Kayla Barnes Discusses Brain Biohacking, Optimal Health, Peak Performance, and Longevity with Rowena Gates #2

00:03:20 Rowena Gates
Well, I was originally a serial entrepreneur in high tech on Internet based software companies and I was in international trade and logistics. I said that I would just help Eng3, and I never left because nobody in trade and logistics ever said, “oh you changed my life!” It felt so good to be involved where you could make a difference for people, and so that I stayed in there. That was 17 years ago. That was before we had the NanoVi product, but it was another wellness product. It really has been a fun area to work in, as you know.

00:04:02 Kayla Barnes
Absolutely. I mean health and Wellness and doing things that you can see a direct impact on the quality of people’s lives is certainly exciting.
So, what exactly were you brought in to help with at first?

00:04:14 Rowena Gates
I was just doing a lot of – I hate to say it – English translation almost, because my partner Hans Eng is German. That’s where NanoVi came from. He’s a German Engineer and he developed it and his English wasn’t as good as his engineering skills, let’s just put it that way!

00:04:34 Kayla Barnes
Well, that was a really important role. Thank goodness that you were able to help there.
So, tell us, what is the NanoVi?

00:04:42 Rowena Gates
It is a device. People can’t see it. It’s about the footprint of the size of a small printer, and there’s a tube that comes out of it and delivers humidified air and you’re inhaling that air. What’s special about it is the water droplets in the airstream have been adjusted by the device in a way that ultimately makes them beneficial for the cells in your body for cellular function, and we can get into all of that later, but just really kind of end to end you breathe it, and then it has an impact on cellular function and after that it’s up to the body how that looks. So, it depends on a person’s condition, what impact is going to be most noticeable to them.

00:05:32 Kayla Barnes
Very interesting and just because you guys can’t see it, it’s an incredibly easy device to use, which I love, because you can do it while doing something else. So, you can do it while working, you can do it while watching television if you like. You can do it while doing so many other things. It makes it really convenient, unlike some other devices. If you’re in a sauna, you can’t really be doing too much other than being in the sauna, so that I really, really love.

There’s a lot of patents involved in NanoVi, right? How many patents are involved in NanoVi?

00:06:06 Rowena Gates
I don’t know the number because there are a lot of different claims on patents that have been approved. However, it’s a very solid patent foundation for the device because it’s really innovative and new, and it’s actually so new that the Patent Office used our company to train staff because they struggled with our device and they wanted to introduce their staff to the kinds of new technologies that they have to figure out how to deal with.

So, it was interesting, we had about 15 patent officers there learning things because they tend to want to pigeonhole a technology with something similar and ours just didn’t fit, so the patent process was quite long.

00:06:58 Kayla Barnes
Wow, that that’s really cool though. You know you’re really onto something when you have to teach them what you’re doing. So NanoVi creates EZ-Water, right?

00:07:10 Rowena Gates
It does. It actually is creating the nature of the water it creates initiate EZ-Water in the cells. It doesn’t just create it at the device and deliver the EZ-Water and you inhale EZ-Water. It’s actually delivering water droplets with water called these coherent domains and their clusters of within the water droplets.

They hold an energy state and when that goes into the body’s water through the mucous membrane, because you inhale it, that’s what triggers the formation of the EZ-Water on the surfaces in the body and the cells, and so EZ-Water doesn’t just fill up a container. It forms on surfaces and it forms at the site. So if you have a protein or mitochondria or something, the EZ-Water has to has to form around that particle. So, what we’re doing is triggering that formation within the cell.

00:08:28 Kayla Barnes
Interesting, can you talk a little bit about what EZ-Water is? Because I hear it quite a bit in the biohacking community.

00:08:35 Rowena Gates
Yeah, it’s really an interesting area. First of all, we’re lucky because we’re in Seattle, and that’s where Gerald Pollack is, and he’s a wonderful friend to us and our company. But he’s really pushed back the frontiers of water science and he came out with a book that’s popular amongst biohackers called ‘The Fourth Phase of Water’, because we know about liquid, solid and gas. His point is there’s a fourth phase and it’s almost like a gel-type of consistency and it’s this special water that forms on surfaces and it’s called EZ-Water because it’s called exclusion zone water and it’s called exclusion zones because it pushes everything else out, so it excludes anything else in the water.

That happens because the water molecules are very densely packed together, so there’s no room for any other particle. They use these little beads that they measure things with, and all of those just get pushed out because the water molecules are so closely packed together.

When it’s in that state where it’s packed together, that’s where it’s called EZ-Water, or it’s almost like a gel-type of consistency. It’s not the same as regular water, although it is water.

