APP ONLY VIDEO: Dave Asprey: “Mycotoxins & Superhuman Performance”

How many of you read the post that I did on my website several weeks ago on the biohacking conference that I attended in San Francisco? It was amazing. The man who organized that event, and who knows more about biohacking than I think any other person on the face of the planet is the guy that you're about to hear from, his name is Dave Asprey. He is from the website bulletproofexec.com. if you have not yet been to that website, go ahead and bookmark it right now or circle it on your program because there is a ton of really good information out there. The last post that he did actually was on decaf coffee. And some people have already asked me why I don't have Dave Asprey's bulletproof coffee here. And the only reason for that is that my mom is a coffee roaster. And I swear, otherwise we would have bulletproof everywhere. But that was the one area where I couldn't upset my mom. So that's why bulletproof coffee was in here. But you can get it right from Bulletproof Exec?

Absolutely.

Cool. All right, well, I'm going to turn things over, but go ahead and give a Warm welcome to Mr. Dave Asprey.

Thanks, Ben. Are my levels right? All right. Sounded quiet for a second there. Good audio guy. Caught it. First word. Dave Asprey. I'm a biohacker. I'm also the author of the Better Baby book that just came out. You can buy it here. You might say, what the heck am I doing talking about babies? But I'm all about human performance and I'm lazy, so I like to do things that have the most impact in the least amount of time. And if you get the three months before a woman gets pregnant right, and the pregnancy right, you've done more for that child and that child's children than you could doing just about anything else. So the most leverage you'll have in your entire life is during that time. So I wrote a book about it with my wife, who's a Karolinska trained physician. You can buy it outside. It's full of all sorts of biohacking stuff that goes beyond just fertility. If you have optimal hormone function, whether you're planning to have kids, whether you're a man or a woman, fertility is a great indicator of vitality and strength. So by managing your fertility, you can do some amazing things. You can also have that stupid Google thing pop up that won't go away even when you disable it. I apologize for that. One of the reasons I'm Here. Is that about 10, 12 years ago, a doctor scrawled all this stuff, which you can't really read. Let's see if that. Oop, it doesn't come up quite like it's supposed to. Right here it says 100% aggregation. See, I can't read it. My wife's a doctor. But this is the one that bothered me. Increased risk for stroke and myocardial infarction. So when I was 30, they're like, you're gonna die. Like you're old, dude. And I thought, this is really not okay. I've been very successful in life, and I eat low calories, low fat. I exercise a lot, like, six days a week, but it's not working. Then I got a brain scan. Interesting referral is what they called me. This is actually a $4,000 scan. They injected radioactive sugar into me, and they told me, hey, Dave, try and think about something. And when I tried to think about something, what came up was no activity in the prefrontal cortex. That's like the human part of your brain that manages the reptilian and mammalian parts. It's kind of the part that thinks. Amazingly enough, though, I was a very successful entrepreneur. In fact, I was absolutely kicking ass on many different fronts. I worked at the company that helped to create modern cloud computing, where I was the director of technology stuff. Yet my brain looked like this. The reason I'm bringing this up at the beginning is that mycotoxins, which is the subject of our talk today, contributed somewhat to what happened here. But also, I totally rocked it when my brain looked like this. I was working, actually, for another startup. We sold it for $600 million while I was getting my MBA at Wharton, working full time with my brain turned off, which I would argue for all of you, your brains are probably not this turned off, but none of you has a perfect brain without red in it right now. And this is a huge area of human potential. So we'll talk about a little bit about what mycotoxins had to do with this, but specifically what mycotoxins, or the toxins that come in mold and fungus, what they have to do with your performance across many different domains. This problem I had in addition to being kind of dumb, because, well, my brain wasn't working, I was also fat. I weighed 300 pounds. This is a picture of me from Entrepreneur magazine. It's a publicly available photo. I was the first guy to sell anything over the Internet. I sold caffeine t shirts to 12 countries from my dorm room. That's me, the fat version. Fast forward a little bit. They told me I might have a stroke. My brain wasn't working. I'd had strep throat or a sinus infection every single month for more years than I could remember. I spent $1,000 a quarter throughout my undergrad on antibiotics because I kept getting sick, got all sorts of food allergies. I was having nosebleeds, bruising, easily. Bottom line is I was old, but I was young. In fact, I don't think I put it up there. I had arthritis in my knees when I was 14. So if something seriously was wrong, that's why I'm a biohacker, because I am doing all the things I do now because I had to solve all this crap. Along the way, I realized there's a lot of human performance that you can do. So let's talk about why that's mold. Hmm. I've been in water damaged buildings with visible black mold. Black mold is the stuff that causes most problems. I ate a diet very high in mycotoxins without knowing it. Unless you're highly unusual, you are doing that today. And the symptoms I had, all of them match. What happens to people when they're exposed to mold toxins? I like data that's part of biohacking. You can't just say, oh, look, it works. You need to get the data that shows that it also worked. My immune system really is sensitive to all of these extremely toxic molds. So I have symptoms, I have evidence of immune response to exposure. So there's pretty good proof that this happened. And I have my non working brain and my obesity. Hmm. So what's the deal? I'm a canary, but I turned my brain on, which is good, because now I'm like a walking mycotoxin sensor. Here's what I found. There's 900 references that show mold specifically causes heart disease. That's not all it does, but that's one of the things it does. That's a lot of references. It's on PubMed. Other things, cholesterol. The bad cholesterol is actually protective against toxins like mycotoxins. Which means if you're eating a low fat diet, you're trying to lower your cholesterol, you're lowering some resilience that you could potentially have. It turns out that lipoproteins and cholesterol inactivate pathogens that come from microbes like mold. They bind specifically to cell walls, they bind to the toxins themselves directly, and they keep your cellular membranes intact. These are useful things that happen when you get enough cholesterol in your body. And if you have a fungal infection, your body naturally raises cholesterol for a very good reason, because you need these to live, which is why knocking down cholesterol when you have fungal exposure in your environment or