The Dr. Hyman Show - Simple Hacks To Boost Energy, Promote Weight Loss, And Reverse Aging

Episode Date: December 10, 2021

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health and Cozy Earth. Most of us can relate to feeling tired, moody, or just overall depleted. It’s not a lack of willpower or motivation that leads to low-energy. It's because we’re up against energy thieves that are hiding everywhere from our immune system to the food we eat, and even our microbiome.  In this compilation episode, I talk to Dave Asprey about using the principles of Functional Medicine and the biology of biohacking to boost energy, promote weight loss, and feel good at any age. We discuss the numerous benefits of fasting, such as reducing insulin, improving brain function, and supporting mitochondria (these are our tiny but powerful cellular energy factories)​​. Fasting doesn’t have to mean feeling stressed, tired, or even hungry—Dave tells us how to remove the fear and pain some people feel about fasting to make the process easier. Dave Asprey is the founder and Chairman of Bulletproof 360, a high-performance coffee and food company, and creator of the widely-popular Bulletproof Coffee. He is a three-time New York Times bestselling author, host of the Webby award-winning podcast Bulletproof Radio, and has been featured on the Today show, Fox News, Nightline, CNN, and dozens more. Over the last two decades Dave, the “Father of Biohacking,” has worked with world-renowned doctors, researchers, scientists, and global mavericks to uncover the latest, most innovative methods, techniques, and products for enhancing mental and physical performance.  This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health and Cozy Earth.   Rupa Health is a place for Functional Medicine practitioners to access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs like DUTCH, Vibrant America, Genova, Great Plains, and more. Check out a free live demo with a Q&A or create an account here.  Right now, you can try out Cozy Earth’s bamboo pajamas and loungewear for 40% off—their highest discount ever offered. Just go to cozyearth.com and use the code HYMANPODCAST.

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. If you were to, one day a week, simply not eat, it would change your life in the most dramatic way. 48% of people under age 40 have early-onset mitochondrial dysfunction. You have to do this if you're alive in the modern world and you wanna live to a highly functional old age. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark.

I know a lot of you out there are practitioners like me helping patients heal using real food and functional medicine as your framework for getting to the root cause. What's critical to understanding what each individual person and body needs is testing, which is why I'm excited to tell you about Rupa Health. Looking at hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, gut bacteria, and so many other internal variables can help us find the most effective path to optimize health and reverse disease. But up till now, that meant you were usually ordering tests for one patient from multiple labs. And I'm sure many of you can relate how time-consuming this process was,

and then it could all feel like a lot of work to keep track of. Now there's Rupa Health, a place for functional medicine practitioners to access more than 2,000 specialty labs from over 20 labs like Dutch, Vibrant America, Genova, Great Plains, and more. Rupa Health helps provide a significantly better patient experience, and it's 90% faster, letting you simplify the entire process of getting the functional medicine lab tests you need and giving you more time to focus on patients. This is really a much needed option in functional

medicine space and I'm so excited about it. It means better service for you and your patients. You can check it out and look at a free live demo with a Q&A or create an account at rupahealth.com. That's R-U-P-A health.com. We all know there's a direct link between the way we grow and process our food and how that impacts our health. But what about the other agricultural commodities we rely on? Well, conventionally grown cotton is one we need to think about. It's often sprayed with a slew of toxic chemicals, including the pervasive glyphosate, which is so dangerous that I've developed an entire podcast

episode and actually a few to it. And these chemicals can persist on our clothing. Cotton also requires huge amounts of water and fertilizers and contributes to the pressing issue of soil degradation. So it's not a very environmentally friendly sound option. Now, to avoid all these issues, I try to buy sustainable, non-toxic clothing as much as possible. Bamboo is actually a great alternative to cotton. As it grows rapidly, it needs very little water or chemical inputs, and as an added bonus, it sequesters a large amount of carbon dioxide, absorbing five times more carbon dioxide and producing 35% more oxygen than trees. My favorite bamboo fabric is from Cozy Earth. They make the softest ethically sourced bamboo pajamas and loungewear I've ever worn. Now these make a perfect gift to any of your friends or

family. I love mine so much I never want to take them off. Another reason I love bamboo fabric is that it's temperature regulating. So the Cozy Earth pajamas are great for helping you get a solid night's sleep without feeling too hot or cold. Right now you can try out Cozy Earth's bamboo pajamas and loungewear for 40% off. Their highest discount ever offer. Just go to CozyEarth.com and use the code HymanPodcast. That's CozyEarth, C-O-Z-Y-E-A-R-T-H.com with the code HymanPodcast. All their products are covered with a 10-year warranty, but I know you'll love them as much as I do. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Feehan, one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. Fasting is a great way to give

your digestive system a break, and it has many other health benefits as well. It has been shown to help with weight loss, reduction of insulin levels and blood pressure, improvement of insulin sensitivity, and reduction of diabetes risk. Fasting can also help the brain function better. On today's compilation episode, Dr. Hyman talks to Dave Asprey about various types of fasting and their benefits. They also discuss how fasting supports mitochondrial function and helps you live longer, better. Let's jump in. If you were to one day a week, simply not eat, it would change your life in the most dramatic way. The data behind fasting is so strong, but most people listening have the same mindset I did when I weighed 300 pounds. It's like this. If I don't eat six times a day,

my body will go into starvation mode and then I'll gain weight. And also I'll want to kill people because I can't stand not eating for that amount of time. I feel like I'm going to die. And when you build metabolic flexibility, when you use the tips that are in here in Superhuman, it turns out you can modulate a hormone called CCK and another one called ghrelin. CCK is the hormone that makes you feel full, and ghrelin's the one that makes you feel hungry, and if you've been on a low-fat, low-calorie,

or vegan diet, your hunger levels will still be set to the highest weight, body weight that you've recently had. So if you went from 300 pounds to 250 pounds, you will have the chronic hunger of a 300 pound person and you will lose. The hunger will win. And that's why I actually lost way more than a hundred pounds because you lose 20, gain 30, lose 30, gain 40, lose 40, gain 50. And you yo-yo, everyone who's been fat knows what I'm talking about. You have like fat pants in your closet. I don't own fat pants anymore. They they're gone like i don't have to worry about that anymore but it took a long time and a lot of research to get there so what you're saying you

can fix that you can fix that and the way you're whatever you are you're not you're not hungry like a 300 pound person no you can reset your fat hunger point and the way you do that is you get ketones present and you could do this by not eating you could do this by putting brain octane in your bulletproof coffee yeah that's what always troubles me you know when the obesity experts talk about the body's set point i mean nobody's set point was 400 pounds i mean historically it doesn't make sense to me your set point is changed based on your metabolism and what you've eaten and your weight. And it can be unchanged. And this crazy thing that we don't talk about this more. All it takes is a blood level in ketones of 0.38.

And if you're not a keto dieter person, that's, it's not going to mean anything. That's for one of the hormones for the other one, 0.48. These are mild levels of ketosis. You know how you do that? Don't eat after the sun goes down. Don't have breakfast and have a late lunch. And if you do that, you'll probably bump up if you have a healthy metabolism. If you don't, you drink a Bulletproof coffee in the morning with brain octane. It'll probably bump your ketones up enough. And all of a sudden, this deep level

relaxation happens in your body because now you're not craving food like a fat person. You've reset. And these studies are out there where the levels of ketones are there so break fast is what you do after you wake up in the morning no just skip that i'm like had dinner it's finished by six something and i didn't eat till like 10 30 the next morning and i felt great and it was like a you know 14, 14 hour, whatever, 16 hour fast. 14 to 16 hours, 18 hours is better. And it's just, it's something that I think because of the Great Depression, because there have been times where your grandparents probably starved. Yeah.

No matter if you're from Europe or the US, different causes for that. So we just like, how could we go a day without eating? Here's the deal. You'll live a lot longer and be a lot healthier if you do that. But all these techniques, whether it's ketogenic diets, whether it's time-restricted eating or low-calorie eating for a week or a fasting-mimicking diet or just an actual fast for a day a week, all activate the same thing.

They all reduce inflammation. They increase your antioxidant enzymes. They increase your stem cells. They increase your mitochondrial repair and cleaning up your mitochondrial function. They increase your antioxidant enzymes. They increase your stem cells. They increase your mitochondrial repair and cleaning up your mitochondrial function. They increase your bone density, increase your muscle mass, improve your cognitive function. I mean, it's like a miracle. The returns are so high. And you'll see on your muffin top the next day, you'll kind of like, wow, I have different

curves than I used to. Or maybe I don't have a curve or I didn't want one. But you see it very dramatically. And you feel a new zest for life when you do this. And the first time you do it, you'll probably feel like crap, which is why the stuff I write about, here's how to not feel crappy the first time you do it. But if you do this every now and then, even you build what I'm calling metabolic flexibility. And in my case, I was at high risk for stroke and heart attack before I was 30.

I was pre-diabetic. I had arthritis in my knee since I was 14. So I had all these fun diseases of aging. Yeah, we should try to get up a picture on the podcast of Dave when he was before. I have some fat pictures. My favorite fat picture is from Entrepreneur Magazine. I'm like 280 pounds and I'm this 23-year-old.

I'm the first guy to sell anything over the internet before anyone knew what the internet was. And I think I think I have pimples, but, uh, you were selling t-shirts. Yeah. That's my, that's my proof of fat picture. Um, but there's, there's so much that happens around the psychology and emotion of this, but all you have to do is do it once and the next day go, wow, that was a little hard and I feel better. But if you do it the right way the first day, it turns out the amount of caffeine in two small cups of coffee will double your ketone production. Adding brain octane to your Bulletproof coffee or to whatever the heck you're having will increase your ketones. So if you can just get your levels up enough, normally it's four days of fasting in order to do that,

or you have to eat the bacon-only zero-carb diet. But these are just things to reduce your suffering as you learn to do this. But where my metabolism is now, Mark, I am perfectly insulin sensitive. There's a scale that goes from one to 160. I scored one. And my glucose tolerance is high.

In other words, I can eat sugar better than most people. I just don't. And I can metabolize fat as well as anyone else. And I do that mostly. And because I move in and out of ketosis, I've built flexibility. So some of the other things that are going to make you live longer, it turns out running marathons isn't going to make it. Yeah. No, not on my list. But regular exercises. And we've been completely deceived. You know, the 10,000 steps a day metric, you know where that came from? No, actually. And it turns out in the late 1950s, a Japanese company and actually named them in the book, they came up with the first pedometer you put on your belt, the little mechanical thing that would click every time you took a step.

And they just decided 10,000 was a good number. And so they popularized it. And to this day, we make trackers. Like I was CTO of a wrist tracking company. And the data there, there's no data for that. It turns out that you need to move for 20 minutes a day. Just walk. And you could do yoga.

You could do a whole lot of vibration. You could do all sorts of whatevers. But just moving around for 20 minutes a day. And then once or maybe twice a week, lift something really heavy or do something that makes you pretty much want to throw up. Like really fast sprint and then stop.

But do it twice. That's all it is. Just to raise your heart rate and get it back down quickly. Those two things are going to create the stimulus you need. Because one of the things that hits us as we age. Those throw up training is what you want to do.

Pretty much. They call it high intensity interval training. But look, lifting something really heavy until you can't lift it, it sucks. And when you're done, you're in your pants. Yeah, I can't. I don't know how people like that. No, it doesn't feel good. I like going for a bike ride.

But like, I started weight training recently. I'm like, I need this big guy kind of encouraging me, because otherwise I wouldn't do it on my own. I kind of wimp out. I'm like, all right, I did three. It's fine. No, he's like, do 12. I'm like, okay.

And it's that pushing yourself to the limit that makes the difference. And yeah, get help doing that. But we're talking 15 minutes of pain once a week. And compared to an hour of going to the spin class every day, that actually isn't going to help you age less. In fact, you might wear out your hips that way. So you save time and you got more anti-aging benefits. And if you go for a walk with a loved one, well, did you actually get that time back anyway? You did. So now you're exercising more intelligently.

And speaking of this occasionally lifting something heavy, one of the other seven pillars of aging is actually just tissue loss. It turns out as we age, muscle loss, but also skin. In the book, I talk about collagen very specifically. Bulletproof is one of the reasons everyone's putting collagen protein in everything because I started writing about it and talking about it about a decade ago. And it's, oh, this actually matters. Your skin is made of collagen. Collagen is the fascia that holds your muscles. It's the matrix for your bones. It's terribly important.

But your ability to make collagen goes down over time. That's why you have thin skin as you age. It turns out there's things you can do that increase thickness of your collagen. In fact, Can you help me with my wrinkles? I'm going to help you with your wrinkles, but not just wrinkles. We're talking about the thickness of your skin, which is really important because along with muscle wasting, sarcopenia, which is a problem for older people, you also get just thinning of all tissues in the body. I remember my mother's skin used to just fall off.

Like she would touch herself and like it would rip. It would tear. Yeah. Yeah. Well you can change the rate of collagen deposition by using light therapy, by getting some sunlight, but not too much by eating more collagen. And by doing less things that prevent the breakdown of collagen, like, like, or you could make sure you have enough vitamin C don't eat bad fats. The usual, the usual, it turns out so many of the basic habits we're talking about support the reversal of aging. But then it comes down to something like

stem cell exhaustion, which is part of this tissue thing. So you reduce the loss of tissues, you increase the turnover rate of tissues, and then you say, well, what do I do about stem cells? Because you run out of stem cells as you age. So in superhuman, I talk about how I've done probably the most extensive stem cell treatment done on one person at one time, where I had three doctors working on me for four hours. The total body makeover? Yeah. The stem cell total body makeover with Dr. Harry Adelson. And this isn't something most of us are ever going to do. Frankly, it was kind of painful. However, I'm looking to live to 180 and I would like, you know, I'm almost 50 and I'd like my body to remain youthful and to have those reserves of

stem cells and to go through and fix old injuries. So that's what I did. And I talk about that, but I also talk about things you can do to make sure that you have adequate stem cell reserves. And it turns out, Mark, it's the same stuff, right? Maybe sometimes you should try some intermittent fasting. Maybe you shouldn't eat bad fats. Maybe you should exercise. Don't eat grains. And those things are shown in studies to improve stem cells. But one of the things we haven't hit on too much, but you talked about in the introduction, is sleep. Yeah. And if you want more stem cells and more growth hormone, all the good stuff, you've got to sleep. So I was looking at my sleep score for last night.

You have the Oura Ring? I have the Oura Ring. Okay. Do you have one too? I got one too. So I've been an advisor to the company for a while because I was CTO of another wrist tracking company called Basis Wellback. So I really know this space well.

The ring is ridiculous. But I looked at my sleep score last night. I slept, let's see, six hours and 50 minutes. But I got two hours and 50 minutes of REM and an hour and 19 minutes of deep sleep in a hotel when I landed at night. Impressive. So this is more... This is more... Let's see, what was mine? Oh, yeah. Oh, let's compare sleep. Oh, when I landed at night. Impressive. So this is more. Impressive.

This is more. Let's see what was mine. Oh yeah. Oh, let's compare sleep. Oh, let's see mine. Okay. So mine, wait, that's Uber. I don't want the Uber app. As you're looking it up, it turns out as you age, your amount of deep sleep and REM sleep goes down predictably unless you do something about it. So I'm getting more sleep than a 20 year old i got a i was in bed for eight and a half hours i slept seven hours and 15 minutes i had a 91 sleep score nice my total sleep was 750 minutes but uh an hour and a half of rem uh deep sleep was 54 latency was 13 minutes which means i'm telling to make it to sleep but i had restfulness i was tossing around.

I'm traveling, so I'm in California. I'm staying at a friend's house. I'm in their bed. I'm going to bed late, like I'm on the East Coast, like 10 o'clock. So, yeah, I mean, it wasn't as good as I'd like. It's still pretty good. I got 92, and I had all blues, which is no bad thing. But it's not always like that like you know it's not but if

you do what it takes to sleep better and i talked about sleep in the book it's been a big theme for me because frankly i was really bad at sleeping and i never wanted to sleep because it seemed like such a waste of time oh yeah uh and now look if you sleep six and a half hours a night well you're in the group of people lives the longest six and a half hours a night, well, you're in the group of people who lives the longest. Six and a half? Believe it or not, the most granular study ever done of one in 2.2 million people. It's okay.

It's just that people who need more than six and a half hours of sleep die more often than people who need six and a half hours of sleep. Now you're making me feel really bad. I'm never going to make it to 180. I'll eat my eight hours. Here's why that works. People who are healthier need less sleep. Or people who sleep better need less sleep.

