Beyond Ketofast Your Need to Know Guide – Part 2 with Dr Joseph Mercola #588

Bulletproof Radio, A State of High performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. This is the second part of the interview with Dr. Mercola, done right after he got off Stage at the 6th Annual Biohacking Conference, which was held down in Beverly Hills. We are now going to talk about some of the other things he shared with the audience on stage. Dr. Mercola, welcome back to the show.

Hey, great to continue with you, Dave.

Let's talk about the other things that you shared with the audience. People were just abuzz with all the stuff you talked about, especially during your breakout session at the conference. But what else was on your main stage presentation that we haven't talked about in the show so far?

Well, before I answer that, if you haven't listened to episode one, please do, because I had some comments about how I felt about what you did with the conference and just so listen to that if you haven't. But extending the conversation. We all know that not eating for a few hours before bedtime is a good strategy. I think there's very few people who will dispute that, at least rational people. But I never really understood why that was so. I mean, obviously putting your gut at rest is a good idea, but what happens when you eat close to bedtime? Well, I was doing some reading on one of my favorite new molecules, nadph, we talked about in the last episode that increases reduces oxidative stress. And it turns out that the largest consumer of nadph, like the largest consumer of nad, is PARP activation, but the largest consumer of NADPH is making fatty acids. So if you are eating food before you go to bed and you're not going to burn those calories, you just because you're not that active. So your body has to do something with them. It can't eliminate them magically through the air, so it has to store them. And it stores them as fat and to produce fat, it's making fatty acids. So you're consuming NADPH and you're lowering your NADPH levels, which is the last thing you want to do in the middle of the night when you're regenerating and repairing. So it's just crazy to self sabotage and eat before you go to bed. And that's my belief, is one of the primary reasons I haven't had a chance to discuss it with some researchers. But I was actually right before podcast, I realized I need to ping Satchin Panda and see what his thoughts are on that. But I'm pretty sure he's the top guy.

Definitely when I interviewed Him. The evidence is really clear. Eating after dark is not a good strategy. What is less clear, though, is that if you're planning to go to bed at 2am, whether it's okay to eat at 10, is there a window? Do you have a thought on that?

No, I do. I think you need that three. I think it's a minimum of three, ideally four. I do five or six hours before. So it's just before you go to bed. So if you've optimized your circadian rhythm and I think you've changed since you had your stem cell makeover, you're going to bed earlier, at least from what you shared on previous podcasts. So that's good. So it's dependent upon your personal bedtime.

So three or four hours before bedtime. And I gotta say, even if you are what Michael Bruce, the author of the Power of Win and a friend and a guest on the show, he talks about whether you're a wolf. You're one of the people who stays up very late at night and was probably evolved to be the night shift to protect the tribe or whether you're a lion. The people wake up at four in the morning ready to kill it. It doesn't really matter. You know, you're somewhere in there. It's still ideal to eat before it's dark. But there are other eating strategies. For instance, if you're working in the emergency room and you're going to stay up all night, or you're a student who's going to study till dawn, you probably do want to eat because you're going to get some stimulating things from it. But you're not sleeping, so you're going to use those calories. But otherwise, even if it's going to be a 2am night and you're going to be writing till late in the evening, I would still say eat, eat before the sun goes down.

Yeah.

Tend to agree.

Yeah. I mean, ideally, I mean, I think that's the prescription for optimized circadian rhythm. One of the things I almost always get perfect scores on on my oura ring or circadian rhythm. It's like it's 100% almost every time unless I'm traveling.

Oh, I got a question for you. All right. So we both use an oura ring and. Okay, I'm making my very best. Anytime I talk about something where I've become enamored of it and like I'm an investor in aura, I've become an advisor to the guy I'm friends with, Harper, he's been on the show. So I call that out. Not to brag, but just so you guys know, I may have a bias, but with the OURA ring, I have found that I'm getting. It's very common to get an hour and a half of deep sleep, an hour and a half of REM sleep, even in six or seven hours of sleep. And sometimes I'll even get two hours of those, which is better than I've ever had in life. What's your average amount of time that you're sleeping, Dr. Mercola? And what are the typical amounts of REM and deep that you're getting?

