Blood Sugar is the Power Energy in Your Video Game Life – Dr. Molly Maloof with Dave Asprey : 706

Bulletproof Radio, a state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's guest is a fascinating researcher. I connected with her at Paleo fx, one of the big conferences about how we eat and how we move. We connected on stage and we're both part of a highly secretive and confidential WhatsApp group where we talk about the latest anti aging stuff that all of you people who don't know won't get to take advantage of, at least until it comes out into a book. Okay, I just now created huge demand to be in the list. Sorry, it's a very high bar for getting in there now. On top of that, she teaches a course at Stanford University on strategies for extending healthspan for greater lifespan, which is totally motherhood and apple pie to me and makes me happy. In her concierge medical practice, she's focused on providing health optimization and personalized medicine to San Francisco and Silicon Valley investors, executives, entrepreneurs, pretty much my people, at least before I turned to Canada and became an organic farmer. But I still hang. She's also a passionate evangelist, an advocate, and just a visionary futurist about pioneering new health technology. So it's gonna be a fascinating interview because you get inside the brain of a doctor who's also teaching courses at Stanford about this kind of stuff. I'm talking about none other than Dr. Molly Maloof. Molly, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Now, I didn't mention this too, but you've advised some food and nutrition companies in your career, like Mars Quaker Red Bull. Wow, you sound like an anti aging, anti aging guru there. Wow. Are you going to give me wings?

I mean, I've just been. I've been invited to participate in some product development here and there and it just come into big companies and tell them what I know. It's kind of fun.

What's notable about that? I was kind of pushing your buttons there. What's notable about that is that big companies are interested in talking to doctors about what their food's going to do to people they didn't used to give a crap.

True.

So I think there's a sea change happening. And I've seen it happen from even big soft drink companies because I get to meet the CEOs of these companies because of being the bulletproof guy. They're starting to care in a way I don't think they did in the 1950s. Better living through chemistry, which is pretty cool. So I just wanted to say it's.

Okay that you do that. Well, here's the thing, though, I have always believed that big corporations are just giant bureaucratic machines that move extremely slowly and are largely unable to innovate effectively. And so it's really important to get in there and to say, look, guys, you don't know what the future looks like. This is what's happening and you better prepare for it.

So how do you know what the future looks like?

I have to admit that this is kind of. It's kind of come off arrogant to say this, but I've always kind of had the ability to see what's coming next and to be ahead of the curve on a lot of things. And so fun fact about me, even though I teach at Stanford, I actually left my residency, I dropped out and started my own medical practice because I basically saw the tech scene was going to completely transform medicine and I said, I'm going to be part of that sea change because innovation and technology is going to shift the way healthcare is done. And we're going to see Apple, Google, we're going to see Facebook, we're going to see all these big tech companies that are getting. They're all going to get into health. And that's happening. Google's. I mean, look at Google. And verily, I mean, all these predictions that I had when I was in my residency, seeing what was happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, a lot of these have come true. And so I've just had the ability to kind of take advantage of that foresight.

It doesn't sound arrogant to me at all. There are a few people out there who have a better grasp of the future than others. I'm also one of those. I'm the first guy who sold anything over the Internet. Like, somehow I had to know that was going to matter. So, yeah, it can sound arrogant, but it's not. And the world recognizes that. They call them futurists and they end up becoming consultants and advisors because no one really knows how our brains do that sort of thing. It's just a rare skill. But you're probably really terrible at something else because you're good at this. What are you really terrible at?

Oh, yeah. Oh man. What am I really terrible at? I'm trying to think of. I'm certainly a thinker and I've had to become a feeler. Like, I've had to learn to feel my feelings. And that has been through deep work and meditation. Like, I'm not naturally like a peripheral nervous system person. I'm more of a central nervous system person. And then I've learned and you can train your body to feel all the things. So even if you're naturally a thinker and an intellectual, you can learn to be a feeler.

We do have that in common, and I don't know if that's true for future people. I just realized that would be an interesting thing to ask you because I recognize you have that pattern about seeing that this is going to matter. And you talk about Google and their health stuff. I hired one of the four people who worked at Google Health when I was a CTO of the wristband company called Basis. And this was the first company to get heart rate from the wrist. It's the same tech that Apple uses today in the watch. And so this was like such a big deal, but there was only four people at Google back then. But at the same time, all the quantified self people like you and me would recognize measuring it's useful, but hacking it is even greater. And you could see it coming if you know how to read the tea leaves. So you're a good tea leaver. Now, speaking of tea, coffee or tea, which one's better for you?

I like both. I like both of them so bad.

I do, too. Shocking.

How can you choose? How can you possibly choose choosing two children?

That is a really powerful quote right there. Now, if you had to choose between a child and coffee, which would it be?

Oh, my God. I don't have children yet, but I'd probably choose a child. I'm worried about this. I'm worried that caffeine may not be optimal for fertility. And so I worry that when I want to get pregnant someday, that I'll have to give up coffee. So that's one of my concerns.

All right. You have to read the Better Baby book.

Yes.

So this was my very first book, five years of research, and I looked into it, and there's all sorts of data out there. And even green tea. Oh, you can drink, drink. Green tea has less caffeine. Green tea depletes folic acid. So you have to take your methylated folic acid if you drink your green tea. And bottom line is, all the evidence I could find said if you want to have a cup of coffee when you're pregnant, it doesn't appear to be harmful unless there are mutagenic mycotoxins present, at which point you should minimize all of those, especially in the first trimester and the three months leading up to pregnancy. So I think you're okay. Just don't. Just don't do the 24 shots of espresso a day that typical doctors do and you'll be fine.

No, I gave that kind of drinking coffee up in medical school. I used to drink cups of espresso when I was a medical student. It was insane.

Yeah, I think it's what we do when we're studying hard. I get you there.

Yeah.

Now, let's talk about your practice. Now that we know you see the future, you focus on something that's been missing from the anti aging world. And the real benefits of an anti aging practice for any person are you feel better right now and it doesn't matter if you're 22 when you start doing it, like, whoa, I could stay up later and drink more and still feel good if that's what you wanted to do. When I was 22, that would have been what I wanted to do. So your quality of life kind of goes up quickly. And so that's what we're calling health Spanish. But it seems like the messaging has just been off for decades on that. Why do you think the messaging is broken?

