The Little Known Secret to Energy and Longevity l Doctor's Farmacy with Mark Hyman, M.D. EP7

[Music] welcome to the doctors pharmacy I'm dr. Mark Hyman that's pharmacy fa RM Acy a place for conversations that matter and today's guest is someone who's gonna tell you things that really matter Dave Asprey is a close friend who's my inspiration and one of the smartest guys I've ever met he's the founder and CEO of bulletproof coffee and bulletproof 360 he is a two-time New York Times bestselling author and I definitely poached his books for learning things from my book he hosts this amazing podcast bulletproof radio featured on the been featured on The Today Show CNN New York Times dr. oz he's worked with world-renowned doctors not me obviously no he has of course actually helped me when I was really sick last year I called Dave because I needed to figure out how to get better and he gave me some extraordinary great suggestions and you know most doctors don't go to laypeople to learn stuff but I go to Dave and he works with incredible scientists to uncover the latest most innovative methods for enhancing our physical and mental performance by taking control of our own biology it's called bio hacking and I love that term because it means you can actually get the code for your biology and you can upgrade your biology you're not stuck with what you got his book headstrong which his latest book which is a great book on the mitochondria we're going to talk about the mitochondria and it teaches you how to be smarter faster and more resilient in your brain and it's got all these great techniques in information and I love it it's really a sort of a how-to manual for your brain if anybody has a brain you need that book and also his bulletproof diet which is a great great book and Dave comes at this honestly I've seen pictures of my hey was younger he was this big fat kid with tons of pimples and oily skin not exactly the sexiest man alive and was doing great work but struggling through this incredible brain fog he was overweight a hundred pounds he was exercising like crazy and he wasn't losing weight and he figured out how to hack his biology lost 100 pounds improved his sleep upgraded his brain even improved his sex that's off line I know we can and he's transformed himself into a better husband father entrepreneur and I would say friend so welcome Dave to the doctor's pharmacy mark I'm so happy you started a show you have such a good take on medicine and to be able to share this with people it's awesome and I'm honored to be here fantastic so what are the things it's challenging for people in the health space and his whole sort of problem and I would say now called orthorexia which is this idea that people are so obsessed with restricting their diets to be healthy and it leads to a set of a restrictive life and for me what's important is not to be restrictive but to learn how to be resilient and you've had to in your own life be restrictive in order to get resilient but you're now exploring and sort of hacking the concept of resiliency how do you become robust and resilient and have more we call metabolic degrees of freedom can you tell us about that orthorexia is a fascinating condition and the truth of the matter is that if you eat junk food all the time it is going to kill you and your body knows that and you kind of get a little stressed but you don't know what's going on and then if you suddenly start eating in a way that makes you feel much better and then you go back to you the other way it's like a punch in the face you're like oh my god I don't want to do that again and it's not uncommon to develop almost like a little bit of a panic response like oh my god if I eat a french fry I'm gonna die and that's where orthorexia and things like that come from and the truth of the matter is that if you differentiate once you're not gonna die you might not feel as good you might get a pimple right but if you do it all the time it's really gonna screw up your ability to show up in the world the way you want to and it's that sense of calmness and acceptance and metabolic resilience that you want to build into what you do so that you say I'm gonna choose not to eat the french fry but I'm not gonna die if I do and that's when you're free of weird emotional baggage whether it's an addiction to junk food or an absolute terror of it neither one of those will be good and I can tell you there's some foods where I will fast before I'll eat them because I know that I'm gonna hurt for a week if I eat that and I know what my kriptonite foods are but I'm not terrified of them I'm denied food that's not going to ya and then there's the concept of biohacking and I created that field and I wrote that first definition which was the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so that you have control of your own biology because not including your emotions and your thoughts and your behavior all the things that are driven by your health because your biology determines your biography that's so well put if you think about it the primary purpose of these little power plants in your body they take food and air and they make electrons and it's the same electrons that power your iPhone literally they're just electrons and where do you think your willpower and your thoughts and your energy come from they come from that and if your body is bad at those little power plants right those are mitochondria they are there ancient bacteria that we like to say that we we harness them two billion years ago to make our cells that can move around my story from headstrong is it it's more likely that these little bacteria moved into the cells that are us and took over and never stopped because they're the ones who read the environment and the other ones who decide how much energy and how