Dave Asprey on the Little Known Secret to Energy and Longevity

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman and that's Pharmacy F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And today's guest is someone who's going to tell you things that really matter. Dave Asprey is a close friend who's my inspiration and one of the smartest guys I've ever met. He's the founder and CEO of Bulletproof Coffee and Bulletproof 360. He is a two-time New York Times bestselling author and I definitely poached his books for learning things from my book. He hosts this amazing podcast, Bulletproof Radio. He's been featured on the Today Show, CNN, New York Times, Dr. Oz. He's worked with world-renowned doctors, not me obviously, no he has. Of course. He actually helped me when I was really sick last year. I called Dave because I needed to figure out how to get better and he gave me some extraordinary great suggestions. You know, most doctors don't go to lay people to learn stuff, but I go to Dave. He works with incredible scientists to uncover the latest, most innovative methods for enhancing our physical and mental performance by taking control of our own biology. It's called biohacking. So stay tuned. That conversation is coming up next on the Doctor's Pharmacy. So welcome, Dave, to the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Mark, I'm so happy you started a show. You have such a good take on medicine and to be able to share this with people, it's awesome and I'm honored to be here.

Fantastic. So one of the things that's challenging for people in the health space, and there's this whole sort of problem, and I would say now, called orthorexia, which is this idea that people are so obsessed with restricting their diets to be healthy, and it leads to a sort of a restrictive life. And for me, what's important is not to be restrictive, but to learn how to be resilient. And you've had to, in your own life, be restrictive in order to get resilient, but you're now exploring and sort of hacking the concept of resiliency. How do you become robust and resilient and have more what we call metabolic degrees of freedom? Can you tell us about that?

Orthorexia is a fascinating condition. And the truth of the matter is that if you eat junk food all the time, it is going to kill you. And your body knows that and you kind of get a little stressed, but you don't know what's going on. And then if you suddenly start eating in a way that makes you feel much better, and then you go back to eating another way, it's like a punch in the face. You're like, oh my God, I don't wanna do that again. And it's not uncommon to develop almost like a little bit of a panic response, like, oh my God, if I eat a french fry, I'm gonna die. And that's where orthorexia and things like that come from. And the truth of the matter is that if you eat a french fry once, you're not going to die. You might not feel as good. You might get a pimple, right? But if you do it all the time, it's really going to screw up your ability to show up in the world the way you want to. And it's that sense of calmness and acceptance and metabolic resilience that you want to build into what you do so that you say, I'm going to choose not to eat the French fry, but I'm not going to die if I do. And that's when you're free of weird emotional baggage, whether it's an addiction to junk food or an absolute terror of it. Neither one of those will be good. And I can tell you there's some foods where I will fast before I'll eat them because I know that I'm going to hurt for a week if I eat that. And I know what my Deny foods are, but I'm not terrified of them.

I'm denied foods.

I'm just not going to, right? And then there's the concept of biohacking. And I created that field and I wrote that first definition, which was the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so that you have control of your own biology.

And including your emotions, your thoughts, and your behavior, all the things that are driven by your health, because your biology determines your biography.

That's so well put. If you think about it, the primary purpose of these little power plants in your body, they take food and air and they make electrons. And it's the same electrons that power your iPhone, literally. They're just electrons. And where do you think your willpower and your thoughts and your energy come from? They come from that. And if your body is bad at doing that.

Those little power plants, right? Those are mitochondria.

They are. They're ancient bacteria that we like to say that we we harnessed them two billion years ago to make the cells that can move around. My story from Headstrong is that it's more likely that these little bacteria moved into the cells that are us and took over and never stopped because they're the ones who read the environment and they're the ones who decide how much energy and how many hormones and what happens in your body on a microsecond by microsecond basis. They listen to you a little bit, but they really listen more to the sunshine, to the air and to the food you eat because that's what they care about. To them, you're a petri dish and they live inside you. So they're going to keep you alive at all costs, and they'll make you afraid of bad food.

And they'll make you afraid of bacteria.

Just like a carrying case for these bacteria. That's what they think. Those little bastards think they're in charge. And the truth is that we're in charge. And when you have that mindset, you can take knowledge from Navy SEALs, neuroscientists, anti-aging medicine, these high performance athletes. And the truth of the matter is that not everyone wants to get swole.

Not everyone wants to live to 180 or more years, which is my goal today. I was 120, but I'm gonna have to be more ambitious and get to at least 150, maybe 180. So I'm a little older than you, so maybe if I get to 170.

Yeah, 170 is pretty good. Yeah, that's like a bronze medal. The truth though, Mark, and I think you're seeing this in your practice and in your own life, there's knowledge now that never existed even five years ago or 10 years ago, and it disseminates so quickly. We're seeing exponential changes. I'm just betting that we already know people can do 120 years because we've seen it. So given that you and I both are now and people listening are enabled to make fewer decisions that harm their biology over time. You don't have to be perfect. Just make less of the little hits that you take all the time. And when you are older, you'll be healthier. And that gives us, oh, another 60 years of technology to figure out the other 50% of my lifespan that I'm counting on. And I'm working with some of the companies doing this, and I know that we will meaningful extend lifespan. And the challenge for you and me is to make this happen for everyone, not just for the billionaires.

And it's not just about extending your lifespan, because who wants to be decrepit in a nursing home? It's extending your health span to equal your lifespan. So my fantasy is, when I'm 120, I go up to a beautiful cabin on the lake with my wife. We have a beautiful bottle of wine, an amazing meal. I jump in the lake, we make.

Love, and I just kind of drift off into the next world. Only at 120.

But that's- okay, well, hopefully everything still works at 120. I'll take that.

That's the first thing that we have to break through. Most human beings, because this is all we've ever seen, we have a picture. Well, after about 40, you peak before then and then you just slowly decline. And yeah, you're gonna be old and hunched over and you might need diapers and you're not gonna know your wife's name. and all sorts of things like this as you age, and that's all BS. It is not necessary, it does not always happen, and if it does happen, it's your fault, and you can change it.

