How This Simple Test Could Add Years to Your Life | Panos DSH #1223

and see if you have some sort of mouth morphology that may be creating, maybe giving rise to sleep apnea.

There's a lot of integrative dentists nowadays that understand the interconnection between how your teeth are evolving and the likelihood of developing sleep apnea.

So evaluating overall the morphology of your mouth and nose is super important.

All right, guys, got Panos here from Panoe.

We're going to talk about the importance of breathing today.

Thanks for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me, Kelly.

Yeah, so I just did one of your tests, right?

And it was a seven-minute test.

Could you explain what happened?

Yeah, absolutely.

So

Panoi is a seven to ten-minute breath analysis test.

You put a mask on, you breathe normally.

And what the device does is that it analyzes how much oxygen you are consuming and how much carbon dioxide you're producing.

And this is one of the most fundamental processes in the human body because oxygen has to be delivered to the cells for metabolism to happen.

Metabolism is the process by which your cells will use oxygen to break down nutrients, that is the fats and carbs you get from the food that you eat, to release the energy that your body needs to survive, thrive, and do whatever like daily functions you do.

And, you know, if you think about it, like every single, major system and organ in our physiology developed to specifically support this function.

You have lungs to absorb oxygen, you have a heart and a circulatory system to pump it, you have mitochondria to use it, and then you have a nervous system to coordinate all of that.

And so, breath analysis is, which is a test we did, is actually the only assessment known to science that can reliably assess all of that process.

Wow.

And so,

it's a 10-minute test produces 23 biomarkers.

And through these 23 biomarkers, by collectively analyzing them, we can paint the picture of how efficiently your lungs, your heart, your cells, your metabolism, and your nervous system are working.

And, you know, some of these biomarkers are quite famous, like View2Max test or resting metabolic rate test.

That's why a lot of people tend to know this assessment as a VU2Max test or a resting metabolic rate test.

But there's a lot more to it, you know, as you just saw from the test that we did.

And so, for example, this test is the only one that can tell you how efficiently you burn fats and carbs and how many fats and carbs your body is burning.

It's also a test that can very reliably identify your biological age because view to max, according to the American Heart Association, is one of the best indicators for how long and well someone is going to live.

So overall, it's an assessment that has been around for about 100 years.

Up until we came along, it was very much in the sidelines for many reasons.

We can talk about that.

But it is because of the fact that it looks into so many different areas of physiology, an assessment that has very established clinical utility in the world of cardiology, in the world of pulmonology, endocrinology, sports science, and nutrition science.

Yeah, I just learned the importance of lifting weights, man.

Yeah.

We're going to throw out my results on the screen, but basically my age was four years above my real age.

So I got some work to do, and I thought I was pretty healthy.

Yeah.

So that was pretty interesting.

You know, people like you that, you know, are typically healthy, you know, may have gone through certain health stuffs in the past, but, you know,

they don't really know if there's any residual damage or things they need to be concerned about when it comes to things of the past, tend to have...

lingering issues that may be impacting what we call the oxygen flow through the body at that particular point in time.

And although that may not be a clinically relevant

thing and may not be considered a disease if you were to go to the doctor, it is something that long term can present certain issues and evolve into some sort of like chronic disease or, you know, major health event.

So there's actually a lot of people out there that would be generally considered fit, but there is stuff to work on.

And that stuff isn't just, you know, superficial.

It is something that would be considered important to deal with because 10 years or 20 years down the road, it may end up being something considerable.

I would say, because we've done like hundreds of thousands of tests up until now as a company, one of the most important things that people have as a problem that they're unaware of is some sort of anatomical issue with their breathing apparatus.

And I use the term breathing apparatus because, you know, it's not just the lungs, but it's the diaphragm, it's the respiratory muscles.

It's the nose, it's the mouth, it's you know, the entire chain that enables oxygen to be absorbed.

Right.

So there's a lot of people that, you know,

develop, you know, mouth abnormalities, right?