So I am very well rested in my six and a half hours of sleep and sometimes less. But I learn to change things that make me sleep like I'm 20 instead of like I'm 26. So let's just touch on that for a minute. We've had some shows on sleep. But we talked about food. We talked about the right kind of exercise we talked about intermittent fasting we talked about you know the sleep issue that the problem in this country is that most americans don't sleep well you know it's an epidemic of poor sleep we've reduced our number of hours of sleep over the last 100 years dramatically we have screens at night we have

you're wearing the blue blocker glasses right now it's one of the companies i started called true dark yeah and it it matters the light thing and eating too late are the two biggest things for sleep yeah so i i think you know getting healthy sleep is important and it's stress response so things like meditation really help ramp you down not drinking too much coffee or not having late after 2 p.m don., don't drink coffee unless it's decaf. Don't exercise after dinner. Don't eat late. No, three hours before bed. Blue blocker glasses.

Get off screens. I mean, these techniques really work. They work in a way that's measurable. And throughout history, you could just wake up and say, do I feel like I slept well? And then you could turn to your spouse and say, did I wake you up with snoring? But my phone tells me it records if I snore and I don't snore very much anymore because if you eat foods that make you inflamed,

you snore a lot. If you eat the right foods, you don't snore. And if you keep snoring, then you get it fixed. And when you go through all this stuff, you realize, wait a minute, I didn't have to spend any more to learn how to sleep well and it was cheaper to do that than it was to go on growth hormone

and all of these other things. So sleep is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to literally age backwards by causing yourselves to self-repair in a way they wouldn't do if you got exactly the same amount of sleep, but it was bad sleep. So I talk about here's what different kinds of sleep do for you and here's how to get them. And for me the the true dark uh the patented glasses for sleep that are more than blue blockers they doubled my deep sleep and when i use a specific kind of of mushroom extract before bed i tripled my REM sleep that's why my scores were that high i found out what worked what kind of mushroom extract do you tell, Dr. Dave. It's an Australian species of lion's mane mushroom.

It's a company called Life Cycle makes it. And the guys came on my show and talked about it. And lion's mane is shown in studies to do stuff, but I never felt normal lion's mane when I took it. There was no difference. This stuff, because of the way it's extracted, I think because of the Australian species, my score goes up every single time I take it. So I don't travel without it i always take it okay life cycle lions mane

true dark twilight glasses and you can lower the temperature do the glasses all the time because you wear them during the day do you uh so true dark makes the ones for jet lag and heavy duty sleep and i'll wear those for at least a half hour before bed. So when I was flying to LA last night, I was on a flight around seven o'clock. So I put on the glasses that help your brain know that it's nighttime. So I'm wearing tinted glasses that are in the red spectrum, not just blue blockers. Blue blockers don't do enough for sleep. They help, but they're not enough. And I do that and I feel great. The ones I'm wearing right now, these are the daytime glasses that block 75% of blue light. So we've got bright studio lights.

I'm on camera for about 12 hours today. And if I stare at bright lights, especially LED lights, I actually get tired after a while. Your brain gets worn out. I wear these, my eyes are happy, my brain is happy all day long. Let me try those. You sent me some.

I have them in my house. Oh yeah yeah it actually is more do your brain relax it's yes it's interesting it's like

the light's kind of hurting my brain and now it's an unconscious thing light creates pressure I feel like I got relief like someone was stepping on my foot

and got off but you wouldn't notice that they slowly put pressure on your foot right wear it for another couple minutes and just watch what your brain does that's fascinating so here's what's going

on people listening to this you stare at your screen and you haven't turned it down at least halfway during the day you start a bright screen on your computer all day long you're underneath bright led lights and at the end of the day you say wow i don't know what's wrong but i really want a cookie and i'm so tired okay so. So let's, let's recap here. Cause this is really important. One, which glasses should you wear when and for how long and where do you get them? Cause you talked about two different kinds of glasses. Got it.

So True Dark is the company, truedark.com and just full disclosure, I started the company. I wrote patents for this company because of the light science and I, so I'm really into this. It's an important biohack. And at true dark, there's something called sunset or twilight. Those are the ones you wear before bed. Those are things that happen at night.

And then the day walkers are what you're wearing. Oh, the sunset one is the one that you can nighttime, nighttime when jet lag and traveling. Okay. So you do sunsets for nighttime and day walkers for the day and you don't have to wear them all the time we make ones that are less yellow than the ones you're wearing but the bottom line is if you want to be awake alert and feel like yourself at the end of a day

of sitting in bright lights if you wear glasses you will feel so different i'm so down this is great okay well you're not getting these back but i already already sent you a pair. I know I got them in my drawer at home. All right. So let's, let's go through again, talking about the different strategies for living to 180 and sleep is key. Blue blocker glasses, all the strategies we've talked about. What else? You know, the other thing that is in the book is having connections, having relationships.

And it all comes back to those dumb little mitochondria we talked about before. If you're a life form, it doesn't matter if you're a cactus or an amoeba or a human, you run the same order of operations. The first thing is run away from, kill or hide from scary things. Because if something kills you right now, it's the end of operations. The first thing is run away from kill or hide from scary things because if something kills you right now, it's the end of life. Okay. So that's why we spend so much of our time in anxiety and stress because our automated systems are looking for something that might be bad for you. Okay. And this is that we overweight, we over-remember the negative things. We don't remember the positive things. The second thing we do, we eat everything. And

that's why you keep eating junk food. You didn't mean to eat because your cells are making you do it. The third thing we do is, so we have, let's see, we had fear, we had food. The other one's also an F word that involves reproduction, okay? Because all life forms have to reproduce, right? Okay. So if we spend most of our energy doing those things, those are all the things, pretty much everything we've ever been ashamed of has come from one of those categories right but is there something else that life does it's another effort called friend right so we are wired in order to do those things and if you community connection community connection have friends special specialize in something and support the people around you and it's why we have biofilms on medical implants. It's why yogurt works. It's why you can have kombucha.

And so we are wired at a very deep level to have a strong community. And if you want to live a very long time, you look at those four things and you make sure you don't have too much stress and you don't feel afraid all the time. And sometimes you have to go to a therapist. Like you got to do your personal work on that one. That's one of the key aspects of the blue zones.

Yeah. Yeah. Poverty and fraud in birth certificates no the community community i mean i'm so teasing i mean the whole idea like in japan and okinawa they have the moais which is you know the parents put together like a group of four or five kids from birth and then they become their community and they go through every stage of life with them. Isn't that just, it's beautiful. I mean, I just had lunch with a friend of mine this last weekend. We've been friends for 40 years

and we've been through ups and downs, marriage, divorces, deaths. And it's just, you know, very powerful feeling to be that seen, known, loved, connected connected and we have a culture of loneliness we have a culture of isolation we have a culture where we're so separate for each other despite you know having 5 000 friends on facebook we might not have one friend we can call it it happens on a on a regular basis you want to live a long time. So what's the cure? Well, the cure for that is actually having friends of different ages.

And this goes for everyone listening. If you are 70 and you're looking around going, some of my friends can't go for walks anymore. Some of my friends are dying. You better get yourself some younger friends. Yeah. It's time. Most of my friends are my biological age. There you go. friends yeah it's time most of my friends are my biological age and if

you're young the way you stay young and the way you get ahead is instead of making all the mistakes yourself ask someone who's already made the mistakes how to not make them so your job is to go out and find someone three times your age that's how I did what I did. Mark, I was 26 years old. I was fat and tired. My brain wasn't working. And I felt like crap. And I found people who were 80 who had fixed it themselves.

And they took me under the wing and taught me this stuff. That's what I'm sharing right now. So you need to find people who are old, the kind of people that you probably, probably frankly don't see right now. Because when people hit a certain age, my parents have told me this. I remember the first time I became invisible. People just didn't look at me. And this is not okay. This is not how you treat the wise elders of our generation. So get an older friend if you're young, get a younger friend if you're old. And that's one of the simplest things you can do

to live longer for both people. What if people are just generally isolated? What do you suggest for them to how to build connections and find friends and? You know, it's really such a personal thing, but if you're isolated, it's probably something you're doing and it's probably fear-based. Remember those mitochondria? Things that might be scary, if you were hurt sometime,

you were bullied in seventh grade, someone abandoned you when you were young, you will still be at an unconscious level looking for that in yourselves. And so until you do that deep work and just feeling safe and being connected to people, you'll probably create that. So a lot of this work is around improve your psychology, improve your emotions. But here's the trick. If you want to do that work and your mitochondria can't make enough energy. You're not going to be able to. There's a study now about willpower that proves it.

Willpower comes from electrons that comes from mitochondria. So if you want to improve your situation where you have friends and community, deep connections with people who care about you. Well, if you're too tired to get out of bed in the morning, you will not do it. So you fix your biology and then you fix your friends. That's great. Okay. Now there's two other big things you talk about in the book, which are kind of novel,

a little different. And I have intimate experience with both of them, unfortunately, which are toxins and ozone. Yes. So let's talk about what you learned about the role of environmental toxins and heavy metals, particularly in aging. And tell us why it's important and what we should do about it. These are really big topics. When you look at what happens when any animal gets older, they accumulate certain things from the environment over time. And I like to go

fishing in Alaska with friends. And if I catch a hundred pound halibut, I'm throwing it back because that's a hundred year old fish full of mercury and nickel and lead and cadmium. And if you catch a young one, then it actually has far less toxins. So kids have less toxins, but they're more susceptible to toxins. And if you look at what happens as we age, mercury, lead, cadmium, thallium, you a lot of kale isn't is an emerging big problem from california any kale is full of thallium it's uh it's the the world nature's strongest uh attractant of that detoxifier yeah so and also arsenic arsenic is another big one thank you so if you're going to live to 180 you are going to to be full of metals. Metals inhibit mitochondrial function.

They lower your testosterone. They cause hair loss. They cause graying. And they cause cancer, as well as actually a whole bunch of other diseases. So you've got to lower your exposure to them. And you have to get rid of them as you live. And there's compounds I write about called chelating agents that you can take with your food.

When I eat sushi, you need the fat from fish. I take chlorella, which is a fracture. So chlorella will bind to the mercury in the gut. So you poop it out, but chlorella will not pull mercury out of your brain. So what you end up doing is over time, you lower the incidence of metal entering your body and you slowly remove what's in your body. And I talk about how to do that in the book, but if you don't know that metals matter and you're just going to eat the fish, you have a problem. So can you measure how much metals you have in your system? Yeah, there's two ways in superhuman that I write about. The gold standard is you collect urine and see what your body's excreting with or without an agent that may cause you to release more.

And then a more common and cheaper way, but less telling is a hair test. And there's usefulness for both of those, but you can go to a functional medicine doctor and say, I'd like to do a heavy metals test. And they'll usually order a urine test for you. And it's very common to find elevated mercury and lead. In fact, if you're over 40, you're probably going to find it.

Yeah. So here, let me just share with you as a practicing physician who, one, suffered from mercury poisoning. Had it too. And two have treated literally tens of thousands of people with metal poisoning and have done tens of thousands of tests. And I would say it's probably one of the most ignored.

Yeah. And underappreciated causes of chronic disease that doctors don't know how to think about, test, or measure. And personally for me, I lived in China and it got huge exposure to mercury. I don't have great genes at detoxifying. And it destroyed every system in my body.

It destroyed my gut. I had diarrhea for years and bloating and pain. It destroyed my mitochondria. I developed chronic fatigue syndrome. And it was such an extreme version that my muscle enzymes were high. My CPKs were like 600. My liver was affected. My immune system was affected.

I started developing rashes and sores all over. I was completely cognitively impaired. I couldn't focus, think, concentrate, remember where I was, you know, in training and thought. This was like, you know, 25 years ago. And I was so bad. And I literally had to become an expert in mercury and heavy metals and detoxification. And I've written a lot about it, but I think, you know, I would say that for many of my patients who suffer from weird or strange ailments it's right at the top of my list of things to look at and the only way to really know what your body burden is you can look at your blood but that only checks 90 days yeah i mean if you're eating a lot of sushi you'll see it's high but 90 days you stop it'll go away you can look

at your urine but your urine also isn't going to be high unless there's an current exposure so if you're in a lead foundry or you're you know eating tons of sushi you might see a little bit of mercury the only way to really look at your body burden is to do a challenge test where you take a pill it's a chelator and you collect your urine for six hours hair tests also check for fish methyl mercury which is where we mostly get our our mercury from it that that also will go away if you haven't eaten fish for a while and then there's another test that looks at the blood work that measures the inorganic mercury which comes from pollution or from fillings and that's called the Quicksilver test and that

that is surprisingly high in people who have a mouthful of fillings. And you can see the difference between fish or a dental mercury. And the treatments are, depending on the person, you know, can be very aggressive depending on what they need. I have a patient who's got this terrible autoimmune disease and we're giving her intravenous support. Other people can use oral support. There's medications. But it's a whole process that has to be done safely.

I think your point is really well taken. I think it's an underserved, an underappreciated component of medicine. And hopefully one day we'll get on board with this because it's just, I mean, it was interesting. There was an article in the New York Times that I was quoted in. It was based on these special forces. Oh, yeah. Those guys get led right yeah so this guy this guy came to see me whose job was he was a you know special forces guy

who was a blast expert so they would you know go blow up stuff you know blow up doors blow up this and they had to train and practice and they had indoor practice training and and these guys were getting all sick and now you know the special forces guys aren't malingerers they're not whiners they're not like oh i don't feel good i don't want to work those aren't those guys these are the guys who you know like stay in freezing ice water for an hour and swim you know right right and do 4 000 push-ups and like you know yeah don't sleep for three days i mean these guys are not whiners they're super humans rightans, right? Yeah. And so the guy came in. I'm like, okay, well, tell me about your job. I'm like, oh, we blow stuff up.

We shoot things. I'm like, oh, okay. And so I said, let's check your heavy metals. And they were sky high. We put him through a whole program. He was, you know, metabolically his system wasn't working. He was overweight. He had prediabetes.

He had cognitive dysfunction. He had all these immune issues, gut issues. All got better. And then he started sending all these special forces guys to us. And we started treating them. And they, all got better. And then he started sending all these special forces guys to us and we started treating them and they just all got better. And one of them was written about in the New York Times because his medical crew and everybody dismissed him and he completely turned around. And the guy who is the lead expert at Mount Sinai, who measures bone lead, which is the most accurate way to measure lead in the body. It's not an easy available commercial test,

but it's a very powerful research tool. He said these guys had really high levels of lead. And he said on the follow-up test, he saw the levels come way down. And he says he's never seen that in his entire experience. And this is a guy who's an expert in lead. How can you be an expert in lead and not know how to boil the body?

It drives me nuts. Because it's not seen as a problem acute poisoning yes chronic poisoning no and there's nothing you can quote do about it it's just nonsense and there's a in fact an fda approved drug called dmsa it's designed for lead removal and actually removes mercury so i think you know for people listening if you have any stranger weird ailments if you have anxiety depression or weird ailments, if you have anxiety, depression, insomnia, autoimmune disease, gut issues, fatigue, cognitive issues, it may well be heavy metals. And you need to find a good functional medicine doctor to help you diagnose that. And you go to functionalmedicine.org or ifm.org and you can find a practitioner who may

know how to do this. I'm going to go a little bit broader than that if you are over 50 and you have not gone through a course of chelation you are not doing aging right you have to do this if you are alive in the modern world and you want to live to a highly functional old age and the reason i say this is that the safe epa limits for lead used to be 20 parts per million and they cut it. It was 40. It was 40 to 20 to 10 to 5. And now they're finding even down to one, they're seeing cognitive impairment in kids. Cognitive impairment and increased risk of cardiovascular disease.

And now the people who are the experts in lead are saying, quote, there is no safe limit of lead. And if you are 40 or 50, you cannot be alive and not have a lead burden in your body you must remove it and it's not that hard especially if you're not really sick it's not going to be a big deal and it's so strange dave because medicine just ignores this but in the journal circulation which is one of the top cardiology journals there was a paper a number years ago that showed that if your lead level was over two, which is quote within the normal limits, which by the way affects almost 40% of the population has this lead level, that your risk of stroke goes up 89%.