Well, that's the thing. It's like what we see as normal aging, we'll call it normal aging, is actually abnormal aging. Yes. And what functional medicine is, is essentially the ultimate biohacking set of tools. It's understanding how to create health and resilience in all your biological systems and networks, and that's what you really, come at as a layperson, but you're sort of finding yourself to the same conclusions. And it's pretty startling how much we know and how little we have actually applied that in medicine and how little your doctors actually know about this.

That's one of the things that inspired me. I was a computer hacker, Silicon Valley, early invention of the internet times. And that's about managing a really complex system where you don't know all the components, you don't know who owns everything, you don't know who controls it, you don't know what changes are going to happen, but somehow you still have to get a webpage to somebody. And it turns out the body is very similar. There's a lot we don't know about what's going on in there, but it's a complex system and we can change the inputs and measure the outputs and we can correlate events. And in traditional Western medicine, we have this idea that, oh, if we don't know the cause, then the correlation is no good. And what I'm saying is, you know, if I do A and instead of B and I feel much better, We can figure out why and how that worked later, but I'm going to keep doing what makes me feel good, look better, and measurably improve my markers of inflammation, my markers of aging, and literally my ability to just be awake and focused and happy at any time of the day. Because I did not have that in my mid-20s. I was 300 pounds. I had serious brain fog fatigue to the point that I bought disability insurance because I'm like, I don't know what's going on. No doctor can tell me. And the problem is, no doctor could tell me. It was their job to tell me and they did not know anything about it.

It's not their fault.

They just don't learn about it in medical school. They don't, but see, even back then, you were doing this kind of work.

Mark, but very few doctors were. Well, I had to biohack myself to health because I had a total system collapse. I wasn't 300 pounds, but every biological system broke down. My gut, my immune system, my brain, my mitochondria, my detoxification system. I literally had to reverse engineer my way to health and I was desperate. just probably like you were in order to figure this out. And what's exciting, the last 20 years since I've done that, we just have so much more accelerated knowledge about how and why to do that.

I spent a million dollars upgrading my biology, and the first half of that was to dig out of the hole that I found myself in because I ate the wrong foods, because I got really bad medical advice because I was on antibiotics every month for 15 years because I had chronic sinus infections that were caused by toxic mold in my house, not caused by bacteria. And just this treadmill that just wrecked my body, it's little bits. Unless you get a virus or something, you're just knocked out. A lot of times people just don't know. It's just like, maybe I'm just weak.

Maybe I'm just not good enough. It's like a frog that's in slowly boiling water.

It'll just stay there and think it's normal. Right.

Until at some point, it's just not okay to stay in here, but by that point it may be too late. All right, so let's dig in a little bit. Now, this last book, Headstrong, was about the mitochondria, which seems like an esoteric thing. It seems like a complicated word, but you sort of explained that there are these little bacteria-like organelles inside our cells, and there's hundreds to thousands and tens of thousands in some cells, and they basically take food that you eat and they take oxygen that you breathe and they turn it into energy that runs every system in your body. And there's byproducts, there's water and you pee out and carbon dioxide that you breathe out, and then there's waste products that your body has to deal with. And that whole process is at the center of everything that matters in terms of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia. Alzheimer's. Yeah. All these things are related. Even autism are related to mitochondrial dysfunction. And there's a woman, Suzanne Goh, who's an extraordinary scientist from Harvard, Oxford, pediatric neurologist who's discovered on the autistic brains that the mitochondria aren't working well.

There's no energy in these kids' brains. And so they gave the mitochondrial stuff.

Support and these kids get better. You may not know this, but I.

Met the clinical definition of Asperger's syndrome until my early 20s. Yeah, it's brain mitochondria. You don't make enough energy, you don't have enough energy to filter out all the noise from the world around you. And of course you're not going to make social skills. That's less important than just being able to know what's going on. And what I'm finding in the research in Headstrong shows 48% of people under age 40 have early onset mitochondrial dysfunction. It means you take a unit of food and a unit of air and you get less than a unit of energy. And everyone over age 40 has mitochondrial dysfunction. They call it aging. I think it's still early onset. Our mitochondria don't have to decline with time, and it comes from poor management. And if you think about it, if they really are ancient bacteria, which we're sure they are, then what you have is you have a gut biome, all these bacteria in your gut, and you have another network of bacteria that's trying to run your system, that's an integral part of your system. And if you treat that, as carefully as you treat the gut in your bacteria, or frankly, you treat your compost pile so that it makes good soil. It's all the same activity. And bacteria actually do think. They have not real brains, but they have a process. They have an algorithm for staying alive. If you make them happy and you tell them only the strong survive and you do the things that you would do to maintain any biome like that, you can actually have way more energy than really Mother Nature intended. I think we can do that.

And that's what I want to dig in. Just wanna sort of share this story that I heard the other day about the role of mitochondrial therapy in treating ALS. Now, you might not have heard this study, but the mitochondria require certain nutrients and certain factors. One of them is called NAD, and we're gonna talk about that. And this is taken as a supplement. It also has some resveratrol, which is from red wine, also is a mitochondrial regulator, and it controls these master genes that affect inflammation, that affect oxidative stress. that helped produce more energy. And there was a preliminary study done. Now, there's been many, many drugs studied for ALS. None of them work. Even the best, best, best one that got approved reduces the decline by about 15%, but you still decline. They did an interventional trial using NAD and resveratrol, which actually stopped and actually improved patients with ALS. And they regained function, which is something that's completely out of the medical paradigm. That just doesn't happen.

And it's one of 10 different mitochondrial stimulation strategies, all of which will help ALS.

So what are the things that like nuke your mitochondria? What are the things people are doing every day that mess them up, that decrease their energy, that affect their ability to function, think, and be?

