Realfoodology - How to Build a Healthier Metabolism & Live Longer | Dave Asprey

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

310: There’s so much noise in the health and wellness space that it can be hard to know what’s actually worth your time. This conversation is all about cutting through that overwhelm and focusing on the habits that can have the biggest impact on your health. Dave Asprey and I talk about metabolism, weight loss, stress, recovery, sleep, protein, regenerative agriculture, and why doing more isn't always the answer. We also get into the role of cortisol, the biggest misconceptions around nutrition, and what it really means to build a healthier, more resilient body without overcomplicating the process. Topics Discussed: → Weight Loss & Metabolism → Cortisol, Stress & Recovery → Protein, Nutrition & Muscle Building → Seed Oils, Regenerative Farming & Food Quality → Biohacking, Longevity & Healthy Aging Sponsored By: → Our Place | Stop cooking with toxic cookware, and upgrade to Our Place today. Visit https://fromourplace.com/REALFOODOLOGY and use code REALFOODOLOGY for 10% off sitewide. With a hundred-day risk-free trial, free shipping and returns, you can experience this game-changing cookware with zero risk. → Cowboy Colostrum | Get 25% Off Cowboy Colostrum with code REALFOODOLOGY at https://cowboycolostrum.com/realfoodology → PaleoValley | Head to https://paleovalley.com/realfoodology  for 15% off your first purchase. → Manukora | Head to https://manukora.com/REALFOODOLOGY to save up to 31% plus $25 worth of free gifts with the Starter Kit, which comes with an MGO 850+ Manuka Honey jar, 5 honey travel sticks, a wooden spoon, and a guidebook! → Timeline | Timeline’s clinically proven formula is now available at a new, lower price. Mitopure now starts at $79, when you subscribe at https://timeline.com/REALFOODOLOGY Timestamps:  → 00:00:00 - Introduction → 00:00:56 - Meet Dave Asprey → 00:02:56 - Rethinking Health and Public Health Advice → 00:07:04 - The Vegan and Keto Traps → 00:09:50 - Finding Your Health Goals → 00:13:22 - Exercising Less, Getting Better Results → 00:18:38 - Dave’s 300-Pound Weight Loss → 00:23:14 - How Calories Affect the Body → 00:26:14 - Biohacking for Better Results → 00:29:54 - Stress, Exercise and Recovery → 00:31:12 - Why Regenerative Agriculture Matters → 00:35:40 - Lectins, Oxalates and Phytic Acid → 00:39:58 - Rethinking High-Intensity Workouts → 00:43:06 - Plant Foods and Mineral Absorption → 00:46:44 - Why Supplementation Matters → 00:50:26 - Dave’s Top Health Priorities → 00:53:30 - Undereating, Cortisol and Weight Loss → 00:55:46 - Alcohol and Health → 00:57:54 - Dave’s Health Non-Negotiables → 01:00:14 - Recovery and Minerals → 01:00:48 - Final Health Advice Check Out Dave Asprey  → Instagram  → The Human Upgrade Podcast Instagram  → The Human Upgrade Podcast  → Smarter Not Harder Book  Check Out Courtney:  →  LEAVE US A VOICE MESSAGE →  Check Out My new FREE Grocery Guide! →  @realfoodology →  www.realfoodology.com →  My Immune Supplement by 2x4 →  Air Dr Air Purifier →  AquaTru Water Filter →  EWG Tap Water Database Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Frankly, I am lazy. I completely admit it. I've started a company that does $100 million a year in revenue. I write a New York Times best seller about every couple of years, and I have a podcast with a quarter billion downloads, and I'm lazier than anyone. I just honor it. Like, I am not going to waste effort. A woman goes on a vegan diet or on a full keto diet without cycling in and out of ketosis. On average, women will hit the wall of spiking cortisol before men. It takes men about 50% longer than women to hit it. There's something that's called the vegan trap. It's the same as the keto trap. And the laziness principle that drives that is that if something is good, more must be better.

So if eating plants is good for you, eating only plants must be better for you. But it doesn't work like that. You'll feel great for about a month. And look, it works. This is the answer to everything I always wanted. And then the next month, you start not feeling so good. Dave, it's such a pleasure to have you on. Thank you so much for coming on today.

It's my pleasure, Courtney. Thanks for having me. So I've been following your work since probably about 2016. I used to manage the band at Third Eye Blind. Holy shit. You're okay, of course. Yeah. Oh.

So were you managing when Stephen and I cooked? No, I think that was right before me because by the time I was term managing you guys, I never got to meet you obviously then, but he kept talking about you and he was the one that got me on Bulletproof Coffee. Oh my gosh. I think that might have been before. Well, he said, Dave, I want to do like a cooking thing. So I went to his Portland show and I brought like an indoor cooking thing and we're making

coffee-crusted salmon before the concert and it's taking forever. And finally, I'm like, dude. you know, your show started 20 minutes ago and your fans are outside waiting. And like, do you just want to like, scratch this? And he goes, I'm the rock star. They'll wait. And I'm like, he really is a rock star. So there you go.

I have many stories like that with him as well. So yeah, I feel like, but yeah, it's so funny. So he was the one that first put bulletproof coffee on the map for me. And around the same time, so while I was tour managing, I started to go back to school a year after that because I was very into health and nutrition and all that. And so I was super grateful that he put me on to your work so early on because you've been such an amazing voice in this world of confusion, I feel like, with nutrition. Something that I really love, just how outspoken you've been about the lack of good public health advice. What would you say are some of the dumbest things that you've seen happen as far as nutrition or health goes?

Well, the two dumbest things are asking your employer to provide your health insurance. because they're not your daddy. And that system doesn't make any sense. And it automatically guarantees you're going to get subpar results. And the other thing is, why would you ever rely on the government for your health? Because their track record is zero. This is the same government that sprayed viruses on people in the 60s and 70s to see how they spread. These are the same people who have allowed glyphosate to poison soil across the United States.

they don't care about your health. Why would you ever listen to anyone from the government? When was the last time the government came and said, or the government were here to help and they actually meant it? When was the last time they said that they were doing something to you for your own safety? So the biggest problem has been, why are people continuously relying on the government when that's not what we hired them to do? I'm in favor of the government.