The risk of a heart attack goes up 150%. The risk of death goes up from a heart attack 55%. And this is more than smoking or cholesterol. And it's like, well, why doesn't your cardiologist talk to you about this? Well, you remember those four killers at the beginning of the interview? All of those are tied to metals in the body. Yes. And especially Alzheimer's. Diabetes can be like arsenic, Alzheimer's. It's nuts. And so this is one of those things where if you want to feel good,

you do this on a regular basis. So what are the basic tips, if you're not going to get chelated, what are the basic tips for detoxifying? For detoxifying not just metals, or you mean metals? Metals. I mean, it all works for everything, but how do you? One of my favorite compounds is glutathione. And you can increase glutathione levels by increasing vitamin C,

by taking N-acetylcysteine. I manufacture a glutathione and you can increase glutathione levels by increasing vitamin c by taking n-acetylcysteine i manufacture a glutathione pill you can get intravenous glutathione which acid and you do iv glutathione at your clinics right yeah yeah and we do it at upgrade labs in la for people to recover better um alpha lipoic acid is another thing selenium can help and zinc zinc can help the natural chelator. Cilantro. But surprisingly, you want to take cilantro only after you've removed most of the metal from your body because cilantro can actually move heavy metals into the brain because it's one of the things that can also penetrate the blood barrier.

So you go through and you say, you know, I'm just going to build some of these in on a regular basis. And then you need fiber. You need to poop and pee and sweat. Shocking how those work. One of the things I write about in here. Triple P therapy. So there's something called modified citrus pectin, where they take the white rind of oranges and lemons and they modify it with an enzyme that is shown to really nicely bind to all these heavy metals. The problem though, if you start taking large doses of that when you're young, it can actually do bad things to you.

So this is something that you might take occasionally when you're young and you might take it more often as you age. And in superhuman, there's other stuff, Mark, that people would never know about and probably something that's really interesting. I interviewed Dr. Andrew Newhouse from Vanderbilt University, wrote the first study on nicotine as a way to cure Alzheimer's disease. Not smoking.

Smoking and using tobacco are bad for you. But using oral nicotine, a spray or a gum or a lozenge or a patch. And there is an argument that I make in Superhuman that says, as you age, you might want to use one or two milligrams. We're talking like 5% of what's in a cigarette, small amounts of nicotine in order to enhance cognitive function and reduce your risk of Alzheimer's. And a lot of vaping and smoking, this is not an argument to do that, but it's to say small amounts of those will improve cognitive function. They

feel good and they are probably anti-aging compounds as long as you don't overdo it. So I talk about how would you use that? How would you do that? And it's not an excuse to smoke. It's certainly not to vape. It's just looking at that little spray thing you get. Yeah. I was just trying to spray it under my tongue and get me high. Every time you do it, you feel great. I'm just worried about Alzheimer's, Mark. I mean, you're 60 now. I'm not worried about you. Oh my God. Okay. And I figured out from a computer science AI, which is my background, computer security,

there's an algorithm that runs in our minds that drives our behavior. And it's the same algorithm that all life shares, whether it's plants or animals. And the first thing that gets all of our attention 10 times more than anything else is anything that's scary, you have to run away from, you have to hide or basically kill anything that's dangerous. So that's why we're also triggered right now. There's this floating potential menace that may or may not be on surfaces or anything like, like just fear everywhere. But there's also all kinds of other things that are fearful.

So that steals your attention and it steals your energy. And then whatever's left over, if you don't feel like something's, you know, that anxiety, then the second thing that all life does, you eat everything because famines kill most species some of the time. So five times more energy goes into what's for lunch than it actually deserves. And then once we've done those cupboard or fall. And so like people are feeling guilty about this. It's no wonder that if someone puts a cookie in front of you, that the cookies like eat me. No. And the cookie says, eat me. And you say, no. And eventually it's like arguing with a two-year-old. You go,

okay, I'll just have half the cookie. And then you beat yourself up later and say, I'm a bad person. But the little part of you, these mitochondria that are the ones telling you to eat the cookie, they control your energy. So if they think they're in control and they haven't been trained to just not care about cookie because they know more is coming, then you spend a lot of time. I found a study, Mark, 30% of people's thoughts are about their next meal. What if you could free up 30% of your thoughts to think about being nice to other people or just to watch Breaking Bad over and over? It doesn't matter. It's free time and it's free thoughts that are not yours right now. So if the first one's fear, the second one's food, there's something else all life does to stay alive forever. Mark, can you figure out that one is also an F word?

Oh, yes. It's a fornication. Oh, Mark, I was thinking fertility, but oh, my goodness, I'm really embarrassed. But yeah, OK, I think it could be the other effort. So three times more energy goes into that and now let me ask you this mark have you ever done something that you're ashamed of that wasn't one of those three things eating fleeing fighting well basically fear fear food and the other F word. You know. You'll actually have 10 things. But in all seriousness, yeah. Yeah, I might have said inappropriate things here and there in a crowd.

I don't know. But usually the inappropriate things in a crowd are coming from fear. Fear. At the end of the day. For sure. Like you said, because something was triggering you. And that's how, that's the human condition. And what fasting does that's really cool is fasting allows you to say, okay, I'm going to teach my body to not worry

so much about food. I'm going to turn off the voice in my head. And from that perspective, it frees up so much energy. And then biologically, it does something else that's magic. Because when you have enough energy, you're able to emotionally regulate better than otherwise. So you're saying, but Dave, if you fast, you'd have less energy. But the cool thing is when you fast, the mitochondria, the little power plants in your cells, the ones that can't make it for four hours without food or for 16 hours or 18 hours, however long you're fasting, the body goes, wait a minute, I guess I should go to the trouble of getting rid of the weak mitochondria and replacing them with strong ones. And so now you've given yourself a power upgrade because now you can generate more power when you do eat. And the only thing that's left is how do we overcome that part of us that says, eat the

cookie, eat the cookie. And for that, I'm a busy guy. I am CEO right now of four companies, not Bulletproof. I hired a CEO for that, but these are Upgrade Labs and Bulletproof Media. And I write books like you do, and you know how busy life gets. And I'm a dad and I'm a husband. Right. And so with all of these things, I really want my energy

to be where I want it to be. And fasting lets you do that, except if you're hungry and distracted and anxious and cold and shaky, which does happen, especially when people start fasting. So over the course of the last 10 years, people have lost a million pounds on the Bulletproof diet, including intermittent fasting. And I've learned a few things from talking with thousands of people about this, as well as my own experience. What happens when you fast and you fast the old way? So I'm just going to go two days without food, like you would in a cave. After about two days, you start making ketones and ketones are the preferred fuel for the neurons in your brain. And if you, if you put the neuron in a Petri dish with sugar and with ketones, it'll eat ketones

first because ketones have more energy than sugar. So the body's like, yeah, of course, there's parts of your body that really require carbs on a regular basis too. So you don't want to be in ketosis all the time, but the reason spiritual traditions fast for at least two days, much of the time is because clarity comes on and all the energy that's going into digestion stops and you get a power upgrade because now you're burning fat instead of sugar. And you're like, oh man, like I feel so good. I feel so clean.

And you stop being hungry after two days of fasting. But who can have a job? Who can have multiple jobs like you and me and like most people listening here and deal with all the crap in the world and being hungry. So there are hacks that turn off hunger during fast. So you can actually go through a day and skip breakfast and maybe even skip lunch and just not worry about food and take that 30% of thoughts, that second effort and just remove it and go, Oh, I guess, yeah, I could eat lunch. I could not eat lunch. I'm okay. Either way,

no thoughts, no willpower involved. And so during the week, how do you do that? And that's why fast this way. That's why I wrote it because the first stepping off a cliff to do your first, even your first intermittent fast, it's a little bit scary. This is to remove the pain of fasting so we can all be high functioning humans. And then on the weekend, I teach, I do a spiritual fast. But here's the first hack for coffee, for fasting.

It is coffee and just black coffee. The amount of caffeine in two small cups of coffee, so about a medium size, large cup of coffee is enough to double ketone production in studies. And when you get your

ketones up to a very low coffee, not, not bulletproof coffee, just plain coffee, plain black coffee or caffeine tablet would do it. If you really are into that kind of things, which I don't really recommend, but it's the caffeine itself, not coffee. Coffee has its own set of powers apart from caffeine. And in those studies, doubling ketone production is pretty good. So let's say that you already slept for eight hours, even if you had a snack right before bed, which is a bad idea. You've got eight hours of fasting, which raises ketones a little bit. And then you have some coffee with no sugar in it, no cream or nothing like that. And that alone is enough to help suppress hunger and turn off all the thoughts about

food that are distracting to you when you're trying to do it. If you can get your ketone levels up to 0.5, which is much less than the keto bro, haven't eaten carbs in a while, where you can get up to one or two or higher, just 0.5 is shown in studies to turn off the hunger hormone called ghrelin, which I know your listeners are familiar with, and to turn on CCK, which is the fullness hormone. So the first hack, black coffee. Second hack is make it bulletproof. And you put in grass-fed butter or ghee, and ghee has no milk protein whatsoever. Well-made ghee shouldn't trigger milk allergies, whether they're lactose or milk protein. I'm very sensitive to milk protein. I can handle butter just fine. And you add the MCT oil and

this for most people can kick their ketones up to that magic number. So then you've got energy from burning fat, but because you didn't have any sugar, your insulin levels didn't go up and you didn't turn on protein digestion. You're still getting the vast majority of the benefits of a fast. So if you do this, it's easier on the body, easier on the mind, and it lowers physiological stress. And that matters even more for women. And so the first one is black coffee. The second one is Bulletproof coffee. The third one is prebiotic fiber.

And this is a type of fiber that cannot be digested by the body. So you're not feeding yourself whatsoever, but it makes you feel really full and you can, it has bugs in your gut, feeds the good bugs in your gut. It helps to crowd out the bad ones. And one of the things that happens during a fast is that the bacteria in your gut, like we're getting a little stressed here. We got no food. When we're stressed, we make more of those fear compounds. Remember I said, all life practices that run away from kill or hide. So the bad guys in your gut, when they don't have food, they make something called lipopolysaccharides or LPS. And you're very familiar with this, Mark, because of your medical background.

But LPS crosses the gut barrier and it's a toxin and it creates a state of anxiety and hunger and it creates a state of inflammation. So what would happen if it also causes weight gain and diabetes? Yeah. LPS is really bad. And if you have bad gut bacteria, it's a problem. So what if during a fast, you took a prebiotic fiber that actually turned off hunger and fed the good guys and helped to crowd out the bad guys, but you didn't raise your insulin levels. You didn't turn on protein digestion. You just reduced the amount of toxins that were being formed in your gut. Well, what happens is the benefits of fasting without the pain. So now it's possible to do an intermittent fast. And I recommend at least 16 hours up to 18 or more. If you want to,

there's many different names for fasting and it's a good thing. Lots of people are popularizing fasting. So they'll put your cool brand names on it. And I've done the same thing. The Bulletproof Intermittent Fast is circa 2011. That was with Bulletproof Coffee. But we know so much more now about fasting than we did back in the early days where you can use any of these three, you can use all three of them together. And then suddenly during the week, you feel better than you did when you had breakfast.

And it isn't any cost. There's no pain at all. And then lunchtime rolls around. And because you're still not that hungry, you make better food choices. Like, you know, I think I'll have the salad instead of the hamburger. And you can really, really just have more control biologically. And those three things matter as well as just understanding the base psychology behind it all. So you're basically talking about a phenomenon we call time-restricted eating and hacks to make it

easier, which is giving your body a break from, let's say after dinner. And by the way, listen, if you have dinner at six o'clock in the evening and you have breakfast at eight, that's a 14 hour fast. That's the other hack. Have dinner early. Like who would have thought, right? Have dinner early. If you have dinner at five, you can eat breakfast at nine. That's a 16 hour fast, right? So it doesn't have to be as onerous as it sounds. And what you're saying is that by doing that, you are going to create a whole series of biological changes in your body that doesn't just make you feel better, have more energy, have better focus, but that actually deals with some of the fundamental biology of aging. Now you wrote

a book called superhuman. We had you on the podcast talking about it. But we used to think that, you know, longevity was genetic. You got handed a good deck of cards from your parents or you didn't. But it turns out that a lot of longevity is not determined by our genes, unless you're really lucky and you got those genes like UB Blake or, you know, he's like, I would have lived to a hundred and something years old. He says, if I wouldn't know, I was going to live so long. I would have taken better care of myself. You know, he smoked, he drank, he did all these horrible things. It's just not fair.

But that's not fair. But that's not most of us. We have to pay attention. But it turns out that what we do in terms of our lifestyle and our diet makes huge impact. And the understanding of fasting or intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating, or even longer fast, a day fast or a day fast a week or a three-day fast, they have profound effects in our biology to optimize all the pathways that lead to health and even longevity that help our energy, decrease our risk of disease, and do a whole series of different things.

So can you kind of take us down that road of what do we know about the science of this? Because it's really phenomenal. When you start to look at it, it's like, wow, you know, if you look at fasting or intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating or bulletproofproof fasting, or fasting mimicking diets, or ketogenic diets, they all do the same thing, which is rejuvenate your biology. It's really rejuvenative and regenerative medicine. It is so rejuvenating because, well, geez, there's a lot of pathways that are involved, but one of the most important one that I talked about there is mitochondrial biogenesis. So when you fast, your body will build new, stronger mitochondria. It's really important for aging. As we age, we lose the ability to combine air and food effectively.

And a lot of people have heard about intermittent training or high intensity interval training, you know, where you just exercise really hard for a brief period of time. And then the body's like, oh man, I might have to do that again. I guess I should get strong. So fasting is kind of the same thing, but for the mitochondria in the cells that go, oh, I might have to skip some meals again. I guess I should get strong. And everyone over age 40 has mitochondrial deficiency unless they're actively managing it. And 48% of people under age 40 have early onset mitochondrial deficiency unless they're actively managing it. And 48% of people under age 40 have early onset mitochondrial deficiency, according to research by Frank Schallenberger, who's been on my show. Has he been on yours? He's one of the ozone guys. Yeah.

Yeah. And he measures mitochondrial efficiency with a very serious set of oxygen masks and all kinds of stuff. So it's real data. So, okay. Number one, let's fix our mitochondria with fasting. Number two, your pancreas and to a certain extent, your liver makes enzymes and their job is to break down proteins and other food items that you eat. It's also enzymes job to go into the body and fix stuff. So you can only make so many enzymes per day. It's the maximum enzyme production capacity of the body. Well, what if, because you're not eating protein, you're not eating carbs during the fast. What if the pancreas is available to make enzymes for healing the body instead of for

digesting food? It will do that. And those two things work really well for aging. And there's a bunch of other things around AMPK, which caffeine or coffee can help with, sirtuins. And not a lot of people are talking about supplementation during fasting because some supplements break fasting. And since I wrote a lot about anti-aging supplements and all the other technologies and techniques in superhuman, I really got into the science about what supplements should you take when you're fasting and which ones should you not take? And tell us, tell us. And this is stuff I

haven't seen online. And this is from, you know, combing pub med. And I do a lot of background research when I write a book. So one of the most important enzymes that I think people should be taking when they fast to accelerate this breakdown of old tissues in the body, break up scar tissue, adhesions, is proteolytic enzymes. And the most common one is called seropeptase. And there are other formulas that I mentioned in the book that are essentially, hey, pancreas, now you don't have to do that. And these can break up the stuff that makes your blood sticky, like called thrombin and

fibrinogen. And if you do that when you're fasting, you're getting a whole deep tissue work out there that's really powerful. A lot of people who fast also miss out on electrolytes. Good old fashioned salt is something that's important, especially in the morning. When you first wake up, some sea salt or Himalayan salt is a good idea, as well as magnesium and potassium. So when you add these precious minerals in during a fast, you actually feel much better and you're keeping your body more balanced. Yeah, it's so true.

I literally take electrolytes every day. I have a little bottle of a liquid electrolytes. I just squirt it into the water. I drink Tom Brady does it drink water without electrolytes, which may explain his longevity and health. And I think when people get hydrated, they think, oh, I'm just drinking water. I'm going to be hydrated. But the truth is you want your inside of yourselves to be hydrated. Yes. The only way to get your inside of your cells hydrated is by having enough electrolytes. So if you just drink water without electrolytes, you can literally die. Yes. People do that in marathons all the time. Right. They, they, they dilute their blood.

So the salt in their blood goes so low that it causes seizures and coma and death. So you need electrolytes. You really do. Afraid of those. And I think for interest, cellular hydration, it's a really important strategy that most people don't use. And I think I'm a big fan of that in terms of really dealing with the fundamental hydration status of the body that makes everything else work better.

