Episode 243: Fastonic: Optimize Healing and Longevity with Molecular Hydrogen
With Alex Tarnava
Ashley:
Hello, everyone. This is Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Today, Dr. Pompa will be talking all about the benefits of molecular hydrogen with his guest, Alex Tarnava, the developer of the first oral stable hydrogen supplement that you can add directly to your drinking water. Alex learned, through many trials, how to trap hydrogen in an open cup, which allows us as consumers to reap the benefits of supplemental H2. They will discuss how hydrogen assists in fasting, shows promise in anti-aging, encourages post-workout recovery, and mitigates oxidative stress, inflammation, and many other triggers for disease and imbalance.
First, I’d like to share a bit more about Alex Tarnava. Alex has a passion for health and fitness, learning, and self-improvement, and was shocked to find he developed osteoarthritis while still in his physical prime. Searching for alternatives to pharmaceuticals, Alex happened upon the potential of molecular hydrogen. Finding no products with the hydrogen saturation he knew was necessary for results, Alex began to experiment with ways of replicating the dosage levels being successfully used across the scientific community. After much trial and error, his oral stable hydrogen was born. Curious to try molecular hydrogen for yourself? Dr. Pompa recommends supplementing with Fastonic, which is aligned with the research and development discussed in this show.
We are offering ten percent off for our CHTV audience at GetFastonic.com. Also, to the practitioners out there who cannot make it to our November Live It to Lead It event in Las Vegas, you can still join us by subscribing to our livestream and virtually attend our three-day workshop that will give you the latest in cutting edge treatments and strategies to build your practice. Please go to hcfevents for livestream access, and you can use the code CHTV to take ten percent off the price. That’s hcfevents.com, with the code CHTV. Hope you can join us. Let’s get started and welcome Dr. Pompa and Alex Tarnava to the show dedicated to molecular hydrogen. This is Cellular Healing TV.
Dr. Pompa:
Welcome to Cell TV. This is a really exciting episode because you all love these episodes where I bring you these new, exciting technologies and products that I take myself and I feel you all need to know about. Hydrogen’s this topic today, and I’ll tell you—I just got off a mindset. It was 12 of some of the most brilliant people in our industry. It was me, Dr. McCullough, Tyler LeBaron, who I actually interviewed on the show about hydrogen, and several other doctors, my friend, Ben Greenfield. We had PhDs, some scientists, and we had clinicians that I feel are leading the way in some of the exciting things that are happening in healthcare right now.
I’ll tell you—we had two days of this mindshare, as we call it, and hydrogen was one of the big topics that we were all sharing ideas about. We were all sharing our clinical experience about hydrogen, and we were all talking about the different effects on the biochemistry and perhaps why we’re seeing the results that we’re seeing. Dr. McCullough shared some great stuff, some of his thoughts, and a lot of the practitioners in the room shared their thoughts. We even had a guy that I know my guest, Alex over there, who I’ll introduce you to in a second, knows very well, Bob Slovak. He talked a lot about hydrogen. He’s been dealing with this for many years. We had a lot of incredible feedback on this topic, and I’m excited to bring Alex.
You are least one of the developers, and the developer of this new hydrogen, this oral stable hydrogen that We’re able to just put in a cup of water and drink. I have to admit, in the old days, we were trapping hydrogen, sealing it in bottles and all these complicated things. Alex, you made it simple, of course. First of all, thank you, and thanks for being on the show.
Alex:
No problem. I just want to say, first and foremost, that’s how I started with hydrogen, too. Everything in our R and D was how to trap it, get more hydrogen quicker, and trap it. The open-cup design was actually an accident.
Dr. Pompa:
Wow, I didn’t know that. As a matter of fact, I asked that this weekend, and nobody actually knew how you ended up coming with that.
Alex:
Yeah, it was a complete accident. As we were trying to get higher levels of hydrogen saturation quicker, we started realizing as we went higher, we’re actually getting lower hydrogen. We’re seeing this whiteout because basically, the reaction, once we’d opened the sealed container, would react so much extra hydrogen—something called Le Chatlier’s principle—and it would -inaudible- up the hydrogen we just saturated.
It was kind of a weird phenomenon happening that led us to months and months of R and D, and replication and figuring out what was going on, to realize, if we’re doing this like this, we can make it in an open cup, as long as we basically maximize the reaction and dissolution kinetics, which is how we led to our discovery. It reminds me of a quote I quite like by Isaac Asimov that said, in science, so often, findings that herald in new revelations and discoveries aren’t met with eureka, I found it, but huh, well, that’s funny. It’s things that you don’t understand at first.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s so true. Honestly, I can look back at some of my own discoveries clinically and go, oh, that’s funny—wonder why that happened? Then out of it came some incredible thing, so it shouldn’t surprise me. Let’s back up a second because maybe some of our viewers, listeners, didn’t see the shows I’ve done on hydrogen. As a matter of fact, I’ll make sure Ashley, my team member here, gives us what episodes those are because you should go back and watch. I interviewed Tyler LeBaron on the hydrogen and he gave some great studies. I want to expand upon it today because I think it’s a topic that we know all about.