even coming from inside your body or from your food might be a bad idea. In fact, if you were to look at this great detective puzzle that is our health, you might wonder whether cholesterol is really that much of a cause of heart disease or a symptom of some other thing that might be toxic. Interesting statin drugs. Anyone know the first statin drug ever? It's called my statin. It's used for yeast infections. It's a really common one. You could even use it for, like, advanced athlete's foot. Hmm. They found out an antifungal drug lowered cholesterol. So all the statin drugs out there are also antifungal drugs, chemotherapy drugs also. Every single one of them is antifungal. Hmm. Gout. It's a risk factor for getting heart disease, which, hmm. Is also caused by mycotoxins. Here's a list of mycotoxins that cause gout. So if you've been thinking about your health and you've been wondering, what do I do to optimize my performance? Live a long time and kick ass. Who would have thought that a variable like this could have such a large impact? Has anyone in here dealt with gout in themselves or in a family member? It's incredibly common. Type 2 diabetes is running rampant. It's a common thing now. I have friends, I went to school with people in their 30s who have gout. Like, enjoying that beer, are you? Oh, yeah, that beer thing. It turns out the most common yeast, the one that we use for brewing, makes uric acid, which can contribute to gout. It also contains something called ochratoxin, which is an amazing toxin. And we'll talk more specifically about that today. By the way, when you're done hearing all this, you're going to want to look at your food differently. And I apologize for that. But I'm not BSing you. Oh yeah, this whole fungus connection to chronic diseases of modern man. Yeah. Antifungal drugs like griseofulvin will cure gout in many cases. In fact, every drug that works on gout also kills fungus. Hmm. There's some surprising detective things going on here. Lets talk about diabetes. These other things that sort of take you off your path of high performance and put you on the path of being old. Oh, cured meat. Many people have heard red meat's bad for you, but many of the studies look at processed red meat versus non processed red meat and they come up with a different answer. And almost no studies look at properly fed mycotoxin free red meat versus industrial red meat that's full of mycotoxins versus processed meat. But when you look at cured meat, you can look at something called a nitrosamine, which is a sign that the meat has basically been contaminated by fungus during the cure. It's incredibly common. In fact, naturally cured salami that you might find in Italy is covered with white fuzz. Unfortunately, while salami tastes good, if it's covered with that white fuzz, that white fuzz introduce chemicals into the food. You can think of it this way. When you eat something, if there is something growing on it, whether it's mold or bacteria, it goes like this. Something colonizes it and it says, that's my cheese, and it's enjoying the cheese. And then something else colonizes it. And the first guy says, hey, wait, that's my cheese. You think you're going to get my cheese? Take this and you squirt some poison out. We call that an antibiotic or an antifungal. Another guy goes, oh yeah, take this. And he squirts one right back. It's like having a farting war. And then you eat it. That's called cheese. But here's the thing. If there is stress, biological stress, on what's growing on your food, then it makes more toxins. This is a very strange thing, but when we manufacture things like citric acid, the way we do it now is we take aspergillus, the mold, oftentimes the toxic mold, and we change out the toxin it makes. And we say, hey, could you make citric acid when we piss you off? And since we've genetically engineered it, we do, we put it in big vats and then we stress it. How do we do that? Raise temperature, lower temperature, electromagnetic fields, physical vibration, sometimes adding chemicals that are mild poisons or toxins for it. So basically, you want pissed off mold because it makes more toxins. Well, if you have molds sitting on the salami you're going to be eating, or in that hunk of cheese with all that blue stuff on it, well, you need to know what else was going on around it in order to know what it's going to do to your body. Or you could just measure the level of toxins directly, which is what I do with the stuff that I manufacture and cured meat, it turns out, is tied to all sorts of bad things in the gut, largely because of fungal contamination. Here are some of the toxins that are made by the common molds that are linked to diabetes. This same one comes up again. Ochratoxin, which we'll get into in more detail. A documented cause of diabetes is asparaginase, and it's made by one of the molds. Oh, yeah. And this common one that some people take as a health supplement causes diabetes in mice. Yo, yeast is not food. Let's talk about high blood pressure. Fusarium, which is a very common mold toxin in food, and one that's not that well regulated, is implicated in high blood pressure. So is cyclosporine. Oh, that's an antibiotic. It's also a mold toxin. Another one. Oh, alcohol also can raise your blood pressure. Wine specifically, because it contains ochratoxin. Beer, which has even more than wine. And that's a bit of a problem if you want to blame salt. It doesn't work. I use salt as a performance enhancing substance. I would like to call it a drug, but then the FDA would take away salt and that would suck. In fact, I use about 8 to 10 grams a day of sea salt. The reason I do that, and I front load it in the morning, and I do that about a teaspoon when I wake up in water, as soon as I wake up. Because in the morning, there's this amazing cycle where your body says, this guy's going to get out of bed. When he stands up, if there's not enough blood pressure, he'll fall over, hit his head on a rock, and a tiger will eat him. Or actually a lion. That's our theme for today. Well, that's not good. So the body says, emergency adrenals kick in, raise cortisol and start dropping potassium and raising sodium. In order to do that, it takes stress hormones. It actually depletes your adrenals a small amount. You want to keep your adrenal reserved for later in the day when someone's yelling at you or when you want to go run faster or lift something heavier. So by taking a little bit of salt in the morning, you can actually have a lot more energy throughout the day. There's also a whole talk, I give on salt and high blood pressure about how it's pretty much a scam because the amount salt raises high blood pressure in healthy people is within the error margin of a cuff. If you're already fat, very fat, or just plain Obese, then salt may be bad for you, although usually not in my experience. So when you talk about high blood pressure, you might want to think about these things as well as salt, because it's not salt a lot of the time. Homocysteine. How many of you know what homocysteine is? Okay. Homocysteine is one of the primary markers of inflammation in the body. The whole bulletproof diet, in fact, most of what I do is around controlling and limiting inflammation in the body, which results in large increases in human performance, cognitive as well as physical. Homocysteine is a great marker