DO THIS First Thing In The Morning To REVERSE YOUR AGE| Dave Asprey
Dave Asprey and guests discuss morning routines and diet strategies for longevity, covering fasting hacks, mitochondrial health, and how different diets like keto and carnivore affect aging and energy.
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The worst diet of all is that one with lots of fried stuff and bad oils. But the second worst diet for people who think they're being healthy, this isn't going to be popular, but it is...
Everyone swears by the lifestyle slash diet that they live by that works for them. People who are vegan swear by it. And the ones who are super healthy have lots of energy. The ones who are vegetarian.
I feel like vegans just swear. They don't even swear by their diet.
Is that just me? Who knows?
Yeah.
I mean, they swear by lots of things.
Sorry, vegans. I'm just teasing you guys. The, you know, the vegetarian diet, people who live a vegetarian lifestyle for a.
Long time say that this is the best for them.
People are carnivore diets, say it's the best for them. Keto. Is there a worst type of diet.
Even though some of these things might.
Work extremely well for particular body types? What, what is the worst type of diet? The worst type of diet is the standard American diet. and there's three things in it that are just horribly destructive. The first one is... what?
Sugar.
Sugar.
Sugar is there, but I don't think it's as destructive as the other two.
Okay.
So, I'll give them an order from the worst to the best of the worst, right? So, the number one thing that is wrong with the American diet is seed oils. These are mega six oils, and canola, corn, soybean, safflower, sunflower, all this stuff that's in everything at the restaurant and most packaged foods at the grocery store unless you buy from the right company. It's full of these oils. These are the oils that drive insulin resistance. Your body takes these oils and they're all plant-based oils. And it says, I'm going to try to construct the outer layer of my mitochondria in my cells, these little batteries, but I have the wrong ingredients. So I'm going to make subpar batteries. Like if you go to the knockoff store and you buy the cheap batteries, they last a third as long as the good ones. That's what happens when you eat a lot of seed oils. Americans have about 40 times more of that oil in their systems than they should, and it gets built into your tissues. And that makes you weak. It is just not good.
Seed oils.
Seed oils are bad. Second thing is industrially raised meat. It's full of xenoestrogens. These are estrogens that make animals fat on one-third less calories than normal. It's also full of antibiotics, and it's destroying the soil of the planet right now. It also is depleting farmland when we take and we grow corn and soy and grain and we don't actually put the animal poop back into the soil the way we do on my farm. What we're doing is we're sucking all the nutrients out of the soil and we're creating a very, very big catastrophe 60 years from now. We'll be out of topsoil because we stopped having animals walk around and poop on it the way it works when you're doing a regenerative agriculture kind of thing. But worst of all, you eat industrial animals They're also full of cortisol. And so you do this, they mess up your gut bacteria and they're full of glyphosate because it was on the feed and glyphosate disrupts your gut bacteria, your nervous system activity and is tied to cancer. So we're getting bad oils. Oh, and those animals, because they ate corn and soy, they're full of bad oils too. So now you're like, man, the steak tasted good. And I had that nice salad dressing that came out of a bottle that was full of crap oils and you think you're being healthy. but you're completely wrecking things. And this is some of the stuff that I did when I was heavy, right? And then the third thing would be sugar, right? You just, if you have a ton of sugar, it's directly harmful. If you do the stuff I'm talking about, you can probably have a few grams of sugar and you won't notice that your body can handle it just fine. So sugar is not good for you and it is addictive, but it is way better to eat sugar than it is to eat corn oil.
But don't eat either one. Don't eat what? Yeah, have sugar every once in a while. But don't eat oil.
If someone said, Here's a birthday cake, it's gluten-free, I don't do gluten. And they said, I made it with canola oil. I'd just be like, no. But if they said, I made it with sugar and butter, I'd be like, All right, I'm gonna have some. And it's that big? The sugar? Okay, your body can process that and it's gone. The other stuff, it sticks and it gets in there and you don't wanna do it. So the worst diet of all is that one with lots of fried stuff and bad oils. But the second worst diet for people who think they're being healthy was this isn't going to be popular, but it is the vegan diet.
Why is that?
There's two things. Okay. I was a devout raw vegan. Okay. I did this for more than a year. I mean, I have bowls as big as my head full of kale and blended and mashed and sprouted. And I mean, I, I'm good with.
Rice and beans and everything.
Yeah.
Yeah. All that stuff. So what happens there is your body doesn't get the essential fats that it needs. We are not made out of plant oils and. I have in my books, I talk about the studies that show when you change the type of oil you eat, it changes what your body is made of. So when you go on a plant-based diet, you're getting two things. You're getting plant-based oils, which are not very compatible with you. Vegans will get mad at me and say, Dave, we can convert plant omega-3s to the good ones. Yes, it takes 45 grams of bad omega-3s to make one gram of the good ones if your body can do that, which it won't be able to do because you're on a plant-based diet. And then you get tons of these anti-nutrients from plants that cause cravings. When I was a raw vegan, I was always hungry. And I think that that's a very common occurrence. And I would say, well, that's weird. I'm going to put more coconut oil or eat more, you know, fresh avocados, all these things. Avocados, it didn't matter. It's because plants don't want you to eat them and they cover themselves in defense systems that cause cravings. So I talk about the five big categories of things that are causing problems with us right now. and many plants that are common on a plant-based diet are not very compatible with humans. Like, oh, they have these vitamins. Yeah, they also stick to the stuff that lines the cartilage in your joints and gives you joint pain, or they inhibit your ability to absorb zinc and magnesium and iron and things like that. And so what happens is you tell yourself you're doing this to be nice to the animals, but what you're doing is you're making sure that the animals will go extinct because everyone was vegan, we'd have no animals. And then two generations later, we'd all be extinct because we'd have no animals to make soil. because you can't grow carrots without animal poop at the end of the day. You can do it for 20 years, you can do it for 30 years, but eventually you have to build that soil back up. So what's happening on a plant-based diet is the wrong fats and lots of anti-nutrients. And that combination is kryptonite for people. And I've had tens of thousands of former vegans go Bulletproof. And part of the reason I made the Bulletproof Diet was because I did harm to myself, including additional food allergies and worse hypothyroidism as a result of being vegan. And in terms of animal cruelty, I calculated deaths per calorie from eating a pound of grass-fed steak every day, which is a lot. You don't need to do that unless you're on the carnivore side of things, which there's an argument for that. But if you do that and the cow is grass-fed and local, unless the cow stepped on a frog, you kill less than one animal per year. in all of your food. But if you eat boxes of processed soy nuggets, you disrupted the lives of whatever was going to live on that land and whatever the tractors killed. And so the number of deaths per calorie is way higher for any grain product and anything other than basically fresh picked vegetables because of habitat destruction and tractor kills. And like, I asked a monk this in Tibet. I'm not dogmatic, but I want to do what works. So I like to minimize suffering. buy from a local farmer, eat less meat but make it grass-fed, and eat very good fats. And if you do that, you'll never have a craving during a fast. And if you don't believe anything I say, you can still be plant-based or vegan and you can still be standard American diet. Dave, I like my industrial animals, you know, go screw yourself. Just do intermittent fasting and you'll still improve. It works for any diet out there and I'm happy to share the knowledge and I've for sure moved a lot of information, there's 3,000 blog posts and stuff like that. But what I want people to do is figure out the foods that are compatible with your biology. And if you're one of the small percentage of people who's like, you know what? Vegetarian works for me. I know people, it really does. They eat some eggs, they eat some cheese, they eat a substantial amount of butter, and magically that really works for them and that's okay. But if it doesn't work for you.
Don'T tell yourself it's supposed to work so you'll do it even more. That's the mistake that I made. Are you friends with some vegans that you've had these conversations with or like Rich Roll or anyone like that?
No, I haven't had Rich on the show, but I would totally do that. And I've certainly had conversations with vegans a lot. And there's kind of two mindsets there. One of them says you're doing it for your health. The evidence does not support that. And here's what's really going on. And it's intimately tied to fasting. There's a compound in the body called mTOR, and you've probably talked about it on the show before. mTOR is a signaling molecule that says grow. It says, you know, build muscle, build tissue. And when you eat protein, a lot of protein, plant-based will raise it, but animal-based raises it much more. So when mTOR goes up, you put on muscle. But chronic elevation of mTOR equals cancer, right? So that's a bit of a problem. So one solution say, well, I'm going to go plant-based and low protein. The problem with that is that mTOR gets suppressed, but it never goes up. So you get frailty. Like these are the people who break their hips. These are people who have the vegan size pants for men, they're like little stick legs, right? You don't want to be there, right? So what's the solution? Well, don't eat for a while, then work out. and then eat. And what's neat is that mTOR is like a spring. You can push it down and when it's down, it's good except if it never goes up, it's not good. So when you push it down, there's three things that we know of that suppress mTOR and this is how you build muscle and how you account for the difference in outcomes from vegans versus carnivores, let's say. So to suppress mTOR, fasting does it, exercise does it, and coffee does it. So what you do is Eat dinner and stop eating around six. Don't eat after dinner. So you got four hours of fasting before bedtime. You sleep for eight hours, you just fasted for 12 hours. Wait another four hours. There you fasted 16 hours, you had a late breakfast, but before you eat, do some squats, go lift. I mean, it can be a very quick workout to just something heavy. And then you eat. And because all three of those things push the mTOR down, as soon as you eat some protein, the body says, Wahoo! And it spikes the mTOR much higher. And then the exercise has a bigger impact on your tissue. So you got more more exercise benefits in less time. Your mTOR was briefly elevated because you only ate once that day or twice that day and then it goes back down and it stays down. People feel good on a vegan diet because they suppress mTOR which is driving chronic inflammation. The problem is you do that forever, you never get the muscles and the growth and then you get the anti-nutrients and you get the bad fats. So it's okay to be vegan for a week. It's probably good for you. But then at the end of that week, maybe you should go carnivore. So cycles are good. And I will tell you, being all keto all the time is terrible for you. Being all vegan all the time is terrible for you and I've done both. that's why intermittent fasting is so awesome because you can eat both vegetables, you can even have white rice, you can have carbs, you don't have to be in keto and ketosis and all that to do fasting. It's cycling in and out.
So be vegan for a day, but just don't be vegan for a year and you'll be fine. Gotcha. Yeah, I'd love to hear you and.
A vegan talk about the research and the science on both sides and see, you know, what comes from that. I love having a genuine conversation where it's born out of health. When it's a lot of the health stuff, like what the health... It was created by people who went to jail for blowing up research laboratories because they were testing chicken eggs. There were some very strong animal rights people there masquerading as health people. But the whole thing about, you know, erections and vegetables and all that stuff, every doctor I know rolled their eyes and was like, this is the worst propaganda I've ever seen. There's no validity to this.
From what's the problem? From game changers or from I don't know if you watched that one.
Yeah, I definitely watched that one.
With guys having meat and then they had no erections the next morning or something and then the ones with vegetables.
Had all the erections in the world or something.
The first animal rights propaganda one was what the health and when people are like, oh, we don't really care that much about it. It's like, oh, we'll make it a performance enhancer. But man, if you want to see an athlete get injured, make them vegan and keep them vegan for a while.
Well, there's some athletes who are vegan. It seems like they're, They say they're healthier, they recover faster. There are some cases before.
They were eating meat and the standard American diet.
Right? Right.
And what you'll find is, who's that famous sprinter who went vegan a while ago? Usain Bolt.
He's vegan. He's a sprinter.
The first year he went vegan because he stopped eating a bunch of crap. And after that, he was sidelined by injuries every year and never set another record.
It could be because he was getting older. there could be other factors there, but yeah, yeah.
I think it's because you didn't have enough coffee.
That's my yeah, I'm always trying to learn, you know, from every, without making one side right or wrong and trying to find the research for every study to see, okay, well, is, what are the cases for eating meat, quality meat, what are the cases for being vegan, what are the cases for vegetarian? Because I'm always trying to learn, like, hey, maybe what I'm doing is not optimal.
