Reversing "Incurable" Cancer with Nature's Most Powerful Molecule | Samuel Shepherd

Dr. Brandon Crawford is joined by Samuel Shepherd, a former Department of Defense biochemical engineer who used his expertise in weapons development to reverse-engineer a cure for his own "incurable" bone cancer. They deep-dive into the science of oxidative stress, the hierarchy of antioxidants, and the specific molecule that allows animals like naked mole rats and sharks to resist cancer and aging.

Samuel recounts his 2003 diagnosis of polycythemia vera, where his blood pressure reached levels that "pegged" medical monitors at 300 mmHg. After years of grueling phlebotomies, Sam used a screening algorithm to find a commonality among cancer-resistant species. That common thread was Astaxanthin. However, he didn't just find a supplement; he discovered a way to modify the molecule into a glucosidic form that bypasses the body's digestive barriers to target disease at the atomic level.

Key Takeaways

1. The Root of All Evil: 92% of inflammatory disease deaths are driven by the hydroxyl free radical. By neutralizing this specific ROS, you address the cause of disease (the trunk) rather than just the symptoms.
2. Molecular Saponification: By using a glucosidic "Trojan Horse" delivery, astaxanthin enters cancer cells and converts acidic free radicals into alkaline ions, dissolving the cancer cell membrane in seconds.
3. The Antioxidant Cliff: Natural cellular protection (Glutathione, SOD) fails significantly after age 42 W or 50 M, making external supplementation essential for longevity.
4. Beyond Brain Barriers: Unlike many antioxidants, this specialized form of astaxanthin crosses the blood-brain barrier, allowing it to neutralize neurotoxins linked to Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

Resources

Use code CRAWFORD at checkout on Valasta.net for a 10% discount on your order.

Valasta.net (testimonials, NIH research papers, dosing information)

NIH Research Database (search: "NIH + astaxanthin + [disease]")

ProQuest Government Research Database

Life Extension (publishes astaxanthin research papers)

Dr. Fred Bisci (mentioned as colleague)

HSCRP (high-sensitivity C-reactive protein) testing for inflammation markers

Hematococcus Pluvialis (algae source of astaxanthin)

Products

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NeuroSolution Full Spectrum CBD

NeuroSolution Broad Spectrum CBD

NeuroSolution Stimpod

STEMREGEN®

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Transcript

Voice Over: Welcome to the Longevity Formula with Dr. Brandon Crawford. Let's explore the new era of wellness.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Welcome to the Longevity Formula, the podcast where we explore a new era of wellness through the pillars of faith, light, movement, mindset, nutrition, and science. I'm your host, Dr. Brandon Crawford, and today we're diving into one of the most powerful, yet underappreciated weapons in the longevity arsenal.

Antioxidants, here's something most people don't know. Oxidative stress is happening in your body right now, quietly damaging your cells, accelerating aging, and setting the stage for chronic disease. But what if I told you there's an antioxidant so powerful it can cross the blood-brain barrier, protect both the inside and outside of your cell membrane.

It has been shown to support everything from eye health to athletic performance, and what if most people have never even heard of it? Our guest today is Samuel Shepherd from Val Asta. Samuel is a leading expert in as astaxanthin, hope I said, that right supplementation and has dedicated his career to understanding how this remarkable antioxidant can transform human health and longevity.

Val Asta has pioneered high quality astaxanthin formulations that are changing the way people think about cellular protection, age related decline. The truth is, we're living in an era of unprecedented oxidative stress, environmental toxins, blue light exposure, processed foods, chronic stress. They're all creating free radicals that attack our cells faster than our bodies can neutralize 'em.

And while you might be eating berries and taking vitamin C, the question is, are you really getting the level of antioxidant protection your body needs to thrive into your eighties, nineties, and beyond? So today we're going deep. We're talking about the antioxidant hierarchy, why astaxanthin stands apart from every other antioxidant you've heard of.

We'll explore oxidative stress as a silent ager. Discuss whether you can really eat your way to enough antioxidant production and break down exactly how to build an oxidant, an antioxidant strategy that actually moves the needle on longevity. If you've ever wondered whether your supplements are working or if you're doing enough to protect your brain, heart, and cells from aging, this episode is for you.

So Sam, thank you so much for joining me. I'm really excited for this convers.

Samuel Shepherd: Brandon, thanks for having me. And it's a, a lot of information that we probably need to get out, at least to the general public.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Absolutely. Okay. So the, the first thing is I know that I butchered how to say the name of Astaxanthin.

So let's, let's get the pronunciation correct first. So it's Asta Xanthin, right? Correct. Asta. Alright. Asta. Xanthin. Okay. So I'm probably going to say that wrong again at some point in time. So feel free to connect me, but or to correct me. So, let's first kind of learn a little bit about you. 'cause you have a bit of a personal story that goes along with the discovery or with your discovery of pioneering in this field.

So what's going on there?

Samuel Shepherd: Well, it, it goes back years. Cancer is one of those things that starts about five to 15 years before it ever presents. It's very difficult to go back epidemiologically and figure out a cause as to what happened with cancer. I think that's what happened in my case. I worked in the petrochemical industry.

I built and developed electromagnetic pulse weapons, auditory weapons, bio weapons for the Department of Defense. And I may have gotten a little too close that I probably shouldn't have. But I ended up in 2003 being diagnosed with an incurable bone cancer called polycythemia Vera. And I my blood pressure would spike to two 80 over one 60.

I'd go in, they'd knock me down to try to keep me from stroking out. I'm the only guy that I know of that's ever pegged for blood pressure cuffs. They kept testing them and 300 millimeters is as high as it goes.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Oh my gosh.

Samuel Shepherd: And they thought the blood pressure cuffs were broken, so they would go get another one and, and that one would peg out.

And then they finally decided, man, you need to be hospitalized. So I didn't stroke, I didn't have any, thank goodness my arteries were in pretty good shape.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Right.

Samuel Shepherd: But I, I got a phone call on a Sunday night from a nurse that said the doctor wanted to see me at seven 30 Monday morning. If anyone ever gets that call, it is not good.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Right?

Samuel Shepherd: So went in, he came in, wheeled right up to me, put his hands on my knees, and he said, Sam, I got some bad news. He said, you've got a, a blood cancer called polycythemia vera incurable. And I said, well, what about chemo or radiation? He just shook his head, no. And I I asked what my options were and he said, phlebotomies.