The first one is eating damaged fats or bad fats. And we hear about this thing called a cellular membrane. But it's not really a membrane. It's a collection of tiny droplets of fat. And your mitochondria have their own little.

Bag of fat that they're held in.

It's like a baggie that holds all the contents of your cell. It's made up of fat. Correct. And then there's another one that holds the cell itself. So if you eat the wrong fats, particularly fried foods, even if you fry them in coconut oil or butter, it's still not good to fry because the heat damages oils. Then your body gets these oils and it goes, what do I do with these?

I'm gonna try and build mitochondria that.

Are supposed to take energy and or take food and air and make energy, but they can't do it because their membrane isn't flexible enough. It gets damaged. I call them FLA. Fats.

Funny looking fats.

There you go. And just don't eat that stuff. You don't need the fried calamari. It's just not good. Eat the guacamole.

I like it.

So that's one thing. Another thing is there are toxins, a variety of toxins, some of which come from Mother Nature and some of which come from man. And if you eat these, even in relatively low amounts, they will affect your mitochondrial function. And the most confusing part that's made this hard for medicine, and particularly nutrition, is that different DNA, different backgrounds can affect which toxins really mess with you. In my case, in my family history, it turns out somewhere on my mother's side, because this is a mitochondrial thing, mitochondria only come from your mom, not your dad. My people don't handle something called nightshade vegetables very well. And this is potatoes, tomatoes, Good thing you're not Italian. Yeah, no kidding. Italian and Greek food are full of it. I grew up dearly loving green chili in New Mexico. And if I eat even one bite of foods from that family, this is the deadly nightshade family, but some people metabolize it. For me, I get joint pain, brain fog, muffin top. It's bad.

What if you take the seeds out and peel it?

Even if I do that, it just doesn't matter. I'm highly sensitized to it. And my daughter's not that way, but I am. and it's irritating, but that doesn't mean for someone listening that it's bad for them. So a third of cases of rheumatoid arthritis are caused by this family. It's a mitochondrial problem, but it's only a problem for people with that genetics set. So what I recommend people do on the Bulletproof Diet, I put a set of suspect foods. These are foods that may cause problems for you, but they may be good for you. So it's not that simple to say, oh, here's the standard MRE, military ready to eat ration that everyone can eat. It's not like that, but you have to know what are your kryptonite foods that lower your mitochondrial function. And the first sign of mitochondrial function, even without lab tests and all the expensive cool stuff, if you eat it and you get a massive sugar craving afterwards or you get massively tired and you can't remember things, your brain is stuffed with mitochondria. It has the most mitochondria of any part in the body, so you're going to feel it in your brain first. If you can't focus after lunch, and you're just dying for dessert, you ate something that whacked your mitochondria. It may have hit them directly or it may have just crashed your blood sugar like MSG will do. Either way, you crash your blood sugar, your mitochondria freak out and they get.

Stressed and it's not a good stress. Exercise is a good stress but that kind of stress is not. So you got the fried foods which is going to kill your mitochondria. You've got food toxins but they're different for different people but you've also got other things you eat? And what is the main thing? And I've written many books about this. It's a clue, it's a hint.

Yes.

The answer is?

The answer is grain.

Sugar.

Oh, sugar, there we go. You know, I don't know, Mark. I don't like sugar. Sugar's bad for you. I don't know if sugar is worse than grains, which are essentially made out of sugar, but covered with other toxins from mother nature. But I'm 100% with you. if you eat sugar, especially drink sugar, what ends up happening is the mitochondria get a burst of sugar saying, yay, but then they're dead. They don't actually die, but they're out of energy and it's that sudden spike and sudden crash.

It causes metabolic damage far beyond just mitochondria. I mean, we eat 152 pounds of sugar and 133 ounces of flour, which is worse than sugar. That's almost three-quarters of a pound a day of flour and sugar. That is poison for a mitochondria. And that accelerates aging and causes this.

Pre-Diabetes and insulin resistance.

That is a huge driver. And then there's also other things, toxins, other toxins. And I had mercury poisoning.

I was about to say mercury, good.

I had mercury poisoning and I had chronic fatigue syndrome and my muscles were damaged. I had a muscle enzyme called CPK really high, which is really a sign of your muscle cells exploding because there's no energy. And it was, I had severe pain and aching all the time and it was because of these environmental toxins and.

There'S a lot of them and some people are more susceptible than others. Mercury is a big issue because we've been burning coal for so long that when you burn coal, it releases mercury into the air and then it comes down in rain and gets in our fish. And some types of fish are much better than others. And you and I have both written about the type of fish that you want to eat, like salmon, not farm salmon. Wild salmon, sardines, herring, yeah, anchovies. All the stuff that people don't like. I like them. All the stinky fish, right? But those are the ones that are safest. But I also had mercury poisoning and lead poisoning. when I was younger. And I remember the first time I got treated for it, my wife was like, Dave, your skin is pink. You've always been gray. And what happens when these toxins are present? Just look a little lead-like.

Yeah, you look lead-like.

And you're actually creating a condition called pseudo-hypoxia, which is when your mitochondria just can't use air and food because they've been poisoned. So you get this sort of backed up system metabolically, and you feel gray, and your skin looks gray, your circulation isn't good, and you get that horrible muscle pain that was just part of my life until I was about 30.

So what do you do to rebuild and revitalize your mitochondria? Stay away from sugar, fried foods, environmental toxins, your kryptonite foods, but what are the things that we can actually do to rejuvenate them and to live to be 180?

Well, the good thing is there's way more mitochondrial organelles, these little bacteria in your body than there are cells in your body. And they are replaceable. So the first thing you want to do is you want to tell them only the strong survive. And there's a few ways to do that.

Is that why you call your book Headstrong?