So You know, Louis, your curiosity is what makes you a fantastic guy. You're always just authentically questioning. And there's new studies out that show that curiosity makes you young. Steven Collier talks about curiosity as being a component of flow state. I'm the same way. Like I said, I was a raw vegan. I was a devout raw vegan. I have to have my enzymes never heated above 112 degrees. And I was hardcore, right? So, I'm willing to be wrong and I've been wrong and I've been really sick and it's gotten to the point now where I talk about the science in all of the books that I write and I'm more convinced than I've ever been that no matter what we agree or don't agree on about what to eat, there's two things. One is if you don't eat for a while every day, you're going to be better off. The second thing is that Eat whatever doesn't make you hungrier after you finish eating and you'll be better off. So if you are the rare vegan who's like, oh, I had a bowl of beans and squishy whatevers, and I am vibing with energy and I'm not hungry for four hours afterwards, I haven't met one yet, but there might be one out there. But most of them are snacking on kale chips constantly because they're ravenous all the time. But I'm very happy to be proven wrong.
I hear you there. and I'm, you know, it's always learning, always exploring.
What are you eating now?
This, this week I'm eating, like, the last month I was, like, doing mostly keto and experimenting with that, and it worked for a while until it didn't. And then now I was like, you know what? Let me try vegetarian plant-based for this week. And so I'm eating vegetarian plant-based and.
Vegetarian is different than vegan, though, just to be aware.
Yeah, it's true. Well, I'm having a little bit of cheese. but yeah, so, and a little eggs, but I'm trying to be more vegan, but I'm having some cheese and eggs, so I guess it's vegetarian. But yeah, so I'm trying that. I'm just trying to explore to see what are the foods make me feel good when I poop, to be honest. Like what makes it feel good when it comes out? Because if it doesn't feel good when it comes out, then I probably shouldn't be eating those foods. And maybe those are peppers, maybe those are whatever nightshades or something or a certain type of meat and figuring out, you know, how do I just flow? easily, effortlessly every time and optimize the gut is really what I'm looking for, which I feel like things are pretty good right now but I'm always looking to improve and test.
It's a common thing with especially with keto where constipation happens, right? And the gut bacteria can get really out of whack on a keto diet. And, this is why I first went keto in the late 90s, it was called the Atkins Diet.
Right?
And I lost 50 pounds on it. The other 50 took 10 years to come off because it's inflammation that's caused by eating the wrong stuff when you're in keto. And then we have the modern renaissance of keto where there still isn't a great focus on here's the right type of protein. You get people putting milk protein isolate, which is almost a waste product in the US into their food saying there, it's keto because it's a protein. And you're like, no, you're doing it wrong. You can do better. But here's, there's three hacks you can do during a fast that allow your body to stay fasted and don't make you get hangry at all. And one of those hacks is the one you're looking for. So I'm gonna walk your listeners through three things you're allowed to have during a fast. And by the way, some people get very angry when I say you can have something during a fast. Those are people who say, But the mice in the study only had water. Like that's because that was all you gave them.
Yeah.
But we wanted people to be high performing. performance and comfortable. And I despise the idea of when I weighed 300 pounds of someone sitting down and saying, Dave, I want you to only have water this morning. And then you're going to go to work and you're going to show up and you're going to perform. And that's without two kids and be focused.
Yeah, I couldn't do it.
And if I did, it would have taken every ounce of willpower and I would have been miserable and I would have been hangry. This is not how to teach people to fast. And I think it's mean-spirited. So it's okay to do things that reduce your hunger and increase your focus during a fast as long as your body's still getting the benefits. So here's the three. The third one's gonna be right for you. First one, there is abundant evidence that black coffee during a fast makes the fast work better. The new science behind that that didn't exist when I first talked about Bulletproof Coffee is that the amount of caffeine in two small cups of coffee doubles ketone production, even if you eat carbs at night. so a little bit of a bump.
Go ahead.
Black coffee, no butter, no MCT. That's step one, right?
That's just black coffee.
Black coffee.
Okay. And that in and of itself doubles ketones.
Got it.
So that's okay during a fast based on the science you've not at night.
But in the morning.
Yeah.
In the morning.
Yeah, of course. Okay. So the second thing. Well, let's talk about why that works.
It also explains why the second thing works. The reason doesn't have some calories, though.
So it wasn't that affect the body in some way with those calories. coffee has nominal calories. It's not very much. And, it's not that calories are going to disrupt the fast. It's raising insulin or raising mTOR are what break the fast.
So, any type of carbs, any type of sugar, anything that raises that.
Yeah.
Carbs, sugar, or protein are gonna break your fast, but there's some wiggle room in there. And, when you have ketones higher, it suppresses ghrelin, which is the hunger and the cravings hormone, and it raises CCK, which is the fullness that was brought to you by Calvin Klein. And it's called a cystokinin for the people who are interested in the hard science of it. What you find, Louis, though, is that when you manipulate those things, the voice in your head telling you to think about food all the time starts to go away. And coffee is shown in many, many studies to be generally good for you. And there's still some people argue about that. Sorry, I just got a pubmed and Google coffee in the name of a disease and see what you find. Make your own decision on that.
Sure. The, it's probably the amount of coffee. If you're having 10 cups of coffee, then it's probably not the best thing for you.
The studies show that up to five cups a day increases longevity and that really slightly better up to five cups. Like in other words, four is probably better than three.
Four cups a day is, it can.
Be caffeinated or decaffeinated, but studies all show up to five cups a day makes you live longer.
Wow, that's interesting.
And so I actually do a cup of decaf in the afternoon because I really couldn't do five cups in the morning. That'd be a little bit too much for me.
You might be too jittery if you're on the food and you're just having caffeine.
So you gotta test this for your body, I think, for sure. You can have one, I'm not telling you to drink more coffee. I'm just saying have a cup of coffee in the morning and you'll be faster. It's going to be easier. And if you're feeling like you want something at 10, have a cup of black coffee versus water and you'll have less distractions, more focus, you'll feel better.
And you'll probably lose weight faster too.
Mm-. So this is like really easy, but someone's like, well, it's not water. You can't do it.
Do you know what a hair shirt is?
Hair shirt?
Yeah. No.
These monks many years ago used to weave shirts out of human hair, and they'd wear them because they were extra itchy, and they wanted to increase their suffering because suffering is a virtue. Those monks are reincarnated as people who only drink water when they're fasting in the middle of a work day. Okay, if you want to do a water fast for medical reasons on the weekend and rest and relax and reflect, that's called a spiritual fast. And there's benefits to that. But to try and do that when you're a mom and you have kids and work, it's not okay unless your body is really in tune for that.
Unless you've slept 10 hours and you're recovered and you're ready for it.
Yeah.
Right.
So there's our black coffee. Second hack is one, yeah, I'm well known for it. I'm not trying to sell more Bulletproof Coffee. And I will tell you, if you use that MCT oil I've been talking about for 10 years, I made MCT a thing. It really wasn't in the world of biohacking. If you do that and a little bit of grass-fed butter, it doesn't have to be two tablespoons, it can be just a small amount, it will give you a lot more ketones from the MCT and something magic happens when you put butter in coffee. We did not know why this was the case, but when you blend butter in coffee, new research at the University of Washington, I donated an unallocated grant to UW and said, could you please look at water and fat and stuff? and Gerald Pollack, who's written several books about this, who's just turned 80, is a biochemist. And he said, look, when you put water next to droplets of butter fat, it forms a very thick exclusion zone. This is the way the body normally drink water. You put the water near your cell membranes, you heat the water, and it changes the water into the viscosity level of water that you need to make energy. But when you do it in a blender and then you drink it just by having a little bit of fat in the water, your body can immediately put that water to work inside mitochondria without having to process it first. And that means you can more effectively burn fat or sugar. And this is why 15 minutes, oh, wow, I got ketones and I got this water I can use, and then poof, your brain wakes up. That's why you drink it in the morning and you feel the difference that you talked about earlier. Okay, so that's a good hack for fasting, but people say, well, wait, why there's calories in there. Yes, but it doesn't raise insulin at all and it doesn't raise mTOR at all. So you're still getting the benefits of the fast. And the third thing, this is going to be the magic one for you. No one's ever talked about this in the context of fasting that I'm aware of before, and it's prebiotic fiber. The recommended amount you should get is about 20 or 30 grams a day. Most people don't get it, or if they do get it, they're eating tons of whole grains with all the anti-nutrients and irritants in them, so it's not good for you. So if you put a couple scoops of prebiotic fiber in water, coffee, or tea, it is carbs, except your body can't digest it and it goes right into your gut bacteria. It feeds the good guys. You'll grow more species and more abundance in your gut bacteria, and they eat it and in studies they convert prebiotic fiber into short chain fatty acids called butyric acid that is proketogenic. And there's dozens of studies that show soluble fiber suppresses hunger. And there's many more that show it makes you live longer. In fact, it's a core part of my anti-aging recommendation.
Wow.
So there you go. Is this a powder?
Is this a supplement? Flavorless powder.
Flavorless powder.
And yes, it's called prebiotic. Prebiotic. What fiber? Prebiotic fiber is what it's called. Got it. And the one I make for Bulletproof is called Inner Fuel. I'm not here to sell Inner Fuel. I'll tell you what's in it. If you want to do that. Bulletproof Inner Fuel, though, it's all packaged up. I did all the research. There's three different kinds of fiber in there. They're all sap from trees. And these are specific things that feed the good guys. And they have zero flavor. So you can put it in whatever and it's very neutral and it doesn't get all clumpy like a Metamucil or like gunky. You can't really tell it's in there. So I usually get about 40 to 60 grams of soluble fiber a day, which is way more than most people. And it's going to make sure that everything goes out pretty much no matter what you eat. the way you want it to. But most importantly, it suppresses hunger and it gives you good gut bacteria. So, Louis, I quadrupled the number of species of bacteria in my gut with the formula. And it's made out of acacia gum, Larch Arabinogalactan, and hydrolyzed guar gum. Try and spell all those. That's why you can Google the ingredients on Bulletproof InterFuel if you don't want to buy the stuff. But you can just Google for prebiotic fiber. and there's different companies who make different types of things. Try this, Louis. You can put it in there. They're still fasting as long as it doesn't have sugar and stuff in there, which some of them do. And that combination, there is no one on earth who can drink a Bulletproof coffee with 20 or 30 grams of soluble fiber and then look at a donut and want to eat the donut. Your body is like, it's full, but.
Can you do the costing mechanism still works? Can you do the Bulletproof and the.
Powder in it, the fiber, and it's all in one and it tastes fine? It tastes just like a latte.
Wow. And that's the trick.
Some of the prebiotic fibers are very flavorful and not that good. These are very neutral. So I think you should try that. And no people are saying, Dave, that can't be a fast because there was something in there. Well, look at your insulin levels. Look at your mTOR levels. Look at the mechanistics of fasting. And what you realize is, wow, this taught me to be able to go without breakfast. This gave me enough power. And then maybe a month from now you go, you, know what? I'll try it without the fiber or I'll try it without the butter or without the MCT, that's fine. But this is gonna teach your body to be flexible and you can do it forever. And maybe some days when you're feeling really strong, I'll just do black coffee. And other days, you know what? I'm a little hungry. Things are off. I'm just gonna put everything in there, but I'm still gonna get my fast.
Yeah.
Man, I want that kind of freedom for people.
There's only three things you need to do to stay alive. If you're a cat, if you're a bacteria or if you're a possum or a tree, it doesn't matter. It's always only three things. Run away from or kill scary things. And plants do that by making poisons or spines and things like that. And they can't run away because they're plants. I'm sorry. All right. And then let's see, you have to eat everything to make sure you don't starve to death.
Right?
So I've certainly done both of those behaviors. You know, you eat all the donuts and oops. And then the third thing is have sex with everything that's left to make sure the species doesn't die out.
Right?
So.
Reproduce, yeah.
Right, so, Lewis, can you think of anything you've ever done you're ashamed of.
That didn't come from one of those three behaviors? I mean, I've been ashamed of a lot of things I've done, but those three behaviors.
What was the first one again? It was run away from or kill things.
Run away from or kill things? No, I mean, I was gonna say getting angry at something that's in that category.
That is right.
Like lashing out or being reactive or being frustrated that I didn't get what I wanted or something. The second one is eat everything. I've done that a lot. I've been ashamed of all the sh... I mean, I was a sugar fiend my whole life. Totally. and I cut out sugar for the last 45 days and what a transformation in my mind and my body and my health just by not having sugar. And then wanting to reproduce, yes, I've been there too.
Yeah, did I really go on that day?
Exactly.
