Dave Asprey: Avoiding Your Personal Kryptonite For Bulletproof Health

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This is Brad Costanzo, and today I am here with Dave Asprey, the founder of the Bulletproof Executive. He's a Silicon Valley investor and technology entrepreneur who has spent five, 15 years and over. Get this, $300,000 to hack his own biology. Dave lost 100 pounds without counting calories or excessive exercise. And he's used techniques to upgrade his brain by more than 20 IQ points. I'd like to go ahead and welcome you here to the show, Dave. Thanks for joining me, Brad.

Thanks for having me on.

Well, as I mentioned offline, I've been a fan and a follower of yours for years and I think you've done some tremendous work. But that being said, what is the number one thing that you recommend people do to maximize their health and wellness?

There are so many things that come to mind, I think. What about sleep? What about stress? But the one thing that people probably won't hear from an average expert and the one thing that's sort of hidden is something that I wrote about in the Bulletproof diet. I call it avoiding your kryptonite. We focus so much on what are the things that make us strong. I eat lots of whatever you believe is going to make you strong. I would propose butter, might be that.

Butter from grass fed cows, of course, or grass fed meat or lots of vegetables. Or maybe you're a raw vegan and you believe that that's what's going to work for you. But whatever your template is, okay, what makes you strong? More exercise makes me strong. But what about the things that make you weak? It turns out that every activity and every food, everything in the environment around you, it has good things, it has bad things. One example of this would be, let's say, protein. There's kind of an obvious example that I also wrote about and I love this example because if I said to you you needed to have 30 grams of protein in the morning so you can have lots of energy, you'd probably say, okay, but then if I gave you a big bowl of spider venom, which is all protein by the way, you look at me like I was natural.

It's natural. It's organic spider venom.

Organic biodynamic spider venom. Exactly. What's going to happen is you're not going to eat it. Apparently we all know at some level that just because it's got protein doesn't mean it's good for you. Different foods between that bowl of scrambled eggs and a bowl of spider venom, very different.

Let's look at everything that we do. Not from a is it good or is it bad? But recognizing that it's a mix of good and bad. If you can take steps to maximize the good and and minimize the bad at exactly the same time, what you're going to experience is a dramatic improvement in the quality of your life. Because it's the subtle little things that can happen in your food or in your environment that trigger brain fog and fatigue and things that make you tired or give you joint pain or ruin a good night's sleep or make you yell at your kids when you didn't mean to. Sometimes it isn't that you didn't do enough of the good stuff, you did all the good stuff, but at the same time you did the bad stuff and you didn't know about it because you don't know what your Kryptonite is.

Right. And that's probably one of the things that makes people so frustrated because they feel as though they're doing all the right things. I'm going to the gym and I'm trying to eat healthy and I'm trying to do this, that and the other and they're not getting any results or maybe they're going backwards. So you're saying that sometimes they're taking kryptonite and not knowing it.

Yeah. There's a couple different types of kryptonite that we'll talk about just in our 10 minutes here. One of them is something that we put in our own food. This is, let's say you add MSG to your food or you don't know it's added. Or in the US a restaurant can add something that's 74% msg to your meal and they can tell you that there's no MSG added because according to our regulations, it's not actually MSG unless it's 75% MSG or more. The cook.

He can tell you this. He can say, look, I promise you, I added no msg. And he believes it because his own label just says spice extract. He doesn't know, he just knows people eat a lot of it when he puts it in there.

This means that if you are experiencing food cravings or you have that energy crash at 2 in the afternoon, it might be because we added man made kryptonite to it. Artificial colorings and flavorings, they're artificial, which doesn't make them good or bad, but they have a biological metabolic impact that is documented to be bad. As a person who's seeking to be high performance, you don't want to have any of that. Less is better. We go out and we spend a couple bucks on a little fish oil capsule that's good oil, assuming that it's not rancid and low quality fish oil, at which point it's bad. But if this much fish oil can do something for you, what will this much margarine do? Margarine is the opposite of fish oil in terms of health. It is inflammatory. Small amounts of margarine are just as bad as those fish oil things are good.

That's really an amazing point right there. It's something. You just gave me a little epiphany because you're always like, oh, well, I'm just going to have a little bit of this, a little bite, little here and there. It's in moderation. But when you think about it, the other things you take in moderation are the really healthy things, like the fish oil. That's really a tremendous point. So sorry to interrupt there, but I just wanted to hit on that.

Oh, thanks. Thanks, Brad. Not at all. Here's the other big source of anti nutrients that is just not talked about enough and it kind of drives me crazy. And just picture for a second that you are.

