6 INSANE FASTING Benefits to Reverse Your Age TODAY! | Mark Hyman & Dave Asprey

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 are alive in the modern world and you want to live to a highly functional old age 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 but most people listening have the same mindset i did when i weighed 300 300 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 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 the 300 pound person and you will lose the hunger will win and that's why i actually lost weight more than 100 pounds because you've lose 20 gain 30. lose 30 gain 40 if there's 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'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 uh you can fix that and the way you're whatever you are you're not you're on 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 can do this by not eating you can do this by putting brain octane in your bulletproof coffee yeah it always troubles me you know when the obesity experts talk about the body's set point i mean nobody's set point was four hundred pounds i mean that's the directly 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 and ketones of 0.38 and if you're not a keto diet or 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 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 these studies are out there where the levels of ketones are there so break fast is you know what you do after you wake up in the morning no just skip that like i 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 that was like a you know 14 hour whatever 16 hour fast 14 to 16 hours 18 hours is better and it's just it's something that 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 u.s different different causes for that so we just like how 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 the all these these techniques whether it's ketogenic diets whether it's time restricted eating or low calorie eating for a week or 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 bone density increase your muscle mass improve your cognitive function i mean it's like a miracle right the returns are so high and you'll see in your muffin top the next day you look kind of like wow like my i have different curves than i used to or maybe i don't have a curve 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 um i was at high risk for stroke and heart attack before i was 30. i was pre-diabetic i had arthritis in my knees 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 oh yeah my favorite fab pictures from entrepreneur magazine like 280 pounds and i'm this 23 year old the first guy to sell anything over the internet before anyone knew what the internet was uh and i thought 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 but all you have to do is do it once and the next day go wow that was a little hard and i 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 yeah adding brain octane to your bulletproof coffee or whatever 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 you know the bacon only there's a little trick diet so 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 1 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 yeah 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 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 uh no actually uh 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 a 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 risk tracking right 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 right and you could do yoga you could do a whole bite of vibration and use 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 let's throw up training as well pretty 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 yeah i can't i don't think i don't know how people like that no i like going for a bike 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 yeah like 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 yeah that makes the difference and yeah get help doing that but we're talking 15 minutes of pain once a week yeah 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 yeah so you saved 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 yeah muscle loss but also skin in the book i talk about collagen very specifically you know 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 it's energy oh this actually matters your skin is made of collagen collagen is the 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 do you help me with my wrinkles i'm gonna 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 your body i remember my mother's skin used to just fall off like she would touch herself and like 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 oh 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 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 um 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 total body makeover yeah the stem cell total body makeover with dr harry adelson yeah and uh this isn't something most of us are ever going to do frankly it was kind of painful however i'm looking to live 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 more growth hormone all the good stuff you've got to sleep so i was looking at my my sleep score for last night you had the aura ring i have the aura ring okay do you have one too i got one too so i've i've been an advisor to the company for a while because i was cto of another risk tracking company called basis while back so i really know the space well the ring is ridiculous but i i looked at my sleep score last night i slept uh 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 massive this is moreover's mine oh yeah oh let's compare something mine okay so mine uh wait that's uber i don't want the uber app wait 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 um 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 that telling to make it to sleep but i had restfulness i was tossing around because i was i was you know i'm traveling so i'm in california i'm staying in a friend's house i'm in their bed right 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 but it's still yesterday it's pretty good i got 92 and i had all i had all um uh blues which is no bad thing so 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 talk 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 and now look if you sleep 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 about 1.29 people than that 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 gonna make it to 180 here's here's the lead by eight hours here's why that works um people who are healthier need less sleep yeah right 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 learned to change things that make me sleep like i'm 20 instead of like so let's just touch on that for a minute we've had some shows on sleep you know 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 the 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 hundred years dramatically we have screens at night we have you're wearing the blue blocker glasses right now 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 pm don't drink don't exercise after dinner don't eat late no 3 hours before bed blue blocker glasses get off screens i mean these techniques really work they 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 these other things so sleep is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to literally age backwards by causing your cells 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 talked about here's what what different kinds of sleep do for you and here's how to get them and for me the the true dark the