I'm a fan of having a government. I just didn't ask them to tell me what to eat because they suck at that. Right? So we should simply ignore what the government says when it comes to health because they are setting a standard for economic and power reasons not for you or me. The dumbest thing I ever saw was when we know that eating lots of sugar and especially lots of omega-6 inflammatory seed oils, we know that that increases your susceptibility to all types of infection, both viral and bacterial. So why would they reward you for getting a shot that hasn't been tested yet, at least at the time? Now it has been tested and the results aren't what they said that they would be. But why would they give you a donut or a can of soda when those are the things that increase your risk? Yeah, I mean, it was absolutely insane.

And I kept waiting, I would say, for the first like six months because I've been, you know, in the health and wellness space for a long time. And I kept thinking, okay, this is a virus. This is affecting your immune health. Of course, like surely someone's going to talk about vitamin D. or vitamin C, getting outside, getting in nature. And there was no conversation. There still is no conversation about how you can take care of your health from a mean

standpoint. It's insane. In the last five situations like this, they come out with a very high death rate. And usually about two years later, they announce on average for all the past previous five non-pandemics like SARS and things like that, that the actual death rate is 165th. of the first one they announced and funny enough that exact pattern has happened with this one so i i just i don't have a great amount of trust there for it but what i do know is in the second week i said that and i said by the way guys here's how to control something called interleukin 6 and i'm like

look all you have to do is these few basic things and here's the studies that show that you can increase your immunity and reduce your odds of getting sick and i got a warning letter and and I was forced to take that post down. Really? Oh, yeah. And of course, I got shadow banned. And what I was talking about was referenced in PubMed. This was nothing crazy.

It was just, hey, wouldn't you like to be, I don't know, bulletproof? Would you like to be more resilient for all sorts of things? Because when you do that, it gives you power just to have a great day. That's your worst case outcome. And your best case outcome is you got exposed and you got sick. You just didn't get very sick. And you can be resilient like that. a lot of my work in creating the field of biohacking and, you know, changing our view towards

grass-fed nutrition and putting collagen. So it's a billion-dollar industry category. Stuff like that, you know, that is resilience built into society. And that's what I want. I just want us all to feel good because when we feel good, we're nice to each other. And when we're tired and stressed and fearful, we kind of act like jerks. It's just, it's built into human nature. Yeah. Well, I'm so glad you said that because this is what my message has been for a long time as well, is that I just want people to feel good in their bodies. And what our message is, is that we just want people to have access to this information on how to do that, because I think so many people are really confused on what it means to be truly healthy, because we have a society that is sick, obese, fatigued,

and no one really knows how to get out, or a lot of us know how to get out of it, but a lot of people are really confused because there's all these different messages going around right now about how to actually get healthy. One of the most disturbing things happening right now is this idea that plant-based diets are somehow good for you. I was a dedicated raw vegan and a non-raw vegan. I just fell for that stuff. And I did that in the early 2000s because I tend to be an early adopter.

And I've tried almost every diet. The reason I wrote my first big book, Bulletproof Diet, people lost 2 million pounds and counting using the stuff. in that book. And I am sitting here. I'm about 8% body fat right now. And I was a 300 pound guy earlier in my life. And the fact that that can happen and it can happen that quickly, it doesn't happen on plant-based diet. In fact, that provably makes you sick. I had to develop the bulletproof diet to help myself recover from what I did to myself as a raw vegan. And there's something I call the vegan trap. In Smarter Not Harder, I talk about something called the laziness principle,

which is that your body wants to save energy whenever it can, and that that's a natural thing. You can harness that to motivate yourself. But what we do is we make these intellectual shortcuts because it takes less energy to just kind of quickly look at something and then use a shortcut to decide what to do. And the vegan trap, it's the same as the keto trap. And the laziness principle that drives that is that if something is good, more must be better. So if eating plants is good for you, eating only plants must be better for you. But it doesn't work like that. And also, if going into ketosis is good for you, you should never eat a carb again. Both of those paths, you'll feel great for about a month if you go strict keto or carnivore or if you go strict

vegan. And look, it works. This is the answer to everything I always wanted. And then the next month, when you start not feeling so good. And in my case, I started breaking teeth because I demineralize my body using plant foods. And I didn't have enough saturated fat, which is where your testosterone and your other hormones come from. Well, I already know that the vegan diet works. So you just go, well, maybe I'll be even more vegan, right? You know, maybe I should take out honey because a bee touched it. And all these ridiculous things that don't even make sense, right?

And eventually I just got sick enough from that that I said, this isn't working. And I added, I still wanted to be raw. So I added raw meat back in my diet way before liver king. And I did eat raw liver, which is freaking disgusting. And you can take liver capsules, thankfully. And it turns out there are things that work and things that don't. And what I want people to understand is that it's okay to say, I don't want to work out today. In fact, 90% of people who exercise are like, I really don't want to.

I just do it because I know I have to. And then they do a small amount of what they know they should do. And then they feel kind of like a lazy bum. What I teach people to do in Smarter or Not Harder is to pick a goal at least. Because like, Courtney, if I said, hey, when you woke up this morning, the first thing that you thought about wanting, was it that you wanted to be healthy? No. It was honestly that I wanted more sleep. Okay, there you go.

I want more sleep. And for most people, if your health is, you know, at least a three out of ten, you know, let's see, what I want. I want wealth. I want power. I want success. I want love in my life. And I want to get laid.

Like, let's just face it. Like, these are core human desires and that's okay. Right. So the only people really want health are people who are really sick like I used to be. And then health is all that matters after you've lost it. So most people are never going to want to exercise. So what if there was a way that you could get your exercise done in 10% of the time that you think it takes? We spend so much time focusing on clean food, but cookware matters too.

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you really notice the difference in everything else too, like bloating, energy, stability, even skin, clarity. For a limited time, our listeners get up to 25% off their entire order. Just head to cowboyclostrum.com slash real foodology and use code real foodology at checkout. That's 25% off when you use code Real Foodology at cowboy colostrum.com slash real foodology. So I teach people in smarter, not harder, okay, like, how do you know what goal to go for? Because if you're saying, I want to be ripped and I want to run a marathon, sorry, those are conflicting goals. If you're going to be an endurance athlete, you're going to be low on growth hormone.