00:10:05 Kayla Barnes
Yeah, it’s fascinating. When I think of EZ-Water, I always think of like the consistency of aloe vera gel. Would you say that, or its maybe less?

00:10:16 Rowena Gates
More important, I think Gerry would say that! Plants are a really great example. First of all, they have a lot of surfaces in their cells, so there’s lots of places that EZ-Water can form. I think that these kind of really dry climate plants that have gel inside could be considered an example of that and that’s one of the reasons – just as an aside for all of us biohackers – that’s one of the reasons it’s better to eat foods that are very hydrating than to just drink water, because the fruits that are very hydrating are kind of carrying it further into your system. That’s the understanding because they carry a lot of water and it’s going to be a in a different form because of the cellular matrix of the plant.

00:11:14 Kayla Barnes
Yeah, that’s a great point. So just to recap on EZ-Water, so the mitochondria would be the surface that the EZ-Water is then kind of landing on?

00:11:24 Rowena Gates
Yes, any cell component. I want to be clear here, although there’s been some research done to show improvement in mitochondrial function with NanoVi, really what we’ve measured and what we focus on is protein function, but the cell has loads of different components in there, and any surface in the cell will have the formation of EZ-Water around it. It won’t discriminate and just pick out the proteins. Proteins are by far the most abundant and the most readily available surface for easy water to form on.

00:12:03 Kayla Barnes
Absolutely. Let’s dive into that a little bit deeper. When you say proteins, can you kind of break it down for our listeners? I think when people hear the word protein, they probably think of a steak.

00:12:14 Rowena Gates
I think that steak is actually a really good start, so we eat protein because we know we need it in our bodies and within the body, about half of the amino acids you need come from your food and then the other half your body produces. The body is made up almost all of proteins, all the tissue, all of that is proteins, and they do all the work in the body. Any biochemical process, all of those things are protein functions, and so they’re called the workforce of the cell. You can’t kind of overestimate the importance of proteins in the body.

We take the proteins we eat and they get shredded down into the amino acids that the body can then use as building blocks for new proteins. Those amino acids – it’s amazing what the body can do, but those amino acids have to be the correct number of them. There’s twenty options, in the correct order, and with the actual correct amino acid used. Your proteins can vary from less than 10 to over 1000 amino acids in one protein. It’s helped some, or quite a few, hormones or proteins. All enzymes are proteins. They’re just proteins that initiate things. Then if you think of collagen, hemoglobin, there’s just endless examples of it that people probably know. There are all just different proteins.

Then we hear of some of the receptors were going to initiate something or block a receptor with the hope of having some pharmaceutical impact on the body. Those are protein receptors where they’re literally trying to override them, and the vast majority of the pharmaceuticals available today are using proteins, or are focused on doing something to protein functions in order to influence the body.

00:14:32 Kayla Barnes
So how does NanoVi influence these proteins? Can you tell us what it could be doing to the proteins?

00:14:39 Rowena Gates
Yeah, so it’s interesting because you could think of it as creating a better environment for the proteins to work for whatever those proteins need to do they can do it more readily because you’ve increased that exclusion zone water that’s forming layers.

One of the important parts I haven’t mentioned yet is that the protein starts as this chain of amino acid that’s called its primary structure, but for it to do anything at all, it has to fold into a very complex 3D shape.

Of course, going from unstructured amino acids to a complex shape requires some form of energy, and it’s a transfer of energy from the water to the protein that lets it fold.

It’s actually called the transfer of entropy, sort of thinking of it as from non-chaos to chaos sort of thing. It’s shifting how closely organized they are from the water to the protein. So all that NanoVi does is it improves that environment, that the necessary energy and the water is more readily available so it supports the folding, then the protein can work. And what that work is, totally depends.

00:16:10 Kayla Barnes
Amazing! So when I use NanoVi, I definitely feel an impact on lessening brain fog. I mean, you’re putting it right into your nose, so how can it correlate to the brain?

00:16:23 Rowena Gates
Well it’s interesting, it won’t matter in your system whether you put it in the nose – and the brain – are close to each other, or not because of the way the energy is transferred across the water in the system, so it will help your foot as readily as it will help your head. It’s very interesting what you’re saying because there’s so many of us that are using our brains. It’s good that you’re challenging your brain and it’s also good to get accelerated repair in the brain because you don’t want free radical damage oxidative stress to accumulate in the brain. You don’t want it anywhere, but especially in your brain. And so, when you’ve really pushed yourself intellectually, it’s similar to pushing yourself physically. You can run a marathon with your brain and therefore you want to recover and restore it, and so the NanoVi can give almost a little buzz, a little bit of clarity and so on because it’s just initiating the repair, that’s what your body needs. Repair any of that oxidative damage in the in the brain.

