Bulletproof Biohacker News with Dave Asprey Episode 3

Foreign I'm Dave Asprey, founder of Bulletproof, here at Bulletproof headquarters in Seattle. Shooting Biohacker News for you. Biohacking is the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so they have full control of your own biology. This lets you do the things you want to do better, faster, with less effort, and you'll probably look better, feel better, and maybe live longer, too, when you dial in some of these variables that are within your control. Biohacker News is all about how to do that. Big think. Just published news on a study from the University of Iowa that found a link between food allergies and autism. And they found that twice as many kids with autism have food allergies as don't. And they're quoting a mysterious link between food allergies and autism. They actually said, we don't know which comes first, food allergies or autism. And what they stumbled across here is something that's much bigger automatically. Cases of autism have chronic immune system autoimmune inflammation. So the nervous system is attacked by the immune system, whether it's caused by food, other things in the environment, or things internally. The microbiome we don't necessarily know, but it's really interesting to see that this thing with inflammation happens. And special shout out to the film the Magic Pill that tied in the effect of a ketogenic diet, just having ketones in your body. And what happens with autistic kids when they get this, it's really phenomenal what happens. Why? Because ketones turn down inflammation in the nervous system. That's what's going on here. Drexel University recently published a study looking at military veterans with PTSD or traumatic brain injury. And they looked at the type of visual art that veterans would create. And they found out that if people were drawing pictures of their psychological injuries or other things that were darker and more about what was going on in their emotional system, they were much more likely to have PTSD versus just brain injury. This is interesting because I interviewed Mark Gordon on episode 431 of Bulletproof Radio, who was looking specifically at the link in clinical data between traumatic brain injuries, a concussion, whiplash, hitting your head when you fall off your bike as a kid, any of those things and the likelihood of getting ptsd. But it turns out just the kind of art you draw, even the kind of doodles you draw, can indicate what's going on in there. Is it an emotional psychological injury on top of a brain injury, or is it just a brain injury because it turns Out a lot of us, probably more than half, have little brain injuries from a long time ago that are affecting how we show up in the world today. And we don't even know it. Recently the Telegraph had a piece that was recommending that to protect yourself from the aging effects of blue light from your cell phone or from LED lights in your office or from your big screen tv. The best protection was sunscreen, which is totally crazy because sunscreen actually blocks ultraviolet radiation. And there are ways to help mitigate the damage from blue light. Because blue light on your skin does one thing, blue light in your eyes and your brain does another thing to scramble the timing of your brain, which itself makes you look older. But if you wanted to protect your skin, you might look at something like the eye armor supplement from Bulletproof, which contains astaxanthin. This is the red colored compound found in wild salmon, found in crabs and marine algae, and it serves as an internal antioxidant for your eyes and your skin. And there's this other amazing piece of technology to protect your skin from the aging effects of blue light. And it's called sleeves. So what you can do when you know you're going to be in a bad light environment, have long sleeves, just expose your skin more to natural light and less to unnatural light. And you'll find you probably like how you feel, you'll like how you look, and you don't have to worry about your cell phone making you look old because of light. There's other things it does, like EMFs that are much bigger issues. Baylor College just came out with a study about a new molecule they found called PMI4 that can target something called stat6 in the lungs that is high in people with asthma. It's really cool to see new pharmacological approaches to dealing with something like asthma, which was a major issue for me when I was a kid. It turns out though, one of the number one causes of asthma is actually air pollution. So maybe you don't need a new drug, maybe you need an air filter. And one of the biggest causes of asthma that's just not well known is toxic mold in buildings. If you have a water damaged building, you have spores floating around. There's a very, very clear correlation between that and and asthma. It is very well established and a lot of people suffering from asthma don't look at the air quality in their bedroom to see what's going on. So maybe we ought to start with the environment around us and then look at our microbiome, which is another trigger to See the environment inside us before we start adding new small molecules and drugs. Although I'm all for these new drugs, because when you discover a drug, you understand the pathway and then you see how the environment changes the pathway. That's bioactive. A national study of 5,222 employees found that they eat at work at least once a week with food provided by workers, and that the food itself was mostly empty calories with things like sugar and processed fats, things like that. The recommendation from the USDA after that, though, was, so they should all be eating more whole grains. And it's really important when you're looking at advice as a biohacker to say, well, does this advice come from vested industry interests, like selling the stuff that's cheap and you can store for a long time, even if it's not good for you, because telling you something is good for you is different than it actually being good for you. And you can tell if you eat something that leaves you full for four to six hours. So you don't want a snack and you feel a ton of energy. That's what you want to eat, whether or not your employer gives it to you for free. It doesn't matter if it makes you feel like crap. It's very expensive to feel like crap. So I look at studies like this as something that we can take with a grain of salt. And by the way, did I mention salt can actually be good for you if you're stressed. It's not always bad for you. A new study from Uppsala University in Sweden just found that drinking green tea can lead to epigenetic changes in women. And epigenetics is the study of how the environment around us changes our genetic expression. And they found beneficial changes in this, which is awesome. But what a lot of people don't know is that if you drink even one or two cups of green tea a day is that it can deplete your levels of folic acid or folate, the natural form of folic acid that's in your body. So if you're pregnant and switching to green tea or just in folic acid, you might actually want to supplement with that stuff on top of the green tea. But we do know that green tea leads to positive epigenetic changes, at least in women and probably in men. A recent study of 1900 men aged between 60 and 78 found that men with erectile dysfunction were more than twice as likely to die from heart attack, stroke, or other cardiovascular disease. So what this means is that if you're having problems problems down under, for lack of a better word. You might want to actually look at your entire lifestyle and do whatever it takes in your diet, exercise, sleep, emotional stress, all the things that are actual stressors for your cardiovascular disease so that you know that that's not going to be what takes you out. Because if you're seeing this early warning sign, it's not a matter of taking a little pill to fix it. It's a matter of changing everything. You might also want to look at the podcast with Amy Killen or Kate Kass on Bulletproof Radio, where I talk about some specific erectile dysfunction hacks that you completely wouldn't believe. In order to learn more about of thing, you should head on over to blog.bulletproof.com where I write about this, or listen to Bulletproof Radio where I interview some of the world's top leaders in performance, people who are breaking new ground in science, or people who are just very high performers at the very top of their game so we can all collectively learn what are they doing that works? What have they discovered that is going to impact what we can do to have control of our own biology? It's a lot of fun.