patented glasses for sleep that are more than blue blockers they doubled my deep sleep and when i used a specific kind 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 um it's an australian species of uh lion's mane mushroom 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 lines made when i took it i 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 i don't travel without it i always take it okay so life cycle lion's mane true dark twilight glasses and you can lower the two do the glasses all the time because you wear them during the day do you 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 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 it it actually is more like your brain relax it's yes it's interesting it's like the lights were kind of hurting my brain and now yeah it's an unconscious thing light creates pressure i feel like i got relief like like someone was stepping on my foot and got off but you wouldn't notice it if they slowly put pressure on your foot right we're in 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 let's recap here because this is really important one which glasses should you wear when and for how long and where do you get them because you talked about two different kinds of glasses got it so truedark 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 eyes i'm really into this it's an important biohack and at truedark 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 so the the sunset one is the one that night time night time when jet lag and traveling okay so you do sunsets for night time 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 oh i'm so down this is great okay well you're not getting these back but i already sent you a guy i know i got him in my drawer all right so let's let's go through again talk about the different strategies for living to 180 and sleep is key blue blocker glasses all the strategies talked about what else you know the other thing that is in the book is having uh 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 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 yeah 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 f word called friend right so we are wired in order to do those things and if you community connection community connection have friends special i 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're 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 the 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 powerful 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 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 five thousand friends on facebook we might not have one friend we can call it it happens on a on a regular basis you wanna listen to 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 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 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 are 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're bullied in seventh grade uh someone abandoned you when you were young you'll 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 yeah so a lot of this work is around improve your psychology improve your emotions yeah 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 yeah 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 yeah 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 if you a lot of kale isn't is an emerging big problem male from california any kale is full of thallium it's uh it's the world nature's strongest attractant of that detoxifier yeah so and also arsenic arsenic is another big one thank you so if you're going to live 180 you are going 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 fraction 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 talked about how to do that in the book but if you don't know that metals matter and you're just getting so can you can you measure how much metals you have in your system and yeah there's two ways in superhuman that i write about the gold standard is you collect urine and see what your body is 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 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 added two and two has treated literally tens of thousands of people with mental poisoning and have done tens of thousands of tests and i would say it's probably one of the most ignored and under-appreciated causes of chronic disease that doctors don't know how to think about well measure and personally for me i lived in china and it got huge exposure to mercury i don't have great genes of 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 i was you know in you're not trying to thought yeah 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 is going to be high unless there's an occurrent 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 urine for six hours hair tests also check for fish methyl mercury which is where we mostly get our mercury foam but 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 quick silver test and that that is surprisingly high in people who have a mouth full of fillings and you can see the difference between fish or or or a dental mercury uh 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 and but it's it's it's a whole process that has to be done safely and it's i think your point is really well taken i think it's an under served an underappreciated component of medicine and uh hopefully one day we'll get on board with this because it's just i mean it was interesting there was there was a um an article in the new york times that um 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 malingers 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 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 these guys are not whiners they're superhumans right yeah and so that guy came in i'm like okay well tell me about your job like oh we blow stuff up we shoot thing 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 pre-diabetes 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 just all got better and one of them was written about in the new york times wow because his you know 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 life how can you be an expert in lead and not know how to become a body it drives me no it's not 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 in fact an fda approved drug called the msa it's designed for lead removal and actually removes mercury so i think you know for people listening if you have any strange or weird ailments if you have anxiety depression insomnia autoimmune disease gut issues fatigue cognitive issues it may well be heavy metals and and you need to find a good functional medicine doctor to help you diagnose that 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 kind of was 40. it was 40 to 20 to 10 to five five 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 letters 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 because medicine just ignores this but in the journal circulation which is one of the top cardiology journals there was a paper number of 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 percent of the population has a slight 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 percent and this is more than smoking or cholesterol or like and it's like well why doesn't your cardiologist talk to you about this well you remember those four killers looks like at the beginning of the interview all of those are tied to metals in the body yes and especially can be yeah arsenic yeah alzheimer's it's nuts and so this is one of those things where if you're you want to feel good you do this on a regular basis so what are the 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 