Well, I'm a bit older than you, and clearly, and I'm certainly not an expert in sleep, but I listen to a lot of people who are like Matthew Walker. And it seems that the amount of deep sleep tends to decrease with you age, and it seems to be observation. So I'm not as optimized as you. One of my goals, and I'm pretty sure I'll be able to hack it, would be to increase the deep sleep. There are many nights where I get zero deep sleep, but it would be, yeah, but they've changed the algorithm. I don't know if you know this. For people like me, I mean, it was nice. I was getting five, six hours of REM sleep, but like, you know, not that much deep sleep. But they changed the algorithm. Now I'm not getting as much REM sleep. So, you know, we're making assumptions here. They're using correlations between your heart rate patterns because they're not measuring your eeg, it's just an estimate. So it's one of the best estimates we have now. But it's not an EEG assessment. And I think Walker is working on some companies that are doing EEGs. I tried the Dream, which is a little more accurate, but it is so cumbersome and the company is just too heavy. Yeah, it's terrible company. It really is.

Dream is an EEG helmet almost that you sleep in.

Yeah. Yeah.

So there may be a hack for you. I just interviewed Dan Gartenberg from Sonic Sleep. This is another company.

When I find stuff, I like that. I haven't investigated it yet, but I've got a tab opened up on my browser.

Try it on your phone. You'll have to put your phone in airplane mode or maybe run it through speakers from another room so you don't get EMFs from it. But especially when I'm traveling, I really notice an improvement in my deep sleep from it. That was why this Is not one of those. I'm an advisor and investor in that company too because I find cool stuff. I'm like, I have to help. So that thing I think is very real and he's got a million dollars of NIH grants behind it. So he's a professor I think at Penn State or University of Pennsylvania somewhere. And I'd say it's the real deal as far as I can tell.

Yeah, no, I was intrigued. It's intrigued enough. I just haven't had the time to go forward with it. Deposit on my list of things to do. But I've got an interesting biohack that you might be. I'm sure you'd be interested. It took a while, it took me about a year to get it, but I just actually had it installed just been completed yesterday. It's a float tank.

Oh, you have a float tank. Oh nice. I've been downstairs too and you know that of course.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's magnesium sulfate and that has seemed to help dramatically. Now this is a float tank construction instructed to do. It's structured water and it's disinfected with ozone. But I believe this company has the potential to create a device that will put in 9 to 10 parts per million of hydrogen concentration. So I could be soaking in hydrogen water. I mean they haven't developed it yet, but I think they will.

Dang, I want that.

I said everyone like us is going to want one of those things. I'll be the first to have it though.

Okay, here's an interesting hack. I've been a little bit hesitant to try it on mine, but if you go to the back of a typical flow tank, you can control the temperature. And normally we keep it around 94, 95, about skin temperature. But if you wanted to do some of the heat shock protein kind of whole body hyperthermia, there's nothing that stops you from putting it at 104 and floating in there. It's going to be a little hot, it's going to raise your body temperature, but you can actually have a short term fever which is really good for getting down viruses, certain parasites, some slow growing gram negative bacteria that accumulate as you age. So I've been wanting to play around with it. The problem is I don't want to be alone in there because if you end up having some sort of a heat shock issue, you don't want to wake up in the morning as a sous vide.

Absolutely. So that is a good segue into heat shock protein.

Yeah, let's talk about that what do.

Heat shock proteins do? Because you hear everyone bantering about, oh, and like every one of us is supposed to know what they do. Well, I sure the heck didn't, so I had to look it up. So what do you think they do?

Heat shock proteins are things as far as I understand it, and I haven't dug in on some of this stuff other than looking at the beneficial effects of sauna and hot cold exposure. But certain proteins in your body will denature even at relatively small increases of this. And denaturing of a protein is when the protein changes its shape in response to heat. So as far as I understand, heat shock proteins are made when denaturing happens, but they're as repair systems. But there's probably a lot I don't know because like you, I am not an expert in them.

