Change Your Brain Every Day - How to Amp Your Brain by Taking Care of Your Body's Batteries - Part 2 of an Interview with Dave Asprey

Episode Date: April 5, 2017

In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dave Asprey discusses the mitochondria with Dr. Amen and Tana. Learn how you can help the “power cells” in your body in order to be less stressed, less inflamed, and even nicer to be around.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics. Amen Clinics represents a true paradigm shift in mental health, utilizing SPECT imaging technology for assessing brain function. Amen Clinics focuses on personalized treatment plans and has an 85% proven outcome rate for patients. For more information, visit amenclinics.com or call at 1-888-288-9834. Hi, I'm Donnie Osmond and welcome to the Brain Warriors Way hosted by my friends Daniel and Tana Amon. Now in this podcast, you're going to learn that the war for your health

is one between your ears. That's right. If you're ready to be sharper and have better memory, mood, energy, and focus, well then stay with us. Here are Daniel and Tana Amen. Welcome back to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Tana and I are here with our friend Dave Asprey, author of Headstrong, coming soon. Also the founder and CEO of Bulletproof, the creator of Bulletproof Coffee, the host of the number one health podcast, Bulletproof Radio. We are having so much fun with Dave now that his middle finger, the muscle there is atrophied. So people who have not been listening are not exactly sure what you're talking about.

They will figure it out. And we've been talking about biohacking your brain. And the first step, obviously, is to look at your brain, because if you don't look, you don't know. Um, but there are these little, um, pieces of your cells called the mitochondria that have really become very interesting to you. Can you talk about how you learned about them, what hurts them, what helps them and why that really took center stage in Headstrong. Over the past almost 20 years, I've spent about a million dollars on hacking my own biology.

And this is because I am a professional biohacker. It's not necessary to do that to get control of your biology, but I'm oftentimes experimenting. I'm using brand new therapies uh now at this point the spec scan is a respected and proven technology the very early days when i had this done it was like a what scan no one's ever heard of this before so so i'll always go to the new cutting edge things and i realized when i look back over all of the problems that i've i've experienced I had chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, Lyme disease. All of those were toxic mold related, by the way. Arthritis, cognitive dysfunction, high risk of stroke and heart disease. There's a common uniting element of all of those things.

It's inflammation. And the uniting element behind that is mitochondria. So these mitochondria, 2 billion years ago, these were free-floating little red bacteria. And through some strange fluke that we're still debating how this happened, they merged with the cells that are us. Now, the story you heard in high school,

if you remember this stuff, is that we harnessed them to become the power plants of our cells. The story that is more accurate, at least from the way things work, is that these harness them to become the power plants of ourselves. The story that is more accurate, at least from the way things work, is that these little guys saw ourselves and said, hey, look, a petri dish. Let's move right in and take over. So in your brain, you have about 15,000 of these tiny little red former bacteria in each neuron, in each cell in the brain. And in the heart, you have 15,000. And in the eyes, you have 15,000. And in the eyes,

you have 15,000. And the rest of your body, you have a few hundred to a couple thousand. So the parts of the body that require the most energy for life have the most of these power plants, or you could also call them batteries. So 10% of your body weight is mitochondria. And there's about a quadrillion of these, way more than there are bacteria in your gut. They listen to the environment. These are semiconductors. They're light-sensitive. They're magnetically sensitive. They're heat-sensitive. They're vibration-sensitive. They make light. They actually can talk to each other with little biophotons. They're fascinating. What these little things do is they control which genes get expressed.

They power hormone production. And if you're going to have a thought in your mind, something has to make enough electrons for you to have a little spark across the synaptic gap. And what's going on here is these guys really are in charge. They don't listen to you very well. They'll sense your stress levels if you're stressed about your mother-in-law or your job or whatever else, but they'll listen more closely to whether or not it's bright light at midnight and they think it should be nighttime. Is it too hot? Is it too cold? Is there too much physical stress?

They're constantly checking millions of times a second to see what's going on and then talking with each other and deciding how much energy you're allowed to have. If you're ready in fight or flight mode to run away, then they're going to take energy and they're going to basically set the battery up in your body for running instead of setting up the battery in your body for recovery, repair, restoration, for making hormones, for producing new proteins. So you end up realizing, wow, if I manage the stuff that these little guys listen to, they're going to make my life a lot easier.