That may lead to sleep apnea.

And because that is mild at that point, it's not something that is clinically relevant.

We have a lot of people that we test that have some sort of deviated septum that is obstructing them from breathing from their nose.

And, you know, not breathing from your nose is going to put you in this constant state of slight increase in sympathetic activation.

And, you know, because of the mutual endocrine system in our body, that can cause your...

hormones to go out of whack.

And then long term, you know, if you have that for 10 years, that may evolve into some sort of issue, right?

Right.

And the other big thing that is now gaining a lot of attention in the clinical world is that if you have some sort of breathing issue that is causing you to have lower than normal CO2 levels in the blood, because of how important CO2 is in delivering oxygen across the body, that may end up evolving long-term into some sort of

neuroinflammation in the brain.

And then neuroinflammation gives rise to neural generation.

So there's a very strong correlation behind how we breathe and the likelihood of developing neurogenerative conditions.

And so

to your point earlier, there's a lot of people out there that think they're healthy, but once we dive and we double click into the components of the oxygen chain, right?

Your lungs, your heart, and your cells, we uncover certain things that, as I said, may not be relevant now and may not be life debilitating now, but 10 years or 20 years down the road, may very well be.

Yeah, I think that's what happened in my case.

I had some nasty bronchitis during the pandemic.

And I actually just found out I'm allergic to penicillin now because they put me on so many antibiotics for growing up.

Yeah.

You know, so yeah, you got to take these tests.

They're really important.

You mentioned a few things earlier.

I did want to ask this first, though.

So since you've done hundreds of thousands of tests, I'm curious which athletes had the best result, which sport.

So,

I mean, as expected, sports that have a lot of cardio and endurance component in them will typically yield athletes that score better in their view to max.

But, you know,

what's also very important for people to understand is that every type of exercise is going to impact our biology differently.

So, if you're looking to have great mitochondrial function and great fat burn efficiency,

doing endurance and zone two training and steady state cardio is going to be your best bet.

But if you want to have a high metabolism, you know, lifting weights is going to be better.

So you may run into an endurance athlete that has incredible view to max,

very good fat burn efficiency because they do a ton of cardio and a ton of steady state, low intensity cardio.

But that person may not have a great metabolic rate because, you know, as a matter of fact, doing a lot of cardio will suppress your metabolic rate, right?

Because your body body is being asked to cover large distances, and so it is becoming more economical because it's trying to conserve energy, right?

And so, on the flip side of things, you can run into bodybuilding athletes, right, that have great metabolic rates because they have huge muscles, and you know,

they're also the

muscle composition is such that enables them to burn more.

The type of training you do will also impact the type of muscle that you end up developing.

But these people will end up having not great fat brain efficiencies so to your point earlier yeah every type of sport is going to optimize your biology in one particular area but it's very difficult to have like the super well-rounded perfect athlete that is almost optimal in all different areas um what i've observed is that at least in the world of triathlon and high rocks now that is becoming a very big trend.

What's Hyrox?

Hyrox is like a new type of competition.

Sort of like, you know, Spartan racing or sort of like, you know, CrossFit.

You know, people do a combination of resistance training, competition with endurance, with an endurance component to it.

And so what we are seeing is that people are now more cognizant.

of the fact that there's different areas in their biology.

And so they should never hyper-optimize optimize for one area because that will most likely leave another area deficient.

And I mean, if you're a professional athlete, right?

And that's your job and, you know, you need to hyper-optimize in one specific area, so be it.

But if you're doing it for longevity, if you're doing it for fun, and then at some point in time, you expect that you're going to give up.

this sport in the sense that you're not going to be training as much, then it's very important to keep in mind that you should never leave any area underdeveloped because that can

hurt you down the road.

For example,

endurance athletes that were great at fat burn efficiency and VO2 max when they were endurance athletes and ended up having a very low metabolism because they became very efficient and ended up conserving energy during movement.

when they give up the tens of hours of training during the week, they may end up gaining weight because they have a lower metabolism.