The thing is we take responsibility for those things and those are things we're responsible for, but they're not you. They're emergent behaviors that come from what bacteria want because the bacteria are the puppet masters in our bodies. and when you realize that, you better take care of those little bastards because they have control over you in some way, but when they give you enough energy in return for this symbiosis they have, you can then have enough energy for the human adult parts of your brain to easily take over and easily control things. We call that willpower. So when you feel the urge to flip the guy off in traffic or to yell at your spouse or to eat all the donuts, if your battery is charged all the way, you're like, oh, I got this. It's not even that big of a deal. I'm just gonna say no. And it's those times when you're browning out a little bit, like, wow, you know, it's the end of the day, I'm a little tired, you know, fine, I'll just have half the donut. And you dive in and- you- have no willpower.
Yeah, there's frosted stuff all over your face and colored sprinkles on your shirt. Or you say the thing you wish you didn't say or whatever happens. Exactly.
Yeah.
Fascinating. So how did you, how have you applied this into your life? What are the main things that you've done on a daily basis that you've seen a transformation in your life? Because you've done a lot of biohacking and mind hacking for years.
For years.
So what is this new stuff that you've been doing? Just to be honest, we've probably seen each other maybe 10 times, like in person. I've known you for a while, but we've probably been interacting 10 times in person. This time, you look younger than I've ever seen you. And we mentioned when you came in, you look stronger, you look like you have more energy, you look clearer. You never looked as clear as you do now. For some reason, you look very clear. high energy and youthful. Not that you didn't before, we just look like even more youthful. So, what are the things that you're doing that is allowing you to have this energy of abundance that you've never had before?
I'm doing a lot of stuff. And one of the things that it's a fair criticism of biohacking is how do you know if it works? Well, like you just said, there's evidence.
That something is working.
Can I tell you that one of the 45 things I'm doing is the one Well, no, because it wasn't the one. There's something called synergy and there's amplification. And if you do A, it doesn't work very well. You do B, it doesn't work very well. And shockingly, if you do A and B, it works. But the double-blind reductionist, like Western medicine thing, I swear there's like some guy in a white lab coat. He's like, there is no such thing as bread. Here's why. I baked the water and nothing happened. I baked the flour and nothing happened.
I baked the yeast and nothing happened. Therefore, there is no bread.
And you're like, maybe if you mixed them and then baked them, there would be bread. But no, that's more than one variable. I can't do it. I have to test single variables. our bodies are incredibly complex systems. So, what I do and what this program in Headstrong, the two-week program is, is let's do many of the things that make your mitochondria stronger all at the same time instead of messing around with just one thing.
Give me a few examples of some of the things. I know you do things at every different point of the day. You do things in the morning, you do things in the afternoon, at night. You're constantly testing and tweaking.
Well, one of the things that doesn't cost anything that's really effective is changing temperature. So mitochondria, their job is to stay alive and then their job is also to kill off the weak. So you got to stress them enough to kill off the weak. That process is called apoptosis. If you don't do that, you get cancer. So you want to stress them, but not too much. So it's brief periods of stress. So there's ice. Ice is great.
Ice tubs or ice showers.
Yeah, just a cold shower in the morning. Not a whole cold shower, because cold showers suck. Let's face it. Yeah, yeah. Just take a hot shower at the end, turn it on cold, do it all at once, and just feel the.
Pain for a minute.
Those little guys, they're gonna freak out. They make them stronger. They get stronger and the weak ones die. And then you burn more calories throughout the day, your brain is clearer, and inflammation goes down. And here's the interesting thing. Every time you have inflammation, it's because your mitochondria aren't working very well. So if something makes you inflamed, It's because you damaged your battery system in the body. When things are working well, they actually change the structure of the water in your body. It's called exclusion zone water. And no one knew mitochondria could do this until a couple of years ago, Gerald Pollack figured this out, and he talked about it at the Bulletproof Conference. So all of a sudden, you're just telling these little guys, Hey, the world isn't always warm and soft and fuzzy. Maybe you should just toughen up a little bit. And then that toughness gets built into your system, and you carry it with you for the rest of the day. And so you're a little leaner, you're a little more on point and it cost you nothing. In fact, you saved a quarter cent.
On heating hot water for that last one minute.
It was just a change in habit. Another thing is exercise. So I looked at all the research on mitochondria and exercise. What's going to make them stronger? What's not going to make them stronger? There's a set of studies that show if you go for a walk for 20 minutes a day, that increases mitochondrial function.
That's it.
That's it.
20 minutes. Now, that's one set of studies. You can go for longer, but if you go for too long, you actually can stress them out, which isn't a good thing. So, if you're going to, every day go for a two-hour run without recovery, it's the lack of recovery that really messes up your energy system. So you see a lot of people who are type A entrepreneurs like you.
Or me where we like to go all night.
Yeah, and on top of that, I'm going to run the Kona Ironman and I'm going to do it without sleep. Just because I could, right? So you push like that, and I've certainly done that, you know, in my early career in tech, that the company that held Google's first servers and things like that, I'm like, why did you burn the candle at both ends when you could also light the middle? Like, it's so bad for you. And it's bad for you because it breaks your mitochondria. Like, they get stressed like that and they communicate with each other. And they do that with, they do it with chemicals. And we believe that they probably do it with light as well, which is really interesting. If those theories are proven, and I would bet right now that they will be, we know that these little parts of your cells make lights the same way an LED light does. They literally make little photons and they receive photons. So a set of scientists are proposing that that's how mitochondria talk, which is why if you're beating up your muscles all the time, you're gonna be tired in your head because the whole system of these bacteria that are interacting and they're not bacteria anymore. They're part of our cells. They're called organelles, but they still have that little bit of bacterial behavior that's built in and that allows us to be who we are and what we are. So it's fascinating. The other exercise, just so people listening, I don't leave them going, I just have to go for a walk. Once or maybe twice a week, but certainly once a week, you need to kick your ass. And there's two ways to do it. And these are actually both in the Bulletproof Diet too, because we knew they worked, but we didn't understand the mitochondrial part of that back then. One is intermittent sprinting. Just basically sprint for 60 seconds.
And there's a neat trick in Head Strong that's not in the first book.
And I got this from John Gray. The men are from Mars?
Yeah.
Yeah, okay.
That guy, he is a crazy biohacker. You would not know this from reading his books about relationships.
No, he goes deep.
So we got to be friends. And he's like, Dave, after you sprint, instead of walking, lay on your back.
Just lay down.
Like the way you're seeing in a crossfit gym, people just kill themselves and lay down. There's a reason they're doing that. They're not doing it because they know.
The reason they're doing it, because they.
Felt the urge and that was like, I could break Whenever I would do CrossFit or lay down, it's because I could breathe.
And I was just like, well, that's the body's natural response. So if you want to increase the height and the trough, which is what you're doing, you're selling guys, you better be ready to just like bring it all at once. You're training the battery in your body.
To totally have a high voltage and then stop.
So, so you should stop and go on your back. You shouldn't stop. Yeah, at least sit down, bury it, lay down.
Really?
For a minute and then get up and sprint again and then lay down. And this is what animals will do, right?
That'S true.
And it's, it, it's amazing what a difference that is. So that's one way you kick your ass. The other way is lift heavy things for 15 minutes or less and don't stop. Keep the muscles engaged the entire time. Don't stop at the top.
Don't stop at the bottom. As heavy as you can.
And you'll, while stretching and warming up.
Properly, why would you do that?
Exactly. I do my warm-ups on the, on the Bulletproof Vibe. You know, I'm vibrating when I do that. Sure, sure. And I, I do that vibration stuff every day, or I for a walk, but quite often I'm on the phone and it's, I'm in Canada. It's dark and raining.
Like, you're in Vancouver, right?
Yeah.
I think of Ireland.
Yeah.
Yeah. I'm on an organic farm. Amazing. Amazing.
Yeah.
So, I mean, it's funny because I've always in track and field when I'm on track, they would always tell you.
To, like, keep walking after you're done with the sprints. So it's interesting. And, and why is it, what's the science behind laying on your back or stopping? It has to do with heart rate variability and cardiac recovery and getting the the system to go from sprint to calm as fast as possible. That's what you're trying to get it to do. It's just to increase the recovery after the sprint so that you can do another sprint. Another set.
Yeah.
And it's, you know, we're talking to do this for 10 minutes, 15 minutes.
It looks a little funny if you just collapse. People call ambulances on it. And you only work out once or.
Twice a week, right? Like a heavy thing, otherwise you're walking and that's it, right? That's about it. Yeah, I'll go to yoga class when I get a chance.
Yeah.
Like, I appreciate yoga more for the stretching and all. But I'm doing all right from a 44 years old. You know, I'm 44. You're a headstrong. Yeah, I'm headstrong. They're muscle strong. I still have like stretch marks. I mean, I've waited for people who don't know. I used to weigh 300 pounds. Crazy.
Like I was obese for until, geez, my mid-30s.
Wow. I could carry it okay as a 6'4 guy. Yeah, a little bit better. I couldn't quite see my feet, but, oh man, you know, I remember the first time I saw my ribs, I'm like, oh my God. Like, for years, Walking down the hallway, I would turn sideways to make space for people because I was just used to having this bulk that I don't have anymore.
How does it feel?
It feels now natural, but for a while it was pretty strange. And I put on about 19 pounds in a month last month.
That's crazy.
I was actually doing something that's not in the book, but if you order, do theorderheadstrong.com, I'll tell you how I did it. But I wanted to increase my mitochondria by 50%. This is a major battery systems upgrade. And I used a research chemical. called a sarm in order to do that. And I wasn't trying to put on muscles.
Like, I'm happy.
You're not training heavy weights all the time, yeah. No, I don't want to look like a bodybuilder. I very much appreciate bodybuilders. I'm also looking to lift 180 and carrying too much muscle mass. It's hard. Well, it's not necessarily. Yeah, it's not where I want to go. So I had to buy a new suit and half my shirts don't fit. Oh my God, I was okay the way I was before, but it kind of feels good to have a little bit Yes, you're strong, man. I'm feeling good. That's great. And 20% increase in strength across the board on the ARX. I have this, when I do lifting, I'm fighting a winch with a computer. So I have like a strain gauge. I don't usually use like heavy things that have gravity associated with them. So I'm basically pushing it to something where it's always quantified and just across the board 20%, 20%, 20% in a month with three workouts on that and.
One electrical stimulation workout. Amazing, man. Super crazy. and you look younger, too.
There's some stem cells involved, but a lot of this, as soon as you get the mitochondria working better, they're responsible for powering recovery and, and, and repair. So what happens? You do this to make your brain work better. You feel in your brain first, but then it goes throughout the body.
And, like, I'm, you know, because you've known me for a while, I am getting younger. You are, man. I'm not. I'm not. You are. It's crazy.
You almost looked, like, a little weathered at times. Like, the first few times I met you, maybe it was because you were.
Like, launching a business.
You're like, Everything was involved in distress. When you first met me, I was a VP at a publicly traded company, head of global evangelism, and starting- I'm doing this on the side. Yeah. And in three years, I was one of the top 20 most influential voices.
In health on the internet.
Like, I was, oh, and I was.
A new dad, or second new dad.
It was a lot.
You got a lot going on.
Yeah.
You had to do, but- you- seemed like more, you just seemed like overwhelmed. Whatever, when I first met you a.
Few times, because you had a lot going on. I can only imagine.
And now you just seem like this lightness about you.
There's something else I've done too. Free-ness, you know. And there's something I write about in here. I've talked about neurofeedback as like a general term, but I opened 40 Years of Zen, which is now something that I'm running as a, well, I'm operationally running it, but it's something that I created that has been like my baby. I wanted the world's best brain mechanic in order to do like performance tuning for my brain. I've had my own EEG machines at.
Home for 20 years.
And what's that? EEG is the idea you can measure electricity coming out of the brain. Guess where that electricity comes from? It's all about mitochondria, right? So, you can measure it and then you can teach the brain, which means teaching the mitochondria how to work better. So, I've been doing this, but I kind of tapped out on all the things out there. So, we created new hardware and software in order to teach you to be in this Zen state, like 20 to 40 years of daily Zen practice. You can achieve that in five days. and that sounds like a big claim. It's just, it's quantitative analysis of your brain. I can show you your brain before and after, and, like, there you go. You just, you made these, these shifts happen. So I've been doing that. It's a facility in Seattle. It's a five-day executive thing. Very few people can go through, and, like, we, we vet out some people just where, like, this isn't the right training for you. But I did that because I really wanted this for myself. So I've been able to go and do that. And here's what's interesting. You get a new battery upgrade, you do this headstrong stuff, what do you spend most of your energy on? You spend it controlling your desire to kill people, your desire to eat everything. You can turn off everything. That's the Bulletproof Diet. How do you lose the cravings? That's what the whole diet thing was about. That's one of the three things. I still haven't hacked that. How do you not want to have sex? Because actually it's good to want to have sex. If you don't have sex, your mitochondria won't be happy either, because that's one of the reasons they exist, is to reproduce, right?
