Mini-Episode: Cool Facts Friday #16

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For 10 years across a thousand episodes and a quarter billion listens. My podcast has elevated what you knew about the capabilities of your mind and body. And because we're at the 10 year anniversary, I'm evolving Bulletproof Radio even further in my plan to upgrade humanity. And I'm evolving myself as well. I invite you to expand your knowledge, explore your performance, and embrace your possibility. With the Human Upgrade, you'll meet bright thinkers and radical doers who push the boundaries of science, technology, personal development, and human performance in every way imaginable. Every guest you listen to, every topic you learn about, every new idea you discover on this podcast is there to move you forward. And join me on this next evolution to upgrade your mind, body and life. And be sure that you're subscribed to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey on your favorite podcast platform so you hear every single episode. My commitment to you is that the time you spend with me on the Human Upgrade will always return more value to you than you spent on it. Welcome to another edition of Cool Facts. We're right in the middle of the awkward teenage phase because this is cool facts number 16. Hopefully my voice won't crack right in the middle of it. At the 7th Annual Biohacking Conference in Florida last month, I had a chance to walk around and ask people what they thought of Cool Facts. And what I heard and what my team heard was that you guys really like these Short Friday shows. So I will keep doing them for you.

Thank you.

Thank you for the advice and for letting me know what matters and even for suggesting some ideas to go through on the podcast form@daveasprey.com podcasts I'll keep these coming for you. This cool fact is about the relationship between autoimmunity and pain. Researchers at the University of Oxford got together and said what would happen if we combined expertise in autoimmunity and peripheral nerve disease and pain in a cross functional way. Well, why would you mix those up? Because they wanted to know why patients with autoimmunity like me with Hashimoto's, why we experience different types of pain than people who don't have it. And autoimmunity is a major issue in high performing people because we tend to push ourselves harder. It turns out there are two antibodies that you'll most often find in autoimmunity called Caspr2 and LGI1. These two proteins live on the membrane of your cells in Your central nervous system, and they actually cause a lot of autoimmune symptoms. Many people with autoimmunity do have pain, but the source and the type of pain have been totally a mystery until now. Researchers found that people expressing Caspr2 antibodies have more pain and it's longer lasting. Meanwhile, people with lgi1 antibodies respond way better to immunotherapy. What does this mean for you? Well, if you have pain all the time and you have autoimmunity, maybe we'll be able to figure out what to do about it. You can turn down allergies. In fact, sometimes allergy medication because of autoimmunity can reduce pain, but we're gonna be able to better target treatments for you. We're right at the beginning of an incredible renaissance in our ability to have very fine grained control over your immune system. My prediction for you, and you can write this down, send yourself an email or something and check with me in 20 years and see if I was right. I think 40% of aging is actually coming from inappropriate immune system activation. And we're about to tackle it as a species. Our next cool fact is about autophagy and nutrient balance in plants. Say what autophagy is how the body cleans out weak or dead cells and replaces them with strong young ones. Think about replacing light bulbs that are about to burn out or have burned out. Turns out that plants get nutrient imbalances just like humans do. And this is a bit of a side note for the cool fact, but you ever hear a western pharmaceutical sales rep say that vitamins don't work yet. They probably buy miracle grow to put on plants because somehow they work for plants, but not humans. That should be a red flag for you. The reason we pay so much attention to this in plants is that we like it when our crops actually turn into food. And we have agricultural productivity that we measure. Since there's so much at stake, you know, feeding our species, we, we really pay attention to proper ratio of nutrients and what happens when it goes off. In fact, we know more about this in plants sometimes than we do in humans. And we know more about it in cows than we do in humans. Unfortunately, we're seeing a lot more nutrient depletion as our soils become contaminated with industrial heavy metals like lead and nickel. And it turns out that autophagy, that process I mentioned at the beginning of this cool fact about cleaning up old and dead cells, is important in plants as well as in humans. Researchers at Meiji University in Japan found that intracellular autophagy was responsible for controlling the balance between zinc and iron in plants. Zinc and iron use the same transporters in plants, which means that if you have too much of one mineral, it leads to a deficiency in the other. And to fix that problem, plants upregulate their autophagy, and that liberates more of the deficient mineral. And there you go, you're back in balance. And in other words, you kill some of the cells until you get back in balance. What does that mean for you? Well, this was plant research, but if that mechanism works in humans, which it likely will, we may find that autophagy is controlled in some point by balance between nutrients that compete in our cells, like zinc and copper. And since zinc deficiency is widespread, both in developing countries, where it's really bad, and even in developed countries where people