Exactly. And so you sort of need to manage them like a system instead of little individual things. So you want to take the weakest 20% of your mitochondria and you want to tell them die. And that sounds a little bit brutal, but here's what happens when they die. Fresh new young ones sprout in the mitochondria. How do you kill them? All right, here's one of my favorite techniques from Headstrong. Tomorrow morning when you take a shower, take a nice warm shower at the end of the shower with the water hitting you right in the forehead and chest, Turn it to full cold. And now after about- that sounds like great advice.

That's so much fun.

I can't wait to do it in the morning. After eight seconds, you're gonna be like, Dave Asprey's a jerk. But if you stick with me for four days, the next day you'll do it, you'll last like 20 seconds. And what's gonna happen is the voice in your head, which is your mitochondria, is gonna say, you,'re going to die. You must get out. It's unbearable to be in here. But you rationally know, if I'm in here for one minute, I'm not gonna die, but it feels like it and you believe that feeling. But what you're doing is you're telling the mitochondria, if you can't make enough energy to keep yourself warm for just a minute of cold water, then you're weak and you should die. And that's them saying, Please don't kill me. Please don't kill me. And you're going to die. And when you do that, after the fourth day, you're like, you know what? This isn't that cold. In fact, I feel invigorated. My skin is tighter. I'm losing weight. I feel good. I sleep better. It's really powerful. We're talking one minute of cold water. Wow. But four days, four days of pain first, and then all of a sudden, just believe me, just try it for a week. You're like, you know what?

I like my life when I do this.

You like the Iceman, you know? Yeah. This is like the weak version of that.

You don't have to go swimming. I find, you know, when I was sick with chronic fatigue, the only thing that would give me like a few hours of relief would be to take a steam or a really hot bath, and then I would jump in an ice bath. Correct. And that would kind of flush everything.

Out, and I'd feel like a minute of clarity and Energy. And the thing is, this doesn't require liquid nitrogen like we have at Bulletproof Labs who cryotherapy. It's low tech, it's free, everyone can do it. And if we all just did that, the measurable incidence of all chronic disease.

Would go down across the country.

Okay, that's a great tip. So what else can we do for a mitochondria? There's two kinds of exercise that matter and I looked up all the research on this stuff and your job with exercise is to make yourself grow healthy young mitochondria but also to grow more mitochondria because who wouldn't want a bigger.

Battery on their iPhone, right?

So one kind of exercise. Most of us are in that low battery mode, right?

Right. That's shut off all the operating apps. Our body will do that.

The last thing is your brain, but the rest of you, it's like you don't have to repair and regenerate. Why would you do that? You don't have enough energy. Just keep it for the brain. Keep it for the lungs. You're totally right. And what I end up doing for this exercise stuff is one body of research says if you move for 20 minutes a day, It has a set of behavior on maintaining youthful mitochondria. So this means not running. You don't have to go get all dressed up in your Lululemon outfit, although you might want to. But all you have to do is just go for a walk. You don't have to run. You don't have to do anything crazy. Just move for 20 minutes a day. That's it? Well, that's step one.

Okay.

All right. That sounds too easy. And if you want to really grow more mitochondria and get all the benefits, for anti-aging, there's another body of research that says at least once and maybe twice a week, you need to do something really hard for 10 to 15 minutes.

Meaning basically exercise hard enough so you're gonna throw up.

Pretty much. What I recommend in the book is that once a week you wanna sprint and you wanna run about 400 yards like a tiger's chasing you and then lay down on your back. It's actually important to lay down on your back instead of stand there. And there's a whole different thing that happens in the brain when you do that around recovering faster. You do that three times, and then you can just say, all right, I'm done. That's not very much pain, and it's not very much work, and it actually is gonna replace being on a spinning thing every day for the week. The idea here is that you- can exercise far less time and get far more benefit.

In fact, we created Bulletproof Labs in.

Santa Monica, which is a facility that has equipment to help people do this with technology. Because the idea is, if you're commuting home every day, and you're commuting to work, and you have kids and a family and responsibilities, you just don't have time to do 90 minutes a day.

That's the good news. Yeah, I mean, I read a study years ago where they looked at giving people 30 minutes of interval training, which is what you're talking about, three times a week versus 60 minutes, six days a week of just like a run, light jog, like a regular aerobic exercise. And at the end of 12 weeks, the group that only exercised 30 minutes, three times a week, far less exercise, had 9% less body fat and were far more fit doing far less exercise.

If you get more fit in less time, it's awesome. And here's what's really going on, Marc, and this ties into your functional medicine background. It's relatively easy to whack yourself over the head in the gym. And I see so many CEOs who, well, you know, I'm running my company. I just flew to Japan and back, and I'm going to do an Ironman triathlon. And I'm like, Let me guess. Your adrenals are shot. Yeah, you can't sleep. You have no sex drive. Your joints hurt all the time. And like, how did you know? It's like, well, here's what happens when you don't recover enough. Well, what happens is exactly that. Hormones crash, adrenals crash, testosterone goes down, women oftentimes get monthly hormone problems.

And it just- so you over-exercise your.

Sex life goes to pot. It really does. And also, if you're constantly stimulating instead of recovering, it just doesn't work. So our job is to actually be masters of recovery, which means small amounts of targeted stimulation, great news, that takes less time, and then recovery. And recovery means you sleep, it also means that if you're in a toxic relationship that you fix it. It means that if you have a lot of emotional stress, old trauma, PTSD, substance abuse problems, eating disorders, you deal with that stuff because if you have chronic stress from just being unhappy, that's enough stress even without exercise. And if you have lots of travel stress, you're jet-lagged. Maybe you don't want to hit the gym really hard. Maybe you just want to take it easy and get some extra sleep and get a massage. And to recognize that the massage makes.

You just as good of a person as going to the gym and lifting heavy things.

It's recovery that matters. That's good.