many hormones and what happens in your body on a microsecond by microsecond paces they listen to you a little bit but they really listen more to the sunshine to the air into the food you eat because that's what they care about you to them you're a petri dish and they live inside you so they're gonna keep you alive at all costs and they'll make you afraid of bad food and then they just like a carrying case for these that's what they bacteria those little bastards think they're in charge and the truth is that we're in charge and when you have that mindset you can take knowledge from Navy SEALs neuro scientists anti-aging medicine these high-performance athletes and the truth of the matter is that not everyone wants to get swole not everyone wants to live to 180 or more years which is my goal today that I was honored 20 but I'm an out to be more ambitious and get to at least hundred fifty let's write an 80 so I'm a little older than you so maybe if I get to 170 170 is pretty good yeah you know that's like a bronze medal the truth though mark and I think you're seeing this in your practice and in your own life there are there's knowledge now that never existed even five years ago or ten years ago and it disseminates so quickly we're seeing exponential changes I'm just betting that we already know people can do 120 because we've seen it hmm so given that you and I both are now and people listening are enabled to make fewer decisions that harm their biology over time you don't have to be perfect just make less of the little hits that you take all the time and when you are older you'll be healthier and that gives us Oh another 60 years of technology to figure out the other 50% of my lifespan that I'm counting on and I'm working with some of the companies doing this and I know that we will meaningful extend lifespan and the challenge for you and me is to make this happen for everyone not just for the billionaires and it's not just about extending your lifespan because who wants to be decrepit in a nursing home it's extending your health span to equal your lifespan so my fantasy is when I'm a hundred and twenty I go up to a beautiful cabin on the lake with my wife we have a beautiful bottle of wine amazing meal I jump in the lake we make love and I just kind of drift off into the next world only 120 but hopefully everything still works in honor 20 I'll take that that's the first thing that that we have to break through most human beings because this is all we've ever seen we have a picture well after about 40 you you peak before then and then you just slowly decline and yeah you're gonna be old and hunched over and you're you might need diapers and you're not gonna know your wife's name and all sorts of things like like this as you age and that's all bs it is not necessary it does not always happen and if it does happen it's your fault and you can change that's the thing it's like what we see is normal aging we'll call normal aging is actually abnormal age yes and what functional medicine is is essentially the ultimate biohacking set of tools it's understanding how to create health and resilience in all your biological systems and networks and that's what you really kind of come at as a layperson but you're sort of finding your self to the same conclusions and it's pretty startling how much we know and how little we have actually applied that in medicine and how little your doctors actually know about this that's one of the things that inspired me I was a computer hacker Silicon Valley early invention of the internet times and that's about managing a really complex system where you don't know all the components you know who owns everything you don't know who controls that you don't know what changes are gonna happen but somehow you still have to get a webpage to somebody and it turns out the body is very similar there's a lot we don't know about what's going on in there but it's a complex system and we can change the inputs and measure the outputs and we can correlate events and in traditional Western medicine we have this idea that oh if we don't know the cause then the correlation is no good and what I'm saying is you know if I do a and and instead of B and I feel much better we can figure out why and how that worked later but I'm gonna keep doing what makes me feel good look better and measurably improve my markers of inflammation my markers of aging and literally my ability to just be awake and focused and happy at any time of the day because I did not have that in my mid-20s I was 300 pounds I had serious brain fog fatigue to the point that I bought disability insurance because I'm like I don't know what's going on no doctor can tell me and the problem is no doctor could tell me it was their job to tell me and they did not know any of their fault they just don't learn about it at most they don't but see even back then you were doing this kind of work mark but very few doctors were well I had two biohack myself to health because I had a total system collapse I wasn't 300 pounds but every biological system broke down my gut my immune system my brain my mitochondria my detoxification system I literally had to reverse-engineer my way to health and I was desperate just probably like you were in order to figure this out and and what's exciting last twenty years since I've done that we just have so much more accelerated knowledge about how and why to do that I spent a million dollars upgrading my biology and the first half of that was dig out of the hole that I found myself in because I ate the wrong foods because I got really bad medical advice because I was on antibiotics every month for 15 years because I had chronic sinus infections that were caused by toxic mold in my house not caused by bacteria and just this this treadmill that just wrecked my body it's