You're not going to have much muscle mass. In fact, it's probably not good for you. But you can still do it. So there's five big goals people are going for. And the motivation to do that is actually. actually feeding your laziness. Go, oh, wow. Think about this. Last time you bought a really nice pair of shoes that was on sale. Did you come home and tell your friends, hey, I just spent $400 on a pair of shoes, or did you say, I just saved $300 because they were on sale?

Yeah, probably that I saved. Yeah. Right. So when I exercise, I go, oh, my God, I did five minutes of exercise. I saved 55 minutes because I got the same results. So I'm all about like, dude, I saved 50 minutes. I barely had to do anything. And then I'm happy that I just did something instead of, oh, man, okay, I finally did it. And I went to the spin class and I sweated all over while some, you know, high-pitched person, you know, yelled at me in spandex to pedal harder. I can get six times better results in literally five minutes and I don't have to sweat. And it's measurable. And I teach people how to do that in smarter, not harder. But maybe cardiovascular stuff, who cares? Maybe you just wanted your energy back. Well, how do you get that?

Or maybe you just want to be better at managing stress. You can train your stress management system. And all of it, it's in tiny fractions of what you think it takes. Because frankly, I am lazy. I completely admit it. And yes, I've started a company that does $100 million a year in revenue. I have six other companies in my portfolio. I write a New York Times bestseller about every couple of years.

And I have a podcast with a quarter billion downloads. And I'm lazier than anyone. I promise you that, Courtney. And I just honor it. Like, I am not going to waste effort. And so what if you just took that approach to how you treat your health and your exercise? It changes everything. And then you feel like you win every time you spend a little bit of time instead of feeling,

I guess I had to exercise. Unless you love it. If you're addicted to endorphins and you just want to go for a 10-mile run every day, I'll just teach you so you can do it without being tired when you're done. We can do that too. I love that. Well, I love the title of your book because it's about working smarter, not harder. And I would reframe that you claiming to be lazy is that you are.

are just you want to be efficient with your time. You want to be smarter with the work that you do and you don't want to be having to work all the time and work harder. That's how I am. You know, there's such a stigma about laziness. That's why I intentionally picked it. Yeah. Where laziness has driven all human progress.

Like most people don't know about this. There's somebody called the baking powder wars. So women used to have to wake up at 5 a.m. to need the bread dough. so it would have time to rise so they could make bread. And then in the early 1900s, someone invented baking powder. And they're like, holy crap. So there were two companies. They made the same product, right?

But they had this huge war of like marketing and all this. So a lot of the package food, junk food nonsense marketing came about from these two companies learning how to sell people something for lazy women. Oh my gosh. Did you want to sleep an extra two hours? baking powder instead of waking up to need the dough, that was laziness that drove all of that progress. And it was so worth it because women got to sleep, right? And I'll just say back in 1900, not a lot of guys woke up early to need the dough. That just isn't how society was set up.

So, you know, what else? Let's see cars. I don't know. It was a lot of work to shovel horse poop. Let's build a car. Like, this is where progress comes from is that we don't want to do hard stuff when we could do easy stuff. And instead of feeling guilty about it, I'm going to do the easy stuff that makes my body strong and resilient, makes my brain work better, even meditation. Okay. You could do the traditional way. I'm going to just take the next 20 years and go stay in a cave in the Himalayas and I'm totally going to be good. Or I, one of my companies called 40 years of Zen. And in five days of intense work with a computer hooked up to your head to show you what you're doing, you can have the same brainwaves as someone who's been meditating for 20 years. So it's not an exact

replacement, but it's close enough. So now you've got that resilience and that calm. I just, I want people to understand. If you want to reach a state, let's reach it very effectively and efficiently. Let's not do it the old way. Let's do it using knowledge we have now about how the human body works, about the automated systems in the body. Because the real reality is, if you can send a signal into your body that the body can hear, the body will transform quickly. If I could go from being a 300 pound computer hacker whose goal is to be in Wired magazine and end up magically being in men's health with my shirt off, or in vogue is probably even like the most unlikely thing ever to happen to me that I ever could have predicted. I promise you it's because I'm lazy.

I just didn't want to do stuff that didn't work anymore. Yeah, I very much can relate with you on that. So kind of in the same vein of this, you mentioned that you used to be 300 pounds. What did you learn in your experience losing that weight, whether it be diet or let's talk a little bit about calories in versus calories out and why that doesn't actually work? And what effectively worked for you losing weight? Well, I just tried the subway diet, you know, from Jared. Jared. Shout out to Jared.

Well, I actually didn't lose 100 pounds. I've probably lost about 250 pounds because what most people do who are heavy and I, And I was an early adopter of obesity, but now 88% of Americans have metabolic dysfunction. So this is endemic. I mean, so many people, they look in the mirror and they're kind of secretly not happy about it. In fact, I will say I was disgusted when I look in the mirror. And this isn't about self-hatred. It's like a sense of frustration and almost like defeat.

Like I've been hungry for weeks. Yeah. And I'm not losing weight. There was a time when I was convinced exercise in caloric restriction was going to save me. And I was in my early 20s. I'd had two knee surgeries already. And I said, look, if I can lose the weight and I can make myself strong, I won't have to have any more knee surgeries because they really hurt. And I hate that.

So I went to the gym six days a week, an hour and a half a day. And I did this for 18 months straight. It didn't matter if I was sick. It didn't matter if I had final exams. I just went to the gym. And I limited my calories. I was a low fat, semi-vegetarian, really, really, really. working, focusing with all of my efforts on this.