for that. Your body makes homocysteine when it's exposed to aflatoxin. Aflatoxin is the most commonly known mold toxin. How many have heard of aflatoxin before? It's like the peanut butter thing, so it's the most famous one. The rest of the ones we're talking about do similar things, but not always. So people say the body was inflamed. Why was it inflamed? Lots of different reasons. But this is actually a reason that can happen. You eat peanut butter every day, you're going to have high homocysteine. You're also more likely to have heart disease. You also make homocysteine because it inhibits mutagenic activity of mycotoxins. So you've got mycotoxins in the body. Your body raises homocysteine to try and protect itself against the mutagens that come from the molds that are attacking you. Or more specifically, the toxins from the molds that are attacking you. Aspergillus, which is a nasty mold that can grow in your gut. It can also be a harmless one. It makes ochratoxin. But if you have that in your gut, your body will raise homocysteine. Why? Because it wants to turn down the toxin production. Let's talk hormones. Hormones are core to how you perform. When I was fat, I had very high estrogen levels, low testosterone. I wonder why my body was turning testosterone into estrogen. Oh, maybe that's why. Turns out if you have estradiol, another one of the female hormones, it helps to protect your liver from mold toxins. Other ones, other toxins actually copy what hormones do. In fact, if you're a cattle rancher and you want to make more money, you buy a little tablet. It's called Xurinol. Yes. It's derived from zearolenone. What they do is in these nice little pharmaceutical companies, they grow zearolenone producing molds. They concentrate the toxin Put it in a waxy pellet. You put that in your cow's ear, and magically, the hormone in it, which is thousands of times more active than normal estrogen, makes the cow grow fat through all of its tissues really quickly on less food. Hmm. They got fat on less calories. That shouldn't be able to happen. Your calories in, calories out. Oops. Well, I called BS on that one, because this problem exists. If you can change feed efficiency in a cow, then calories in and calories out is not the end all be all. But what's important is that you might eat that meat after this is done. Let's talk about a few other biological realities here. Here's what. Mycotoxins actually change the way your nervous system functions. In fact, since I know where mycotoxins hide, I can tell you if my kids eat something moldy or something that was likely moldy. I can tell by their behavior what happened. You wouldn't know it, but a common cause of nightmares is exposure to mold in foods. This is documented by people who study this for a living. In fact, a very famous mold toxin would be lsd, which comes from ergotamine, which is a fungus that grows on grain. So we know that small parts per million or even parts per billion, mold toxins can affect your brain and your cognition and specifically your emotional regulation. They also control how you form proteins. You want to be bulletproof. If you want to be bulletproof, you should make proteins the way your body wants you to make them. There's also this immune function. If you take mycotoxins accidentally or even on purpose in the form of antibiotics, it affects your immune function. What does this do for you? It damages your tissues, which makes you perform poorly. It also is linked with autism, miscarriage, and a whole host of fertility problems, which is one of the many reasons that I wrote the Better Baby book. Because this is happening. We don't hear about it so much in humans, but we hear about it a lot in agriculture. Because if you're a large conglomerate running an industrial farm operation, you know damn well that something just killed a higher percentage of this season's crop of animals. What was it? And you start doing the detective work, because there are hundreds of millions of dollars on the table. The detective work is done. We just don't like to point it at us. We like to point it at those yummy animals. We eat some more. Things that fungus will do for you. Oh, they hurt your sex hormones, they lower thyroid function, and they change the way your pancreas works. This is big stuff. Like, if you want to go out there and kick butt and this is going on in your life, it won't happen. And very small changes in the amounts of these can cause big changes in performance if they're one of the things holding you back. British Medical journal article from 10 years ago, list of things that you can get. Memory loss. This was a major issue for me back when I was living in a house with toxic mold. I couldn't remember squat when a toxic mold grew in my house in Palo Alto, literally within a day of the dishwasher being replaced when the old one had been leaking. We had Aspergillus and penicillium growing back there and a little bit of stachybotrys, which is one of the very worst. My wife, who speaks five languages and never has needed a personal organizer in her life because her whole calendar is, like, laid out somehow in her mind in a way I can't quite comprehend. She started losing words and needed to write things down she'd never written down before. It literally takes away your memory, and if you don't figure out what's going on, it can take it away permanently. It was helpful. We figured it out within a week. Destruction of brain tissue. You saw those red spots in my brain. I showed signs of toxic brain exposure. But the SPECT scan that I did didn't say what toxin caused it. That sort of scan doesn't do it. They just said something damaged your brain. We don't know what it is. Cancer. There is a very high correlation with mycotoxins in cancer. Allergic reactions. It's amazing what happens, even from things like soy sauce, for a lot of people, because soy sauce contains mycotoxins. It's made by brewing aspergillus. Unexplained hair loss. Can't get pregnant. One in eight couples today is having a hard time getting pregnant. That's why I'm not worried about a population problem. If you look at the trend, the sperm count, fertility rates, survival rates in third worlds, things like that. The bottom line is that we're losing our ability to reproduce. And one of the big contributors is environmental estrogens. And one of the large producers of environmental estrogens is. You got it. Our friends the fungi, birth defects, headaches, sores on your skin, rashes, canker sores, chronic sinusitis. Major, major problems with fungus growing in sinuses. Now, the stuff, this mold doesn't really care. We're wet, we're warm, we're made of good stuff. They'll grow in your sinuses if they can get a foothold. Respiratory problems, which are on the increase. Asthma. Yikes. So what the heck do you do about all this stuff, James? Let me tell you a few more stories. Mycotoxins store mostly in fat. We feed that. We feed mycotoxins to our animals. We eat the animals. Slight problem. There's a reason that I keep talking about grass fed beef and grass fed butter. Almost to the point of just being disgusted by the way, God, I'm getting hungry. I actually did take a. I ate a whole stick of butter in front of a senior vice president. From Twitter once at south by Southwest. There was no other food. I don't like to just eat it unless I wrap it in bacon first. But. Speaking