No, no. And that was more than my understanding. But when I looked into it and I've done quite a bit of review on it, and I certainly don't claim to be an expert, but I think I understand it at a deeper level. It's actually, it's not denaturing, it's actually misfolding. And what shocked the heck out of me, and I didn't. But I've seen it from multiple sources now that 30% of the proteins that you make right out of the box, Right out of the box, 30% of them are misfolded.

Wow, I did not know that.

Yeah, I didn't think you did. Not many people know that. So 30% are misfolded. And the mechanism your body has to repair that damage is heat shock proteins. And actually you'll appreciate this because heat shock proteins are actually a corollary to autophagy. So what happens is that the heat shock proteins goes into tries to repair the damage and to refold it. If there's so much damage that it can't refold it, it will tag it with a substance called ubiquitin and it polyubiquinates that molecule and then it goes through the ups, the ubiquitin proteasome system, which actually degrades it and recycles the constituent elements. Very similar to autophagy. It's a parallel course for autophagy. So the heat shock proteins in autopsy are really similar. I never knew that. But that's why it's so important to increase these heat shock proteins and one of other nutrients I took during fasting, sulforaphan, not only does it increase NRF2 pathway, but it increases heat shock proteins and also an HDEC2 class 2 inhibitor. So, you know, these are the types of things that you want to do. So heat. That's why I use this sauna as part of the keto FAST program is the sauna. I like the near infrared because I think you get the photobiomodulation with it too. So I use that and then you can combine it with cold thrombogenesis for sure. But there's other stressors. Exercise probably increases heat shock proteins as a, as does even some other oxidative stresses. So there's a lot of things that increase it. But I think heat is probably one of the most important ones.

I like that explanation. Essentially come on in and repair stuff.

Yeah.

And it's funny what happens when you lift heavy. The same thing. Absolutely. What happens when you use ozone therapy? Oh, here's a big spike in free radicals. I guess the mitochondria that can't make protective antioxidants should die and be replaced by young ones that can. So all of these things are just extra stimulants that tell the body you need to be able to handle more than. More than you would if you were just lazy and sedentary and you weren't in a constantly cyclically changing environment. So heat shock proteins are yet another. Another way to do it. What's your take on the old Swedish technique that my wife's a fan of? You know, roll in the snow, get in the sauna. Roll in the snow, get in the sauna.

I don't, I haven't seen any research published on it, but it seems to make sense because it's all about cycles. Which kind of brings me back to one of the other elements of the benefits of partial fasting, as opposed to like the fasting mimicking diet or water fasting, is that you can do it more frequently. Now, one of the cautions that those who should not partial fast or regular fast for certain would be anyone with an eating disorder, anyone who's underweight or who is breastfeeding or pregnant, because pregnancy and breastfeeding are anabolic phases and you don't want to compromise those at all. So assuming you don't have any of those things, then you really want to activate autophagy and. And it's best done by fasting. Intermittent fasting can do it some, but it's really only a mild increase. And you'll get. You can get close to maximum with the keto fast, partial fasting, but you can do that twice a week unless you go below your preset ideal body weight. In my case, it's about 180, 181. If I'm below 181, I will not partial fast because I'll lose too much weight and I just don't want to lose weight. So most of the times I can do it at least once a week. And if I'm at home when I'm not traveling, I could do it twice a week. So that's another major benefit. So ideally you can get partial fasting, autophagy benefits and then the refeed benefits, which is according to Longhorn. I believe most of the benefit from fasting occurs during the refeed, especially if you've integrated it with the strength training and growth hormone benefits. Then you're going to do that over 100 times a year. In no way are you going to be water fasting for 100 days a year unless you're morbidly obese. You just can't. Your body can't support that. It'll make you very unhealthy or even fasting, mimicking diet, you're not going to do it that much. Most people do it once a quarter, maybe a little bit more. So you get a lot more benefits by doing it. And collectively you'll radically over increase the number of times that you can get it.

What's the lowest percentage body fat for men and women that you consider to be in the healthy range?

