Dave Asprey funded $50,000 in research showing that blending butter into hot coffee converts water into a gel-like form cells can use directly for energy. Tibetan yak butter tea, made by hand-churning, produces the same effect at high altitude. Without blending, you miss this water-chemistry benefit and your body has to work harder to digest the fat.
All right, guys, I promised you that I would tell you why you had to emulsify butter. You still want to hear about that? Okay, this drives me nuts. It's because when I first discovered bulletproof coffee, I remember went to south by Southwest a long time ago, and I was really hungry, and I said, all right, I don't have time. I hadn't quite figured out how to make bulletproof coffee on the road, so I ate a stick of butter in front of, like, an SVP from Twitter, and I drank a shot of espresso, and I just felt like crap. And I was still hungry. And every time I've ever tried to do it, a rational person, why would I bother? Eventually, I funded $50,000 worth of research at University of Washington on basic water chemistry with Gerald Pollock, who's been on the show a couple times, and he's a guy who really discovered and has looked into the biological effects of the exclusion zone of water. And here's the short version of why you blend your bulletproof coffee instead of just eating butter and coffee. This goes far beyond the keto diet. This is full bulletproof mode. It's because when you eat, or, sorry, when you drink any water, your body converts that water, which is what we'll call bulk water, in something called exclusion zone water. And it does this with vibration or infrared light. That is heat from cells. And when that water is exposed to those things and is near fat. Oh, newsflash. All of your cells are made of tiny droplets of fat. That's what the cell membrane is. So now you have water that's by fat. The water creates a thin layer of gel like water. And that's what your body needs to use in order to fold proteins or to make ATP. Now, in Tibet, where I first had yak butter tea, it's 18,000ft elevation. There's no oxygen to speak of compared to what we're used to. There's also no heat. It's cold. It was 10 degrees below zero, and I was there. So these smart Tibetan people, this little lady who gave me yak butter tea, they figured out that if they put the butter in the tea and they use a handheld butter churn, it goes to chunk cha, chunk, cha, chunk kind of thing. They. They drink the tea and they get a burst of energy, which is what I experienced, which made me come back and experiment to figure out why, so we could do what became bulletproof coffee. And it turns out that blending really matters, because it makes exclusion zone water, and then you drink it, and your cells don't have to make bulk water. They can just use it to shortcut to making energy. And when I paid for the research and Jerry did his work at the lab at uw, they found out that droplets of butter fat next to water create the thickest zone of exclusion zone water that he's ever seen. And that a very hard time testing brain octane oil, because brain octane oil is so liquid that just being able to look at it under a high resolution microscope was difficult. So we actually have photos of the change in water chemistry and by butter. So I will tell you between the polyphenols that are in bulletproof coffee, they're called melanoids, between those, between the heat that's in there, between the physical vibration or agitation from blending it or shaking it really well, Bulletproof coffee works better if you blend it longer. This is well understood. I've noticed it, I've talked about it, Other people have confirmed that. So it's this magic thing where there's probably six different mechanisms for it. But you put it in that blender, you blend it for 20 seconds on high with hot coffee, with even a tiny bit of butter will do it because the droplets spread everywhere. If you're hungry, you can have more. And you put the brain octane there to get ketones. And that combination of ketones from the caffeine in the coffee, ketones from brain octane oil, the water chemistry change from the butter and maybe from the brain octane, you drink that, you're like, oh my God, something shifted. So that's why, to answer your question, you have to blend or emulsify the butter. You cannot do it without that. And so many people don't quite get it. Otherwise you have to have bile in your body whose job it is to emulsify fats. But it happens lower down and you don't get that water effect. It's pretty cool.