of animals, how do ranchers know they have moldy feed? This is from a site, mycotoxin.com, i think. Mycotoxins.com this is what ranchers talk about when they sit down for beer. Why they drink beer after they get this I haven't figured out yet. But they say, hmm, cystic ovaries. Oh, that's vomitoxin. Let's test for that in our food. They have test kits they buy for about 150 bucks with 36 wells that they can use to test the food. And it's not that they're saying, oh, let's not feed that to the animals. They're just saying, let's feed that to animals right before we kill them. Because that way, if they're going to die, they don't have time to die because food's cheaper when it's moldier. So aflatoxin M1. Oh, look. Milk contamination, which they do monitor in milk or they just make less milk. Oh, we lost money. We better test our food. Feed rejection. Look, have you ever seen a cow throw up? I don't even know if that works with three stomachs, but I don't want to see it. Intestinal hemorrhages, it goes on and on. They measure this percent of abortions at birth. Fertility. Basically, this is cow PMS right here. Mad cow disease. Never mind. Speaking of bacon, here's what we do with pigs. Fumonisin, which is a very common toxin in corn, causes lung edema. So these pigs are not dead, so they're still alive. Let's feed them the cheapest food that we can feed them so that they don't die and they get fat with the least amount of dollars involved. Since not all of these things are even tracked, and especially in The US we have lower standards than some parts of China, believe it or not. The ranchers just look at this as. Look, these are basically economic inputs and outputs. How much intestinal hemorrhage is enough to have to sell the pig? And the answer is as long as it's not dead, you can sell it. So let's buy the cheapest food with the most toxins. That's why pastured pork makes great bacon. The rest of the bacon you ought not to eat. So where do these things hide? Now that maybe you're thinking these are gross. There's moldy places, moldy bodies, it grows inside your body and there's moldy food. All right, here's a quiz and there's a prize. What food makes up 25% of your maximum European safe level of ochratoxin on average? The US doesn't track mushrooms, cheese. Good guesses. Coffee. That's exactly right. In the US we don't track ochratoxin. So I guess it's okay. In Europe they have a maximum upper limit and they estimate that the average coffee drinker gets 25% of the maximum safe dose, which I don't agree that's a maximum safe dose at all from coffee. And that's why I drink coffee that is tested for mycotoxins, because I know I do the testing and I design the process to make the coffee. Can you catch? So these are two things that I do. Two of the most heavily toxin laden foods that have the most to offer in terms of performance would be coffee and dark chocolate. So I went out and found different ways of producing these things. When I say producing, I mean how they're harvested, how they're grown, how they're picked, what species, what part of the world they're grown in, and then every step between there and when we get it into the bag. And then I test using expensive laboratory equipment to figure out is there any detectable mycotoxin or any other biogenic amines which come from microbiological breakdown of amino acids and proteins. And these come back with non detectable, which is how they're supposed to be. And the end results are that you perform much better on it. To the point that I haven't tested brain performance on the chocolate, but on the coffee. I have an IRB approved study. I haven't published the results yet, but we looked at nine measures of cognitive executive function on a large mass market brand of coffee versus this coffee and found overwhelmingly better performance, statistically significant on six of the nine measures from drinking Mycotoxin free coffee versus the other mass market stuff. Very big difference. And this is why it matters. How your stuff is created and whether or not there are small trace amounts of mycotoxins in it, it's quantifiable that it hurts your performance. Here's what to do about moldy places. They're relatively easy. You can air test before you move in somewhere. You might think I sound a little bit paranoid. It'll cost you four or five hundred bucks. Americanairtesting.com works in the Bay Area. I don't know if they come all the way up here, but you want to test the air before you're going to decide to live somewhere for a long time. If there's mold inside a wall, you're not going to see it. One of the times when I got quite ill, I bought a condo, slept in the bedroom. Didn't know that on the other side of the bedroom wall there was a leaking water heater owned by another unit. And on the back side of the wall was black, slimy mold. And I got the worst headaches. I felt like I was drugged all the time. I dogsat my parents dog. It almost died from some lung problems. It got in one week at the house and my now ex wife basically went nuts. I mean more nuts. My experience in the Bay Area, a third of local rentals have mold problems. If you're up here, it's a major problem because people turn on humidifiers in the winter. Well, you have humid air, warm inside, ice cold outside. You have condensation on the inside of the walls. It's a rampant problem, even in places like Alaska. So controlling indoor humidity, it turns out, affects how you feel. If you're not going to spend a couple hundred bucks on air testing, go to the place that you're thinking of renting and sit there for a couple hours, read a book, do something, stir up a little bit of dust, and then just note how you feel when you're done. And if you don't feel great, then you don't have to go to the place. I can tell you walking in the door within five minutes. About a third of places are not really good for inhabiting, especially public schools. Tools. If you're dealing with performance problems that are unexplained, random health problems, unexplained weight gain, stuff like that. Does your gym smell funky? If so, it is funky. Go to another gym. If you find out from a test you have the really bad stuff, you leave everything behind that has holes in it. Anything porous when my place in Palo Alto got infected, they looked at the air test and they came back wearing astronaut suits. I'm not joking. They had positive air pumped in from outside. They took everything in the house that could be dry cleaned and dry cleaned it. They wet mopped everything else. They scrubbed the air for three days and they ripped the kitchen down to the studs and then tested the air again, then rebuilt the kitchen to get rid of this stuff because it's that toxic to human life. But if you're in a place that has that growing and they just don't know. Buyer beware. If you have other kinds of toxic stuff, you do what I just described. Hepa, vacuum, wet dust. It's incredibly expensive. You can have lifelong better health if you never live in a place with toxic mold. So be aware of this when you're looking at where you go and if it smells bad or you can see mold on the windows or the skylights or in the bathroom. There's other places. It's pretty hard to get mold out of your body. You can take antifungal drugs. You wouldn't think they would be performance enhancing, but for a good number of people they are. The reason I believe this is the case is that we have this microbiome stuff growing in your gut. We only just maybe last year announced in Wired magazine, oh yeah, there's like a fungal biome that no one's ever tracked. So we have fungus growing in our gut, all of us do. And we have no real clue what it's doing because we haven't really done the genetic work to understand it. We're still sort of stuck on the bacteria. Remember that thing about the cheese? Bacteria, fungus fight each other, throwing little chemical bombs at each other. It's going on in your gut too. But for some people, antifungals can do amazing things. And that's, I believe, what's going on in the gut and also in the skin. And this is a problem. We don't actually look at fungus in the body the way we look at bacteria. We're good at fighting bacteria, we're bad at fighting fungus. In fact, the number one drug for antifungal use is Diflucan or fluconazole. It's known as. They sell one pill to cure vaginal yeast infection. 