That's a good question. You know, that really depends on your individual goals. But if it's pure health and it's not some type of competition. Yeah, because, you know, you can't dissociate that from. Because people have a lot of competitive goals. And, you know, some people would take a pill that would kill them in two years if they could be a world champion. So we have to separate those two out.

Right. So for people who just want to be healthy, not people who are fitness.

Models or something, men, I really wouldn't go much below 8 or 10%. Probably for women, maybe 15 to 20 somewhere in there. And I have. Yeah, I think it's probably the ranges. I mean, maybe you can go down to 12. For women, I wouldn't go much below. I think below 12, you start losing your period.

I think it's also problematic for women because some women have big breasts and they're made out of fat and you know, they can change size as you lose your weight. But if you just genetically have more fat there, your percentage of body fat is going to be higher than someone who's smaller. So the range has to be a bigger range for women. And then there's also the question of, I think aids for women because of fertility. Women are storing EPA and DHA on the inside of their thighs and on their hips. And most of that gets used for their first baby. So if you're young and in the infertile years, you probably should have some extra fat and it has a benefit there. So I think it's much harder to say what it is for women. But for guys, what I've seen below 10 is probably not ideal for anti aging maybe 8. But I mean, I have one friend who's been on the show, he showed me his scans. He's like a 2.3% or something. And at that point your lungs can actually adhere because there's no padding in there. Your lungs can adhere to parts of your rib cage or your fascia in there and actually be torn. But he feels great, he looks good and he's in amazing shape. And I'm like, man, maybe you should eat more carbs or something.

Yeah, well, that's the whole thing. It's very clear to me that you just cannot do well, you can, but I would not recommend it. If your interest is health is to do chronic keto, it's a bad strategy. You can do it to attain metabolic flexibility and for some people it might take a month, maybe even better part of a year. But once you've got it, you do not want to be on a continuous. Your body needs carbohydrate on a regular basis. And in my case, I used a lot of healthy fruit. I've actually got a garden, I think that's bigger than yours now. I'm growing mangoes. I'm harvesting a gallon of blueberries a day now for the last few weeks I've got a little blueberry farm and cherries and peaches and avocados.

You're eating those seasonally though. I mean, you're in Florida where it's very sunny. So, yeah, seasonal fruit, I get it. It's. It's that at least where I am, I'm much further north in Canada. So we have our blueberries. Haven't hit yet, but I'm going to be eating a ton of blueberries in summer when I get sunlight. But the rest of the time I don't use fruit. I use prebiotics because that works better.

Use what is available. So especially if you can pick it off your property, that doesn't get much better than that. But the key point here is that you're cycling in and out, cycling in and out. You don't want a fast continuously. You certainly don't want to stimulate MTOR continuously. You want to cycle between the both of them. And I think that's when you're going to optimize your health. And the frequency is based upon your specific body and you got to learn to listen to your body. So sometimes it might even be more than twice a week you want to do it or sometimes it's once every two weeks. So there is no right or wrong. We're just offering guidelines in the book and encouraging people to honor what their body's telling them and listen to that feedback and then apply it and see how it works. Because, you know, it's a work in progress. And I don't think anyone's really come up with the ultimate research backed solution to do this. I mean, we just have generic principles to guide our strategies by.

And anyone who does do it is going to have to have a copy of your genetics and they're going to have to have a copy of your gut bacteria, at least where they are now. And when you implement changes, three days later you'll have different gut bacteria. And so we will have predictability here. That's why those general principles that you're talking about, you talk about them in keto fast and just on your website and stuff, we're talking about these matter. But this is the most important thing. If something works really well for your spouse or your friend, try it. But if it doesn't work well for you, it's not because you didn't do it right, unless you didn't do it right. It's because you're different and you have different circadian rhythms and you have different everything. So follow principles and tune for yourself. And that was the biggest mistake that I made 20 years ago when I was working on this. Oh, this seems to work really well. But guess what? Most people aren't a 6, 4, formerly obese, almost muscular guy. So all of that really matters. And so for me to do the same thing, that would work really well for one of my friends from South India where they have a totally different genetic heritage and a different diet that evolved over the course of tens of thousands of years, they might handle legumes better than I do. Right? And that's okay. And neither one of us is right or wrong. And it's that mindset that I think that you carry well in your work and you've evolved your diet substantially over time based on evidence and based on what works. Where did you start out from a nutritional perspective? Like when you started nicola.com in 1997. Just walk people listening how much you've changed because I'm really impressed by that.