That's good to know. I'm gonna write that down. Yeah, you said something there very hopeful is we can actually change our mitochondria by changing our thoughts. That our thoughts actually are being eavesdropped on by our mitochondria. And that if you have a set of beliefs or attitudes that are keeping you stressed, because you and I live very crazy lives, but both of us aren't really stressed. seem to kind of go through every day and have a good time and enjoy life, right?

You can do big things and still be happy. In fact, my next book comes out in September. One of the big themes in it is that you can only do big things if you work on happiness first, right? And whether your goal is to do big things or just do the things that make you happy, you will not have healthy functioning cells if you have a belief system that says everything's a threat. Because the mitochondria, they want to keep your petri dish alive no matter what. And if they believe that you believe there's a tiger present, even if the tiger is just the next email or the next Facebook post or the next time that you're getting in a fight with your boss or whatever it is, if that looks like a tiger to a dumb little bacteria, they're going to constantly change your metabolism to be ready to fight. And you'll be in that fight or flight mode. And there's a complex thing that happens with neuropeptides, these little tiny chains of amino acids, little protein fragments that are signals throughout the body. And another thing that most people don't know about When your heartbeat changes to get ready to run away from a tiger, there's a magnetic field around your heart, shaped like a donut, and it's tipped eight degrees to the left, and you can measure this. This isn't the woo-woo side of things. This is hard physics. And if there's the electrical current, it makes a magnetic field. We also have proven that mitochondria are sensitive to magnetic fields. That means that they're listening to your heart. And when you're ready to run, your heartbeat changes predictably. And if they're getting that signal and they're getting neuropeptides of stress, They're going to be like, screw recovery, screw repair, who cares about cancer? There's a tiger here, it's going to.

Eat me, cancer doesn't matter. It doesn't know, it's just your imagination that you think your spouse is having.

An affair, which may not be true. You still get the same response. Exactly, and if that's running the show, your body will naturally make sure that you stay alive right now and not worry about preventing death 20 years from now because hey, if you miss this one, the one down the road doesn't matter. And if you realize they're dumb, they're little bacteria, they care about three things, Mark. this is mitochondria. Number one, run away from kill or hide from scary things because if you miss that one, it's game over. The petri dish is dead. Okay. Number two, eat everything. Because otherwise, if you don't eat within a month, you're going to starve to death. And maybe that's not true for us, but that's what they think. They're dumb little bacteria. So the algorithm is eat everything. This is why if someone puts a plate of cookies in front of you, it's really hard not to think about the cookies. They just keep calling to you.

They're actually not calling to you.

It's your Mitochondria going, Hey, is that food?

Hey, is that food? Eat it, eat it, eat it. Although, I believe if you change your brain chemistry and your hormones, that it won't really look like food anymore. I walk by the Starbucks caray of pastries, those cakes and scones and donuts and muffins, and I'm like, it doesn't look like food. Even if I'm hungry, I'm like, oh.

That doesn't look like food. It's a rock.

Why would I eat a rock? You are absolutely, absolutely correct. I used to want to eat it. I used to go to the airport when I was traveling around, and you.

Can sneak around and buy a Cinnabon when no one was looking, and I'd get the one with nuts because I.

Thought I was healthier. We've had such a similar path.

I used to have these cravings like, I've got willpower. I forget willpower comes from mitochondria. It's energy, right? I've got willpower, but every time you say no to these, you're using a little bit of willpower till you run.

Out and then I'll just have half the cookie, right?

And then you feel like a bad person. Well, you're using science, not willpower, to fix the problem. What happens with me now, the same thing.

You look at that and I'm like, those don't make me feel good. Those aren't food. And I would never eat one.

I would rather eat nothing.

Eat it if I wanted to. I'm not gonna go, I'm not gonna eat if I want to, but it doesn't attract me. The desire is gone. And it's sort of striking and sometimes if I get eating a little too much chocolate and sugar, then it starts, oh, that might be interesting to eat.

And then I stop and I'm like, it goes away. So it's all hormones and biology. It really is. I can tell you in the last 10 years, there's one time I've had grains and it was actually when we were hanging out, Mark, in Greece at Vishan Lachyan's event. And we're on some little Greek island and there's a guy at a little guest house and he said, Here's some baklava. It was made by my grandmother from local wheat and honey. Like, you know, I'm eating that. I took some charcoal with it.

I felt great the next day.

It's fine. In Europe, it's better, right? It is. But that sort of thing to be willing and acceptance, but just to not.

See it that way, it's mitochondrial. Yeah, it's so true. Okay, so now let's get into one of our favorite topics, which is fat. I love fat. We love fat. And it's very relevant to the mitochondria. So tell us how you sort of came to figure out that MCT oil which is this derivative of coconut oil that has superpowers for your mitochondria. How did you figure that out and.

Tell us why we should use it? Well, mitochondria can burn three different energy sources. They can burn sugar, and they love to do that because it's quick and easy and dirty and leaves a lot of exhaust.

A lot of exhaust, meaning it leaves oxidative stress and free radicals that causes inflammation and aging. So it's like, Dirty fuel.

Dirty fuel, exactly. And they can actually burn protein, which is a horrible thing to do for energy. You want to use protein as a building block, but if you eat a high protein diet like I did in the 90s, what happens is they can break this down, but talk about metabolic disaster. It leaves even more dirt than sugar does. So enough protein to restore all your cells, build strong muscles, strong bones, healthy skin, super important. Excessive protein without any, either fat or carbs, really bad for you. and then they can burn fat. But most of the time, they're not trained to burn fat. So you end up in this situation where if you eat fat, you don't really use it, especially because you're usually eating it in the form of a donut.

And when you eat fat with sugar, it's deadly.

Exactly.

We call that sweet fat.