So that's just an example to show that there's always a balance that you need to strike and testing to see how you're faring in all these areas is obviously hyper, you know, very important.

Yeah, you see that with athletes that retire, they quickly put on weight.

Some of them are

basketball players, runners.

Yeah, that's super interesting.

You mentioned the mouth breathing earlier.

Have you seen this mouth taping trend?

Yeah, a lot of people are

understanding now that the the way you breathe is such an important contributor to so many different areas of your health.

I mentioned a few earlier.

So if you hyperventilate, you blow off too much CO2, that reduces whole body oxygenation.

You breathe with your mouth, you automatically

up-regulate sympathetic activation, down-regulate parasympathetic activation.

For our listeners, sympathetic, fight-or-flight, parasympathetic, rest, chill, recover.

You obviously want to be in the parasympathetic as much as possible.

And the way, the reason why breathing is going to so profoundly impact the activation of the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system is because the way the nervous system is connected on your lungs.

You have the sympathetic connected on the upper part of the lungs and then the parasympathetic in the lower part of the lungs.

That's why when you're a belly breather, you engage the diaphragm and you take deep breaths, you're activating the parasympathetic system.

Whereas when you're a chest breather, you're this hectic, anxious breather that is, you know, in many times

a factor of mouth breathing, right?

You will activate the sympathetic system.

And so

for all these reasons and more,

you need to breathe as much as possible.

from your nose obviously in conditions of high exercise intensity it becomes impossible

But for the most part, especially obviously during our sleep, we need to be nose breathing.

And, you know, it's understandable that people are trying to achieve that through mouth breathing.

Breath work is going to be a very, very important ally if you have breathing abnormalities and you want to fix them.

And then what I always like to tell people whenever we see someone that has you know breathing abnormalities, pay a visit to the doctor, see if you have a deviated septum, see if you have some sort of, you know,

mouth morphology that may be creating, maybe giving rise to sleep apnea.

There's a lot of integrative dentists nowadays that understand the interconnection between how your, you know, teeth are evolving and the likelihood of developing sleep apnea.

So

evaluating overall the morphology of your mouth and nose is super important.

Yeah.

Because there's cases, right, where, you know, you have a deviated septum.

And no matter how much mouth taping you're going to be doing,

the nostril is blocked.

We need to unblock it.

How common are deviated septums?

Fairly common.

There's

people that have had accidents.

There's many reasons that can lead to something like that.

Yeah.

I know sleep apnea and sleeping issues overall are getting pretty common too these days.

Very common.

Very common.

And a lot of it has to do with breathing, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a very big comorbidity with the fact that we are chewing food that is a lot softer than what it used to be.

James Nestor in his book about breathing talks about that a lot.

And it is so true.

You know,

the fact that we're not consuming food that is natural is also certainly a contributor to the fact that we are seeing this sleep apnea epidemic that because of this strong comorbidity with neurogenerative diseases, right, you know, ultimately, I think we're going to see a very big rise in, unfortunately, neurogenerative conditions down the road for our generation, right?

Wow.

Which we haven't yet seen.

You know, right now we're just seeing the first wave of symptoms, which is sleep apnea, but there are, as I said, second and third order effects that will, you know, unavoidably start to occur down the road.

That's scary, man.

That's scary, I know.

Yeah.

Is that a big reason why you started this company?

So how we started as a company, it's so interesting.

So

I personally have no background in health.

I did my first degree in mechanical engineering.

That was back in Greece.

Came to the US, did my graduate degree at Stanford.

That was in engineering again.

I went into big tech.

I was working in enterprise data centers and then Oracle for a little bit.

And then my co-founder, Apostolos,

he's my first friend in life, actually.

Yeah, we met

first year, first day of elementary school.

That's awesome.

So we've known each other since the age of six.

So we went through elementary, middle school, high school together, also undergrad.