And at the end of that time, I still weighed 300 pounds. I was stronger. I could max out all but two of the machines at the gym, but I was still a 46 inch waste. I am a 32 inch waste right now. So I wasted 702 hours of my life. And I want that back. I'm not going to get it back,

but I can save other people from doing that. And we have this really sick, sick, Calors in, Calors Out perspective. And there are people, mostly very angry people, and they're angry because they're hungry all the time. It's not their fault who are online who are still going out there. Look, you know, if I have a Snickers bar and a Diet Coke, they cancel each other out because I only had this number of calories and that's fine. You're like, what kind of planet are you on? Yeah, it's wild. Calories and Colors Out is an excuse for big food companies to sell you cheap, addictive crap. And the new version of calories in, calories out is get your protein. People don't

know about this one yet. It turns out, this is so weird, different proteins do different things to you. As an example, have you heard of sarin nerve gas? No. So there was a terrorist attack in Tokyo a while ago, and they used sarin. Seren's an extract of plants. It's a plant protein that kills you on contact. It's one of the most poisonous substances known to man. like way more poisonous than cyanide. And it's a plant protein. So using vegan logic, you should never eat any plants because a plant will kill you. Well, the China study, which is a big study on or a big book on vegetarian diets,

is making the claim that animal-based protein will kill you because one animal-based protein that's highly processed from dairy increases cancer risk when you take it with a pro-cancer thing that is, by the way, plant-based. So a lot of people, including me, fell for that. I was a devout raw vegan. I used to believe in the calories thing as well. And what you find is that you can be undernourished, which raises your cortisol levels. You can assume that calories are all that matters, which is an excuse to eat junk food or to have a cheat day.

And then you are chronically hungry all the time. But what finally taught me that this just doesn't work is that in the animal agriculture industry, And I, for the last, oh, dozen or so years, I've lived on an organic farm raising animals for a portion of that time. So I learned in person about this. There is a drug you can give a cow and the cow will get fat on 30% less calories. Okay. This drug does, I don't know, tens of millions of dollars a year in sales to ranchers. If that drug can exist, every single influencer who says calories in, colors out, they are either liars or they are just wrong.

And I think there are some who know it doesn't work. They don't care. They say it anyway. And there are some who just, they're misled. And it's very sad. So different calories do different things. And in smarter or not harder, say how it can be like wave it around.

I know. You should just have it as a photo behind you. So in smarter or not harder, I talk about getting a signal into the body to make it do what you want. And food is a signal. And when you eat matters a lot. There are studies now that show if you give the same number of calories and type of calories to people and you give it to them at noon, they might lose weight. But if you give them at midnight, they gain weight. If those studies are possible, calories and calories out is complete nonsense.

And people say things like, but what about Newton's law? Well, have you ever considered that one gram of uranium has 10 million calories in it? So if you should be able to eat just a little bit of uranium, oh, but then they go, but you can't digest uranium. It's like, exactly. So perhaps some calories digest differently than others. Calories from animal protein like steak, it takes 30% of those calories to digest the steak. But if instead you just have straight plant-based sugar, then it goes,

all in. So what? It turns out it's just not that simple. And what I found is that when people talk about diet, yeah, they might want to lose weight. But for the first time since they've kept track of this in surveys, when you ask people, what do you want from your health? The number one answer is always I want to lose weight. Except it changed. Now it's I want to manage stress better. So I went through 10 years of running the world's first biohacking lab. It's called Upgrade Labs. And I said, all right, what do people really want? And it turns out there's five different goals that are big for health. And one of them is, I want to lose weight. Another one is I want to manage stress better. Another one is I want muscle. Another one is I want cardiovascular fitness. And one of the biggest ones is I want

my energy back or I want weight loss. And those are the same thing. We can give your body the signal that says, do a better job of turning 30 pounds of air and some food into electricity. And when you do that, you don't store fat. You actually use energy and you become a high energy person. So I teach people in Smarter or Not Harder how to know which of those goals is their first one. And then which new technologies or techniques work better than what we used to do. All of exercise has been pick up rocks or maybe concentrate rocks into iron plates or run away from tigers. And you can do that on a spin bike if you want, but that's what we do. But you can give your body a signal that says, I'm going to push you so hard, so quickly

that you almost get dysregulated, but not quite. And then I'm going to help you recover faster than you're supposed to. So then the body goes, oh, that wasn't so bad. I guess I will set myself up to be able to do that again. And when you use the techniques in smarter or not harder to get the right goal, your top goal, you can also make yourself smarter. That's the other big goal that people want of that list is I want my brain to work better. So you end up with this ability to go, wait, it only takes a couple hours a week and I can hit all of these. I used to think I needed eight hours a week of exercise. You don't. You should go for a walk every day for 20 minutes, but if you love going to the gym, you can do it. If you have the camaraderie of being in like a

sweaty room with recycled air with someone yelling at you on an exercise bike, it's okay. You can do that for fun, but you don't get the cardiovascular results. I can, in five minutes, three times a week, I can give you six times better results than doing a spin class for an hour a day every day. And like, what? That's the new world of biohacking. And that's why Smarter Not Harder needed to exist is I lost 702 hours doing stuff that doesn't work. And I don't want to do that anymore. If you're looking for a delicious drink that will improve energy, focus, and support healthy inflammation levels, you need to try Paleo Valley's superfoods.

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try Manukora honey. Head to manacora.com slash real foodology to save up to 31% plus $25 worth of free gifts with the starter kit, which comes with an MGO 850 plus Manuka honey jar, five honey travel sticks, a wooden spoon, and a guidebook. That's MAN, U.K. 0.0.org.com slash real foodology to save 31% plus $25 worth of free gifts. Yeah, I need help in some of those areas in my life, like managing my stress. I learned two really big lessons in exercise and in diet that you learned as well. I used to go really hard on super high intensity interval training. I would do like one to two sole cycle classes a day.

Oh my God. My cortisol was like through the roof. And you know what's so funny is that I was about 10 pounds heavier than I am now. And what I did is I just started hiking every day. I live in L.A., and so I just go on these beautiful, gorgeous hikes that are like 10 minutes for me or a walk around my neighborhood. And that's the majority of what I do now. I go to a class maybe twice a week where I lift some weights because I think it's important also to focus on muscle. It is, yeah.

Yeah. But outside of that, I don't really do anything else. And my biggest fear is that if I was losing these, you know, like two hours a day high intensity workouts, that I was going to gain weight. And you know what happened is that I actually lost weight because I lost all that, that, like, cortisol muffin top around my stomach. And then another thing that I also learned as well is I was vegetarian for five years. I fell into the propaganda. I was duped by it.