Okay, so I think people need to get down to the right terminology effectively around all this stuff. So anti aging was sort of the first term for I don't wanna die, I wanna live a long life. Great, that's wonderful. But a lot of people also want to live a long life with quality of life. Right. And so they wanna be healthy and live a long life. And that's what health span is. It's the number of years you have healthy without disease or disability. But then the question is, what is health? Right. And so this is what I've been kind of trying to figure out for last 10 years. Because health is this amorphous term and it used to be the complete absence of disease or infirmary according to the World Health Organization. But that's kind of pie in the sky. Everybody's going to get hit with something here and there, whether it's a cold or you break a bone. The real measure of health is how quickly you bounce back after you're hit by some sort of challenge. And so really fundamentally underneath health is this concept of capacity. And so I got really obsessed with mitochondria because they're fundamentally power plants that make and store charge as capacitors. And so these incredible organelles are fundamentally responsible for our ability to be healthy and adapt and self manage in the face of adversity, which is the definition I like to use.

It's amazing what happens in mitochondria and the idea of being a capacitor for engineers who are listening, a capacitor basically can store a certain charge and then deliver it very quickly, whereas a battery doesn't deliver things quickly. A battery delivers a constant flow of energy so that mitochondria can provide a big quick hit, almost like a car that can accelerate really quickly versus a car that can accelerate slowly but then hold. Hold a constant speed. And the. The nature and abilities of mitochondria are fascinating. And so you got into those. Was that from medical school, where you first got interested in those?

I got interested in them in the last few years, actually. The last couple years. In the last year in particular, I got really obsessed with glucose metabolism and the first people in San Francisco to put a glucose monitor on as a healthy person and say, hey, I went to a quantified self meetup, and I said, hey, guys, turns out that my blood sugar isn't normal. And I thought I was super healthy. I was like, well, what is the regulator of blood sugar? And it's actually the mitochondria, because they're the ones that are metabolizing the fuel and then using the fuel and dictating where it goes. So they're signal transducers. They're all nodes in this giant system in our body that's taking information from our outside world and deciding what to do with it. And so evolutionary fitness is kind of what they're here to do. They're trying to keep you alive, and then they're trying to help you reproduce. Like your body really wants to do those two things, and the mitochondria are the ones dictating those actions.

Do you know what cells in the body have the highest concentration of mitochondria?

Adrenals, I believe.

No.

Or the brain.

No.

No. What am I missing?

I was wondering just the way you explained that. I loved it because a Headstrong was my mitochondria book. So I went really deep on mitochondria in this book, and how do you hack them? And what I found was that in the heart and the brain, you have about 15,000 mitochondria per cell. Like capacitors, you need these energy for neurons, specifically neurons in the brain, not glial cells, but only in women. Cells in the ovaries have 100,000 mitochondria per cell.

Whoa.

And when you said right there, mitochondria are sensing the world around us and deciding what to do. Who do you think decides which egg is gonna drop? Those little bastards are the ones deciding which egg is gonna be your baby. Right?

Wow.

That's how in control of our Survival, they are. There's no other explanation I could think of for why we'd have 100,000 there other than that they're environmental sensors and capacitors and power producers. Isn't that cool?

That is the coolest thing I've heard in a long time. You have blown my mind.

Well, that's hard to do. Well, thank you. I'm sending you headstrong, by the way. It's going to be like, please do.

I'll do.

It will make you happy. I used to weigh 300 pounds and I was pre diabetic before I was 30 and had all these other health things that really came down to making mitochondria work better. And when I manage them using the stuff that I make for bulletproof and lifestyle and all that, magically, it's almost like I'm young again. But I had all these.

Isn't that incredible?

Yeah, I had all the old people diseases in my 30s.

Which people don't realize is that the mitochondrial theory of aging basically presupposes that a lot of these chronic lifestyle related diseases all have the same origins. And it's inactivity, it's too much stress and it's eating the wrong food, eating too much of the right, too much food and then never fasting right. So it's metabolism, it's movement and it's our stress response.

It really is. And there's nothing as enlightening as actually looking at what your blood sugar does. So for me, I went to a doctor at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. This has got to be going on like 20 years ago. And like I've started gaining weight again. I feel like I'm hungover all the time. I feel like someone poisoned me. I'm just so tired and you know, I don't know what's wrong, but I can tell you some's not right. And it turns out I was living in a house that had toxic mold, stachybotrys, which directly poisons mitochondrial functions. Go figure. But we didn't know it at the time. So he looks at me and says, oh, maybe you should try to lose weight. I'm like, maybe you should kiss my ass. I work out an hour and a half a day, six days a week. I've tried everything and it doesn't work. And he said, well, maybe you have high blood sugar. So every day, 20, 30 times a day, I was pricking my fingers back then and I came back with a chart that I made by hand and he's like, you're not supposed to Be pricking your fingers. You don't have diabetes. I'm like, you told me it was high blood sugar, but it's not. My blood sugar varies, but it's not crazy high. I don't have diabetes. And he just kind of shook his head like, what sane person would do that? And had nothing to say other than that vitamin C would kill me. And so I fired him. But I remember that experience, and I really didn't like it. And it gave me compassion for diabetics. But about three years ago, I bought a continuous glucose monitor, and I tried it for a month or two until I ran out of sensors. I wore it on the Dr. Oz show, and they're like, what's that weird thing on your arm? And I'm like, I don't think I can tuck it under my shirt. Sorry. But I'm actually wearing one right now.

Yeah.

So I started again maybe three months ago, and I said, I'm just going to wear one for a year. And it's crazy what the lack of sleep does for blood sugar regulation.

It's incredible. Well, it makes so much sense, right? Like, your body is responding to stress, and stress releases cortisol, and cortisol contributes to insulin resistance because your body is trying to help you maintain blood sugar for your brain to function, to get you out of danger. So it's the adaptive stress response in real time. And, like, people don't realize that the stress response is an adaptive response. It's actually when it becomes chronically activated that it becomes disease. And that's just modern life.