it's little bits you don't unless unless you get a virus or something you just knocked out a lot of times people just don't know and it's just like maybe I'm just weak maybe I'm just not good at rock that's in slowly boiling water well just stay there and think it's normal right until at some point like it's just not okay to stay in here but that point it may be too late all right so let's dig in a little bit now this last book had strong 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 ourselves and there's hundreds to thousands and tens of thousands in some cells and they basically take food that you eat and they take oxygen that you breathe they turn it into energy that runs every system in your body and there's byproducts so 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 Horkheimer say oh yeah all these things are related even autism yeah are related to mitochondrial dysfunction and there's a woman Suzanne goes extraordinary scientists 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 gave them mitochondrial stuff support and these kids get better you may not know this but I met the clinical definition of Asperger's syndrome till 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 gonna 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 and 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 mm-hmm 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 piles 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 I'm 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 when I 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 have heard this study but the mitochondria require certain nutrients and certain factors one of them is called nad and we're going to talk about that and this is taken as a supplement it also has some respect role which is from Redwine also is a mitochondrial regulator and controls these master genes that affect inflammation that affect oxidative stress and help produce more energy and there was a preliminary study done now there's been many many drug studied for ALS none of them work yeah even the best best best one that got approved reduces the decline by about 15 percent but you're still in decline they did an interventional trial using nad and resveratrol which actually stopped and actually improved patients with ALS and they regain 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 it less so what are the things that like nuke your mitochondria one of the things people are doing every day that mess them up that decrease their energy that affect their ability to function think and be the first one is eating damaged fats or bad fats and we hear about this thing called a cellular membrane but it's not really a membrane it's a collection of tiny droplets of fat and your mitochondria have their own little bag of fat that they're held in it's in a baggie that holds all the contents of your cells made up of fat correct and then there's another one that holds the cell itself so if you eat the wrong fats particularly fried foods even if you fry them in coconut oil or butter it's still not good to fry because the heat damages oils then your body gets these oils and it goes what I do with these I'm gonna 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 socom FLS funny-looking fat's there you go it don't eat that stuff you don't need the fried calamari it's just not good eat the guacamole like so that's one thing another thing is there are toxins a variety of toxins that some of which come from Mother Nature and some which come from from man and if you eat these even in relatively low amounts they will affect your mitochondrial function and the most confusing part that's made this hard for medicine and particularly nutrition is that different DNA different backgrounds can affect which toxins really mess with you in my case in my family history it turns out somewhere on my mother's side because this is a mitochondrial thing mitochondria only come from your mom not your dad my people don't handle something called nightshade vegetables very well and this is potatoes tomatoes okay tiny and Greek food are full of it and I I grew up dearly loving green chilli in New Mexico and if I eat even one bite of foods from that family this is a deadly nightshade family but some people metabolism for me I get joint pain brain fog muffin top but like it's just it's bad and what if you take the seeds out and peel it even if even if I do that it just doesn't matter I'm highly sensitized to it and my daughter's not that way but I am and it's irritating but that doesn't mean for someone listening that it's bad for them so a third of cases of rheumatoid arthritis are caused by this family it's a mitochondrial problem but it's only a problem for people with that genetic side right so what I recommend people do on the bulletproof diet I put a set of suspect foods these are foods that may cause prosperity but they may be good oh yeah 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 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 a 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 gonna kill your mitochondria you've got food toxins yeah 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 don't know Marc I I don't I don't like sugar sugar is bad for you I don't know if sugar is worse than then grains which are essentially made out of sugar but covered with other toxins from other nature but I I'm a hundred percent with you if you eat sugar especially drink sugar mm-hmm what ends up happening is the mitochondria get a burst of sugar saying yeah but then they're dead like there's none actually died but they're they're out of energy and it's that sudden spike in sudden crash it causes metabolic damage far beyond just mitochondria we we know 252 pounds of sugar 100 3 3 oz of flour which is worse than sugar