So every month for four years, I was phlebotomist just to keep my red blood cell count down.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Samuel Shepherd: And that got a little old after about four years my life. Yeah. I asked him how long I had, he said, with this form of cancer, 97% of the people perish within 10 years. But my hemoglobin was 27, my hematocrit was 80, 81, 82.

It was pretty high. So I was in a vulnerable position of throwing a blood clot to my brain, my heart or my lung at that point. And he said, if it, it could happen right now and it would take me 10 minutes to declare you dead. So he gave me a, a window of 10 minutes to 10 years. So off to the hospital, I went, that was my first phlebotomy and I went in every month thereafter.

After about four years of that, it got a load. I noticed that the rate at which my hemoglobin was climbing out was the slope was getting steeper, and I knew that I was probably gonna throw a blood clot. So about four o'clock in the morning, I decided to try to figure out what was going on. I truly believed that God had given, given me all the tools I needed in my toolbox to figure this out.

And with my, my background in biochemical engineering, I could figure out how the universe pretty much worked. But boy, this was a tough one.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Samuel Shepherd: So I through research then, and I had access to a government database called ProQuest. And it's now made, made available. At that time it wasn't, but so I queried it and asked for all the animals that apparently don't get cancer, and the query came back with these five salmon, pink flamingos sharks, elephants, and naked mo rats.

And I then was, I was working on a project in San Diego, and so I went to Scripps Oceanographic and asked if they could get tissue samples of those animals. And they, they had 'em, and they said, well, I put up a, what, what's called a screening algorithm, which says, I want a ma a mass spec done on all those tissue samples.

I want everything screened out. No proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, enzymes no amino acids. And I wanted to see what molecule existed across all five of those species. So they came back and they said, well, we found one. And I was a little shocked to be honest with you, and it was astaxanthin. So I asked where astaxanthin came from.

It came from an algae called Hemato cus plu. I began growing that in one of those, I call 'em hillbilly hot tubs, but these intex hot tubs you can buy at Walmart.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Samuel Shepherd: I put in my backyard and it had a bubbler. I could bubble CO2 in and I put a cover over it, almost like a greenhouse. It was ideal for growing algae, just like a swimming pool is You're always trying to kill algae in a swimming pool.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Exactly.

Samuel Shepherd: And so I got really good at growing it and the algae itself is green in color, but I understood from the Salton sea trials or things that I'd looked at at the Salton Sea area in California. That when the ponds begin to dry out, the color of the algae begins to change. There's several species that do this.

Some turn purple, some turn red astaxanthin turns bright red. So what I did is figured out what causes that algae to go from a green algae to a red algae. 'cause the red was the astaxanthin and it was about 3.8% astaxanthin when it gets stressed. So I needed to find the stressor. So what the stressor is, is when the pond dries up, begins to dry up, the salt content, increases the algae, senses that, and it says My pond is drying out.

I have to protect now against the ultraviolet rays of the sun, or I'm gonna cook. Hmm. Fascinating. It pushes the astaxanthin right out to its cell membrane, and it accumulates in little vacuoles right underneath the phospholipid membrane of the algae. The algae goes into the soil when it rains. A hundred years from now, it resists and comes back as a viable, as lgal form.

So there was a whole lifecycle of that. So I began, I just added salt to my reactor and it converted in from within 48 hours from a green algae into a bright red algae. So I would, it's called dissolved air flotation. I bubbled air in, floated it to the surface, skimmed it off, put it in a dehydrator, and I knew it was 3.8% by weight inside the algae cells so I could dose myself.

So if I selected a four milligram or a five milligram dose, I could calculate how many grams. Of this red algae I had to eat. So I started out in that four and five milligram area, and I did that for about three months. Every day I was taking four milligrams of this dried algae in my eggs, in my salad, but made sure that I consumed that much every day.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: So were you, was it dried or did you just take it live and how do you

Samuel Shepherd: Yeah, it was all, all a dried algae.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Okay.

Samuel Shepherd: So, my phlebotomies went from once a month after about four months of this, to once every two months. So the slope of the climb out curve decreased.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Samuel Shepherd: So over 30 days, it's, it's, it's this steep, with the four milligrams, it's this steep.

So then I thought, okay, this is moving in the right direction and since it's a red algae, I wanted to make sure, 'cause red things in nature technically could be quite toxic or poisonous, like red tide and all that. So I wanted to make sure I wasn't killing my liver or my kidneys. So I did blood work and everything became normal.

My A1C was running about 6.2 before this, and it dropped down to about 5.4.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Wow.

Samuel Shepherd: I didn't change it. I didn't change anything. And I thought, well, this is a good sign and it wasn't killing.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: And what time period was that?

Samuel Shepherd: About four months.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: That's remarkable. That's

Samuel Shepherd: great. Yeah. So, I thought, okay, four milligrams didn't kill me.

Let's just triple the dose. So I went to 12 milligrams. You

Dr. Brandon Crawford: sound like me.

Samuel Shepherd: Yeah, yeah. So more's gotta be better, at least, at least to the inflection point.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Right.

Samuel Shepherd: You know, there's that dose response curve, and it follows almost like a normal distribution curve.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Mm-hmm.

Samuel Shepherd: You are okay. You're okay. You're okay.

All right. You're optimal now. You're dying. Yes. And it's sort of the way these things work. Yeah. So I went to 12 milligrams a day and my phlebotomies got pushed out within two months, got pushed out to once every four months. That was significant. That was statistically significant.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yes.

Samuel Shepherd: And I thought, oh my golly, this is actually working.

And so now I had three slopes of the curve I had to control. No astaxanthin, I had four milligrams and I had 12 milligrams. Now I can calculate with those three slopes how much do I have to take so that I'm never phlebotomist for the next 50 years of my life. It's just a mathematical game, and it came out to be 96 milligrams a day, so I, oh

Dr. Brandon Crawford: my goodness.

Samuel Shepherd: Yeah. So I started taking a hundred. And my phlebotomies ended, I cured myself of PolySci of an incurable bone cancer. I cured myself now that it was in 2013. I was declared cancer free from, so from diagnosis in 2003 to 2013, which I only had a 3% chance of making it there.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Samuel Shepherd: There was no trace of polycythemia vera.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Praise God, man.