And it's there to help you. It really is. Are you wearing a continuous glucose monitor right now?

I literally just took two of them off today because I had them on for the last two weeks. I was comparing the Pro with the one you can get as a prescription. I actually worked for two different, actually three now, three companies that are working in cgm. And I spent a good two years just pouring through every single research paper I could find on the topic. And so I really look at CGM and the curve as like, the ultimate lifestyle biomarker. And it's like where you're. It's like you're a video game. You literally are in the video game of your life. And this is how much power and energy you have. Basically how much energy you have and what's happening in your body and how it's being spent is it reflects all of that.

It does. And if you want to really just be aware of how real or false your hunger response is, if Your blood sugar is still adequate, and you're getting a hunger signal. It's not a real hunger signal. Something's not right. So you can literally say, oh, my stomach says I'm hungry, but my data says I got plenty of energy in there. So until my body uses the energy, I'm not gonna eat.

A lot of people don't realize what they're eating is causing blood sugar spikes. So they're eating a lot of refined carbs, packaged, processed foods, refined sugar or just a vegan blood sugar.

A vegan diet, let's say, or just a vegan bowl.

Right. And, like, one of my friends recently ate some Mexican food. She had some rice and beans and a vegan taco, and it was all carbs. And she had this massive blood sugar spike. And then right afterwards, it dropped, and she was hungry again, and she was like, well, I don't understand why this is happening. And I'm like, well, you just had a huge glycemic load, and then your body had to pump out a bunch of extra insulin, and then it dropped. And the problem with this condition is that people don't realize that these blood sugar spikes are damaging blood vessels, and they're also taxing the pancreas.

And.

And they're also contributing to high insulin levels, which can raise your risk of cancer. And unfortunately, you can't see this information unless you're wearing a blood sugar monitor or you're pricking your finger a million times a day. So there's actually now, I think, six companies that I know of that are building software for cgm. And what we're going to see is this entire ecosystem emerge of companies, just like what happened in genetics. We're going to see a whole world of CGM companies, just like we see genetic interpretation companies.

The problem we have now, though, is they're just not stylish. Like, I've got this white dot on the back of my arm.

Yeah, no, the thing is that these aren't cool right now, but soon they're going to be implantable, and they already are implantable if you're a diabetic. And I'm actually kind of interested in going and learning how to implant them in myself, because I don't want to look at it. I just want it to be there for three months. And so what's wrong with that? That sounds like a great idea.

Well, there's a couple of questions I got for you there, because you're a medical doctor. Okay. Emfs.

Oh, yeah. So we actually do. All right, all right. So emfs, right? Like we're electromagnetic beings, right? Our bodies are electromagnetic, let's get that straight. And mitochondria literally resonate through electromagnetic frequencies with each other. So we know that they fundamentally act this way. So the real question is, is what are we, what are we going to do about the fact that society is covered in EMF now? Like you, where do you live now?

I live on an organic farm on 32 acres on Vancouver island where there's almost no EMFs at all. And my office is a Faraday cage and I'm wearing a tinfoil hat. Okay, I'm just kidding. I don't have a tinfoil hat.

I'm actually moving to Maui. I'm moving to Maui for three months because I feel like San Francisco. I am concerned that our level of EMF here, and we talked about this in the WhatsApp group, it's very possible that this is damaging our health. Like everybody's walking around like zombies. It, it's insane.

It's pretty, it's pretty sad how it's changed just from, you know, public health perspective with, you know, the, the homelessness problem there.

It's Blade Runner.

It is a little bit Blade Runner, but the, the, there is something going on with really high dose EMFs, I believe. And we, the reason is there's hundreds of studies that support that and they're also, we understand the mechanism, the voltage gated calcium channels, which I've covered on previous issues of the previous episodes of the show. Do you think that's the mechanism? Is this voltage gated calcium channel of voltage changes on the mitochondrial membrane from emfs and that causes a calcium influx or what is it?

I think it's a good hypothesis, but I think that there's a bunch of different hypothesis. Right? And so like the problem is, is that nobody wants to admit that this is like the number, like I know 10 people who are less than 40 who've had cancer and two have died. And this is not acceptable, right? Like it is not acceptable that we are getting so sick so young and we need to ask ourselves what are all the possible causes? And I think a lot of it does have to do with how we eat, how we live, how we breathe. I mean the air pollution, the water. We are living in a super toxic world. And I think people are kind of leaving San Francisco in big cities and starting to realize that the quality of life is better outside of these environments that aren't conducive to health and flourishing.

That's one of the reasons I live where I do. And it's a sacrifice because I travel more than I otherwise would and I don't have access to certain services. But I do get to. Right now, the only meat that I eat when I'm at home, I fed it. I know exactly where it came from. I have pigs, sheep, and turkeys, and the cows come from the neighbors. And I don't feel bad about it. In fact, I feel really good about it because I know the animals lived a good life. They contributed to the soil that's growing my vegetables. It's all good.

Totally. You know, you're living the example.

Most people, though, aren't in a position to do that. I know how lucky I am to do it. I also know that property values here are about 10% of what they are in the Bay Area. So there's that.

But I mean, the real thing, we need to. So here's what's fascinating. Like, Switzerland adopts 5G, and then there's a massive protest and it gets no attention in our news. But, like, people are pissed that this stuff is coming. And I don't think enough people think deeply about this and care enough to question it, unfortunately. And so it's kind of just happening without enough regulation. And obviously the government is not the experts on all these things. I wouldn't say that. So I'm concerned. But I'm also taking action and deciding to spend some time away from the city of San Francisco and literally take three months and work remotely from Maui. Because the last time I was there, I was just like, I feel alive, I feel. Well, I feel healthy and vibrant. And a lot of it was the sunlight, the air quality, the water quality, the plant life, and just the fact that it doesn't feel like it's covered in the kind of EMF and mold that San Francisco's covered in.