that's almost 3/4 of a pound a day of flour and sugar that is poison for him out of country really or its aging causes this pre-diabetes and in some resistance that is a huge driver and then there's also other things toxins other toxins and I had mercury poison it's about to say mercury good I had mercury poisoning in 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 mm-hmm 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 and rain and gets in our fish and some types of fish are much better than others and you and I have both written about the type of fish that you want to eat like salmon not not farm salmon or wild salmon sardines herring anchovies you know although although most of the people don't like I like although stinky fish right but those are the ones that are safest but I also had mercury poisoning and lead poisoning when I was younger and I remember the first time I got treated for it my my wife was like Dave your skin is pink I've never been gray and what happens when these toxins are present just look a little lead like yeah you look like and and you're actually creating a condition called pseudo hypoxia which is when your mitochondria just can't use air and food because they've been poisoned so you get the 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 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 that we call you back headstrong yeah exactly and so you sort of need to manage them like a like a system instead of like little individual things so you want to take the weakest 20% of your mitochondria and you want to tell them die and that sounds a little bit brutal but here's what happens when they die fresh new young ones Wow 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 after battles like great advice that's not so much fun I can't wait to do it the morning after eight seconds you're gonna be like Dave Asprey is a jerk if you stick with me for four days the next day we'll do it you'll last like 20 seconds and what's gonna happen is the voice in your head which is your mitochondria I'm just gonna say you're going to die you must get out it's unbearable to be in here but you rationally know if I'm in here for one minute I'm not going to die but it feels like it and you believe that feeling but what you're doing is you're telling the mitochondria if you can't make enough energy to keep yourself warm for just a minute of cold water then you're weak and you should die and that's them saying please don't kill me please don't kill me you're gonna die and when you do that after the fourth day you're like you know what this isn't that cold in fact I feel invigorated my skin is tighter I'm losing weight I feel good I sleep better like it's really powerful we're talking one minute of cold water but before there's four days of pain first and then all of a sudden just just believe and just try it for a week like you know what I like my life when I do this like the Ice Man yeah this is like the the weak version of that you don't have to go so I find you know when I was sick with chronic fatigue the only thing they would give me like a few hours of relief would be to take a steamer really hot yeah bath and then I would jump in an ice bath correct and that would kind of flush everything out and I feel like a minute of clarity and energy and the thing is this doesn't require liquid nitrogen like we have it bulletproof lab suit cryotherapy it's low-tech it's not 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 that's a great tip so what else can we do for a mitochondria there's two kinds of exercise that matter and I looked up all the research on this stuff and your job with exercises 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 hmm so one kind of exercise in there that low battery mode right everybody will do that you know the last thing is your brain but you know the rest of you it's like you don't have to repair it and regenerate why would you do that you don't have enough energy just keep it for the brain keep it for the lungs you'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 eat youthful mitochondria so this means not like running you don't have to go get all dressed up in your Lulu outfit although that 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's not too easy yeah and if you want to really grow more mitochondria and get all the benefits for anti-aging there's another body research that says at least once and maybe twice a week you need to do something really hard for 10 to 15 minutes meaning basically actually as hard enough so you're gonna throw up pretty much it's what I recommend in the book is is that once a week you want to sprint and you want to run about 400 yards like a tiger's chasing you and then lay down on your back it's actually important to lay down on your back instead of stand there and there's a whole different thing that happens in the brain when you do that around recovering faster you do that three times and then you know you can just say alright I'm done that's not very much pain that's not very much work and it actually is gonna replace being on a spinning thing you know every day for the week the idea here is you know 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 you do 90 minutes a day that's a good news yeah I mean I read a study years ago where they looked at giving people 30 minutes of interval training which is what you're talking about three times a week versus 60 minutes six days a week of just like a run light job like a regular aerobic exercise and at the end of 12 weeks the group that only exercised 30 minutes three times a week far less exercise had 9% less body fat and we're 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 gonna do an Ironman triathlon and Mike let me guess your adrenals are shot yeah you can't sleep you have no sex drive