And I thought that eating animal, any sort of animal protein was really bad for me. I also, I started learning about factory farms and just how terrible they are for the environment, how hard they are on animals. And this is something we can talk about because I know that you're incredibly passionate about this. Oh, yeah. But then I found the world of regenerative farmers. And I realize that there's actually a really huge missed opportunity here to not only take care of the animals, but also to take care of the environment.

There's this huge propaganda and misconception going on right now that we need to go plant-based in order to save the world and save the animals. And this could not be more false. And I love that you talk about this too because this is a huge passion of mine. Can we talk a little bit about regenerative farming and why that's so important? Yeah. Now, smarter or not harder, I don't talk a lot about regenerative ag, except the farm. fact that grass-fed beef or bison if you don't eat beef for specific religious reasons, like if you're Hindu or something, or sheep or goat, any of the ruminant animals,

those are foundational to the ecosystem as well as to your health. They are necessary. And it's possible to be a well-trained vegetarian who eats a lot of eggs and cheese if you're not allergic to those, which a lot of people are. And you can get away with it. It's not as good. But if you take out the eggs, you're screwed. Like you are not going to age well.

You're going to be less healthy. So I believe so much in Regenerative Ag that I was one of the earliest voices supporting grass-fed agriculture for human performance as well as for the environment. And since I started advocating, I couldn't eat anywhere in L.A. Because it was a bunch of plant-based nonsense or factory farms. I don't eat factory farm food because it's bad for me. It's bad for the animals. It's bad for the planet.

And I also lived on a farm that wasn't a farm when I got there. We used regenerative agriculture to restore five acres of former gravel pit to being fertile land with three cows and 25 sheep and 25 pigs and a bunch of chickens. So I believe in this. And I will tell you straight up, an animal that is raised by a small farmer, it lives a good life. And there's a sacred connection between humans and farm animals where we nourish them and they nourish us along the way they nourish the soil. So if you're interested in environmental stuff, keep in mind, I was a raw vegan. I just stopped being a vegan when I went to Nepal and Tibet in

2004. I spent three months. I was learning meditation from the masters and I'm in a remote monastery in Tibet. And I've done my 10 days of meditation and I'm talking with the llama, the head guy at the monastery. And I said, you preach no killing, but I see a yak skin on your prayer pole. So you're a hypocrite. And Tibetan Buddhists love to argue and like they think it's fun. So this wasn't a disrespectful thing. It wasn't fun, yeah. And he laughed at me and he goes, one death feeds everyone.

And I was like, oh my God, mind blown. And I came back and I started writing about deaths per calorie. And I will tell you straight up, your stupid vegan avocado toast kills, way more ground squirrels and butterflies and all the other cute things. All those things than a grass-fed cow. If you eat a pound of grass-fed meat every day, you will kill exactly 0.6 animals in the entire year, unless the cow stepped on a frog.

I mean, that's it. Along the way, if it's done with regenerative ag, that cow pooped a whole bunch and that poop made incredibly fertile soil. there's an ecosystem in the soil. So all the worms, all the little creepy crawlies, the ladybugs, all those things, they get to live. And when you get corn and soy and all these vegan plant-based foods, they're in sterile land where the soil has been sterilized by glyphosate. And there is no life. There are no rabbits.

There are no mice. There are no voles. There are no turtles. There's no salamanders. There's no anything. It's acres and acres of factory damaged soil. Healthy soil pulls carbon out of the air. It is the biggest carbon sink we have.

And unhealthy soil doesn't do that. It sits there. So we are right now about 60 years away from running out of top soil. And all I want people to do is to understand what works. So if you want to save the environment, you want to improve your health and you want to reduce animal suffering, your only choice is to eat regenerative agriculture foods. Yes, you should eat plants. All plants are not good for you. Many of these superfood plants cause inflammation.

And I've written the Bulletproof Diet about that in particular. It was the first book out there, chapter one, let's see, we have lectins. We have oxalates from spinach and kale. And we have something called phytic acid, which is a big part of smarter, not harder. Because it turns out whether you're talking about nutrition or you're talking about exercise or meditation or any of the biohacks that I've talked about, But over the years, if your body is depleted of fat, soluble vitamins, it won't work. So I call vitamin Dake is just a critical thing. And you need this before you do any other biohack.

Vitamin Dake is D-A-K- and E. And those drive minerals into the cells and keep them there. And if you don't have those, nothing else works very well, including your avocado toast or your bowl of testosterone lowering corn flakes. Now, after that, it comes minerals. And trace minerals and macrominerals, we are so deficient because when you eat plant-based foods, they suck minerals out of your bones, out of your cell membranes, out of your mitochondria, and then your body doesn't work as well.

So I teach you in Smarter or Not Harder, here's how to get vitamins, D, A, K, and E, and here's the type of minerals you need. If you get those right, then it becomes easy to manage your stress. becomes easy to lose weight. It becomes easy to increase cognitive function or build muscle. But if you're going out there, buying all these muscle supplements or cognitive enhancing supplements and you don't have trace minerals and vitamin dake, it just doesn't work right. So these are foundational to your body and these are the lazy principle. Okay, do those first because they affect everything. And after that, you can tweak. And I think people are going to read the book and go,

oh my God, I really can in one hour a week get more results than 10 hours a week. You get one day of your life back to spend with your family, to spend with your community, to spend on your career, whatever matters to you. And you're healthier and stronger and faster and more resilient and smarter than you were before. And I just think it's worth it. But I honestly don't think for what I do, spending 10 hours a week on exercise is worth it because I can do better in an hour.

And then I get those nine hours, I can be with my kids. I can write a book that matters. I can do things that are important in the world. I think everyone listening, if you could get better results than you are today in less time, you would do it. And if you felt so good when you were done, you had more energy,

those other nine hours become really, really valuable because now you had enough energy to do something. And maybe that's something is you're going to go to a yoga class. Okay, maybe that's exercise. Maybe it's just relaxation and fun, right? You don't have to stop exercising in ways you love. you just got more results. I've done yoga for many years. I put my ankle behind my head, you know, and you know, do the, look, I'm been near than you. Yoga competition, right?

