Bulletproof Biohacker News Episode 5 With Dave Asprey

Hey, I'm Dave Asprey, and this is biohacker news, a segment of bulletproof radio. Biohacking is the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so that you have full control of your own biology. Want some extra neurons? The key might be in your blood. Scientists at Edelburg University hospital in Germany and the University of Innsbruck in Austria figured out a way to reprogram human blood cells into neural stem cells. Thanks to some genetic hacks, it's the first time reprogr stem cells have actually multiplied and grown in a lab. The ability to grow those new brain cells that actually work is a massive deal for treating neurological conditions like stroke, Parkinson's, maybe Alzheimer's, or even just aging. Stem cells are like the play doh of the human body. They're ready to be shaped into any kind of tissue the body needs, including brain cells, if you get the right stem cells. But getting anything out of the blood and making it turn into anything else is a complete game changer. So if you want to strengthen your stem cells and make more of them, you can get stem cell therapy. And if you can aff recommend this. Bank your stem cells. If you bank your stem cells, what happens is they pull some fat out from basically your lower back and put them in a cryo facility so that Even if you're 100 years and years from now, you can get stem cells that you had taken out when you were 25 or 35 or even 55. So having young stem cells that were frozen in time to make you younger later, very good investment. Cost you probably 1,000 or $2,000 a year. But if you don't want to go under the needle, you could activate your stem cells using some bulletproof lifestyle hacks, like improving the qual, reducing or managing stress. You could cut out sugar. You could try fasting bulletproof intermittent fasting. In fact, you could read head strong, which is pretty much a menu of how to increase mitochondria and at the same time, make your stem cells work better. In a 2010 study, mice fed spirulina for 28 days actually grew new stem cells, and the ones they had were more resilient to stress. At the bulletproof upgrade labs in Santa Monica, we even have a piece of equipment that rapidly changes atmospheric pressure on your body that is shown to increase your stem cells. Pretty cool. They're hackable. You probably already know that cold exposure is good for you. Well, the reason that cold exposure is good for all of us is that it stimulates brown Adipose tissue, also known as brown fat, which generates heat in your body in response to cold through a process called thermogenesis. The problem is you lose most of your brown fat as you age. You save just a little bit between your shoulder blades. New research indicates that brown fat isn't just a heater organ. Scientists from Germany, Finland found that after a meal, brown fat in mice interacts with the gut hormone secretin to signal fullness to your brain. So the more brown fat you have, the more full you're going to feel after a meal. You want more brown fat? Take a cold shower. Do the techniques that you'll find in Head Strong or in Game Changers, my last two books that tell you, hey, here's how to get in a very small amount of time your body to turn on thermogenesis. According to those researchers, any stimulus that activates brown fat could make you feel fuller faster during a meal. So that 30 seconds of uncomfortable cold shower in the morning might mean that your lunch or your dinner works better to keep you full. So, based on that study, try this hack and tell me how you feel before your next meal. Try placing a heat pack on your upper back where brown fat sits. You might look a little bit weird, but pay attention and see if you feel hungrier or more full. I think that the warm pack is going to make you feel more hungry and a cold pack is going to make you feel feel more full. A new study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that people who slept less than six hours a night were 27% more likely to get atherosclerosis, hardening of the arteries. Sleep quality mattered, too. Among participants with poor quality sleep, the heart disease risk jumped 34%. Yikes. Did this study just say that the quality of your sleep is more important than the duration of your sleep? I think it did. This has been core to the bulletproof teachings for more than eight years. And now we have more data. I perform at my best with about six hours of sleep, and the new research echoes what I've said for years. When it comes to sleep, quality is more important than quantity. So how could you improve your sleep quality? You could sleep in a pitch black room, limit your exposure to blue light before you go to bed. I use the TrueDark glasses. I started that company because that's part of what I do. You can find your sleep chronotypes. You can optimize your sleep around the times that you're supposed to be going to sleep. You may be an early Riser, which is great. You may also be a night owl, which is also okay, as long as that's what your genetics tell you to do. If you go to bed and wake up at the right time for you, you're totally going to change the quality of your sleep. Don't drink caffeine about eight hours before bedtime. That means around two in the afternoon, stop drinking coffee and switch to decaf. I drink two bulletproof decafs, one in the afternoon, one after dinner because I want the extra polyphenols from coffee. But whatever you do, just don't have caffeine. Because even if you say I can drink caffeine and go to sleep, your sleep quality goes down. And in this study, quality mattered more than length. For the best data of all though, you've got to track your sleep, even in pen and paper. Sleep log. Just tracking how did I feel when I woke up can make a difference. There's an app you can get on your phone that will use the microphone to track how long you slept and how well you slept. So you can have sort of painless, you barely notice little ring, or you can get full headbands and all sorts of crazy sleep monitoring gear if you want to. It doesn't really matter as long as you just track it every night and see. Did I do a better job last night than the night The World Health Organization. Not that I would believe a lot of what they say, to be perfectly honest. They just announced that a high fiber diet can reduce the risk of heart disease, diabetes, stroke and colorectal cancer. Fiber rich whole foods increase satiety and favorably influence lipid and glucose levels. The problem with this advice is that the most common sources of fiber out there are things like lentils, things like wheat or any other kind of grain. What those are are things that are packaged by mother nature to have compounds that keep animals from eating them because plants don't want us to eat their babies. So yes, it is true that fiber is really