You put 12 clinicians and scientists, who I believe are top in the world, in a room together, and hydrogen was a big topic of that. We’re onto something really exciting. Okay, hydrogen, the smallest molecule on the periodic table, smallest element, so we know it can cross into membranes—but who cares? When I’m watching a show, I want to know how does this benefit me? How can this help me? I know we don’t want to make claims or things like that; we want to be careful, but what is the hydrogen rage about?
Alex:
Hydrogen—what really strikes me, and what originally interested me in hydrogen probably isn’t as true now, but actually what we found out about it is even cooler, which is surprising. It’s really neat for me to see how many people are talking about hydrogen now because when I first heard about it about a decade ago, about a year after that first major med article came out showing it was selective pre-radical scavenger for the hydroxyl radical—I thought that was awesome because I had just been following -inaudible-.
Dr. Pompa:
Let me just bring that to logic for people, what that means. There’s a nasty free radical called a hydroxyl free radical. It’s considered to be the most damaging, dangerous free radical that we know of. Hydrogen really gets rid of this, to put it in the simplest terms that I can, and it makes people feel better. Okay, go ahead.
Alex:
Exactly, right. For so long, we thought the answer was antioxidants, antioxidants, antioxidants because it’s all these reactive oxygen species that are wreaking so much havoc on our bodies, but antioxidant therapy just wasn’t going anywhere. It doesn’t get to the mitochondria. It doesn’t take out the bad guys; it takes out the good guys. It causes imbalances. It was really a dead end. When I saw that about hydrogen, I got really interested, but there was nowhere to get it. Years went by. I was young; I was healthy. I forgot about it until I got pretty injured and sick.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s always the way it is.
Alex:
Yeah, I was desperately just searching PubMed all the time to look for anything to help with my afflictions, and hydrogen kept on popping up, and I’d remembered it, so I was following along. I still couldn’t get any commercial products, and I decided, if no one’s going to make this stuff, I’m going to figure out how to make it. Now we’re figuring out more and more.
Dr. Pompa:
By the way, when your name came up this weekend, that was what people said. Look, this guy just figured it out. He was dead set; he was resolve in that he’s going to figure this hydrogen thing out, and he did. Two people in the room said, man, that guy impressed me with that, and we take our hat off to him. They hold you high.
Alex:
That’s good to hear. If I would say anything, it’s more obsession, and there was a lot of minds. A lot of minds working on this. I’m not some genius that sat here and figured out everything on my own. When I started, I realized there’s only so much knowledge one person can have. I partnered with my founding partner Dr. Holland. He’s a medicinal PhD chemist. I hired a physicist; I hired an engineer. I started working with a biochemist. I started working with manufacturers because we figured out the chemistry in a month, but then it was 15 failed scaleup attempts and 1,000 iterations before we got our first production-ready tablet. It’s very different to make one in a mortar and pestle than to make a million.
There’s so many issues with scaling up with this kind of thing. I quickly started realizing, and I actually became the formulator for the excipients and everything myself because that was actually the trickiest part. I read every publication there is on pharmaceutical formulation science to figure out what’s going on, how to do this, how to do that—kept pieces of paper in the middle of the night on my table so that if something came to me, as I woke up I walked and wrote it down. I just acted like the quarterback of everything.
I’d speak to the chemist and figure out what was going on with chemistry, but not bring any of the manufacturing or the engineering or the physics or anything or the excipients. Then I’d go and talk to each individual person, and get, in layman’s terms, their thoughts on what was going on with their specific issue. I just started putting it together like a puzzle.
Dr. Pompa:
Right, that’s awesome.
Alex:
It’s impossible that I could have done it alone. I just learned that strategy from a book of -inaudible-, if you know who that is. He basically talked about how we’re so desperately in need of PhDs in general science that can sit in these summits, listen to everyone from every specialty, and figure out what’s going on because nobody can talk to each other. Nobody knows what the other person’s working on because the way knowledge is going, everything is so specialized.
Dr. Pompa:
By the way, that was the point of this weekend. We do this a couple times a year where we bring all of us together who are doing amazing things clinically from a scientific perspective, and we share it. We literally just share everything that each other are doing for the reason you just said. I’m telling you, Alex, every time we do it, amazing transformation things happen. We come out with things that make a difference in the world and peoples’ health. That’s the way it works; you’re right on the money with that. It’s a strategy that really because of the way medicine works today and science, nobody’s sharing ideas, and when we do, magic happens.
Alex:
It’s so hard for most of them, too because when you’re talking to people who are only talking about your thing—even you explaining about the hydroxyl radical—you forget about what other people don’t know. When you talk about something all day every day, it’s so hard to put yourself in someone else’s shoes to know well, I’ve been talking about this for years every day, so of course everyone else knows. That’s just not the case. You see it so often when you try and share with someone, educate someone. Their eyes just glaze over, and it’s because of my issue or someone else’s issue communicating because we’re not putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes.