There you go.
So sex is good for you and all that. The thing is, how do you control that overwhelming anxiety, the fear, the sense of overwhelm?
The stress, yeah, yeah.
I sit in these big pods that we've made that literally have 24 electrodes glued to my head with a computer showing me how to be chill. So literally on the way over here, I was negotiating a $100 million deal, no joke, right? And it's a very substantial thing. I'm looking at venture capital dollars and all these things. And right before that, I was on stage with Jim Quick at Quick Learning. But I'm not stressed. Like you can see me, like I'm happy and I'm full of this. Before, even five years ago without this level of training, I think it would have been harder for me to task switch and just to be grounded and present. So some of this is just deep internal awareness. And because I don't have the food craving thing, the one-third of my cognitive burden that would have gone towards saying.
No to food or thinking about food, that's gone.
You're just gonna give it to me. I need something. I need some energy, right?
Yeah.
And the part of me that that's like, I have to run away from or kill things, that's turned off. I mean, if you were to attack me right now, I would respond appropriately and with my instincts, but I'm not like over sensitive to those things. So I'm in that sense of groundedness and awareness, but not in a state of fear. And that also frees up a huge amount of energy that was subconscious, but it was like constant worry in the background. What if, what if, like, what if there's not enough, what am I going to say next? All those voices, those are just gone. The voice in my head is just blissfully silent now. And then there's that third behavior there like that. I'm married, so I get some.
There you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great, man. Amazing.
There's seven things that make us old. Mitochondria is just one of them, and it turns out it's one that might be an underpinning for many of the other things.
What are the seven things?
Seven things are, I call them the seven pillars.
Okay.
And one of them is mitochondrial mutations or essentially insufficiency. So this means your cells can't make enough money or enough money, enough energy for you to make enough money. So what really happens there is I wanted to make enough energy to repair a cell. I couldn't make enough energy with the.
Food you gave me or with the.
State of the cell. So I didn't repair the cell and then bad things happen.
You get old.
Yeah.
And so if that's one, I want to make sure I don't repeat myself when I'm pulling these straight jackets. I'm happy to have you. Yep, so Mitochondria is the first one.
The next one is something that I.
Call cellular straight jackets. And it's fascinating that everyone's heard of beta-amyloid plaque because, oh, we have Alzheimer's disease, everyone has amyloid. But what you don't know is amyloid forms throughout your body in all of your proteins, and it's basically cross-linked proteins that are inflexible. and you get more of this as you age.
And it turns out there's things you.
Can do that are coming online right now that'll break it down, but there's.
Also a lot you can do just.
To prevent it from forming because it's almost like a cellular level scar tissue. So you've taken plenty of hits as an athlete, right?
So you know what scar tissue in.
An elbow or knee or hip or something does. Imagine each cell, every time it gets inflamed, it just wants to get a.
Little bit more scar tissue.
This is happening.
If you're going to live to at least 180 like I am, you might.
Want it to happen a little bit.
Less, otherwise I'm going to be walking around pretty stiff when I'm old and I don't really want that.
Okay.
So how do we eliminate that?
Well, that one, I mean we can.
Go through in detail on each of these things.
That one, it turns out what you eat really matters because if you eat.
Stuff that makes you inflamed or if you have an autoimmune condition or if you have environmental allergies and you don't deal with them, that constant chronic low levels of inflammation, that's what does that. Builds up, yeah. So you're talking 20, 30 years after this stuff starts and all of a sudden just bad stuff is going on in your body. You don't know why and literally the cells can't move the way they're supposed to move. And what's going on there is you eat fried stuff on a regular basis. You eat those grains, the whole grains.
You still think are healthy even though.
They are shown to cause inflammation in all humans. Sorry, I wish it wasn't that way because I like a croissant like the rest of us. I love croissants, but they're just not good for us. And some people are more sensitive than others. For me, there's something called the Nightshade Family. And I wrote about this in the.
Bulletproof Diet, by the way, I saw it right there.
Thank you.
And Dr. Gundry talks about nightshades. Yeah, so that was one of the four categories of plant toxins that might be a problem for you in the Bulletproof Diet. And Dr. Gundry, who's a good friend, focuses on those very heavily. And there's other stuff that comes in plants like heavy metals. It's a major cause of aging. There's a whole chapter on heavy metals. Did you know kale is the number one source of thallium in our diet?
Thallium is called the poisoner's poison.
So, we shouldn't be having kale?
No, kale's gross. Have you eaten it lately?
Oh, gosh. Yeah, but they put it with sauteed.
With butter and some garlic.
You have to torture kale.
No kale. I don't know that no kale is.
Necessary, but- I thought leafy greens was the thing.
Leafy greens, some of them, but there's a difference between lettuce and kale, a very big difference. I have a farm, right? I've got sheep and pigs. If I give them raw kale, they spit it out. I'm not even kidding, there's a pile.
Of raw kale, they will not eat it.
I can put it in the compost, the worms will eat it.
Right.
Wow, interesting. So you're not supposed to be eating kale. Kale is high in oxalic acid, which causes systemic inflammation going back to that. very high in it, actually. Kidney stones and gout are happening in all kinds of people who eat too much kale, especially raw kale. So I wrote a post actually a couple of years ago. It's like, Hey, cook your kale, dump the water, add some baking soda to precipitate out these microcrystals. Because one of the things that kale does, if you eat a lot of it, those microcrystals start circulating around, they bind with calcium, and they stick in your tissues. In women, there's something called vulvodynia, where.
The crystals form in the labia.
And then it's really painful even just to sit down. What about... Cook your kale is what I'm saying. Don't eat it every day. Cook your kale.
Don't eat raw kale.
What about kale chips now?
I guess it's kind of cooked a.
Little bit, I guess. Yeah, they're cooked, but you want to wash the stuff out. It's a really strong toxin that the plants use to keep from being overeaten. Not be killed.
Yeah, right.
They don't want us to kill them. That's different than lectins, but it's There's stuff like that that's out there.
But here's the thing.
You don't have to be perfect about it. It's not like a kale's good or kale's bad. If you're doing two kales a day, you're probably going to get kidney stones or other bad stuff over time. I was a raw vegan. I did a lot of kale. It was not good for my joints. It's not good for most people. So that said, wow, can it taste good with bacon? Hell yeah.
Small amounts.
If you're having a side dish of collard greens and kale, just eat it and enjoy it. But if you're doing it on purpose to ramp it up, it's actually not going to make you superhuman. It's probably going to increase systemic inflammation.
Which is going to increase your risk.
Of the four killers I write about in the book, like diabetes and things like that. Kale doesn't cause diabetes, but systemic inflammation does. So it's like stop taking these thousand.
Little cuts that we take in our life.
Just take less. You don't have to be perfect.
And if you can find the foods that are triggers for you. So for me, I can eat some kale occasionally.
If I eat a lot of it, I really feel it.
But the nightshades, they trash me and I love them.
The main nightshades are, is that tomatoes?
Is that...
It's spicy peppers, eggplant.
I know.
Cayenne, I grew up in New Mexico. You're not supposed to eat it.
Well, no.
You can probably eat it just fine a third of us if you have the genes I do. I eat it and I have the knee pain. I've had three knee surgeries if I was 23. I had arthritis since I was 14. It's caused by those. If I don't eat them, I have no pain in my back. If I eat them, it comes back reliably every time. But if you don't know it and you're saying, well, I have this kind of crunchiness and it's always there, you.
Have to find out what's causing it.
Because if you allow it to happen, when you are 60 or 70, you're.
Gonna hate your life, right?
And if you fix it now, your energy level goes up right now and you love your life right now and when you're old, you won't look or feel old. So it's that important that we figure that out. And so that's kind of cellular straight jacket. Inflammation causes this cellular level scar tissue to form. Then there's zombie cells. It's one of my favorites.
Is this three?
Yeah, this is three. Zombie cells.
Yeah.
Zombie cells are cells that should die but don't. And they sit there and they take up space and resources.
They make free radicals but they don't do their job anymore.
So the best way to kill those.
Off is Does he fast? Turns out fasting causes autophagy, which is one of the ways to do it. And there's a few drug protocols I write about in here and some other supplements, one called fisetin that comes from strawberries and seaweed, that are shown to remove senescent cells. And these seven types of aging, these have been studied by a lot of people I've interviewed on my show. And in 20 years of running an anti-aging nonprofit, I've gotten to know the people doing the research. So, decades of knowledge has gone into, we finally understand this. David Sinclair, that's a guy you just have on the show if you haven't.
He is a guy who's just written.
A book that says, straight up, I've spent 30 years studying aging at Harvard. And you know what? I feel safe now saying that we can turn the biological clock in ourselves.
Backwards because now we know why we age and what to do about it.
Straight up, you don't do that as an academic unless you are sure We're actually at the point where we know these seven things will do it. If you have a car, you know that you want to keep your car for a while, you should change the oil, change the tires, and do the maintenance schedule. But if you only do half the maintenance schedule, the car isn't going to make it. Well, these seven things in Superhuman are the seven things that you account for. Because if you don't do all seven.
Of them, you're not maintaining your chassis very well.
You'Re going to have a problem. And so to get rid of these zombie cells, fasting is a big deal, as well as some of these other new things that are coming online. And what's neat here is I can actually tell you exactly when and what is happening. And right now, for those most people won't go on the drug cocktail that you can get because it costs about 500 bucks and it's still considered experimental. All of my anti-aging friends, Like, oh yeah, I'm gonna do that once every.
Year for the next while because it's.
Worth $500 and they feel better and their immune system works better and they're noticing a difference. So I'm talking about the stuff that crazy billionaires do, the stuff why it works, the stuff that you can do that's very affordable, you know, $50 supplement.
Or something, and then the stuff that's.
Free that stops the problem in the first place. So the deal is you don't have to go out and do it, but anything the crazy billionaires are doing, if it costs $10,000 right now, It's going.
To cost a 200 bucks.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just by raising awareness, you're going to.
Go to your insurance company and be.
Like, Hey man, why can't I get this? Because I don't need knee replacement if you give me stem cells in my knees. And I've done, I write about it, share the whole experience. I did a $120,000 whole body stem cell makeover in Utah. Yourself? Well, I mean, I had doctors doing it, not me. Right, right, right. Yeah, so I went in, three doctors, Dr. Harry Adelson let it, and a neurosurgeon from Johns Hopkins named Marcela. And then Amy Killen did the cosmetic stuff. So, I'm unconscious for four hours. They're pulling a half a liter of bone marrow out. What?
How do they do that?
They go in through your hip, the iliac crest. I've had that done twice. Once I was awake, actually, with no anesthesia. Oh, my gosh.
I have a video.
The video, you see them hammering on this thing, and then they go, like, right on the bone marrow. Look at your face. Gosh, really? It doesn't hurt. Everyone says it hurts. It's just this, it's the weirdest feeling I've ever had. It was intense, but it wasn't pain. It was more like fingernails on a blackboard intense.
Ah.
So I did that. What was this?
Let's see, I did that about a year ago.
No way.
And how much did they take bone marrow?
Half a liter.
I'm not, that's a good amount of bone marrow. Wow, so what do they do with that? Well they take it, they get the stem cells out of it, and then they re-inject them throughout the body. So I had stem cells from my fat and my bone marrow. I had them injected every joint in the body, knees, hips, every all along the spine, inside the spine, along the spinal cord with the cannula, into the cerebral spinal fluid, into face, hair, male reproductive organs, pretty much everywhere you can put a stem cell in a human.
I did all at the same time in four hours. Yeah. You had to be in pain for.
A few days afterwards. You know, the first two days were pretty tough. I couldn't moved. Mostly from the spinal stuff where they put it inside the spine.
Oh my God, man. Every joint though, so they're injecting through.
A needle or through a-- yeah, just a needle. And they use a 3D x-ray machine or ultrasound and they guide the needle.
To go right to get it along this.
