"I Did This To REVERSE MY AGE & Reduce Inflammation!" | Dave Asprey & Mark Hyman

Inflammation is always caused by the power plants in our body called the mitochondria. And by fixing those, you fix your brain, you fix your body, you change how you look, you get new pants, you get everything. I weighed 300 pounds in my early 20s and I started having really good success in my career and I started having more and more problems with my brain where I just couldn't remember things and they weren't working. And after 20 years and a million dollars spent hacking myself, It comes down to the fact that I had muffin top, but I also had muffin top in my brain.

Ah. And it was just- what's that?

Muffin top is that unfortunate thing that kind of hangs over, but it's all caused by inflammation. And when I went into the science, inflammation is always caused by the power plants in our body called the mitochondria. And by fixing those, you fix your brain, you fix your body, you change how you look, you get new pants, you get everything, and fats at the center of that.

So what happened to your brain? You had cognitive issues, but it was more than that. You really had brain damage.

I did. It turns out I lived in a house that had water damage, which had caused toxic mold to grow. And when I got a SPECT scan from Dr. Daniel Amen, which looks at what parts of your brain are working, they found no metabolic activity in the front of my brain, the part that makes you human, when I tried to concentrate. So here I was walking around feeling like a failure, I was fat and I wasn't eating. I would be on a low calorie, low fat diet and I stayed fat no matter what I did and I was just so tired. And it was the mission that says, this is unacceptable. I don't want to live my life this way. I will do anything. And it turns out the secret was, well, don't have toxins in the environment around you. And also you have to eat a lot of undamaged fat. And when I did that and made some other changes, like even more vegetables.

Than seems sane, suddenly everything got easy. I love that. More vegetables than seems sane. That's the amount we should eat?

Pretty much.

So, when you discovered this lack of blood flow in your brain, it must have sort of hit the light bulb for you, which is it's not an emotional problem, it's not a psychological problem, it was a physical problem that was causing your broken brain.

It was really scary because they also said I was at high risk of stroke and heart attacks. My blood was really, really sticky, my inflammation markers were off the charts. And until then, I had felt like I'm a bit of a failure. Like, I've been pushing really hard, I'm succeeding in my career, but I have the accelerator pressed all the way down and I'm slowing down, not going faster. All my willpower is at work, but it's not working anymore. That was the scary part. And that understanding, this is a hardware problem inside me. It wasn't about how hard I tried. It was about just physical stuff. All of a sudden, that's something you can hack. You can fix that. But if it's you who's weak, you're not gonna fix that.

Yeah, and that really speaks to this phenomena that's out there in our culture, which is that people blame themselves when they're not focused, when they're depressed, when they have no energy, when they can't sleep, they go, there must be something wrong with me. And you had tremendous willpower. You started businesses, you were running big companies. But even though you had your foot to the accelerator, you really couldn't function because you hadn't figured out what's really underneath it. So, Dave, you're really a brain expert, not by choice, but because you had to be. And, you know, we talk about the brain, but most of us don't really have a clear idea of actually what's going on in there. And there are a lot of myths about brain and brain function. Could you talk about some of those myths?

The biggest myth about brain power is that it's a function of willpower and trying. It's not. Different people have brains wired differently. But everything that happens in your brain, every neuron that fires, whether they grow or don't grow, comes down to something called a mitochondria. These are ancient.

That's a big word.

It's a big word. But it's just ancient power plants. These are ancient bacteria that became part of our body and they decide whether your brain has power or doesn't have power. So the way to make your brain work better is to have more energy, to make these parts of the brain that support your neurons, that support all the other parts of the brain. to make them stronger. And you do that with the environment around you by eating the right foods. These guys, they're made out of fat. You gotta have the right fats in order to do this.

Yeah, it just reminds me of one of our guests on the Broken Brain documentary series, Dr. Suzanne Goh, who has discovered that mitochondrial dysfunction is at the root of many kids with autism. And that by optimizing these power plants in these kids' brains, you're able to take the most severely damaged brains and get these kids to wake up by understanding the mitochondria, these power plants, and actually optimizing them.

It's not just those kids, Mark. Until my mid-20s, I had all the symptoms of Asperger's syndrome. It runs in my family. I have PhD scientists going back generations. And I really can't put words to what happened when I turned my mitochondria on all the way. The reason it matters so much for our brains is that our brain has the most mitochondria in each cell. There's like 15,000 power plants per cell, and the rest of you might have a thousand power plants per cell. So you feel it up here as soon as you do anything that gives you a better power system in the body. And what drives your willpower? The power system. What drives your heart, the power system. What drives your ability to love or to think or to focus. It's all about electricity that's formed by this tiny part in your cells. And I wrote Headstrong, my book, about what happens, what are the things you can do to support your energy. So you'll feel it in your head first, but it'll spread through the rest of your body. And I don't have the 300 pound body anymore, and I don't have the inability to focus or make eye contact or the other things like that. It's a profound difference. 48% of people under age 40 and everyone over age 40 has a weakness in their brain that comes from their mitochondria. It is eminently fixable as long as you do the right things.

Yeah, so what's powerful here is that it's a hopeful message. We have these mitochondria, we're messing them up, and we can fix them. And it's linked to almost every known disease. In fact, it's the fundamental phenomena of aging. Linked to Alzheimer's, to Parkinson's, to depression, to chronic fatigue, to all sorts of cognitive issues, ADD, autism, Asperger's, all these things that we think are fixed brain disorders.

You're suggesting something pretty radical, which is they're really not fixed that you can actually Fix them. You can fix them. The cool thing about these power plants in your cells, there's a quadrillion of them in your body and they all talk to each other and they're designed so that the ones that are weak can die and be replaced by fresh ones. All you have to do is send them a signal that says, Hey, it's time to straighten up here. And when you do that, they make more energy for you. And that's what I did. And that's how I can start companies that grow big and I can be a good parent and I can do all the things I do because I regenerated that part of me.

It's amazing. So let's talk about the two parts of what we need to know to fix our mitochondria, which is one, what are the things that harm them? What are the poisons for mitochondria?

And two, what are the things that optimize your mitochondria? It's fantastic that you went in the right order there, Mark. The first thing to do is stop.

Doing the things that make you weak.