That’s not just true with the general population; that’s true with other people working in science, with medical doctors, with all sorts of doctors. If you don’t explain things in laymen’s terms to give someone a chance to understand, they’re not going to have input, and now they can’t combine it with what they know.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no doubt. Hopefully, we do that today, man because believe me, there’s people watching this that will hear this, and they will apply it. They’ll apply it to a whole new level; it happens all the time, actually, on the show. Okay, you had said something really profound. You basically made a comment that we know that all these diseases today are caused by inflammation, but hydrogen’s not an anti-inflammatory. It doesn’t work that way. As a matter of fact, I like to call it a redox molecule, where it doesn’t push antioxidant and it doesn’t push oxidation. It brings homeostasis or balance to the body. Explain that because that’s a really important part here.
Alex:
Absolutely. What a lot of people don’t realize is we need inflammation. Inflammation isn't bad; inflammation is how we protect ourselves from injury. Our immune system—it all runs on inflammation. We need it, but what we need is a balance. Hydrogen isn’t an anti-inflammatory. In fact, in some senses, it can increase inflammation. What hydrogen does is it regulates production of our proinflammatory cytokines. They’re these tiny little proteins that lead to the development of inflammation. Hydrogen goes around, playing around with dials in our body and just up and down regulating—turning up the dial, down the dial to find this balance, which is what we need.
I know in talking to some researchers, they say one of the amazing things about hydrogen—if you take a healthy cell and you put a hydrogen-rich medium on it, nothing happens. Nothing goes up, nothing goes down; the cell is healthy. If you then take that cell and artificially damage it, now you see all these gene expressions changing, these up and down and all sorts of markers. Hydrogen is trying to desperately balance everything to make sure everything’s working properly.
Dr. Pompa:
By the way, one of the things we had noted, using hydrogen during a fast—we do a lot of fasting in our protocols. A lot of people because they’re sick, they build a lot of hydroxyl radicals that we said in the very beginning, that hydrogen has a positive effect on. There’s a lot of other things that happen during a fast. We don’t like giving thing during a fast because we don’t want to push the body left or right. We don’t want to push the body in a direction; we want to rely on the innate intelligence. That’s where we came to the conclusion that hydrogen is perfect during a fast because it doesn’t force the body; it relies on innate intelligence. If it needs oxidation, it brings it. If it needs inflammation, it brings it. If it needs reduction, it brings that.
It becomes the perfect fasting thing, and clinically, it’s been a savior for us, Alex. When I contacted you about putting it in a product, that’s how we came up with Fastonic. There it is, Fastonic—hence the word because all of these doctors now, we’re using it in our protocols in this way. I have to ask you this question. When I started doing research on fasting—you probably know the answer to this. How many studies have been done on hydrogen? What’s a round number, at least close?
Alex:
Human?
Dr. Pompa:
Both animal and human.
Alex:
There’s just under 40 human studies right now, with I think about as many underway. There’s over 1,000 publications on hydrogen, but that includes hypothesis articles, opinion papers that have been published, everything like that. I think there’s around 700 in animal, invitro, and human combined, but there’s well over 1,000 total publications.
Dr. Pompa:
If I just look down a list here that I have—and by the way, some of these were done with medications, but these are positive outcome studies. No doubt, many of them were done with medications, so we can’t make claims exactly, but these are positive outcome studies.
Alex:
The thing about hydrogen is in a lot of these studies, they are using the traditional medication to help with disease or recovery, and they’re using hydrogen to either lower the dosage or ameliorate the negative consequences of the dosage. Like radiotherapy—they use hydrogen in conjunction to reduce the oxidative stress and the damages from radiotherapy in cancer patients. It wasn’t actually to deal with the cancer; it was to deal with the side effect of the treatment.
Dr. Pompa:
There’s one of the studies. There’s one on rheumatoid arthritis, Parkinson’s. There’s one on body composition. There’s tons of studies here on metabolism, meaning obviously, it has a potential effect on weight loss or weight loss resistance. Tissue injury, mitochondrial, inflammatory myopathies—I’m just going down a list here, folks. Literally, that’s how many studies are here. Wrinkles, psoriasis—again, there’s a long list, but you get the point. Alex, how can one molecule affect—again, I’m reading down a list of studies. How can one molecule affect so many different conditions positively?
Alex:
It all comes down to gene expression. We’ve probably all heard that saying, it’s in your genes. What matters is in your genes. That’s only partly true; what matter is how your genes express themselves. As we accumulate all these damages over time, our genes start expressing themselves differently. As our inflammatory bodies are dysregulated, we have too much, too little. Our redox is dysregulated; we have too much oxidative stress or too little.
As we accumulate the -inaudible- end products, as our -inaudible- start shortening, our gene expression changes. All of this happens, and they all go around in a circle. Any of these can cause the other, and then we just start falling apart. I like to think of hydrogen as taking care of a car that’s falling apart, and the timing’s always off. Every bump you go over, the timing is off. Your car starts sputtering; your gas mileage is bad.