But you know what? You're asleep. Yeah, you're asleep.
You wake up and you sort of look like a terminator.
Yeah.
It was the first two days were just not happy.
But you know what?
This is the sort of thing I'm very unlikely to have spinal stenosis when I'm eating because my spine is rejuvenated. and all of the old injuries that I've had are just going away or have gone away.
And really dramatic stuff.
Even my wife, frozen neck since she was nine when she fell out of a two-story building. And three days after she got injected.
She'S like, I can move my head for the first time all the way.
This is amazing.
So how much of it is placebo versus science? I don't really-- Science, you know?
Oh, for stem cells, there's a huge amount of science.
I mean, I wonder how much of.
It is like, okay, it's been injected. Now I can feel confident to, you.
Know, I think that she had other treatments. I mean, she's an ER doctor. You know, trained at Carolyn's Skin Studio. She's had lots of people work on her. And she was just not even expecting that, sort of like, yeah, inject all these spots, whatever.
So for her, it was that.
And then they also do the reproductive organs. We've had a couple kids, and she's 50. And so both of us had our reproductive organs done. She was just completely floored, like massive changes. So you could say, okay, Dave, that's a ridiculously you could buy a Tesla for that. Here's the deal.
Number one.
You could live an extra. Yeah, well, so I'm a guinea pig. So, like, you know, we worked a deal. And two, and I have other friends who've gone through the full treatment. Like, I'm really serious about living a long time, but it shouldn't cost that much. Like, it will be $12,000 in a little It's coming down fast, fast, fast. But the differences in how you feel are profound. So if that's an example of what a crazy biohacker would do, okay, let's say you're facing a hip replacement or joint replacement. Would you go in and spend $5,000 instead of getting the replacement if you had a 50% chance of not needing a new joint? Most people would, especially if their insurance company would do it, because the joint replacement is 25 grand and growing your own tissues back is five grand? Let's do that. And so a lot of superhuman, I'm going to talk about that kind of stuff, saying maybe you should know it exists, but there's so many things that are free and cheap that can regenerate something. Let's talk about knees. I mean, you and I have talked about knees before, but there's something called Prolozone that I talk about here. They inject ozone gas. It's $150 injection into your knee and it causes cartilage to regrow. And I've seen x-rays before and after people cool. And I've seen the difference in my own joints. So, it's pretty strong stuff. And, have you ever heard of injecting ozone in a joint?
No.
Most people haven't. But the science has been going back since World War I, 100 years of science, and it's just unknown. So, I interviewed and got to know the pioneers in that space, the people who are the top in the field, and I talk about it in the book saying, here's what ozone therapy does to restore Mitochondria, number one of these aging things.
So you go through this and there's.
Kind of the story of what it's like to do these things, but also here's what you can do right now to increase stem cells. By the way, fasting seems to be.
Really effective for a lot of us.
Sleep and fasting are those- and do the trick.
Those are crazy things, but then how do you sleep? That's kind of a big deal. So do you track your sleep on a ring?
I need to get the Oura ring.
I'm supposed to get one.
Soon.
Oh, man. Well, it's amazing, right?
Yeah.
I'll email Harpreet if you want, but let me show you a sleep score here.
That's here we go.
So, I slept six hours and 50 minutes. Two hours and 50 minutes of dreaming sleep. That's way more than a 20-year-old gets in eight hours of sleep.
Really?
Oh, yeah. And an hour and 19 of deep sleep here.
So, I gotta track this so I.
Know if my sleep's working or not. Right.
And I can tell you if you're getting an hour for more than an hour, I do an hour and a half of deep sleep, you're getting more than most people.
And over time, as you age, there's.
A decline in REM and deep sleep. Those are what keep you young. So I sleep like a young person.
Wow.
And I did that on purpose. I did not used to be good at sleep. I learned how to do it. I've written the preeminent blogs on sleep hacking. And when people talk about blue blocking glasses, they're not enough. I started a company called TrueDark that does actually patented glasses for sleep that are more than blue blocking. And you wear those right before bed and I don't get jet lag when I use them. And all these crazy things because now we know the science that we didn't know 10 years ago. So, our ability to sleep like young people has changed and that will reduce your risk of the things that are most likely to kill you as well as make you younger.
Better sleep.
Yeah.
All right, so we got mitochondria, zombie cells, cellular straight jackets, All right, there's buildup of gunk inside the cells. I call it intracellular junk. And our cells have these things called lysosomes and their job is to take broken down parts of the cell or parts of food metabolism and digest them and use them. So, it's sort of like a furnace that burns waste or burns garbage. So, if you went to the dump, there's an incinerator. But what if you put stuff in the incinerator that wouldn't burn? Eventually it gets full and you can't use the incinerator because there's no more space to put stuff in. Well, that's happening in your cells right now. So companies are working on enzymes you'll be able to take that will help to remove that. In the meantime, what you do is you put in less stuff in your body that your cells can't break down. So in other words, don't put the hunks of metal under the incinerator because they don't burn.
Right?
Right.
So to solve this problem, right now, the easiest thing to do is don't eat a lot of sugar because sugar helps to create something called advanced glycation end products or AGE, and don't eat burned meat or burned vegetables for that matter. In the Bulletproof Diet, I wrote about the dangers of eating advanced glycation end products. And the problem is there was only two studies, but we know that they form anytime you eat sugar, the sugar goes into your, if you spike your blood sugar level, it goes in and it browns your tissues the way onions get caramelized. That's advanced glycation end products. You can make that creme brulee or that crusty meat. I don't know why they taste good.
Because they're really bad for you, but.
Yeah, they taste good. So if you don't eat those burnt things. Yeah, go to the restaurant and say, could you not blacken my steak? And you just don't want to eat that blackened or super burned stuff. And if occasionally you have a caramelized crunchy crust on your steak, make it brown, not black. You don't have to be perfect. But when you do that, when you eat those things, now we know they go in and they just stick right in the lysosome and now your cells can't burn all the other bits of protein. So you end up getting eventually zombie cells because of that. So let's put less stuff in there that's harmful. So don't spike your blood sugar levels, don't eat burned food. Big difference. Then there's accumulation of stuff outside the cells.
Right?
And this is another different set of problems. And it's amazing that sometimes fasting makes a really big difference for this. It does everything, huh? It does, but you can also bind toxins by taking things that bind toxins. You have these heavy metals that are inside the cells and outside the cells. As any animal ages, things that bioaccumulate get worse and worse. So, I like to go fishing. And so, I'll go up to Alaska with friends once a year. And if you catch a 100-pound halibut, a little bit, you throw it back. And the reason you do that is this fish is probably 100 years old.
And.
It'S probably going to lay a lot of eggs, which is good. You should let them reproduce. But even if you wanted to eat it, that fish has 100 years of eating other fish.
Oh wow.
And it is full of mercury and nickel and cadmium and all the things that will mess up your cellular metabolism, give you gray hair. There's a whole chapter here on gray hair and hair loss and stuff like that. and wrinkles and skin. But the real issue here is you and me are the same way. So if you eat food, you need to eat clean food and you want to actually go through and remove the toxins as you go. Otherwise, when you're a hundred years old, you have a hundred years of toxin buildup of these things that don't naturally leave the body. So in superhuman, I take this fiber supplement, take activated charcoal, charcoal and do these things that allow the body to just naturally eliminate these things. Otherwise, they'll go in and they'll be in your liver, they'll be in your brain, they'll be in your skeleton, and they'll be in your nervous system. And over time, all the diseases of aging associated with metal buildup and those things. So that's an example of a toxin that could be outside of cells. One of the other seven pillars of aging is the telomerase.
Number five.
I think this is number five. The telomerase, the one that we had. We have toxins inside the cells and outside the cells, like the buildups. So you have intracellular, you have extracellular, it's number five. Okay. Extracellular.
Extracellular.
E-X-T-R-A. Extracellular. So inside and outside the cells.
Yeah.
And then, let's see, number six would be telomerase.
And this is something- the ends of the gene, or the ends of the DNA, what is it? They're different than the ends of the DNA. It's essentially, imagine it like a wick. If you have a cell, every time it divides, you subtract one unit from the wick, and that's called the Hayflick limit. So it's normally about 37. So if you have normal telomeres, you can copy a cell 37 times and then it won't do anything. At that point, you get zombie cells. So what you want to do then is figure out a way, how do I add more pieces onto that wick? The only problem is if you add too many pieces onto it, it increases your cancer risk. But what if you could reduce the number of things? So really, regeneration, anytime you increase growth of your cells like a young person, you increase cancer risk. So it turns out in here, I'm like, well, there's four things that are gonna kill you if you're average. And cancer, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's, and diabetes. 80% of people listening to the show, one of those is gonna get you. Really? And usually diabetes is a precedent to the other three. So let's assume we're not average because you can read the book and you can do the things and you and I aren't average. because we have the ability to order the food that we want. Just that alone is a huge advantage. There's a lot of people who actually don't. They're in a food desert.
They can't get grains all day or whatever.
Yeah, I can go to 7-Eleven or I can go to the dollar store. Which one, there's no food there. Not yet. We'll get some collagen bars into Whole Foods or into 7-Eleven one of these days. But what's going on with telomeres is now there are herbal compounds that are shown to increase the length of telomeres.
But they cost a couple grand a month.
Oh man, that's a lot. Well, it's insane, but there's a Russian peptide, which is a small group of amino acids that's injectable. That's been studied since 2003. Peptides are the biggest thing right now. Oh yeah, I've been using peptides for years. Oh, excellent. Oral or injectable?
Injectable.
Okay, let's talk about that. There's a chapter. Oral better or what? Depends on what they are, but injectable is good. There's a whole chapter on sarms and peptides in here as well. Because this is the cutting edge stuff. I love that the nutritionist is doing that because licensed nutritionists and doctors, it's a gray zone for them.
And they should be completely free to.
Help people use them, but because they're not pharmaceuticals. They're not a drug. Yeah, they're not a drug, but it's injectable. So, there's weird regulatory zones.
He was saying this is what every doctor is talking about in all the conferences and all the research. now coming out as, you know, I've.
Got the natural and I've been on it for 10 years.
Wow.
Right.
And it's crazy what happens because this one in 2003, of course, I'm an anti-aging guy, so you hear about it and you say, all right, I'll try it. And you inject it for 10 days once every six months and it dramatically lengthens telomeres. So you can do that and it costs 50 bucks. So you're thinking, all right, I want to live a lot longer. I got seven pillars of aging telomeres matter. so I'm going to use this peptide. And one of the reasons I wrote Super Human, Lewis, is that there's no one who's really going to market that those are non-patentable, but there's something that all of us need to know about because I want to live in a world full of people who are older and full of energy and full of wisdom. Because when I was 26, the reason I know all this stuff, I magically made my way to an anti-aging nonprofit group, and I was learning from people two times almost three times my age. One of my really good friends, Mike, there was in his mid 80s and he's on our board of directors. And the first night I meet him, we're out till 11:30 at night talking about all this stuff. I'm like, this guy has as much energy as I do and he's way.
Older than I am. How did he do this?
And you just realize it's possible, it's just unusual. So if it can be done, how.
Do you do it?
And so I feel that when we have a world full of people who have the wisdom of of having experienced things, enough energy and enough desire to give back, it saves the rest of us a lot of time and energy to have that, the village elder actually not have Alzheimer's disease and not be in a hospital. That's a big part of my mission. And getting a $50 thing that makes your telomeres longer, that's a pretty good ROI.
That's pretty sweet. It's already out there or is that.
Something you're going to- It's called epitalon. It's here, it's not something I make.
I'm not selling that, so I'm just.
Telling you about it. Epitalon, E-P-I-T-A-L-O-N. And I forget which chapter it's in, but I describe it and if you ask your nutritionist, they'll probably know about it. Okay, cool. And there's things that speed healing, something called BPC-157. You've probably tried that one. It's one of the injectable ones. It works and there's other ones, some called TB-500 and you go into this and you're saying, wait, But all of these are under $100 and all of them have really strong effects. So if you're dealing with something like, oh, I have an injury or this hurts or I'm looking at this aspect of aging and I don't want to deal with that or my brain isn't working, my brain wasn't working, I had arthritis, I was fat, I was a high risk of stroke or heart attack, I had pretty much the diseases of aging before I was 30. And it sucks and I'm not going back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So now you've got me asking myself, what is number seven. I know number seven is here.