It's not about that. It's that if you love doing yoga, you do it. But it's not the thing that's going to send the signal into your body to make you as resilient and as fit as you want to be. It's just good for you. Did you know that there are about 10 billion mitochondria in your body right now, tiny systems powering basically everything that you do? And while people call mitochondria the powerhouses of the cell, they're really more like little life machines. They help support your energy, your muscles, recovery, and overall resilience. But as we age, mitochondrial function naturally becomes less efficient, which can show up as lower

energy and slower recovery over time. That's why I've been really interested in mitopure from timeline. Mito Pure contains urolithin A, which supports a process called mitophagy, helping your body clear out damaged mitochondria and support healthier cellular energy production. And I love this approach because it's not about pushing harder. It's about supporting the foundation underneath how your body already works. Timeline's clinically proven formula is now more accessible. Mitopure starts at $99 and listeners can get 20% off at timeline.com slash real foodology. Again, that's timeline.com slash real foodology.

Well, I think this comes back to listening to your body and also we don't have to do these really high intense cortisol pumping workouts in order to be healthy. Like we've talked about it a couple times in this episode, walk. Just go for a walk around your neighborhood. You know, just move your body. I think that's the most important thing. So are you saying you just work out one hour a week? And does that mean like just strength training wise?

I do. Probably five minutes of strength training every week. Wow. And people are like, how dare you? And like, okay, guys, I am 8% body fat. And like, there are guys who have bigger biceps to me, but I look pretty good, right? I'm 27% old. I just turned 50.

Wow. And I have apps. And I came from behind. I have been fatter than most people listening to your show. And I am not joking about spending five minutes. Yes, I have access to all of the upgrade lab technologies. I have it in my house so I can go down and I can do it. When I meditate, I will put electrodes on my head from my 40 years of Zen company.

And if I can do once a week, if I can do an hour of that kind of meditation, it replaces an hour a day. In fact, I get better results from that. And if I do an hour of that a day, it's, oh, my God, that's transformative. And I honestly, I could probably do that, but I never, I know how I have other stuff I'm doing, right? Yeah. So that's why I want people to understand. If you have an hour to invest in improving your health, why don't you do the thing that works best? because right now you're probably picking up rocks or running away from tigers and those don't work very well.

No. Oh my gosh. I think most of us are doing that. But the threat now is like social media and we're not running from tigers anymore, but our cortisol is acting as though we are. It's awesome that you're talking about cortisol. And I talk about that in smarter or not harder. Many women especially are susceptible to this. If a woman goes on a vegan diet or on a full diet, keto diet without cycling in and out of ketosis or goes for high-intensity interval training. On average, women will hit the wall of spiking cortisol before men. It takes men about 50% longer than women to hit it. And so women, the first sign is, I'm not sleeping as well as I was before, right? And then, oh, my cycle is a regular.

And then my hair is getting thin. And this happens reliably. And for guys, you know, maybe after instead of four weeks, it takes us six or eight weeks. And then it's, I wake up and there isn't a kid. stand. That's different, right? And oh, my sleep quality went down and then you wait a while longer and same thing, thinning hair. So this is what high-intensity interval training combined with caloric restriction does. And this is exactly what the big food industry tells you to do. Eat low-calorie junk food that was expensive and had almost no energy in it. Like a bag of kale

chips with 40 calories for six bucks. Like screw you. That's full of plant toxins. It has no energy to speak of and all the vitamins and minerals are locked up by plant compounds so you can't absorb them. I want to talk about that. It's a perfect recipe for junk food. So let's talk about minerals some more, right? And bioavailability of certain minerals and and also amino acids in plant-based foods. Plants, they contain proteins to protect themselves for the most part. Those are not plant proteins for eating and for fueling bugs and animals. Plants actually don't want us to eat them. So they develop defense systems. If you eat too many plants, they steal your minerals and your species gets weaker so that there'll be less of you and more of them.

That's how plants defend themselves because they can't run away. Throughout history, we've developed techniques to make plants less toxic so we can eat them when there's a famine and there's no animals for us to eat. And that's how it works. And it's great because during famines, we haven't died as a species because we could eat all sorts of weird stuff. but we took the hit in our kidneys and our liver. And the primary things that plants do is they induce inflammation or they steal minerals from you. And I talked earlier about vitamin Dake and I talked about these minerals. 80% of people are magnesium deficient.

But there's a great variety of trace minerals that would have been present in our water or in our rock salt if we were still eating very much of that. But we don't get that anymore. Even the plants that we're getting are grown in soil that is now deficient of minerals because we've been growing plants there that extract minerals. So when you look online and it says your garbonzo beans that cause gut inflammation have X amount of iron in them, no, they probably don't because the soil is depleted. But even if they did, it's locked up via something called phytic acid. And this is a big focus in smarter, not harder, is that if you're binding all of your minerals, you cannot get the results that you need from all of your exercise or any other thing you're doing to improve your health.

So minerals are required for almost every biological process. And that's why if you go to danger coffee.com mold-free coffee, but it has trace minerals. A lot of trace minerals from plants added back in. And these are in an ionic form that can directly go into your cell membranes and can restore mineral balance in the body. because now you're getting enough minerals. And it doesn't have all the calcium and magnesium and the macromenrals because you need many grams of those per day and you take those in capsules. Courtney, many people say, like I used to many, many years ago,

well, I believe in getting all of my nutrients from my food. I used to say that too. Yeah, that's why the U.S. government requires that grains be fortified with vitamins and minerals. because you cannot get it from that kind of food. You might get it from an animal-based diet if you eat a lot of animal organs and oysters and things like that, which frankly almost no one does. And even then, if you get all of your nutrients from Mother Nature, shouldn't you also get only toxins from Mother Nature? And you go, oh, wait a minute, I'm swimming in an environment of man-made chemicals that overload my toxin elimination mechanisms. So even then it doesn't make any sense.