It doesn't work at all. So what's left then is this diet that started out in about the year I was born, the Atkins diet, was the first modern diet that had ketosis involved. Ketosis is this period where your body says, oh, in order to stay alive, I have to burn fat. Let me get good at it. And this is a state that's been known for thousands of years because every meditation tradition has this period of fasting. And when you stop eating for four days, the body is like- your brain turns on. Yeah, you're like, I feel so good. And now you can experience oneness with the universe and you can meditate effectively and it actually works. The problem is that It's kind of hard to hold down a job and take care of your kids if you're not eating at all for long periods of time and living in a monastery. So, the original version of hack. Right. It was like, let's eat bacon and pork rinds and artificial sweeteners, which was the original Atkins diet. And you know what? I lost half of my 100 pounds on that diet in the early 90s. And then, of course, gained it back. You gain it back and you can't lose the other half because you're toxic and you don't feel good. So, what happened is I started running an anti-aging nonprofit group in the San Francisco Bay Area in Silicon Valley. and I started meeting all these experts in metabolism years ahead of their time and having them do presentations for the public. This was the first group to import coconut oil into the US after it was banned. And we had found some studies that said coconut oil is really a powerful thing. And coconut oil is about 52% of this thing called MCT oil. And there's four classes of MCT oil. It turns out that the cheapest and most abundant MCT oil doesn't have this ability to turn into ketones for your body to burn. but about 15% of the fat found in coconut oil has that ability. And 5% of the fat, the most precious 5%, is able to dramatically elevate the ketones in your body, which means if you eat coconut oil, it's better than a lot of other oils, but it's not going to put you in ketosis any more than eight hours of fasting. And that's a study from UC San Diego that found that out. But the stuff we use in Brain Octane, which is that most rare form of MCT, Brain Octane is a bulletproof product. That stuff is able to raise ketones four times more than coconut oil. And what this means is that if you're eating a low carb but not a no carb diet and you put some of that stuff in your bulletproof coffee, you pour it on your salad, put it in your smoothie, the way I do, I do it three times a day, you always have ketones circulating in your body. And when ketones are present, your mitochondria, they're dumb little bacteria, they're like, Hey, I got fat. I've got energy from whatever else you're eating, some carbs from your vegetables. I'm gonna have some CTL right now. There you go. And this came about, no one knew that brain octane was better. There was no university research, but I experimented with the different ones to figure out why normal MCT oil was giving me, we called it disaster pants, it was so common in the early days. Great for constipation.

Exactly.

And brain octane oil didn't do that, but more I got a really strong mental edge from that that I didn't get from the other forms of MCT. and that was why we built that into the recipe for Bulletproof. And then research came out years after we started and basically saying, oh, it does raise ketones four times more. But here's the lesson for everyone listening, Mark. It's that if you feel a difference, it's okay to believe what you feel and notice from your food, right? I did not have any data. I made a decision based on, oh, I ran a self-experiment. I felt a difference. I'm gonna do what works. And if you apply that to your food in your life, and if your doctor or your friend or your nutritionist or some online guru says, this food's good for you, and you eat it and you do what they said and you feel like crap, it's okay to do something different and doesn't make you a bad person.

I always say the smartest doctor in the room is your own body. Amen. And listen to your body, because it's going to tell you what works and doesn't. Yeah, so the keto thing is fascinating because there's a whole spate of books out there now on ketogenic diets. There's a whole spate of books on intermittent fasting. and fasting. So this is a whole merging area that's really getting a lot of attention. And I'm seeing this in the medical world, we're looking at it for epilepsy, for autism, for Alzheimer's, for diabetes, for cancer even, and having dramatic effects. And it's really the body switching from sugar burning to fat burning. And when you do that, it burns cleaner. Your mitochondria love it. It actually does all the anti-aging stuff, which is so cool. Building your stem cells, reducing inflammation, increasing your antioxidant enzymes, building muscle, increasing bone density, it's pretty striking and improving your cognitive function, even your sex drive, all improve when you switch to this, which is something we've been doing for literally millions of years because we didn't have grocery stores. We had to like hunt and gather.

And if we had a bad day, we'd have to be able to function. The ketogenic trend is interesting. The original Bulletproof Diet book had a section on intermittent fasting and how you could use brain octane or MCT or a fat-only breakfast to increase the rate of ketosis during a fast. So you're not technically fasting because there's some calories, but there's no insulin, no protein, and things like that. And the problem is during the research for that, I ate a lot of different foods. I tested a lot of things on myself, and I went into extreme ketosis. for three months straight. And this is when you basically don't eat very many carbs at all.

Less than 50 grams or 30 grams.

Of carbs a day. Yeah, I said, I'm going to do one serving of broccoli a day. I want to eat like an Eskimo. So I'm eating just tons of fat and protein. And you know what I- you-'d be eating moss if you ate a- yeah, I would be eating moss, right? Well, here's what happened. I developed allergies to eggs, which are an amazing superfood. And I developed allergies to almonds, which I didn't have before. And so what happened? Well, if you go into ketosis and you stay in ketosis in that you have less than 15 or 30 grams of carbs a day where your body naturally produces these ketones, your gut bacteria get wrecked, like completely wrecked. And they don't make something called butyric acid, which is required for you to make energy. In fact, it also raises ketosis, it turns out. So I ended up coming out with a recommendation there that says be encyclical ketosis. And this matters even more for women than for men. which means you can be in ketosis for a week. You can accelerate it using the brain octane and things like that. Or you can do it without any of that stuff or just with plain coconut oil. But the deal is after you go in, you need to go out and come back in. Why are you doing that? It's because the body likes cycles and because your gut bacteria will completely slay your mitochondria. Here's what happens if you only eat fat and protein, which some people try to do for months on end, and.

They have to dig themselves out of fiber because that's what your Gut bacteria live on, yeah.