If you, go ahead. No, no, I'm sorry. Keep going. Okay. If you're one of these tiny ancient bacteria, you have only really four things that you need to do. And this is why I wrote Headstrong. And these rules apply for the largest mammal and the tiniest life form. Number one, run away from or kill scary things. But this is a basic rule for life, like protect yourself. Number two, eat everything. And when I was 300 pounds, I certainly did that more

than I would like. This means don't allow famine to kill your species, which is the rule. The other rule is make sure you reproduce quite frequently. That's another thing that might get us in trouble sometimes. And the fourth thing that really I'm discovering more and more is build a community. And this is why we get biofilms that form from bacteria. And this is why you get packs of dogs and we get tribes of people and even political parties and stuff like that so it turns out that those four behaviors are amplified from a quadrillion ancient bacteria all the way up and

those become our instincts and our behaviors in my work in in the creation of cloud computing and artificial intelligence my undergrad degree is in creation of cloud computing and artificial intelligence, my undergrad degree is in a subcategory of artificial intelligence. We look at something called emergent phenomena. And what's going on here is when you get those four rules repeated a kabillion times, technical term, what you end up with is the ego. You end up with the automatic negative thoughts, the way you write in your books, Dr. Hammond. These things, they're actually coming from these core instincts. Well, you then take all this extra energy in your brain, your human brain, your smart brain that understands what's a threat, what's not a threat, and you use it to control, impulse control. Well, it turns out that if these things have enough energy because you feed them right and because you train them right and you make the environment right, their stress level goes down.

And then all of a sudden, they set your biology up for success. And then you have fewer automatic negative thoughts. And then that frees up even more energy. So you end up both turning up the amount of energy because they're wasting this energy freaking out about the environment they didn't need to. And it makes you happier and it makes you a nicer person. That's why I wrote Headstrong because when people have enough energy, they're nicer to each other. Like we're wired to build community, but only after we make sure that we ate enough we killed scary things and we had a mate and after that we'll be nice to people so just enough energy makes us nicer so what are the things that hurt our mitochondria one of the biggest things is

toxins and toxins come from man-made toxins they also come from nature-made toxins. They also come from nature-made toxins. There's been an ancient war between bacteria and fungus. Antibiotics are byproducts of fungus, of mold, and they kill bacteria. Well, if 10% of our body weight is ancient bacteria, you can imagine that mother nature's toxins that come from certain types of mold might be really bad for us. So is glyphosate, the toxin that we're spraying on our soil and our food for weed control. So is mercury that they used to put in your mouth from dentists. These things, even the toxins that grow in coffee from the mold in coffee, which are a big part of the Bulletproof Coffee recipe, these are proven to be mitochondrial respiratory toxins.

Think about it like this. You have an iPhone, a brand new phone, and the first day you have it, it charges easily and it lasts all day long. And after you've had it for six months and you've charged and discharged the battery a few times, now it loses its charge at three in the afternoon. Well, something is affecting the efficiency of the charge. And when you take toxins, the efficiency of the charge in the battery in your body drops, you simply can't hold the energy, you can't make enough energy all day long. So I talk very specifically avoid toxins that are respiratory or mitochondrial toxins. The biggest one being

toxic mold in your food, but in your environment, breathing is really bad. And then sugar, sugar is a short term enhancer and a long-term destroyer of mitochondria so you want to not have huge swings in blood sugar and you want to avoid grains because grains both contain many of these toxins and they have their own toxins that cause inflammation so the other big one that is completely not talked about in but i talk about a lot in headstrong is light since now we've shown that mitochondria are light sensitive we know that bright white and blue led lights are like the corn syrup lighting they're terrible for your mitochondria they create stress in the eyes a 23 increase in damage to the cells in the eyes. They trigger advanced macular degeneration at an earlier age,

which is a mitochondrial disease. And the eyes are an extension of the brain. So when you basically torture your eyes with these white LED lights that you can buy for cheap right now that are supposed to be more energy efficient, they actually create cognitive stress. They actually create sugar cravings because your brain gets tired from the low-quality light. You stress the mitochondria in the eyes, They actually create sugar cravings because your brain gets tired from the low-quality light.

You stress the mitochondria in the eyes, and the mitochondria signal other mitochondria with chemicals and probably with light that are deeper in the brain, deeper in the rest of the body, and you end up with fatigue because of poor-quality lighting. So that means turn off the gadgets. That's interesting. Turn off the gadgets and get rid of your indoor LED lights. Use incandescent bulbs. Use halogen bulbs. These are more like sunlight. And I've just lost track.