Samuel Shepherd: Now I had to figure out why it worked.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Samuel Shepherd: And that one got to be costly, but I didn't trust anybody else. I didn't want take money from a pharmaceutical company. I didn't, I didn't want to go that route. So I ended up figuring out and found the four majors and there's five actually reactive oxygen species that caused 92% of all death.

From, from inflammatory disease. That includes cancer, heart disease, irritable bowel, type two, diabetes Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Ms. Hashimoto's. They're all caused by those four free radicals. So the way that I developed it was I took a basic design of a tree, a giant oak tree. The root structure are all the things that add to our reactive oxygen stress, health condition.

So we have diet, I have radiation, I have pollution, I have smoking, I have alcohol consumption, I have sugar, I have fr all these things cause that cause these free radicals to form. Well, the free radicals is the trunk of the tree. There's really only five. There's an R, there's a reactive nitrogen species, and then there's four oxygen species, superoxide CT oxygen, the peral and the hydroxyl free radical.

The hydroxyl appears to be the one that's causing most of the problem. So, oh, and then the branches. The branches of the tree are the presented diseases. So the doctors stand off to the side and they reach up and touch the branches, and they try to treat type two diabetes. They try to treat the effects of the trunk, though that tho that Ross causes those diseases.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah,

Samuel Shepherd: so what we realized was that we're no longer treating the symptoms of disease. We're cutting the tree down, we're eliminating the Ross that causes those. So it doesn't make any difference as long as you keep your inflammatory disease state at a, a biologically safe level, you won't present with any of those diseases.

And that's how it worked. When we begin to give it to people with arthritis, for example their Parkinson's tremors ended, so we were getting the side benefits of it. Everybody presents differently, but the common, the commonality is those four free radicals.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah. The

Samuel Shepherd: oxygen free radicals.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: I could just intervene just a little bit because I talk about this with my patients.

I tell them think about your cell and then largely your mitochondria within your cell, like a combustion engine. Right. And so

Samuel Shepherd: Exactly right.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: You know, you, you go and you turn on your vehicle and it's, you know, you have gears running, you have belt spinning, you have all this kind of stuff, and it's generating power to move you and to do work.

Even if you're not smoking and you're not, you know, doing all of those things. You are still producing friction within that engine, you're still producing an environment that just by how it's designed to run, it's going to develop inefficiencies if you don't service it, if you don't treat it properly.

That's the same thing for your mitochondria. So I consider that friction, right? Those inefficiencies developing within the engine of the mitochondria. I refer to those as these reactive oxygen species. And so the servicing then are using things like stantin or

Samuel Shepherd: Yeah.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Stantin to, to essentially do your oil changes and keep that engine serviced and running efficiently.

Now, I don't know if you agree with that analogy or, or not. I

Samuel Shepherd: do, yeah.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: But I, I need people to understand, you know, because I, I have a lot of people that'll come in and they'll be like, look, I, I eat well and I exercise and I do all these things. Why do I need to take a supplement? Why do I need to do whatever?

It's like, because you're still. Going to be, you know, accelerating aging based on X, Y, and Z, right? So this is just a very, you know, simple and eff very effective way to service your mitochondria, service your cells, keep them running as effective and efficiently as possible. So, but I love your analogy of the tree.

That's brilliant. And, and how, you're right, man, you cut this off at the root level. All those things like the fruit of that tree that are causing all the problems, they, they wither and die. That's brilliant. I love

Samuel Shepherd: it. It, and, and it, it absolutely works. Just to go back a little bit on the, on the beginning, I ate the algae for a number of years and it worked.

Then I thought I'd really get clever as, as a chemical engineer to extract the astaxanthin from the algae. So I'm not eating so much of the biomass. So, we did and developed a, a, a, a unit operation called a super critical CO2 super critical extraction. And you basically put the astaxanthin in, in a very high pressure CO2 environment, and the CO2 becomes a liquid, a solvent, and it dissolves the astaxanthin out, and then that liquid solvent is filtered.

You push it into another pressure vessel and you slowly release the pressure and the CO2 sublime from a liquid directly into a gas, and it leaves your astaxanthin in, in the bottom of the pan. So it was the, I knew that the the astaxanthin in a dry form didn't apparently work because the stomach acid degraded it so quickly, so dry astaxanthin, powdered, the astaxanthin wasn't good.

So we put it in a high Omega-3 olive oil. And the olive oil had a protective liposomal form around it. So I began taking that. Well, that was the first indication when I did it at the same dose, a hundred milligrams a day with the new purified form of astaxanthin. My my cancer returned

Dr. Brandon Crawford: No, no way.

Samuel Shepherd: Yeah, that was a very scary period of time.

And so I just kept increasing the dose of the oil to try to get it to stop, and I ended up well over 800 milligrams a day of the pure oil to get it to stop. Well, if I'm eating the algae, I only was using a hundred milligrams per day to stop the cancer when I went to the purified form, all of a sudden I'm at over 800 milligrams per day to get the same effect.

That's a pretty dramatic difference. What was different in the biomass? Was there something else in the biomass that was helping me? So we did a mass spec and we found that the form of the astaxanthin in the natural biomass is in what's called the gluc acidic form. What that means is that the algae can attach either a fatty acid or a sugar molecule directly to the oh on the astaxanthin, and it's called a gluc acidic.

We use this frequently in pharmaceutical medicines. We used it in bio weapons development to get it to absorb faster into the, into the body. So when we did the CO2 SUPERCRITICAL extraction, we cracked that glucose off and it wasn't there attached to the astaxanthin anymore. So it wasn't as a, as absorbable.

In the pure form as it was in that gluc, acidic, or glucose form. So I developed you B based on the electromagnetic frequencies of vibrating the oh molecule in the astaxanthin and on the sugar to the point that they would react without high temperature, they would stick together. So that's what velas is, that's what the patents are based on, is how did I stick that sugar back onto the astaxanthin?

And

Dr. Brandon Crawford: by having that, that, that glucose molecule on there, that would actually increase the uptake into the cell, wouldn't it?

Samuel Shepherd: Absolutely. So what happens is, when this now gets through, we have lipid protection for the HCL in the stomach, for the hydrochloric acid in the stomach. So it makes it through the stomach, gets into the small bowel.

