These are the essential nutrients your body needs to hack your energy levels | Dave Asprey

Your body is more like a whirlpool in matter than actually something that exists because all the cells in your body will be replaced over seven years. So you're just an exceptionally slow whirlpool. And that means that if you're taking things in and things are going out, if you don't take the things in that are required for you to show up at your full performance, at your full energy levels over time, you get we the body that you will leave this room with is fundamentally different than the body you came here with. Because right now your metabolism is working, it's taking some of the stuff you ate and it's replacing cells and you're actually shedding some cells, other ones you'll be excreting later. So we don't see it this way because I have a body. Your body is more like a whirlpool in matter than actually something that exists because all the cells in your body will be replaced over seven years. So you're just an exceptionally slow whirlpool. And that means that if you're taking things in and things are going out, if you don't take the things in that are required for you to show up at your full performance, at your full energy levels over time, you get weak. So I don't know anyone who is made out of kale or sugar or even carbohydrates. Now, carbohydrates are useful and something you probably want to eat. Unless you have epilepsy. You can go without carbs for a while if you want to lose weight or for a specific thing. But if you do it for a long period of time, you will hate your life. Because we're less than 1% carbohydrate, we are actually an equivalent percent of minerals, but we're made out of protein and fat and water. So if you're saying, all right, I'm going to do a solid for the earth because you've been misled, what you find is you're eating a whole bunch of these plant based proteins that don't have a lot in common with your proteins. And you don't have the right raw materials because your amino acid ratios are off. And something else happens that's magical. You guys have probably heard of collagen protein, right? So I made collagen into a billion dollar industry category. And collagen is important because it's not just a collection of amino acids, the building blocks of protein. When you eat proteins, proteins act as signals into your body. Things called peptides that are present. The reason you feel good when you put collagen in your coffee is that there are signaling molecules called di and tripeptides that actually talk to your body. They're one of the ways of getting a signal into your operating system. So it's fascinating how all this works. But when someone says, I have this very highly processed product like brown rice protein, it was cheap, but it doesn't do the same thing. In fact, you need to eat twice as much of that as you do animal protein to get the protein equivalents in your body. So imagine that you were one of those. Well, we're in Colombia. I can say this. There was a time when people would take two condoms full of cocaine, double bagged, and then swallow a whole bunch of them and then fly to the U.S. right? Well, they ate the cocaine. Why did they die? Because it wasn't bioavailable. Plants do the same thing to their proteins so that you can't use them because they don't want you to use them. Those proteins are in the plants either for defense or for reproduction. But plants are not primarily protein based. So when we're like, we're going to go get all these proteins, it's because someone somewhere said, you got to get enough protein. There's two kinds of protein I'd like to tell you about. The first one is called sarin, the nerve gas. It's been used in terrorist attacks. It comes from beans. So it's a plant based protein. So using vegan logic, therefore all plant based proteins will kill you. I mean, it's just logical. Or there's spider venom. If you eat that, it's probably not going to be very good for you. So therefore all animal based proteins will kill you. Or what if different proteins did different things in your body? Well, they do. So you want proteins that your body can absorb and make full use of and that contain larger amounts of minerals and that don't contain things that block your minerals. And you can be vegetarian and do this because you have access to cheese and you have access to eggs and you have access to butter and actually yogurt and stuff like that, assuming you're not sensitive to it. So that's why you can have countries that are primarily vegetarian. And they do fine because they're getting their saturated fats and they're getting animal based proteins. They're just not eating the animals. So I would encourage you, if you're on a 100% plant based diet for some reason, to at least add ghee back into it because your life will change and you'll be able to better absorb polyphenols that are in it. So raw materials, protein, high quality absorbable protein, including collagen protein is absolutely necessary. The anti aging studies that I've cited, there's a case for doing 0.6 grams of high quality animal protein per pound of body weight. That's probably not enough, but there are some studies that show that that can work. The predominant belief here is about 1 gram of protein per pound of lean body weight. So when I weighed 300 pounds and I wanted to weigh 200, I would have needed 200 grams of protein a day. If you know you had 30 grams of protein this