I was in the mechanical engineering school.

He was doing applied physics and math.

He then went on to Cambridge, UK,

focusing to do his PhD on sensing technologies.

And when he was there, he discovered the amazing world of breath analysis.

Breath analysis is at the same time such an old, but also such a new field old because this type of breath analysis called cardiometabolic testing has been around for about a hundred years

uh and he was like this is such an important thing why isn't everyone doing it at least as part of their annual physical um

and uh i always wanted to do something of my own and you know i found that that was like a very interesting idea and we started working on that together.

As I said, we were like the first company to create a device that provides this assessment in an easy and practical way for the average clinic.

And so

that made the test a lot easier.

But then the other problem that we uncovered as we made the test easier is that the analysis, the interpretation, and also the prescription based on the information coming out of the test was also a very big issue.

Because, you know, as I said, this test had been around for about 100 years, but it remained at the sidelines for decades, despite the fact that if you look at the clinical literature, there's so much information to establish it as a very, very important assessment.

And so to address that,

you know, we made the hardware cheaper, more practical, more affordable.

but then we also built the entire ecosystem of services and software to streamline the the process for analyzing the data and then providing wellness prescription, nutrition training, biooptimization so that clinics don't have to hire an entire team of experts to be able to analyze the information.

Because the reality is that there is so much information coming out of your breathing.

And

the time requirements and the

certification and the skills and expertise required to analyze all the data pretty much made it cost prohibitive for the average clinic.

That makes sense.

That's probably why they didn't adopt it on a mass scale, right?

Yeah.

Because growing up, I was never taught to do this type of test.

No one ever brought it up.

Exactly.

And even like, you know, varsity athletes or professional athletes haven't even done the test.

It's crazy.

Wow.

Now they probably are.

And now there's obviously a big trend.

And, you know, it's very important that people like Peter Artea, Andrew Huberman, and so many others like are talking about the value of VO2 Max, but it was because the hardware was very expensive and impractical.

And also analyzing data was also very difficult and costly that kept that from entering like mainstream adoption.

And because we made it easy for the average health provider, we now have places like Equinox doing it.

We now have like

resorts like Four Seasons doing it.

uh restore you know uh hyper wellness like people in the longevity space also people in the weight loss space so we you know out of the people that we test, I would say vast majority of the people are actually the average person who just wants to stay healthy and, you know, live as long as possible and as

good as possible in terms of quality.

It's really important data.

I could see why insurance companies wouldn't want to cover this because it's pretty preventative, right?

Once you can see that data, you can kind of map out what you want to do next.

Yeah, totally.

And, you know, at first principle,

you should expect that payers would cover something like that.

But, you know, that's a totally different discussion.

The insurance industry is focused on so many different things.

Intrinsically, it's not financially motivated to prevent conditions because, at the end of the day,

if healthcare costs go up,

when health expenses go up, premiums go up.

So they're basically passing on the cost to the consumer.

But whenever you have

this

coexistence of the payers also being providers providers and also having like the entire stack of health services under one roof, then obviously you have, you start to see a lot more motivation towards prevention.

And that's a great tool for preventative medicine.

That makes sense.

Since you've done so many tests, have you plugged in the results into some AI software to kind of see any trends?

Yeah, I mean, as I said earlier, one of the most interesting things that we see as time goes by is that, you know,

things, limitations related to to people's breathing is the number one thing

and then

also

we start to see very interesting trends behind the personalization of you know the nutrition the training prescription that yields the best results for every individual

we you know test and obviously retest people and in between we take care of their nutrition and their training and their bioptimization so we can start to determine you know what works and what uh doesn't for every individual And obviously, what works most effectively is

what people are looking for.

Right.

Have you seen pretty good results with that?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And is it pretty personal, or is there kind of one-step formula?

So there's obviously

basic things that apply to everyone.

So, yeah, you need to do weight training, you need to do cardio training, you need to do interval training.