good for gut bacteria. And the bulletproof diet is very high in fiber from vegetables, which is different than fiber that's packaged with chemicals that are actually bad for you, made by plants. So take that advice with a grain of salt. Fiber is technically a type of carbohydrate, but unlike sugar or even starch, your body really can't break fiber down. Instead, it goes right into your gut where the good gut bacteria eat it and they make compounds that are actually short chain fatty acids. So fiber turns into fat in your body, which is how your body Uses it to make energy. So strengthen your immune system and even reduce inflammation. There is some fiber and fruit. However, there's a ton of sugar. Maybe that's a problem. They do recommend vegetables, which I like. The problem is that putting those whole grains in there is not going to work for you. Most of the bread and the wheat that you can get today in the United States is sprayed with glyphosate. Glyphosate disrupts your gut bacteria and the gly in glyphosate is something that can stick into the collagen in your body and disrupt your body's ability to make healthy connective tissues. It is something that you simply don't want. There's also something called a field toxin and a storage toxin. And these are mold derived toxins that are very common in grains. So you might want to be careful where you get your fiber. What else is in there with your fiber? You wouldn't eat fiber that had a bunch of bad stuff in it, would you? So get the right fiber. Just like eating the right protein. Eating the right fats is different than saying eat proteins or eat fats. So you're better off getting it from these leafy green vegetables, sweet potatoes, and maybe even with some grass fed butter. A biotech firm in Boston has built a new neural network that can tell you if you have a rare genetic disorder just from your selfie. The network is called Deep Gestalt and it analyzes facial features to generate a list of the 10 genetic syndromes you're most likely to have. It outperformed clinicians in three initial experiments and it had a 91% accuracy in identifying the correct syndrome. Homo performance, 500 different images. One of the best biohacks you can make is to understand your genetics. Your genes affect everything from your metabolism, your muscle growth, even to your caffeine sensitivity. Technology like Deep Gestalt is a big step forward in the genetic testing space. It means that one day soon you might be able to better understand your DNA just by having your face analyzed. That's way easier than taking a blood sample or mailing your spit. But to be really clear, it's not a genetic test until we look at what the code inside your cells, your actual genes, say, which does take blood or spit or at least some tissue from your body. What's cool though, is we can have correlations that say it's very likely you have this condition. So let's confirm it with an actual genetic test. At the core of biohacking is something called epigenetics. Which is the study of the science of how the environment around you and inside of you changes your gene expression. So just because you have the gene doesn't mean it's going to do something bad to you. But I am completely looking forward to the day where you can walk around and you can take a selfie. They can watch how you walk, even listen how you talk and diagnose years ahead of time whether your brain is going the wrong direction. We are right on the cusp of that, and I am so incredibly excited about that. You want to live longer like I do, Maybe to at least 180. Take a page out of Marie Kondo's book and declutter your cells. A new study from the Weisman Institute of Science found that triggering the immune system to remove old damaged cells actually raise the median lifespan in aging mice. This is particularly powerful stuff because cells naturally accumulate these dead organelles, these damaged proteins and oxidized particles, and they build up inside them. It's like the junk that builds up over time in a clogged pipe or maybe in the back of your closet. And it accelerates the aging process, increases risk of cancer, age related diseases like dementia, and overall oxidative streps. And unless there's some way for your body to clean those cells out. While it's one of the major causes of aging, one of the things that's in that research is called autophagy. And it's a detox process your body undergoes to clean out damaged cells and regenerate new ones and to kick it into high gear and to help your immune system get rid of all that junk you eat. A high fat, low carb cyclical diet, like the bulletproof diet, complete without excessive damaged proteins or damaged fat. You want to experiment with intermittent fasting. You want to exercise using high intensity interval training, expose yourself to occasional cold and get some high quality sleep. A report published in the Lancet says the planetary diet will improve human health and save the planet by ensuring sustainable food production. This diet recommends eating a variety of plant based foods, low amounts of animal based foods, and half your regular red meat and sugar consumption. And they believe the diet will help reduce chronic disease like stroke and diabetes and will cut back on environmental degradation. So if climate change is the major problem, which it is, moving away from industrial meat and these commercial feedlots, it's good for everyone. I'm just going to say this. The number one planetary diet you could do is don't eat industrial meat ever again in your life. If you make that decision and say, I'm going to eat the vegetarian food, I'm going to eat the vegan food. You're going to be better off personally, because feedlots don't just contribute to soil erosion, water pollution, pollution, fossil fuel consumption, bad air quality. The problem is the end product is low quality meat that's cheap, but it's loaded with hormones, antibiotics and toxins. So you eat it, you poison your gut bacteria and you don't perform well. The environment loses, the animals lose and you lose. You got to stop doing it. That's the real planetary diet. You do want to cut the amount of animal protein you eat. You want to spend twice as much per pound on the meat you eat and eat half it as much. When you do that, your budget stays the same, your health improves. Where we differ between the planetary diet and bulletproof principles is that the planetary diet is basically saying, how do we get cheap food out of the soil to feed lots of people? Well, I'm going to tell you, how do you get the best food out of soil to feed lots of people? Number one, have animals walking around fertilizing food. Number two, eat more vegetables and eat less grains. Grains are cheaper than vegetables for cows, they're cheaper than vegetables for humans. Eat your vegetables, vegetables and leave the grains for the birds.