morning, raise your hand. Okay, a few people. If you ate protein but you have no idea how much, raise your hand. Okay, good deal. You probably ate 10 grams of protein, maybe 12. So if you find yourself always hungry, you find yourself not putting on muscle, getting fat. An easy thing to do is to increase protein and actually just pay attention for a day. Just say huh, it turns out I only ate 60 grams of protein. You can easily absorb 30 grams per meal. And if it's high quality protein, you can actually do 50 grams a meal if you need to. I do about 50 grams a meal, but I'm not a small person so I need a little bit more protein than, than a four foot tall woman would for instance. But you still need the protein because protein also builds bones. So getting those raw materials, if you have that and then you pick up something heavy, you'll grow muscle. If you don't have that, you pick up something heavy, you'll produce stress hormones because your body couldn't respond to the signal to improve that you put into it. The other two, just preeminent but boring things are vitamin Dake. That's vitamindake.com D, A, K, E. I talked about those yesterday. This is vitamin D3 which comes from animals. There's vitamin A. There are lots of people tell you, well, just take your plant based vitamin A. It's beta carotene. Your body can't convert beta carotene efficiently into retinol, which is a proper form of vitamin A. When people get into vitamin A, they don't get macular degeneration. Their eyes work better and many, many systems in the body work better. Vitamin K is missing from plant based foods. Unless you like natto. Who's tried natto? One, two people. Did you like it? No. So natto is a traditional Japanese ken. You've had natto, you probably like it. You can't eat it. You can't eat it. Okay, good deal. So natto's a traditional Japanese food and I got to give it to the Japanese, like their selections of seaweed. Very high minerals. And when they eat small amounts of soy, traditionally, it's always fermented heavily to get rid of all the bad stuff in soy. Natto is fermented until it looks like mucus and it tastes like mucus with a little bit of peanut butter in it. But it does contain vitamin K2, but you get it mostly from dairy or you can get it in a pill. And you won't get very much from industrial dairy, but you'll get it from grass fed dairy, especially if it's cultured butter. But if it's mechanically separated butter, you don't get very much of it, which is why you get the Kerrygold. You get the butter from New Zealand and magically it's more yellow because it has more nutrients, but it just tastes different. Your body likes it somehow. That's your meat operating system going, I got myself some K2. I love this. And it just tastes good. And it's not just the flavor. It's the nutrient sensors in your body that are invisible to you. That's why you drink Danger Coffee. It's like, I don't know, it tastes like really good coffee. But there's something else that's your nutrient sensors going, minerals. Thank God I needed minerals. So Vitamin Dake drives minerals into the body. So if you go to the Vitamindake.com website and you pick up Minerals 101 or you're maybe already taking multi mineral, there are multiple companies who make those and you get that combination of things. Everything you do will work better. So if you want to have your energy working well, what you would do is you would make sure you have these first before you take the sexy nootropics, before you take the stuff that enhances libido or whatever supplement you're into, you just start with the basics because we know they're missing from our food. The next thing is fiber. Like, Dave, I thought you hated plants. I don't hate plants. They hate us. It's totally different. See, they told me not to laugh at my own jokes, but I just make myself laugh all the time. So you guys just have to deal with it. All right? So when you get enough fiber without anti nutrients, what you're going to find is it changes the microbes in your gut and you need healthy bacteria in your gut. And you can take probiotics. I love probiotics. But if they don't have anything to eat, it won't work. One of the best sources is something called acacia gum, because you're looking for fiber without plant poisons in it. You'll find these people go, well, I'm from the 70s. We learned if you eat whole wheat because fiber. Let's ignore all the other stuff that's in whole wheat that's sucking minerals out of your body. Or I'm going to eat brown rice because of fiber. Let's ignore the 80 times higher arsenic levels in brown rice versus white rice. There's a very good reason that countries where rice is a traditional food, if you were not the poorest of the poor, you would eat polished rice. And if you were a peasant and you had no choice, you would eat brown rice. They know it's hard on the gut, but literally, because fiber, it's the same thing. You guys seen Idiocracy, the movie? Only a couple. If not, this is your homework. You need to watch Idiocracy. I predicted the future really, really well. And this is about the world's dumbest man who gets frozen chronically and wakes up 200 years later when he's the world's smartest man. And the world is starving to death because they're spraying Gatorade on the crops. Because electrolytes, we're doing that right now because fiber, the presence of fiber doesn't cancel out the fact that there could be cyanide in it. But the thinking is, well, if it has