Nick Hutchison breaks down Dave Asprey's Superhuman, a guide to slowing aging through diet, sleep, and recovery techniques. The book's three sections cover the four major health killers, methods like collagen and cold exposure to preserve tissue, and advanced therapies like stem-cell treatment. Hutchison, 26, plans to start with a food-sensitivity blood test.
Chapters
Hello, Book Thinkers family. Today's book tip is going to come from Superhuman by Dave Asprey. I thought this book was fantastic. What pulled me in initially was the subtitle, The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever. It did come highly recommended to me from a few members of the Book Thinkers community. I got a couple DMs about this book and it kind of fit in perfectly. I'm looking for ways to optimize my health, to optimize the output that my brain can give me every single day because I'm working so much. So I figured I'd give it a shot. And I just read Own the Day, Own Your Life by Aubrey Marcus. I loved it. I heard that it kind of had a similar setup and recommendations or set of recommendations, so I gave it a shot and I did love it. So hats off to you, Dave Asprey. You did change a lot of things in my daily routines, which I'll talk about in a couple moments. This book is broken down into 3 parts, and the first part is Don't Die. And in this section, Dave tells you about Uh, the 4 killers and the 7 pillars of aging. He talks a little bit about how food is an anti-aging drug. Then he talks about why sleep is so important. And then lastly, using light to gain superpowers. So that section's about not dying. Biohackers kind of have a funny rule. It's the first rule of biohacking, and that's to eliminate the things that are killing you immediately. Today we're doing a lot of things that maybe we don't consciously do, but we do a lot of things that are killing us. The same things that make us age are also the things that make us feel weak and sick and burn our energy, and they make us feel unhappy. One example of that would be inflammation. It's a killer. We eat tons of food on a daily or weekly basis that causes inflammation that we're not even aware of. And by simply eliminating that, we can prolong our lives. We can feel healthier. We can have more energy, more mental clarity and focus. And it's such a simple thing that none of us pay attention to. So one big action item for me is in the coming weeks, I'm doing a food sensitivities test. And a lot of these food sensitivities tests take a blood sample and then they run that blood against around 100 different food types and they look for a reaction, an inflammatory reaction. And then when you get the results back, you can read through these food types and you can see what causes inflammation in your body. So let's just say that every single day I have a morning smoothie, which I do. And it has, geez, at this point about 15 different things that go into the smoothie. But let's just say one of them might be peanut butter. And I don't know that peanut butter is causing me inflammation, but my blood work says that it is. By simply eliminating peanut butter from my diet and never eating it again for the next 100 years of my life, I could remove a battle that my body's going through on a daily basis. And that's going to prolong my life. That's going to give me a massive amount of energy over the next 100 years, 365 days every single year, I'm putting my body through a fight that it doesn't need to go through. So that's a super, uh, affordable test that I think everybody can take. And it, you know, it's one example that Dave gives on ways to improve your life. So I thought it was fantastic. Then he goes into aging backward, and in this section there are tons and tons and tons of different recommendations, and there are certain things that I am implementing. One super simple example is that collagen, which gives your skin its firmness and helps you kind of maintain that wrinkle-free complexion, it's readily available as a supplement that we can take. Every year after 25, we lose 1% of the collagen that our body produces naturally. So you can supplement with it, and you can do certain things like cold exposure, taking cold showers, or microneedling. There's so many ways that you can restore the collagen in your skin. to give you sort of an ageless look as we grow older. So certain things like that are being added into my routines. And then the last part of this book deals with healing like a deity. We can recover much faster than we think we can by using some of the techniques in this book. Now, Dave's pretty crazy. He's doing forms of stem cell therapy that go way over my head, and maybe they're not even available in the US and they're not regulated, but people like this have access to that stuff. And the more that we educate ourselves and look for opportunities to implement things like stem cell therapy, well, they become— as the demand goes up, I should say, the cost goes down and they become more accessible to people like us. So educating ourselves and learning about people like Dave Asprey and what they're doing to prolong their lives, we can take advantage of those opportunities as well. So anyway, I thought this book was pretty cool. Like I said in the beginning of the video, I'm entering a stage in my life where I'm using my brain more than most people do and more than I did in the past. I'm pushing it to its limits, 10, 12, 14 hours a day, and that's real intensive focus. And I'm actually doing something. I'm not just scrolling through social media and calling that using my brain. And because of that, I need ways to optimize it. So as I said, optimization is the word of 2020 for Me, and books like this are fantastic. I would highly recommend this book. I have a list of a million things that I've implemented, so maybe I'll do a more in-depth video and talk a little bit more about what's going into my morning smoothies and changes that I've made to my diet. I'll do the results of my food sensitivities test when I get it back and talk a little bit about some of the changes that I'll probably be making at that point. But here's the deal. I'm 26 years old right now, and I want to make sure that at the end of my life, I'm feeling energetic. I'm feeling great. I have the ability to focus. I've avoided a lot of these issues that people can run into if they don't pay attention, like diabetes and Alzheimer's and cancers and all of these other issues that we can run into. So that's that. Oh, check out this book. Like I said, if you've read it, let me know what you think. If you have any fun or cool or hip or new anti-aging techniques, drop them down below. And with that, go read something. Have a fantastic day. Bye.