Let's face. Started before when I was in like grade school and I was having margarine on white toast.

Yeah, me too.

Sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, you know. Yes. And then I graduated to oatmeal or Quaker Oats or something and then didn't get much better. Was definitely low fat. My fat intake was so low. Now admittedly I have a genetic defect from hemolytic anemia called thalassemia beta thalassemia. So my cholesterol levels are low, but I got my cholesterol down to 75, which is.

That's bad.

That's criminal. That's not bad. That is criminal. So. And you know, I didn't. It wasn't intentional. It was just an artifact of just following a low fat diet for me. So that was what that was pre med school. But in med school wasn't much different. I didn't really understand this until I was mentored by Rosedale in 95 and he helped me appreciate the. Ron Rosedale, a physician who's really popularized the insulin concept. And he was one of the first people advocating the importance of insulin because it was.

He pretty much discovered insulin resistance and he called it syndrome X.

Right. No, no, Syndrome X is a different.

A different author.

Metabolic syndrome.

Sorry, Metabolic syndrome. That's what I'm thinking of.

Yeah, yeah, that was. I think Gerald Raven. Who.

Okay, got it. I confused the stats.

But no, he's popularized certainly in our community. There's no question he was the leader in that. And I was. I remember in a lecture hall with him with like 15 of us, he was just explaining how insulin worked and it changed my approach. And really I started getting much better results in my practice clinically. But then you just learn more and more. The recent stuff is lectin issues that was promoted or widely spread by Gundry.

Yep. And lectins were in the bulletproof diet too, in particular. But they're like one of five big things in food. But. But they're an important one.

You were ahead of the curve. No question. Well before I appreciated it. And now is it definitely part of any strategy. I recommend if anyone for an autoimmune issue, no question to remove the lectins. But with respect to diet, I think the keto was relatively recent four years ago or so.

You were also mostly raw and kind of not vegetarian. Ish, maybe is the way to describe it. For a while. I think you evolved And I did, too. I was a raw vegan for a while. I was like, yeah, more raw is better.

Was a raw vegan. But I did believe in raw foods. And I still eat a lot of raw foods. But, you know, it. Not that. I mean, it's not exclusively raw foods. I think it's. There's not. It's not a sin to cook, especially some of these vegetables or to remove the lectins. It's really important to do that.

Yeah.

So, you know, it just evolves and you learn. And then I thought that regular continuous tito was so good. I mean, it was the best diet out there, so you should do it continuously. And my body taught me otherwise. And I realized it had to be cyclical. And then integration of the partial fasting, I think, is the newest revelation. And really, I think it's such a magnificent strategy to optimize your health. For people like us who really want to live as long as we can, at least to 100, with having all of our functioning intact and not being frail and having really good cognitive function, I think these are the strategies you've got to do. In addition to the one thing that I did talk about on the stage, which is my book for next spring, which I'll probably be back on to discuss, when we have a lot of details, is the emf, because emf, the biggest issue there, and I won't go into detail because we really wanted to finish this conversation on the fasting, but it's another source of oxidative stress. It's a massive source.

And.

And it's one that's surprisingly almost universally overlooked by almost every researcher. You can review the studies and they all talk about it, but no one is talking about the oxidative stress, the peroxy nitrate, the carbonate free radicals. They're just ignoring it. And I'm really going to conf. I'm interviewing David Sinclair in about two or three weeks, and I'm going to definitely have that discussion with him. And I'm going to see. I'll bet. But I'll bet he doesn't. He's not aware of it. It's not that he's foolish or anything. He just doesn't know. But it's a big issue. You can increase the NAD all you want, but you've got to before you remediate the damage. We all know that prevention is better, so you don't want to have the damage to begin with.

