Adam Torres and Christian Drapeau discuss stem cells.
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Show Notes:
Why should we want to boost the number of stem cells circulating in our bodies, and how can we do so? In this episode, Adam Torres and Christian Drapeau, Founder & Chief Science Officer of STEMREGEN, explore stem cells and STEMREGEN.
About Christian Drapeau
Christian Drapeau is a scientist, author, medicinal plant expert, and pioneer in the field of stem cell research. He holds a graduate degree in Neurophysiology and has been involved in medical research for 30+ years, the last 20 specifically dedicated to stem cells. He pioneered the understanding that stem cells constitute the body’s natural healing and repair system and has traveled the world in search of the most powerful plants that support stem cell function and enhance the body’s regenerative potential. He has written 5 books, including the best-selling “Cracking the Stem Cell Code,” as well as dozens of published scientific papers on brain research and the biological process he coined “Endogenous Stem Cell Mobilization”. Having lectured in 50+ countries, he is known by scientists, physicians, and biohackers alike as an expert and pioneer of his field. A scientific advisor to many companies, is currently the Founder and Chief Science Officer of STEMREGEN where he developed the most potent plant-based stem cell supplement.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today’s guest is Christian Drapeau, and he is the founder and chief science officer over at STEM Regen.
Christian, welcome to the show. My pleasure, Adam. All right, Christian. So we got a lot to talk about today. So we’re gonna get into stem cells. A lot of a lot of conversations around this topic about aging, about regeneration and like, what, should we be thinking about it as we all age? I’m so excited to have you on here, but before we get into stem region , and really in the stem cells in general, let’s talk a little bit more about you.
So I see chief science officer. So how did you get on this path? Like, where did all this start for you? Well, my, my background by training is neurophysiology. So I was doing brain research at the Montreal Neurological Institute, and I was hired in 1995. By a company that was selling at the time, you may have heard of the product.
It’s Klamath Lake blue green algae. So it’s a blue green algae that grows naturally in a lake in Southern Oregon. So I was hired to do the research on this product and basically scientifically document mechanisms of actions, active compounds, just to explain the various benefits. So as I was doing all of this, At some point I came across people who had reported reversal of things like multiple sclerosis, insulin dependent diabetes, liver failure, heart disease, Parkinson’s.
So at first it’s one or two but as over time it’s, you know, 50, 100 people. Then some of them I get the medical file. There’s a point where it became very clear this product was doing something that we could not explain. It was way beyond. What we knew about this product until early 2000 at the very beginning of the whole field of stem cell research, the idea just came.
What if stem cells were the repair system of the body? And what if that plant was stimulating the release of stem cells from the bone marrow to very farfetched idea at the time, but we bought the equipment to put it to the test. And we very quickly discovered that this is how this plant was working. It was triggering the release of stem cells from the bone marrow.
So from that day on, then basically everything that I did was in the field of stem cell research. How does that, I’m always curious. I’m not a scientist. I’m a podcaster. So I’m always curious about how the scientific mind works. And I’m so curious when you, like, when you start seeing these occurrences happen that have are happening over and over and over again At what point was this, like, Like that tipping point for you personally to where you’re like, I have to go deeper in this.
Like, this is my, I’ll use this word. You didn’t use this word, but this is my thing. This is my obsession. Like, this is what I need to focus on because this is the thing, like as an entrepreneur, as a founder, and this is what I want to spend my time on. What was that point for you? Or was it a buildup? Like, how did that transition happen?
No, it’s a very good question because, you know, you kind of just have to put yourself in my shoes or, you know, in real life. So you hear a story, it’s just a story, it has no scientific value. Then you hear two, then you hear three, then you hear, and then it grows. So there’s a point where it’s like, are they all telling these stories?
And I’m the type of scientist, and I’m the type of scientist that I’m not going to deny reality because it doesn’t fit with my theory or my understanding. I prefer to say I accept reality. I just cannot explain it right now. So there’s a point where it was really building. , and there is a point that really became for me the turning point.
Is one day I received a box. It had a photo album. And and before opening the photo album there was a letter attached to it. And it was a woman describing that to me. When she was 12 years old, she was walking with a kerosene lamp and she tripped and burned herself on the face, chest, and arm, third degree.
And she was, she had like very, very severe scarring all her life. When she was 60, so this is 50 years later. When she was 60, she started to take this blue green algae and she said, in her letter, she was describing how the scar is starting to get inflamed, red, and itchy, but she described it as a tear. For her, it was healing itchiness.