One of the things I do is I drink mineral water, which has a substantial amount of electrolytes in it. There's calcium, magnesium, potassium. There's probably less sodium in it, but I get plenty of sodium in my food. And it's funny when you're fasting or when you're not fasting, a little bit of salt when you first wake up takes the load off your adrenal glands.

And when you're fasting, it is a state of stress on the body. And it's not a bad stress unless you're already really stressed. In which case I tell you, maybe you ought not to fast. And it's not a bad stress unless you're already really stressed. In which case I tell you, maybe you want not to fast. If you've got a bad night's sleep, you're jet lagged. It's okay. Have some breakfast, just have some protein and some fat and breakfast. Don't have a lot of carbs and you're going to, you're going to feel better. So electrolytes help. The other thing is when you do the prebiotic fiber, that means that you have

more water sitting in your digestive system longer and it can absorb better. So it turns out having fiber helps you stay hydrated. And if you do fiber and electrolytes together, even during a fast, some people still say, well, wait, you can only have water during a fast because that's what the mice did. I'm like, yeah, but we're not mice and we have jobs and the mice just sit there and run on a wheel if they feel like it. So what we want to do is get the benefits of fasting and having a caloric surplus during a fast isn't going to work, but we're talking not very much from a calorie perspective and very specific types of calories that your body either doesn't use or doesn't use in a way that's going to break the fast. So you add your electrolytes, you add your, your digestive enzymes and away from those, the other supplement that I

talk about in fast this way, that's really important is activated charcoal. Now we talked about LPS at lipopolysaccharide. Those way before you get into the charcoal, explain what kind of prebiotic fiber you're talking about. Give us an example of some prebiotic fibers that you'd use. There are now a great variety of prebiotic fiber products on the market. And certainly I formulated one for Bulletproof, but the primary ingredient in many of them is acacia gum, which is basically a sap from a tree that is shown in studies to feed the good guys. You can also add a variety of oligosaccharides, hydrolyzed guar gum is another one that's out there. And there are literally dozens of formulas that are designed to be prebiotics. And I wrote a lot about these and looked into the anti-aging

effects of getting enough of this is called soluble fiber. This is not the chunky sawdust kind of metamucil or psyllium husk. I don't mean those. What I mean is the stuff that dissolves in water. And you do that. And magically, you'll probably have healthier poop. But most importantly, you're changing the ratio of the bacteria in your body. You can also take probiotics with prebiotics. And doing that during a fast is okay

as well. In fact, at that point, if you eat nothing and then you take the good guy prebiotic and the good guy probiotics, you're crowding out the bad guys pretty effectively. You might as well do that. You were fasting anyway. You didn't have breakfast. It's pretty easy to do. Now, if I do too much fasting or even intermittent or time-restricted eating, I'll tend to lose too much weight, which I probably shouldn't advertise in public. But it makes people jealous, right? Yeah. I mean, and I've worked hard at optimizing my metabolism, so I think I do very well. But are there some people who shouldn't really be doing this, that it's too much for their system? There's a whole chapter for women in Fast This Way

that's really important because, Mark, you and I know this, we probably don't say it enough. Most of the studies that you'll find on PubMed, they were done on young white men. And that's because that's who was in college and they used college students as guinea pigs. And until about 20 years ago, being the research. Yeah, exactly. These guys are cheap. We'll just, you know, they're fodder. And for women, fasting really is different. I have routinely seen women who go on a full ketogenic diet. This is why I've always recommended cyclical keto. That's at the core of the bulletproof thing, cyclical keto with low toxin plants.

And when you get that dialed in, it still can be a lot for women. So during certain times in your cycle, you know, it's okay to have breakfast. You already have enough biological stress. So you want to do your intermittent fasting on days when you're in pretty good shape and you don't want to do it when you're completely wrecked. And there's a benefit if you're not doing it every day, like you get, if you do it three days a week, is that good? I think for women, especially women who have a meaningful amount to lose, or if they are in perimenopause, especially try it three days a week or five days a week, but have breakfast a few times and don't have, you know, a bowl of carby cereal, but have some eggs and, you know, salmon or whatever you like

for breakfast. What you're going to find there is that if you do intermittent fasting every single day and your metabolism isn't up for it, it's too much of a stress. And the idea of stress is turn stress on, recover, turn stress on, recover. But if you just turn stress on and stay that way, after about six weeks, what you'll find is that women hit the wall first and their thyroid goes off and their sex hormones go off. So their cycle becomes irregular. They don't feel as good and their sleep quality goes down first. Guys take another couple of weeks on that.

If they're living a normal, stressful life, like, wait a minute, what happened? After you're used to it, after you've become trained on this, you can fast pretty much every morning. If you want to me, I do an intermittent fast five days a week, Saturday morning, I have breakfast with the kids and sometimes Sunday morning too. And you know what? Sometimes I even have carbs for breakfast, even though it's not good for me to say it was a Saturday morning, right? I just don't have gluten exactly. That's right. But they're almond, uh uh coconut flour pancakes that are from my cookbook food what the heck should i eat which are really good you know i do have that cookbook in the kitchen my 13 year old daughter reads it so yes mark uh that that is a good book so so i want i

want to sort of dig in a little geeky science here with you because I think that most people don't realize that all these strategies have a reason that we were designed and exquisitely adapted to starvation. We weren't designed to deal with the amount of abundant food supply we have now, which is about 700 plus calories more a day than we had per person 50 years ago. Right. Where are they going? It's going in all the junk food, processed food. I mean, snacking, that's a whole nother invention that I don't even understand that is just a way to sell more junk that we don't really need to be doing.

And so I'm not a big snacking person. If you have to snack, your last meal was broken. That's right. And that's a big part of the message in Fast This Way. You've got to eat in such a way that you don't have cravings. And then fasting becomes painless. And my kids have learned this. You know, my daughter, when she was 10, she said, Daddy, we get to school.

And right away, they start trying to make us have a snack. Don't the other kids have breakfast? I'm not hungry until lunch. And like she literally asked me that. She was just really genuinely curious. And it was so cute. But it was also so sad because some of her friends, their parents are vegan and doing their best. Their kids have a green apple for breakfast. No hungry green apples make you, how could you ever focus on a green apple? It's terrible. It's terrible. And so what

I was saying was that when you, when you look at our genetic adaptation, it's to starvation. So we have all these biological mechanisms that optimize our biology in the face of scarcity. And we clean up house, we clean garbage. You were mentioning the sort of mitochondrial renewal. You know, there's something people have heard about called autophagy, which is where you eat your own tissues and cells and recycle them. It's just like a recycling plant that gets rid of the garbage and the old stuff. You also have mitophagy, which is a way to recycle and renew mitochondria. And it all happens with the fasting. And in fact,

there's a great book, I'm sure you've heard of it, read years ago called Ending the First Cause of Death. And it's all about, it's all about this exactly. And this whole idea that was, I mean, decades ago, because Sid Baker, who was one of my functional medicine mentors, probably the real grandfather of clinical functional medicine, told me about it. And I was like, wow, this is great. It's a little book, a little dense, kind of geeky, but it's just up your alley there, Dave. And so the idea is that when you do that, all these things happen. You increase your cognitive function because you want to be able to find the next meal. So your mental alertness and acuity improves. Your metabolism increases the fat burning so you can burn off your fat stores.

You lose belly fat. You increase muscle mass. You increase bone density. You reduce inflammation. You activate your antioxidant enzymes. You increase stem cell production. So you literally go into a full-on rehab, repair, and remodel. It's like getting your old car and taking it to the body shop and cleaning out all the junk and putting in new parts. Essentially what happens when you do this kind of eating. So I think for all of us, it's worth thinking about how do we do this? And that's why your book Fast This Way is such a great addition to this whole literature because it really guides people on how to do it. I love the subtitle is Fast This Way, Burn Fat, Heal Inflammation,

and Eat Like the High-Performing Human You Were Meant to Be. And I think all of us settle for being less than high-performing humans. We all settle for what I call FLC syndrome. That's when you feel like crap. And we don't often know we feel like crap until we don't. And that's why I encourage people to check this book out, Fast This Way, and do what Dave's telling you, because it works. And unless you've tried it, unless you've given your body the gift of this experience of learning how to modulate your food intake, to change the timing, the frequency, the quality, the kind of food you eat, to try some of these hacks, you're not going to really

know what's available to you. All right, so let's dig in a little bit. Now, this last book, Headstrong, was about the mitochondria, which seems like an esoteric thing. It seems like a complicated word, but you sort of explained that there are these little bacteria-like organelles inside our cells, and there's hundreds to thousands and tens of thousands in some cells. And they basically take food that you eat and they take oxygen that you breathe

and they turn it into energy that runs every system in your body. And there's byproducts. There's water that you pee out and carbon dioxide that you breathe out. And then there's waste products that your body has to deal with. And that whole process is at the center of everything that matters in terms of cancer heart disease diabetes dementia Alzheimer's yeah yeah all these things are related

even autism yes are related to mitochondrial dysfunction and there's a woman Suzanne Goh who's an extraordinary scientist from Harvard, Oxford, pediatric neurologist, who's discovered on the autistic brains that the mitochondria aren't working well. There's no energy in these kids' brains. And so they give them mitochondrial stuff, support, and these kids get better. You may not know this, but I met the clinical definition of Asperger's syndrome until my early 20s. Yeah, it's brain mitochondria. You don't make enough energy, you don't have enough energy to filter out all the noise from the world around you. And of course, you're not going to make social skills. That's less important than just being able to know what's going on. And what I'm finding in the research in Headstrong shows

48% of people under age 40 have early onset mitochondrial dysfunction. It means you take a unit of food and a unit of air and you get less than a unit of energy. And everyone over age 40 has mitochondrial dysfunction. They call it aging. I think it's still early onset. Our mitochondria don't have to decline with time and it comes from poor management. And if you think about it,

if they really are ancient bacteria, which we're sure they are, then what you have is you have a gut biome, all these bacteria in your gut, and you have another network of bacteria that's trying to run your system, that's an integral part of your system. And if you treat that as carefully as you treat the gut in your bacteria, or frankly, you treat your compost pile so that it makes good soil, it's all the same activity. And bacteria actually do think.

They have not real brains, but they have a process. They have an algorithm for staying alive. If you make them happy and you tell them only the strong survive and you do the things that you would do to maintain any biome like that, you can actually have way more energy than really Mother Nature intended. I think we can do that. And that's what I want to dig in. And I just want to sort of share this story that I heard the other day about the role of mitochondrial therapy in treating ALS. Now, you might not have heard this study, but the mitochondria require certain nutrients and certain factors. One of them is called NAD. And we're going to talk about that.

And this is taken as a supplement. It also has some resveratrol, which is from red wine, also as a mitochondrial regulator. It controls these master genes that affect inflammation, that affect oxidative stress, that help produce more energy. And there was a preliminary study done. Now, there's been many, many drugs studied for ALS. None of them work. Even the best, best, best one that got approved reduces the decline by about 15%, but you still decline. They did an interventional trial using NAD and resveratrol, which actually stopped and actually improved patients with ALS. And they regained function, which is something that's completely out of the

medical paradigm. That just doesn't happen. And it's one of 10 different mitochondrial stimulation strategies, all of which will help ALS. So what are the things that nuke your mitochondria? What are the things people are doing every day that mess them up, that decrease their energy, that affect their ability to function, think, and be? The first one is eating damaged fats or bad fats. And we hear about this thing called a cellular membrane,

but it's not really a membrane. It's a collection of tiny droplets of fat and your mitochondria have their own little bag of fat that they're held in it's like a baggie that holds all the contents of your cells made up of fat correct and then there's another one that holds the cell itself so if you eat the wrong fats particularly fried foods even if you fry them in coconut oil or butter it's still not good to fry because the heat damages oils then your body gets these oils and it goes, what do I do with these? I'm going to try and build mitochondria that are supposed to take energy and or take food and air and make energy, but they can't do it because their membrane

isn't flexible enough. It gets damaged. So I call them FLS, funny looking fats. There you go. And just don't eat that stuff. You don't need the fried calamari like it's just not good eat the guacamole so that's one thing another thing is there are toxins a variety of toxins that some of which come from mother nature and some which come from from man and if you eat these even in relatively low amounts they will affect your mitochondrial function and the most confusing part that's made this hard for medicine and particularly nutrition is that different DNA, different backgrounds can affect which toxins really mess with you. In my case, in my family history,

it turns out somewhere on my mother's side, because this is a mitochondrial thing, mitochondria only come from your mom, not your dad. My people don't handle something called nightshade vegetables very well. And this is potatoes, tomatoes, hot peppers. Good thing you're not Italian. Yeah, no kidding. I just think Italian and Greek food are full of it.

And I grew up dearly loving green chili in New Mexico. And if I eat even one bite of foods from that family, this is a deadly nightshade family, but some people metabolize it. For me, I get joint pain, brain brain fog muffin top like it's just it's bad and what if you take the seeds out and peel it even if i even if i do that it just doesn't matter i'm highly sensitized to it and my daughter's not that way but i am and it's irritating but that doesn't mean for someone listening that it's bad for them so a third of cases of rheumatoid arthritis are caused by this family. It's a mitochondrial problem, but it's only a problem for people with that genetic set.

So what I recommend people do on the Bulletproof Diet, I put a set of suspect foods. These are foods that may cause problems for you, but they may be good for you. Right. So it's not that simple to say, oh, here's the standard MRE, military ready-to-eat ration that everyone can eat. It's not like that. But you have to know what are your kryptonite foods that lower your mitochondrial function. And the first sign of mitochondrial function, even without lab tests and all the expensive cool stuff, if you eat it and you get a massive sugar craving afterwards or you get massively tired and you can't remember things your brain is stuffed with mitochondria has the most mitochondria of any part in the body so you're going to feel it in your

brain first if you can't focus after lunch and you're just dying for dessert you ate something that whacked your mitochondria it may have hit them directly or it may have just crashed your blood sugar like msg will do either way you crash your blood sugar your mitochondria freak out and they get stressed and it's not a good stress. Exercise is a good stress, but that kind of stress is not. So you got the fried foods, which is gonna kill your mitochondria.

You've got food toxins, but they're different for different people. But you've also got other things you eat. And what is the main thing? And I've written many books about this. It's a clue, it's a hint. Grain. Yes. And the answer is? the answer is grain sugar oh sugar there we go you know i would have i don't know mark i i don't

i don't like sugar sugar is bad for you but i don't know if sugar is worse than than grains which are essentially made out of sugar but covered with other toxins from other nature but i'm a 100% with you. If you eat sugar, especially drink sugar, what ends up happening is the mitochondria get a burst of sugar saying, yay, but then they're dead. Like they don't actually die,

but they're out of energy. And it's that sudden spike and sudden crash. It causes metabolic damage far beyond just mitochondria. I mean, we eat 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour, which is worse than sugar. That's almost three, we eat 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour, which is worse than sugar. That's almost three quarters of a pound a day of flour and sugar. That is poison for a mitochondria. And that accelerates aging and causes this pre-diabetes and insulin resistance. That is a huge driver. And then there's also other things, toxins,

other toxins. And I had mercury poisoning. I was about to say mercury. Good. I had mercury poisoning and I had chronic fatigue syndrome and my muscles were damaged. I had a muscle enzyme called CPK really high, which is really a sign of your muscle cells exploding because there's no energy. And I had severe pain and aching all the time. And it was because of these environmental toxins. And there's a lot of them.

And some people are more susceptible than others. Mercury is a big issue because we've been burning coal for so long that when you burn coal, it releases mercury into the air and then it comes down in rain and gets in our fish. And some types of fish are much better than others. And you and I have both written about the type of fish that you wanna eat like salmon, not farm salmon,

but wild salmon, sardines, herring, anchovies. All the stuff that people don't like, I like them. All the stinky fish, right? But those are the ones that are safest. But I also had mercury poisoning and lead poisoning when I was younger. And I remember the first time I got treated for it, my wife was like, Dave, your skin is pink. You've always been gray.

And what happens when these toxins are present? Just look a little lead-like. Yeah, you look lead-like. And you're actually creating a condition called pseudo hypoxia, which is when your mitochondria just can't use air and food because they've been poisoned. So you get this sort of backed up system metabolically and you feel gray and your skin looks gray.