The HCL is neutralized to a more neutral pH. The enzymes in the small bowel see that sugar and they immediately pull it in. It's called a Trojan horse, is what it's. So it's pulled right through the sugar's absorbed very, very quickly. So, it's absorbed into the bloodstream very fast. So now you have this glucose attached to the astaxanthin floating around in your bloodstream.

Now, one of the things, and this took several years to figure out, but one of the things that we found is that cancer loves sugar.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Absolutely.

Samuel Shepherd: So cancer is operating on a very thin edge. It takes I think it's 32 sugar molecules to make two molecules of a TP In normal cells, it takes two molecules of sugar to make two molecules of a TP.

Normal cells are much more efficient. Metabolically than the anaerobic nature of of a cancer cell. So, ca cancer is constantly looking for sugar, and it'll steal it as your liver produces it. It has priority over all the sugar. So you cannot starve sugar unless you remove your liver.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Hmm.

Samuel Shepherd: So you can cut all the sugar out you want 87% of all the sugar that you use in your body is produced by your liver between two and 6:00 AM in the morning.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Right?

Samuel Shepherd: That's where it's, it's it's done. So we tricked it when the, the metabolic process happening in, in the mitochondria of a cancer cell creates a huge number of these oh zero charged free radicals. What that means is that just has the same number of electrons as, as protons 16 in, or ate in an oxygen.

Hydrogen has one. So there's nine electrons floating around. It always leaves one electron unpaired that makes it highly reactive. It well, no matter what it touches, it will steal an electron. So it's an oh zero charge the pH of a, it's like a Lewis acid. The pH of an oh zero charge is less than seven, which means it's acidic.

So the environment around the cancer cell thrives in a slightly acidic environment. That acid environment destroys neighboring normal cells and makes room for the cancer to grow. So when that gluc acidic astaxanthin is sucked in, pulled right into the cancer cell, the cancer cell splits the sugar off and uses it for fuel.

But now the astaxanthin is intracellular. It's inside the cell, and it will donate an electron to that oh zero charge and make it an oh minus one, a hydroxyl ion that ion has a pH of 12 and immediately ponies the, the phospholipid membrane of the cancer cell and the cancer cell dies in four seconds.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: That's beautiful. That, that is so brilliant. How you worked through that and I mean, it's, it is just amazing. Your whole story is amazing, and this is just one of those really apparent moments where you have someone where you know, you were given a really bad diagnosis, just, you know, terrible, and you used it not only to help yourself, but now to help so many other people and.

Your brilliance of how, you know, being able to, to go to the drawing board and really reverse engineer this whole situation. Yep. I mean, I'm, you know, hats off to you, man. You, you've, you've done such a good job of Yeah.

Samuel Shepherd: Keep in mind that, that what I'm explaining to you is probably 30 years, you know, it's, it's, it's a, there's a long time in between when, you know, that's just the way the story goes.

But this started in 2003, I guess 20 years. 20, 25 years,

Dr. Brandon Crawford: 23 years. Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. So, so I'm really cur, I had a que a whole line of questioning that, but, but I have another line of questioning that I'm actually developing from listening to you. So, I'm really curious about dosing, right?

Because when prior, when I was using astaxanthin, you know, everything said, you know, start with like one milligram, right? But I mean, I'm, I mean, you started with four, you went up to 800. So if we're using. Your product. Right? So let's talk about me.

Voice Over: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: I've got I, I have Hashimoto's. I keep it relatively well managed.

If my stress levels go up, my antibodies go up. You know, but, but my inflammatory markers are all within range now. I, I do, you know, a lot of regenerative medicine, laser therapy, all the things. So someone like me trying to keep that Hashimoto's in check and just, you know, got a, you know, stressful lifestyle, run multiple businesses and all that.

What type of dose with your product should, should someone like me be on?

Samuel Shepherd: There's a couple ways to determine it. What we look at is the, your H-S-C-R-P. Mm-hmm. We wanna, we wanna see where your baseline inflammatory disease state is. It is currently.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Okay. Well, it was like 15 and then, you know, and then I started really working on it.

Not just that, but my apo, lipoprotein B was in the severe range. My homocysteine was elevated. I had several inflammatory issues going. Yeah.

Samuel Shepherd: They go together.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Samuel Shepherd: RP is greater than three. You're gonna get an inflammatory disease. It's just a matter of time.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Right. And now, right. Obviously by doing multiple things largely, I, I started doing monthly extracellular vesicles.

We have a really high dose, very pure product that we use. That combined with my new lasers actually, I've got various protocols with the lasers and all the things that I'm doing. So all those inflammatory markers are now within normal range. Even the apo lipoprotein B really the main thing that's unchecked is my antibody levels.

My TPO and my thyroid globulin antibodies are still like. Two 50, you know, they're still pretty high. Mm-hmm. So that's the main thing going on.

Samuel Shepherd: The the way we we look at it is we looked at your body weight. We want every cell in your body to be saturated with astaxanthin in the cell membrane.

So what we do is we look at, we actually calculate it from I don't wanna get really technical here, but a avogadro's number. We looked at the number of cells in the body. If we had, how many molecules of astaxanthin do we need we assume about a 30% actual absorption into the, into the body.

So we did it by molecule and by the number of cells that you have in your body. So the number of cells is directly related to body weight. So we, through a long, pretty long process, we, we developed, we started out at about, a half a milligram per kilogram of body weight that would half

Dr. Brandon Crawford: milligram per

Samuel Shepherd: kilogram

Dr. Brandon Crawford: body weight.

Okay.

Samuel Shepherd: So, so we started out at that, at that low, at that low dose, and that assumed a certain efficacy of getting the cell saturated. Then as we progressed, we found that in some cases they didn't. They saw it, the H-S-C-R-P drop and it flattened out. So then we'd bump it again. So we worked towards the dosing.

Now we're up to about one milligram per kilogram of body weight.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Nice.

Samuel Shepherd: And that protects you then? E especially

in, in highly active mitochondrial situations where you're processing a lot of fuel to generate a TP, which happens at the mitochondrial level. In that process at the mitochondria, you're generating a lot of exhaust gas. The, it's just, it, it is just the way energy. There's always waste. When you, when you produce energy, it's called Gibbs free energy.