So she continued to take it, and she took a picture of herself in the mirror every week, and she ended the letter by saying, go and look at the photo album. And as you flip through the photo album, over about a year’s time you saw the first picture. She’s heavily scarred in the last picture. There’s no scars left.
So I’m looking at this and this, I cannot deny. So it’s something that I have never heard of. So, so that became like, okay, let’s go figure what is in this product. So we did a number of studies. We had a number of hypotheses. So this was in the, in the early days when Omega three we’re Coming out on the marketplace, the science of omega 3 and it’s been associated with healing nervous system, cardiovascular system, and we have benefits in all these areas.
So I thought, maybe it’s an amazing source of omega 3. We did a study that was associated with Harvard. We discovered that, yes, it had a great, it is a good source of omega 3, but the amount is so small that at the end of the day, even if it’s true, it’s a great source. You take a teaspoon, like a tablespoon of flaxseed oil.
And you should have the same benefits. And of course, we don’t have the same benefits with this. So great data, but it did not really explain it. So we went through a few of these protocols. And one day I came across an article and the title was turning blood into brain. The first study to my knowledge reporting a stem cell going from the bone marrow going to the brain and becoming a brain cell.
So we’re in 2001. At the time, stem cells are only precursors to blood cells and we know that the, the brain does not repair. So I thought that study was like very, very interesting. So I looked for other information. I found another paper documenting stem cells going to liver, becoming liver cells, another one to the heart becoming heart cells.
And I just thought, you know, if stem cells can become heart, liver, and brain, why not pancreas skin long? And the rest, it makes no sense that they would become those three and not the rest. So I assumed. It’s just a matter of time, scientists will become, will find other that stem cells can become everything.
So let’s assume they can become everything, then that means they are the repair system of the body. How do you see a stem cell going to the brain, becoming a brain cell and it’s not its function? So we publish an article in a journal called Medical Hypothesis, suggesting that stem cells are the repair system of the body.
And in the back of my mind, I’m like, If all of this is true, what if that plant, just like we have plants stimulating the immune system, what if that plant was stimulating the repair system? So that was really the genesis of this whole story that I’ve been with for like 23 years, but that’s how it started.
I want to stay in those early days just for a little longer. Like when you publish that article and you’re coming out with these findings, like what is it like to bring that to the scientific community? Like what, what’s that like? Well, at first, just publishing the idea, it’s just an idea, so nobody will object to an idea.
So, this one went without notice, if you will. Like I know that we have great comments for this article but nobody ever said anything about it, really. It’s when we published that this Which might actually be okay, right? When you were at the idea stage, that might be okay to not have all of the eyes on it yet, right?
You’re still testing. Yeah, I guess, I guess it was. But in retrospect, if you’re too early, go ahead, but it did not last long , because the, paper was really the basis of our, theory, our hypotheses, and we went immediately into the lab work, so very soon we discovered that that plant was working as a stem cell mobilizer, putting more stem cells in circulation.
When we started to put that out, the answer from the scientific community was like a hundred percent, it was a wall. Like a hundred percent it was a wall. That doesn’t mean anything. It could be random. It doesn’t mean anything. And if you don’t have a mechanism of action and an active compound, it’s just like pure random and it doesn’t mean more stem cells in circulation doesn’t mean that it will help you repair in anything.
And you know what, maybe it’s bad for you. Maybe it will give you cancer. So , this is really what we got from everybody. So the next four years. Was a slow grind of really identifying the active compound, the mechanism of action, doing the proof of concept doing the, the safety studies, doing the study on cancer, the, doing the, finding the patents, and then, so, the next, until about 2005, 2006, that’s really what we did.
How do you, as a, and again, I’m not a scientist, so this is so interesting to me. How do you as a scientist and as obviously an entrepreneur to go through these challenges and then without, when, and possibly like possibly on the other side during this time period, I mean, you didn’t know for certain until you did all the tests and went through that.
I think you said four years of labor to prove it. But how do you stay mentally strong during that time period when maybe the data or it could be proven the opposite, you know what I mean? Like where I think it’s just different as a scientist. And when you’re like involved, not just financially involved in everything else.
I mean, other entrepreneurs do that too, but I just feel like this. So, different between like, if, if the results are, is the data’s not right at the end of the day, then the thesis is wrong. And you spent a lot of time, there’s always learning, but you spent a lot of time on it and it’s not like another necessarily thing where you can just pivot, like it’s not a piece of software, right?