To make sure my memory still works.
Number seven is loss of tissue. And as we get old, do you imagine that real thin skin?
Yeah.
So I actually talked about the rate of collagen loss and then what you can do about that. And if you are going to live for 100, 150 years, it's almost like having an investment in a bank account that compounds. So if you're saying, I'm just going to take aging the way it normally comes, you're gonna have really thin skin when you're old.
Or you could have lots of collagen.
Yeah, it's not just collagen, but in that case it's an example of collagen.
So, yes.
Fat, it's collagen. Yeah, it's whatever.
Yeah.
And they're a combination of exposure to light. There's things like red light therapy or.
Just getting some sunshine.
Not too much sunshine, but not no sunshine either. People have lost a million pounds using intermittent fasting and bulk of coffee and the other principal and that, and it stood the test of time, but I've learned a lot. And what you find is that there is not an answer for the general population because women are not just smaller men with less muscles. And so it varies. It also changes on time of life. And the most important thing, and the thing that motivated me to write Fast this way, is that it's not the same every day. So I was on a big TV show in London that required me to be awake at 2:30 a.m. and fully alert with bright lights on and, you know, being in a studio. That next morning was not the time to intermittent fast because I already had enough circadian stress. And so the deal is what's the right fast for you today and to give yourself permission to do it differently. And, you know, 'cause you're a pro athlete or you were, you On a day when you don't have it and you say, I'm going to go lift heavy anyway, what would happen to you?
You might hurt yourself, you might strain something, you might not have the energy to do the full thing, and then you might regret it. You might pull a muscle, who knows?
Exactly. And fasting is the same kind of a thing where you're saying, okay, what did my Oura ring tell me this morning about my readiness score? Okay, if I'm ready to go and I'm totally full of it, maybe today is one meal a day. and maybe you're gonna wake up and say, you know, on most days I just do a 14 or a 16 hour fast because that's what works really well for me. And I usually do a 16 or.
An 18 hour fast.
Today it's around two o'clock, I had my first meal. And before that, I just had some black bulletproof coffee without even the butter and MCT because I didn't have time to put it in there because I was busy. And like my metabolism could handle that, but when I weighed 300 pounds, if I would have tried that, I would have been hangry and hypoglycemic, and I would not have shown up the way that I expect myself to show up. So it's that kindness to yourself that says, you know what? Today I'm going to do this. And if it's just not working, it's okay to say I only fasted for 12 hours, which is the minimum fast that really does anything. Most people do 12 hours and don't even know it.
So am I hearing you say that just because you say you want to intermittent fast for two weeks or for a month, that you shouldn't push the fasting if you went to bed at 2:00 a.m. for some reason, if you haven't recovered from your workouts, if you're exhausted and you're moody, that maybe you should eat breakfast or you should have a smoothie or do something to give you more energy and calories in the morning as opposed to just, well, I'm supposed to fast because it's going to make me live longer and kill off these dead cells or whatever. But it may be more harm if you actually don't listen to your body.
Is that what I'm hearing you say? that is exactly right. Fasting is like exercise and you don't want to overdo it. You don't want to underdo it. And what we fall into as just being humans is what I call the fasting trap. And for that, there was the keto trap. And before that, when I was a raw vegan, it was the vegan trap. And the trap goes like this, and I may be more guilty of this than most people when I look back on my life. Hey, this is good. I'll just do more of it.
Right?
And that isn't the thing. The right amount is good. And many things in life have a U-shape response curve or an inverted U. So what that means is if you do just a little bit, nothing happens. You do the right amount, you get tons of benefits, and if you do too much, the benefits go back down. And fasting is a stressor on the body, but it's a good stressor unless you already have enough stress. So, look, if your girlfriend broke up with you last night, maybe a 24-hour fast today is just really not the thing to do, but maybe wallowing in a bucket of ice cream isn't the right thing to do either. And there's something in the middle there. And so when people say, How should I fast every day? I can tell you for women, the recommendations, there's a whole chapter just on the studies for women in the book because there are fewer of them. It turns out the minimum effective dose is three fasts a week, like a Monday, Wednesday, Friday. If you can do 14 or 16 hours, you'll get some benefits. And you get used to that and you say, you, know what? maybe I'm gonna do it five days a week. But I tell everyone, even, and this will make some people mad, have breakfast Saturday or Sunday. Don't have crazy ridiculous, you know, IHOP. But if you wanna have some gluten-free pancakes even, it's fine because if you have a flexible metabolism, you should be able to handle it and you want your body to know that it is in a land of plenty. You don't need all the time, but that there's always enough food. And if you push your fasts too much too often, you get an epigenetic, an environmental signal that says, Hey, there's kind of a little bit of a famine going on here, and then your body adjusts in a way that isn't good for you. So it's the idea time without time with, but you still have a sense of abundance in your tissues, which is very different than a low calorie diet, which just makes you feel like crap and want to punch people.
That's not good. So it's taking it in, in cycles. Let's do, I'm going to do this for two weeks, four weeks. but it's not going to be years consistently fasting because that may not be as useful to your body long term.
I think it will be years. Most people who practice intermittent fasting and learn how to do it the right way, they have more energy in the morning than when they have breakfast. Like Saturday morning, I sit down, we have a small organic farm, so we're going to have bacon from our own pigs. It's the best bacon on the planet. I like bacon, but I look at myself, man, it's only nine. I really don't want to eat anything right now because I know that I actually have more energy if I don't eat, but I'm going to because I'm doing it for a social thing. This is family time. And I also know that I'm teaching my body, you should be able to handle this. And I do, but there's times when I look at it, I'm just not hungry even though this is a time when most people say I'd be ravenous. And it's that freedom from the voice in your head that says, if I don't eat lunch, I'm going to starve. That's the reason people do this for long term. In fact, one of the studies in Fast this Way talks about how the average person spends 15% of their thoughts about what their next meal is. I'm like, maybe we could have that 15% back and do something better with it.
Yeah, it's more about optimizing your life and not obsessing over the brain thinking about what am I going to eat or watching media that's saying eat this fast food and you're constantly saying, well, what's next? What's next? As opposed to allowing your brain and your gut to rest for a little bit.
The brain and gut rest thing is very interesting because in the history of fasting, it's always had spiritual context or health context. And what they do is they say, well, fast for a couple days, and then on the third day, you stop caring about food, you get a lot of energy, and then you can go into this new open spiritual state. And there's several things happening there that I never would have imagined to be true back when the idea of skipping breakfast was something that was scary. I'm like, I don't want to do that. The first thing that happens is that when there's food in your stomach, even if it's really good food, that food is going to take energy to digest. So energy that could have gone into thinking or feeling or repairing tissues or whatever, it goes into attacking the steak you state and it breaks it down and you absorb it, and then you get more energy later. But the process of doing that is an energy suck. So if you have especially a high sugar, high carb, even oatmeal kind of breakfast, well, all of a sudden all the energy that should have gone into your morning goes into your gut and that's not where you wanted it to be. And then your blood sugar goes up, then when it goes back down, the muffin calls to you at 10:00 AM and you really want the muffin and then you start expending willpower on the muffin. Meanwhile, your body is spending extra energy digesting, so you have less energy for willpower. You're probably going to eat the muffin. and it doesn't mean you're a bad person. It just means that that's biology. But the second thing that happens on these longer fasts is that you go into a state of ketosis after about a couple days of not eating anything. And ketones provide more electrons to the neurons in your brain than even glucose or sugar or carbs do, even though that's what your brain usually eats. So all of a sudden now, you get these people fasting. All the energy that would have gone to digestion is going into repairing their tissues and going into their brain and their brain got more energy because it's burning a better fuel. And then the body says, well, if there's no food, maybe I should open up my perception and my sensors and I should become more tuned into the world around me so I could find something to eat. Now, if you say, I'm not gonna eat yet, I'm gonna use that openness to connect with others. I'm gonna use it to connect with myself to go for a walk in nature. You're actually in a different state. So you get all three of those from a longer fast, but the hack that I now have 10 years of experience with is that when you use MCT oil during a fast, I have very good evidence you stay fasted, but you get the ketones that would have been present after a three-day fast. And this is why people will say, okay, I'm going to do the Bulletproof Coffee thing in the morning, which I'm well known for. And there's a couple of things going on there biochemically, but one of the things is that you just got the third day of fasting feeling the morning you fasted. And this is very sustainable. I mean, there are people who have done this for 10 years now and keep doing it because they're never hungry. And just not being hungry is such a relief. I know when I was a 300-pounder, I knew you could have hunger.
You're always hungry though when you're 300 pounds, right? In the beginning?
I was never hungry. I was always craving.
I didn't know there was craving.
Ah, right?
What's the difference between craving and hunger?
There you go. Most people listening probably feel cravings most of the time. And craving is when if I don't eat soon, a disaster is going to happen. I really need to eat and it's an intense thing. But it turns out hunger is, I should probably eat some time in the next couple hours to perform better, but if I didn't, I'd be all right. I could go till tomorrow if I need to. So hunger is a gentle feeling. the intensity of cravings is terrible. And what people find when they learn how to intermittent fast in the right way is that they've eliminated cravings and hunger becomes a gentle presence in your life. Like, oh, it's a little bit cold in the room. Maybe I could turn the thermostat up. But if I don't, I'll be all right. And that calmness and peace that comes from it, that was what led me to write the book.
And what's the biggest mistake you've made in fasting personally in the last 10 years or mistake you've seen from other people who've tried to do fasting that it didn't work out for them.
It's falling into that fasting trap that says if something's good, more is better. Extremism of it. Extremism or even just something that worked for a little while, assuming it's always going to work. I noticed when I started writing about intermittent fasting, it's been a big pillar of the Bulletproof Diet for a long time.
I think before intermittent fasting was really cool.
And then people would call me and they'd say, especially women, I, you know, I felt amazing. I've lost weight. I can't believe this. Like, who would ever thought butter would make me not hungry? I love my life. But then they call about four weeks, five weeks later and say, you know what? I feel like my sleep quality has gone down. What's going on here? And then I say, well, did you follow the advice of cycling in and out of keto and having some carbs sometimes and not not pushing it. Like, well, no, I just felt so good. So I just kept doing that one thing, which was I didn't eat any carbs for long periods of time and then I added this intermittent fasting. And then, so step one is you lose quality of sleep. Same amount of sleep, lower quality. Second thing, and men usually hit this about a month after women, but men and women both get poor quality of sleep. Women will get, their cycle is less regular than it was before. So I'm going, Hmm, this is weird. I don't normally have hormonal issues, but I'm feeling it this month more than I do. And for guys, I'm waking up without a kickstand. And the third thing that happens, I.
Was watching you process that. Yeah.
So you're waking up without a kickstand.
Because you're not having carbs and you're doing an extreme way. Is that what you're saying? Well, it's because you're over fasting, right?
And so the body is like, oh, it's a stressful environment. I don't really need that biological function very well because there's not enough food. It's a famine. And your cortisol levels go up. And what happens when cortisol goes up and you keep it elevated because you're not eating often enough is thinning of hair. And it happens in women and men. So like, okay, sleep, hormones, hair in that order is what happens when you overfast.
Interesting.
And I've gone through times where I definitely went over keto. I went through a three-month period where I ate Just one serving of broccoli a day and the rest was just like meat and all. And it was all grass-fed and very carnivore-ish, although I didn't have zero veggies. And I felt amazing at first, but by the end of that, it's exactly the same as over fasting, where I'd wake up 12 times a night but not know that I woke up on my sleep monitoring things that I was. And then you can even mess with your gut bacteria if you overdo it. So the deal is, look, you skip breakfast and you have lunch around noon or two. and sometimes you only have dinner, but you mix it up and that's actually how it was in nature. But this idea of a rigid fasting schedule and you're gonna like muscle through and push through. Like if you're fading, right? And I'm just not feeling very good.
Eat some food, have some broccoli, have.
Some vegetables, have some salad, have some, yeah. Yeah, and it's okay. And the flip side is also true. What if you say, I'm going to have a 16 hour fast today and noon comes, like I am so feeling good. like, you know, I'm gonna make this a 20 or a 23 hour fast because I have it.
You're feeling good.