People who don't supplement today, given the abundance of evidence for it, they're actually harming themselves. We live in a world that is not very natural. And to say, oh, my diet's going to be natural, but my environment is going to be unnatural and more toxic, I can tell you what's going to happen. It's not going to be pretty. I know, because I did that before I was 30 and I had to reverse it. So take your supplements, start with vitamin Dake, then take a macro mineral and get your

trace minerals, whether it's in danger, coffee or some other way. with supplements. And I talk about baseline supplements that everyone needs. And I talk about supplements that you can take for specific outcomes like stress resilience or what should you take to increase muscles. And you talked about amino acid availability. Well, most people don't really know what an amino acid is. Let me define that really quick. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. And what happens in nature is either a plant or an animal will take these amino acids and possibly form them, but then they take them and then they stack them together. And when you have a few amino acids stuck together, that becomes a peptide. And I'm well known

because I introduced collagen peptides to the market and now it's a billion dollar industry, right? That was part of what Bulletproof did. And peptides are just small chains of amino acids. And when you have more of those put together, then you have a full peptide. So think of amino acid as a letter and a peptide is a word and a protein is a complete sentence or a paragraph. When you look at what a plant-based protein has, it's, well, what letters are in there, what amino acids are in it. And they typically don't have a complete amino acid profile because there's about 19 amino acids that we need.

The thing is, we need the right balance of them. Imagine you're playing Scrabble and you don't have the letter W to form the word that you really wanted to form. Well, that's a problem because if you don't get a W, you are not going to win the game. And right now, when we're dealing with protein levels in our bodies, if you want results from your exercise, you must have an abundance of amino acids. So there's always the ability to reach into the scrabble bag and pull out another letter until you get the one you need. And when you eat these ridiculous plant-based proteins that big food is trying to convince you are the same as meat, even though they're not, they simply don't contain the right amino acids. And even if they're in there, they're stuck to other compounds.

So what you end up getting is, oh, it says protein, it says 10 grams of protein on the label, but it doesn't work when you eat it. Prime example, I'm not going to shame any particular brand here, but there is a popular brand of keto cookie that is plant-based and has 10 grams of protein per cookie. The protein is gluten is gluten because gluten is a protein. So it's a pure gluten keto cookie. Do you think it's going to work the same as something? something with way protein or with eggs.

No. They don't work the same. And it's going to come to the side of glyphosate. Oh yeah, we won't even mention glyphosate, but yeah. So this is what's going on. And my goal is with smarter not harder, I'm going to tell you, here's where to get your amino acids that work. And I'm going to tell you, here's the baseline minerals and fat soluble vitamins.

If you take those, everything works better. And there's no point in exercising hard doing hit training three or four times a week and over-training, if you don't have minerals and fat soluble vitamins to put them where they need to go, your body cannot adapt to your environment without these present. So I teach you that, and I just teach you how to do less work to make your body more adaptable. Yeah, it's awesome. I think this is going to be helpful for a lot of people because this is something that I personally struggle with, as I've gotten more into the health world, there's so many different modalities and things that we can do now. And I mean, you're a perfect example of this. You're constantly researching and biohacking and trying the newest

and latest trends. And it's, I get to a certain point for me where I'm like, okay, but what can I do that's just going to be the most efficient, not a total time suck, and it's going to help me get to my goals. So out of everything that you have researched, that you've tried, what would you say maybe are your top like five things that people do? Well, the most important thing I could tell you to do is, read the part of smarter or harder where you identify your health goal. Because if you don't know what your goal is, it's very hard to answer that question. So you've got to say, all right, you know, was my goal energy or was it stress resilience or was it muscle, right? Or was I wanted to be smarter because the answer is very different for that.

But I can tell you, when you get very low into the meat operating system, there are some things that work to improve everything. And we talked a lot about vitamin dake and the trace minerals and the regular minerals. If you get your minerals and your fat solubles, everything works better. So that's non-negotiable. the only supplements you take, it's those. And by the way, those make you less likely to get an infection of any kind as well. So that's a side effect. Great side effect. We have that. The second thing is you need to get enough high quality animal-based protein from grass-fed animals. It's non-negotiable. I'm sorry. You can say, but I want to be vegan. And I can also say, yes, I want to be a ninja turtle.

That's not how it works. I'm sorry. So, you know, I respect. your desire to be something that doesn't work. So you've got to do that. You also don't eat after the sun goes down. This is so important. The timing of food matters. And I talk about hacking sleep and smarter, not harder. And also, if you don't even want to buy the book, go to sleep withdave.com, which is the best URL of my entire career. That's a really good one. And I teach you how to sleep. It's a free thing. Like it's a sleep challenge. I teach you over the course of the two everything I know about getting more sleep because I was a terrible sleeper. I got two hours of REM and two hours of deep sleep last night and seven hours. So it's possible to fix a terrible sleeper and make

them a good sleep. So you've got to learn how to sleep and part of that is don't eat before bed. And the other stuff that's becoming more mainstream that's been a core of biohacking forever is wake up and see the sunshine without any lenses between you and the sun because that sets your timing systems. So a lot of what we're doing is unconsciously manipulating our meat so that But it knows what's going on in the world around you. And it feels safe and it feels motivated to build more muscle or to build more electricity. And the other thing that I'm just going to say is, if you do things that make you weak every day and you don't do more things that make you strong, you're doing it wrong. And it's usually easier to stop doing things that make you weak.

So if you're eating something that sucks minerals out of your body that you think is healthy that isn't, or something like spinach and kale that actually give you kidney stones because of oxalic acid and are a major cause of gout. But you think it's healthy. You just have to stop the habits that take the energy away from you. And when you do that, it turns out it's not that hard to build muscle or to do the things you want to do. And this is this final one, it will be a bit controversial.

But assuming that you're eating a good quality diet, there's a meaningful chance. that you're not eating enough, especially in women. So an undernourished person who exercises too much cannot lose weight because of cortisol. And sometimes it's a matter of eating more. And in that case, it's in particular, more protein and less carbs. And just don't eat omega-6 oils at all.

They're just bad for you. You'll get some of them no matter what, but don't eat anything fried in restaurant oil ever again. You were the first person to ever put this on the map for me, actually. I remember you posted about a stuff this was a long time ago, that they show that French fries or just any of these industrial seed oils in particular are worse for you on the cardiovascular system than smoking cigarettes. That blew my mind.