Like it could, you can be wrong. Like, how do you deal with that? Well, if I have a superpower, it’s probably that I am not really easily influenced by other people’s idea. I stick to reality, I stick to the truth, and I’m very objective when I look at these things. And I would say, I’m not at all comparing myself to Galileo, but my point is that, Galileo did not need to wait for other people to agree with him.
He never doubted that the Earth was round. So the moment that the little data that was in the scientific literature was pointing in the direction that stem cells were the repair system of the body and that by putting more stem cells in circulation, you could really have a significant impact on health, there were already papers published in 2001.
So on the basis of what was available, So, I, it, like it never crossed my mind. I would have never believed that it was not true. So although it took time to demonstrate it and convince people, for me, there was never a slight question in my mind. It was from the day one, I knew that that’s what it was. Hmm.
Amazing. Why do you think it took so long to discover this repair system? Like, what do you think that, was in? Well, the main reason is because it’s entirely invisible. If you look at a stem cell under a microscope, If you don’t have tools to mark it and identify it as a stem cell, it’s just a lymphocyte.
It just looks like a white blood cell. And it is such a small portion of your lymphocyte, it’s probably in your bloodstream, probably like one stem cell per 10, 000 lymphocytes. So when you look at a bunch of lymphocytes under a microscope, the chance that one of them is a stem cell is very low. And if you look at it, you could not tell that it’s a stem cell.
And so it’s completely invisible. And when a stem cell enters in a tissue like the liver, for example, within eight hours, it starts to transform into liver cell. So if you take a slice of your liver and you look at it and you see a liver cell, you cannot tell that yesterday this one was a stem cell.
So the process is entirely invisible until the discovery of markers that allowed to mark cells. And when that was discovered, and more specifically, we’re talking about green fluorescent protein. I’m not saying that green fluorescent protein led to the discovery, but it led to the, to the demonstration of it in such an.
obviously matter that now he’s made it like an undeniable fact. And it’s basically, it’s a gene that codes for this green protein and if you shed light on that protein enclosed green, you take that Gene, you insert it into an, into a stem cell. So now that stem cell will always make these green pr green fluorescent protein.
But if that stems L gets into the liver, becomes a population of liver cell They will all be liver cells, but you just have to shed a light on them and they start to glow green. So now you can tell all these liver cells were stem cells the day before. So now it visualized the whole phenomenon and it just like make these discrete flows.
So in a matter of just a few years, all this, this hypothesis that stem cells were the repair system of the body became like obvious. And then before that, that’s why it had never been seen. It was not visible. I want to spend some of the time that we have left here talking about the actual product.
Cause I know there’s a ton of things online too that people can, when they go further into the actual product STEM region and they look at like kind of the application and, and some of the benefits of it. But let’s talk about maybe how you develop the product and how you thought, you know, the best way for people to introduce STEM cell support into their bodies would have, would be like how that part of it came to, came to life.
Well, so when we discovered what this blue green algae was doing and we completed all the work for me I’ve been chewing on this for a number of years It’s impossible that there’s only one plant having an effect on stem cells We have all been saying this with the environment if really this is our repair system.
There has to be other plants So I started to look at other plants associated with historically with a broad variety of our benefits with the hypothesis that Nobody had ever looked at it, but maybe their real main mechanism of action was an effect on stem cells. Things like goatee berry, medicinal mushroom, adaptogen, those kinds of things.
So we tested a lot of those. They ended up having pretty much all an effect on stem cells, but it’s when I had a chance to go in remote areas of the world, like in Madagascar, what is their go to plant? On the Tibetan Plateau, what is their go to plant? And through that, I process. I identified five plants that have a strong effect on stem cells.
I brought them all together, and that’s what we have now in stem regen. And the main use for, let’s say, of course, if somebody has anything broken, we need to understand there’s no better way to repair than to stimulate your repair system. But from a longevity standpoint, from a health standpoint, we just have to understand that while stem cells Go specifically where there’s something to repair when there is nothing to repair in the background.
They are the renewal system, meaning that we experience aging as like an old fence in your backyard. Like every year we are one year older, but it’s not how the body ages. Stem cell research has really demonstrated every single organ and tissue in the body is constantly in the process of tissue turnover.