Dr. Pompa:
The older we get, the more the dang timing keeps going off, by the way.
Alex:
Say this car—you can’t get the part. You can get the bolt, the timing. Maybe the casing’s broken, so every time you go to drive, hydrogen is popping your hood and adjusting the timing to hear it purr just right. You’re still going to go over bumps. Your timing’s still going to get knocked off, but it’s periodically adjusting that to hear that purr, so you’re purring just right for a little while longer. Hydrogen goes around and it just moderates things. It adjusts this here; it adjusts that there. It can have a lot of benefit for a lot of different things, but that’s why it’s so neat as being as adjunct therapy in a lot of these trials on top of the proven medication because hydrogen’s coming along on the side. It’s helping with this, helping with that, helping along the way.
Dr. Pompa:
By the way, as more alternative practitioners, we find the same with our supplement protocols because I’m asked that question a lot. Can I use it with this? Can I use it with this protocol? I’m like, you have to understand. Hydrogen brings the body to homeostasis. It makes everything you’re doing work actually better because of the reason you’re saying.
Alex:
Absolutely, and a lot of people forget this about some supplements sometimes. There’s been talks about studying omega-3s in people who eat lots of fish. It’s about balancing your omega 3s to 6s, so if you’re already eating a good balance, an omega-3 supplement might not help. The people who need an omega 3 are the people who aren’t eating fish, aren’t eating seeds, aren’t getting enough of it because it’s about balancing your levels.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and the other cool part about this not being an antioxidant, an anti-inflammatory, or an oxidant, in a sense—-inaudible- in oxygen has amazing capabilities and helps many people with many conditions. The cool thing about hydrogen is you can’t—I’m always asking, can you take too much? Your body just won’t use it if it doesn’t need it.
Alex:
Hydrogen doesn’t last long. I think when you take in hydrogen, it’s gone out of your system with 5 minutes to 30 minutes. We look at the amount of hydrogen that’s used in something like deep sea diving and -inaudible-, I think it’s called. They use a lot hydrogen instead of nitrogen for deep sea diving. They’ll use 1,000 times the level of times that we’re delivering. The safety of hydrogen is so well-established. We can produce up to ten liters of hydrogen a day from bacterial production in our stomach and intestines. That’s one of the neat things about hydrogen, how delivering such a small dose can have such a huge impact. It could really come down to—where all the benefits is in adjusting gene expression is we need that high-dose intermittent blast.
We’re producing hydrogen all day long, slowly in our stomach. Every time we eat fiber, every time we eat carbohydrates, we’re producing hydrogen. Getting that blast of hydrogen water or blast of hydrogen—it’s that big blast that knocks everything right because our body tolerates that daily production.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s like getting stem cells. People produce stem cells all the time. When we fast, we even produce more of them. In fact, part of the magic of fasting—
Alex:
-inaudible- not long ago, actually.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you produce a lot of stem cells during a fast. However, when you get an injection of stem cells, it’s even this bigger blast, and boom. It strikes up healing, so it’s similar. Yeah, I’ll tell you—I read a study. I know we have a lot of athletes that watch the show as well, and how it obviously helps recovery, which therefore helps performance. Why is it? How can that be?
Alex:
There’s about as much study for humans on hydrogen in sports performance as anything. There is a lot of study on hydrogen for athletic performance. In fact, we just had a clinical study that was just presented at ACSM, American College of Sports Medicine, back beginning of June. It showed in middle-aged overweight women, a pretty dramatic increase, I think about eight 8 percent increase in VO2 max, but then about a 50 percent increase in time to exhaustion and work completed at the end of a 28-day—
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I’m looking at the study. 28-day hydrogen-rich water study capacity on middle-aged overweight women.
Alex:
Yeah, so they had pretty dramatic improvements. In talking with that research team, I had some thoughts on it, and they agreed completely. They don’t think hydrogen was actually increasing VO2 max, which I’d agree with. It was helping people workout harder and longer, and then recover quicker. These women were improving their own VO2 max by the end of the study from being able to train longer and harder, and then recover quicker.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I would agree with that. I brought that up because know that some of those are not athletes watching this, if you’re not feeling well or sick—I always say, if it works for athletes recovering, it works for the sick as well. As a matter of the fact, it’s the opposite. Typically, athletes have trouble healing things because they’re functioning at a much higher level than would a sick person. It’s really cool when you have something, and it really dramatically affects the athlete. You know darn well it’s going to affect the sick person struggling, especially because they’re not making; they’re not recovering. They’re not healing the same way as an athlete.
Alex:
Exactly, and I can talk a bit anecdotally about myself. This ties into our second clinical trial, that’s also a single-use athletic performance. I can’t fully discuss the results because it’s still going through peer review, but it was a pretty big improvement in submaximal heartrate. I notice that when I take a massive dose of hydrogen before a cardio workout—
Dr. Pompa:
How much is that? What do you call massive dose?