But then you start to see a lot of

benefits and a lot of

greater results whenever you personalize the amount, for example, of resistance, cardio, and interval training that every person should do.

Got it.

Yeah.

I saw, yeah, on my results, I said to do cryo, red light, hyperbaric oxygen.

Yeah.

So, something else that we do as a company that is very important for the clinics we work with is we can take all of their bioptimization services, plug them in our software, and we can provide a two-rated list of bioptimization services that the client should undergo based on their limitations and obviously based on what is available in the practice.

And that is becoming a very

powerful upselling tool for our clinics because it sort of bridges the gap between, you know, what

could I do in your clinic and what should I do based on the limitations that are personal to me.

Right.

I'm a big fan of the hyperbaric.

Yeah.

You know, out of the bioptimization services that you will find out there, so your cryos, your red lights,

hyperbaric oxygen exposure is probably one of the most

well

studied ones and the one that has shown like very significant and powerful impacts

pretty much across the board when it comes to, you know,

healing from wounds, healing from injuries, but then also in many cases, you know, brain injuries,

neurogenerative conditions, and so on and so forth.

I mean, the mechanism behind hyperbaric oxygen is like very fundamental.

You're increasing pressure.

And so the

chances and the amount of oxygen that you plug into the cells is much greater.

And because, you know, oxygen is such an important thing for healing, you're basically speeding up the healing process across the body.

That's why it is something so powerful.

Yeah, certain athletes will go to higher altitudes to train harder, right?

Yeah, that's a different mechanism than hyperbaric oxygen exposure.

This is basically exposing your body to a condition of lower pressure.

But hyperbaric oxygen is increasing the pressure.

And because you increase the pressure, you force more oxygen into the cell.

And as I said, because more oxygen means more healing, then you speed up the healing process.

wherever that is needed.

Yeah, that makes sense.

I'm big on saunas too.

Yeah, you know, sauna, like very big on saunas as well.

And then also combining it with cold plunge, you know, this combination of cold and hot exposure.

I mean, we've known it, we've known, we've known it, you know, for millennia now.

If you go to Pompeii,

one of the first things you see is the ancient Roman baths, which had cold exposure and hot exposure.

Wow.

Yeah.

We've known that for

a long time.

And it's very important

that people are now gravitating towards all of these things.

You're seeing like saunas and cold plunge in the entire gamut of, you know,

income spectrum.

Like you have the bathhouses in New York, but then you also have, you know, Russian banya and more, you know, affordable options.

So it's obviously a big trend and looks like a lot of people are taking these things.

a lot more seriously because they can you know very much have an impact in your biology you know i obviously the four pillars for longevity as i like to think of them would be to move well eat well sleep or recover well love and be loved you know we should never forget about the fourth one such an important thing but then you can have all of these additional services like hyperbaric uh sauna cold exposure and so on that can you know very much supercharge uh you know your the impact that nutrition and training

Yeah, people focus on the wrong things first, right?

Yeah.

Some people love the biohacking stuff and they eat like crap.

Yes, obviously, you know, as I like to say, it always starts under the squad rack.

You know, we need to start under the squad rack, but obviously, there's a lot more besides that that we can do to be smarter and ultimately get the biggest bang out of all the time and the commitment and the effort that we're putting behind our longevity, right?

Absolutely.

Does Panoi have a big presence in Greece back home where you're from?

Yes.

So we have a big team

in terms of like our development team, our manufacturing, and then some operations

functions are based in Greece.

All of our business development and sales is done here in the United States.

And we have a facility in Boston.

We're thinking of opening one in Miami soon.

uh but then uh we also have customers in greece as i said we sell a lot into the hospitality space.

We have some pretty big resorts that we work with in Greece.

But our main focus is the U.S.

market.

We sell to clinics and businesses in the health space.

It can be anything from high-end fitness all the way up to primary care and specialty care.

Obviously, very big in integrative medicine.

And

if someone wants to get tested, we have a locator we're going to share with you.