like how do you i mean how do 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-acetyl cysteine i manufacture a glutathione pill you can get intravenous glutathione acid uh 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 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 okay there's people perspire 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 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 or bad for you but using oral nicotine a spray or a gum or a lozenge or patch and there is an argument that i make in superhuman that says as as you age you might want to use one or two milligrams we're talking like five percent 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 you know vaping and smoking stuff this is 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 talked about how would you use that how would you do that and not it's not an excuse to smoke it's certainly not to vape it's just 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 yeah i'm not worried about alzheimer's disease oh my god okay and i figured out from a computer science ai which is my background uh computer security um 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 a sphere 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 especially when you're feeling covered 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 cook is like eat me no and the cook 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 um 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 uh fornication oh mark i was thinking fertility but oh my goodness i'm really embarrassed uh but yeah okay uh and it could be the other awkward 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 feeding fleeing fighting well basically fear fear food and the other f word you know you'll actually have ten things but but in all seriousness yeah yeah might have said inappropriate things here and there in a crowd but usually the inappropriate things in a crowd are coming from fear here at the end of the day right 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 the mitochondria the 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 with four companies not bulletproof i hired a ceo for that but these are upgrade labs and bulletproof media and you know 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 wanted 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 people start fasting so over the course of the last 10 years people 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 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 like oh man like i i feel so good i feel so clean and you stop being hungry after two days of fasting but who 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 f word 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 okay how do you do that and that's why fast this way it's why i wrote it because that first stepping off a cliff to 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 here's the first hack for cough or 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-sized large cup of coffee is enough to double ketone production in studies and when you get your ketones up to a very low puffy 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 creamer 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 you know the keto bro you know i 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's black coffee 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 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 cool brand names on it and i've done the same thing the bulletproof intermittent fast 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 lunch time rolls around and because you're still not that hungry you make better food choices you know i think i'll have the salad instead of you know 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 phenomena we call time restricted eating and hacks to make it easier which is yeah 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 no that's the other hack have dinner early like who would have thought right dinner early if you have dinner if you have dinner at five you can eat breakfast at nine that's a 16 hour fast right yeah so it doesn't have to be as onerous as it sounds and what you're saying is that by doing that you're 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 you be 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 when i was gonna live so long i would have taken better care of myself you know he's smoked he drank he did all his heart 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 a day fast a week or 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 it's really phenomenal when you start to look at it wow you know if you look at fasting or intermittent fasting or time restricted eating or bulletproof vesting or fasting mimicking diets or ketogenic diets they all they all do the same thing which is rejuvenate your biology it's really rejuvenative and regenerative medicine it is so rejuvenating because 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 to combine air and food effectively and a lot of people have heard about intermittent uh 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 that should get strong so fasting is kind of the same thing but for the mitochondria in the cells they go 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 according to research by frank shellenberger um who's been on my show has he been on yours um he's one of those no but he's the ozone guys yeah yeah yeah and he measures mitochondrial efficiency with a very serious set of you know 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 this is stuff i haven't seen online and this is from you know combing pubmed 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 serrapeptase 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 um 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 liquid electrolytes and i just squirt into the water i drink tom brady does it drink water without electrolytes which may explain his longevity and health 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 your cells to be hydrated yes the only way to get your inside of yourselves 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 marathons right they dig yeah 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 i think for interest cellular hydration it 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 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 gonna you're gonna 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 could 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 wait 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 the chunky sawdust kind of you know 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 you're you 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 if i do too much fasting or inter 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 uh it makes people jealous right yeah i mean i and i you know i worked hard at optimizing my metabolism so i think i i do very well but uh are there some people who shouldn't really be doing this that it's 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 doing the research yeah exactly like 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 that's why i've always recommended cyclical keto that's at the core of the bulletproof things sickle 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 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 carbi 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 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 it was a saturday morning right i just don't have gluten and corn syrup that's right but they're almond 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 went 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 uh where is it 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 i'm not a big snacking person if you if you if you have to snack your last meal was broken right that's right and that's a big part of of the message and fast this way you've got to eat in such a way that you don't have cravings and then fasting becomes painless my kids have learned this you know my my daughter when she was 10. 