Oh, the mold is a whole other issue in San Francisco. It is hyper aggressive there. And I've come to believe just from studying mold, I did a documentary on mold and it really affected my health. Is that when we genetically engineer mold to make something like citric acid, which is a common food additive, so we use mold Aspergillus, specifically in Aspergillus nitra, the black mold is. In black mold, there's multiple species that are toxic, but to increase the toxin yield, and this is modified so the toxin is actually citric acid. It's not really a toxin, but we've sort of hacked these things. What they do is they increase EMF exposure in the culturing environment to increase toxin formation I'm pretty sure that might work in the world around us, too. But all I know is when you're in areas, San Diego is a big problem. San Francisco is a big problem. There's a lot of really hyper aggressive mold there. And I feel it. I. I walk in, I'm like, oh, man. Like some. Something kind of messed with my mitochondria, and I'm way more resilient. And you can fight the mold with bacteria. I started a company, Homebiotic, that is a probiotic you spray around that eats mold hyphae, so the mold can't reproduce even if it wants to. But it's taken years of work for me to become as resilient as I am in those environments. And I think emfs might be a part of it.

Yeah.

So you've decided for your health span, like, all right, I'm getting out of Dodge, basically.

Sure. I mean, I have to come back and teach in the spring, so I'll probably return to Palo Alto for a few months just to be at Stanford. But then the real question is, where do I really want to live? Because I don't want to be in a city like San Francisco right now. It's just lost a lot of its magic, and it's just. Just energetically. Everyone says the same thing, energetically. It feels like a massive voltage drop when you enter. Like, it's not a. It's not the vibrant, innovative city it once was. A few years ago, like, even seven years ago, when I first moved here.

I spent a long time in the Bay Area. You know, my. My career in tech was there. And, yeah, something has changed. I can't tell you exactly what it is. The vibe is different.

The vibe is different.

Now. Are you going to put a continuous glucose monitor on before you go to Hawaii and wear it while you're there and then see what happens when you come that.

I have done that. Yeah. In fact, I've worn them. I've worn a glucose monitor for, like, three years straight. So, like, I almost always have one on. I'm in the process. And sadly, I'm throwing out a whole, like, bunches of boxes of Abbott Libre pros. Because they do expire.

Yeah.

Which is super lame. And they actually do. When they expire, they don't work as well because I've done a bunch of comparison testing. The. The thing that I've noticed, though, I went on two different meditation retreats recently, and my first meditation retreat was like. So it was like Zen and ecstasy and bliss, and it was massively just enlightening. The second meditation retreat was like stressful. And all this stuff was coming up I didn't want to deal with. And I literally saw this, this emotional reaction in both situations. I saw it in the cgm. One of them was like super even keeled a little blip for food despite eating a vegetarian diet for two weeks. It was like, you know, pretty consistent. And then my variability went way up during the really challenging emotional experience. So I thought it was going to be ice and even killed in Maui. But it was actually the internal stress that I was experiencing that was causing it to change. And what people don't realize is that a lot of stress is not necessarily outside of you. It's the stuff that's running on the inside that you're not addressing. And like a lot of people have unresolved traumas that are just almost like an energetic. It's like malware in the brain and an energy leak in the back. It's like constantly draining your energy. And so I'm a big proponent of telling my clients to if you have trauma, go get some emdr, go deal with your trauma therapy, go to get psychedelic medicine. Because unresolved trauma is a massive stress in the body. And it just, it's like malware in the background.

It's amazing. I look at it from a mitochondrial perspective. They're trying to keep you alive. Your pattern matching system decided that something in the environment was a potential threat, even though it's all just a story in your head. And so it's going to change your blood sugar stance. And I, I felt the same thing. I went through some real stressful negotiating stuff about a month ago. And I was like, man, what is going on with my blood sugar? It is totally wacky. We're talking like 15 points higher than it normally is. And my ability to maintain just a short blip after a meal, even a properly composed meal, it was not as good. And that's emotional stress affecting your, the very energy fuel substrate of your body. It's there. But I looked at heart rate variability since I really started blogging about this and from running a nonprofit before that as one of the big quantified self ways of measuring stress. Like you though, the continuous glucose monitoring. If you have both of those signals. I use my OURA ring to track my heart rate variability at night, my blood sugar throughout the day. I can tell you pretty good. How well is the system working based on fuel availability and then efficiency of how it's running. And trauma will suck fuel and cause it to squirt at the wrong time, it'll drop your system. What I want to call it system coherence from heart rate.

It's crazy. Someday we're going to have devices that are going to be real time HRV and real time CGM that are going to be so invisible and embedded in whatever wearable that they're going to come out on. And we're going to have these incredible feedback systems and then eventually we're all going to not need them anymore because we're going to know what it feels like to be stressed out. We're going to know what it feels like to have high blood sugar. I know my blood sugar right now is probably. If I were to go measure it in the 80s, probably the low 80s because I haven't had breakfast, but I'm worked up a little bit, so maybe it's upper 80s. I'm on a podcast. I'm communicating. I know what it feels like to be at different levels because I've just worn these long enough.

What's your favorite cgm?

Well, this is a really interesting question because I'd say that right now because of cost and convenience, the Abbott is really winning. But the free, yeah, the Freestyle Libre is good, but then Dexcom is coming out with a new one soon that's going to probably out compete the Abbott. And the real thing that I want to see is, I want to see direct consumer, consumer cgm, because I don't think this should be a prescription device. I think the information about your body should not be behind a pharmacist's desk. I think it's absurd that you have to ask your doctor for information about yourself.

Isn't it also absurd then that I have to ask a doctor for thyroid medication if I want it?

Totally. I mean, this is the whole crux of what biohacking is about, right? Having to hack a system because it won't give you what you want. Like, people should be able to do what they want with their bodies. People are allowed to drink, people are allowed to smoke. Why can't people learn about their bodies? Like, what's wrong with that?

I get into this argument with my wife, who's also a medical doctor, and I'm like, I think it's a crime against humanity that I'm not allowed to order any substance. I want to modulate what my body does. I'm talking antibiotics, hormones, any medication or chemical that's available on the planet. It's my body, my biology. Hands off. Are you supporting that?