20 years ago that was a life saving AIDS drug because people with AIDS couldn't fight fungus and they were getting Karposi sarcoma. So it's amazing that that drug has gone from, oh my God, they're Dying to just treating common mold problems because mold is getting more aggressive. And that's a function of what we've done to our soil with rampant agriculture to grow grains. The other thing you can do, stop feeding mold in your body. Eat low carb. So one of the things I do with a bulletproof diet is I go for a cyclical ketogenic diet where you eat relatively high fat, which microbes don't like, and you eat low carbs, which fungus loves. When you do that, you oftentimes get die off symptoms. Because one of the ways you can stress a fungus or bacteria is you lower its food supply. It gets stressed, it pumps out toxins. Now, the way food cravings can work is fungus says, hungry, give me sugar. And the way it says that is, here's a nice bunch of toxin. And then you're like, God, I got a headache, I got brain fog. It's not necessarily low blood sugar, it's that your toxin load is up. Feed the fungus. Happy fungus, less toxin so you can get on this thing. This is happening in people right now. There are supplements you can take. Grapefruit seed extract is pretty amazing. Oregano oil. Oh, wait. Vitamin D, like the paleo vitamin of choice, is an antifungal agent. There are studies that show you put vitamin D in with mold and mold dyes. Interesting. So does vitamin C and vitamin E. In fact, every single vitamin you can name stops or reduces fungal growth. They're all antifungal. Garlic works really well, even if it does inhibit your ability to meditate very well. Caprylic acid, one of the two acids in MCT oil, which is one of my favorite forms of fat. In fact, I manufacture an MCT oil. This is another kind of fatty acid that you can purchase that is very powerfully antifungal. So most people that I know, when they start doing even a few things that are antifungal, they perform a little bit better, they feel better. Because low grade fungus in the gut creates things that give you brain fog. Probiotics. Well, if you have bacteria and fungus, help the help the bacteria. Just make sure you use the right ones. Antibiotics are concentrated. Mycotoxins don't take them unless you're dying. It gets a little worse, though. And this is where biohacking is interesting. We talked about the interaction between a mycotoxin or between a mold and a bacteria. Well, if you breathe mold, which most of us do at some point or another, it can change the bacteria that grows in your nose. It turns into a biofilm forming Multiple antibiotic resistant form of bacteria, at which point it makes its own toxins that cause brain fog. So even if you have no fungus growing in your body anymore, you still have basically this lump of self organized bacteria making toxins that affect your brain right next to your brain and your sinuses. So people who've been exposed to this actually deal with this. And the way you fix that is you put a couple drops of Lugol's iodine and salt in hot water, you lean forward like this and you snort really hard and you just suck the iodine right up your nose. It's unpleasant, but it works. There's other things like nasal spray that help. Here's what gets really tough though. With moldy food, You want to eat grass fed meat. If it's not grass fed, you actually just don't want to eat it. And if you try this for a month, it's okay to not eat meat at a meal. Just don't eat it. Go to the restaurant. If they don't have fish, usually they have fish that's not farmed. Eat that. If they don't have it. Eat the vegetables, that's fine. Put extra butter on them, you won't be hungry. Eat eggs, but eat ones that ate no corn. The reason is that about 90 to 98% of dried corn is contaminated with fusarium mold in the US it forms on the mold on the corn while it's growing. It's part of it and it's a significant problem from a corn based economy. Don't eat any cured meats. I make an exception. I mean, bacon is like, you know, love. But here's the thing with bacon, if you didn't cure it yourself or it wasn't cured really carefully, it's probably not safe if you're having performance problems like this. I cure my own bacon and it's really good. Grass fed butter matters, not just because of the mycotoxin, but because of the fatty acid content in the butter. So kerrygold anchor anything that says it's from cows that ate grass versus cows that ate corn, which is full of mycotoxins and bad oils as well. Coconut oil and MCT oil are really good because they're antifungal. There's a problem though with coconut oil. A lot of coconut oil is made through a process of fermentation and some kinds of coconut oil, specifically a kind called copra oil which doesn't have to be labeled as copra oil. It's the lowest cost one. It's actually gray colored because of the mold that's still in it. So if you ever wondered why sometimes you eat coconut oil and you don't feel so good, it's because that was moldy coconut oil. Major issue. Wilderness family naturals tests theirs for mycotoxins. That's the brand that I prefer. There are other good brands, but some of the very common Internet brands, I know very, very well that they have mold in them, and so do some of the physicians I've worked with. Don't eat stuff that eats corn. This just kills me. Avoid chocolate and coffee. In fact, it killed me so much that I stopped avoiding chocolate and coffee, and I just made the good stuff. It was a personal mission to have coffee. I gave it up for five years. Instant coffee. I've never found instant coffee that's safe. Decaf, until last week, was universally contaminated because we take the very worst quality beans and then we decaffeinate those. Because why would you ever decaffeinate good coffee? It's going to lose its flavor anyway. So you end up with the most toxic. Beans get decaffeinated, usually with a water process. Now and then they sit wet without the antifungal called caffeine in them, and they get more moldy, and then they get roasted six months later, and then you drink them. So I just created the bulletproof decaf coffee where we take high quality, tested beans, we send them to the facility that's basically next door, they decaffeinate them, we bring them back, we roast them immediately and ship them off to people. So it's actually decaf, which has health benefits. Decaf actually stops