You have the energy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
And, like, I feel like as an athlete, you would know this better than most. Sometimes you go to the gym and you do the prescribing. Other times, like, I'm gonna put another set in because I can, and because, like, my body's ready. If we approach fasting that way, really good things happen. And I thought it was important. I look at everything I do, and, I mean, because we're friends and all. you know I do cryotherapy and stem cells and all kinds of crazy stuff, right? But there's a return on investment for everything you do. And it's not based on dollars, it's based on energy. You spend energy to do something and you get energy back. Well, fasting is like, okay, you walk into the bank and you don't have an account there. And the teller's like, oh, hi, here's some money. But I didn't do anything. That's right here, here's some money. And we'll pay you interest on this later today. and then two years from now we'll pay you more interest. But I didn't open an account. I didn't put any energy into this. I was like, yeah, I'll find that. That's all right. Because with fasting, you spent no money and no time and no energy on breakfast. So you got paid right now. You got free energy and free money and time back. And then all morning long you have less hunger and more energy than you did when you had the Pop-Tarts. And then you don't get type two diabetes and you have more energy and you have to buy smaller pants. And all kinds of good things happen. even if you're not perfect with your diet. And so this is the one thing that has the highest return on investment because you invest less than you do today.
And what do you think is the worst food to eat before you start fasting? Like, what's the worst thing you could do where it's kind of doesn't matter that you're fasted because you just had this, this and this, you know, 16.
Hours ago, a bunch of fried stuff, especially like french fries.
Yeah.
From a restaurant especially because they use such bad oils. and what you find from fasting is that sometimes it's effortless and sometimes you just have gnawing hunger the whole time. And the gnawing hunger, it's your fault. It's what you ate before the fast.
Interesting.
So in Fast this Way, I teach about these six big categories of food that are likely to cause cravings for you. And they don't all cause the same intensity of cravings, but these are foods that aren't as good as we think they are. because we have anything you're gonna eat has three things in it and most nutritionists only look at two. I'm not picky on nutritionists specifically. Dietitians are even worse. I'll pick on them. These are the guys who feed you Jello with NutraSweet in it. But there's calories in food and some types of popular wisdom say, well, eat food with less calories. Guys, calories are energy. Energy is what you want. and to say that you are somehow going to feel really good on a low calorie diet, it does not work. As a 300 pound guy who's lost way more than 100 pounds, I'd say I'm a 200 pound guy now, but you go low calorie, lose 20 pounds, gain 30, lose 30, gain 40. It does not work.
It makes you miserable and it makes you just cranky.
So what's the solution? What's the solution then? Well, the solution is you actually eat enough calories and you eat the right kinds of calories. So let's assume your food has some energy in it. the second thing food has, it has nutrients. So it has vitamins and minerals and stuff like that. This is good. Now, most of the time we stop there and say, okay, you should eat more of this because it has, for some reason, some people say less calories and other people say more nutrients. But the third bucket is what matters. The third bucket is anti-nutrients or toxins. And it's not like any food is perfect, but some have more or less calories, some have more or less nutrients, and some have more or less anti-nutrients. And if you pretend like they don't exist, which is how most nutritional stuff is written. Let's eat this because it's packed with this, ignoring the fact that you could literally have a bowl of cyanide. And if you put some vitamins in it, they'd say, well, it's low calorie, it's high in vitamins, you should eat that. And so I teach people in Fast this Way, look, here's the things to look for. If you eat that, you're probably gonna have a miserable fast with low energy cravings and be cold. But if you don't eat that, you're gonna have a much easier fast. And then you start to realize, wait a minute, maybe I'm going to choose foods that don't make me hungry as soon as I finish eating them. And if you master that, even when you're not intermittent fasting, you're gonna have lunch and instead of wanting a snack at two, I'm actually full until dinner. I just don't want to eat, so I don't think about eating. I don't reach for the cookies.
Yeah.
So instead of willpower, it's just biology. It's so much easier that way. What would you say would be the.
Top three foods if you could only have three that you would eat before a fast, whether it's 16 hour or 24 hours. It would be definitely grass-fed steak. There is nothing more satiating than animal fats or butter. This stuff, it's full of nutrients as long as it's grass-fed. If it's industrial, it'll actually give you cravings. It's not good to eat industrially raised animals. So the idea that meat is good or bad, you got to know what meat, how is the animal treated, and all that. It matters. I wish that it didn't matter. I wish you could just eat gravel, but it doesn't work. so this is something that is the most satiating, something with a lot of soluble fiber in it. You can do broccoli if you want to, you can do some vegetables, preferably cooked. Not all vegetables are going to have the same effect on you. So I talk about things like how the nightshade family of vegetables, which have been a core part of the Bulletproof Diet, like guys, watch out for that. If you eat bell peppers, you're probably gonna feel different than if you eat cabbage. In fact, you'll feel very different. and when I say that, most people go, oh, wait, I guess that might be true, but we've just never thought about it.
Different. Different in a not feeling as good.
With the night shades. Bell peppers are in the deadly nightshade family. They're clearly not deadly, but they cause inflammation in many people, but in others they handle it pretty well.
Right.
So I'm like, watch out for that. But for me, I would say, give me some vegetables, give me some steak. And then the other thing that's going to be really good is anything with fat. dark chocolate, guacamole, things like that. A salad with a really heavy dressing with real olive oil, not the fake stuff, and with some extra MCT oil in it and some extra avocados on top. So give me the good undamaged fats, not a lot of seed oils. Give me some protein and give me some vegetables. You do that and you can cruise all day long. But if you say, oh, instead I'm going to insert some kind of fancy raw kale salad. Kale gives a lot of people cravings. In fact, it's not very good for you at all. In fact, have you ever eaten a huge kale salad and then being, I'm so full, I'm so satisfied, I'm just bursting with energy. I'm not gonna be hungry for four hours?
No.
Even if you cover it in bacon, it still doesn't work. Kale has stuff in it that pisses your body off. It really does. And it's just how it is. It doesn't taste that good either.
But even if you like the taste of it, it's not particularly a strong health There you go. And how does from all the research that you've done, obviously you've tested this for 10 years personally, but from the research and the science, how does fasting the right way play a role in anti-aging in your life and in other people's lives?
The number one thing fasting or intermittent fasting regularly will do. And remember, it doesn't have to be a super long one. 14 hours can start, 16 hours is We're not talking heavy duty, you know, living in a cave kind of stuff. And that will stop you from having insulin resistance. When you have insulin resistance, it means that insulin levels go up and your body can't hear them, so they go up higher. When your insulin is higher, your all-cause mortality goes up. In other words, your chances of dying from every disease you can think of happens. What insulin resistance means is that when there's energy in your body, your cells are weak enough that they can't make good use of the energy. and fasting fixes that problem. When sugar goes up in the body, it forms something called advanced glycation end products. It basically cooks your tissues the way onions brown in a pan. And we know this from 30 years of anti-aging research about the effect of excess insulin and sugar in the body. Fasting will fix that. But on top of it, there's something.
Called autophagy, which is a core part.
Of the recommendations I make, which is do whatever it takes to cause your body to turn its protein digestion mechanisms back on you. Because if it's not busy eating steak and eggs or, you know, tofu, if that's what you're into, it'll turn around and go, oh, there's some extra debris, some junk inside the cells, outside the cells. I can clean that up. And if you go a little bit longer, it says, you know what? I've got enough extra enzyme activity here. I think I will take out the weak mitochondria, these little power plant generators. I'll take out the weak ones and replace them with young, strong ones. And you start upgrading yourself internally. because the stuff that would have gone into digesting the food you eat every two hours because that's what someone told you to do in the 70s. Instead of doing that, you're eating the stuff in your body that makes you old. And when you control insulin and you control autophagy, something very interesting anti-aging wise happens, and it's that you actually have younger and more abundant stem cells in your body. So intermittent fasting has proven to increase stem cells, increases testosterone, human growth hormone, and a huge swath of anti-aging substances in the body. And it's free. It costs less than eating breakfast.
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Louis, this is going to shock people, but Nicotine is a mitochondrial stimulant in low doses. I've never smoked, smoking's bad for you. But if someone came to me and said, Dave, here's a plate of deep fried food and here's a cigarette, I would rather smoke the cigarette. Because at least I'll get the nicotine performance boost and the damage from the free radicals from the smoke and all the other crap in the cigarette, they're only gonna really hit me for four hours. The fried food's at least 24 hours of damage to the brain. to the membranes in the mitochondria and in your cells that make all this energy, bad fat is really bad for you. And one of the reasons that I.
Look the way I look is I.
Don'T eat bad fat. It's not, oh, I'll just have a little bit. I just had to have the deep fried Brussels sprouts. I'm like, what do you fry those in? I don't eat that crap.
It's not food.
And when you get that freedom from cravings that comes from eating a higher fat diet, from using brain octane and Bulletproof coffee and all that stuff, you suddenly have that ability to be like, I'll just pass on the fries because I know the steak is coming. When you do that sort of thing, okay, you look better, you feel better, but your brain stays sharper. And I'm amazed at the changes I've been able to experience from just that one decision.
Wow.
Not that I've ever smoked instead of- Right, right, right. Exactly. So what are the things you like are non-negotiables that you cut out? Maybe like five or seven things you.
Think everyone should cut out of their- Things that contain MSG have to go. And there's still a group of science trolls that say, There's no evidence that.
MSG is bad for you.
I'm like, except for like, A gazillion pieces of evidence that you chose to ignore. MSG causes hypoglycemia. Restaurants buy spices that are 74% MSG by volume, and they are not required to be labeled as MSG. Spice extractives, paprika extract, garlic extract, a lot of the extracts and flavorings, natural flavorings sometimes. The food companies sell these in magazines, in catalogs saying does not have to be labeled as MSG. They know it's MSG, but according to FDA law, actually it's probably USDA law, but 75% or above is MSG. When you eat this, or let's say you're running a restaurant, you want to make more money, put something into the food that has MSG in it that isn't labeled. Your chef can, without even knowing it's in there, will be, oh, no, there's no MSG. I checked the label. When people eat this, it's going, they're going to like the food because it tastes good. they're also going to increase the order by about 30% because they're going to order more drinks because they get thirsty and they're going to order dessert because they got hypoglycemia. Guess what hypoglycemia is?
It's a lack of energy going into.
The inputs and the batteries in your cells. So you feel like you need more? Well, they start creating a panic response.
It's like, give me sugar, baby. And that's where sugar cravings are coming from.
So yeah, you got to not eat MSG. It's just not there. Healthier fats because you have less cravings when you have more fat. And it's not just healthier fats. because it's undamaged fats. You can take this grass-fed steak and like, oh, it's so amazing. It's got that nice ribbon, like a ribeye, a nice yellow fat that's juicy and good. Well, throw it under a broiler at 450. You don't want to eat it because when you damage fat, it makes really toxic free radicals that directly lower your energy production. So you want gently cooked meat. A lightly caramelized steak is fine. A blackened steak, you gotta cut off the black part or just don't eat it. And I'm sad to say this, but if you're cooking on a grill versus baking, broiling, or cooking in water or even like a stir fry, the grill makes a lot of things that we've known for years contribute to cancer.
Really?
Yeah.
And unfortunately, before they contribute to cancer, I love grill. You can add smoked salt though. If you get like the real smoked salt, not the MSG salt, like Lowery's.
And all, but the stuff where they.
Have like alder smoke.
It is.
It's so good. It's amazing.
Because it's bad for you probably, right?
It's the MSG though, so that's good. So I'm like, use the stuff where it's just the pure smoke. That isn't gonna cause damage to your mitochondria. People like, Dave, you're such a picky bastard. Seriously, look, try it. Try this for two weeks. And just the times when I would have had a food coma, food comas are not normal. Shouldn't have them. Yeah, the coma comes because the energy in your brain where you should have been on, turned off because the energy was going to pumping crap out that.
Shouldn'T have been there in the first place.
People probably didn't have food comas 100 years ago.
Yeah, if they did, it was like vodka and juice. Yeah, right. But it wasn't like putting all these toxins in our body and see inflammation constantly. Right.
Yeah.
And talking about inflammation, I think you.
Say inflammation is the muffin top of the brain. Is that right? Yes. And what does that mean?
What is that?
Well, anyone who's ever had muffin top maybe notices that some days it's there and some days it's not. Muffin top is not fat. Muffin top is inflammation. If it's always there, you have a little bit of flab. But for most of us, you're like, you know, I went out drinking last night, I stayed up late or I flew somewhere and then the next morning I had muffin top. You don't put on fat like that. It's just the fact that your mitochondria became less efficient at managing water and you ended up getting some bloating.