Yeah, I actually do support that. The reason Why I support that is because doctors are practicing ancient medicine. That's out of date. I'm sorry, but the fact that doctors are still prescribing statins across the board for high cholesterol without actually asking why is the cholesterol high in the first place? Okay, cholesterol's job is to repair damaged blood vessels. So why are blood vessels becoming damaged? Okay, so maybe it has to do with hypertension. Maybe it has to do with too much stress. Maybe it has to do with the fact that they're living in polluted cities. That's all the oxidative stress coming from that. Or maybe it's the blood sugar. I mean, a large percentage of diseases, a large percentage of heart disease actually is caused by high blood sugar. And that's not really talked about enough in heart health, I would say. So we give people statins. Statins actually increase your risk of diabetes. Okay, so now we have this vicious cycle of we're giving people drugs that are causing the exact. Basically causing the cause of heart disease. Like it doesn't make sense to me. Statins are not preventing heart disease. They're treating the marker and they're not really looking at the source.

They're also causing harm to mitochondria directly, which you kind of need health if you're going to live a long time, right?

Yes. I think we've really screwed up the management of heart disease in this country and we've kind of like we really, we're doing people a disservice by practicing old medicine.

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And so if you. If you go to your doctor today, they're just going to be doing what they were taught, which was like, 15 to 20 years ago, what they were taught. And that's. In my opinion, that's silly. So, like, you have to be responsible for your own health. You have to have your own agency and autonomy over your body so that you are responsible for your health, because your doctor is not going to manage your health. Your doctor is going to manage your care. And there's a difference.

You're on the very fringe of what most medical doctors would say on that. And I have to thank you for that. I 100% support your. Your perspective there. And I find it really frustrating when I want to buy something that I've used before that I know would be useful for my condition, whether it's to improve it or because something's off and I have to go wait in line with a bunch of sick people to get someone to look at me for five minutes to write a piece of paper so I can go wait in line at another place so a bunch of people can make money, but they aren't working for me. And that's just not okay. And so I think we're. That system will fall down under its own weight, and it is in the U.S. exactly. But to be an MD, an MD who's saying, all right, I'll let you. I'll let you only come to me when you want to, and you can still go to the pharmacist without having to pay me a tax. That's. That's progressive. Really progressive. Well, thanks, Molly.

And also pretty weird, right? Like, I'm literally like, how do I make people healthier so that they don't need me eventually? You know, like, my goal is for you to become completely resilient and capable of managing your own health and coming to me eventually for, like, you know, something that you really need my help for. But this is a total paradigm shift of the way we think about medicine. I don't think I really completely finished the thought around managed care versus managing health. The system wants you to not actually care that much so that they can give you drugs and surgery and keep you in the system. They don't want you to be fully autonomous, unfortunately, because then you wouldn't need their help.

Right?

Like, you wouldn't need the system as much. So my goal is that people get so healthy that they don't need all the drugs and surgery.

I've heard from a few people that they think we should pass a Law that you have to get a prescription from your doctor before you can practice fasting. Wouldn't you support that from a revenue perspective?

I think, I mean, that's a cool idea, but that's more like practicing extended fasting, I'd say, because, you know, people do bonk.

Extended fasting is different, but it's one of those things where, okay, that has probably stronger effects than a lot of medication, but you can do it without a doctor's thing. But there's probably someone out there saying, we have to regulate this and we can make money from it.

Well, I mean, I think that if doctors could learn to prescribe behavioral medicine, that would be phenomenal. You know, I think, like, look, exercise is literally the best anti aging drug on the market. And fasting is what we're designed to do. Like our absolute primitive genetics is designed to fast.

Hold on a second.

Eating all the what?

Exercise is the biggest anti aging thing. Not food.

No. So exercise, fundamentally, if you look at the hallmarks of aging, exercise reverses all of them. We've studied this. We've actually studied. There's papers on how every single hallmark of aging is reversed by exercise. Now, I would say lack of food is better for you. I think most people don't understand this, but we're designed to be fasting most of the time. We're not designed to be eating all the time. We have the genetics of scarcity. And so abundance is actually damaging to health. So food is fundamental to health. If your food's wrong, your fuel's wrong, you're screwed.

Yep. And it'll make you old faster if you eat french fries as your primary fuel source. Right?

100%. I would say that if you don't look at your food first, actually, I would say looking at sleep is pretty paramount. You can't even make good food decisions if you're not sleeping well and you don't have enough energy to exercise if you don't sleep well. So you really got to look at your sleep, but then you got to look at your food because it's basically what nurtures the microbiome, but it also provides you with your fuel supply. So if you don't have any gas in the tank, you're obviously not going to run. But most people have literally hundreds of thousands of calories on their body that they're not burning because they're not metabolically flexible enough to tap into it.

I want to ask you some fasting specific things about what you're recommending, but this is a real specific thing that I don't know the answer to. I asked Sim Land on the show, who wrote a book on metabolic autophagy about, okay, the bulletproof coffee or bulletproof fasting was from the bulletproof diet in 2014, where for breakfast you have coffee, but you put some brain octane and some butter in there so you get no insulin change whatsoever. Third parties are validated. It's the breakfast with the least insulin change because they found none from doing that. But you have some energy, so you actually feel good because you're metabolizing the fat. And his perspective on autophagy, as is mine, is that given what we understand about it, you're still maintaining autophagy, which is the breaking down of old cells and excreting toxins.

I mean, that's a really good question because as far as I can tell, even the side of food can stimulate insulin, right? So there's gotta be some minor bump in insulin by just the act of consuming something I didn't.

Other than compared to black coffee, which I suppose might be some minor cortisol thing, I don't get a bump in my blood, in my blood sugar at all. Other than just from waking up when you get a small cortisol spike.

Yeah, I do see a little bit of my blood sugar go up when I drink coffee just from the catecholamine release. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah. I mean, here's the thing. Like a true fast is, you know, no food. Right. And Trufast is. I mean, the real question. I don't really subscribe to the snake fast concept of no water because I think water is part of how we run this hydrogen turbine in our cells. So, you know, water is pretty darn important. You need it. But I do think that like there is this big question as to whether or not you can get same effective autophagy or not. We'd have to be measuring it. And the question this is the biggest problem in mitochondrial research is we don't have good tools for measuring phenomenon that are like incredibly hard to measure. Like, the devices that you need to measure ATP and mitochondrial function are like, they're like thousands and thousands of dollars and they're in research labs. Like we don't have great tests for these things right now.