It sounds obvious, but- Brain kryptonite, you call it. Yeah, it's exactly what it says in Headstrong. And the idea is that if you are used to carrying around a hundred pound barbell, I'm gonna get strong so I can carry another one. But what if you just set that one down? You'd have a lot of strength. And that's the equivalent of getting rid of toxins. And one of the biggest toxins that affects your mitochondria is damaged vegetable oils, fried foods, and other things that are pretty commonly known toxins like mercury directly impacts these. And what I discovered is that there are classes of compounds made by mother nature that impact your mitochondria as well. For instance, vegetables don't want you to eat their babies. Okay. Certain types of things like whole grains, the outer part of the whole grain, has chemicals in it that directly slow down your ability to make energy. And that's supposed to tell us not to eat the whole grains, but well, we might have made a few mistakes. So there's definitely classes of things like that, but the one that's most scary is prescription drugs. The majority of prescription drugs cause damage to these batteries in our cells, No wonder you have less energy if you get hooked on the prescription drugs. Like what? Metformin, antidepressants, and almost all antibiotics.

And antibiotics are basically to kill bugs, and your mitochondria are ancient bugs that.

You'Ve kind of hijacked to make your energy. It makes a lot of sense when you put it that way, but to this very day, we're dealing with people who get cancer and diabetes and Alzheimer's disease, which are mitochondrial problems. Absolutely. And they get it after taking prescription drugs for other things.

Yeah. It's a part of the problem. It's not the only cause. Yeah.

The other thing to understand is...

There's one more drug you didn't mention, which is used by millions and millions and millions of Americans. Which drug would that be?

Statins. I can't believe I missed statin drugs. Statins are well documented, probably the most.

Documented, to cause harm to mitochondria. And it's not a side effect, it's.

An effect of the drug, which is to block your energy production. Yeah, and somehow that's supposed to be good because it changes a variable that doesn't cause heart disease. So getting people off statin drugs is a very effective thing to do. But it's really scary because we've been programmed to believe that if we eat the fat that our battery system is built out of and we stop taking statins that we'll die. That's a lie. It just doesn't work like that. And when you get high functioning mitochondria in your cells, what you end up with is a body that's resilient and resistant to every type of degenerative disease that we get. You also immediately reduce your cravings, you turn your brain on, you can focus, And when you have enough energy in the power plants in your cells, we are wired as human beings to be nice and kind to each other. But you will not do that if the cells in your body are in a lacking state. You've got to be well fed so.

You can be everything you can be. That's right. I mean, most people walking around with what I call FLC syndrome, that's when you feel like crap. I was there. And I had the same thing. I was mercury poisoned and it totally nuked my mitochondria. My muscles hurt, my brain wouldn't work, I had no energy. everything went south. And what happened was I even had damaged muscles so that my muscle enzymes increased called CPK, which is a pretty unusual effect of it. And it was really sort of catastrophic for my health. And by fixing the mercury issue and by optimizing my mitochondria, my numbers went to normal and I got my life back.

It's amazing. Here you are, it's one of the big names in functional medicine. this happens to you, the same thing happens to me and to thousands and thousands of other people that I interact with online. I did everything I could with normal Western medicine and it had no effect on my weight, no effect on the constant muscle pain, all those things. It was only when I turned to a more holistic approach where we're looking at the system of the human body that I was able to get rid of the toxins and then figure out what's going on and then turn up the volume on my energy and suddenly the things that have been lifelong problems, multi-generational actually in my family, they went away.

Yeah, and there are different people who have more susceptibility to mitochondrial issues. I did, I found a gene that I had that made me more susceptible, but you can actually fix that by optimizing the way your genes are turned on or off and by dealing with this mitochondrial issue.

You can, it's interesting that these power plants in your cells come from your mom and your grandma, and so on and so forth, only from the maternal lineage. So if you look at your mom's family, and there's a bunch of sick people, and you look at your grandma, and there's a bunch of sick people, well, then you know that you probably have something going on there, and you can get a genetic test to see what's going on with your mitochondrial DNA, but you don't have to. What you want to do is the same thing that works for people who don't have those things. Expose yourself to less toxins, eat more of the right kinds of fat, and don't eat junk food, don't eat processed food, and don't eat sugar, grains, corn syrup, artificial colorings, super sweet and esparto and Monsanto's general set of things and you will feel amazing. Yeah, it's powerful.

So you hit upon a lot of things that are actually poisoning the mitochondria. Environmental toxins, they're called metals like lead, mercury, persistent organic pollutants, which are all the chemicals we're exposed to. Anything that drives inflammation, mostly sugar and processed food, are refined oils, right? These are powerful things that we're exposed to every day that we have no awareness of. And the sad thing is that this is the future of medicine. And yet most doctors, when you go to them say, you know, I don't know what's causing this, or they'll say, I don't even know about mitochondria. I don't know how to diagnose mitochondrial problems. I don't know how to treat mitochondrial problems. But there's a huge science around this, right? So you talk a lot about that in your book and you help us.

Understand that this is not just some crazy idea. This is actually the future of how we're going to be treating patients. It's the future of how we're going to treat patients because mitochondria are the uniting element that explains everything that's happening because all inflammation comes from mitochondria. There's no other source of it. So if you get to the very root of it, when you make some simple changes, everything can get better all at once instead of this ancient view, I'll work on just the kidney, I'll work on just the knee, I'll work on just heart disease. If you fix our disease and cause cancer, which is also mitochondrial at the same time, some common large research organizations that we know about are doing. It doesn't work. You have to do everything. And the only way to do everything is to go down to the root cause. And the root cause is your body is not converting food and oxygen into energy for you to go out and be who you're capable of being. And we can fix that now because we understand that system. It is hackable.

Yeah, that's true. You mentioned food and oxygen, which is really what your mitochondria do. They take oxygen and food and produce energy that runs every system in your body. But you talk about something very interesting which is EOMD and that's not a form of sexual dysfunction. It's actually a real thing that we can actually understand by looking at little kids. A little two-year-old is running around like crazy, never stops, always curious, someone who's 80 is sitting in a chair not doing anything and that's because of their mitochondria. It is. So what is early onset mitochondrial dysfunction?