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 you know 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 yeah and and we clean up house we clean garbage you were mentioning the sort of mitochondrial renewal you know there there's something people have heard about call 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 and in fact there's a great book i'm sure you've heard of it that i 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 was one of my functional medicine mentors probably the real grandfather of clinical functional medicine uh 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 up your up your absolutely there dave and so the idea is that when you when you do that all these things happen you you increase your cognitive function because you want to be able to find the next meal so your mental alertness and acuity improves yes your metabolism increases the fat burning so you can burn off your fat stores you 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 full-on rehab repair and remodel it's like it's like getting your old car taken 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 the subtitles fastest way burn fat heal inflammation and eat like the high performing human you were meant to be and i think 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 fastest 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 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 bring they turn it into energy that runs every system in your body and there's byproducts there's water and 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 go 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 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 that's what i want to dig in and i just 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 uh one of them is called nad uh and we're gonna talk about that and this is taken as a supplement it also has some resveratrol which is from red wine also is 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 yep 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 like nuke your mitochondria what are 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 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 yourself it's 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 your coconut oil or butter it's still not good to fry because the heat damages oils then your body gets these oils and goes what do i do with these i'm going to try and build mitochondria they're 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 call them flfs 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 i like it 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 um my my people don't handle something called nightshade vegetables very well and this is potatoes tomatoes no kidding i just italian greek food or full of it and i i grew up dearly loving green chili new mexico and if i eat even one bite of foods from that family this is a deadly nightshade family but some people metabolise it for me i get joint pain 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 yeah it's a mitochondrial problem but it's only a problem for people with that genetics right 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 make it for you right right so it's not that simple to say oh here's the standard you know 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 it 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 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 you got the fried foods which is going to kill your mitochondria you've got food toxins yup 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 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 mother nature but i'm 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 there's no don't actually die but they're 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 need 152 pounds of sugar and 133 ounces 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 it really 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 my 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 it was 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 it 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 want to eat like salmon not not farm sandwiches or wild salmon sardines herrings yeah anchovies you know although something people don't like all the stinky fish right but those are the ones that are safest but i also had mercury poisoning and lead poisoning uh when i was younger and i remember the first time i got treated for it uh my my wife was like dave your skin is pink i've never 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 and you're actually creating a condition called pseudohypoxia which is when your mitochondria just can't use air in food because they've been poisoned so you get this sort of backed up system metabolically and you feel gray and your skin looks great 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 so we call you headstrong yeah exactly and so you sort of need to manage them like a like a system instead of 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 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 and now after about sounds like great advice that's not 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 what i'm saying please don't kill me please don't kill me you're strong survive you're gonna die all right 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 we're talking one minute of cold water but four days four days of pain first and then all of a sudden just just believe me just try it for a week you're like you know what i like my life when i do this you like the ice man you know yeah this is like the the weak version of that you don't have to go swimming i find uh you know when i was sick with chronic 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 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 cryotherapy it's low-tech it's free everyone can do it and if we all just did that the the measurable incidence of all chronic disease would go down across the country okay that's a great tip so what else can we do for 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 in that low battery mode right right 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 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 okay all right that sounds too easy yeah 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 i mean you basically exercise hard enough so you're going to throw up pretty much so 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 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 that's the good news yeah i mean i read a study years ago where they looked at uh 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 job like a regular aerobic exercise at the end of 12 weeks the group that only exercised 30 minutes three times a week far less exercise had nine percent 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 there 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 uh 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 it just over exercise your sex life goes to pot it really does and also if you're constantly stimulating