00:17:35 Kayla Barnes
Yeah, I love it for that. You mentioned free radicals and oxidative stress. Can you tell us what free radicals are?

00:17:44 Rowena Gates
Well, let’s go back a little bit. There’s lots of ways that they can be formed, but even breathing creates free radicals. You could think of it, oxidation is like the exhaust from running the engine of a car, you can’t avoid it, and the free radicals are damaging molecules and they can be mitigated.

They can be interrupted by antioxidants so they don’t do damage, so you get the reactive oxygen species as they’re free radical. If it needs an antioxidant before it damages a cell component, it’ll be neutralized. But it’s never perfect, because there’s always been aging as long as we know. There’s always more damage than there is repair. So that’s why we want to amp up the repair side of that equation.

Even someone like you – perfectly healthy but you want to keep that repair up because that’s what keeps you feeling great. If you’re already more on the recovery side, you already have some chronic condition or something then regaining the repair and improving that side of the equation is going to be incredibly helpful. Then the last group is performance athletes, or any kind of high performer, where they this stress to body a lot with that performance and then you want to also give it extra repair.

I didn’t tie it together with NanoVi, but when I said with oxidative stress damage, that’s one of the highest priorities for your protein activities is to repair damage, especially if it’s in the DNA, but it’s this ongoing process is your protein functions going to be in there repairing damage. Proteins themselves are damaged and they also do all of the repair work. That’s why NanoVi has such a big impact on oxidative stress damage.

00:19:59 Kayla Barnes
Absolutely, that’s another one of the key benefits that I talk about a lot. especially people I think that are really – I don’t know – may be type A and that are biohackers. We want to burn the candle at all ends from working out hard to being successful and performing well in our careers and in our fields. I think it’s so important that we prioritize that recovery. Even some of the biohacks that I do, I know that they can produce some oxidative stress at some point, so I think it’s OK in manageable levels, especially if I’m using something like the NanoVi to go in and help reduce those oxidative stress levels. I think that’s really interesting.
So we talked about the proteins, but what about protein folding? Doesn’t it somehow help the protein folding?

00:20:54 Rowena Gates
Exactly, that’s exactly what it does. That’s sort of our claim to fame, actually, because it’s so important that they fold in order to function, and also that they fold correctly and don’t end up misfolded or left unfolded because those are at the heart of neurodegenerative diseases. You want your proteins to be working correctly. You can’t just let them accumulate in plaques. Problems in the brain, especially, is where that’s noticeable.

We really just help with that folding process to get it from the chain of amino acids into the folded shape that can actually function, and then after that the body takes over. I think your comment about getting deep sleep is really interesting because that’s one example of when the body has a little extra help, what’s it going to do? Probably in your case it helps to balance the autonomic nervous system, which is something you can always see with this device, is people will come out of the stress mode and then later with monitoring later on, they start to increase the parasympathetic side, but if you balance your autonomic nervous system, calming then fosters better sleep.

00:22:24 Kayla Barnes
Great, because that was going to be my next question. I was going to ask you what do you think the mechanism was that was promoting my deep sleep because of course, especially for someone like me, once we see that once, we want to replicate it time and time again. I told you that my friend reached out and says he runs it for 90 minutes and he is able to replicate that super deep sleep with NanoVi, which is definitely amazing.

So, we’ve talked about how NanoVi can help with the proteins and sleep and brain health, but what about longevity benefits of NanoVi? Of course it’ll be along the same lines, but how do you see NanoVi playing into longevity?

00:23:10 Rowena Gates
It’s interesting. Longevity is a tricky one of what actually makes you live longer versus what lets you live healthier and more vital and so on. We climb the ladder because we can prove that. The former we don’t have that evidence, and that’s still out there, and so that’s also something that biohacking is like I don’t necessarily have to live forever, but I want to feel good the whole time I’m alive, and both mentally and physically. But definitely with the healthy aging and high performance. We have people that are way too old to be doing what they’re doing and performing at the top level and it’s just remarkable what’s possible, and I just applaud those people to keep doing this, you know?

00:24:10 Kayla Barnes
Yeah, I absolutely love that and it’s very, very cool. So what about some biomarkers, or different studies that you guys have done with the NanoVi. Have you guys done any biomarker testing? I know you guys have a lot of research. Can you talk a little bit about it?

00:24:28 Rowena Gates
Yeah, we’ve a lot of research. One thing is with biomarkers, basically anything you’re testing, if you’re using blood urine markers, those are likely to show differences. The bigger thing is whether there are other confounding factors or not because if you can’t diet or something, you could have more oxidative stress than if everything was fine and so those individual biomarkers that people do, those are just more kind of interesting. They’re informing the individual but they’re not a study, it’s not science.