Would you believe that at Upgrade Labs there's two locations in LA for Upgrade Labs and soon one up. Where I live in Canada, we have exclusive access to a technology that allows you to measure your actual mitochondrial function using special algorithms around oxygen consumption under exercise.

Interesting, interesting. I'm interested. I'm going to have to go visit that.

Yeah, it's pretty cool. And I think it's necessary.

It's still somewhat indirect, isn't it? It's indirect, but it's VO2max is like one of the better tools as well.

VO2max. The algorithms are wrong for measuring essential mitochondrial heteroplasmic. Like how effective are your mitochondria at turning blood sugar or fat into energy? And so you can measure how efficient are mitochondria, which is a measure of how they're working, but they're not going to tell you, oh, you're losing an electron at step three in the Krebs cycle. It can't do that.

Yeah, well, one of the things that I like doing, if you really want to geek out on this, is you just get a blood sugar monitor and you get a ketone monitor and you start measuring as you fast what's happening in your body. So I did this for two months. I did, I did every other day fasting, which is kind of crazy as a woman to do that because everyone's like, oh my God, you're going to damage your health. But I felt awesome. I looked awesome.

It was so 24 hour fast every.

Other day, 36 hour every other day. Yeah, it was some serious metabolic Olympics. But I was measuring my glucose ketone index and I was literally, over the course of a few weeks, watching my body become more metabolically flexible. So you can see if your body is dropping into ketosis and how fast it's dropping into ketosis. And you can see how, whether or not your blood sugar is shifting and if your blood sugar is not dropping as your ketones are rising, then you're usually under some sort of stress. And if your blood sugar is dropping and your ketones are rising, then you know that you're tapping into ketosis. Right. You're actually in ketosis. But then if your blood sugar is dropping and your ketones are dropping and that's basically you're bonking. And this is what happens to carb addicted athletes when they run races and they, and they don't have any gels.

Right, right.

Or like they, you know, like you shouldn't have to use those. Those aren't good for you.

No.

And if you are using those in a race, it's because you're not metabolically flexible enough to tap into your own fat supply. And so, you know, basically like, this is the way that you can see how metabolically flexible you are is by just measuring these two markers.

I have not found it Implantable or stick on a ketone sensor. But I believe not yet. You and I aren't the only ones fantasizing about that. It's. It's coming.

Oh my God. That plus cortisol. And it's like holy grail. The clouds will open up and the light will shine down on all the heat.

It's getting to the point with these sensors where I could slap one of these on my mom or dad and be like, hey, go monitor this. And it's really empowering to see what your last meal did. So you say, oh, I have to have 2 cups of rice or potatoes or whatever. And you realize, wow, that meal didn't serve me the way I thought it did. So it actually changes your desire for certain foods when you just realize every time I do that, I get a bad score. So it's like using gamification for good.

Well, yeah, there's two things that can happen or three, really. So if you're like you and I, you love data, you love information, you're like, empower me with more. But if you're like my parents, they're like, I don't even want to see this anymore. They're in denial about, you know, the reality of what their lifestyle is doing. And then there's like the third, the third person which is kind of like hesitant and wants to know more but like doesn't really know what to what it means. And that's where I'm really excited that there's a bunch of software companies coming out that are going to interpret all this. So there will definitely be a whole world of technology that's going to arise from just glucose monitoring.

Now we talked about having just fad the bulletproof coffee traditional recipe. What I've been doing for the past while, and I wrote about this in Superhuman, is I'm concerned about gut bacteria. When I went on a three month, zero carb, essentially one serving of broccoli a day, no other carbs at all, it really messed up my biology and I ruined my sleep quality, dropped my testosterone, increased cortisol. Not a good diet. So carnivore, it was almost carnivore, except I ate some broccoli, right? And I did this as I was just running through tests before I published the bulletproof diet to sort of see, all right, you know, do we really need carbs? And what I ended up with was cyclical ketosis because you have to feed your gut bacteria. What I've been doing lately, I launched, I found out I had 48 species of bacteria in my gut from the viome test, which is a little bit low for what I wanted. So I made a prebiotic. It's called inner fuel. It's. We ended up launching it as a product. And I use that now. I put that in my bulletproof coffee in the morning on some mornings. And it is keto. I mean, it is made out of carbs, but it's indigestible carbs that get turned into propionic acid and butyric acid by gut bacteria. So you get these really happy, healthy gut bacteria. And it doesn't raise blood sugar for me. Who knows if it does for someone else? I mean, there can be individual things. So I put that in there, and now it's like, okay, I'm certainly incredibly full when I do that. I'm talking 75 calories, but not calories that my mitochondria are getting unless they've been transformed by gut bacteria. And I basically tripled the number of species in my gut, which is good for aging.

What's in this? What are the kinds of fiber?

It's acacia gum fiber plus hydrolyzed guar gum, plus larcha ribinogalactin. So these are tree saps, basically.

Oh, yeah. I'm loving those right now. I've got to try this because I actually prescribe acacia fiber. And is it arabinogalactin? Is that how you say it? Yeah, I prescribe those for sure.

Okay. So I put all three together, and I mean it. But for me, it took three months. I just put it in my coffee in the morning, my bulletproof coffee. And my species went through the roof. And I published the data. And what I don't know, though, is am I still fasting if I do that? And people have asked me that because gut bacteria makes something called fiaf, fasting induced adipose factor. They'll amplify what your liver makes to tell your body to store more fat or to burn more fat based on what the gut bacteria want instead of what your mitochondria want. So do you have any data or thoughts on if you feed just your gut bacteria with something that doesn't raise your blood sugar, Are you still fasting or are you not?

You know, I've thought a lot about fasting in the microbiome because I've done so many different kinds of fasting in the last two years. Like, I've done extended fasts, like three day fasts. I've done 20. I mean, when I first started fasting, I just started, like, gradually adding days and I definitely noticed after a prolonged fast that I would have almost a dumping type syndrome where I'd reintroduce food and it would just go right through me. And part of that was because I'd killed off a lot of my microbiome. And I've been watching people in the fasting world develop depression.