It's an and tropic term that it applies to it, but the, the simple fact that we consume food requires that we generate these free radicals and we ourselves. Now, why does it happen? At our, as we get older, when we're younger, we have three cellular antioxidants that protect us. We can do a lot of stupid things when we're younger.

I could drink a lot of beer. I could stay up late. I could eat pizza, and I could get away with it.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: I've done those things.

Samuel Shepherd: Yeah. The reason is because we're producing a lot of glutathione, lyce and superoxide dismutase.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yes.

Samuel Shepherd: Those three cellular antioxidants that we produce when we're young, but, and I have, I have the data and the, and the curves to show this on the website is the average age for women.

It drops almost 80% by the age of 42. They're no longer producing those antioxidants. It's nature's way of taking us out. For men, it's age 50. So when men turn 50, they start feeling arthritic. They, their tired level drops, their testosterone levels drop. All these things begin to happen because they're no longer producing glutathione.

Their superoxide dismutase levels have dropped dramatically. And their lyce is really the last one, but it's not as effective as the glutathione. Mm-hmm. Now, when that happens, the, the changes begin to, so that's when we actually start generating, in most cases it's, it's a normal distribution, but in most cases we start generating these diseases.

And in with children, now we're finding children that are sick are genetically not producing glutathione at the necessary levels to offset their oxidative stress metabolism.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yes. They're being born with an amount of mitochondrial inefficiencies, let's just say that is quite dramatic. More than, I mean, it's unprecedented the amount of uhdr Yeah.

Samuel Shepherd: Overwhelms their cellular antioxidant levels.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah. And so, so that's a question I would, I would want to pose to you is because I have a high pediatric population. You know, anything from autism, neurodevelopmental disorders, brain injury you name it, right? We see a lot of kids. Is this something that kids can take and then you know, is their do the same dosing strategies apply?

Samuel Shepherd: The same dosing strategies apply, and then we use markers, we use the CRP.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Okay?

Samuel Shepherd: We want, we wanna drive that CRP under three milligrams per liter. And typically, in pretty much all cases, the human body can handle an oxidative stress in that area of between. You'll never get it below 0.1. We have to have some inflammation just for ourselves to communicate,

Dr. Brandon Crawford: right?

Samuel Shepherd: So it can never be zero, right? But between 0.2 and three. That's where you wanna be. The lower you go, the lower your probability of generating an inflammatory disease. We have people targeting, if you wanna get below one, you just keep increasing the, the, the dose until you get there and then you wanna maintain there.

So you can reduce the, the, the dose a little bit. But we monitor the H-S-C-R-P.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Okay. So, I, I do have a question because you were talking about how, you know, this produces essentially a pH of 12 within the cancer cells. Is this going to overall be alkalinizing for your body or is it specific to those?

It's

Samuel Shepherd: the only way. It's the only way that you can alkalize your body. You cannot eat alkaline foods because it gets neutralized by the acid in your stomach

Dr. Brandon Crawford: right

Samuel Shepherd: now. There's some you the pH of your blood. Is always 7.35. If it's 7.3, you're in trouble. If it's 7.4, you're in trouble.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Samuel Shepherd: So your, the, the biology keeps your blood pH at 7.35.

There's no way to get to 12 and get alkalization to the cells through your blood system. It will not allow it. And if you force it, you'll get deathly sick. So what we found is that we have to deliver, deliver a chemical leukocyte astaxanthin. It's a, it's a bio chemical. We deliver it and it's neutral.

It has a neutral pH, so it gets into the bloodstream. And when it gets inside the cell and donates an electron itself does not become a free radical. But when it donates that electron, it converts the hydroxyl free radical into a hydroxyl ion. That's how we make soap. So let me, let me go through, when, when we make soap, we take fats, fatty acids, and we react it with sodium hydroxide.

That makes lie. So back in the 18 hundreds, that's how they made soap. They took animal fats, mixed it with ash from the burn pile, and they can make soap. Well, the, it's the same fatty acids in the cell membrane of a cancer cell. So when it sees that OHIN, it ponies, and that's the chemical process. It converts it the entire phospholipid membrane into a water soluble soap, a detergent, and it breaks apart the aqueous environment, completely sulfates that cell membrane and the cancer cell ruptures, and all of the guts of the cancer cell flood into the area around it.

It's picked up by the bloodstream. It's cleaned up with the macrophages, the neutrophils and, and basophils and T cells. It's cleaned up and the amino acids are all recycled. So that's how it works. The advantage is, is when the cancer cell is ified, it dies. It doesn't reproduce. Some normal cells can also be ified, but they regenerate normally, but there's no side effects.

It's the same way that chemo works, except that there's no side effects with this and there's no regeneration of the free radicals. Chemo works by just saturating your body in brute force with an inflammatory disease, and it generates a huge concentration of these reactive oxygen species to go in and mutate the DNA, destroy the DNA.

And hopefully it dies. The problem is you just mutated at a, a probability that can be calculated. You just mutated the DNA of normal cells, so you're gonna get a represenation of that cancer in five to 15 years caused by the chemo treatment.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah. But we're not studying out that long, so it was a success.

Right. So,

Samuel Shepherd: yeah.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Oh gosh. So, the other, you know, really fascinating thing about astaxanthin is that it does cross into the brain, so it will pass through the blood-brain barrier which is unique. You know, not everything will get into the brain, especially if we're taking it orally, right? Correct.

Protected. So how, number one, how in the world does this, because it's not a small pro, it's not a small molecule. How does this get into the brain? It must be very beneficial for the neurons if our brain is just like sucking this up like a sponge.

Samuel Shepherd: It's fat soluble. So at the endothelial level in the arteries, it has a tendency to plate out in those endothelial cell membranes.

Once it passes through that it can be readily absorbed. The other thing that the brain really wants is that sugar. So there are glucose, Glu four is a good example, but there's glucose channels all along the the endothelial cells in the arteries that allow sugar to pass into the brain because neurons need a lot of sugar.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Samuel Shepherd: And so this, that's the carrier mechanism. Even we found even without the glucose attached, it would linger in the arterial walls, and by what's called concentration gradient, the higher I make the concentration on one side of a membrane versus the other, there's what's called a concentration gradient, a diffusion.