This is something that definitely affected me even since I was a kid. And it's what happens when you're old, when you're young. You start making energy like an 80-year-old when you're five or 10 or 15 or anytime under 40. And half of people under 40 now have this problem. It's like when you get a new phone, you make calls on it all day, and when you're ready for bed, there's still battery left. This is so amazing. And six months later, after you've charged it a few times, it's dead by three o'clock, just like you. It's the same thing. It's actually using the same kind of electrons that our bodies use. It gets them from a different source. Well, what if you could fix that? And even better yet, my goal, this is going to sound big, is I believe it's possible for me to live to at least 180 years old.

All right, I'm down with that. I'm coming to your birthday party. All right.

See? I love that. It's probably possible. And the secret to doing that is causing my mitochondria to die when they're weak so they'll grow new ones and giving them all the raw materials they need to make healthy, strong, amazing mitochondria and not doing the things that damage them regularly. By doing that and all the other anti-aging things that I've been doing for 20 years, maybe I'll only make 140.

But I'm gonna die trying. That's great. So you mentioned all the things you can actually do to actually resurrect your mitochondria, to help them work better, to build more of them, to make them more efficient. What are those things that you've learned actually that are most effective?

One of the simple things that makes me happy is that it doesn't cost anything. Every morning you take your shower, the end of the shower, turn the water all the way to cold and let it hit you in the face and chest. And you'll last maybe 10 seconds the first time. But if you just stick with this and you do it every day for about four days after the fourth day, you'll be able to do it for 30 seconds and it stops being painful and it starts actually feeling good. And the reason for that is for those first four days, all your weak mitochondria are screaming, We're gonna die, we're gonna die.

And all you have to do is.

Go, Yes, you are. And you'll be replaced with your strong mitochondria that can make heat when they need to. It sounds like a small thing, but your whole day is better. And the other thing to do is go into cyclical ketosis. And those are big words, but what that means is occasionally eat so little carbohydrate and protein and lots of the good kinds of fat, that your body goes into fat burning mode. This is going to sound crazy, but we measure energy in calories. And fat has more calories than sugar. So when you burn fat, all that extra energy goes into your mitochondria and.

They dance a little party. They run better on fat than carbohydrates, which is what we think. We need carbohydrates for fuel, for energy. Right. Right. But it's actually not true. In fact, I went to Cornell and my roommate was a PhD student in nutrition and now he's a professor at University of Buffalo and he studying mitochondria. And he told me, Mark, you know what we discovered was in athletes, extreme athletes, that if you actually substitute fat.

For carbohydrates, the mitochondria work much better. In fact, they prefer fat. The number of endurance and extreme athletes doing Bulletproof Coffee is amazing. Bulletproof Coffee uses an oil called Brain Octane Oil that directly turns into this fat-burning molecule that not only do endurance athletes and our brains love, It's the neurons in your head. If they have a choice between sugar and this kind of fat at the same time, they will eat the fat first. It's so important. But you will never have this kind of fat burning molecule in the body unless you go on a four-day fast, an extreme low-carb diet, or you use an external source like the brain octane.

Oil that's part of Bulletproof Coffee. Yeah, I want to get more into that because there's ways of tricking and hacking in a sense. body into a fasting mimicking state.

Right.

And there was a guy who read about recently, you might have heard about this, who was a Mount Everest guide and he'd summited Mount Everest many times but he always needed oxygen and he was always using those goos and those sugar and glucose things to get his energy up and he was very fit but it was using the wrong fuel source and he decided he would try a ketogenic diet and he was able.

To climb Mount Everest without oxygen for the first time. You'll see multiple photos of Bulletproof Coffee at Mount Everest Base Camp because lots of climbers are doing this. When you're in ketosis, you have so much ability to burn oxygen and food that all of a sudden it doesn't matter if there's less oxygen because you have more capacity as a human being. I've been able to get zero altitude sickness when I do things that involve increasing mitochondrial function instead of just pounding sugar or just doing what I used to do 20 years ago when I'd go to high altitude, which was I'm just gonna feel like crap. You don't have to feel like crap when you're at work or when you're at the top of Everest. What you want to do is have more energy and that's the antidote to feeling like crap.

So what's interesting is that, you know, we've found that calorie restriction prolongs life. Yes. But it'll make you grumpy and depressed and hungry, which doesn't sound like much fun. Not much of a life. So there's a way to sort of bypass that calorie restriction and create the same effects that lead to longevity. And there was just an article in.

The Journal of the American Medical Association.

About this, which talked about intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating.

Can you talk about how that works? Intermittent fasting sounds like kind of a technical thing and it's probably got the wrong name. But here's the deal. You eat the same amount of food every day you were going to eat. You just don't spread it out into lots of small meals. Small meals really stress out these power plants in your cells because they need time to go into rest and repair mode. And if they're constantly in get food, get food, get food, you don't get to do the work. So what you do is you wake up in the morning, you don't eat anything until a late lunch and you have a big late lunch, big dinner, then you go to bed and you don't do it again until the next day. It turns out for 18 hours a day you don't eat and for most people, not eating, I'm going to die. Except it's not like that. Because you're getting enough food and enough of the right kinds of fat and you remove the kryptonite that causes all these cravings, what happens is you feel amazing. And the hack for that that works really well is in the morning, if you have only fat with no protein and no sugar, you can feel no hunger whatsoever. Like Bulletproof Coffee. That's why it's so popular.

It's quite amazing. I've done it and it works. And I think that it doesn't create the sense of hunger or starvation. It just makes you focus.

I write my books doing that, so it really helps. You do too. I've written all of my books doing Bulletproof Coffee. And there's special coffee beans, there's brain octane oil that converts into this fat-burning molecule called ketone and then there's grass-fed butter instead of milk. Because get this, milk protein is one of the things that can cause mitochondrial harm. So avoiding milk protein for many, many people is important and some people handle it okay, but for me, no, you got to take that out.

Yeah, amazing. So there's this process that happens when you do this time-restricted eating, which is called autophagy, which basically means eating yourself. And it actually allows your body to clean up all the waste, recycle all the bad stuff, and supercharge the mitochondria to make new ones and actually do all the things that actually help promote aging. And you talk about this thing called mTOR, which is quite interesting. It's a receptor, a system in the mitochondria that actually, when activated, causes longevity. And how do you activate it?