And it can be public.

So

if you want to subscribe for consumers uh that want to get tested you know we can uh send them to one of our trusted affiliates um and yeah i love it dude i've been to 20 countries greece has been my favorite all right nice yeah we should go in greece i went to crete uh athens was okay i i i love crete which part of crete i couldn't tell you i was a kid but it was by the water you know i'm sure everywhere once by the water but yeah Crete was actually one of the longevity hotspots of the world.

Really?

Yeah.

I didn't know that.

Yeah.

I mean, a lot of people think about the five blue zones, you know, Costa Rica,

Sardinia, Icaria in Greece,

Okinawa, and then Loma Linda, California.

These were the five that were most popularized through the documentary that

aired on Netflix

recently.

Yeah.

But

There are many other blue zones in the past.

I think Crete ceased to be one late 70s, early 80s.

And obviously, it has to do with the intrusion and invasion of the Western way of living,

which is the same reason why, if you look at all of the five blue zones,

four of them are about to completely fade away.

Whoa.

With the exception of

which one would you say?

I would guess the one in Japan.

Loma Linda, California.

What?

Yes, sir.

And you know why that is?

It's because people there are already

in the

midst of the Western type of the very unhealthy Western living lifestyle.

And

they have taken a very conscious decision to say no to all of the things that make Western lifestyle unhealthy.

And they're very

conscious and mindful of what they need to do.

to remain healthy.

Whereas the remaining four blue zones do not really had

the,

didn't really have exposure to all of this unhealthy lifestyle.

And so they're kind of oblivious to, you know, what works, what doesn't.

They obviously have a lot of their traditions, right?

They're now fading away.

And that's why you started to see this gradual decline

in these other blue zones.

Wow, I didn't know that.

So they're going to be going away soon.

Unfortunately, I mean, you know, what we hope through this longevity movement to achieve achieve is that, you know, our world becomes a blue zone, right?

You know, why should it be that, you know, only a few select locations around the world only have this, you know, privilege of getting to 100, you know, Loma Linda, California, I think is probably the best example.

Yeah.

That, you know, you can be very much in the midst of in the very center of unhealthy living.

But if you make certain decisions about your lifestyle, you weight train, you have powerful, strong community, close relations to people, focus on healthy nutrition that

is predominantly whole food, plant-based,

then inevitably, you're going to have a very positive impact in your longevity.

Yeah, I think that community aspect is often overlooked.

There's a lot of people

in the health space that just focus on numbers and analytics.

Yeah, yeah.

And, you know, there's a very strong bi-directional relationship between, you know, the fourth pillar, the love and beloved, and the remaining three.

So, you know, we cannot expect that, you know, humans will become robots and they will eat perfectly, train perfectly, and then sleep perfectly when they're not loved and they don't have anyone to love, right?

When the fourth pillar goes away, then obviously you start to see, you know, people neglecting their training, neglecting taking care of themselves and whatever way that is important.

And so, you know, there's obviously a lot of direct biological impact that emotional well-being has on our biology.

But then it's the second and third-order effect, which is, you know, you take away, you know, the love component, and then all of a sudden you don't eat as well, you don't train, you don't sleep as well.

So, you know, there's that as well.

Yeah.

Julpanos, what's next for you?

Where can people learn more about Panoe and keep up with you, man?

So certainly follow us on Instagram, Panoe Analytics.

Visit our website, panoe.com, p-n-o-e.com.

Something for people to know, Panoe stands for breath in Greek.

And, you know, breath analysis is what we do.

And, you know, we look forward to bringing breath analysis to the world.

Yeah, I highly recommend taking the test, guys.

I learned a lot today.

I can't wait to start improving.

And I'll probably retest in my

moments.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we look forward to seeing you in Miami.

Yep.

Yeah.

I'll be there for F1.

So maybe I could retest there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That'd be good.

Perfect.

Yeah.

Staving again.

Awesome.

Check them out, guys.

See you next time.