the effect of Urolithin A? And not one, but there are several studies from different groups in the US and Europe showing that Urolithin A preserved muscle mass and had an effect on fat inflammation by dampening inflammation and led to lower glucose effects. And is that through GLP-1 or through other pathways that you were mentioning through the gut microbiome? Are there other ways to hit on glucose metabolism? It needs to be studied. And we are actually now running one of the largest trials on Urolithin A with the National Institute of Aging, with a lady called Josephine Egan who actually discovered GLP-1 back in the ’80s and ’90s.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – Oh, very interesting.
Dr. Anurag Singh – She is very curious and we are doing this study in pre-diabetic, overweight individuals and we look at all these hormones and GLP-1 in that study.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – Oh, that’s very interesting. Are you guys still recruiting or is it underway? When will you have results?
Dr. Anurag Singh – It’s on clinicaltrials.gov and it’s recruiting in the National Institutes of Health, so yeah, in the Baltimore, Maryland area. If you’re interested, sign up for it. If you fit the inclusion/exclusion criteria.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – We’ll make sure that my team connects with your team and we’ll get all these links in the show notes. Everybody, if you go over to the to the website you can find all of this information. We’ll also link to a nice hefty bibliography of these extraordinary studies. People are researching Urolithin A for all sorts of indications. It’s just a hotbed of science happening thanks to you guys characterizing this molecule and kind of moving it out into the world and, you know, bringing attention to it. It’s very exciting.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – It’s potently pleiotropic, you know, there’s more to be discovered. It’s very exciting and I’ll continue to, hopefully, host you guys here and talk about it. I have one more question. It’s a little bit of an outlier question, but it’s just around excessive weight loss in the face and the dermatological- I mean, that’s a huge problem. Or at least it’s a discomfort when people lose a lot of weight and they actually look old. I mean, is there any kind of- I have patients in my practice struggling with that and we’re dialoguing with how to deal with it. And I think at this point our best recommendation is filler, unfortunately. But what do you guys think about with regard to this problem?
Dr. Anurag Singh – Yeah. As you said, this is a concern actually highlighted by one of the dermatologists at NYU. And then a lot of people have woken up to this, that those who have been on Ozempic or Ozempic-like weight loss drugs over a period of time, they have this “Ozempic face”. I think that’s what you were describing, which is basically what they describe as sort of accelerated skin aging, wrinkles, you have a loss of skin elasticity. You lose the fat, obviously, not only the abdominal fat, but also fat in the face, and so that gives you a shrunk and hollow look on the face. And you’re right. The option that I hear from dermatologists is fillers. But I think what you need to think, is that Timeline has more than just nutrition products targeted towards improving muscle and mitochondrial health. We are also a longevity company and we try to deepen the science on mitochondria, whether it’s muscle, brain, or skin.
Dr. Anurag Singh – We actually started hearing from our oral consumers that they were seeing skin effects, and so we developed this. We studied the skin and its mitochondria and we found that we could take old, poorly energetic mitochondria and skin cells of old people and their skin cells, and we could turn them, much like we saw in the muscle cells. And so, we ran these studies and we see improvement in skin hydration, better barrier, less wrinkles, better elasticity. And so, it is one of the options I think people have, again, linking it to the Ozempic story, I think losing fat in a very fast manner has ramifications, and so, you don’t want accelerated aging happening in your muscle or your skin. And so, we have a line of products that people can look up. Listeners can look up Timeline.com and see our suite of skincare products that really hit on skin longevity and skin health.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – Yeah. That’s right. And I think it is coming at it from a similar angle. It’s inhibiting the inflammation, supporting collagen regeneration.
Dr. Anurag Singh – Yeah, it’s hitting intrinsic and extrinsic aging, which is basically skin inflammation and poor mitochondrial cellular health. And we know Mitopure does amazing things on both of those pathways. And we have great data that we have published in a preprint and now we’re trying to get it published in the top journals as well so the findings-
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – Good. Okay. Well, we’ll definitely link to that preprint as well and tag it when it’s accepted into a journal. All right. Well, Dr. Singh, once again, it was just really great to talk to you. Anything to add, anything we didn’t cover?
Dr. Anurag Singh – I think we covered mostly, you know… Probably just, people who are on this journey of these weight loss drugs need to have a discussion with their doctor, talk to their dietician. I think that should be standard practice in the clinical realm around what are the other options available to think 360, right? Not just the eye on the prize, which at that moment seems to be increase weight loss in 12 to 18 months but think about the long-term ramification and keep in mind that muscle is a very key longevity organ you need to pay attention to it.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – Yes. And we’re losing a significant amount. Those numbers are daunting.
Dr. Anurag Singh – Yeah.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – Okay. All right. Well again, always appreciate you joining me.
Dr. Anurag Singh – My pleasure. Always fun and always great discussions with you, Kara. Thanks for having me.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald – Absolutely.
Anurag Singh is currently Chief Medical Officer at Timeline, which develops next-generation advanced nutritional products targeting improvements in mitochondrial and muscle health. With an M.D. in internal medicine and a Ph.D. in immunology, his experience includes work for top consumer health (Nestlé Health Science) and startup/biotech companies (Amazentis/Timeline). He’s authored > 40 articles in top science journals and has designed and led > 50 randomized clinical trials in nutrition. His research over the past decade across multiple clinical trials on the postbiotic Urolithin A and its health benefits related to muscle health has led to the launch of multiple consumer products.
Timeline is offering Dr. Fitzgerald’s readers a 10% discount on Timeline products. Head on over to TimelineNutrition.com/Kara10 and use the code KARA10 at the checkout.
Study: Once-Weekly Semaglutide in Adults with Overweight or Obesity
Pre-clinical trial (Recruiting): Effects of Urolithin A Supplementation on Glucose Metabolism in Healthy Adults 55>= Years Old: A Randomized Triple-Masked Controlled Clinical Trial
Preprint article: Topical application of Urolithin A slows intrinsic skin aging and protects from UVB-mediated photodamage: Findings from Randomized Clinical Trials
Preclinical trial: Effects of Mitopure (Urolithin A) on Skeletal Muscle Function, Iron Metabolism and Endurance Performance (ENDURO)
FxMed Podcast: Beyond Mitochondrial Health: Can Urolithin A Slow Down Aging?
DrKF Blog: Beyond Beauty: Targeting Skin Longevity with Urolithin A
FxMed Podcast: Decoding Aging: The Science Of Cellular Rejuvenation With Dr. Vittorio Sebastiano
DrKF Clinic: Patient consults with DrKF physicians including Younger You Concierge