And fiber comes from plant foods. It's fiber. And your gut bacteria, they talk to other bacteria like your mitochondria. And when they're unhappy, they make something called LPS or lipopolysaccharide. And when you eat a high fat diet, fat escorts lipopolysaccharide past the lining of the gut. All fat or just certain fats? It turns out all fats will do it, but saturated fats, specifically the long chain saturated fats, will do it even more. But it also just so happens that this amazing extract of coconut oil that might go by the name of Brain Octane protects the liver from lipopolysaccharides. And one of the reasons I put that in the Bulletproof Coffee recipe was, well, if you do have this going on in your gut and it does go through, at least like there's an oil that is shown in a study to provide a benefit. And that said, you want to have healthy gut bacteria that don't make these toxins because those toxins are direct mitochondrial poisons. so if your gut bacteria are off, they will make your body's mitochondria also be off. So we talk about toxins from other sources.

That's why the idea of intermittent fasting is a cool idea, because it's cyclical, right? We used to call it breakfast. Break the fast. You're not supposed to eat after dinner and don't eat until breakfast, 14 hours, 16 hour fast. But we don't do that anymore. We eat all night, we have bedtime snacks, we eat first thing in the.

Morning, and we don't give our body a chance to repair and recover. And it seems to do a lot of the same things. It is shocking what happens and I would encourage anyone listening, if you've never tried an intermittent fast, it means eat before the sun goes down and then skip breakfast and have a light lunch. In the morning, you can have just black coffee or tea or you can do it with Bulletproof coffee without any protein, without any sugar or any artificial sweetener. And when you do it either way...

It's no Bulletproof mocha, huh?

There's a chocolate, but if you put much chocolate in there, you're gonna get some carbs and you want no carbs. you want your insulin to your body to say, oh, I've got no energy from sugar, no energy from protein whatsoever. Therefore, what do I do with all this? I'm going to do my own system repair. And what you're going to find is you weren't hungry. You didn't completely crash and want the muffin at 10:00 a.m. In fact, you probably really like your day. And I'd also encourage you, do not do this every single day, especially if you're a woman.

Do this a couple of times, two, three times a week. You don't have to do it every day. It's fasting. I don't know if you know the work on fasting mimicking fasting diets. Oh, absolutely. It's fascinating work, which is sponsored by the NIH, spend tens of millions of dollars looking at this. And what they do is put people on a fast for a short period of time, basically very low calorie diet where you go into ketosis. And if you do it once a month or every couple of months, it has profound lasting effects on your biology.

In terms of reversing diabetes, weight loss, anti-aging stuff. I just, I love it that we finally spent $10 million on something that wasn't a drug. I came up with something called the Bulletproof Rapid Fat Loss Protocol and it's on the website and it says how to lose weight faster than you're supposed to. And the risk of rapid weight loss is that your fat cells in your body contain a lot of toxins, mercury, pesticides, things like that. And if you lose weight really rapidly.

The way I have a couple of times in my life, you can get.

Really good brain fog from that. Brain fog and it poisons your thyroid and there's all kinds of nasty stuff and you hit a plateau. Exactly, so you have to bind toxins during it. But it was really funny because I did not know about the NIH research and all that stuff and it's not the same as that but the idea is low calorie ketosis for bursts of time and then you stop.

Yeah.

And that stuff, it has merit. And just if you're listening to this and you have like I did 100 pounds or 50 pounds of weight to lose, it's not supposed to cause you pain to lose the weight. It's not supposed to be hard. You're not supposed to be hungry. If you do this right, what happens is you just have to buy new pants every three weeks. Like that's it.

And you're like, wow, this is amazing. I had a patient complaining to me, Dr. Hyman, I'm really upset with you.

Why?

Well, I keep losing so much weight, I have to keep buying new clothes.

Yeah, Mark, you and I should invest in like Dockers and Levi's, right? Just because I'm telling you, I have bought so many pairs of pants and also one of the great moments in my life was when I looked on the shelf in my closet, I'm like, I have all these fat pants. Because I always go up two or four inches. I've gone from a 46 to a 34 waist. There you go. But I have been a 34 waist for the past four years without any variance.

Yeah, I feel like I've been a 34 waist since I met you. You look younger, healthier, better. fitter, more muscular. Your Skin's better.

I mean, it's pretty impressive to see. It's like, whatever he's doing is working. Well, the stuff in headstrong, mitochondrial support, ketosis, collagen protein, brain octane, bulletproof coffee.

Cyclical ketosis, all those things. When you stack them up. Yeah, man, I can't even believe how I feel. I'm 45. So great. I'm 58, and I'm like, I'm working on it. You're looking good.

So I I have a couple more questions.

I want to shift gears a little bit. Two more questions. One is. And this is an inflammatory question.

Is it fried?

No, it's vegan. Can you be a healthy vegan? Yes or no?

I was a raw vegan. I can make the best raw vegan cheesecake and raw vegan everything possible. I really want to tell you that you could live on gravel. And that, because I think, imagine this, even the plants wouldn't suffer if you ate just gravel. but it doesn't work. I mean, are there some people who it works for?

Because you see guys like Rich Roll and he's like an ultra-marathoner. He's an ultra-marathoner. It's a movie game-changer's coming out where.

You see all these elite athletes who are vegans. How does that work? Well, it's interesting. And doesn't Rich Roll talk a lot about joint pain and how he deals with muscle pain and other things that are signs of mitochondrial dysfunction? I don't know, does he? Yeah, he's mentioned this. And having been a very focused very well-educated, raw vegan, and then even in a raw omnivore for a while before I did the whole Bulletproof thing, I have seen thousands of people, including myself, who were made ill by a vegan diet. So do you need to eat a ton of vegetables in order to be healthy? Actually, you do. It's absolutely required. Should you avoid industrial meat like the plague? Yes, you should. And this is where the vegan diet has it absolutely right. Will you live as long as possible and feel as good as possible? If you eat a lot of protein, even if it's grass-fed, you will not. Because a high meat or high animal protein or a high vegetable protein diet, frankly, is bad for you. You need to be on a low to moderate protein diet. The real problem with a vegan approach is that it's the fat. You do not get saturated fat. At least have some butter on your vegetables. Like broccoli evolves to hold butter. Coconut oil doesn't have the same types of fat. It doesn't have conjugated linoleic acid.