Mtor is a very interesting molecule because it causes you to put on muscles, which is helpful, but if it's chronically elevated all the time, it actually promotes cancer. So what you want to be able to do is turn mTOR on and then turn it off. And there's three things that help to suppress your mTOR so then you can turn it on all at once to get muscle growth without getting cancer. And one of them is exercise. So if you exercise, it'll push your mTOR down so it'll spring forth. Another one is intermittent fasting. And the third one is coffee. So there's something called tripling down on mTOR that's in Headstrong where you do all three at once. So you don't eat breakfast, you exercise and you have coffee.

You're bulletproof coffee.

Bulletproof coffee. And when you're done, you're like, okay, what just happened? I exercise, I felt a little odd because I didn't have any fuel except fat. But actually now I feel really, really good. And then all of a sudden you just put on muscle. but the rest of the time, this is a mistake that was made all throughout the 80s and 90s when this low fat mistake happened in the 70s, everyone switched to a high protein diet. And a high protein diet causes you to always have high mTOR, which contributes to cancer. So it's a delicate balance because your mitochondria decide whether a cell gets cancer or it doesn't get cancer. They decide if a neuron in your brain will fire or not fire. They decide when a cell divides and they even decide what genes will be turned on or turned off by the environment around you. These little guys are running us.

It's powerful, powerful stuff. And they were discovered through some bacteria on Easter Island, right? Which is a very kind of mystical idea. So let's talk about what you call in your book, Brain Kryptonite. I think everybody understands that image of Superman getting Kryptonite and becoming very weak. So what are the sources of Brain Kryptonite?

Brain Kryptonite isn't just something that comes from your food. It comes from the environment around you. You can imagine your body is having systems that look at everything around you to see what's happening so they can keep you alive. That's their job because they think you're a petri dish for them to live in. That's okay. So one of the things that's big kryptonite for them is junk light. It's kind of like corn syrup, except it comes from lighting.

Is that why you wear those glasses, the orange glasses all the time? I do.

They're called TrueDark glasses and they're actually a set of filters that reduce stress on the eyes because the eyes have the most power plants just like the brain inside them. So when you're looking at your computer screen, when you have LED lights all around you and fluorescent lights and you're indoors all the time, it causes 23% more damage to your eyes. And we're looking at a huge wave of macular degeneration. This is early onset blindness that is caused by mitochondrial weakness that is caused by light. So junk light is a source of brain kryptonite I use the true dark lenses before I go to bed to make sleep better. Another thing that's huge, that's a major cause of brain kryptonite, is simply a lack of quality sleep. And I don't mean sleeping more, I mean sleeping better. There isn't evidence that sleeping nine hours is going to make you live longer than sleeping six hours. In fact, there's evidence that that isn't the case. It's about how good was the sleep and what drives how good your sleep is is whether you're eating junk and whether you're exposed to bright light before bed. Looking at your iPhone right before you go to sleep is something that is brain kryptonite.

Even with those different filters and screens they put on them. You can improve the quality of the.

Light that comes off your iPhone, but unless you're using optical filters like the TrueDark glasses, you can use your iPhone. Yeah, you can see some colors on it. It's pretty dark, but you can at least read that way. And that's actually what I do every night. I double my deep sleep, I measure this every night, and I double my deep sleep every night when I completely avoid junk light. So one thing that you could do right now is you can go into your bedroom and look for every LED that's on at night and cover them up. And we make little true dark dots you can stick on there that do it. Even when they're off? Even when they're off, there's a lot of little blue lights here, green lights there, white lights here. All of those mess with your mitochondria. And here's something almost no one knows about. Our cells make light, just like an LED light bulb. They just make little tiny bits of it. And at night, our cells talk to each other with light. And then, if it's bright though, the light from a single LED bulb can overwhelm the light that your body uses to communicate with itself. And then all the repair processes that were supposed to happen at night, they don't work. And instead of working as a system, your body works as a bunch of little different things that can't talk to each other. This is why having a sleep cave is so terribly important for a mitochondrial function, for your brain, and for not.

Getting every kind of disease that you can name. It's true. I don't want to go camping or mountain nature and there's no Wi-Fi, there's no EMS, there's no unnatural light.

I always sleep so much better. There's a reason for that. And speaking of brain kryptonite, we already talked about fried food and things like that that are obvious brain kryptonite. Another one is holding your cell phone up to your head. I am a scientist. I'm absolutely not an alarmist. I've been keeping my cell phone on my thigh. I wear special pants that have a little side pocket because my book on fertility, Tommy, don't keep your cell phone near your junk. And I did a whole body bone density high resolution scan, and I have very high bone density because of the biohacking I do, except right where my cell phone sits by my femur, I have 10% less Bone density right where the phone sits. Bone density is driven by mitochondria. If you are making phone calls, holding your phone up to your head, you are cooking your brain, which has the worst possible effect because this is where you have the most mitochondria. So use the speaker phone, use the headset, and if you have kids, my kids' rule is if the phone is transmitting, you don't touch it. It's gonna be on the table in front of you. You're not allowed to hold something on your lap or hold it up to your head or hold it right here. It's just not okay to do that because their skulls aren't thick enough to protect them.

It's true. I don't know, have you ever looked at the iPhone about? And if you look on the instructions in the iPhone, there's a whole section on radio frequency. I think it's called RF. You read it, it's like, this is dangerous, don't hold it in your head, it has to be this far away, it's not safe. And I don't think most people realize that. This is actually the Apple iPhone, I'm.

Sure the other phones have it too. It's a warning, it's like, don't do this because it could kill you. Just about every modern phone on the market is at the very upper limit of what's allowed for something called SAR, which is a measure of how much heat it can produce in your cells. The bad news is that your mitochondria aren't really listening to that problem. The ability to make electrons gets messed with at much lower levels. The other thing you can do to reduce brain kryptonite is put a little lamp cord control switch on your Wi-Fi router. So before you go to bed, turn off your Wi-Fi. It doesn't cost you more than five bucks. It's a little habit, you brush your teeth, turn off the Wi-Fi, and I promise you, you won't be web surfing when you're asleep.

Like, it's okay. It's amazing. So, Dave, in your book, you talk about something called ATP. What is that?

ATP was a rap band from the 1990s. ATP is-- Did they have a lot of energy? You down with ATP? Yeah, you know me. Remember this guy?

No. All right.