instead of recovering it 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 yeah 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's good that's good to know i'm gonna write that yeah you know you you uh you said something there very you know hopefuls 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 oh yeah both 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 uh my next book comes out it's never 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 the next facebook post or the next you know 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 doughnut and it's tipped eight degrees to the left and you can measure this this isn't the woo side of things this is hard physics and if there's electrical current it makes a magnetic field we also have proven that mitochondria are sensitive to magnetic fields yeah that means that they're listening to your heart and when 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 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 hey 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 is mitochondria number one run away from kill or hide from scary things because if you missed 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 i believe if you change your brain chemistry and your hormones that it won't really look like food anymore then i walked 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 yeah 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 them with nuts because i thought that was the healthier you know but like we've had such a similar path i i used to have these cravings like i've got willpower i forget willpower comes from mitochondria it's energy right i've got willpower but every time you say no to these you're using a little bit of willpower until you run out and they're like i'll just have half the cookie right and then you feel like a bad person well you're using science now willpower to fix the problem and what happens with me now 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'd 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 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 in greece at lock yeah news event and we're we're on some little greek island and there's a guy at a little guest house and he said here's some baklava oh it was made by my grandmother from local wheat and honey like you know i'm eating that yeah i took some charcoal with it i i feel great it's fine but in europe it's better right it is but but that's sort of thing to be willing in acceptance but just to not see it that way it'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 want to 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 it leaves even more dirt than sugar does right so enough protein to restore all your cells build strong muscle 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 it doesn't have 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 when you stop eating for four days the blood brain turns on yeah you're like i feel so good and now you can you know 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 hack right i 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 hundred pounds on that diet in the early 90s and then of course getting it back you're gaining 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 non-profit 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 u.s 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 five percent 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's 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 pour it on your salad put 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 they're done 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 right now there you go and this came about no one knew that brain octane was better we there was no university research but i experimented with the different ones to figure out why normal mc2i was giving me we called it disaster pants it was so common in the early days great for constipation exactly and brain acting 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 into the recipe for 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 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 wow i ran a self-experiment i felt the difference i'm gonna 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's 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 it doesn't make you a bad person no i always say the smartest doctor in the room is your own body amen listen to your body because it's gonna tell you what works and doesn't and talk about uh 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 20s so i did not get that great genetic start and if i can walk around at 48 with about 10.2 10.5 percent 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 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 gotta 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 the most important why is it that people are willing to spend an hour a day in a spin class which is probably creating over training 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 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 weeks to turn on that's another podcast exactly but and hey go peegan there you go the 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 at the end of the book i actually tell people try fasting from hate right i'll talk about fasting from sex or at least porn for a brief period of time because your body feels like you're you're gonna die if you don't have sex freaking like you're not going to die if you don't have sex for a couple 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 is 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 it we're just going to normalize fasting and also acknowledged mark there are a lot less painful than my workouts my trainer that's like i don't know no more reps please yeah he makes me do he makes me do push-ups with bands you know you put like a oh that's so cool i love basically 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 question but you mentioned tom brady the other part of his longevity he figured out like i did that night shades um the lectin problem with nightshades for me but not for everyone for about a third of people man those things cause cravings like no one's business if you give me nightshades like potatoes or a bell plant bill plants bell peppers or eggplants man i want to eat sugar like no one's business right so you got to find the foods that don't trigger can you give up tomatoes i i just can't give up tomatoes yeah i'll still eat some fresh tomatoes i take out the seeds and you peel them and this is it was a core tomato off the vine in the garden in a hot august summer day well you have a garden experience i live in an organic farm and that's something that that i also would encourage people to fast from junk food and industrial meat and things like that um 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 i can't have skittles i can't have reese's peanut butter cups i can't have cheetos or whatever things 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 wow when you choose to do that kind of a fast you can still eat but you're giving back to the planet and the 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 mastered 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 send 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 and 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 uh 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 you know have deep conversations even if we don't have the same world view 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 masks i mean mass man and 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 and