Latest / Common Sense Health / Your Body Has a Nuclear Clock: What Cold War Fallout Reveals About Cell Renewal
Transcript
- Stephen Thomas BSc. Hons: Hello. Now, people often ask me when I say something like the digestive tract completely renews every four days. How on earth do I actually know that? I mean, it's not like scientists are physically counting your gut cells every Tuesday. Well, let me explain. The answer is a lot more explosive than you think. Because to figure it out how fast your body heals itself, for instance, science had to rely on the Cold War and a whole lot of nuclear bombs, which is why I use the word. Explosive there. So seriously, to understand your own stomach, we have to start with a massive cloud of radioactive fallout. So back in the 1950s and 60s, the world superpowers, because they were really clever, were detonating nuclear bombs above the ground like they were firecrackers. Now, when a nuke goes off, it fires out a massive, terrifying flood of subatomic particles called neutrons. Now these neutrons fly into the atmosphere and slam straight into the nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere. Which do make up about 78% of our air, anyway. The impact literally, love that word, pops a proton right out of the nitrogen nucleus and transforms it into a rare, heavy radioactive isotope called carbon-14. Now, because of all these detonations, atmospheric carbon-14 levels nearly doubled in less than a decade. And scientists call this sudden spike the bomb pulse. And while a global nuclear arms race was objectively bad for humanity, it accidentally gave biologists the ultimate scientific cheat code. See, after the treaties kicked in and the above-ground testing stopped, levels began to steadily and predictably decline. But because plants pull carbon from the air and animals eat those plants, that specific atomic signature got locked into the food chain. So every single year. had its own unique exact radioactive timestamp. And who ate that food? Well we did. Whenever your body creates a brand new cell, it uses the carbon from the food you just ate to build its DNA. And once that cell is born, its DNA is locked in time and it holds a permanent, unchangeable record of the exact carbon 14 levels of the year it was made. So decades later, researchers realized they could look at human tissues Measure the carbon-14 in the DNA and pinpoint the exact birth year of those cells. So suddenly the human body became a living historical archive. And when they started testing different organs, the results were mind-blowing. I mean, take your liver, for instance. It is the body's ultimate detox unit. Everyone says that. And it takes a beating from every questionable life choice you've ever made. Now, when scientists check the atomic Clock of the liver, they discovered the average age of the human liver cell is less than one year old. Your liver is essentially an infant. Even if you are celebrating your 62nd birthday, as I am, not celebrating my birthday, but I'm 62, the liver you are using, or I am using, is barely a toddler. Then they looked at the brain, which settled a massive decades-long medical debate. For generation, doc. Thought you were born with all the brain cells you'd ever get. There are some obvious vegan jokes here, but I won't do them. But the bomb pulse proved that your hippocampus, the area responsible for learning and for memory, if I'm if I remember that right, is actually churning out around 700 brand new neurons every single day. Sadly, the parts of your brain responsible for advanced logic and language didn't show any new cell growth. Those neurons perfectly match the patient's actual birth year. So, yes, you can learn new tricks, but you're stuck with the same hardware for your personality. Bad news for me, So the same thing happened with the heart. Doctors used to think a damaged heart could never grow back. The carbon fourteen data proved It actually regenerates about one percent of its muscle cells every year when you're young. It's slow, but it's happening. What about your bones? They look and feel like permanent concrete, but they are constantly being broken down and remodeled. Your skeleton completely replaces itself roughly every ten years, but nothing, absolutely nothing compares to your digestive tract. Now when scientists tested the epithelial lining of the human small intestine, The carbon fourteen signature didn't match the patient's birth year. It didn't even match last year. It perfectly matched the current week. Your gut is a brutal, hostile wasteland filled with concentrated stomach acid, aggressive enzymes, and trillions of bacteria. It is a biological demolition derby, basically. To survive, your intestine uses literal conveyor belt system. Deep in the lining, there are stem cells that are aggressively multiplying. Pushing older cells upward like an escalator until they reach the top, wear out, and then get shed completely. The timeline on this is so incredibly fast that you get a completely brand new intestinal lining every three to five days. So think about the math on that. You are walking around right now with a 10-year-old skeleton, a one-year-old liver, a heart that's almost as old as you are, and a gut lining that is literally younger than the milk sitting in your fridge. And now we simply have to talk about fat cells. Because the bomb pulse finally settled one of the biggest and most