Your circulation isn't good and you get that horrible muscle pain that was just a part of my life until I was about 30. So what do you do to rebuild and revitalize your mitochondria? Stay away from sugar, fried foods, environmental toxins, your kryptonite foods, but what are the things that we can actually do to rejuvenate them and to live to be 180? Well, the good thing is there's way more mitochondrial organelles, these little bacteria in your body than there are cells in your body and they are replaceable. So the first thing you want to do is you want to tell them only the strong survive.

And there's a few ways to do that. Is that what you call your book, Headstrong? Yeah, exactly. And so you sort of need to manage them like a system instead of like little individual things. So you want to take the weakest 20% of your mitochondria and you want to tell them die. And that sounds a little bit brutal,

but here's what happens when they die. Fresh new young ones sprout in their place. How do you kill them? All right, here's one of my favorite techniques from Headstrong. Tomorrow morning, when you take a shower, take a nice warm shower, at the end of the shower with the water hitting you

right in the forehead and chest, turn it to full cold. That sounds like great advice. That sounds so much fun. I can't wait to do it in the morning. After eight seconds, you're going to be like, Dave Asprey's a jerk. But if you stick with me for four days, the next day you'll do it, you'll last like 20 seconds. And what's going to happen is the voice in your head, which is your mitochondria, is going to say, you're going to die.

You must get out. It's unbearable to be in here. But you rationally know, if I'm in here for one minute, I'm not going to die. But it feels like it, and you believe that feeling but what you're doing is you're telling the mitochondria if you can't make enough energy to keep yourself warm for just a minute of cold water then you're weak and you should die and that's them saying please don't kill me please don't kill me you're gonna die and when you do that after the fourth day you're like you know what this isn't that cold in fact i feel invigorated my skin is tighter.

I'm losing weight. I feel good. I sleep better. Like, it's really powerful. And we're talking one minute of cold water. Wow. But four days of pain first. And then all of a sudden, just believe me.

Just try it for a week. You're like, you know what? I like my life when I do this. You're like the ice man. Yeah. This is like the weak version of that. You don't have to go swimming. I find, you know, when I was sick with chronic fatigue fatigue the only thing that would give me like a few hours of

relief would be to take a steam or a really hot yeah uh bath and then i would jump in an ice bath correct and that would kind of flush everything out and i'd feel like a minute of clarity and energy and the thing is this doesn't require liquid nitrogen like we have at bulletproof labs do cryotherapy it's low tech's free, everyone can do it. And if we all just did that, the measurable incidents of all chronic disease would go down across the country. Okay, that's a great tip.

So what else can we do for our mitochondria? There's two kinds of exercise that matter. And I looked up all the research on this stuff. And your job with exercise is to make yourself grow healthy, young mitochondria, but also to grow more mitochondria because who wouldn't want a bigger battery on their iphone right so one kind of exercise in there that low battery mode right right that's shut off all the operating apps and just like

our body will do that you know the last thing is your brain but you know the rest of you it's like you don't have to repair it and regenerate why would you do that you don't have enough energy just keep it for the brain keep it for the lungs you don't have to repair it and regenerate. Why would you do that? You don't have enough energy. Just keep it for the brain. Keep it for the lungs. You're totally right. And what I end up doing for this exercise stuff is one body of research says if you move for 20 minutes a day, it has a set of behavior on maintaining youthful mitochondria. So this means not like running. You don't have to go get all dressed up in your Lulu outfit, although you might want to. But all you have to do is just go for a walk.

You don't have to run. You don't have to do anything crazy. Just move for 20 minutes a day. That's it? Well, that's step one. Okay. All right. That sounds too easy.

And if you want to really grow more mitochondria and get all the benefits for anti-aging, there's another body of research that says at least once and maybe twice a week, you need to do something really hard for 10 to 15 minutes. Meaning basically actually it's hard enough. So you're going to throw up pretty much. It's what I recommend in the book is, is that once a week you want to sprint and you want to run about 400 yards, like a tiger's chasing you and then lay down on your back it's actually important to lay down on your back instead of stand there and there's a whole different thing that happens in the brain when you do that around recovering faster you do that three times and then you know you can just say all right i'm done that's not very much pain and it's not very much

work and it actually is going to replace being on a spinning thing, you know, every day for the week. The idea here is... You can exercise far less time and get far more benefit. In fact, we created Bulletproof Labs in Santa Monica, which is a facility that has equipment to help people do this with technology. Because the idea is, if you're commuting home every day, and you're commuting to work, and you have kids and a family and responsibilities, you just don't have time to do 90 minutes a day working out. That's the good news.

Yeah, I mean, I read a study years ago where they looked at of family and responsibilities, you just don't have time to do 90 minutes a day. That's the good news. Yeah. I mean, I read a study years ago where they looked at giving people 30 minutes of interval training, which is what you're talking about, three times a week versus 60 minutes, six days a week of just like a run, light jog, like a regular aerobic exercise. And at the end of 12 weeks, the group that only exercised 30 minutes three times a week, far less exercise, had 9% less body fat and were far more fit doing far less exercise. If you get more fit in less time, it's awesome. And here's what's really going on, Mark.

And this ties into your functional medicine background. It's relatively easy to whack yourself over the head in the gym. And I see so many CEOs who, well, you know, I'm running my company, I just flew to Japan and back, and I'm going to do an Ironman triathlon. And I'm like, let me guess, your adrenals are shut. Yeah, you can't sleep, you have no sex drive. Your joints hurt all the time. And like, how did you know? It's like, well, here's what happens when you don't recover enough. Yeah. Well, what happens is exactly that hormones crash,

adrenals crash, testosterone goes down. Women oftentimes get monthly hormone problems. And it just goes- So if you overexercise, your sex life goes to pot. It really does. And also if you're constantly stimulating

instead of recovering, it just doesn't work. So our job is to actually be masters of recovery, which means small amounts of targeted stimulation. Great news, that takes less time. And then recovery. And recovery means you sleep. It also means that if you're in a toxic relationship that you fix it. It means that if you have a lot of emotional stress, old trauma, PTSD, substance abuse problems, eating disorders, you deal with that stuff. Because if you have chronic stress from just being unhappy, that's enough stress even without exercise.

And if you have lots of travel stress, you're jet lagged. Maybe you don't want to hit the gym really hard. Maybe you just want to take it easy and get some extra sleep and get a massage. And to recognize that the massage makes you just as good of a person as going to the gym and lifting heavy things. It's recovery that matters. That's good to know. I'm going to write that down. Yeah. You know, you, you, um, you said something that are very, you know, hopeful is we can actually change our mitochondria by changing

our thoughts, that our thoughts actually are being eavesdropped on by our mitochondria. And that if you have a set of beliefs or attitudes that are keeping you stressed, because, you know, you and I live very crazy lives, but both of of us aren't really stressed we just seem to kind of go through every day and have a good time and you enjoy life right you can do big things and still be happy in fact my next book comes out in december one of the big themes in it is that you can only do big things if you work on happiness first right and whether your goal is to do big things or just do the things that make you happy, you will not have healthy functioning cells if you have a belief system that says everything's a threat. Because the mitochondria, they want to keep your

petri dish alive no matter what. And if they believe that you believe there's a tiger present, even if the tiger is just the next email or the next Facebook post or the next time that you're getting in a fight with your boss or whatever it is. If that looks like a tiger to a dumb little bacteria, they're going to constantly change their metabolism and be ready to fight. And you'll be in that fight or flight mode. And there's a complex thing that happens with neuropeptides, these little tiny chains of amino acids, little protein fragments that are signals throughout the body. And another thing that most people don't know about, when your heartbeat changes to get ready to run away from a tiger,

there's a magnetic field around your heart shaped like a donut, and it's tipped eight degrees to the left, and you can measure this. This isn't the woo-woo side of things. This is hard physics. And if there's the electrical current, it makes a magnetic field.

We also have proven that mitochondria are sensitive to magnetic fields. That means that they're listening to your heart. And you're ready to run your heartbeat changes predictably and if they're getting that signal and they're getting neuropeptides of stress they're gonna be like screw recovery screw repair who cares about cancer there's a tiger here it's going to eat me cancer doesn't matter it doesn't know it's just your imagination that you think your spouse has having an affair which may not be true you still get the same response exactly and if that's running the show your body will naturally make sure that you stay alive right now and not worry about preventing death 20 years from now

because if you miss this one the one down the road doesn't matter and if you realize they're dumb they're little bacteria they care about three things mark this mitochondria number one run away from kill or hide from scary things because if you miss that one it's game over the petri dish is dead okay number two eat everything right because otherwise if you don't eat within a month you're going to starve to death and maybe that's not true for us but that's what they think they're dumb little bacteria so the algorithm is eat everything this is why if someone puts a plate of cookies in front of you it's really hard not to think about the cookies they just keep calling to you They're actually not calling to you.

It's your mitochondria going, hey, is that food? Hey, is that food? Eat it, eat it, eat it. Although I believe if you change your brain chemistry and your hormones, that it won't really look like food anymore. I walk by the Starbucks caray of pastries,

those cakes and scones and donuts and muffins, and I'm like, it doesn't look like food. Even if I'm hungry, I'm like, oh, that doesn't look like food. It's a rock. Why would I eat a rock? You are absolutely, absolutely correct. I used to want to eat it. I used to go to like the airport when I was traveling around.

You can sneak around and buy a Cinnabon when no one was looking. And I'd get the one with nuts because I thought that was healthier. We've had such a similar path. I used to have these cravings like i've got willpower i forget willpower comes from mitochondria it's energy i've got willpower but every time you say no to these you're using a little bit of willpower till you run out and they're like i'll just have half the cookie right and then you feel like a bad person you're using science and a willpower to fix the problem and what happens with me now the same thing you look at that and i'm like those don't

make me feel good those aren't food and i just i would never eat one i would rather eat nothing like i would eat it if i wanted to like i'm not gonna go i'm not gonna eat if i want to but like i just it doesn't attract me the desire is gone and it's sort of striking and and sometimes if i get eating a little too much chocolate and sugar then it starts oh that might be interesting to eat and then i stop and i'm like it goes away so it's all hormones and biology it really is i can tell you in the last 10 years there's one time I've had grains and it was actually when we were hanging out, Mark, in Greece at Vishen Lakhiani's event.

And we're on some little Greek island and there's a guy at a little guest house and he said, here's some baklava. It was made by my grandmother from local wheat and honey. I'm like, you know, I'm eating that. I took some charcoal with it. I felt great the next day. It was fine.

At least in Europe, it's better, right? It is. But that sort of thing, to be willing and acceptance, but just to not see it that way, that's mitochondrial. Yeah, it's so true. Okay, so now let's get into one of our favorite topics, which is fat. I love fat.

We love fat. And it's very relevant to the mitochondria. So tell us how you sort of came to figure out that MCT oil, which is this derivative of coconut oil that has superpowers for your mitochondria. How did you figure that out? And tell us why we should use it. Well, mitochondria can burn three different energy sources. They can burn sugar and they love to do that because it's quick and easy and dirty and leaves a lot of exhaust. A lot of exhaust, meaning it leaves oxidative stress

and free radicals that causes inflammation and aging. So it's like dirty fuel. Dirty fuel, exactly. And they can actually burn protein, which is a horrible thing to do for energy. You wanna use protein as a building block, but if you eat like a high protein diet, like I did in the 90s,

what happens is they can break this down, but talk about metabolic just disaster, at least even more dirt than sugar does, right? So enough protein to restore all your cells, build strong muscles, strong bones, healthy skin, super important. Excessive protein without any either fat or carbs, really bad for you.

And then they can burn fat, but most of the time they're not trained to burn fat. So you end up in this situation where if you eat fat, you don't really use it, especially because you're usually eating it in the form of a donut. And when you eat fat with sugar, it's deadly. Exactly. I call that sweet fat. It doesn't work at all.

So what's left then is this diet that started out in about the year I was born. The Atkins diet was the first modern diet that had ketosis involved. Ketosis is this period where your body says, oh, in order to stay alive, I have to burn fat. Let me get good at it. And this is a state that's been known for thousands of years because every meditation tradition has this period of fasting. And when you stop eating for four days, the body's like- Your brain turns on. Yeah. You're like, I feel so good. And now you can experience oneness with the universe, and you can meditate effectively, and it actually works. The problem is that it's kind of hard to

hold down a job and take care of your kids if you're not eating at all for long periods of time and living in a monastery. So- Yes. The original version- So we've run a hack. Right. It was like, let's eat bacon and pork rinds and artificial sweeteners, which was the original Atkins diet. And you know what?

I lost half of my 100 pounds on that diet in the early 90s. And then, of course, you gain it back and you can't lose the other half because you're toxic and you don't feel good. So what happened is I started running an anti-aging nonprofit group in the San Francisco Bay Area in Silicon Valley. And I started meeting all these experts in metabolism years ahead of their time and having them do presentations for the public. This was the first group to import coconut oil into the US after it was banned. And we had found some studies that said coconut oil is really a powerful thing. And coconut oil is about 52% of this thing called MCT oil. And there's four classes of MCT oil. It turns out that the cheapest

and most abundant MCT oil doesn't have this ability to turn into ketones for your body to burn. But about 15% of the fat found in coconut oil has that ability. And 5% of the fat, the most precious 5% is able to dramatically elevate the ketones in your body, which means if you eat coconut oil, it's better than a lot of other oils, but it's not going to put you in ketosis any more than eight hours of fasting. And that's a study from UC San Diego that found that out. But the stuff we use in brain octane, which is that most rare form of MCT, brain octane is a bulletproof product. That stuff is able to raise ketones four times more than coconut oil and what this means is that if you're eating a low carb but not a no carb diet and you

put some of that stuff in your bulletproof coffee you pour it on your salad put it in your smoothie the way i do i do it three times a day you always have ketones circulating in your body and when ketones are present your mitochondria i mean they're dumb little bacteria they're like hey i got energy from fat. I've got energy from whatever else you're eating, some carbs from your vegetables, et cetera. I'm going to ask about MCT oil right now. There you go.

And this came about, no one knew that brain octane was better. There was no university research, but I experimented with the different ones to figure out why normal MCT oil was giving me, we called it disaster pants. It was so common in the early days. Great for constipation. Exactly. And brain octane oil didn't do that, but more, I got a really strong mental edge from that, that I didn't get from the other forms of MCT. And that was why we built that into the recipe for Bulletproof. And then research came out years after we started and basically saying,

oh, it does raise ketones four times more. But here's the lesson for everyone listening, Mark. It's that if you feel a difference, it's okay to believe what you feel and notice from your food, right? I did not have any data. I made a decision based on, oh, I ran a self-experiment.

I felt a difference. I'm gonna do what works. And if you apply that to your food in your life, any data i made a decision based on wow i ran a self-experiment i felt a difference i'm going to do what works and if you apply that to your food in your life and if your doctor or your friend or your nutritionist or some online guru says this food is good for you and you eat it and you do what they said and you feel like crap yeah it's okay to do something different and doesn't make a bad person no i always say the smartest doctor in the room is your own body amen listen to your body because they're going to tell you what works and doesn't. And talk about once you do that, the various kinds of ways that people are fasting and what you really recommend. Mark, you've talked about the

genetics of aging. I mentioned that 300 pounds. I had arthritis when I was 14. I had all the diseases you expect when you're 70, when I was in my twenties. So I did not get that great genetic start. And if I can walk around at 48 with about 10.2, 10.5% body fat, the New York times says that I'm almost muscular. And I don't over, you're slacking. You're slacking, Dave. I'm like 7%. I don't over you're slacking you're you're slacking Dave I'm like seven percent I don't know what is going on with you I know like we're in a competition to get to 180 but like you know you got to work on that three percent there Dave I'm I'm feeling I feel like a failure right now it's it's one of those things though where where that that idea of fasting as being as

important as exercise may be more important than exercise, although I think they're both important. Why is it that people are willing to spend an hour a day in a spin class, which is probably creating overtraining anyway, but they're not willing to skip breakfast sometimes? I think skipping breakfast is easier and it's okay to do both. It's just from a return on investment thing that it's the most important thing that I could think of. Even if you're not committed to changing your diet, even if you're going to eat all the things that you and I know are not real food, fasting can still help. It's just a lot easier and it helps more if you eat the right way.