Alex:
I drop five tablets in a half later.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s what I was just going to say. You’re looking at about one tablet, okay.
Alex:
When I do this workout, with usually, the timeframe, intensity, everything, I’m usually at about 155 to 160 heartrate. I stay at 120 after taking the hydrogen, and my muscles don’t get as sore. I don’t get as tired. I’m still sweating buckets, but my heart -inaudible-.
Dr. Pompa:
My son, who works out at a high rate—he said, “Dad, when I take the hydrogen, I don’t get sore. I can crush it. I can take time off. That’s how much it clears lactic acid.”
Alex:
That was one of the first things. When I started taking hydrogen, I was still recreationally doing small competitions and CrossFit and everything. I found it wouldn’t help me on round one. My performance wouldn’t be better on the first workout, but I was doing a lot more reps in workout two, three, four, five in a day than I was without hydrogen. After that, I didn’t get that deep—especially in your legs—that deep feeling of pain where you can’t sleep. You’re so sore; you’re stiff. My legs were still tired.
If I tried to go do a workout the next day, they were tired. They were weak, but they weren’t that stiff, sore, your legs were going to fall off pain. It just so dramatically reduced my pain. Any athlete knows what I’m talking about. You stare at the toilet and you’re like I don’t know how I’m going to do this. You stare at stairs and you’re like, I don’t know how I’m going to get up. Hydrogen got rid of that. You’re still weak; you still needed a recovery, but you weren’t incapacitated.
Dr. Pompa:
The study that I read looked at hydrogen—as a matter of fact, I think it was after I heard Tyler LeBaron speak at one of my seminars on hydrogen. He talked about how this particular study, it mimicked caloric restriction, etcetera. I’m thinking, gosh, if it does that, this may be good for weight loss. I’m sorry, it is good for weight loss, but it may be good for fasting. It was something else that he said, and that’s what made our doctor group say, I bet this is magic for fasting, and that’s where it all started. That study—do you know that study where it talked about that?
Alex:
I’m trying to remember. I know there’s a few that I thought would be pertinent to fasting. I get jumbled sometimes because I’ve read every study that’s published now. I forget which one is which sometimes, but there’s definitely some. There was one on a growth factor that could have been pertinent. There was one on PGC-1alpha, shown balancing blood sugar, which I know would be really important in fasting. I was speaking to one researcher that thinks a lot of this stuff, especially the heartrate and everything, probably comes back to what it does to the brain.
When we look at a lot of these studies on hydrogen for cognitive function in the elderly, and then we look at, how is it changing our heartrate so dramatically? How is it doing all these things? That could just come back to the brain and how we’re processing energy. There’s going to be people who can speak to that a lot better than I can, so I’m relaying of this stuff.
Dr. Pompa:
We’ve noticed it clinically.
Alex:
I can tell you—the burst in energy I get from hydrogen—I don’t always intermittently fast, and sometimes when I do, it’s by accident because I’m working a 16-hour day. I take a hydrogen and I’m just perked right up. My energy is higher, especially traveling, jet lag. Drinking hydrogen when I get off the plane, it is better than coffee for sure. It’s different, a lot different. You’re just alert, focused, and that’s one of the things I find when I intermittently fast. Until you get your calories right, and what you’re eating right to go through the day and get used to it, your brain is clouded. It clears my brain.
Dr. Pompa:
I know one of the studies, maybe even more than that, has to do with ghrelin. Ghrelin, leptin—ghrelin communicates directly to your hypothalamus, right to your brain, to your practitioner’s point. It has a very close relationship with leptin. Both control hunger; both control fat burning. It most likely has something to do with that hormonal cascade that actually starts in the gut. I just don’t know that we’ve figured it out yet, honestly, but we know that it affects ghrelin, which we know that affects leptin, and that affects the brain.
Alex:
That’s actually an older study. We’ve known that one for a while longer. I think they’ve replicated that one, too.
Dr. Pompa:
There’s something magical happening there for sure. It’s pretty remarkable. I guess, again, all these studies done on weight loss, metabolism—it’s playing a role in that ghrelin pathway, metabolism pathway, hormonal pathway somehow.
Alex:
Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Pompa:
I watched a video on YouTube, and there was two mice. It was basically, I believe that they were—I’m going to say Parkinson’s. I think it was Parkinson’s; maybe you can recall. They were basically running in circles, and they were Parkinson’s mice. They gave the one hydrogen, and it immediately, literally immediately stopped and was like normal. I doubt it lasted, but it showed that effect immediately on the brain. Have you seen that? Did you see that video?
Alex:
I haven’t. No, but that’s interesting.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. Where did I see that? I think Tyler showed it at my seminar and then I looked it up after that. Darn, it just popped up into my mind, or I would have pulled it up before the show.
Alex:
No, I want to see that. it’s interesting—so many things about hydrogen. It just speaks again to that analogy of that old car, that every time you drive it, you need to find the timing right.