You can also get bloating if you.
Eat a bunch of carbs because you store water weight when you eat carbs and things like that. But when you get that muffin top, it's highly variable. So when you see the muffin top here that wasn't there yesterday, your brain.
Has the same kind of inflammation. And here's the really, yeah.
If you see it on the body, it's in the brain. And here's the weird thing about inflammation. Inside each cell in the brain, there's this 15,000 mitochondria and they have something called the electron transport chain. So they make electrons from food and then they have to move them. So if a cell is, let's just blow it up, it's the size of my hand.
Right?
And the electron has to go from here to here. Well, make inflammation happen. Now the electron has to go twice as far.
Wow.
So a small increase in inflammation really changes the efficiency of the system. And that's why inflamed neurons and brain inflammation is terrible for cognitive performance. And if you're seeing inflammation in the body, you'll see it in the brain.
Drops the mic. No, I'm kidding. What else is inflammation foods that we shouldn't have?
Gluten.
Yeah.
And look, there are people who will argue, oh, I like gluten. Okay, that's great. I like heroin too, right? Okay, I don't actually like heroin.
Or alcohol or whatever.
I've never tried heroin, to be honest.
But that whole thing, it doesn't matter.
I like sugar too, but that's not good for you. Yeah, yeah. And so that's not a valid argument. And then there's a bunch of people say, there's a bunch of studies that show that only celiac's, no, there's study after study after study that show that gluten causes problems. More for some than for others, but it's never a food that makes you.
It's not an enhancer.
No, it doesn't have value. At best, it's neutral and it's probably bad. And it's not going to make you superhuman. It's not going to make you everything. It's not going to make you great. You're the school of greatness, right? If you really want to be great, gluten just shouldn't be on your diet. And if you're like, oh, I just have it twice a week, no, it causes continuous changes in your immune system. depending on what genetics you have and all those things. So just because you're like, well, I can eat it and I feel okay...
Doesn't mean it's not damaging something in.
Your body or mind. You can also start smoking if you feel okay. It doesn't mean it was a good choice, right? Exactly. So I know that that's a controversial thing, but we should take gluten out of the human diet unless in times of famine. It would be better for our soil, better for agriculture, better for animals, better for us, better for everyone. We know better now. We just do it because that's what we've done for the last few thousand years. We had to feed a lot of.
People when we didn't have good technology.
Yeah, or we didn't have the money or whatever. Yeah, exactly. All right, so we talked about bad fats, we talked about burned fats, we talked about burned meat, we talked about gluten.
All right, here's the other thing.
Sugar, right? Well, sugar, absolutely. Except mitochondria love sugar. So, yes. What types of sugar? Well, they love straight up glucose. So, fructose is bad for you, like high fructose corn syrup especially. And by the way, anything that's not organic and is made out of corn is full of glyphosate. which is essentially Roundup, that stuff is a mitochondrial inhibitor. Guess what? These bastards who make glyphosate, who literally we should stop them tomorrow because it's destroying our soil, they say, It doesn't affect humans because it only affects bacteria. There's a quadrillion ancient bacteria in your body that are in there and they are affected by glyphosate. It's just a fact, not to mention your gut bacteria, which talk to your mitochondria via these light pathways. they're also affected by glyphosate. So you need to eat more organic and you shouldn't eat concentrated corn products anyway. But there are times, especially if you're like, wow, I'm getting a really strong sugar craving, guess what? You might want to give into it.
But what should you do?
Have a banana or an apple or something? A banana or an apple or mostly fructose, you're not going to get it. You might want to have a small amount of real sugar.
Really?
Or honey or something? Yeah, honey could work. And you'd want to do that just because you're having an energy crash. And it's better to train your body, you got to burn some fat. Use some brain octane, which will go straight to ketones. But you can do that and a little bit of sugar. So if you're listening to this, like, wow, I can feel like I'm crashing. I had lunch at this restaurant, it tasted too good to be true. Maybe I'm getting a sugar crash. If you prop up your glucose without having a huge wave of sugar, I'm going to eat your five scoops of Ben and Jerry's a tiny bit along with some fat and protein. it might turn off a migraine. It might affect you in a big way. So, if you're crashing, there's nothing wrong with saying, All right, I need a little bit of sugar right now.
It's some honey and some pistachios or some cashews or something.
Yeah, some halva, right?
That'd be fine.
And so, people are really surprised. Like, Dave, I thought you were a zero carb. No, the Bulletproof Diet has always been a cyclical ketosis diet that uses external ketones in the form of brain octane to make sure you always have some ketones. ketones are these fat burning molecules that give you more energy than sugar. We're wired to only have ketones or only have sugar. And here's the cool thing about your brain. Your neurons, they prefer fat as fuel. They'll burn ketones over glucose even if they're both in your brain at the same time. But the way we evolve, we're not supposed to have fat and sugar. If you want fat, it's easy. Fast for four days or go on the Atkins diet, like a ketogenic diet. And then you have no glucose and only fat, or eat some carbs and some protein and then you're back in glucose mode, which is our default energy production mode. Well, you can cheat, and that's part of Ed Strong. What if you had enough protein and a few carbs, not too many, so you actually had glucose in the system and you had ketones? You're not supposed to be able to do that. You're supposed to be in one or the other, but because brain octane converts to ketones, even if you're eating carbs, there you go. Now you get the benefits of ketones, which is more energy in the mitochondria. The neurons in the brain, they get to get their optimal fuel, but the immune cells in the brain called glial cells, they want sugar. So they get a little bit of blood sugar that comes from eating even vegetables and from eating steak and things like that. So all of a sudden now, both types of cells in your brain got the kind of fuel that was best for them. So now you have the energy to grow new neurons, to do neurogenesis, things.
Like that, which is cool.
Oh, and we haven't talked about neurogenesis very much. We talked about BDNF before. There's a new supplement that I write about in the book. The studies just came out. It's the one you gave me. Yeah, it's called Neuromaster. Where'd I put it?
And there it is.
Yes. So this comes from coffee fruit. This is not coffee beans, just not green coffee extract. And in two different studies, it raises that BDNF, that factor that gives you a more youthful brain. So when I'm doing all this crazy brain training at 40 years in, when I'm meditating, when I'm doing anything that I, this skill acquisition thing, including reading, I take one of those in the morning. So it keeps my brain at higher BDNF levels. And I do all the other practices in here. Most of the things that make your mitochondria strong also increase BDNF. So even intermittent fasting, the bulletproof intermittent fasting, all those things do it. So it doesn't matter what you're studying, what you're working to be better at, having more neuroplasticity can only benefit you. And that's why we came out with that stuff. I'm pretty excited about it. It's one of my important new supplements.
Yeah, you got so much at bulletproof.com, you got tons of great products and foods. You've got the bars that I love that we're talking about the lemon bars.
They're amazing. What's it happening again?
The ingredients?
It's brain octane oil and collagen protein instead of like there's a lot of bars. Whey protein is bad. Yeah, whey is not that good, but a lot of the very common ketogenic bars have milk protein isolate from non-organic milk. It's like It's one step above soy protein.
It's toxic, right?
It's got some inflammation? It is very likely to increase inflammation and certainly it's not pure. And in collagen, you can't get in most food. You have to boil bones to get bone broth or gelatin or something. So, I'd have a bar where all the protein in it comes from collagen with cashew as a binder and then to get the brain octane to suppress hunger and turn on ketones. That's what I eat when I travel. I give these things to my kids and I just made those bars because I didn't want to eat the ingredients like artificial sweeteners are universally train racks for your mitochondria. Things like sucralose, aspartame, acesulfame potassium, those belong on those kryptonite foods list. And, a lot of people who are into keto, and by the way, I lost 50 pounds in the late 90s on the Atkins diet going to ketosis, and I ate artificial sweeteners all the time. And, you can't lose the other 50.
Pounds because artificial sweeteners cause inflammation and.
Half your weight gain is is inflammation anyway.
It doesn't matter how hard you work out. Yeah, right.
Didn't for me. I'm doing the food. Yeah. An hour and a half a day.
Six days a week, and to not.
Lose weight after a year and a half. I'm sure 20.
Yeah.
I was only like 24 when I did that. Oh, really? Wow. And I felt like such a failure. I'd had three knees or two knee surgeries. Oh, man. And I was like, All right, I'm never going back. I'm done with these surgeries. I'm going to be in the best shape of my life.
I can max out every machine at.
My gym, and I would do 45 minutes of cardio at an incline.
Wow.
And, but you were still eating the wrong things.
Yeah, I was actually eating less calories, about 1800 calories a day, and I was eating a low fat diet and I could not lose the weight. I was like, I could bench press my thin friends while they eat french fries. And it was one day I looked at them, I'm like, wait a minute, I actually do eat less than any of my friends. And like, it's not me. Like, it's not that I didn't try hard enough. It's not that a moral failing, it's that what I'm doing just doesn't work. And what happened, I was over training and I was, fat deficient and protein deficient, eating inflammation and all that kind of crap.
Yeah, yeah. And, if you guys haven't checked out bulletproof.com, make sure you check it out. You got a lot of great resources, the books, the diet stuff, but you have tons of supplements, products, foods, the.
Bulletproof Coffee obviously has changed thousands of.
People'S lives, hundreds of thousands. I've been out 48 million cups of.
Bulletproof Coffee so far.
No way.
Served in what way? How are you quantifying that? Like at home or at a store?
In a total?
Bulletproof coffee is the mold-free lab tested beans with brain octane oil and grass-fed butter. Putting butter in coffee is better than putting milk in coffee. Milk steals the polyphenols from your coffee. It sticks to them and polyphenols are required for mitochondria to function. If I check this out, throughout all of history, the first trade routes established were for salt. Salt is required for adrenal function. It's fundamental being a human. If you have salt cravings, there's an easy thing to do. Give in to them. Just use sea salt. You need that.
That's your adrenal system crying for salt.
That was like cash back in the day, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You paid your Roman soldiers in salt as a man worth his salt. And maybe a woman, but back then, I don't think they paid for women in salt.
Right.
Paying for women is bad, by the way.
Right.
That's what they did back then because they were bad Romans.
Yeah.
Anyway, you know what I'm saying? Like, literally, soldiers paid in salt.
Yeah.
And from there, the next evolution of those roots was spice. What are the highest polyphenol foods on earth? They're spices. You know, oregano, thyme, vanilla, like all of these things, right? And after that was tea. Tea is also a high polyphenol food. It turns out these little mitochondria that run things, they are desperate to get these compounds that function as antioxidants but also are signaling molecules to the body. So we set up global commerce. We've had wars over access to polyphenols. and we've had wars over coffee. And it turns out coffee is the highest polyphenol food in the American diet just because we get most of our polyphenols from that. So part of the Head Strong program is you need to add more high quality spices and herbs to your food, more turmeric, and coffee is good, tea is good, dark chocolate is good. Unfortunately, alcohol is bad for mitochondria, but wine has some polyphenols in it. So if you're going to have some, at least drink wine with less anti-nutrients that harm mitochondrial function.
In it.
So there's cool stuff you can do in all these different things, but who would have thought that polyphenols were so important to the evolution of our society? Well, it turns out Bulletproof Coffee is the culmination of that where we don't use milk in it, we use butter because butter allows you to absorb the polyphenols and we use brain octane in it, which also allows you to make more energy from it. So all of a sudden the mitochondria, like, you gave me energy, you gave me you gave me polyphenols at the same time. I'm ready to party.
And that's why you feel so different when you drink it. I love it. And there's no crash and it tastes smooth. And it's like, I don't drink coffee.
But I like Bulletproof. So we drink it all the time here.
Cool.
Yeah. Yeah.
But I never drank coffee before. Isn't it like being a. Like being a vegetarian that eats fish? Yeah.
Exactly. Yeah. But I never had coffee before. I mean, I'd have it every now.
And then or a cappuccino or something just for, like, a taste or whatever.
But now, yeah, I do it almost every day. It's a performance enhancing substance, and you.
Drink less of it, like a cup.
Topping off Bulletproof is a good way.
It goes a long way. Cancer is caused by food.
And sugar is the number one culprit.
Diabetes, Alzheimer's, heart disease, the big killers.
Are by sugar and food.
Yes. So if you change your diet, you should be able to prevent or cure sometimes. Sometimes cure. Depends how far along things are, I guess.
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