And one of the things that's really behind fasting, Mark, is the idea that fasting is just going without. And in the book, I talk about, okay, let's think through what happens emotionally when you say you're going to go without something. We have other kinds of fasting that you probably haven't thought of. The keto diet is fasting from carbs. The vegan diet is fasting from animals. I don't know why you'd want to do that

if you want to live healthy for a long time, but maybe for a couple of weeks to turn on. That's another podcast. But, and Hey, go pig in. There you go. The, uh, uh, the, the thing that's also happening, you fast from substances that's called, you know, addiction or sobriety, you know, addiction treatment or sobriety. And we have fasting from people. It's called solitude. And we have fasting from the, the, the end of the book, I actually tell people try fasting from hate, right? I'll start with fasting from sex or at least porn for a brief period of time. Cause your body feels like you're, you're going to die. If you don't have sex frequently, you're not going to die. If you don't have sex for a couple of

weeks, you're not going to die. If you don't have food for a month, but you feel like you're going to die if you don't have sex frequently. You're not going to die if you don't have sex for a couple of weeks. You're not going to die if you don't have food for a month, but you feel like you're going to die if you don't have food for a brief period. We're talking about skipping breakfast, but the body's like, no. So that's the thing. How do you create a sense of safety when you're going without something that you think you need, that you feel like you need, but you know you don't need. And just by doing that for brief periods of time, it's just like lifting weights. It's just like exercise, but it's exercise for your emotional body. It's exercise for your spiritual body. It's exercise for your physical body, including those subcellular things that you just talked about. And when we change our mindset to fasting as just exercise,

we can do exercise, Right. And you might feel like you're going to die on the treadmill, but you know, you won't and you do it anyway every day. So we're just going to normalize fasting and also acknowledge Mark. It's a lot less painful than my workouts, my trainer. I was like, I don't know. That's my wife. No more reps, please. Yeah. He makes me do pushups with bands. You know, you put like a, Oh, that's so cool i love bands like i'm like holy cow well i mean you are looking a little bit bigger in the shoulders there so all that tom brady stuff seems like it's working yes it is there was something else i know i'm not exactly answering your question but you mentioned tom brady the

other part of his longevity he figured out like i did that nightshades um the lectin problem with nightshades for me but not for, for about a third of people. Man, those things cause cravings like no one's business. If you give me nightshades like potatoes or bell peppers or eggplants, man, I want to eat sugar like no one's business. So you've got to find the foods that don't trigger things. How can you give up tomatoes? I just can't give up tomatoes. Yeah. I'll still eat some fresh tomatoes.

I just take out the seeds and you peel them. And this is, it was a core part of tomato off the vine in the garden and a hot August summer day. Well, you have a garden experience. I live in an organic farm and that that's something that, that I also would encourage people to fast from junk food and industrial meat and things like that. Now there's a fast I can get behind. Fast from industrial food. I love that. It's a real type of fast. You say, look, I'm going to go without

because there are people, in fact, a great many people listening right now, they're going, you mean I can't have Skittles? I can't have Reese's peanut butter cups. I can't have Cheetos or whatever the thing is. Well, you can have them. I'm telling you that fast from them because your body feels like you're going to die if you don't have those. And the side effect of a fast like that, Mark, is as you all know, it builds soil. And we have pigs, sheep, turkeys, chickens, and a great number of vegetables growing on my organic farm. I feed my local community and I'm building soil like no one's business. We recovered a five acre gravel pit using animal manure and turned it back into fertile soil. And we're restoring the forest on a part of the property. When you choose to do that kind of a fast, you can still eat,

but you're giving back to the planet. And the work you've been doing lately on food policy and all that stuff, that is also a part of the fasting world. You are choosing to go without the things that make you weak, even though there's a part of your body that wants you to eat those. And you are becoming master of that part of your body. And when you're a master of that part of the body, the side effect is you're nicer to everyone around you because you're eating better food. Like everybody wins when you do this.

It's so important. Wait, wait, wait. I don't want to just pass by that. You just said something that's highly profound because in the middle of this incredibly divisive world, I mean, I was born 60 years ago and yeah, they were Democrats, Republicans, and there were certainly divisions in society and there was segregationists and there was hate. But the level of divisiveness, the level of reactivity, the level of hatred. I mean, I post a picture of me with now President-elect Biden talking about how we can start to build bridges and have conversations.

And we don't have to agree. We can have deep conversations, even if we don't have the same worldview without hating each other. And I mean, and there was just the most incredible blowback that I just could not believe and all this projection of hatred on me and saying I was for vaccine mandates and mask. I mean, mask man, it's stuff I never even, I was just talking about love and let's, let's all be friends and let's, let's disagree, but let's disagree nicely. Let's not vilify and hate. And I was like, whoa.

And what really is clear, and David Perlmutter's work and his son Austin in their latest book, Brainwash, really talked about this, that our diet, our modern industrial diet has literally hijacked our brain and activated the amygdala, which is the fight or flight, attack, defend, victim part of our brain. And so we are operating in a highly activated way in which our frontal lobe becomes disconnected from our amygdala. Our frontal lobe is the adult in the room. It's our executive functioning. It's our executive functioning. It's the one who doesn't do the stupid thing, even though he thinks about doing it, right? Instead, it's like Dennis the Menace. And when I think about what I'm not doing, what

I'm going to do, I've already done it. And I think this is such an important thing you said, that it changes the quality of our behavior, our emotions, our relationships, our fear, our anger, our hostility. These are things that are killing us society now. And I just, it just breaks my heart. Me too. I interviewed Dr. Vivek Murthy, former U.S. Surgeon General. He wrote a book saying in his time as Surgeon General, the number one epidemic that he came across that was causing

the most problem wasn't viral at all. It was connectedness. He said, we have a profound state of loneliness and disconnection in people, and that's what's making us sick and we have to fix it. So then a week after he comes out on the podcast, he gets named by Biden to Biden's to co-chair his coronavirus task force. This is a guy who values connection and connectivity and will value those things so that our policies might say, it's kind of important we don't turn on that epidemic when we're trying to turn off another one. And I said, hey, congratulations. We got a guy who cares about what we care about on a panel. Man, the amount of people saying exactly what you heard,

just projecting all this hate. Here's what's going on, Mark, to take it back to fasting. Okay. If you don't have a healthy metabolism, your blood sugar can crash. And if you do something like eat MSG, which as you well know, as you've written about is hidden in so many foods under fake names. And when you eat MSG, it causes hypoglycemia. When your blood sugar gets really low, your body says, oh, this is kind of an emergency. I need some blood sugar. Good thing I have built-in systems

to turn on blood sugar instantly. It's called cortisol and adrenaline. So your body says, I'm crashing. Let me get you some stress hormones right here. And then you get your energy back, but it's fighting energy. It's stress energy. And then you get your energy back, but it's fighting energy. It's stress energy. And then you see someone post about, Hey, could we have more connection and empathy

and kindness? And they're like, you're a bad man. Well, there's a connection directly to food. There really is. And it really is by fasting. You train your body to do that. And by fasting from crappy foods, you actually have more control of who you are and you can show up as the person that you want to be instead of the person you are when you're hungry.

Because I don't know about you, but hypoglycemic is a very real word for me. At least it used to be. Yeah. What is that? ICD-9, Garni-CD-10 code 1034.2. Is that it? It's a clear medical diagnosis. Hypoglycemic.

That's very funny. Now, we're sort of kind of skirting around the edges of this, but in your book, you talk about how fasting can be a powerful entry point into honesty and control of ourselves. What do you mean by that? Well, there's two kinds of fast. There's fasting for health. And you can do this intermittent fast with the hacks you do during the week.

And there's another kind of fast, which I call a spiritual fast. And these tend to be for at least 24 hours, a little bit longer, where you actually sit with what's going on in your feelings. You journal. So what I'm doing for people who order Fast This Way and send me the receipt at fast this way.com. I'm taking them through a two week. I'm calling it a fasting challenge, but it's really a fasting course where as an author, I feel like I haven't done my full job because I'm also a teacher. I taught at the university of California for five years. So I'm actually teaching people what's in the book for two weeks. And we're going to all together thousands of people at the same time, practice

intermittent fasting with the hacks, without the hacks. But for the last two days of this two-week challenge, we're going to do a spiritual fast. I'm actually going to get you a fasting journal and you're going to be able to sit there and say, all right, I'm actually going to go for 24, 36, even 48 hours without food, but I'm going to do it mindfully. I'm going to reduce distractions in my life and I'm going to be hungry. And I'm going to say, wow, how many times am I actually thinking about food? Do I really want to snap at my kids or am I getting even more angry at the news that I shouldn't be watching during a spiritual fast anyway? All of those things so we can gain awareness of ourselves. And the cool thing is because you're fasting, you have extra ketones present and you have more energy to think about it. And this is why all the great spiritual

traditions include fasting because that little boost to the neurons is a boost that you can use for self-awareness. And that's why fasting is so powerful. It puts you back in charge of you instead of letting these automated life systems like, is that scary? Take my attention. Is that food? Take my attention. Is that a nice pair of legs? Take my attention.

Right. You're supposed to own all of that and you can own all of that. And it doesn't have to be painful to get there. And the reason most of us haven't taken on fasting and the reason it terrified me. In fact, I was offended when someone told me I should fast when I weighed 300 pounds, because I'm like, I would die. It would be terrible. All of that fear. It's not real. The fear is real, but the reality is very different. And the more we can help ourselves live in reality, the more control we have of our energy, that energy goes to the prefrontal cortex, which allows us to catch those negative thoughts

before they turn into negative behavior. And the challenge in the book at the end is, look, just spend two hours fasting from hate. Maybe spend a whole day where you don't say one hateful thing. You don't think one hateful thing. You don't think one hateful thing. And that is really challenging. I took electrodes up to my head and spent time meditating, a lot of time meditating to get to that point where I can do that. And even then you'll see these things sneak in, but just a regular short practice of that allows you to remember the kind of person that you're capable of being instead of the kind

of person you are when you're constantly triggered by industrial foods, by industrial news sources, and basically by a world that really isn't set up to let you be who you're supposed to be. It's true. We live in a world that's constantly going after our amygdala. Yeah. It's because the amygdala is easiest to trigger. It makes you buy stuff. And for those of you who really think there's free will, I encourage you to watch a documentary called The Social Dilemma and really pay attention to it. Because what's really happened is that we have been psychographically mapped in ways ways that algorithms target our innermost fears, insecurities, and weaknesses to drive our behavior in ways that are invisible to us, that we think are free will, but actually aren't.

And, you know, when you talk about fasting, I just want to drop in for the last few minutes into the spiritual context of fasting, because it always in the past was a spiritual practice. It was a way to remove the distractions of the outside world, to go inward, to find peace, stillness, to become awake in different ways, to things that really matter. And, you know, this year has been rough. I mean, this year has been just so rough. Like, I think all of us want to take the reset button, hit reboot, defrag, you know, and just do a do-over on 2020. I mean, COVID, politics, the economy, social distancing.

I mean, fire. I mean, you know, just the heartbreak of what's happening in the world right now is real and it's tough and the divisiveness, the conflict. And I think, you know, it wears on all of us, it wears on our nervous system. And the fastest way is a beautiful doorway into using your biology to help unhook from some of that. And you talk about a lot of practices, not just dietary in the book. And I really encourage people to get it fastest way, burn fat, heal inflammation, eat like the high performing human you were meant to be. I love it. It's really good. I think it's one of your best books yet, Dave. Thank you. But, but I, but I, I want to kind of drop in because I've been feeling this personally. I've just been

feeling like, Holy crap, what a year I need a, I need a break time out. And so I I've decided, uh, which is really tough for me because I do, you know, like you, I have five, six companies. I do so many different things. I got to interrupt you for a second. You're one of the most giving guys that I know. Like I know all the, cause we're friends. I know all the stuff you do that you never talk about to give back. And you're, you run a hundred miles an hour helping people and you always have just to put that on the table. Thank you. I appreciate that. So I feel after 30 years that I'm giving myself permission to take the month of December off and it's a little terrifying and it's going, and as we're talking, I realized it's going to be a month of fasting and I've

already committed to, you know, a really clean diet, which I mostly do anyway, to no coffee, to, sorry, Dave. Okay. I thought we were friends. No alcohol. It's fine to do that. Yeah. No alcohol, no email.

That's going to be the hardest one. I think I'm highly addicted to email. No news. I'll talk to people on video conferencing or phone. I'm not doing zoom conferences. I'm literally just going to drop into being instead of doing, I'm going to be in nature. I'm going to be in my body.

I'm going to be with friends in a socially appropriate way and distance way. I'm going to do spiritual practices that help me fast from the things that are really disturbing my happiness and my ability to really, yeah. And I think I'm pretty good at managing it all most of the time, but I, I'm like, wait a minute. You know, I remember, you know, being 25 and being completely unencumbered from all of that, you know, there was none of that. And when, when I was 25, I remember my twenties traveling, there was no cell phone. There was no internet. You know, you had postcards, you had letters you could write,

right. You wouldn't make a phone call because it was $10 a minute to talk to anybody in the States if I was in some other country. You were just in the experience of life. And I'm craving that again. And I think I wish we didn't even have to describe it as fasting because all of a sudden we've been in this over-consumptive world, not just over-consuming food, but over-consuming information and news and in ways that aren't volitional, like our news feed and our social media feed aren't really our will. They're being fed to us by algorithms that are trying to manipulate us in real ways that are highly documented.

It's not just a conspiracy theory. I mean, just watch The Social Dilemma or watch the great hack and you'll see what I'm talking about. And so, you know, as you're talking, I'm really inspired that you've written about this. I'm really inspired that you're talking about these issues because so many of us need to reset and to reboot and to rewire ourselves. And food, I think, is the easiest doorway to retrain your brain, to retrain your biology, to reawaken to the things that really matter in life and to the beauty. And just to drop in. And I think,

I think this is really a gift in a way, in a weird way of this moment, it's all causing us to reevaluate our lives and to see what matters, what's important, what do we care about and how do we, how do we break this cycle and, and rehuman ourselves? There's a word that most of us use on a daily basis. And it's a word I've been fasting from for the past 15 years. And the word is need. When you need something, it means if you don't get it, you'll die. But when you tell yourself, I need to go to the store. No, you could have had the groceries delivered. You could have fasted or you could have asked a friend, but you didn't think of those things because you told your amygdala that you needed it. And so many of us have gotten to

where I need to check my email. I need to do this. I need to do blah, blah. I need to watch the news. I need blah, blah, blah. None of those needs are real. And when you- Sometimes I really need to pee. That's real. I got a lot. That's a real need.

Okay, there you go. I'll give you that. So there are some real needs, but the vast majority of things are, and I would even go so far as say, well, Mark, we could get you a catheter. You don't really need to pee. It's just the best path. So let's go. I just wet my pants.

So those are the things that where fasting lets you address one of the things that we really think we need and lets you go, you know what? I thought I needed that, but it was a want. And when we replace the word need with the word choose or the word want, it is incredibly relaxing and it makes you feel safe. And it's part of what you get when you just skip breakfast, maybe eat dinner a little bit earlier and do some of these other practices. You realize that you want a lot of things that you think you need. And when you sort those out, your anxiety levels go down. Anytime anxiety goes down, kindness goes up.

It's beautiful. Yeah. And I think that's a beautiful way to say it. You know, when you refocus on the things that matter, your kindness goes up and the toxicity of our own minds and our own bodies goes down in the world around us. I mean, I think it's in this world, all we can do is actually, you know, focus on ourselves and what we can do to really live in integrity. And I think the more we do that, the better we can be agents of change in the world. And it reminds me of a

story of Gandhi, who once had a mother bring her child to see Gandhi, and the child just loved sugar and ate candy all the time. And she said to Gandhi, would you please tell my son to stop eating so much candy? It's not good for him. And Gandhi goes, come back in a week. The mother comes back in a week and he says to the little boy, you know, I think it's good that you probably stopped candy. And she said to him, why did you tell me to come back in a week? Why couldn't you have told me that last week? He says, well, I was eating candy last week. I had to stop eating candy.

That's integrity right there. It's just about integrity. And I think if we can focus on our own integrity in our lives and come in alignment with who we are and what we want to be, how to be the high performing human that we were meant to be. And I think you mean high performing, not just in, you know, life as an athlete, but spiritually, emotionally, physically, mentally, relationally as a human being in the community of life. That's what you mean.