Yeah.

And so I know that there's a relationship between too much fasting and killing off the microbiome because I've seen this happen in more than one person who's like a serious faster. And they're like super, like, some of them have companies around fasting. Some of them are like super arrogant about how many they fast for two weeks at a time.

I know.

And I'm like. And I've always told them, look, you've got to tend to the microbiome because it's like a garden. If you don't till a garden. It's like if you had. If like someone, let's say you just completely like left town for two weeks, Dave. And then fired all your staff. If you. I don't know if you have staff who run your farm, but like, you know, if your farm is left to. Left to, like, farms are not going to grow effectively if there's not someone that's tending to it. Right. Like, you have to actually grow a microbiome and you have to tend to the microbiome like a garden of your, of your body. And so it will not thrive if you don't feed it appropriately. I kind of try to imagine like a primitive human and what they would be doing as they'd be looking for fuel and looking for food, and they'd probably be, you know, picking up a few nuts and berries here and there or picking up a few leaves here and there and probably still consuming even though they're at a low level of blood sugar. Because, you know, that's kind of the whole. If you think about anyone who's ever gone mushroom hunting, like, you know, you bring trail mix with you, right. Like you're kind of going to be looking for some food in your environment. So I don't necessarily know if humans are designed to just not have any food at all except for an occasional meal or if we're meant to be kind of grazing or gathering slowly over time. So I think it makes sense. I mean, if you look at, you know, wild animals, they're kind of nibbling on food here and there and then they're looking for their big meal.

Yeah, I guess it depends on. You look at a tiger or Something, you know, they're going to eat their big meal they don't eat for a while. And maybe they'll eat a mouse or something or a coyote would. But if you look at like my sheep, they never stop. And they're, they're basically, they're pooping as they walk along, eating. And they're just like a little lawnmower that's mulching as they go. And the soil's happy for that.

Yeah.

I feel like most of the time we probably didn't have regular snacking because if we are out hunting, you're not going to have snacks. And if you're. You're out gathering, you might eat a berry along the way, but you're pretty much bringing it back home. And I feel like most of the time we weren't snacking.

True. And by snacking, I'm always. I'm talking about like, more like wild porridge food, right?

Yeah.

So, like, the stuff that you'd be eating out there is mostly fiber. It's not. It's like fiber and fiber nutrients. It's almost got, like, no carbs in it. Right. Think about nettle. Or like you can't eat nettle, but you have to, like, prepare nettle. But if you think about just like gathering, you know, green leaves from, like a forest floor that you might be on a nibble on, like, there's. It's mostly fiber and some phytonutrients.

Yeah. It's the polyphenols, even berries. I mean, we know these sweet plump things. I have the native species growing on my property. They're wild. They're half the size of my little fingernail. It would take you six hours to get a thousand calories of those, if you were lucky, and your back would be sore and they would only be in season for three weeks. So it's not like that was a real serious fuel source. But they're just full of anthocyanins and all these other polyphenols that we know feed your gut bacteria. So it might have just been. They had tea. Right.

And then you're also in an environment where you're touching soil. That soil is getting inside your body, and so that's contributing to the microbiome as well. So, you know, speaking of the microbiome, have you heard of this company called Sun Genomics?

No. S U N Genomics.

Yeah. So what they're doing is they're. I love seeing companies come along that are doing what I've been doing in my practice, but that are systematizing it and scaling it. Like, that's one less thing for me to have to do with my brain. And so what this company is doing is measuring your microbiome, and then they interview you and they ask you questions about what's going on in your gut, any symptoms you have of gut dysfunction, anything you really want to work on with your health. And then they create a custom compounded supplement of species that are designed to optimize your gut health. And so I've had some clients on this that have had some gut dysfunction, and they just, they love it. They think it's great. I'm not even, I'm not promoting the company. I'm not affiliated with them. But I think it's interesting that we're now getting into the designer probiotic space, like it's actually happening, because I used to actually take like The Genova Diagnostics GIFx and then I, and I would literally create custom gut healing programs for people. It would replace specific bacteria that would really. I mean, you've talked about histamine producers versus histamine degraders forever. Like, you know, giving people custom probiotic regimens that optimize their systems. That's totally coming. And it's, it's pretty exciting.

I'm maybe a little more skeptical than you are on that front. There's, there's so much data about prebiotics and just changing what you eat to stop smacking the good guys that you'll actually grow what you need. And I, I've taken at least $100,000 worth of, of probiotics over the course of losing my 100 pounds and fixing my health and just anti aging and not seen a lot of results from a lot of them. Some I've gotten results from. But I'll tell you when I got the prebiotic load up, so I'm getting 60 grams of soluble fiber that feed the good gut bacteria. I also continue taking my probiotics, but I feel like the prebiotics trump the probiotics. But you probably want both. And my viome data supported that for me. Like, I'm not seeing the pre, the, I'm not seeing the probiotics that I take come out in the poop. So a lot of them aren't growing for whatever reason. Yeah, but the combination is probably best.

I mean, a lot of these have to be refrigerated. Right. And like, there's another company that's, that's coming out of San Francisco called Whole Biome, and they're, they're creating a specific Probiotic symbiotic blend that's going to be refrigerated and it's literally an intervention for lowering blood sugar. So we know that if you have a healthier gut, you're going to have a healthier metabolism.

Yeah.

And so there's just going to be a whole bunch of companies that are going to capitalize on this specific facet of health.

Check this out. I was talking with Naveen at Viome because they have 100,000 plus samples or something like that. It's got to be that many. Now they ran it through an AI algorithm. They can tell you with some kind of high degree of certainty. I don't know if I can say what the number is. I'd want to check with them first. But they can tell you what your blood sugar will look like from eating a specific food based on the composition of your gut bacteria.