Adenosine triphosphate. is the name of this chemical. But what it really is, is it's the chemical that we use to make energy in our cells. And it's fascinating because through something called the Krebs cycle, we make this molecule. There's only 50 grams in our big whole body. It's a tiny amount and we recycle it over and over and over as our ability to make all these electrons that let us be who we are. That 50 grams turns into 400 pounds of this chemical because we use it, remake it, use it, remake it, use it, remake it. Well, if every time you use it and remake it, you don't do a very good job with that inside your cells, you get inflammation and then you run out of ATP. So a lot of the hacks that are in Headstrong, the things that allow you to turn the system back on, involve giving you more ATP. And tiny, tiny amounts, you're only dealing with 50 grams here, can completely change how much energy you have throughout the day. that's the kind of stuff that changed my life.

So essentially, when you eat food and you breathe, it goes through this power plant and at the other end comes PLOP ATP and also oxidative stress or free radicals.

Yes.

You have to have a balance there. And when you mention light, I don't think most people realize what ATP actually is. It's. It's adenosine triphosphate. And when you have those sparklers on the Fourth of July, that bright, powerful light, that's the energy. of ATP. And that's what's driving our whole system. And as soon as you stop making ATP, you're dead. Literally.

You have six seconds of ATP in your body at any one time. It's amazing, but you're exactly right. It's all about the P and ATP, which is phosphorus. And your job is to take a phosphorus off. When you do that, you get lots of these electrons you can use. Electrons, the same as in your computer, your phone, your washing machine. that's what powers us. And if they don't go into powering you, they go into puffing you up. And that muffin top happens. And if you've got that muffin top around your waist, it also means you have the inflammatory molecules called cytokines inside your brain. Inflamed brain. And inflamed brain cannot do what it was meant to do. So when your cells are running normally, they're like this, they're tight. And when you get inflammation, because you're wasting ATP, the cells get big. When they get big, now it takes a long time for chemicals and electrical signals to move around inside the cells. And that means that you're going to feel not as good as you could feel. It means that you're going to forget why you opened the fridge. You're not going to remember where your car keys are. What was that word? And you'll even say things you regret because you get hypoglycemia and hangry and all those things like that. And it's not necessary. It's just about your body making energy. It's not about being a good or a bad person or being smart or dumb or being forgetful or anything like that. It's not about being weak. it's about being powered.

Yeah, it's so true and one of the things that I want to connect the dots on here is that inflammation affects almost every brain dysfunction, right? Depression is inflammation in the brain, Alzheimer's is, autism, ADD, Parkinson's, all these diseases of the brain are actually inflammatory diseases and they're just that person's response to inflammation and that's why you see this same cause, inflammation driving all these diseases. And so it's really important to understand how to get the inflammation out of your system, which is eating a whole foods diet, it's exercise, it's dealing with stress, it's fixing your microbiome, it's getting rid of environmental toxins, it's actually optimizing your nutritional status, all of which will help process and deal with the triggers of inflammation.

It makes a huge difference. And there's something to be careful with when we say a whole foods diet. Remember that some foods really don't want you to eat them. So if you don't cook some foods, for instance, they will have compounds in them that harm the mitochondria directly. So you want to eat a diet that's right for your biochemistry. And the interesting thing is that you may have evolved, Mark, where you handle some foods really, really well because your ancestors ate them for thousands of years. And someone sitting next to you, like me, may not handle those same foods the same way. and it's okay to have biochemical individuality. But if you eat something and the next day your joints hurt and your pants are tight, that's a pretty good sign that you don't handle that very well and you might want to take that out of your diet for a.

Little while and see if that's what's going on. That's why I always say your body is your best doctor.

Yeah. It tells you exactly what you need.

It does. All you have to do is listen. So in this series, we've talked a lot about neurogenesis, which is the ability of the brains to make new brain cells, which we never thought possible. But emerging science has shown that that's actually true, even up to the point of death. How does that connect back to mitochondria and what do they have to do with each other?

In Headstrong, I write a lot about neurogenesis because I run something called 40 Years of Zen, which is a neurofeedback laboratory up in Seattle. And we train executives to have better functioning brains. It turns out the signal that causes neurogenesis is something called BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor. Miracle grow for the brain. Exactly. And it comes from things like exercise and polyphenols. And there are certain types of plant compounds that can raise neurogenesis four times more than exercise just by adding them to your diet, which is kind of interesting. And then neurogenesis happens in two forms. There's synaptogenesis, which is where you actually grow new synapses to be able to do things, and something called myelinogenesis, which is when you put insulation on a nerve so that it can carry electrical signals really fast. This is when you practice something for a while. And what we found is that if you eat the right types of fat, you have the building blocks to insulate nerves. So not only can you cause the brain to change, you can cause it to change and become more effective and efficient. And that is powered by fat. And guess which part of the cell decides whether you're going to grow a new neuron or not?

Your mitochondria.

Bam.

Amazing. You know, you had a bad experience with a brain toxin called mold. So how does mold affect the brain and how do we deal with mold? What are the mold containing foods? What are the ways we can determine whether we have mold exposure?

Mold is the single biggest source of environmental kryptonite in the world today. And when I interviewed you for the documentary called Moldy about this, we talked about how mold itself is an ancient enemy of bacteria. For billions of years, mold and bacteria have been fighting. That's where penicillin was discovered. because it was a mold chemical that killed bacteria. Since our power plants are bacteria, it's no wonder that mold causes this huge range of health problems. In fact, it causes so many problems that it doesn't seem like it could be one thing because different people have different effects. And it happens because of condensation, water damage, a leak under your sink, things like that that wasn't there yesterday but now it's there and I just gained 25 pounds and my brain doesn't work. all these things happen. What's going on there is the mold is directly poisoning your ability to make energy in the mitochondria. At the same time, it triggers a huge inflammatory response throughout the body. So it's the mold itself and the poisons made by the mold. And how you can tell this is happening is if you feel radically different when you go into one environment versus another, you got to pay attention. If you move or you get a new job or start working out in a new gym, And all of a sudden, you're like, wow, I feel dizzy, I feel fat, I put on weight, I'm strangely emotional. You gotta look at the world around you because it's not just you, it's you interacting with the system of the world. And you can do things like get a mold test. You can, in fact, if you look at the science, Mark, and you look at the data, at least half of buildings in the US, particularly schools, have a toxic mold problem. This is why it's so important that you look at this. If you can smell something in your house or your workplace, you need to fix it. It's the single biggest thing you can do to keep your brain working well. The best test out there is called an ERMI test. And you can get it from a mold inspector. They'll come to your house and they'll test how much toxic mold is in the air versus the outside air. I once had 88 times more toxic mold in my kitchen because of a leak behind the dishwasher that I didn't even know about. and my dog stopped eating. I got really tired. I could sleep 12 hours and wake up feeling like I didn't sleep. Groggy, poor decision making, irritable, all these things. And it just hits you and you just feel like, wow, what just happened? Because you don't see this stuff.