Dr. Pompa:
Many of our viewers—you’re aging yourself because they have no idea that cars can go out of timing. I’ve heard you give a different example that perhaps the younger generation might relate to. This example’s important because this hydrogen thing is hard to grip. I think you need examples. It was about the lighted path.
Alex:
Okay, yeah. Basically, this is an analogy about how hydrogen balances our inflammation. If you imagine inflammation like a flame, and think of this path through an icy, snowy park in the middle of the wintertime. The flames keep the path clear, keeps it warm, lit, so you can walk safely and get from point A to point B. When inflammation goes out of control, what happens is—those fires are covering the pathway. Now you can’t walk through. The fire’s back. The extent of it being your protector is a bad thing. So often, the response for a lot of drugs is to shut down the fire. What happens if you shut down the fire is the ice freezes over. Now you can’t pass. Let’s cover the fire with a bunch of water and foam.
Now it’s slippery; it’s a mess. You still can’t pass. Hydrogen’s like going over to the dial and just turning down the flame. Now the flame is a nice, pleasant warming fire that gives you light and clears the snow and the ice on the path. Hydrogen does this for a lot of things, not just inflammation. Hydrogen isn’t an anti-inflammatory; it just balances the production of what leads to our inflammation. It’s the same thing with the antioxidants. Hydrogen isn’t like an -inaudible- antioxidant like Vitamin C that you just take, and it goes in and indiscriminately reacts with the good and the bad guys because we have good oxidative species.
Nitric oxide is a free radical; we need it. A lot of drugs rely on controlling nitric oxide. Viagra, and not just Viagra for common uses, but we’re looking at it for the heart and all these things. Hydrogen basically just goes in there and it adjusts production of or endogenous—so those are ones we create internally—of our antioxidants. It only does this to a balance. It’s just, again, tweaking with it so we’re producing the right amount of -inaudible- superoxide dismutase catalase to deal with our own body.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we’ve learned so much, I’d say, from a clinical perspective as well as a scientific perspective. The world was antioxidant crazy for a while. We realize that people that take more antioxidants could actually lead to cancer and other problems—lack of energy, for example because we need inflammation, as you pointed out. Yet, if you take too many things that create oxidation, you can drive inflammation. Too much of that, to your point, is the fire burning around the path, and that’s not good, either.
That is the cool thing. I think the new science is redox, meaning the balance between oxidation and reduction—inflammation and driving the right amount of inflammation that tour bodies need for good immune system, good energy production, etcetera. That is it. you said in the beginning that you got into this because of your own battle. What did you go through, and how did hydrogen help you?
Alex:
Basically, I was that guy that was always doing something. To give you context, my common law spouse right now—she talks about how we first started dating, she was talking to her friend saying, it might not work out. I’m too fit and athletic for her. She won three CIS golds at nationals for cross country in Canada, Canadian Intramural Sports, and just qualified for the Boston marathon on her first marathon attempt. She is crazy fit and athletic, but I was training six, seven times a week, sometime six hours a day. I was doing martial arts, Muay Thai, Jiu Jitsu. I was doing CrossFit. I was doing workout competitions for fun that were different than CrossFit. I was then going on hikes.
I was doing all this crazy stuff. All of a sudden, I got really sick. We’re talking, I woke up one day and I had no explosive movement in my body. I went from having a 54-inch plyometric jump onto a box, to I couldn’t jump onto a plate. It was bizarre because my slow movement lifts, a dead-lift, a squat, a bench press—they were unaffected. I was lifting the same amount of weight, had no explosive movement. I had no lower coordination; I couldn’t catch a ball properly. I was sleeping close to 16, 18 hours a day, and had developed almost narcolepsy. I was falling asleep sitting on a couch if I wasn’t doing anything just for a couple minutes. They couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me; it must have been some sort of virus. My best friend at the time, he was training for a triathlon—again, a very high-end athlete, finishing top five in Spartan races, if you know what those are. They’re obstacle course races.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, my friend Ben Greenfield does them all the time.
Alex:
He was top five in the sprints and the beasts locally. He mixed three weeks of work and was hospitalized twice from pneumonia as a 29-year-old competing for a triathlon. It hit me different. I couldn’t move. I was tired; I was out of it, and they were doing blood tests twice a week on me. At first, my C-reactive protein was at 34, which it shouldn’t really be about 3. I forget what the units are, of milligrams per milliliter or something like that, but the number was 34, it shouldn’t have been 3. I was also seriously anemic, and all these issues were going on. They didn’t know why; everything was coming back clear.
It lasted about three weeks, and all of a sudden, I dropped below one on my CRP. Whatever it was cleared, but when it cleared, my joints stiffened. I developed osteoarthritis in my right shoulder. I had moderate osteoarthritis in the matter of a month. My shoulder was throbbing and aching. I went from being super flexible to I couldn’t get into a butterfly position on the ground. I couldn’t touch my feet and put my knees to the ground. For someone that had been doing Jiu Jitsu for years, couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t move my hip. I couldn’t throw a kick. My hips wouldn’t turn over. Everything seized up, and that’s when I got really desperate.