inflammation. Some of what it does, but you get it without the mycotoxins. It sounds ridiculous to be that picky about your coffee. Except that we have the data. We know what mycotoxins do to you. We know it's in the coffee. It's a common problem in coffee. It's a common problem in chocolate. So if you know it's there, why would you choose to put that in your body? If you care about being superhuman, you care about high performance. You simply wouldn't do that if you had the knowledge. And you have the knowledge. If you're going to eat nuts, undamaged nuts that are from the fridge, it's kind of annoying. I would like to just eat handfuls of nuts that have been sitting out for a week. Unfortunately, they do mold once they're out of their shell. And if they're ground nuts, Here's a little trick. If you're a nut producer, I used to live in the Central Valley where they produce a lot of nuts. You take the pretty nuts and you sell those because they're more valuable. The ones that are broken, a little shrunken, little shriveled, not so pretty. You grind those ones up and you sell them as butter or chopped almonds. Don't buy pre chopped nuts. You're fully capable of tossing them in a magic bullet and chopping them yourself if you want to. Don't eat peanuts. They're not nuts anyway. They're bad for you. Bananas. The black part in bananas is just bad news. Other fruit with soft spots, unless you just dropped it on the floor, picked it up, look, new bruise. Soft spots are bad for you. When you get fungus growing, you can see the fungus. It also sends hyphae like little strings throughout the food. So in some foods, cutting out the mold isn't going to cut it. Most fermented things are not a good idea. Grass fed yogurt, especially if it's raw or kefir, can work. Apple cider vinegar can work. Many fermented products have this problem going on. They also have high histamine levels, so you can get good probiotics from some fermented foods. But a lot of people, more than you would think, are sensitive to fermented foods and they don't understand why they feel like crap all the time. And it's because they're eating fermented foods every day. If you have times when you just don't feel good, try going five days, six days with zero fermented anything and see what it does to you. You may find amazing differences. Some people, like Michael Alan Smith, a guy who runs a cool blog out of Seattle. He's done the test. This guy eats like a bucket of fermented cabbage every day. I don't know how much he farts, but he's gone. He's done the test twice. He eliminates it. He has no difference. He's not sensitive, but many people are. In fact, the data shows one third of people have genes that make them sensitive to this. So basically, one in three of you sitting here probably has genes that mean you should not be doing this. That makes me sad to say no cheese. But generally most cheese is not a good idea. If you have this as a performance issue, there are other reasons to not eat cheese. Processed foods are designed to last a long time. A little bit of mold grows, they're still good. We'll sell them. Don't eat grains. And if you're going to do alcohol, I Have a whole infographic on the website where I tell you Exactly. It's on bulletproofexec.com, probably/alcohol. It's an infographic that says which alcohol has the most toxins to the least. Short version is potato vodka is your best bet. Beer is the worst. Red wine is the next worst. Sorry, I like red wine too. It just doesn't like us. Leftovers generally spoil faster than you'd think. So if you're real sensitive, don't eat leftovers or at least freeze them. Don't let them sit in the fridge for three or four days and take a sniff and then eat it. It's to going going to affect your performance. And finally, sushi, white rice and wild caught fish. That's a pretty good deal. You might get a little extra mercury when you might want to take some chlorella or something with that, but what the heck. This seems kind of daunting. Bulletproof diet boils all this down into eat this. This is better than this, is better than this is better than this. And it's a free infographic download. But you may not have to do all this. But if you try all this, you may experience a new state of clarity and mental and physical performance that you didn't know you were capable of. The whole bulletproof concept is I want you to try the diet and try the other stuff I talk about for two weeks because you will experience this new inner power that you didn't know you had. And once you get that, that's your bar. And then you start working towards feeling that way every day. Most people have never experienced feeling that good. And unfortunately, if this stuff is getting in your way, it's not like you can say I'm just going to do the no cheese diet. Everything else affects you too. So what I've done is taken years and gone through and looked at all the research I can find. In fact, there were 1300 references in the Better Baby book alone and said, what do we do to move the needle in the direction of kicking ass all the time? And maybe you're fine on half the stuff on this list, but if you don't eliminate all of it at once, you're never going to know. If you want to try detoxing a little bit. This is what you do if you've been exposed to mold, but you might just try this if you're hungover. Activated charcoal, 10 capsules three times a day is a lot. If you're prone to constipation, you need to take something that Loosens you up or less. Charcoal bentonite does the same thing. There's another thing on the list here. All of these things soak up toxins in the body. Most people feel enormously better if they have just a little activated charcoal. In fact, if you feel for some reason that you don't know, like why I'm off my game today, I don't know why, I'm a little bit just not as superhuman as I'm used to being, it's amazing what three or four activated charcoal capsules will do. They soak up toxins in the gut that are affecting your brain. And if you really have issues with this stuff, there's things like an anti cholesterol drug called cholestyramine. It binds to bile. And in those of us who are optimized for living, especially in northern Europe, we have these genes called HLA genes. And they're designed so we can go into a town, not get sick from all the weird microbes there, have an arrow stuck in us, or maybe get cut with a sword, then run away, not bleed to death, and then do it again next week. What that means though, is that if you're exposed to toxic molds, your body actually turns on its rapid coagulation and it turns on its self defense systems. And when that happens, they don't turn off because we weren't optimized for this kind of world. I'm one of those people. You can turn down that response with an anti diabetes drug. You can do it with Chinese herbals like stefania root. But for the most part, most people who don't have severe problems because they lived in a really bad place, take a little activated charcoal every now and then, try some modified citrus pectin, and your performance will improve. And that's really what this is all about. Do a quick time check. What time am I supposed to be done here? 10. All right. All right. Beautiful. We're nearing the end. Like this slide. 10 minutes for questions. I can talk about coffee and other bulletproof stuff if any of you want, besides just mycotoxins.