It's invisible.

And you can't always smell it.

No, we couldn't smell a thing. Yeah, it's true. And it's like a chameleon because it can cause so many different issues. And as a physician, I never learned about mold or mold illness or mold damaged buildings when I was in medical school. And today, you know, I was seeing a patient at Cleveland Clinic last week who was a physician who had a horrible history of an autoimmune disease that just knocked her completely down and she was on heavy-duty steroids, all these powerful immune suppressing drugs. And I just took her story and listened to her history. She said, I was fine until I moved into this house in Virginia and it was super moldy. And they knew it was moldy because it was so obvious. It was that bad. and she said, I immediately got sick.

It's interesting because especially with physicians, mold doesn't affect everyone the same way. So you have two people. In fact, I interviewed a husband and wife couple where they're both physicians in moldy, and she got profoundly sick when they moved into a moldy trailer during a remodel, and he had no symptoms. But at least he believed her. And the problem that I had and that most people have is you go to the doctor and you say, I have these 10 symptoms, and doctors are trained in med school If someone has 10 symptoms, what are they?

Crazy or depressed?

Exactly, they're hypochondriacs. So then they try and put you on an antidepressant. Right away they try to do that to me. I'm like, Are you kidding me? Like, Did you see my clothes? And then they say, well, maybe you should eat healthy. Like, I am eating healthy. I'm working out six days a week. And then they call me a liar.

This happens over and over. In fact, a substantial number of medical schools themselves have mold growing because they're old buildings. Yeah, and it's true. And doctors don't know what they're seeing or can't figure it out or have never seen it before, their default is this must not be something real and covered over with an antidepressant. And it's so sad because millions and millions of people suffer needlessly by not getting the right diagnosis. Yeah. Okay, so you talked about fat and the mitochondria, but I want to get really specific. There are bad fats, there are good fats. So what are the best fats for the mitochondria and what are the worst fats?

The best fats for the mitochondria are saturated fats, monounsaturated fats, and fish oil. So this means avocados, this means macadamia nuts, and yes, grass-fed butter, coconut oil, brain octane oil, which I manufacture as a subset of coconut oil that causes the most ketones. There's something called MCT oil you can also get, although it doesn't raise ketones as much, and it can cause other gastric distress issues, but it works. So you'll find people who put those on their food, olive oil, things like that, they act differently, they feel differently. Undamaged, unroasted nuts like walnuts have some omega-6 oils, you need some of those. And when you get these and you eat your fresh fish, wild caught fish, not the farm stuff, your brain starts to regenerate, but it takes two years and studies to replace about 75% of the cell membrane.

You have to get an oil change. It takes a long time.

It does. And the cell membrane is kind of a big word, but what that really is is that each cell in your body is covered in tiny droplets of fat that push water away. And each mitochondria inside the cell, there's tens of thousands of them, are made of tiny droplets of fat. So it's no wonder that if you eat the wrong fats like vegetable oil, canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, hydrogenated fat, or anything deep fried, even if it's fried in good oil. What you get is you get the wrong fats built into your mitochondria and into your cells, and then they constantly cause free radicals and inflammation. And it takes a while to rebuild the system. It took me about three years of super high fat, only undamaged fats, before I finally just lost the desire. Like, I couldn't get enough grass-fed butter. It was like it saved me. I'd been a raw vegan. I sufficient. But after three years, I backed off because I just didn't need as much as I did before.

So if this is true, how do you reconcile the statements by the American Heart Association that we should reduce our saturated fat consumption less than 10%, even 5%, and eat more of these refined oils? That's their recommendations. And everybody hears that and they go, oh, coconut oil is bad. Saturated fat is bad.

I almost laughed when They published that rehash of studies that the last of which was done in 1973. Every study on fat since 1973 was rejected by the American Heart Association so they could keep pushing the agenda of the American Canola Oil Manufacturers Association that funds the American Heart Association. Follow the money is what you're saying. It's a corrupt organization. And when real doctors and scientists looked at the data from the 1970s studies that the American Heart Association relies on, It turns out that the biggest of those studies, the one that ended in 1973, when you look at all the data, it actually found the opposite of what the American Heart Association says. So what we're dealing with here is pure marketing and propaganda from a company, a nonprofit company, that is backed with an agenda. And the agenda appears to be keep people sick.

Yeah, it was interesting. There was a study that was buried for 40 years. that was done by the guy who created what we call the diet-heart hypothesis, which is that saturated fat raises LDL cholesterol, LDL cholesterol causes heart attacks, so reducing saturated fat will prevent heart attacks. So that's never been proven, but it's an idea. It was a hypothesis. They did a study which they could never do now, 9,000 mentally institutionalized patients, half got butter and saturated fat, half got vegetable oil. and they thought the vegetable oil group would win, but in fact, even though their LDL levels went down on the vegetable oil, they had more heart attacks and death than the group on saturated fat. In fact, for every 30 points lower LDL, the risk of heart attack went up 22%. And that study was buried in a basement for 40 years until a researcher from the NIH tracked it down, found the data, and published it just recently. So that completely kind of, and these studies could not be done now, which is a randomized controlled trial. Most of these studies on saturated fat are population studies. They all have all kinds of confounding factors. They don't necessarily elicit the real answer, but this is a gold standard study.