Coefficient that forces the astaxanthin through the cell membrane. So there's a couple ways that astaxanthin is, is absorbed. One is chemical transport with the gluc acidic astaxanthin. The other one is concentration gradient where you just build the concentration up so high on this side of the membrane of the arterial wall compared to the other side, and it, it mass diffuses through the cell membrane.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Okay. That's, that's fascinating. So, you know, there's, there's a few other antioxidants that people know of more, right. Vitamin C, vitamin E, coq 10,

Voice Over: turmeric. Yeah,

Dr. Brandon Crawford: glutathione. Exactly. Yep. How does Astaxanthin compare to these other guys? Is this like the king of the antioxidant world?

Samuel Shepherd: It is. There's no other antioxidant we've been able to find on the planet other than what's called dragon's blood, which is found in the bark of a tree in the Amazon.

It's not available, but. There's we measure it by what's called OAC score, oxygen Radical Absorption Coefficient. Its ability to absorb hydroxyl free radicals. Well, let me give you an example. Turmeric has an OAC score of about 122,000. Dark chocolate is 26,000. Dark chocolate's not all that bad for you.

It actually has an antioxidant property to it. But turmeric, which is one that, or c curcumin are the very familiar ones. It has an OAC about 122,000. The velain, the gluc acidic form form is 2.2 million.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Oh my

Samuel Shepherd: 22 times 20 times more potent than turmeric for the same dose level. That that is what really set this off.

And now the NIH. You can go onto a search engine and just search NIH and Astaxanthin and whatever disease, Hashimoto's cancer, type two diabetes. They've all done the research on this. I testified in Congress in April of 2019 in Washington, DC there were about 200 people there. I think Ben Carson had his staff there in the five majors.

John Hopkins, Sloan, md, Anderson, Mayo, and the Cleveland Clinic were all present. They were shocked when I revealed to them that these four free radicals are the cause of 92% of all human death. They didn't like that because I'm at a cause level of disease and it really was very disruptive because they treat the symptoms, they want the disease to present.

So that they can treat it, it becomes an economic decision. It's called remuneration bias.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Samuel Shepherd: I'm not interested in that. I want the disease stopped. No more treatment of disease. That would be my ultimate goal is there is no more disease to treat. And that's very offensive to the medical industry.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Very.

There's no money in that man.

Samuel Shepherd: No, there's no money in a cure. You've probably heard that before,

Dr. Brandon Crawford: ab Absolutely. Well, would it be beneficial, oh, sorry, go ahead.

Samuel Shepherd: One of the things that we found was that when we gave this, I, there was a, a lady in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and we were giving it to her. She was 80, 80 or 82, and we gave it to her for her arthritis.

She couldn't get her arthritis under control. And in about seven days she called me back and she said, my arthritis is gone. She said, this is, this is absolutely remarkable. And I said, yeah. I said, it works pretty fast in, in most people that are, have a very high H-S-C-R-P. And she, she said but that's not why I'm calling you.

She said, something you didn't know is I had severe Parkinson's. I couldn't hold food on a fork. I would throw it into the booth of, in a restaurant over into the next booth. I, my tremors were so bad. She said, since I've been on this, I no longer have tremors. Well, that lit me up because how did that happen?

And I'm very familiar with the dopamine hydroxy dopamine. Hydroxy dopamine is a molecule we give to animals to give them Parkinson's so that the pharmaceutical companies can test their Parkinson's medications on those animals. So hydroxy dopamine is what causes Parkinson's, not the lack of dopamine.

The medical industry has it wrong. So what I did is biochemically went in and showed the reaction between dopamine plus the hydroxyl free radical yields, hydroxy dopamine. So what do they do in the medical industry? They say, we can't treat and get rid of the reactant, the hydroxyl free radical. Let's just reduce the amount of dopamine or, or in this case, increase the amount of,

Dr. Brandon Crawford: increase it actually speed it up.

They more fuel on fire.

Samuel Shepherd: Right? So they prescribe more levodopa or carbidopa and for a short period of time until their hydroxyl free radical concentration catches up to it, their Parkinson's free.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Mm-hmm.

Samuel Shepherd: But pretty soon they've just created. A inflammatory response. 'cause every molecule of dopamine goes to the liver and regenerates the hydroxyl free radical in the, in the liver.

It's just a matter of time before the hydroxyl free radical catches up. So what we do is we say, we find that these Parkinson's patients are producing fairly high levels of dopamine, but it's being converted into the hydroxy form of dopamine. So what the veloc does is it knocks the hydroxyl free radical out and stops the Parkinson's disease.

No more reers, no more shakes, we find.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Was she like moderate to severe? Mild to moderate.

Samuel Shepherd: Severe,

Dr. Brandon Crawford: yes. To severe.

Samuel Shepherd: Yeah. She was Was

Dr. Brandon Crawford: she on L-dopa?

Samuel Shepherd: Say that again.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Was she on the l-dopa? Was she on dopaminergic?

Samuel Shepherd: She was. Through, through Hershey Medical, but hers, she was getting what's called resistant to the, the the, the synthetic dopamines.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Samuel Shepherd: So when we began to look at that chemistry, you know, in prostate cancer, for example one of the solutions is to knock the testosterone levels down.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Samuel Shepherd: And they chemically castrate people. Well, that's not the problem. If test testosterone fed cancer, then why aren't these 20 year olds

Dr. Brandon Crawford: seriously

Samuel Shepherd: getting cancer?

If estrogen causes breast cancer, why aren't these young girls very high estrogen levels getting breast cancer? It doesn't happen. Now, why doesn't that happen? The reason is they have the cellular antioxidants that neutralize the hydroxyl free radical when they're young and they don't get the reaction of testosterone plus the hydroxyl free radical.

Yields hydroxy testosterone. Hydroxy testosterone is a known carcinogen. It's known di hydroxy Estrogen is also a known carcinogen. So where do those molecules come from? Testone testosterone plus the hydroxy free radical yields hydroxy testosterone. So what they do, they say, let's cut out the testosterone.

As a man, you are never going to get to zero testosterone,

Dr. Brandon Crawford: right?

Samuel Shepherd: You have the XY chromosome and you're gonna be producing it. Women are never going to get to zero estrogen, so the risk remains. The key is get rid of the hydroxyl free radical. We now have an oral form of, of glutathione or antioxidant that works more powerful than glutathione.