You get a new skin every month, a new liver every 2 3 years, half of a new heart every 25 years. Everything goes through that turnover. The problem, so, you lose cells and you need to replace them. That’s the role of stem cells in your body. They are your renewal system also. The problem is that we’re born with red marrow that makes stem cells And it converts very quickly into yellow marrow that does not make stem cells.
By age 30, we’ve lost about 90 percent of our red marrow. It’s a natural process. But that’s why we discovered in our 30s that we don’t recover as fast. We don’t heal as fast. And from that point on, everything starts to, now we start to experience aging because we cannot offset that. That process of cellular loss.
When we understand that, we under, and it’s another article that I published about 10 years ago suggesting that this decline in the number of stem cells is the cause of aging and the development of diseases, age related diseases. And I said, there’s one way to demonstrate that, or to prove it, let’s go and count the number of stem cells in people who have developed any kind of age related diseases, and let’s compare that with healthy people of the same age.
Now about 50 of those studies are done, and across the board, heart disease, atherosclerosis, arterial disease, erectile dysfunction, diabetes, liver failure, kidney failure, emphysema, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, lupus, arthritis, and the list keeps growing. All these people have an average 50 percent or less than the number of stem cells that you find in healthy people of the same age.
So, the big picture here is that your repair and renewal system, what keeps you healthy as you age, it’s your own stem cells. Every day, it depends on how many stem cells. You have in your bloodstream. So this product is blend of plant stem regen every time you take it on that day You will release 10 million additional stem cells that will be bloodstream to participate to this process of tissue repair It’s really that simple That’s amazing.
And I noticed that you’ve written quite a few books on this as well for so you have correct me if I’m off on the number, but I have five different books that are all related in this topic. So like crafting the stem cell code and, and a few others, maybe, can you talk a little bit about that and just the educational side of what you’ve created for those that are, you know, the other armchair, I’m going to say the armchair scientists out there like myself that just get really interested and want to go down the rabbit hole even further.
Well, the main book is Cracking the Stem Cell Code, and that was so we are in the third edition right now, so the latest edition that is of just a few years ago is as re as additional chapters, but the original book was in 2010, and the idea was simply, In the world of stem cells, everybody is talking about stem cell injection and nobody was talking about the fact that stem cells, when you do an injection, oftentimes comes from your blood, from your bone marrow, from your own, from your own fat tissue.
So that means they’re already in your body. If they are so regenerative, What is the natural role of stem cells, and how can we leverage stem cells in our body? So that’s what this book was about. There was nothing else written on it at the time. I did a deep dive in science. That’s what it is.
Until that one was out, I was constantly being asked about what was the role of stem cells. So there’s a smaller version of it that was first published. And the other ones are on other topics. I wrote another one on Herbs from the Amazonian rainforest. I’ve been working with plants for, for a long time.
Before that I wrote one on accelerated learning. How to, how to learn fast. Like you want to learn a language in a week. There are ways to, to receive the information. Play with it in your brain. Where you can learn like really fast. But this, I published this in my 20s. Amazing. So the main book here is on, is on stem cells.
And I’m working on the second one. Love it. Well, Christian, really appreciate you coming on the show today, and I’ve really enjoyed learning more about how stem cells work, and of course, stem regen, you’re right, and , that’s one of the things that I noticed, and I didn’t know why that was, but I hear a lot about injections, I hear about other things, and I was always curious about that, and now, what you’re telling me about being able to introduce and other stem cells into, or induce, and by taking stem regen, and by trying that out, like, , that becomes very interesting for me, and different, and I noticed there’s different Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Protocols on the here as well. Like I’m like checking out the website and you have different protocols. You have a you have one for sports for people in sports and you have a couple other ones here. So this is super interesting to me. That being said, Christian, if somebody wants to learn more, I see stem region.
co is the website. Any, any other ways that people should follow the brand? Well, stemigen. co is the place where you get all the information about the product. This is where we publish blogs and videos and all of that. If not, if you go to stemcellchristian on both TikTok and Instagram, then I very regularly post there.
Any question that I have, I respond there. And so I’m pretty active on both of them. Perfect. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll put the links in the show notes so that you can just click on the links and go check out Christian’s social. And then also you’ll check, you can check out the product.
And speaking to the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit. that subscribe button. This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re reaching out to new, new individuals, new new ideas and hopefully new and bringing you new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and Christian man, really appreciate you making time for us over here. Thank you so much, Adam.