That's exactly what I mean. And there's actually a fourth F word that all life does after those first four words, it's friend. And even Maslow's hierarchy of needs, his final need that he didn't get to publish before he died. I just did a podcast on this was for transcendence. So when we get the baseline stuff out of the way, what's left is we are meant, we are wired, we are built from the cells up to be kind to one another. And if there's too much emphasis on those first three F words,

there's not enough room for kindness. And that's what we're getting back to right now. So your reset you're going to do is a perfect example of that kind of spiritual fast. So fasting is just going without, and it clearly food is a low hanging fruit, but you can go with all kinds of stuff that you think you need. And when you do it for brief periods, you might realize that your life changes in a massively, massively beneficial way. And the way the change manifests is in happiness. But it also manifests in changing the world around you. Because when you're nice to people, they get happier too.

And it has a very big amplified effect. We only need a few people to really step up like that. And then all the people around them are like, wait, what's going on here? I haven't seen someone be level in a while. Maybe I could be a little bit more level. So this will spread and it has to spread because that's what humans are wired to do. And if there's anything that you're a little anxious or stressed about giving up, that's probably the thing you need to give up the most. Yeah. That was why for me, it was loneliness. I'm like, I'm going to sit in a cave and feel lonely because I'm so stressed

about, you know, what if I didn't realize that was pushing me the way it was. And it's that realization of how much power these things have that we haven't thought about. And like you said, you're going to fast from social media. You'll realize how much power it has that you didn't give it that it took. So, yeah, I mean, that's not a huge one for me. Email like, yeah, I can give up alcohol caffeine sugar process i mean that's easy i can do yoga every day meditate no that's all easy for me giving up email that starts to make me really anxious and and i honestly dave i didn't really even think about it because i was planning my trip and my journey for the for this month of de. And until we started talking, I'm like, well, what are those things that I'm really not willing to give up? And I thought email, I'm like,

no, I'm going to announce it on my podcast that I'm giving up email for a month. I'm going to email you and see if you answer. You realize that, right? I'm going to have an auto responder. Talk to my assistant. I'll be back in a month. If you have anything important, email me again in a month. I promise you, Mark, if it's really important, you're going to get a text message or a phone call from your assistant. That's how it works, but it doesn't feel like it works that way. This is going to be so good. I'm so excited for you. And, and I just, uh, you know, Dave, you are, you are one of the few people who's out there in this space who really is seeking the world for those things that will enhance the quality of our lives

at all levels, physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally. And you really have no ego in the fight. I think it's a really rare quality in people. And you've really done a lot of work to overcome some of the sort of spiritual and emotional challenges. And you've been very successful and done in a way that's just with love. And it's just beautiful to see. Thanks, Mark. You didn't know me when I was younger. I was pretty much a jerk. Just to be really clear.

You were eating jerk-inducing foods. I also had managed, because I was a computer hacker, I had managed to pretty much erase my identity to just be like, you couldn't find anything about me online. I was very happy to be anonymous and to be well known as an author it's actually worked for me like i i'm not in this to get known i'm willing to be known because i think i can help otherwise there's no benefit to it that's why the whole idea of intermittent fasting is a cool idea because it's cyclical right you you know we used to call it breakfast

break the fast you know you're not supposed to eat after dinner and don't eat till breakfast 14 hours 16 hour fast but we don't do that anymore we eat all night we have bedtime snacks we eat first thing in the morning and we don't give our body a chance to repair and recover and it seems to do a lot of the same things it is shocking what happens and i would encourage anyone listening if you've never tried an intermittent fast, it means eat before the sun goes down and then skip breakfast and have a late lunch. In the morning, you can have just black coffee or tea, or you can do it with bulletproof coffee without any protein, without any sugar or any artificial sweetener. And when you do it either way. It's no bulletproof mocha, huh?

There's a chocolate, but if you put much chocolate in there, you're going to get some carbs. And you want no carbs. You want your insulin, your body to say, oh, I've got no energy from sugar, no energy from protein whatsoever. Therefore, what do I do with all this? I'm going to do my own system repair. And what you're going to find is you weren't hungry. You didn't completely crash and want the muffin at 10 a.m.

In fact, you probably really like your day. And I'd also encourage you you do not do this every single day especially if you're a woman do this a couple times two three times a week you don't have to do it every day it's fascinating i don't know if you know the work on fasting mimicking diets oh absolutely it's fasting work which is sponsored by the nih spend tens of millions of dollars looking at this and what they do is put people on a fast for a short period of time basically very low calorie diet where you go into ketosis. And if you do it once a month or every couple of months,

it has profound lasting effects on your biology in terms of reversing diabetes, weight loss, anti-aging stuff, right? I just, I love it that we finally spent $10 million on something that wasn't a drug. And I came up with something called the Bulletproof Rapid Fat Loss Protocol. And it's on the website and it says, how to lose weight faster than you're supposed to.

And the risk of rapid weight loss is that your fat cells in your body contain a lot of toxins, mercury, pesticides, things like that. And if you lose weight really rapidly, the way I have a couple times in my life, you can get really good brain fog from that. Brain fog, and it poisons your thyroid, and it's all kind of nasty stuff, and you hit a plateau. Exactly. So you have to bind toxins during it. But it was really funny because I did not know about the NIH research and all that stuff.

And it's not the same as that, but the idea is low calorie ketosis for bursts of time and then you stop. Yeah. Powerful. And that stuff, it has merit. And just if you're listening to this and you have, like I did a hundred pounds or 50 pounds of weight to lose, it's not supposed to cause you pain to lose the weight. It's not supposed to be hard. You're not supposed to be hungry. If you do this right, what happens is you just have to buy new pants every three weeks.

Like that's it. And you're like, wow, this is amazing. I had a patient complaining to me, Dr. Hyman, I'm really upset with you. Why? Well, I keep losing so much weight. I have to keep buying new clothes. Yeah, like Mark, you and I should invest

in like Dockers and Levi's, right? Just because I'm telling you, I have bought so many pairs of pants. And also one of the great moments in my life was when I looked on the shelf in my closet. I'm like, I have all these fat pants. Cause like I was go up, you know,

two or four inches. I've gone from a 46 to a 34 inch waist. There you go. Right. But I have been a 34 inch waist for the past four years without any variance. I threw away my fat pants. I mean, since I met you,

you look younger, healthier, better, fitter, more muscular, your skin's better. I mean, it's pretty impressive to see. It's like ketosis. Whatever he's doing is working. Well, the stuff in hedgehog, mitochondrial support, ketosis, collagen protein, brain octane, bulletproof coffee, cyclical ketosis,

all those things when you stack them up. Yeah. Man, I can't even believe how I feel. I'm 45. So great. I'm 58 and I'm like, I'm working on it. You're looking good. So I have a couple more questions. I want to shift gears a little bit. Two more questions. One is, and this is an inflammatory question. Is it fried? No, it's vegan. Can you be a healthy vegan? Yes or no? I was was a raw vegan i can make the best raw vegan cheesecake

and raw vegan everything possible i really want to tell you that you could live on gravel and that because i think imagine this even the plants wouldn't suffer if you ate just gravel but it doesn't work and i mean are there some people who it works for? Because you see that guy's like Rich Roll and he's like an ultra marathoner. He's an ultra marathoner. There's a movie Game Changers coming out where you see all these elite athletes who are vegans. How does that work?

Well, it's interesting. Doesn't Rich Roll talk a lot about joint pain and how he deals with muscle pain and other things that are signs of mitochondrial dysfunction? I don't know. Does he? Yeah. He's mentioned this. And having been a very focused, very well-educated raw vegan, and then even in a raw omnivore for a while before I did the whole Bulletproof thing, I have seen thousands of people, including myself, who were made ill by a vegan diet.

So do you need to eat a ton of vegetables in order to be healthy? Actually, you do. It's absolutely required. Should you avoid industrial meat like the plague? Yes, you should. And this is where the vegan diet has it absolutely right. Will you live as long as possible

and feel as good as possible? If you eat a lot of protein, even if it's grass-fed, you will not. Because a high meat or high animal protein or a lot of protein, even if it's grass-fed, you will not because a high meat or high animal protein or a high vegetable protein diet, frankly, is bad for you. You need to be on a low to moderate protein diet. The real problem with a vegan approach is that it's the fat. You do not get saturated fat. At least have some butter on your vegetables. Like broccoli evolved to hold butter well coconut oil doesn't have the same types of fat it doesn't have conjugated linoleic acid our cells are not

made out of coconut oil butyric acid that's out of butter that's what yeah it's named for that right right so you need some of that stuff and i gave a talk at david wolf's conference who's a well-known vegan and And I talked about how animals support soil. And if you're eating, say, ghee, even just adding ghee to a vegan diet, it helps you absorb these polyphenols, these colored compounds from your vegetables. So you get more from the vegetables you eat.

You can honor mother nature. You can honor animals. I live on a 32 acre farm. I grow all of my own food, which is mostly vegetables. And we have two pigs, one named Brussels snout, and four sheep. And you don't pigs, one named Brussels snout,

and four sheep. And you don't have to eat a lot of meat. And I eat a good amount of sustainable salmon that swims by my house. I'm pretty fortunate. Just go down the river and grab it. Right. But ethics matters. Animal cruelty matters. Do not eat industrial meat ever. It is bad for you. Should you occasionally eat some animal protein? I think for most people, there's a case for that. And should you have some fat on your vegetables that isn't just coconut oil to live the longest, feel the best, have the best hormones? It actually works better that way. So be a butter vegan. Yes, be a butter vegan. If you're going to be a vegan, you will like your life more.

Okay. Last question. You are traveling on the frontiers of health and the exploration of human biology, human capacity, human resilience, human potential. What are you seeing as you explore this territory and the outer reaches of our knowledge? What are the things ahead that you're excited about that you want to give us a little glimpse into what might be? It doesn't be proven yet, but what are you seeing ahead that we should be paying attention to? About three years ago, I started something called 40 Years of Zen, which is a computer-assisted,

neurofeedback-driven, five-day personal development retreat. But instead of using, sitting in a cave and meditating and fasting, which by the way, I've done that as well in Tibet and Nepal and the Andes. Like I've traveled the world to learn from the masters on those things because they matter so much.

I can tell you, I've never seen anything like what focused neurofeedback tied with meditation and forgiveness and quantifying those things. So you can sit down and say, I wanna let go of that anger I hold towards my mom or my dad or my ex-spouse or whatever the thing is. And to do that with what's basically a lie detector that tells you when you do it.

And I see people every week just experiencing huge heart openings with measurable changes in their brain waves. And here's the scary thing. Most of us are, we have a huge amount of energy going into making brainwaves, and they're not useful brainwaves. It's energy that's basically kind of sloshing around in there. And now we're to the point where you can learn to put the energy that's in your brain,

that this is energy that comes from that food you put in your mouth. And if it's going into brainwaves that are disordered from an untrained brain, you could spend 25 years in a monastery. Or you could actually spend a couple weeks with some focused practice based on neuroscience. And you see the power levels shift. So the stuff that isn't doing anything stops. And the stuff that actually makes you more of who you are goes up. I think, Mark, we're on the cusp of being able to reverse PTSD, reverse old trauma, and give people

substantial improvements in their IQ, but more importantly, in their level of internal peace. And it does start with energy from food. That's why Bulletproof is my biggest, we have to disrupt big food and to get the stuff that makes us feel good in. But once you have enough energy, what are you gonna do with it? Well, maybe you should apply it to like your brain to turn on happiness turn on gratitude and turn off what would be like here and all that we can do that and the science is happening right now it's the coolest time ever to be alive that's pretty amazing so so i meditate 20 minutes twice a day that would mean i'd have to like live to be 400 to get the benefit of this amazing so we have to not only train our mitochondria, we also not have to

just create health in our biology, but in our brains, we know how to actually access this through different doorways like neurofeedback. Mark, you've always known this because I know you show up in the world. I know about the work you've done with Paul Farmer, your nonprofit work. There's a love, there's an energy, a gratitude of vitality that we bring to the world when we show up all the way. And you've had this ever since I've known you. Thank you. I think that all of us have this in us. I agree.

It's hidden and it's hard to access and there isn't enough power for it. But when you turn that on, we're right at the cusp of being able to take someone who's really pretty damn miserable and say, you know what? Let's fix your diet. Let's get your nutrients in order. Let's fix your diet. Let's get your nutrients in order. Let's remove the toxins. And then let's show your brain how to be happy. And it's actually a learnable skill instead of something that just happens to the lucky few. That's so true. So, so much of our suffering is related to how we care for our organism that doesn't allow us to thrive and be present and connected. It's so beautiful.

All right. So, last question. If you were king for a day and you could change anything in the world about health or food or the policies we have, what would you do? If I could change anything about our policies, I would allow people who make food or gadgets or anything else to talk about the science behind what they do. You mean you have to prove that it's safe and effective? Oh, well, right now, it turns out that as a company, at least the CEO of a company that manufactures food, I am not allowed to cite some of the scientific research that shows that the things I make are better for you than junk food full of sugar, right? And how can we live in a place with free speech where it's not okay to publish a study that says, for instance, cherries help with heart attacks, according to one study. There was a company that sold cherries from their orchard and said, oh, look at this cool study.

And they totally got shut down for that. But you can call crap happy meals. That makes you happy. Exactly. So I would like us to have freedom of speech for people and companies to say, here's what we know about this today. You can make your own judgment, but at least here's what we know.

So transparency in our food. Transparency in our food. Science and transparency. I love that. Okay. Diabetes is a disease where your cells can't use food in the form of glucose and air to make energy. It's a mitochondrial dysfunction, a metabolic dysfunction disease. And that disease raises your risk of glucose, and air to make energy. It's a mitochondrial dysfunction,

a metabolic dysfunction disease. And that disease raises your risk of cancer and heart disease and Alzheimer's disease. Yeah, four times the risk if you have diabetes that you're gonna get dementia. Exactly. So could it be that all four of the killers are all tied to metabolic dysfunction,

which is tied to mitochondrial performance? It turns out it is. It also turns out that your body has all these amazing repair systems that you can turn on that have been there always that are probably not turned on. And every one of those repair systems is dependent on functioning mitochondria. So when we look at these seven pillars of aging, one of the first ones is mitochondrial mutations. These mitochondria, they're ancient bacteria that are a part of our cells now. They look like little bacteria if you look at them in a microscope. And they have their own DNA that's bacterial DNA. And so you could say that, oh,

we harnessed them. But from their perspective, like we found these mobile Petri dishes that walk around and do stuff and we're the puppet masters. And if we don't like what's going on, we just make less energy and then they feel crappy and then they do what we want. So literally they're driving a lot of the, the reason that you just unconsciously reach for the cigarette or you reach for the donut. It's because your mitochondria are saying I need food right now. And they're talking to you and then you find the donut in your hand or you told yourself you weren't going to smoke today and you did. who's pulling the puppet strings? Those little bastards are. Yeah, let's get those. No, we don't want to get them. We want to help them.

You do want to help them because when they're happy, you're happy. And that includes eating the right stuff. It includes sleep, all the good stuff that you talk about on your show, Mark. However, they mutate relatively easily. So... They're easily damaged. Yeah. Right? They're easily damaged. And your job is to teach your body, you know, if one of them is damaged or slow, kill it all the way and replace it with a fresh young one, because we have that ability. But if you eat too much, eat too often, eat the wrong things, don't do the other things that don't cost much, if anything, then the systems that...

Like exercise and sleep and... Yeah, you know, things like that. Yeah. Really basic stuff, to be honest. But if you do them at the right time or in the right way with a little bit of structure around them, what happens is the old, weak mitochondria get out of the way and make space for young ones. And when that happens, all of the other repair systems can turn on and there's other things you can do people don't know this but we have something called zombie cells that i write about in superhuman and what a zombie cell is is a cell just like a real zombie it sits there and it's not dead really but it's not alive really either

and it sits there makes free radicals it takes up space and it does nothing good for you but it's not alive really either and it sits there makes free radicals it takes up space and it does nothing good for you but it it adds to your metabolic burden so what do you do well these are called senescent cells in the aging field and there are things you can do to encourage your body to get rid of senescent cells and they range from something you hire pac-man to come and clean them yeah that's pretty much it we have little robots that come in and there are people actually want to make little nanobots and stuff unnecessary the body is such a beautiful elegant thing it wants to live a long time it wants to repair itself but it's it's going to make a decision let's see donut self-repair and if you let the body decide without intervening it's going to pick the donut every single time you know why because throughout all of human history

there have been regular famines and if there's a donut it's a to pick the donut every single time. You know why? Because throughout all of human history, there have been regular famines. And if there's a donut, it's a good idea to eat it in case there isn't a donut tomorrow. And you know better. We all know better. Yeah, we evolved in an era where there wasn't Krispy Kreme or Dunkin' Donuts in every corner. And our cells don't know that, though. They're still stuck in that. So they will self-sacrifice. They'll turn off their ability to save energy to take care of themselves for the donut so this is just about knowing oh if i brush my teeth i'm better off i don't get cavities there are basic metabolic maintenance things that i write about in superhuman that we haven't been taught to do yeah it's pretty interesting you know when we look at all the things we do know about aging right and and all the interventions that seem to turn off aging and turn on you thing let's call it she read a book

called you thing that's a great name okay it's fascinating and it and it's um the the things that are showing up in the science now whether it's calorie restriction the only thing that's been shown to increase longevity reliably in animal models is restricting calories. You eat less by a third, you live a third longer, but you're miserable. So I don't want to do that. Then there's what we call intermittent fasting, which most people mean by that time-restricted eating where you eat an eight-hour window. Then there's true intermittent fasting, which may be fast a day or two a week. And then there's fasting-mimicking diets and there's ketogenic diets. All of those activate the same thing,

which is this process of self-repair and healing that is a natural thing that our body does, but that we interfere with all the time by just eating all the time and eating all the wrong foods all the time. And your book really goes into how do we reverse that process? How do we understand what harms the mitochondria?