It's totally true. I don't think you should do either one, but nicotine in small doses, not from smoking, but just nicotine in general, it reverses Alzheimer's disease. I broke that news by interviewing a guy called Dr. Nicotine from Vanderbilt University. And there's 30 years of research showing that small doses of nicotine are probably good for you. But if you smoke a cigarette, you get about eight hours of systemic inflammation. And from the French fries, you get at least 24 and usually 48 hours of inflammation. So seriously, if you're saying, I just heard this podcast and you go to the restaurant and you say,

I just ordered the deep fried, whether it's calamari, mushrooms, cheese sticks, it doesn't matter. If it's deep fried at a restaurant, you never eat it. It's just not food, just like you wouldn't smoke a cigarette. Or maybe you would, in which case, at least you know what you're doing. If you can have a bunch of butter on your broccoli, you can have a grass-fed ribby. Those are better than French fries anyway. Yeah. Or get your French fries cooked in ghee.

There's a couple restaurants in L.A. that cook them in ghee or duck fat. Nice. Duck fat is safe. Ge is safe. Tallow is the best. And I actually found a place here in Austin called Holy Cow. And they make sweet potato fries in palm oil. And if it's fried in palm oil, that's fine.

Wow. Yeah. It's great. It's great information for people to have. There was so many other things I wanted to ask you about. Maybe you can throw this in really quickly, and then I have a question that I ask all my guests before we go. But cancer and alcohol or just alcohol and it's toxic effects on the body,

everyone's talking about this now. Are there any supplements that mitigate the effects of that? Oh, my gosh. I love this. I published the alcohol roadmap. It's probably on Dave Asprey.com at least 10 years ago. I'm like, look, we know. alcohol makes your brain worse. We know it makes your sleep worse and we know it it promotes cancer.

And there's a lot of studies about this. And it's taken a long time for this to get out there. I also recognize that people are going to drink and maybe knowing this, you'll follow my rule. Just drink stuff that's older than you. Because then you can't afford it and you only drink one or two glasses, right? So if I drink a $50 glass of scotch or something, I'm not going to have two of those because it's too expensive. right? Yeah. And so that's a way to limit it. But if you drink even one drink a couple nights a week, it lowers your quality of life. So when you are going to drink, what do you do? You take glutathione, which is a really important antioxidant in your liver that is the primary detox pathway for alcohol. You can take vitamin C. You can take ennecetal cysteine. Those will help with alcohol. You can take

activated charcoal, which will bind to toxins and wine and beer that help greatly. But if people listen to episode 1,000 of my podcast, which is called The Human Upgrade, I interview the PhD biochemist who's running a company that makes a genetically engineered probiotic that stops alcohol from turning into aldehyde in the body. Wow. So that's the human upgrade episode 1,000. So there's some new tech coming along. I'll just tell you, though, if you want to kick ass at all parts of your life,

Alcohol should be a celebratory thing that you do once a month, and it should be amazing alcohol. And when you do it, you pregame by making your liver more resilient and you take charcoal with it and probably these probiotics, and then magically you feel better. Those are some great tips. Okay, so I ask all of my guests before we go. What are your health non-negotiables? I'm assuming yours are probably going to be pretty long, but this is like no matter how crazy, busier day is, These are things that you do that are non-negotiables for your health.

You're going to laugh. I actually don't really look at anything as a health non-negotiable. Because for me, health is just table stakes. It's not my goal. I don't particularly want to be healthy. I want to be superhuman. In fact, one of my books is called that. I want to be so much beyond healthy that health is boring.

I want to be so magically resilient that I can handle anything the world brings my way. And yeah, I can handle that. I've got more, right? I can do this. It does not health. I want to be so far beyond health. I'm like, I remember, I'm just healthy. It was so, it was so like pedestrian to be healthy, gross. Like, can you imagine I can handle this now? Like, that's where I'm, my whole consciousness is about building that.

Yes, I can handle that level of stress. Yes, you know, that was a terrible thing. But what do I do to engage that state of high performance that's around biohacking? One thing that's non-negotiable is I just don't eat junk food ever. It's just not worth it. Once you learn how you feel when you're on a clean diet consistently, cheat days are dumb. If you don't have a cheat day, eat a bunch of sugar with good fat and that's okay. But if instead, oh, I had a bunch of artificial coloring sweeteners and fried cheesecake, whatever,

you're going to feel like garbage and have cravings for days. So I just don't do that. I will fast before I'm going to eat crappy junk food. But I will cheat. But cheating just means I have elevated blood sugar for a little while. And since my metabolism works, it goes away. It's fine. And I don't even gain weight from that.

So that's just my biggest non-negotiable is you don't eat the stuff that makes you weak. The other thing that's non-negotiable is I do intermittent fasting several days a week because I just don't feel as good if I eat for 12 hours a day. It just doesn't work very well for me. I would like to say that getting a good night sleep every night is non-negotiable. but I stayed up until 4 a.m. on New Year's Eve and I slept on a friend's floor because it wasn't really safe for me to drive home. And I can say that I didn't drink any alcohol that night. So I didn't, but it's okay. I can handle it. I'm super human. I can take the hit, right?

Yeah. The other thing that's non-negotiable is having a recovery practice. So the next day after that, you know, I wasn't at my full power normal self. So I did the things that restore me back to equilibrium as fast as possible and I'm fine by that evening. So the other thing, I do not mess around when it comes to those two supplements, vitamin dake and getting minerals, both in my coffee with danger coffee and taking mineral supplements for the macromenerals. Those are just the most important supplements you could ever take and they're cheap and they're widely available. That might be the best answer I've had yet. Oh, thank you. Thank you. That or Ricky Lake was probably my other favorite where she said that taking an edible and having wild sex with her husband was her health non-negotiable.

And I was like, I love Ricky. She was on my show a while ago. I met her at Burning Man. And that's a really good answer. And I would have probably put, you know, tantric sex or something in there, but I'm single. So what the heck? Well, there you go. You're putting it out there now. Dave, thank you so much. This was a great interview. Oh, thank you, Courtney. My pleasure. Thank you so much for listening to the Real Foodology podcast. This is a Wellness Loud production produced by Drake Peterson. Theme song is by Georgie. You can watch the full video version of this podcast inside the Spotify app or on YouTube. As always, you can leave us a voicemail by clicking the link in our

bio. And if you like this episode, please rate and review on your podcast app. For more shows by my team, go to wellness loud.com. See you next time. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and doesn't constitute a provider-patient relationship. I am a nutritionist, but I am not your nutritionist. As always, talk to your doctor or your health team first.