And it's been buried. Mark, when I started writing the Bulletproof Diet, when I invented Bulletproof Coffee, I was doing at least 10 12, 16 tablespoons of butter a day, which I don't necessarily recommend for people, but I wanted to see what would happen, and it was what my body really wanted to recover from being a raw vegan, low-fat kind of guy. And I was a little concerned being an anti-aging professional. Yeah, why you and I doing it hurts you, right? Yeah, I have kids. So I drew my blood all the time. And you know what? My inflammation markers went down, and I got a calcium score, all the things like that. Even after years of doing this, I am better on every measure that I know of except cholesterol. And my cholesterol isn't sky high. I have high HDL, the good protective stuff. I have very low triglycerides when we eat this way without all the sugar and crap like that that actually causes heart disease. And my LDL, frankly, I don't really care as long as my inflammation markers are low. I've been inflamed my entire life because I ate margarine and soybean oil and corn oil and all the crap that the American Heart Association Convinced my parents was healthy. Margarine. Yeah, it's shocking and it's a Better than butter. It's offensive that they did this to us. And in fact, at this point, the American Heart Association would say a McNugget's fine, right? It's fried in canola oil and all this other kind of crap. But here's the deal. If I had a choice between a McNugget or a plate of french fries and smoking a cigarette, if you look at inflammation- Smoke the cigarette. I would pick the cigarette. I'm not even kidding. I don't eat anything fried for a reason.

That's true.

And I don't smoke either. But it's that bad and you have these people out there who are promoting this and I believe they probably have just convinced themselves they're doing something good, but in order to do that you have to willfully put on blinders and keep them on and ignore all new data and unfortunately for the American Heart Association, there are guys like you and.

10S of- Not just me, but the researchers from Harvard and Tufts. The Dean of Tufts, I asked him, I said, So would you eat butter or a bagel if you had a choice? He said, I eat the butter. No bagel.

That really puts a nail in the coffin there. So I'm really hoping that we cause groups like the American Heart Association, the American Diabetic Association, even the American Dietician Association to wake up and understand mitochondria, understand that our brains and how we feel are most important and inflammation drives that and that if what they're recommending for their little specific disease causes inflammation, they are not serving humans.

That's true. I mean, the mitochondria are so critical and it affects so many people and doctors just have no clue how to diagnose it. I had a patient recently who was a young man, he was 20 years old in college and he had this horrible condition, probably some genetic quirk, where if he exercised his muscles would break down. Wow. And he would get sky-high levels of muscle enzymes. He had severe pain and he couldn't work out or exercise at all. And I said, Look, you've got some weird genetic thing. I don't know what it is, but let's treat your mitochondria. And over the last 20 years as a functional medicine expert, I've been studying and treating mitochondrial disorders for a long time. And I gave him a cocktail of mitochondrial nutrients, things like CoQ10, carnitine, ribose, and acetyl-L-cysteine. and a bunch of other nutrients to help maximize his ability to produce energy. And within literally just a few days of this, he was able to exercise, his muscles didn't break down, he had no pain, he can work out again. I see this on a less extreme scale, those people who exercise and they kind of poop out and want to take a nap afterwards, doesn't make them feel good, they have mitochondrial issues. And if you give them a mitochondrial.

Cocktail, they go, wow, now I can exercise. My father, about 15 years ago, had a heart attack. and a double bypass. Strangely, he had the heart attack about six months after living in a very moldy building, and he had a very clean set of arteries before that. So the mold triggered some changes in his vascular system. He had a heart attack, and he wakes up from a double bypass just feeling like crap. The same mitochondrial cocktail you just described, I made it for him. And this isn't new information. This is 15 years ago, right? We've known these things work, but they just haven't hit the mainstream. within 10 minutes of drinking and he's like, I feel like myself again versus I just feel like nothing. So giving your cells the power to do what they're supposed to do gives you the power to be who you're supposed to be and that's something that everyone should understand.

That's so powerful. So we talked about one, brain kryptonite, which is really mitochondrial kryptonite, how to get rid of those. We talked about food and fats and how to optimize your mitochondria and we also are talking now about some of the special hacks that you can use as nutrients and other compounds to help upregulate your mitochondrial function. It's powerful. So we actually have the science of how to do this. What are some of the other things that people are doing like meditation or exercise or dealing with other factors that might affect your mitochondria?

It's really interesting when you look at how the mitochondria sense the world around you. They look at light, They look at sound, gravity, pressure, magnetism, because they're essentially little semiconductors, which means everything in the world affects them. They don't listen to what you want very well, because after all, they're just dumb little bacteria. However, when you change how you feel when you're meditating or when you're feeling extreme gratitude or love or compassion or kindness, it changes how your heart beats. And when your heart beats, it makes a strong magnetic signal, the strongest signal in the entire body. and the signal is called heart rate variability. So when you're in that place where you think about puppies or your mom or whatever it is, your mitochondria are like, oh, there's no threat here. Let me take my precious energy and turn it towards making new proteins, towards regenerating. And if your heart is going da dum, da dum, da dum very regularly, that's what a stressed animal does. So if you're living in a state of stress, because you have a Facebook post over here, an email over here, someone yelling at you over here, and someone cut you off in traffic and you're not meditating, your heart sends a magnetic signal that your cells listen to that says, get ready to fight. And if you're always ready to fight on a cellular level, you will never rebuild the cells. And that's why it's so important to take a deep breath, to meditate, to have a spiritual practice, and to do whatever it is a walk in nature, whatever it is that allows you to just calm down, because it's not just you calming down. That calm signal tells this system in the body of a quadrillion cells, chill out and build new cells right now. That's pretty important.

Powerful. And there are actually apps on iPhones and other devices where you can put your finger over the camera and it will tell your heart rate variability so you can actually see what happens. And the most simple heart rate, which.

Is.

Beat like 72, 72, 72, that's bad. And the worst one is a flat line, right? There's no variability there. And the most complex heart rate is the healthiest heart rate.

This is contrary to what a lot of people would think. It's just about number of beats per minute. No, it's about the spacing of it. And your heart should basically be playing music, but not just playing music with the same beat all the time. The way your heart plays music is when you go to the happy place, how you go to get there. That's one of the biggest mitochondrial hacks is just telling your body that you're in a safe place full of abundance and amazingness. It changes your ability to make energy in the cells, which changes actually how you show up in the world.

So, mitochondria respond to many influences, but one of the most powerful ways to access your mitochondria is exercise. So, can you talk about what are the best kinds of exercise to activate your mitochondria?

When I was writing Head Strong, I dug really deep in the research about mitochondrial physiology and exercise and found two distinct groups of exercise that are shown to really have a difference from mitochondria. The first is go for a walk every day of at least 20 minutes. That's the minimum effective dose. Just a walk. It doesn't have to be like running upstairs, things like that. You can do that if it really makes you happy, but that's not going to make you a better person. Going for a walk has this effect of basically stirring the pot and it causes your mitochondria to work better and it causes you to grow new ones. And then once or maybe twice a week, depending on what level of fitness you want, you do one of two heavy duty exercises only for 15 minutes. So this is very time efficient. One is called high intensity interval training. And with this, you sprint for about 90 seconds like a tiger's chasing you. Very few people like to do this. You do it anyway. And here's the trick that's in Head Strong that's never been written about as far as I know. Instead of walking for a minute and then sprinting again, you actually lay on your back.