Our cells are not made out of coconut oil.

Lauric acid, that's out of butter. That's where lauric acid comes from. Yeah, it's named for that. So you need some of that stuff. And I gave a talk at David Wolfe's conference who's a well-known vegan and I talked about how animals support soil and if you're eating, say, ghee, even just adding ghee to a vegan diet, it helps you absorb these polyphenols, these colored compounds from your vegetables so you get more from the vegetables you eat. You can honor Mother Nature. honor animals. I live on a 32 acre farm. I grow all of my own food, which is mostly vegetables, and we have two pigs, one named a brussel snout, and four sheep. And you don't have to eat a lot of meat. And I eat a good amount of sustainable salmon that swims by my house. I'm pretty fortunate. Go down to the river and grab it. Right, but ethics matters, animal cruelty matters. Do not eat industrial meat ever. It is bad for you. Should you occasionally eat some animal protein, I think for most people there's a case for that. And should you have some fat on your vegetables that isn't just coconut oil to live the longest, feel the best, have the best hormones, it actually works better than vegan. Yes, be a butter vegan if you're going to be a vegan. You will like your life more.

Okay, last question. You are traveling on the frontiers of health and the exploration of human biology, human capacity, human resilience. human potential. What are you seeing as you explore this territory and the outer reaches of our knowledge? What are the things ahead that you're excited about that you want to give us a little glimpse into what might be? It doesn't have to be proven yet, but what are you seeing ahead that we should be paying attention to?

About three years ago, I started something called 40 Years of Zen, which is a computer-assisted neurofeedback driven five-day personal development retreat. But instead of using, sitting in a cave and meditating and fasting, which by the way, I've done that as well in Tibet and Nepal and the Andes, like I've traveled the world to learn from the masters on those things because they matter so much. I can tell you I've never seen anything like what Focus Neurofeedback tied with meditation and forgiveness and quantifying those things. so you can sit down and say, I want to let go of that anger I hold towards my mom or my dad or my ex-spouse or whatever the thing is, and to do that with what's basically a lie detector that tells you when you do it. And I see people every week just experiencing huge heart openings with measurable changes in their brainwaves. And here's the scary thing. Most of us are, we have a huge amount of energy going into making brainwaves, and they're not useful brainwaves. It's energy that's basically kind of sloshing around in there. And now we're to the point to the point where you can learn to put the energy that's in your brain, this is energy that comes from that food you put in your mouth. And if it's going into brainwaves that are disordered from an untrained brain, you could spend 25 years in a monastery, or you could actually spend a couple weeks with some focused practice based on neuroscience, and you see the power levels shift. So the stuff that isn't doing anything stops, and the stuff that actually makes you more of who you are goes up. I think, Mark, we're on the cusp of being able to reverse PTSD, reverse old trauma, and give people substantial improvements in their IQ, but more importantly, in their level of internal peace. And it does start with energy from food. That's why Bulletproof is my biggest. We have to disrupt big food and to get the stuff that makes us feel good in. But once you have enough energy, what are you gonna do with it? Well, maybe you should apply it to your brain to turn on happiness, turn on gratitude, and turn on fear and all that. We can do that. And the science is happening right now.

Now.

It's the coolest time ever to be alive.

That's pretty amazing. So, I meditate 20 minutes twice a day. That would mean I'd have to live to be 400 to get the benefit of this. Amazing. So, we have to not only train our mitochondria, we also not have to just create health in our biology, but in our brains we know how to actually access this through different doorways like neurofeedback and Zen.

You've always known this because I know you show up in the world. I know about the work you've done with Paul Farmer at your non-profit work. There's a love, there's an energy, a gratitude, a vitality that we bring to the world when we show up all the way. You've had this ever since I've known you.

Thank you.

I think that all of us have this in us and it's hidden and it's hard to access and there isn't a power for it. But when you turn that on, we're right at the cusp of being able to take someone who's really pretty damn miserable and saying, you, know what? Let's fix your diet. Let's get your nutrients in order. Let's remove the toxins. And then let's show your brain how to be happy.

And it's actually a learnable skill instead of something that just happens to the lucky few. So true. So much of our suffering is related to how we care for our organism that doesn't allow us to thrive and be present and connected. So beautiful. All right, so last question. If you were king for a day and you could change anything in the.

World about health or food or the policies we have, what would you do? If I could change anything about our policies, I would allow people who make food or gadgets or anything else to talk about the science behind what they do.

Right? You mean they have to prove that it's safe and effective?

Oh, well, right now it turns out that as a company, as at least the CEO of a company that manufactures food, I am not allowed to cite some of the scientific research that shows that the things I make are better for you than junk food full of sugar. And how can we live in a place with free speech where it's not okay to publish a study that says, for instance, cherries help with heart attacks, according to one study. There was a company that sold cherries from their orchard and said, oh, look at this cool study. And they totally got shut down for that.

But you can call crap happy meals that makes you happy.

Exactly. So I would like us to have freedom of speech for people and companies to say, Here's what we know about this today. You can make your own judgment, but at least here's what we know.

So transparency.

Transparency in our science and transparency.

I love that. Okay. Well, Dave, thank you for sharing your wisdom, your knowledge, your expertise, your heart, your soul with us. It's been an extraordinary conversation here in the doctor's pharmacy.

Thank you, Mark. Thanks for your work in the world.

Thank you. Thank you all for listening. if you like this podcast, please share this with your friends and family, leave a review, really matters to us, and you can subscribe on iTunes or wherever else you subscribe to your podcast. And we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy. Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad free. With Hyman Plus on Apple Podcasts, you can enjoy every episode without any breaks. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap Try Free to start your seven-day free trial.