That’s when I was searching for things, and hydrogen kept on cropping up. I wasn’t getting better. The doctors had me on 1,000 milligrams on Naproxen a day, and then I gave myself an ulcer. I was still trying to train, and I fainted three times in a week because I had ulcers. I bought an ionizer. I won’t say the brand, but I spent $4,500 on this ionizer to make hydrogen. It wasn’t working, and then I just thought to myself, how do I even know there’s hydrogen in this?
Dr. Pompa:
At that point, you had actually started researching hydrogen. You were already sniffing down this road.
Alex:
Yeah, I was. I knew Naproxen wasn’t a long-term solution. Right when they said, here’s 1,000 milligrams a day, I started looking. Okay, what’s going to be a long-term solution for me? I can’t take 1,000 milligrams of Naproxen every day for the rest of my life. I’m not really a candidate for surgery or joint replacement. At the time, I was 29 years old. They won’t let you until you’re 65, and I’d never be training properly again anyways. I was sniffing down hydrogen. It wasn’t working; I wasn’t getting better, and that’s when I found out about the H2 glue, the -inaudible- agent. I’m going to test this ionizer.
Dr. Pompa:
What he’s talking about, folks, is you can literally—in the water, when you put Fastonic in water, I can use this, test it, and go, there’s hydrogen. This is real. This isn’t mythical because you put it in there, and it’s like, is it really in there? It is.
Alex:
With the Fastonic, with what we’re doing to get the quality saturated nanobubbles of hydrogen that stay relatively stable in suspension—you might drop 90 drops in half a liter of water, between 80 to 100 drops. That’s how much hydrogen you’re getting delivered to people, whereas with this ionizer, I had to triple the volume of water to get one drop. It just didn’t have hydrogen. To me, instead of feeling ripped off, I felt great because I’m like, well, hydrogen’s not a dead end. I’m not getting it. That’s when I started actually buying the full articles from research teams. I’m like, well, the scientists are making hydrogen. How are they doing it?
I started looking at the methods, looking at all the ways to get the hydrogen in the water, and basically turned into a kitchen chemist and started doing it on my own. After a while of doing that, I had a bit of a sober second thought. I said, I’m pretty adept at learning new skills, following instructions, and being creative, but I said nothing really beats expertise. I want to make sure that I’m not doing anything dangerous to myself. That’s when I found my partner, Dr. Holland. I basically showed him all the chemistry I’d done, showed him the formulation, showed him what I was trying to do. At first, he thought it was the worst pseudoscience he’d ever heard in his life. He’s from England, so think an English accent saying, this is hocus-pocus magic. I won’t talk to you.
I gave him a dozen of the better studies that existed on hydrogen four years ago at the time, and rebutted his points, saying, I understand what you’re saying here. This is what we’re doing on this thing. He got back to me and said, “Well, there certainly seems to be some evidence on this. Okay, I’ll take a look at what you’re doing.” He took a look. I kept on sending him one study every day, one study after a day, one study after a day, as he was looking at my work. It was a little bit serendipitous. I didn’t know he’d taken a new role on a company that was looking for a cure on Hep B. I sent him a study with hydrogen and Hep B. He pulls me for lunch and he basically said, “Listen, I had to trust the scientists on all these other studies because it really isn’t my specialty, but unless this data is frauded, this works. We need to get this out to the population. Are you looking for a partner?”
Dr. Pompa:
Wow, that’s how it happened, man. Yeah, it transformed your life, and now millions of others. It wasn’t but, I would say two years ago that I was—I got onto the hydrogen thing. I looked at it, but I was trying the products and they just weren’t working. The product that did work was the one that you’d trap it in the bottles, but it was just arduous. It didn’t work nearly as good as this one does, but it still got the ball rolling.
Alex:
Yeah, same idea. Another guy had invented that tablet. You need to trap it under pressure, time and pressure to get it. Like I was mentioning, that’s how we originally started our development, to make a better version of that. The phenomenon that we kept on witnessing, which is what our patent revolves around, of seeing this whiteout, and these high levels of hydrogen when the water’s turning white because we know that if the water’s white, the means that hydrogen isn’t actually dissolved. How is it where we’re still testing it? When we figured it out, that the molecule’s around 120 pico, which For Americans—with metric scale, if you think a micron. There’s a nano, which is 1,000 times smaller than a micron, and then a pic is 1,000 times smaller than the nano, so hydrogen’s super small.
We’re creating one molecule of hydrogen at a time, which is the beauty of these tablets. Then we’re finding this literature on how nano bubbles of gases will stay—not dissolve, but don’t dissipate, and just stay relatively stable in suspension. We started figuring this stuff out and then testing, trying to falsify in every possible way to say, are we missing something? Everything kept on pointing to what we’re doing. We’re looking with lasers at the bubble size, seeing that we’re hitting a first peak of 80 nanometers on the average size of the bubble. We’re seeing all this stuff. Then we said, okay, what we need to do is figure out how to make the perfect flow of these bubbles, so the bubbles are as small as possible, so we can get as many of them dense packed into this cup of water. People can just drop a tablet in a cup, and a minute later, drink it.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s extraordinary. How many tablets of the Fastonic would someone have to take to get a benefit a day?