What causes inflammation? How do we shift that? So let's talk more about these cellular aging forms, cellular aging processes that drive disease and that you talk about as being the cause of aging. So these seven pillars of aging. You mentioned the zombie cells, but let's go through the other ones. Another one that's really interesting is called cellular straight jackets and superhuman and people have usually by now heard of something called amyloid plaque or usually it's beta amyloid plaque because people say oh that's what causes alzheimer's disease it's actually not what causes alzheimer's disease it's a symptom of it but it turns out amyloid throughout the body

forms and is a contributing cause of aging so So if you were to say, oh, I fixed my mitochondria, but I have amyloid everywhere, you're still going to show signs of aging. You're not going to have maintained your youthfulness. That's why there's these seven pillars that support you. It turns out inflammation causes it. It's the equivalent of having a callus or a scar over time. So amyloid plaque in the brain, chronic brain inflammation, which is caused by mitochondrial dysfunction in the brain. But you can have this in your bicep.

You can have this in your endothelial cells. It can happen throughout the body and it builds up over time. So when you start saying, I'm going to live twice as long as mother nature wants, you're going to have to do something about this. Otherwise, half your body is going to be amyloid plaque and you're going to be walking around like a piece of bamboo, not like a flexible human. So how do you get rid of this bamboo? Well, there are a variety of new enzyme formulas that are just about to come on the market that scientists have been working on the anti-aging field that can break these down. In the meantime, though, how about this? What if

you actually didn't build them up because you addressed inflammation? Yeah. Okay, what caused inflammation? Well, what causes inflammation? How do you get rid of it? Every single time there's inflammation, it is ultimately coming from your mitochondria. And there are things that signal inflammation to happen in the body. And things called inflammatory cytokines.

So one of the things you do is you find the habits you have every day that trigger inflammation and you stop doing them. Like? Like eating grain, eating bad fats, eating anything fried in any oil. Sugar. Oh, no, sugar is good for you. I'm eating. All right. I think this podcast is over now.

It's actually a gluten deficiency that we're all suffering from Mark. No deficiency. Lack of sugar. I don't know if ice cream. I think that's the key to everything. It turns out if someone was to have three grams of sugar with their meal, if they have a healthy metabolism, it will do nothing to them.

But three grams of an inflammatory oil, a damaged oil, what does three grams of fish oil do to you? A lot. A lot. What is three grams of highly oxidized fried oil going to do? It's going to do a lot in the wrong direction. Yeah. So it turns out sugar, if you're on a high sugar diet, especially liquid sugar, it is going to wreck your gut bacteria and gut bacteria are a part of the aging puzzle. So I would say though, bad fats are more dangerous than sugar and you don't want to eat either one of them. But you know, if there's a teaspoon of sugar in a normal meal on occasion, it's a lesser evil. Yeah. It's not that it's the pharmacologic doses that we eat of, you know, 150 pounds a year per person. That's not that. It's the pharmacologic doses that we eat of 150 pounds a year per person.

That's the problem. It's horrifying, right? It's not the sugar you put in your food. It's the sugar added by all these companies. You're 100% correct. And there are a group of people say, if you eat a single carb, you're a bad person. I like to call them the keto bros or dirty keto. And what's going on there? Okay. It turns out your keto mafia yeah oh good one your your gut bacteria they must have soluble fiber which is a carb yes like i manufacture soluble fiber i intentionally put it in my body i in in the book i actually talk about the number of gut bacteria species that i had it was 48 because i travel 150 days a year i cannot eat enough vegetables at restaurants it's hard right well i quadrupled. I put two scoops of the inner fuel, a prebiotic

mix of plant fibers, and I put it in my coffee and now I'm at 196 pieces, right? And I didn't have to eat kale. I didn't have to smell kale. So we got an anti kick now? Absolutely. Kale is bad. But what's going on around this inflammation in our cells that causes these cellulose straight jackets is, look, if you eat some fried stuff, oh, it's a special treat. I just eat it a couple times a week. It constantly grates on your system. It's going to take four days to get rid of all the inflammatory compounds from that. And you do that for 20 years, and all of a sudden, your cells are walking around with less flexibility and way more amyloid we are eating a inflammatory mitochondrial damaging diet yep is our main diet and it is what we talk about all the time it's it's it's something that is just so pervasive and that it unfortunately is so easy to get

oh yeah whereas like you said you're on the road it's hard get vegetables. I literally go to a restaurant when I'm traveling. I say, can I please have three sides of vegetables? You know, like... You know what comes? Four... Four string beans. Yeah, four string beans. And they're all deep fried in, like, some kind of batter.

The worst was when I was in Des Moines, Iowa, doing a public television show. And I was, like, in the hotel. I wanted some food. I'm like, all right, can I get some vegetables? Because I'm i'm like well we have green beans and i'm like okay so they brought green beans and they they were canned green beans they were soggy and gross and they were covered with this brown sugar gravy oh like like a soup of gravy over the green beans and that was the vegetables and wow did you wash them off with coca-cola i just

what to do i was like i was like oh what a vegetable it was terrible but i said i said okay is there a chinese restaurant around here and then there was and i went there and they actually had a lot of veggies as long as they're steamed a lot of times you go to a chinese restaurant they fry a lot of funky oils so you get the funky oil and steam broccoli right and people might say dave you and mark you are so picky and extreme but here's the deal if you eat no fried food for the next two weeks and you look at your skin and you look at how you feel when you wake up and you look at your grip strength and you look at every single metric about how good you're doing you will improve so but i like fried food. Look, you can also say, I like heroin. I don't care.

Don't use it. It doesn't matter if you like it. It's just not okay. It's true. And my kids know that. And I've taken my kids out and said, all right, let's go eat serious junk so they can feel it. All right. So we've talked about the mitochondria mutations.

We talked about the cellular straight jackets. We talked about the zombie cells. Let's talk about age. Yeah. Advanced glycation end products. It turns out two of the other pillars of aging are buildup of extracellular and intracellular junk. It turns out inside your cells, there are some compounds that your cells are supposed to be able to burn up and get out. So every cell has something called a lysosome inside it, and its job is to burn up extra protein and use it for energy so that you can break it down into its components and get rid of it.

But we eat things, and we sometimes over time generate things in our bodies that our lysosomes can't break down. It's sort of like you have an incinerator at the dump, but you stick enough things in there that won't burn. It can't function anymore. And then you get a big pile of stuff at the dump. So what do we do about that? Well, the easiest thing is make sure that you eat less of the things that cause those things to back up.

You know, they're called ages, advanced glycation end products. It's sort of like, you know, the crust on a bread or the crispy skin on chicken. It's like the creme brulee, that crispy thing. That's basically proteins and sugars forming a compound that accelerates aging. It's literally called ages. Yeah. And they bind to receptors called rages. You can't make this up.

Inflammation end products. It's basically sugar and protein combining together that create this massive inflammatory response and oxidative stress, which then damages your mitochondria and creates this vicious cycle of aging and disease. You nailed it. It's funny, when I wrote the Bulletproof Diet,

which came out in 2014, but it was based on about a decade worth of experiments before that, I wrote, you don't want to eat ages, advanced glycation end products, because I could feel the difference in my inflammation when I ate them. I knew that they weren't good because I was fat and old when I was young. So I reversed that, but I'm a good canary. And I cited a couple studies,

but we also make advanced glycation end products in our bodies when we eat sugar. So you eat these huge doses of sugar. The sugar courses through your body looking for proteins to stick to, and it will do that. But in, in superhuman, I cite new research where we talk about the effects of eating advanced glycation end products versus making them on the best way to eat them.

Microwave your food, microwave your food and eat caramel, which is pretty much solid advanced glycation in progress. Caramel? Oh, my God. Don't tell me that. Sorry. Caramel is my favorite.

It's so good, but you're taking milk and sugar and just cooking and cooking and cooking and cooking until it's a brown sticky. You're ruining my life, Dave Asprang. You can make caramel that tastes the same out of plants. All right, I got it. And burned meat is a really big thing when you barbecue it so what these are these burned vegetables grilling your vegetables does the same thing as

grilling meat it creates the same toxic chemicals i go to restaurants to say i like a plate of broccoli and they bring me a plate of blackened broccoli like you ruined it right you don't do that so less stripes and less charring. I go to a place, I only eat grass fed pastured animals or I don't eat it. Eating industrially raised antibiotic corn and soy fed animals is a great way to age quickly. But I'll go there and I'll say, please don't char my steak. Like cook it gently. I still want to meet your marriage. Low cooked meats. Yeah. Dutch oven is my new favorite thing. So good. You put the stuff in there you put some vegetables

and tomato sauce whatever you put in the oven for three hours come back and it's like magic and it's done julia child it comes out it's like it's ready i do a lot of something called sous vide because i'm lazy so you you ziploc your your steak or whatever in a thing put it in a water broth with a little temperature thingy and you come back 24 hours later and no matter what cut of meat it is it's perfectly tender and medium rare and and it takes almost no work yeah and so wait did i save time and get a higher quality food that tasted good because here's the deal in superhuman in the bulwark diet in your work we are talking about eating foods that are more satisfying more delicious and more tasty to the point that someone someone puts a piece of, you know, big pharma or big food

birthday cake from some commercial bakery versus something that you would recommend or I would recommend, you'll look at that and you'll say, that one's pretty, but I want to eat the thing that tastes really good and nourishing and satisfying and your body will actually guide you to the good stuff. Yeah. You know, I've noticed that. I mean, over the years, you know, I used to eat more junk and crap when I was younger. And now if I like walk through like, you know, a Starbucks case full of all this stuff, or I go in some restaurant, it doesn't look like food to me.

It's like, why would I eat that? It's like a rock. I'm not gonna eat a rock or a piece of wood, but like it doesn't actually look like food to me anymore and i don't crave it i don't want it it's not like i'm depriving myself i just literally don't actually have an interest in it and it doesn't actually look appealing to me and it doesn't even i don't think it'll taste good and when i if i do taste it it's like ugh and why would i eat that i i'm with you there and people think it's a little bit crazy. Cause I remember when I weighed 300 pounds, I would have the worst cravings and you'd see those,

those scones or whatever in the case at the coffee shop. And you're like, Oh, I really want that. And you walk past, it would just call to you. Those are your damaged mitochondria, desperate for energy going,

you know, please, please eat that. Please eat that. And it's same thing now in my pattern matching system, those don't register as food anymore because they're actually not food for humans. And now that my pattern matching system is right, I just, like you said, if it could be a rock,

it could be a cactus, but you wouldn't put it in your mouth. Right. So therefore the willpower it takes to do it is gone. It's not a willpower thing anymore. Not at all. Once you rewire your hormones and rewire your brain chemistry,

your body will actually want the right stuff. It actually will like it. Now, here's the thing. You have a kind of outrageous claim. You're kind of an outrageous guy. Let's talk about why that's not outrageous. And your outrageous claim is you want to live to be 180. Yeah.

Now, I don't think, well, maybe Methuselah, but maybe some guy who no birth certificates that claims he lived to be 180. I don't know. But you don't want to really just live that long. You want to have a great life. You want to have better sex, super brain power. You want to not get sick. So tell us your secret plan, which is not so secret because you wrote about it in Superhuman,

for aging backwards that will add more years to your life and more life to your years. All right. I want to know that. I'm taking notes. First, I'm going to your life and more life to your years. All right, I'm gonna tell you that. I'm taking notes. First, I'm gonna tell you why 180 is a real number, and then I'm gonna tell you that. Okay, okay. Is it a deal? Because I'm buzzing your job, but I'm curious.

I'm like, all right, okay. Okay, so. Well, you better live that long, because then at least I have one friend. Yeah, absolutely, we'll be hanging out. Because everybody's gonna be dead. We're just gonna be you and me. I don't think it's going to end up like that.

A lot of people listening to the show are going to live decades longer than they think. And I want you to go back 100 years, Mark. If you're going to live to 150, you've got 90 more years. If I live to 180, I've got 136 more years. But let's go back 100 years. Here's 1919. World War I is ending where many of the battles are fought on horseback yeah look at where technology has taken us today and you look look at

it it's kind of scary yeah well you you look in 1950 end of world war ii if you were the president of the u.s and you wanted some research done there were massive armies of people with card catalogs who'd go out and do research and six months later they'd do something you and me and everyone listening to your show today can go online for free in half a second and search pubmed which is pretty much all of the medical knowledge that we have yeah all the scientific okay you and i had to do micro fish half the people listening don't know what a micro fish is right this is by the way it's like a photocopy on a tiny little piece of transparent plastic and you go to the library and check one

out in an envelope and put it on a weird little viewer screen that would amplify it i'm not even making this up this is a real thing you remember it and then you'd fax it to someone too right like that was that was actually before facts it to someone too, right? That was actually before fax. That was way before fax, right? But all of these things have happened. And by the way, a fax machine is one of those things you put paper in and it transmits it in a weird way that comes out on the other end with a piece of paper. It's like kind of an old technology. Let's see if some people don't know what a fax is anymore.

But I asked someone to fax me something. They're like, fax? What? They still do fax? I'm like, yeah. For medical stuff. Oh, because somehow it's morex me something. They're like, fax? What? They still do fax? I'm like, yeah, they still do. For medical stuff. Oh, because somehow it's more private or something. Okay.

I look at all this and you say, okay, you've had Dr. David Sinclair on the show. He's been on my show. I write about his research in the book. And there are dozens of other people that you and I both know who have spent decades working on aging on different facets on each of these seven pillars. And they're saying our work has borne fruit. So my supposition is really straightforward. If we know that the oldest person alive today is 120. 22.

Yep. Give or take. Madame Clement. There you go. Although she might have filled in for her mom. There's a new accusation about that. Oh, you think she was a con? As a matter of fact, do you know the single biggest predictor

of whether an area is a blue zone or not? Lack of birth certificates? Yes. It's poor economy, lack of education, and lack of birth certificates. I'm not joking. Very strong statistical correlation. So there are a few people who are only half as old as they say they are, or probably 20 years younger because their mom had them.

So that's not to say there isn't fraud there. But if you look back through recorded history, I have a book sitting on my bedside table from the grandson of the caretaker of an Indian guy who was said to be 185. And there's all kinds of crazy stuff in this book. I don't know if this is real. The guy died, whatever, 1930s. But you look back through all of the different historical texts,

things like traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, there is talk and there is research about long-lived people, exceptionally long-lived. I mean, at the turn of the century, the longest-lived people on the planet were the Plains Indians. They had the most centenarians of any population. Interesting.

I didn't know that. It was buffalo and a few berries and whatever else. Grass fed buffalo hump, my favorite. In fact, it's true. With buffalo, the most precious part was the fatty hump on the back and that would go that and the liver it would go to the chief and the kids yeah yeah and it's the same way with the ancient uh mayans the ruling class would have fish run in 200 miles from the coast so they could eat fish and they give corn to the slaves right and it's still that

way you have to run pretty fast so the fish wouldn't rot i think they had like multiple handoffs and it might have been pony express for fish yeah pretty much yeah the fish express the sardine express and plus their runners were fast i think but it's it it's it's just fascinating to me that if we can't do 50 better than our best today in next hundred years, given the amazing technology and the research of people that you and I know, it's because an astro. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below.

Until next time, thanks for tuning in. Hey, everybody. It's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from.

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