I heard this and I had a chat with the other co founder, the scientist, I can't remember his name. I met him at the Transformational Technology Conference. I spoke right after him and he was just saying, he was telling me this exact thing that they can without fail predict what foods are going to do to you. But the problem, I told him is that, well, we don't eat foods in isolation, we eat foods in combination. And so I would argue that the other question, blood sugar is not just about what you're eating, it's about how much you're eating, it's about when you're eating it, it's about what are you eating it with. It's about what did you do before you started eating, what are you planning to do after you ate and then like how did you sleep and what's your stress like? So let alone like the pollution levels in your environment and you know, the other issues like vitamin D. So there's so many things that affect blood sugar that, besides just what we eat, that I think it's a little bit, it's a little bit overconfident to say that, you know, we are now eliminating CGM as a tool. That's what he told me. He's like, we don't think we need CGM anymore. And I'm like, no, you still, it still changes based. I mean I've seen a blood sugar spike in myself and I went, and I've done, I've worked out for 30 minutes right afterwards and I've dropped it in like 10 minutes. I've got my blood sugar.

Yeah, I think there's a market, I think you'll be able to Say that you can choose foods that don't spike your blood sugar without a cgm. But I mean, I have some very high quality electrical stimulation stuff that I'm trialing for upgrade labs and I've been using this for a while. I can take my blood sugar down into the 70s in 30 minutes. I could be running on myself right now. But, but I mean, I'm sore for, for seven days afterwards. It's like doing 10,000 squats while I'm sitting watching TV.

Oh, is that that machine I heard about? Yeah. So someone from upper A labs contacted me and I started looking at all your stuff and I saw this thing that, that you guys have that's apparently like a week's worth of working out in like an hour or something.

Oh, that's, that's. We call that cold hits. So that gives you two and a half hours of cardio equivalent in 21 minutes. But it's doing that with compression to manipulate lactic acid levels and temperature changes to keep oxygen and blood inside your brain and your organs. Different thing. This is one that isn't commercially available yet at the labs, but I've been using these waveforms for 15 years now. And you can put on muscle like crazy. But what I'm essentially doing is a heavy duty, powerlifting workout without. It's an intense experience, I'm not going to say, but it's less likely to injure you and you can literally do something else while it's happening.

Cool.

What I saw in my CGM was, wow, I went really low to the point I'm going to lay down if I don't eat something. I actually got hypoglycemic from it, which isn't normal. But without cgm, I wouldn't know that. And I'm sorry, my gut bacteria just didn't care that I did that. So there's something going on.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, here's the thing that's kind of interesting about mitochondria and blood sugar metabolism. There's really two really good ways to damage mitochondria and the first one is just eating too much. Right. Like over fueling your body damages complex one, but the second one is not using up the fuel you have. The benefit of exercise is that it's essentially using your fuel. Right. It's like it's basically flipping the switch. You're going from carb to fat metabolism. If you run out of your fuel, that's actually a good thing. That's a, that's a way to train your metabolism. So, so it's a way to become more metabolically flexible is to use a fuel you have during exercise. So fasted exercise is fabulous for doing this.

Yeah. I would share that recommendation for people who have the flexibility in their day. Skip breakfast, work out at the end of your fast around one or two in the afternoon, and then go eat and wow, magic will happen. It's a really powerful practice. And you don't have to do it every day. You probably do it twice a week and you're gonna see crazy benefits from it.

I also bet that you had higher ketones when your blood sugar went low. I bet when you went quote unquote hypoglycemic, you were still producing ketones.

I probably was. Wouldn't surprise me. And because, I mean, I am the guy behind brain octane oil, I always have some ketones because I have a tablespoon of that stuff in the morning, my ketone levels usually go to 0.5. So I've got background ketones available whenever I want them. Now, I've got one more question from you, Molly. I'm just loving all the cool stuff we talked about, but how long do you think you're going to live? I mean, you're into anti aging, you're managing all this stuff you talked about health span. But let's pick a number. What's your number?

Well, I think that the question is, do you really want to live that long? I want to live as long as possible without disease. And so if I hit past 100, great. But if I'm in a nursing home, no, I'm sorry, I'm not doing that. That's not happening.

Those are different questions. Right. If it was like, oh, I'm going to cut off both your arms and both your legs. How long do you want to live? Well, you might say, I still want to live, or you might say, I'm done. Right. But let's assume that your health is functional and that you move around under your own power and your brain works and that you have healthspan. So given that as a presupposed notion, what do you think is possible?

I would be stoked to get to 120. I think that'd be rad.

Okay.

120 is your number, you know.

Okay.

But I don't think that we're going to see. I mean, here's the thing. Like, I thought a lot about this, and I think that if we all want to get past 100, then we all have to be taking way better care of our lifestyles. But the other issue that we're not really accepting, which is that our environment, like if we don't get our environment to a state of more balance and harmony, like we're kind of in trouble. And so I would argue that it's not just what I do with my lifestyle, it's also how we take care of the world.

Molly, thanks for being on Bulletproof Radio. It was a fascinating discussion. We talked about all sorts of cool stuff I didn't think we'd talk about. I feel like we could talk for a lot longer. Your website is drmolly Co. That's drmolly code. And despite you talking about your psychedelic trip and living to your late 90s, that's not the kind of Molly we're talking about because.

Nope.

But it's memorable. So Dr. Molly Co. And are you taking on more clients or you're spending time?

I am taking on a few more clients. I don't take that many at a time on purpose because I go really deep with everybody. But I am going to develop an online course as well soon and I'm working on a book, so. And expect a lot more media for me in the next year because I think health media is really a good way to educate large swaths of people. So thanks for doing what you do, Dave.

You got it. If you like today's episode, you know what to do. Go fast or do something like that. Or get a continuous glucose monitor if you want. I don't think you can get a little Dave face sticker unless you meet me and I have one and I'll stick it on for you. But you can actually use a hot melt glue gun to put bling on your glucose monitor if it's not pretty enough for you. But I can tell you if you wear one, it's going to make you cool and it'll make you aware of what your food is doing to your actual energy levels versus what you think it's doing. It's totally worth doing. And if you haven't read Superhuman, you haven't read Headstrong, you're not read up on some of the topics we talked about. They're accessible, readable books that are well, well worth your time. And if you don't like reading and you like podcasts instead, I actually recorded Superhuman for you, even in my own voice. So it'll be just like this episode, but even more packed with info. Have an awesome day.

A Human Upgrade, formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully, read all labels and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by by Bulletproof Media.