As a matter of fact.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: That's beautiful. How long has this been on the market?

Samuel Shepherd: Since 20. We started dosing people in 2015 2013. Okay. And then in 2018, we we've never done any sales marketing we've never advertised. I just gave it to friends and family. Their cancers went away. They told everybody, it went completely around the world.

We're now in 27 countries where in all 50 states, the NIH felt it was important enough to allocate about $80 million to see if I was right. And they did. And all the papers are now available to the, so if you Google NIH plus NIH and Astaxanthin and Disease particularly, you can do cancer, you can do heart disease, you'll find all these research papers since 2016 when they first figured it out. But in 20 19, when I did the presentation in Washington the one of the directors of at John Hopkins come up to me and he said we're gonna try to confirm this. And I, I volunteered to help. And he said, no, you just need to go away.

And I thought, okay, I know where this is headed. Well, they actually allocated a lot of money and they put a lot of research in. So you'll see a lot of recent reports that doctors don't even have an inkling that this information is even out there. Doctors rely on pharmaceutical companies to tell them what to do.

Doctors are not researchers. They're not reading these reports. Pharmaceutical companies are reading it, but they keep it sequestered. But now it's available to everybody who wants to know it's out there. Life extension is a great resource for publishing a lot of these research papers, but you can get the direct papers from the NIH now since 2015.

They've made 'em all available and they know what causes cancer.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Right. So is there, is there anyone that should not be taking this product?

Samuel Shepherd: We haven't run into anyone yet there. There's some people with heart disease that are on blood thinners, warfarin, heparin, or, you know, some of the more recent ones.

And one of the things that we found is that their SED rates and their clotting factors were affected by taking the astaxanthin. When we began to look at it, we found that these people were taking blood thinners and supplementing with the ValAsta and their blood got very, very thin.

Voice Over: Yeah.

Samuel Shepherd: They panicked and the doctor panicked and said, you need to get off of ValAsta.

Well, ValAsta doesn't thin your blood. It normalizes your blood and changes the, the electron configuration of the platelets. It makes 'em less sticky. So the problem is the warfarin and heparin, you don't give warfarin and heparin to normally blooded people

Dr. Brandon Crawford: seriously.

Samuel Shepherd: So when the blood becomes normal,

Dr. Brandon Crawford: you know, it's like, oh my gosh, your blood's thinning more.

Do I take you off of the medication or do I take you off of this

Samuel Shepherd: supplement

Dr. Brandon Crawford: supplement that is improving your health? This is insane.

Samuel Shepherd: The doctors want to keep you on any meds that they can get you on. Yeah. That's the, that's the real problem here. We can solve this with diet. We can solve this with understanding that complex biochemical reaction that happens in the mitochondria.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Mm-hmm.

So

Samuel Shepherd: it is complex.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Was it essentially making the blood thinning medication more effective somehow? And, and because of that, should we also be concerned if someone is on like a high dose steroid regimen or something like this? Is that maybe something to consider?

Samuel Shepherd: Yeah,

Dr. Brandon Crawford: we don't, from a patient perspective, you know, I've got,

Samuel Shepherd: we don't see any contraindications.

We have people taking chemo and ValAsta simultaneously. Okay. In direct opposition to their doctor. And, and the result's pretty amazing. Cancer cannot handle a two-pronged attack. So if I have, let's say a gemcitabine for pancreatic cancer, gemcitabine is a chemo drug given to people with pancreatic cancer.

It has an initial hit and seems to, to work positively, and then it gets resistant. It can no longer penetrate into the pancreas. When we then supplemented with ValAsta, with the gemcitabine, it killed, the cancer astaxanthin stopped or inhibited the gemcitabine resistance and it, it allowed pancreatic cancer to be cured to it went away, which is highly unusual for pancreatic.

Voice Over: Very.

Samuel Shepherd: So the chemo works in one way. The astaxanthin works in the other. The cancer cannot deal with a two-pronged attack like that, and it kills it very, very, very quickly.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Okay. I know that we're kind of coming up on time here, so I want to be. You know, considerate of your time. But I do have, you know, one more question before we wrap this up.

So, when we're, when someone's dosing right, obviously you want to find that that dose that's high enough to really achieve the things that you're trying to achieve. What are signs that we're starting to get too high? Is it a bowel tolerance? Like, what, what are we, what are we looking for?

Samuel Shepherd: If the body, we, we go off of body saturation.

So when it gets into the small bowel, if it cannot be pushed into the body anymore, then it'll come out as a red stool. You'll see your stool turn red. It's not blood. You're not bleeding to death. It's it is just spillage. It's just spillover.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Okay?

Samuel Shepherd: So what we wanna do is maintain a slight orange to red tint to your stool now in highly stressed conditions.

You'll, that will change. You could be taking a dose one day, get into, for example, power lifting. I, that's what what I do also, I lift weights where at the same dose level, one day I'll have a red stool. The next day it would be be brown at the same dose level. Well, what that means is that I've just increased my oxidative stress condition and I've used up, I'm obs, I'm absorbing all of it that I'm taking in, which means my body is craving more.

So we, it's very easy to control with that maneuver.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Okay. And, and we don't have to worry about accumulation per se. So if you have, you know, really bright red stool one day, you just reduce the dose, next day you're, you're probably gonna be fine. And, and we're not really looking for symptoms per se, it's just showing that, hey, you, you didn't absorb all of it so you're excreting it.

That's it.

Samuel Shepherd: That's right. That your, your body is saturated. Once your body is saturated, you can probably start reducing the dose because it'll get redder and redder in your stool.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Okay.

Samuel Shepherd: And you just slowly back it down and taking it in the morning and in the afternoon, it stabilizes everything. And so you're not just getting a plug moving through your small bowel, sort of like a plug slow reactor.

Okay. And, and if you can put it in two different timeframes during the day, that seems to be helpful. The, the absorption, it allows for recovery. Yeah. So your, in your first pulse you'll absorb a lot of it, and it takes a while for the en enzymes and the cold and the small bowel to clear. So when you come in with the second pulse in, in, at noon, say, so you do it at breakfast, you do it at noon, or you do it at 10, do it at two.

