In this video, I review the limited research on the AMPK-activator AICAR.
Friends welcome to another day of q and a’s joined by my lovely and helpful wife lucy hi guys should ask me one of your questions from instagram so the next question is by um username that i would not even try to pronounce uh leo are you family familiar with a car it seems to have all the positive effects of carterene without the drawbacks besides being expensive
Your channel is great keep going thank you lucy um okay so this is an interesting i i remember seeing the question but i didn’t know that he compared it to uh cartering which is probably a poor comparison so carterine works through the ppar uh mechanism i i i don’t i don’t know if it’s the beta ppr beta there’s a there’s an alpha gamma and beta i’m not sure i
Don’t remember which one it works through but ppe but cartoon works to a very complex system that is affected by the same system that uh a car works on but it’s not the same system so a car is a very interesting i’m calling it a car i don’t know how you pronounce it and you can’t pronounce the whole word it’s so difficult i don’t it’s a really i can’t even
Remember what it was but i’ve been looking into a car actually for a little while because it has some unique properties so i don’t know if people are injecting it or if they’re if they’re consuming it in tablet form i’ve never taken it myself just a cautionary note but i have read the literature extensively on it basically a car is similar to metformin what
Metformin does is it activates the amp kinase pathway the amp kinase pathway is activated in your body when you’re in a start a starvation or a low nutrient it’s a nutrient sensing pathway when amp so how efp kinase turns on generally is when amp is increased in proportion to atp which is this famous energy molecule so when the ratio of amp and atp goes up amp
Kinase is turned on your body is a nutrient sensing pathway it senses your body’s law on nutrients it turns on amp kinase and p kinase does a plethora of things in the body including making your body uh burn more fat um uh try and uh you know burn more born burn more glucose in the muscle send more glucose in the muscle it changes the way the the liver functions
It does a lot of things in the body so that’s why i take my formula she takes metformin also and we’ve been taking metformin for a very long time the problem with metformin is that metformin reduces mitochondrial it affects the function of mitochondria and reduces the respiratory chain the first respiratory chain of the mitochondria so the effect of this well i
Get that i guess there are two effects of of metformin one is that and the other one is also it causes an increase in lactic acid buildup which may which so both of these things the first one the mitochondrial effect reduces the benefits you get from exercise slightly there have been some studies that have shown that it’s very popularly discussed in longevity
Communities and so some people have been turned off metformin because of that because basically it shows that if you basically it implies that if you don’t exercise metformin is extremely helpful for you but if you do exercise with like extreme cardiovascular exercise it may blunt the cardiovascular exercise effects on the body because of this inhibition of
Mitochondrial respiratory chain one however and then there’s the lactic acid lactic acid buildup which reduces your um strength in the gym as well as the amount of amount of reps you can do mainly so those are the issues with metformin a car does not cause this mitochondrial issue it works through a separate mechanism a car actually it’s naturally found in the
Body and it’s it’s it simulates ampk in the body so your body recognizes it similar to amp sorry it simulates amp so if your body recognizes like amp and thinks that the ratio of amp and to atp has risen so because of that it turns on the amp kinase pathway but and so it doesn’t affect the mitochondria in the same way that metformin does but in addition to that
It also has amp kinase independent effects so particularly if i’m recalling it has it turns on nrf2 which is a antioxidant regulatory gene pathway in the body independent of amp kinase and it also turns off some of the inflammatory cytokines like i’ll uh maybe il-1 beta for short il-6 as well as the nf kappa b pathway which is a pro-inflammatory pathway in
The body independent of amp kinase so it has at least those two effects independent of amp kinase also it has been shown to be cytotoxic to leukemia i remember leukemia uh cancers independent of amp kinase now it is also toxic to other cancers but through the amp kinase pathway when when the amp kinase pathway is turned on mtor goes off so it affects cancers
In general but there are at least three effects that are independent of amp kinase that have to do with acar which is really interesting so a car reduces inflammatory cytokines in the body it improves uh it reduces inflammatory cytokines particularly from from high fat diets and rodents so it reduces it from palmitic acid for example saturated fats which are
Pro-inflammatory saturated fats actually cause inflammation in the brain sodium monounsaturated fats only polyunsaturated fats don’t i’ve mentioned this before so it reduces that it also reduces the inflammatory response from lipopolysaccharides which are uh released by our microbiome and sometimes enter our bloodstream or go through the they affect the vagal
Nerve and therefore affect their inflammatory response in the body so it has this effect it has antioxidant effect it uh improves uh glucose uptake it does everything that metformin does basically it improves glucose uptake to the to the muscles it reduces uh glucose uh production from from consuming carbs in the liver it increases fat oxidation in the liver