and what really is clear and david promoter's work and his son austin in in their latest book brainwashed 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 the one who doesn't do the stupid thing even though he thinks about doing it right well he said it's like dennis diminis and when i when i think about what i'm uh not doing what i'm going to do i've already done it you know like and i think yeah 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 i just it just breaks my heart me too i 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 so but and okay that's 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 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 yes 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 hypoglybicity is a very real word for me at least it used to be yeah that what is that icd-9 going to see 10 code 1034.2 is that it it's a clear medical diagnosis hypoglyphy that's very funny now you you sort of we're sort of kind of skirting around the edges of this but but in your book you talk about how fasting can be a powerful entry point into honesty and in control of ourselves yeah 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 in your feelings you journal so what i'm doing for people who order fast this way and send me the receipt at fastthisway.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 gonna 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 gonna do a spiritual fast i'm actually gonna get you a fasting journal and you're gonna be able to sit there and say all right i'm actually gonna 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 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 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 of the amygdala's easiest to trigger it makes you buy stuff and for those 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 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 uh 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 the the the heartbreak of of what's happening in the world right now is is real and it's tough and the divisiveness the conflict and i think you know it wears on all of us it wears under 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 have practiced i gotta interrupt you for a second you're one of the most giving guys that i know like i know all the because we're friends i know all the stuff you do that you never talk about to give back and you're you run 100 miles an hour helping people and you always have just to put that on the table thank you i appreciate that so i i feel after 30 years that i'm giving myself permission to take the month of december off awesome and it's a little terrifying and it's going and as we're talking i realize 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 [Laughter] 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 the 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 yeah and i think i'm pretty good at managing it almost 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 in my 20s traveling there was no cell phone there was no internet yeah 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 and i just 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 we've been in this in this over consumptive world not just over consuming food but over consuming information and news and 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 um 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 uh 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 re-human ourselves there's a word that most of us use on a daily basis and it's a word i've been fasting from uh 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 gone through 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 real need i'll give you that um so there are some real needs but the vast majority of things are and i would even go so far and say well mark we could get you a catheter you don't really need to be it's just the best path so let's just wet my pants so those are the the things that where fasting lets you address one of the things 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 this beautiful way to say it you know when 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 is actually you know focus on ourselves and what we can do to 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 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 you know what i think that's integrity right there it's it's about integrity and i think if we can focus on our own integrity in our lives and come in alignment with who we are what we want to be how to be the high performing human that we were meant to be and i 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 it'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 through the 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 right i haven't seen someone be level in a while maybe i could be a little bit more elaborate 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 that's not a huge one for me email like yeah i can give up alcohol caffeine sugar processed food i mean that's easy i can do yoga every day meditate nope 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 december and until we started talking i'm like 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 yeah it's i'm going to have an autoresponder talk to my assistant i'll be back in a month if you get 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 i just uh you know dave you are you're 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 i think it's a really rare quality in people and yeah and you've really done a lot of work to to overcome some of the sort of spiritual emotional challenges and you've been very successful and done in a way that's just with love and it's just it's just beautiful to see thanks mark you didn't know me when i was younger i was pretty much a journalist just be really good 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 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 work for me like i'm not in this to get known i'm willing to be known because i think i can help there's no benefit to it 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 until breakfast 14 hours 16 hour fast but we don't do that anymore we eat all night we have bedtime snacks we 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 light lunch in the morning you can have just black coffee or tea or you can do it with bulletproof coffee without any proteins without any sugar or any artificial sweetener and when you do it either way it's no bulletproof mocha huh there's a chalk on but if you put much chocolate in there you're going to get some carbs and you want like you want no carbs you want your insulin to 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 gonna do my own system repair and what you're gonna 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 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 every day it's fascinating i don't know if you know the work on fasting mimicking diets it's fascinating 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 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 dollars on something that wasn't a drug yeah and i 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 there and it poisons your thyroid and there's all kinds 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 for bursts of time and then you stop yeah and that stuff it has merit and just if you're listening to this and you have like i did 100 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 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 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 because like i always 