Alex:
One.
Dr. Pompa:
One, yeah. I take two a day. Like you, if I do a really hard effort workout, I may take up to four.
Alex:
Yeah, I take more, a lot more. What I can say—say, for my shoulder pain, I find that taking four a day gets rid of pain. I can sleep on my left shoulder, just a little bit slow. On top of the arthritis, I got into a car accident not longer after, and it tore up my labrum. I have partial tears throughout my rotator cuff and a labral tear, so my shoulder is all messed up. Hydrogen gets rid of the pain. I don’t take anything else other than HQ.
Dr. Pompa:
Can you take all four at once?
Alex:
I do, yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
I like to get it done. I like that shock because like you, I notice an immediate impact.
Alex:
It gives me a boost of energy when I take all four. I’d recommend people try one. I’ve been drinking hydrogen for four years. I’m a big guy; I’m 250 pounds, so I want a bigger dose. My girlfriend, who runs marathons—she’s 115 pounds, give or take. She finds that one tablet every other day gets rid of her hip -inaudible-, which is common in female runners. She doesn’t need nearly as much as I do. That’s what I was going to say. One a day should be good for most people. Some people might need two; I need four. It really depends on the person and the body.
Dr. Pompa:
This is mostly anecdotal, but I’ve had two people who have high uric acid levels, -inaudible-, etcetera. One of them, when they go on a fast, it flares up. When they do the Fastonic, zero. As a matter of a fact, it’s taken the -inaudible- completely away. It’s just remarkable. I think that was at two, two a day. I can just speak clinically. It helps so much of the pain conditions, autoimmune. Obviously, it has such a regulatory effect on the immune system, and it’s pretty remarkable. It’s one of those things that I love giving to people because I know there’s always this reaction at some dose, anyway.
Alex:
Yeah, for sure. I get anecdotals all day long. Every day, I get new ones. It always surprises me. It’s one of the things that we’re donating and funding to a lot of public research. I believe it’s really important to donate to public teams, especially because they’re the ones—it’s one thing to pay a team a few hundred thousand dollars to find the result that you want them to find. To find public researchers who are truly interested in hydrogen, want to study their subject—what I do is, I usually donate them money to do extra tests, so that I get a better understanding of what’s going on.
We have all sorts of these things. Every team who comes to me wants to study something different. I say, yeah, absolutely because you hear all these anecdotals, but we also want to know what it does, how it does it, and how it’s going to benefit us, so that we know better how to use hydrogen in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years down the road.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s one of the things I love about it. You do get a lot of anecdotal evidence with the product, but there’s science around it. It’s not being driven by one company. You said it best; once you learn how to read studies, you realize that you can push a study in a direction you want to push. With this, so many people are doing so many different studies for different reasons and coming up with at least one unified answer. This stuff works, man. Listen, your creation’s in Fastonic, man. We appreciate it, no doubt about it. As a matter of fact, I’m going to take more a day after this. I get excited after I hear all these studies. I’m going to take more of it.
Alex, thanks for being on the show. Honestly, like I said, I know these people love these shows because they love the next thing. I’m very cautious about products that I do shows on because I don’t want to watch a show two years later and be like, oh my God, I missed it on that. I can tell you, in our mastermind group this weekend—some of the brightest minds of our industry, we all agree that this is here to stay. It’s the real deal.
Alex:
It’s great for me seeing how this is going down because when I was first interested in hydrogen years ago, nobody had ever heard of it. When all the studies are coming out Japan and China and Korea, you really wonder. You’re like, okay, nobody in North America, nobody who speaks my language is talking about this or has heard of this. Now that more and more studies are coming out, more researchers in Europe, North America are studying hydrogen, more clinicians are advising with hydrogen, all these things—it really makes me feel happy about these four years of work that I’ve been putting in in the past. I’m like, for all the evidence here, I didn’t get it wrong. We’re learning more; this stuff is amazing, and it really puts a smile on my face.
Dr. Pompa:
Good job, man. It’s been a pleasure having you on the show. Hey, if you have a breaking study and you want to bring it, let’s bring it on Cell TV, man.
Alex:
Absolutely.
Dr. Pompa:
Thanks, Alex. Thanks for being on.
Ashley:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Don’t forget to check out GetFastonic.com to take ten percent off this groundbreaking molecular hydrogen supplement. Practitioners, just a reminder that it’s not too late to join us in Vegas from November 2nd to the 4th, and you don’t even have to travel. We are offering tickets to the livestream of our Live It to Lead It event. You can go to hcfevents.com for more information, and you can use the promo code CHTV to take ten percent off. We’d love to have you join us. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 AM Eastern.
We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us a podcast.drpompa.com, and please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing the show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.