frustrating debates in human fitness. For a long time, people wanted to know when you lose or gain weight, are you actually growing and destroying fat cells? Or are you just stuffing the ones you already have? Well, the nuclear clock gave us the answer. And it turns out your body handles fat cells exactly like a budget hotel handles its rooms. So think about it. If a hotel suddenly gets a massive rush of tourists, they don't instantly hire a construction crew to build 50 brand new rooms. That that would take too long. Instead, they cram more beds into the rooms that they already have. And when the tourists leave, the hotel doesn't demolish the rooms, they just empty them out. And that is exactly how your body manages fat. The bomb pulse revealed that the total amount of fat cells in your adult body stays remarkably constant. When you gain weight, you aren't growing a massive army of new cells. Your existing fat cells are just inflating like balloons to hold more storage. And when you lose weight, those cells don't vanish. They just deflate and wait around. But here's the crazy part. The carbon-14 data showed that about 10% of your fat cells do die off and get replaced every single year. So even though the hotel always has the same number of rooms, the bricks are constantly being swapped out. So over the course of a decade, you get a completely fresh set of fat cells. So if you're struggling with your waistline, don't blame new fat. Blame your body's incredibly stubborn, highly efficient hotel management system. and as a fun bonus, this is just something that appeals to me. Art detectives now use this exact same nuclear trick to catch world-class forgers. If a painting is claimed to be a masterpiece from the Renaissance, But the flax used to weave the canvas contains a heavy dose of 1960s Cold War radiation. Well, the gig is up instantly. So the next time you feel like you're stuck in a rut and can't change, just remember, broadly speaking, you aren't even the same person you were last week. You are a walking, talking, constantly regenerating miracle. And we only know the exact speed of your gut because we blasted the atmosphere with nuclear radiation. Wow, my science is wild, isn't it? Now Whenever I share this sort of mind blowing data about our body secret nuclear clock, my comment section absolutely explodes with questions. And honestly, you guys do ask some brilliant stuff. So before you head down to the comments to type out your own question, let's do a lightning round breakdown of the three biggest questions I always get when I talk about this sort thing. First up, someone always asks, shall I do a voice? Wait. If our organs can regenerate, why do people still need kidney transplants? Can't the figny the figney can't the kidney just fix itself? Well, this is a common misconception. See, the kidney actually can regenerate, but it has a very specific limitation. It can only repair its filters, not its architecture. As you know, I have very many success stories about kidney filtration rate returning. So think of it like this. Think of your kidney like a high end coffee shop with a row of very busy espresso machines. Now the kidney is made up of millions of tiny filtering units called nephrons. If a few of the internal parts wear out or get slightly damaged, the kidney can absolutely swap out those cells and repair the machinery. But here's the catch. Your body stops making new espresso machines the day you are born. So if a disease or high blood pressure or a sudden trauma destroys the actual structure, the housing of those filters, they are gone forever. The kidney can't build a new machine from scratch, basically. So once too many of those machines break down, the remaining ones get overworked or they fail. And that's when a transplant becomes the only option to keep the system running. Hopefully that made sense. Viewer comment number two, and I'll try not to mess up the sentence. If we get a brand new skeleton every 10 years, why do doctors say an arthritic joint will never heal? I read that one quite well. Anyway, the answer. This one sounds like a massive biological contradiction, right? We just said your bones completely remodel themselves over a decade. So why are your grandma's knees still clicking and hurting? Well, the short answer is bone is not cartilage. Your skeleton replaces itself because bone has A massive thriving blood supply, and it's blood that brings in the construction workers and the raw materials needed to constantly rebuild the factory. But your joints are lined with cartilage, you know, the slippery shock absorbing cushion that stops your bones from grinding together, the white bit on a chicken drumstick, you know, that bit. Anyway, cartilage is an entirely different beast, it has zero blood vessels because. There is no blood flow, there is no conveyor belt delivering nutrients or stem cells to fix the damage. So when your cartilage wears down from decades of sports injury or just everyday wear and tear, it's like a pothole on the road that the city council completely ignores. There are no workers coming to patch it up, basically. The bone underneath might be happily replacing itself every 10 years, but without that cartilage cushion, it's almost just raw bone grinding on raw bone. But I just want to Put a little side note here from my lower back specialism in and work I did in rehab. I do believe there are some things you