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 yeah i mean once 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 ketones everybody's doing is working well it's my the stuff in hamstring mitochondrial support ketosis collagen protein brain octane bulletproof coffee cyclical ketosis all those things when you stack them up yeah and 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 i have a couple more questions i want to shift gears a little bit two more questions one is and this is a inflammatory question is it pride no it's vegan can you be a healthy vegan yes or no i 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 uh and that because i think imagine this even the plants wouldn't suffer if you ate just gravel um but it doesn't work and i mean are there some people who it works for because you see that guy's like rick rich roll and he's like a ultra marathoner he's not there maybe game changers coming out where you see all these elite athletes who are vegans how does that work well it's interesting and uh doesn't ritual 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 uh yeah he's mentioned this and having been a 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 high vegetable protein diet frankly is bad for you you need to be on a low to moderate protein diet the real problem with 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 butter 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 acid that's out of butter that's right yeah named for that right right so you need some of that stuff and i i gave a talk at david wolf's conference who's a well-known uh vegan 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 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 on the river and grab it right but 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 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 even to 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 a computer-assisted neurofeedback driven five-day personal development retreat but instead of using uh sitting in a cave and meditating 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 want to 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 here's the scary thing most of us are we have a huge amount of energy going into making brain waves and they're not useful brain waves it's it's injury 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 this is energy that comes from that food you put in your mouth and if it's going into brain waves 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 mm-hmm i think mark works powerful 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 like 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 going to do with it well maybe you should apply it to like your brain to turn on happiness turn on gratitude and turnover would be like fear 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 and 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 non-profit work uh there's a 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 you've had this since ever since i've known you thank you i think that all of us have this in us and i agree it's hidden and it's hard to access and there is 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 saying you know what 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 just happens to the lucky few that's so true so so much of our suffering is related to how we care for organisms 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 um ryan you have to prove that it's safe and effective oh well right right now it turns out that as a company as 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 had that cherries help with uh with heart attacks and 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 you can call crap happy meals that makes you happy right 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 transparency in our currency in our 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 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 yeah so when we look at these seven pillars of aging one of the first ones is mitochondrial mutations so these mitochondria they're ancient bacteria that are a part of our cells now they look like little bacteria and if you look at them in a microscope and they have their own dna that's bacterial dna and so they're 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 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 so yeah let's get those no 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 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 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 makes 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 it 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 to higher pac-man to come and clean them up yeah that's pretty much it we have little robots that come in and there 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 good idea to eat it in case there isn't a donut tomorrow you know better we all know better but we evolved in an area there wasn't krispy kreme or dunkin donuts in every corner so yeah 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 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 write a book called you thing that's a great name okay it's fascinating and in its 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 i don't want to do that then there's then there's what we call intermittent fasting which most people mean by that time restricted eating where you eat an eight-hour window and 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 yeah all 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 yes and and your book really goes into how do we reverse that process how do we understand what harms the mitochondria what cause inflammation how do we shift that so let's talk more about these cellular aging forms that say 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 well let's let's go through the other ones another one that's really interesting is called cellular straightjackets 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 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 in 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 right okay what causes inflammation well what causes inflammation 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 gluten deficiency lack of sugar not enough ice cream i think that's just keto it's her 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 gonna 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 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 a teaspoon of sugar in a normal meal on occasion it it's a lesser evil yeah it's not that it's yeah it's the pharmacologic doses that we eat of you know 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 a 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 you're keto mafia 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 talked about the number of gut bacteria species that i had it was 48 because i travel 150 days of the year i cannot eat enough vegetables at restaurants it's hard so right well i quadrupled it 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 species right and i didn't have to eat kale i didn't have to smell kale so we got an anti-kale kick absolutely kale is bad but what what's going on around this inflammation in ourselves that causes these cellulite jackets is look if you eat some fried stuff oh i just it's a special treat i just eat it a couple times a week it 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 emily are you eating a inflammatory mitochondrial damaging diet 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 to get vegetables i literally