In fact, I just had one of the Bulletproof coaching students just said, Dave, I read the first chapter of Headstrong. And I'll send the first chapter to anyone. Go to orderheadstrong.com and you can get the info on that. He said, I read it and now I understand. Monday through Friday, I have intense sugar cravings and I'm tired when I come home from work at five. I eat exactly the same thing on the weekends and I don't have any sugar cravings. It's like, it's the light in my office. So the next day he wore a baseball hat and looked a little dorky and some sunglasses indoors and he didn't have a sugar craving. It's awesome. Yeah. I actually know a couple of people who had

mitochondrial dysfunction and that's really a nasty thing for people to go through. It's actually life-threatening. But fascinating to watch what somebody has to go through when their mitochondria literally are not functioning properly. You know, have to stay home, be on a ton of medications. They have zero energy. It's really scary and um i actually read a study that was really interesting as well that when when women are it was done on women it's probably anybody but they did this study on overweight women and when they were overweight and they were pre-diabetic and when they um first started exercising it was really hard because their mitochondria were not functioning properly, right?

And they were insulin resistant and had a hard time. But over time, over four months of cutting out sugar and exercising at a moderate pace, not intense, but just moderate, just enough where they could actually manage it, their mitochondria became more efficient. So I thought that was really fascinating. 10% of your body is the mitochondria. All right, before we run out of time, what are things you can do specifically to help them? Well, aside from avoiding toxins, the way we talked about eating more plants that contain polyphenols is terribly important. Polyphenols, we like to call them antioxidants from plants, but they're actually signaling molecules to your mitochondria

that do a lot more than just antioxidant function. And the most common source is coffee in our diet. It's a big source of polyphenols. One of the reasons it's in Bulletproof Coffee is it tastes good. It has that green tea, dark chocolate, and any sort of herb and spice, the brightly colored ones, those tend to have dramatic amounts. So use more spices and herbs, not the MSG stuff, but the real ones. Those are precious, and there's nothing stopping you from tripling the amount of oregano you use.

And it actually matters for the mitochondria in your body. On top of that, just this avoiding fructose, high fructose corn syrup, avoiding processed foods is really important. And then switching to a higher fat, but higher healthy undamaged fat diet is terribly important. And if you can get into ketosis, it really helps. Ketosis is a fat burning mode. Normally you have, you have to fast for three or four days or go on an extreme, like an Atkins kind of a diet in order to do it, but there are easier ways. Brain octane oil, which is one of the ingredients in Bulletproof Coffee, is known to increase ketones. When you can get ketones into your mitochondria, you actually turn down inflammation. And when you burn fat for fuel, you end up getting

about 147 electrons. And electrons are the unit of energy that our body runs on versus glucose or sugar, which gives about 36 electrons. Interesting. It's a big difference and it turns down inflammation right away. So people feel the food cravings and sugar cravings go down within a half hour of getting some ketones present. And there's some more science about why that works. We can go into maybe in the next episode if it's helpful.

But bottom line is eating good quality fat makes healthy cell membranes and makes more energy in the brain. And you would see that in your clinics, Dr. Amen, right away. If someone comes in not eating toxins with ketones present your their brain is going to look different than if you have someone who's like a corn syrup margarine consumer or eating fried fried french fries at the restaurant every night their brain's going to look different right you know i'm not sure if i told you but my granddaughter has a seizure disorder and on a ketogenic diet her seizures went I mean, she had 161 one day.

And now it's sort of to modified Atkins. And she's done amazingly well. So I just couldn't recommend Headstrong more. Go to orderheadstrong.com. You can read the first chapter for free. Learn about Bulletproof and Dave's world. Is it bulletproof.com that people can go and learn about the podcast and all the other things your company does?

When we come back, we're going to talk about one of the most important medical issues of our time. We're going to talk about one of the most important medical issues of our time. We're going to talk about mold and the brain. Stay with us. Thanks for listening to today's show, The Brain Warrior's Way. Why don't you head over to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com. That's brainwarriorswaypodcast.com, where Daniel and Tana have a gift for you just for subscribing to the show. And when you post your review on iTunes, you'll be entered into a drawing where you can win a VIP visit to one of the Amen clinics.

I'm Donnie Osmond, and I invite you to step up your brain game by joining us in the next episode.