can actually do. You can improve your diet, you can cut out inflammatory grains and sugars and move more. Motion is lotion. And this does seem to slow down progression of disease and arthritis pain. And in some cases, I've seen it be reversed. Now, sadly, my clinical experience is a drop in the ocean. And I'm reporting this information here is basically about mainstream medical views. But I have seen improvements in real life with real people, but I gotta stick with the science because I don't have hundreds of thousands of pounds to do a study with just carnivores or keto people. And that's the other thing to remember with studies. they're pretty much all not carnivores. Anyway, then the next comment would be something like: hold on, you just said the liver is basically a newborn. infant that completely replaces itself in under a year. So why on earth do people need liver transplants? And again, the answer is pretty logical. I know it sounds like the ultimate plot hole in human biology, but it all comes down to a race against time and the deadly enemy known as scar tissue. See your liver is like the wolverine of human organs. It has such a sort of insane regenerative power that you can literally cut away 70% of a healthy liver. And it will completely grow back to its full size in just a few weeks. You know, it it's pretty miraculous miraculous. Not doing very well in words today, but it has one fatal weakness, and that's called cirrhosis. Think of your liver's regeneration process like a highly skilled construction crew. Now, if you give them a clean workspace, they can rebuild anything. But if the liver is constantly pounded by heavy alcohol use or Hepatitis or severe fatty liver disease, the cells don't just die, they get inflamed and they form this hard, tough scar tissue. Now eventually that scar tissue builds up so much that it completely blocks the blood flow to the liver. It's like trying to build a house on top of a giant heap of concrete rubble. The construction crew is there, ready to work, but they can't get any bricks or wood or power to the site because the roads are totally blocked. Now, once a liver becomes completely fibrotic or scarred over, its regenerative superpowers are permanently choked out. And at that point the construction crew has to pack up, and the only way to save the planet is to drop in an entirely new, unblocked workplace via a transplant. So before I go, now just a small sort of writer's note. I could soften the claims that the entire skeleton is replaced every 10 years and that the gut lining has been directly carbon dated to the current week. But my aim in all these videos and articles is to be as broad as possible and not get too into the weeds. Because bone remodeling does vary considerably by sight and age. And while intestinal turnover is generally established through cell kinetic studies at roughly three to five days, the central story Is so wonderfully bonkers, you know, nuclear fallout, genuinely becoming a biological timestamp that I don't get too much into the weeds. But of course, if you do want to get into the weeds, you can consider becoming a member of my YouTube channel or signing up for my Substack. If you're already on my Substack, then you could go into the paid membership part because I do go more into the weeds with all those sort of things. But broadly speaking, I do think it's amazing that in the 50s and 60s, you know. 70, 60 years ago, the powers that be were stupid enough to continually be exploding nuclear weapons. And really that is very bad for humanity. Or you might say, it's a peacekeeping thing because if everyone's got them, no one's going to use them, that sort of thing. But the good thing that came out of it was the human mind is so clever at using some adversity to bring some new science and some new understanding to human biology using the principles of the nitrogen. Becoming a carbon fourteen isotope. I think it's I th I think the human mind can be an absolute marvel. It it it's it's a work of genius, really, how they thought that out. Anyway, hope you enjoyed that. If you did, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing. If you think you're subscribed, can you just double check? Because you know YouTube is so wonderful. And press that notification bell if you want to be informed of future upcoming videos. I think I've got one coming out about peptides, very Hot topic at the moment. And someone has suggested that I follow up on something I said in a live stream about the fraud in scientific papers regarding the imagery that they use on cell cultures and nerve regeneration. You would not believe it that some of the images are actually photoshopped, some are made by AI, and some are deliberately edited or flipped, or the contrast is changed. To back up the story of the paper. So that's coming soon as well. Anyway, if you want to support my work, do consider becoming a YouTube member or joining my online community because this takes a lot of work. this video has taken probably about six, seven hours to put together. And you know, hopefully I'm giving you some value as well. But anyway, if you can't afford that, totally get that too, because times are hard, it's very difficult for me to buy a ribeye every day. That's why I'm not doing that. I'm not buying a sirloin every day. But anyway, hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you on the next one. I'll be back.