go to a restaurant i'm traveling i'll say can i please have three sides of vegetables you know like and you know what comes four four string beans yeah four string beans and they're all deep fried in like some colored batter the worst was when i was in des moines iowa doing a public television show and and i was like in the hotel i wanted some food i'm like all right can i get some vegetables because 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 like like a soup of gravy over the green beans and that was the vegetables did you wash them off with coca-cola i just didn't know what i was like to do 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 steamed 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 and my kids know that and i've taken my kids out and said all right let's go eat serious junk so so they can feel it all right so we talked about the mitochondrial mutations we talked about the cellular straightjackets 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 are supposed to be able to burn up and get out so every cell is 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 to 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 at the dump but you stick enough things in there that won't burn it can't function yeah 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 to back up you know they're called ages advanced glycation and products it's sort of like you know the crust on the 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 make this up right advanced vacation implants it's basically sugar and protein combined together they create this massive inflammatory response and oxidative stress which then damage their 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 yeah 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 in products versus making them on you know the best way to eat them microwave your food microwave your food and eat caramel which is pretty much solid advanced location and product 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 live day 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 vegetables they're like oh grilling meat burn vegetables grilling your vegetables does the same thing as grilling meat it creates the same toxic chemicals i go to restaurants and 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 a medium 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 that 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 and 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 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 bulb of diet in your work we are talking about eating foods that are more satisfying more delicious and more tasty to the point that if someone puts a piece of you know in big 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 you 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 like it doesn't look like food to me it's like why would i eat that it's like a rock like i'm not gonna eat a rock or a piece of wood but like i i it doesn't actually look like food to me anymore and i don't claim that 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 doesn't even i don't think it'll taste good when i if i do taste it it's like look i'm going to eat that i i'm with you there and people think it's a little bit crazy because i remember when i weighed 300 pounds i would have the worst cravings and you'd see those those scones or whatever in the 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 same thing now in my pattern matching system those don't register as food anymore because they're actually not food for humans right and now that my pattern matching system is right i just like 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 isn't it it's not like i don't it's not a willpower thing anymore one shot 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 look 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 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 in superhuman for aging backwards that will add more years to your life and more life to your years all right i don't want to know that i'm taking no first i'm going to tell you why 180 is a real number and then i'm going to tell you that okay okay because i'm busting your job but i i'm like curious i'm like all right okay okay so then all your well you better live that long because then at least i have one friend yeah absolutely we'll be hanging out everybody's gonna be dead we're gonna like just gonna be you and me i don't think it's gonna end up like that a lot of people listening to the show are gonna live decades longer than they think yeah and i want you to go back a hundred years mark okay if if you're gonna live 150 you've got 90 more years if i lived 180 i've got 136 more years but let's go back 100 years here's 1919. world war one is ending where many of the battles are fought on horseback yeah look at where technology has taken us today and you look at it it's kind of scary yeah well 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 in search pubmed which is pretty much all of the medical knowledge that we have yeah all the scientific papers 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 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 i was it was that was actually before facts it was way before facts right but 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 that they're like facts what they still do facts i'm like yeah they're medical stuff oh of course somehow it's more private or something okay i i i look at all this and you say okay you've had dr david sinclair on the show um he's 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 clermont there you go although she might have filled in for her mom there's 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 uh lack of birth certificates yes it's poor economy lack of education and lack of 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 probably 20 years younger because you know their mom had them and you know 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 i mean at the turn of the century the longest-lived people on the planet or the plains indians they had the most centenarians of any population interesting i didn't know that they ate was buffalo and a few berries and whatever else red buffalo hump my favorite um 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 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'd give corn to the slaves right and it's still that we have to run pretty fast so the fish wouldn't rot i think they had like multiple handoffs pony express for fishing 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 the next hundred years given the amazing technology and the research of people that you and i know it's because an asteroid hit the planet hey youtube if you like this video you're gonna love the next one click on it to check it out today when brains are damaged with alzheimer's that basically it's like type 3 diabetes in the brain and it can't utilize glucose or sugar as well but it can utilize fat or ketones which is why you see patients in the study show and i've had my own personal patients significantly

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 134,348

Keywords: Mark Hyman, Mark Hyman interview, Mark Hyman live longer, Mark Hyman diet, how to live longer, how to age in reverse, nutrition tips, healthy foods, health tips, health theory, fasting tips, how to never get sick again, prevent disease, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, inspiration, motivation, dave asprey, dave asprey fasting

Id: wAYtubs36aQ

Length: 150min 34sec (9034 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 20 2021