Like one of your first slides where you saw all the things you were toxic or that were allergic to poisoning your body.

What lab is actually.

How do we get through that?

There's some new tests. That's actually an allergy test. Let's see. Yeah, but let's see where this came from. If I was to go to my.

Doctor and say I want.

You could say you want a mold allergy test. This doesn't say. It doesn't Say what lab it's from, I'd have to figure it out. Enviromold. IgG. So it's an IgG mold test. IgG immunogamma globulin right there. So you can get these from a variety of places. More recently, you can actually test for the presence of the mold toxins themselves. One of my good friends, someone who actually did the full baby book protocol and just had a beautiful baby a couple years ago, she called me and she said, this woman's really smart. She called me and she said, I'm starting to lose words. My memory is going, She's a successful corporate development executive, et cetera. And she just moved into her boyfriend's place. He wasn't having any problems there. He lived there for a long time. And basically she lost her health over the course of a year to the point she was almost disabled. And I kept saying, it's mold. You have all the symptoms, you have nosebleeds, etc, etc. And when they finally got the test, they had Stachybotrys growing in the closet in their bedroom. She was breathing it every night and getting worse and worse and worse. Yet someone with different genes wasn't having this problem. So a third of us have the genes to get worse from that. It's enough to know if you're one of those people. And also, even if you are a person who can be resilient in a moldy environment, you're not going to be maximum performance if you're spending your organ reserves fighting off these toxins that you're introducing to your body. You want stress on your body to be good, stress to be useful, stress that causes adaptation. You don't want to waste stress by swimming in toxins all the time. You can probably handle it, at least for a while, but you're not going to end well compared to if you hadn't swim in those toxins. And you use that same stress to lift heavy things or to sleep more, or to do whatever the heck it is you do for fun.

Fermented foods, kombucha are so in right now. So that's a little mix for kombucha.

Is a funny thing. The question was, what about fermented foods? It's a little discouraging. Try no fermented foods for a week or two. Try them again. Mental clarity, what your mouth tastes like when you wake up. Body odor. Like, once I went on the bulletproof diet, I stopped having body odor. Like, I can go for a very long time as long as I'm eating Right. I just don't smell. It's kind of cool. You don't get bad breath the way that you're probably used to the morning breath, dragon breath thing. It's a sign of body toxins. Kombucha has five, basically not well known or well understood antibiotics in it. And I drink kombucha sometimes, but I always drink the brand. I forget its name. That tells you what species are in it. Uncontrolled fermentation with random stuff from the environment is a very bad idea because the microbes in the environment change their genes basically every time they replicate every 20 minutes. And they can swap genes with other ones around them. So we've created a whole new probiotic on the planet. The soil itself changed because of stuff we sprayed on it. About 30 years ago, we turned on the X man factor. Everyone starts evolving and growing fangs and wings and stuff like that. We did that to mold 30 years ago and it's been doing it ever since. So there's stuff out there that ferments today that never fermented 50 years ago. And that's one of my questions for people who are really into fermented foods. It's like, what's growing on your food? What does it make if you don't know that you're taking risks that 50 years ago, Weston A. Price and company just didn't have to worry about. Do you comment on your intermittent fasting protocol and whether you still are doing that or inactivated? Oh, can I comment on the bulletproof intermittent fasting protocol? Yeah, I do it like six days a week. This is a protocol where you wake up in the morning and you have a cup of bulletproof coffee, which is made from toxin free coffee, by the way. Caffeine is an antifungal and there's a bunch of other good herbal stuff in coffee. Then you take MCT oil, which is antifungal because of the caprylic acid in it, and grass fed butter, which helps with gut healing because of the butyric acid in it. And you blend it and when you blend it, it gets frothy and foamy. It tastes really good, like a latte. And you drink it and then you're not hungry for eight hours. It turns out that eating fat doesn't turn on the oh, I'm eating response that comes from eating sugar or from eating protein. So you lose all your cravings. You have lots of energy, but you still get the benefits of intermittent fasting, which are pretty good mimetic of actual real caloric restriction. So you don't have to restrict calories, but you get the genetic effects of doing that. It also puts you in ketosis faster than fasting alone will do. You want to be in ketosis or fat burning mode, often on the bulletproof diet, but not all the time. You want to cycle in and out so you don't adapt either way. I do it six days a week, honestly, because I have more focus, I feel good, and I just don't worry about food or food cravings ever. And I can go 18 hours without eating. All I have is, even if I only have a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of mct, I'm done for the day. If you can't afford to rip down your kitchen and there's black mold, what's a good way to just kill it or limit it? If you can't afford to tear out your kitchen and you have black mold, what's the best way to get rid of it? Hire an arsonist. I'm serious. You need to get out of there. Yeah. So you're mentioning the cycle. How do you cycle out on the bulletproof diet? How do I cycle out on a one day bulletproof, intermittent, fast, or on a regular basis? So on a one day basis, when I do eat, it'd be a late lunch or dinner or both. I eat lots of vegetables with fat and some meat, but not excess protein. Then every three to seven days, I'll have carbs in the form of white rice or sweet potatoes or maybe yucca root. And the reason you do that is because if you go on a no starch diet for long periods of time, bad stuff happens to your ability to produce mucus and other like, essential things in the body.