A grain of, or not a grain, a stalk of wheat, let's say. So you don't have teeth and claws. You can't run away. So your job is to reproduce your species. Since you can't run away, if an animal comes and turns you into a sandwich, you die, and the species is over. So over centuries, you evolve a complex set of defenses. It's called the whole grain, the outside part of the grain. And you cover yourself with phytic acid and you cover yourself with other things. You make lectins, which are compounds that stick to different sugars that line the cells in bodies, things that trigger autoimmunity. And you basically make yourself unattractive as food because every kind of creature in nature likes to eat starch, which is what's inside that wheat kernel. So there's bacteria, there's fungus, and there's animals all trying to eat you so you make yourself less attractive. Now, every food does this. 20% of all. Rheumatoid arthritis is caused by vegetable defense systems that are anti nutrients. Maybe they're fine for you, but maybe they're a kryptonite for you. You don't know unless you know your genes or unless you test yourself. And that's why in the bulletproof diet, I'm like, here's a set of suspect foods. You need to not eat these for a couple weeks and see how you feel. And magically, those rashes that you've had, or your joint pain or those headaches or your sleep quality or your asthma or migraines, they go away. And then you realize one of these suspect foods was a cause. And it's these antinutrients, these sources of kryptonite that are in our food that mother nature put there that can cause the problem. Perhaps the scariest one is mold toxins. 24% of the global food crop is lost because of toxic mold growing on our food supply. Wow. Now, the rest of the food, it's not just all mold free, it has some mold. In fact, we have regulatory limits. And it's impossible to get to extreme zero mold because you might have one, one tiny part per quadrillion, at which point it's essentially zero. But the levels that we've set are different for different countries, and they are set for economic gain versus for maximum human performance or even maximum human health. For instance, one of these toxins, the most common toxin in coffee of all things, is called ochratoxin A. On the bulletproof website, I have 1200 studies on the health effects of Ochratoxin A and 34 studies documenting that it's a problem in the coffee industry. The U.S. and Canada have no regulations for the amount of ochratoxin A that's allowed in coffee, but Europe and Asia do have them. So if you drink a cup of coffee in North America, there is a very significant chance that you're getting some amount of ochratoxin A. And I did a little study looking not at whether you're going to get bladder cancer or something, but but what does it do for your ability to perform at a cognitive level? We had a group of people do two tests every day of seven different types of executive function. What we found was a statistically significant improvement in their test scores when they were using coffee that did not have mold toxins in it. This is a coffee that I manufacture with lab testing that actually stopped the production of the toxins earlier in the production of coffee. And then we lab test to verify that our process worked. So this is a thing. There is a huge body of evidence that says coffee is good for you. There's also a body of evidence that says mold toxins are bad for you. More of the good, less of the Bad. Follow that rule for everything you do from a nutritional perspective. And this is why organic matters, this is why fresh matters, and this is also why local matters. And if you get all three of those together, you may find that that 2 o' clock in the afternoon, I'm getting tired, I feel like I'm going to crash. That kind of stuff that's happening because you actually have toxins earlier in the day. And then your liver says, oh, no, I have to deal with all these toxins. Can I have some blood glucose, please? Then your blood sugar drops and you get tired, and then you get a food craving, and then you try and deny your food craving because you're trying to lose weight. When you deny your food craving, you use up your willpower and by the end of the day, you're a zombie. This is why avoiding kryptonite matters, because it lowers that spark, it lowers your ability to bring it. Even if you're a little bit tired, it takes spirit life out of you and your goal is to just not come close to that stuff or even just to minimize it a little bit. Every little bit you minimize gives you a better quality of life.

Well, that's remarkable. You've really kind of shined light on a handful of those things that I can relate to personally in my own life. And it makes a lot of sense. It definitely complements all of the other advice that we've been hearing as well. And it shows you how important, you know, taking care of even just a small amount matters. Because sometimes moderation is not good. If it's moderation, if you're moderately getting some of the bad stuff and the kryptonite, that's great. And you've done a great job over the years of educating folks with the bulletproof diet and your bulletproof philosophy. But you want to tell people if they want more information on this, on you, where they can go and how they can find out more information.

Sure. You head to your nearest bookstore or online and buy a copy of the bulletproof diet book, which has all of this very concisely. But if you want to get it right now, you can pull out your cell phone and text 58885, the words BPDIET and your email address and I'll send you the one page infographic. You can print it and put it on your fridge. It's free and it has all of these important points on one page so you don't have to go study for years to learn all this stuff about where kryptonite hides.

That's great. Well, Dave, I appreciate your time here today, and I appreciate having you on the show.

It was a pleasure. Have a great day.

You, too.