fiber, it's good for me. No, there's no evidence for that. So if you are from a part of the world where your ancestors ate beans and legumes, you probably tolerate them well, but you probably don't cook them right because your grandma's like, you got to soak them for two days or you have to pressure cook them. Even something like quinoa, which is indigenous to Peru, Hippies are buying so much quinoa that locals are starving because they can't get access to their foods. But when they cook it, they ferment it for several days. If you eat quinoa, it needs to be pressure cooked or it's not actually safe to eat. And even then, quinoa and flaxseeds and things like that, they have high levels of phytoestrogens. Remember yesterday, we have a 50% drop in testosterone across our species. Maybe eating more plant estrogens because fiber is a stupid idea. I'm not saying you can't eat any of those foods. I'm just saying eat less of Them. And if you do well on beans and legumes, then cook them very well. But there are tons of people, no matter what you do to them, they're not going to work well for you. And people say, but I can get all the protein I need from my beans and rice. It's a complete protein. Yeah. You're going to get 500 grams of carbs to get enough protein. That doesn't work very well. I don't want you to be protein deficient. I don't want you to have too much protein either. But I'd rather you have a little too much than not have enough. And then they'll say, what about eating the rainbow? Okay. Do you think our ancestors, throughout most of the year, had a rainbow of foods to select from? They flew kumquats in from Florida. No, they didn't do any of that stuff. So how is it that that's what we have to do, but our ancestors didn't do it? They were surviving on potatoes and cabbage all winter long with a few hunks of pork if they were lucky, depending on what part of the world you're from. Right. If your ancestors are Hawaiian, the rules are different from a tropical part of the world. Right. But this is actually how it works. And it's fascinating to me because what we're really needing from these plants is polyphenols. And we're going to go back in time a little bit when we were first establishing trade routes across the continents. Do you know what the first thing we carried was? You want to guess? Salt. We used to pay people in salt. The salt we used back then had all of the minerals that you needed. It was rock salt, it was sea salt, and it was so precious that people would die trying to transport it over the Himalayas. Wow. And right after that, those tread routes were for herbs and spices and tea and coffee. Why is that? Because we need polyphenols. They are thousands of times more dense in oregano and rosemary and thyme and cumin and all of the traditional herbs. Those are Mother Nature's multivitamins. And we've used those medicinally and we've used them for culinary reasons because they're very high in plant based compounds that are good for us, but they're low in all the other stuff that's bad for us because you only need a tablespoon of oregano and you get massive benefits from doing that. So if you're worried about getting enough plants, you actually should be worried about getting enough polyphenols. The colored compounds in plants. So literally 4x the number of herbs you put on your food when you cook, it'll taste better and you'll get huge health benefits. And then if you just didn't have the salad, you'll be okay. And you can eat the salad, too. It's good for you. Unless it has parasites on it. By the way, 90% of parasite infections come from eating raw vegetables, not meat. But it's almost like PETA doesn't want you to know that. Do you guys know what PETA stands for? I think it's People for the Eating of Tasty animals. But I've been. I've been trolling them for 20 plus years. I just. I love PETA. They're one of my most fun toys. All right, we already talked about healthy fats as raw materials. I'll just say your brain is 45% saturated fat. Your body doesn't make a lot of fats on its own, but one fat that it will make is palmitic acid, which is a saturated fat. Mother's milk is more than 50% saturated fat, yet we go around saying it's bad for you. It's not bad for you. How many times have you had a family member say, you can't eat that because cholesterol, Right? Well, the American Heart Association. This is a great story. We have time for it. I was at a very exclusive mansion in Malibu overlooking the water. And there's about 50 people in the room. Peter Gruber's there. Like Hollywood elite are there. And I go in and I talk to a lady. She goes, I'm curious what you have to say. I'm a cardiothoracic surgeon. I'm like, well, this is going to be good. So, you know, just real respectful. And I gave a talk, and I talked about saturated fat, and I talked about thyroid and talked about all these things. And at the end of it, the lady stands up. She said, I'm the president of the American Heart Association. And I'm like, and by the way, two days before, I was talking with Nina Turwich about a class action lawsuit against the AHA to stop the nonsense they were doing. And she stands up and she. She looks at all these people and she said, everything you said is right. We figured out five years ago that eating cholesterol doesn't do anything bad to you, but no one will listen. Eat your eggs. It's okay. Unless you're allergic. Okay? Like, that's how it works. Like, this is. This is humans. This, Sam.