So, we really went on the science side and we verified that the device is producing and doing exactly what we say it is with the water humidity that’s known to have the impact that we have on the body. And so we’ve tested both the device and the humidity and then the impact on the body, we’ve had a big study done on proteins showing different types of damage to different types of proteins and the three areas of damage are either chemical, oxidation or heat damage.

They take these proteins, injure them, measure their base level, and then they treat them either with a sham device which is turned off inside but still produces the exact same humidity and everything, or an active device which is NanoVi. The results are really stunning. These proteins do far better with NanoVi and they do it for all types of damage. There is variation amongst the different proteins and also amongst some things for oxidation, if you if you pre-treat or post-treat, that was something they also measured, it doesn’t matter. They’re both beneficial, so that suggests NanoVi is preventative of damage.

But with heat, if you pre-treat and then you damage the protein by heat, it doesn’t help it. Post-treating helps a lot and so we have to look at it that there’s so much complexity in the body. But the study is able to pick up some of that nuance, and certainly strong evidence that it has both a preventative rule protecting protein function and also helping to repair it faster so that you get a much higher number of proteins that are viable for the NanoVi device versus the sham device.

That’s the first area and then the other is on the placebo device with athletes showing that was a university study on athletes where they used an all-out exertion test to create oxidation in the system, because you’re metabolizing so much oxygen that you have oxidative damage. It was double blind, placebo-controlled and they looked at the placebo device versus the active device and those results are quite stunning. For this study with those athletes, there was 17% less blood lactate when the NanoVi was used preventatively before the exertion test, they showed that there was a higher immune response. Basically, your immune system was kicking into recovery mode substantially higher with the NanoVi device versus the placebo device, and so that’s what we want. We want faster recovery. We want that thing amped up.

We haven’t studied the brain in that context, but it will be similar with the brain where you want it to recover quickly when you’ve burned a lot of oxygen concentrating, so you could extrapolate to that. We’ve also looked at oxidative stress damage, heart rate variability is standard, it’s easy to measure the difference. Heart rate variability is an indicator of the autonomic nervous system, so stress. What do they say? Rest and digest, as opposed to stressed, or stay and play or something.

Then DNA studies looking at the DNA damage, which is the hard kind of DNA damage to fix which is double strand breaks, and so that was a small study, but it was compelling. The range was between 15% and 34% less DNA damage when the NanoVi was incorporated for a week.

00:29:45 Kayla Barnes
Wow, that’s incredible, and so they were doing in that study they were doing NanoVi before, after or both?

00:30:00 Rowena Gates
After and they were all endurance athletes, it was done at an Olympic training center.

00:30:05 Kayla Barnes
Amazing, so when you talk about the heat stress is that related to an athlete maybe heating up the body internally or is that talking about potentially like the sun heat stress?

00:30:17 Rowena Gates
It could be both. It could be both for an athlete, and that’s in addition to the oxidation.

00:30:24 Kayla Barnes
OK, so interesting. What are athletes using for their protocol then? For the most part, I mean, of course everyone is going to be different, but if you had to have like the perfect NanoVi protocol, say I’m actually going to go to the gym after we finish up the podcast. So what would be optimal for me, if I’m going to do a hard workout?

00:30:48 Rowena Gates
Ideally, you’d use it before and after. Most athletes use it after. If you use it before you can expect better performance and so that might be more reps in the same amount of time or more speed, or more endurance, or even as simple as feeling better at the end of the routine that you normally do. The guy that used to be the CEO of Upgrade Labs when it was Bulletproof Labs, he was very keen to make sure NanoVi was in the opening of labs, because he reduced his hill climbs by 20% and he’d done it for years. Numbers in your bicycle measures it, and so that’s the kind of difference that some people will see. Then using it before makes a lot of sense if you’re looking for performance, always after is great for recovery and the research supports both.

The one exception is for the biohackers out there who are looking for hormesis, then what they’re trying to do is stress the body so the body ups its game to make it stronger, and in that case, they should wait a few hours before they use the NanoVi for recovery. Otherwise, it’s counterproductive because they’re trying to create all that stress. and so then if they wait maybe 2-3 hours then they help the body bounce back after it’s gone through that period of saying, “Hey, wait a minute, I gotta kick into gear here, I’m not I’m not performing at level.”

Those are very rare and it was something pretty common a few years ago that people would be concerned about and now we don’t hear about it so much. But there are certainly people who are working within that training regime, and in that case, they would delay the use of NanoVi.