I remember going back a long time in Mountain View, California, at the. I think it was called Red Rock Coffee. I don't know if it's still there. I sat down with the guy who held the first patent on 802.11B, the first Wi Fi patent.

Wow.

And at the time, he already was a senior researcher, had been working on this stuff for 20 plus years. And he said, well, I'm retired now, but I'm taking the million dollar test equipment that we had used in the lab to look at what these WI FI signals were doing. And I turned it around and I pointed at humans. And he opened up his laptop and he said, look at all the signals coming off of people. Isn't this amazing? I know there's health data in here. I think I'm going to be able to predict something. And I've lost touch with him. A long time ago, I wish I'd recalled his name, but this was 20 plus years ago. And that always stuck in my mind is like, there's something going on here. And then you read Electromagnetism in Life and Robert C. Becker's books and all, and you realize, okay, there's something going on here. There's a book from 1984. The head of the Karolinska Institute, one of the top 10 hospitals out there, wrote a book about electricity in the body. And he wouldn't publish it until he retired. He's like, oh, they're going to try and take my license for writing this. And it's 800 pages of craziness. So I believe that there's something here and it feels like your book may be one of the big factors in this is your next book in making people just pay attention to it. Because it's absurd to think it doesn't matter. This is a long lead up, but here's my big question for you. Do you think it's possible that we could build a communications infrastructure that used the right type of, of emf? That it was actually biologically neutral or even beneficial for life instead of harmful?

I'm pretty confident there is. It's just that there's no interest in this because of the perversion of the focus of the research from the wireless industry. It is absolutely in the exact opposite direction. But the first step is really implementing things that we did early on. I mean, when I started a networking computer that officers think is the early 90s, we ran ethernet cable. Wireless didn't exist. All our computers internally were by Ethernet cable. We could do that in our home easily. Yeah, you don't need wireless in your home. So that's a big part of it. The challenge to the more extensive challenge, especially with the introduction of 5G and the satellite distribution of that which is going to make it essentially available over the entire planet. And wireless frequencies don't just affect humans, they affect every form of life on the planet. Animals, insects, birds, bees, you name it, they're affected by. So it's not just humans that are going to be impaired. We're really destroying our environment. So I don't know. There probably are some ways to remediate it, but it would require some really bright scientists to understand it. Certainly part of the damage is due to the pulsing of the signal and the frequency. It's not going to be done though. I mean, big pharma and vaccines are a big issue, but boy, I'll tell you, wireless is going to drop way after those things do.

Maybe I'm hopeful about it, but I think there's a $500 billion plus business opportunity. The networking company that comes out with hard science that says use this networking protocol is. And people don't have this oxidative stress. There will be governments in small countries, probably like Norway or someone will start, or Finland or Sweden, and they're just going to say, you're not allowed to use the stuff that's like smoking. And maybe there will be an insane amount of money, insane enough amount of money that a very large company is going to say, you know, if we can be the one to do this, all the other guys are going to have to get our patents. So come on, engineering friends listening. I know there's a lot of you out there. Somebody get on this.

Yeah, well, there's certainly enough income in it because the tobacco industry, pharma industry and wireless are all about the same role. Over a trillion dollars revenues every year. So the revenues are there. And you're more of an electrical or electronic expert than I am, certainly. But I would think that the wireless signal is one issue, but the more challenging one is going to be the cell phone radiation, which is a different structure completely, I believe. Because I think remediating the wireless isn't that much of a challenge because you can obviously get rid of it. I think that's one of the biggest crimes we have, is the introduction of wireless radiation in the classrooms. I mean, it is of any population that is most at risk for the damage from this. It is our kids. They have thinner skulls, their brains have more concentrations of water, higher concentrations, so they absorb this radiation more easily. And, and they're in the developmental stages of their brain, so they're more susceptible to the damage. And we are just decimating our youth by. You know, even if we have our home as a safe haven, we send them to school.