just don't take their vitamins, well, I think we're going to figure out that autophagy is tied to zinc and to copper. It's really promising research. Anything that tells us how to get brighter energy in our bodies is stuff that gets my attention. And if autophagy is your jam, definitely check out the podcast about autophagy, especially episode 773, which is a very scientific episode. It's called Trigger autophagy without fasting. Dr. Elizabeth Yurth talking on spermidine. Our next cool fact is also about autophagy. And this is, what do cells do when they're stressed? How does it change autophagy? One of the things that autophagy does is it breaks down cells, but it doesn't just break them down and flush them away. It actually uses the parts of cells that are broken down as building blocks to make new, younger cells. So you're not just changing your burned out light bulbs, you're recycling them and using them again as much as you can. So you only have to replace little bits of them, like filament. Well, researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology took that a little bit further and said, how does autophagy support cells when they're heavily stressed? By changes in their environment. You know, when the cells are forced to quarantine? No, sorry. That was a different kind of cellular stress. The researchers transferred cells from their normal, exciting glucose medium into alcohol or ethanol. And the cells said, ah, I'm drunk all the time. And then that because they had to change to be able to metabolize that fuel, there was a giant influx of mitochondrial activity in the cells. Autophagy went all in and broke down the cells so they can make new cells that could handle a different kind of Stress, in this case because of the alcohol. They needed more of an amino acid called serine. So if you're a medical doctor or a researcher, hey, that's cool stuff. But why serine? Because it's what causes mitochondria to grow, at least in this model. So what does it mean for you? It means that things like high intensity interval training, the things that we do for you at upgrade labs that cause extreme levels of stress for very short periods of time, are likely to cause autophagy. In fact, there's a lot of research that shows that to be true. And that's why you can actually get a lot more exercise in a lot less time. So you get the benefits and you have a ton of free time left over to meditate or train your brain or do whatever else. And if you want to know more about this magic ability to get rid of your older, weaker cells and cell components, check out episode 477 with Naomi Whittle. It's definitely one of my top all time favorite podcasts. We just go so deep on this thing that's so important to making you stronger. Your next cool fact is about genes that prevent obesity and maybe cause obesity. So if you were like me and nothing you did, including a low calorie diet with lots of exercise, would make you lose weight, maybe it's in your genes, but I'm gonna bet it's probably in your lifestyle and in toxins and eating the wrong foods, including diet soda, which 100% makes you fat, even when angry trolls say it doesn't. As we know, obesity kills people. You know this. Yet most people in the United States especially, but around the world, are really working hard to maintain healthy weight. And there's all kinds of reasons for it which are at the core of most of what I write about. Scientists at the University of Virginia found 14 genes that cause weight gain and three that stop you from gaining weight. Researchers took these genes discovered in worms and said, hey, maybe they work in mice, too. And one of those genes is already associated with obesity in us humans. So they were onto something. And they found that if they blocked the effect of just one of those genes, the mice did not gain weight. They had improved insulin sensitivity and they had lowered blood sugar levels. Now, what does this mean for you? All we have to do is figure out how to edit our own genes. Or more likely, all we have to be able to do is figure out how to block the action of that one gene. And maybe you won't get type 2 diabetes, you won't have the metabolic dysfunction that is running rampant in our society. That sounds pretty good. In fact, maybe you could live on junk food and still be healthy. I'm not going to bet on that, though. In the meantime, pass the butter. The next cool fact is some new research supporting the theory that Alzheimer's likely is an autoimmune disorder. Alzheimer's disease is one of the fastest growing health conditions for older people, yet we don't have a lot of treatment strategies that work other than well, nutrition and exercise and things like that. According to researchers out of the University of Toronto, there's a lot of evidence that Alzheimer's is autoimmune at its core, and this lines up a lot with what you've learned on the previous episode of Bulletproof Radio with Dale Bredesen, who wrote a book called the End of Alzheimer's, which is worth a read if Alzheimer's is on your radar. The researchers found autoantibodies in the cerebral spinal fluid of Alzheimer's patients, and those autoantibodies mean that there's an autoimmune reaction happening and that causes neuroinflammation, which causes the death of neurons or the destruction of synapses that connect your neurons. Now that we know it may be an autoimmune condition, let's fund that research and that should quickly lead to new treatment options so that if someone has Alzheimer's disease, we can reverse it more quickly. And if someone is at risk of Alzheimer's disease, they just won't get it at all. And by the way, in 1986 the first paper showing that low dose oral nicotine is a treatment for Alzheimer's disease was published out of Vanderbilt University. There are some things that work, they just aren't patentable.

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