00:32:50 Kayla Barnes
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think that we touched on this before, I go in the hyperbaric chamber pretty often. I was in there for about an hour and 20 earlier just doing some work, but what is the perfect NanoVi hyperbaric oxygen therapy protocol look like?

00:33:08 Rowena Gates
We have a lot of centers using it. They get better outcomes and all but one uses it after because there’s two reasons for that. You’ve done the oxidative damage because you pressed more oxygen in the system, and so why not address that right away and give yourself a little boost? But the other reason is interesting, but when you’re in hyperbaric it can be an up to an hour later that your systems can be flooded with oxygen. When you come out of it, it doesn’t just disappear from the system. Well, NanoVi doesn’t add oxygen, but it helps with oxygen utilization. So, when you come out within that hour, if you’re using the NanoVi, then you’re going to get extra benefit from the hyperbaric session, so you can amp up your value of your hyperbaric system without adding more oxidative damage.

00:34:07 Kayla Barnes
Yeah, that that’s really smart. I’m going to have to tweak my protocol a bit because I told you I was doing NanoVi at night because I wanted to improve my sleep, but maybe I should start doing NanoVi once after the hyperbaric chamber and then before bed as well. Can you overdo it or no?

00:34:27 Rowena Gates
You cannot overdo it, but I would definitely if you have to choose, definitely use it after hyperbaric. I think every hyperbaric center should have one – or many! At night, that I think that’s such a great idea. You cannot overuse it because of the way it works. It’s not like adding a substance like oxygen or anything that can override the way the body works.

It is just playing a supporting role and so that makes it so that it’s not problematic and it also is what makes it so complementary to virtually any of the other biohacks out there and certainly hyperbarics. It’s used a lot in conjunction with Cryo or PEMF or any of the brain training. 40 years of Zen uses it during their cap training because they get better performance. People brains function better for their training and so it’s very complementary with other things that people are doing.

00:35:44 Kayla Barnes
Absolutely yeah, I definitely agree. We talked about a couple of protocols so maybe it pre-gym protocol, post-hyperbaric protocol, but if you’re just an average user wanting to upgrade your performance, is there an ideal time of the day? Is it nice to start your day off with it in the morning if it’s at your desk? Or obviously if you want to do some NF1 experiments and try to up your sleep I highly recommend using it before bed, but what are your favorite times to use it or what do you recommend the protocol be?

00:36:17 Rowena Gates
I essentially use it as my meditation timer in the morning and then I have it on my desk during the day and I just use it whenever. I don’t worry about if it’s on for a long time. I’m now going to start trying doing it more before bed, but I think the most important thing is that it fits into somebody’s schedule and some people will use it on stationary exercise equipment because they’re trying to stack things and spend less time. My kind of favorites if you can set it up with your stationary equipment if you use that. And then, if you can use it at your desk doing e-mail, texting, social media or whatever, it’s great because it’s easy to just add into the day.
Those are sort of my favorite times, if you can do that and then aside from that, if you’re using it regularly it’s not that you have to use the same time every day or one time of day is going to be a lot better than another, because if you’re using it daily, it’s supporting your system even when you’re not using it, and so it kind of carries from one day to the next, and you have this ongoing advantage of it.

If you can only use it sporadically, that’s when it’s more important to use it after exercise or however you want to incorporate it to accomplish what you’re trying to accomplish.

00:37:52 Kayla Barnes
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, absolutely. So, I feel like we’ve gone over some of my main pillars, anti-aging, sleep, athletic performance. Obviously, what the NanoVi is and talked a little bit about EZ-Water. Is there anything else that you think that the audience should know?

00:38:14 Rowena Gates
I actually think we’ve really covered things fairly well. I feel like I should think of something that we haven’t talked about. Often people who are interested in pricing and it’s is not an inexpensive machine. Over time it is because you’re not paying every month for the supplement or something, so over time, it is inexpensive, but initially there’s an investment upfront. We will try to work it out and make it work for people as best we can.

00:38:51 Kayla Barnes
Yeah, absolutely, and I actually have and I’m going to include it in the show notes: Eng3corp.com/kaylabarnes
That has some of the reasons why I love the device and it has a lot of other scientific studies and data for people interested in really diving into that. Rowena, it’s been such a pleasure to have you here today. I just am grateful for your friendship and grateful for NanoVi and the whole 9 yards. So, I really appreciate it.

00:39:26 Rowena Gates
It’s such a pleasure. I love what you’re doing and I so appreciate everything we’ve built so we look forward to more great things in the future!

00:39:36 Kayla Barnes
Oh, absolutely I completely agree!

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