Do you recommend this diet to everybody or just people who have mold toxicity levels?

The bulletproof diet's about optimal mental performance and getting rid of all sources of inflammation we can find that are not useful. Inflammation. Everyone I know who goes on it. Okay, that's not true. There's probably five or six people went on it and just didn't work for them. Probably for a variety of other reasons. I'm not going to get into here, but the vast majority of people go on it. The biggest 2 comments I hear are I didn't know I could lose weight this fast and I'm never hungry and I don't have food cravings and my mental clarity and focus is something I've never had before. This has been my own experience with it and I've done it for years and years now. And I just don't want to go back to feeling the other way.

Is there an assumption that we are all infected with mold toxicities?

Everyone has fungus in their gut and the fungus that's in our gut does make psychoactive stuff. Some of us are more affected than others, but we're all affected. And the bulletproof diet is not designed to be just an antifungal diet. It's designed to be a high performance diet for cognitive function that just happens to make you gain muscle and lose fat without working out very much. Kind of convenient side effects. I believe that fungus growing in the body is bad. I haven't seen a study that says it's really useful to have a certain species growing in the gut. But we may not know that.

Let's take one more question for Dave.

Two. Come on.

Two. One. One.

Turns out your mucus is made of polysaccharides, which come from starch. I did a 30 day trial where I ate one serving of vegetables every day and the rest tons of butter and meat from grass fed animals. And what I found was that it destroyed my sleep quality. I was waking up nine or ten times a night without memory and feeling exhausted. When I woke up, I had super dry eyes and dry sinuses and I actually developed a couple new food allergies, which sucks because I have enough food allergies from all my mold exposure. And the reason that happened is because the mucus that lines your gut to prevent the stomach acid from eating away the walls. I didn't have enough of that either. So I was trying to replicate those guys in the Arctic who supposedly lived for two years on pure meat. I don't know, maybe I'm not cut out for that, but it didn't work for me. There's also an adrenal stress thing that happens. So getting the carbs for women especially every three or four days is likely better. Some women are great on every seven or every 10 days. Guys tend to go every seven days, maybe every 10 days. But women, it tends to be a shorter thing and it has to do also with hormonal regulation. That was my last question.

Dave Asprey, folks. Give him a hand. So while Dave is getting the mic, over to Phil, Phil Maffetone, our next presenter. Just a couple of quick things. How many of you are going to be making the instant coffee in your hotel room tomorrow morning? I stopped doing that as soon as I discovered Dave's stuff. And it definitely makes a difference. When you're traveling and you're on the go, that's bad news. Dave's book is here. We've got a bunch of them. The Better Baby Book. I can't guarantee it's going to get you laid, but it will tell you what to do afterwards if stuff goes the way you want to or want it to, whatever the case may be. Anyways, this is Dave's Better Body Better Body Baby book. Better Baby book written by Dr. Seuss. Go check it out. It's on the table. Fantastic book. I read it last month and it is awesome. I also put a link to that book on our Facebook events page for the Become Superhuman event. I also use a few other things that Dave has on his website. Like I use his anti aging formula with the oxaloacetate in it before I go out and do interval based training workouts. I also use his liposomal glutathione before I drink or engage in heavy drinking, which I never ever, ever ever do. Except tomorrow night. This is also does this look familiar to anyone? You got this in your bag. This is a very potent antifungal oil of oregano. I travel with this. I use it quite a bit as kind of like a daily tonic. What you can do is just take a few drops. Some people put them in water. Yeah, it's not that bad. Just put it straight into your mouth like that. And I am not caught dead traveling without this stuff. So this is wild Mediterranean oil of oregano. Very different than the stuff that you can get from a lot of health food stores. We go to the to the best quality source for this stuff. So check that out. Use it. It's in your bags. And you can also do heart rate variability testing and post meal pulse rate testing. It's called the Dr. Koca's Pulse Rate Test to see how you're responding to certain foods. There's not a ton of studies out there that look at heart rate variability and food toxin exposure, but it may be worth tracking for you just to look into that as you're going.