That's what you'd feel like doing if you're running from a tiger.

Exactly. Well, that's why you lay down because then you're showing the body tiger rest. Tiger rest. So the signal that your mitochondria get is, oh, you know what? I should be ready to make a ton of energy at any time. And any one of these quadrillion cells that isn't up for that needs to step on out and I'll replace it with a better one. That's why that's important. And on the weight-bearing side, which is really important, especially for women, lifting heavy stuff. And I don't mean a 10 pound dumbbell. I mean as heavy as you're capable of, but you only do it for 15 minutes. For me, I'm in the best shape of my life. And in order to do that, I work out 15 minutes a week. But when I work out, I'm gonna cry because I'm picking up the heaviest things I can do. And that's a very interesting strategy because it also tells the mitochondria, those of you who can't deliver 100% energy right now to lift this heavy thing, you need to go. And it sends a signal to the mitochondria that control your bones. grow bigger, harder, stronger bones, and all of the other things in your body, it's all about what are the extremes? Same thing with the cold showers. It's all an environmental signal that just tells the mitochondria, be ready. And if you can do that in the shortest possible amount of time, that's.

What exercise really is. So what you're really talking about are little tricks that you can use to sort of increase your metabolic function and increase your mitochondria. Most people don't realize that when they say metabolism, they're actually talking about the mitochondria. And people say, I have a slow metabolism. Well, they might if their mitochondria aren't working. And the ways to speed up your metabolism is through the interval training, through the strength training that optimize your mitochondria and all the other hacks you talked about. And what's really amazing is that when you do that, you can exercise far less amount of time and you burn.

Far more calories throughout the day by doing nothing, just sitting on the couch. Very true. If you do the hacks that are in Head Strong, you do the cold showers, improve your sleep quality, and go for that walk and do these other strength training and high intensity interval training, you will every day burn probably 300 to 500 more calories without having to have a lot of extra stress to do it.

That's like running an hour. That's like going to an hour jog, right?

It is. And if your metabolism is taking your food and putting it on your hips or your legs or anywhere else on your body instead of putting it into the energy that makes you who you are, it's time to fix your metabolism. It doesn't mean you're a bad person, it doesn't mean you're weak, it's just a hardware problem and it means you need to send a signal to those quadrillion bacteria that are running things and tell them step up.

And when you do that, they will. Okay, so Dave, what are the top tips that you have for becoming headstrong today and what are the Top five things people can do to optimize their brain function.

Number one, eat more good fat. That means undamaged fats that haven't been heated and fried and none of those vegetable oils and all those other just industrial processed things that are out there. If you do that, your brain will now have the building blocks to become a strong brain. Another thing, follow the exercise recommendations in Head Strong. Go for a walk every day, just a short walk, enough to stir the pot, and once or twice a week do something really hard for a short period of time. It completely changes what you can do. Number three, at the end of your shower, turn the water to cold full blast. You can curse me while you do it, but after four or five days you'll thank me, I promise. It's a brief period of discomfort and you'll burn more calories all day long when you do that and your brain will like it. It affects inflammation, it affects all sorts of things. It's very simple and easy to do. The fourth thing, Stop junk light. Consider the true dark glasses, go through, dim the lights at night, turn off lights you don't need, and very importantly, make a sleep cave so that you tape over or block all of the light that you can see in your room so that your cells, your mitochondria, can talk to each other and do the reorganization and the optimization that they are supposed to do and they've done for billions of years until we turned on the electric lighting. And the final thing is something that we talked about, Mark, and it's meditation or even more specifically, if you don't know how to meditate, it's just gratitude. Every night before you go to sleep, find three things that you're grateful for and just think about those for 30 seconds. That's all it takes. When you do that, it's going to change the way your heart beats. It's going to take you out of fight or flight mode and it's going to tell your body, Hey, well you're sleeping tonight, maybe you should fix the mitochondria. Maybe you should grow new proteins. instead of while you're sleeping being ready to fight. If you do those things, you will be headstrong, you'll turn off your inflammation, and as a side effect of all this, you'll probably need smaller pants.

So, you know, there's another ingredient for health and well-being that often is ignored, and which there's a huge lack of in our society, which is the power of connection, love, and community. So, what role does that play in your health, mitochondria, your brain, All the rest.

When I was writing Headstrong, I realized that there are three basic things that a bacteria does in the world that we also do. And number one is run away from, hide or kill scary things that might be a threat. That's our fear response. The next thing is eat everything, bagels, cookies, whatever it is. And this is to make sure that the bacteria doesn't starve to death, doesn't run out of fuel. And the third thing that's also an F word is make sure that you reproduce. So fear feed and some other thing. Well, once a bacteria has done those things, it'll do something magic. It'll make yogurt. And this is the fourth word that starts with F and it's friend. What we do at a cellular level is the same thing we do as humans and we form a community. Yogurt is cooperating bacteria to make something bigger than any one bacteria. and your body does this to form who you are. And when you get those basic three needs met where you have individual companionship, enough of the right kind of fuel so your cells don't feel like they're starving, we call that fat, and when you don't feel like you're scared all the time, we call that forgiveness. When you get those in order, you're ready to go out and form a community and the community can support you and we are wired to be kind and nice and supportive to other human beings. It's our core nature. but that nature gets disrupted. When your mitochondria don't work, you just don't have the energy to be kind to other people. That's why it's so important that we fix our mitochondria and we fix our brains, because it makes us help our community naturally and that's what makes us feel best. And when we do that, it creates a feedback loop. So you support your community, you have acts of kindness, and you help other people, and that makes you feel good. And when you feel good, your mitochondria gets stronger because you know you're doing the right thing and it actually pays it forward, but you always get a return on that. that's why community is so important, because community helps you and you help the community.

If you love that last video, you should check out the next one for sure on getting to the root cause of all disease.

It's not really just about the food, it's about how our body responds to the food. How does our body protect its health? And that's what the health defense systems are all about.

It's true. I remember traveling once in Hong Kong.