So therefore it would reduce hypothetically uh fatty liver as well um so it has basically you can think of all the effects of metformin in addition it has a couple of other effects now what are the drawbacks to this the drawbacks are it has a very short half-life compared to metformin so my form if you take it it lasts a couple of days with you i don’t know the
Exact half-life in humans of a car i’ve looked into it before and couldn’t find any research on it maybe i wasn’t looking into it enough maybe i should look into it more i will if i buy it which i’m thinking of doing but it definitely has a shorter half-life because i recall that there are studies trying to develop new molecular versions that have a similar
Effect of a car with a longer half-life and with better blood-brain barrier permeability because it doesn’t cross the blood-brain barrier much although there are studies that show that it has a neuroprotective effect although those studies show interestingly that the neuroprotective effect which occurs in not just neuroprotective but it proliferates neurons
In the brain in rodents decreases after two weeks after 14 days not decreases it reverses so if you use it continuously for 14 days the effect on the rodents goes away on the brain while the effect from exercise continues because the brain has these effects on the brain as well i mean the brain the the exercise has these effects on ronan’s brains as well so
Basically my impression of a car is first of all uh it’s not like i i know that these websites that carry the sarms and stuff like that carry a car i don’t know why they picked a car out of all things there’s many other things that they could be carrying a car would more be used by people who care about their health or longevity it’s not gonna cause you to
Lose fat rapidly that’s not gonna happen metformin was thought to do a similar thing it doesn’t do that it causes people to lose like one pound a year or something like that it doesn’t have a huge effect on it and metformin’s more long-lasting and probably stronger than this um also by what is a car used for it’s not used for anything it’s not prescribed for
Anything it was just in development and then they stopped developing it i’m not sure why uh but it’s not being used for anything pharmaceutically but a car also i didn’t mention has a low uh or a low bioavailability when taken orally so that’s why i was curious if people were injecting it or not but so the point is if you’re interested in your health it really
Seems to be an interesting molecule there don’t seem to be any downsides to it except for the lactic acid potentially which is small and it’s it’s a short-term thing right as well as a potential increase in uric acid levels which may also happen with metformin but it the advantage i think of this over metformin is that you can use it so for example say you’re
A bodybuilder or someone who’s actively raising mtor so you can’t take too many days off to take metformin metformin would take about two days off your mtor results so you could use this repeated administration for a couple of days and you take those days off or for example say you’re taking two days off to fast but your it’ll take a while for your body to
Get into this nutrient sensing amp kinase pathway you can use this or metformin to speed that up so it’s it’s very attractive personally i’m interested in using it and it’s really attractive because of that mitochondrial effect too so this will probably reduce your benefits from exercise less than metformin so it’s a very attractive molecule i’m glad he asked
This question he didn’t ask it on the q and a’s so he should ask it on the q as next time but i saw it on another page and i thought we should include it for sure so do look into a car by the way if you guys have used a car let me know in the comment section below how your experience went i’ve never used it personally i want to know if people are injecting it
Or if they’re consuming it in oral form as well as how much you guys are using and if you’ve noticed any effects and the final thing is about as comparison to cardarine cartering is a is a totally different animal that cartoon is dealing with the ppar complexes it’s increasing it’s not fully understood how it works i’ve made a video on cartoon before you can
Check it out it is not affecting amp kinase directly it will not have these benefits on uh on mtor and you know i also didn’t mention that this this uh a car has been shown to so see obese people and obese rodents also have an uh up regulation of amp torque one which is the mtor complex one all the time so a car on its own reduces that and normalizes it to a
Non-obese rodent model so carter would never do any of these things the downside to cardarine is that it’s been shown to be uh to increase tumors in rodents and ppr as a complex is very complicated all the ppar agonist drugs of all the all the pprs alpha beta and gamma all have certain side effects that are concerning because i think ppr is such a big uh you
Know a big complex biological mechanism in the body yeah but so basically think of this as an anti-inflammatory it’s a it’s a pro fat oxidation uh by the way i didn’t mention it improves insulin sensitivity uh dramatically but obviously all the effects of metformin but also has anti-inflammatory effects antioxidant effects it is short acting it is not very uh
Orally bioavailable um and that’s what you should know about it it’s more if you’re interested in your health or limiting the effects that you’re having the side effects from uh from being uh having your mtor always on maybe growing cancers you know damaging your body in that kind of way this is an attractive molecule okay thank you for your question guys we’ll
See you next time you
Transcribed from video
The Advantages of AICAR Over Metformin By Leo and Longevity