Now you've, you've now been more efficient at absorbing that second pulse.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Do you take it with food without food? Does it

Samuel Shepherd: matter with food? With food, because it's got olive oil in it, it's high Omega-3. And in some people they have, they don't like the oil on their stomach.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Hmm. Okay, cool.

Samuel Shepherd: So there's a little, little bit of a reaction there.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: That's great. This has been a very fascinating conversation. Like, truly, this has really blown me away by how deep you've gone into, you know, really creating something quite remarkable. Where can people go to learn more about this product and more about you?

Samuel Shepherd: The, I go to velas.net. All the testimonials there.

All the NIH papers are there for the research. We have free consulting, so if we have nurses on staff the telephone number is (803) 470-1913. So if you have any questions regarding ValAsta and its effect biologically, those nurses are sitting there ready to answer your questions. There's no charge for that at all.

And our whole objective is to stop these diseases. And Dr. Fred Bii, I don't know whether you you've ever heard of Dr. Fred Bii or not Yes. Of New York. He and I are very good friends and, and he's on the right track, but his is not, he, he does take ValAsta, but his is also for years was massive doses of vegetable sources of these antioxidants.

He's a raw vegan.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Samuel Shepherd: And he took huge amounts of, of these. So he in fact was getting these carotinoids in his bloodstream as antioxidants very early on.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Samuel Shepherd: And I think,

Dr. Brandon Crawford: you know how to, you know how to tell if someone's raw vegan?

Samuel Shepherd: No,

Dr. Brandon Crawford: they'll tell you.

Samuel Shepherd: That's right. That's right. Yeah.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Oh,

Samuel Shepherd: he, he, he's been trying to convince me, and I've told him no.

Vegans oftentimes are missing some amino acids, and, and you notice they lose weight. There's, there's cannibalism going on. There's essentially nine amino acids that ve vegetarians have a tendency to meet. Five of those nec essential amino acids are in pumpkin. So just ask a vegetarian, how many pumpkins are you eating a day?

Well, it's zero. They're not, they're not getting 'em well with meat. Or in, in a keto type diet, you, you get all of 'em. Meat contains all of the amino acids necessary for a good health.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Samuel Shepherd: It's a real struggle for vegetarians to to get there. And as a re, as a result, they lose muscle tone because their muscles are being cannibalized to get those nine essential amino acids to keep everything flowing properly.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Right. And if you're losing muscle tone, you're losing brain tone. So it's, you know, not just a, a muscle story. And, you know, I I I'm not gonna give up mistakes.

Samuel Shepherd: Yeah. I'm not either. I, I still actually gave a talk at Rotary up in eastern Ohio and one of the guys in the back, I kept telling them that, you know, this keto diet is probably the way to go.

And he says, what do you eat for breakfast? And I said, well, for the last 40 years I get up and I have bacon and eggs every single morning.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: There you go.

Samuel Shepherd: He said, what? I said, yeah. He said, well, well, Bacon's got all that fat. I said, this is years ago. I said, you're gonna find out that that fat's actually good for you.

Cholesterol is not the problem. It's inflammation that causes cholesterol to plate out in your arteries. It's a lesion, it's a sore, it's a wound caused by the inflammation.

Voice Over: Yep.

Samuel Shepherd: And his comment to me, and he says, I think you're just bragging. I said, well, I've been doing it now. My cholesterol is about one 70, but I don't eat any fruit and no fruit.

And it's the fructose i'll blueberries are okay, blackberries, but anything that has more than four grams. Fructose per a hundred grams of fruit you should stay away from.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Samuel Shepherd: Fructose cannot be metabol cannot be utilized in, in any cell in your body.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Right.

Samuel Shepherd: And it's a primary source of, of inflammation.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. So, so everyone, you know, go to val asta.net check out this amazing product line. I definitely am fully supporting this. I, I, I'm, I'm on it myself. I you know, I have my kids, my wife, like everyone, like this is one of those products that is that important.

One of those supplements, molecules, whatever you want to call it, you know, right up there was some of my favorites, like Fatty 15. And, you know, those types of products, like this is in my mind, essential this is something that we need to be doing to protect ourselves and to protect our loved ones.

And especially if you're recovering. Something, whether it be a brain injury, a chronic pain disorder, your kiddo has autism or something like that. Like there is, there are so many reasons to be using this product and, and you know, I used to use Astaxanthin products in the past and I couldn't really tell a difference, right?

And so that's the thing about, you heard the science, like you heard what, you know, they've done at Val Asta. Like there is a difference in this product, in the other products on the market. So I just want everyone to be able to, you know, have a chance and opportunity to improve their life by trying these products.

And so, Sam's been, you know, grateful enough to to do a discount code for all the listeners. And so if you use the Code Crawford at checkout, there'll be a discount for you there. We'll put all the information in the show notes so you can have access to it there. So. Before we wrap up I want to hear from everyone.

Have you experimented with Tase, xanthin or other antioxidant protocols? What's your experience been like? What questions do you have about oxidative stress and cellular protection? Share your story in the comments below and let's keep the conversation going. If you're interested in exploring more topics around brain health, longevity optimization, photo biomodulation, and cutting edge functional medicine, check out our other episodes of the Longevity Formula.

We dive deep into the science of living longer and living better. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show for YouTube. Don't forget to hit the like button, subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications so you never miss an episode.

Everyone, I do appreciate you watching. Sam, I really appreciate your time and all of your vast knowledge. Is there anything that you wanna leave the audience with before we sign off here?

Samuel Shepherd: Just take control of your, of your health. It's, it's no one's guaranteed the quantity of life. All we really have is the quality of our lives.

We could all disappear tomorrow, but quality is if you don't have the quality of your life in the form of a healthy life, that becomes your obsession and all everything else. Your family, your vacations, your children all become secondary.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yep. And that's coming from someone that 23 years ago was told that he had 10 minutes to 10 years to live.

So,

Samuel Shepherd: yep.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Thank you so much for everything that you shared with us today. I really appreciate your time.

Samuel Shepherd: Thanks, Brandon.

Voice Over: We hope today's episode has inspired you to take that next step towards your best self. Remember, the path to longevity is paved with small daily decisions. Your journey is unique and every step, every choice brings you closer to your ultimate vision of a healthier, happier life. For more insights, tips, and resources, visit drbrandoncrawford.com.