your joints hurt all the time and like how did you know it's like well here's what happens when you don't recover enough yeah well what happens is exactly that hormones crash adrenals crash testosterone goes down women oftentimes get monthly hormone problems and it just goes 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 actually be masters of recovery which means small amounts of Targ 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 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 trouble 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 its recovery that's good to know I'm gonna write that yeah you know you he said something they are very you know hopefuls we can actually change her 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 lies but oh yeah both of us aren't really stressed we just seem to kind of go through every day and you know a good time and you can rely right you can do big things and still be happy in fact my next book comes on it's ever 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 Tigers just the next email is 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 gonna constantly change your metabolism to 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 Wu side of things this is hard physics and if there's the electoral 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 gonna screw recovery screw repair who cares about cancer there was a tiger here it's going to eat me cancer doesn't matter it doesn't no it's just your imagination that you think your spouse has having an affair which may not be true you look at the same response exactly and if that's running the show your body will naturally make sure that you stay alive right now and not worry about preventing death 20 years from now because if you missed this one that one down the road doesn't matter and if you realize they're dumb they're little bacteria they care about three things mark these 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 gonna starve to death and maybe that's not true for us but that's what they think their 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 here's 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 walk by the Starbucks Caray of pastries those cakes and scones and doughnuts and muffins and I'm like it doesn't look like food even if I'm hungry oh that doesn't look like food it's a rock why would eat a rock you you are absolutely absolutely cry used to want to eat it yeah I used to go to like the airport when I was travel around you can sneak around and buy a Cinnabon when no one was looking and I'd get there one with nuts because I thought I was the healthier we've had such a similar path I used to have these crazy I have got willpower I forget will power comes from mitochondria it's a no joy I've got willpower but every time you say no to these you're using a little bit of willpower till you run out and they'll just have half the cookie right and then you feel like a bad person are using science no willpower to fix the problem 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 would rather eat nothing like I would eat it if I wanted - like I'm not gonna go I'm like neat if I want to but like I just it doesn't attract me the desire is gone and it's sort of striking and and sometimes if I get eating a little too much chocolate sugar then it starts oh that might be interesting to eat and then I stop and like it goes away so it's all hormones and biology it really is I can tell you in the last ten years there's one time I've had grains and it was actually we were hanging out mark and in grease at vision Lackey on a news event and we're on some little Greek island and there's a guy at a little guest house and he said here's some baklava oh it's made by my grandmother local wheat and honey like you know I'm eating that yeah I took some charcoal with it I felt fine it was in Europe it's better right it is but but that sort of thing did to be willing and acceptance but just to not see it that way it smile Kandra yeah it's so true okay so now let's get into one of our favorite topics which is fat I love that 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 it 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 all right so enough protein to restore all your cells build strong muscles strong bones healthy skin super important excessive protein without any their 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 doughnut and when you eat fat with sugar it's deadly exactly it doesn't that sweet fat it doesn't work at all so what's left then is this diet that started out and in about the yard 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 body's line turns on yeah I feel so good now you can you experience oneness with a 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 a long periods of time and living in a monastery so yes the original version AK right I was like let's eat bacon and pork rinds and no 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 gained it back you gain it back and you can't lose the other half because you're toxic and you don't feel good so what happened is I started running an anti-aging non-profit group in the San Francisco Bay Area and 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 5% is able to dramatically elevate the ketones in your body which means if you eat coconut oil it's better than a lot of other oils but it's not going to put you in ketosis any more than eight hours of fasting and that's a study from UC San Diego that found that out but the stuff we use in brain octane which is that most rare form of MCT brain octane is a bulletproof product that stuff is able to raise ketones four times more than coconut oil and what this means is that if you're eating a low carb but not a no carb diet and you put some of that stuff in your bulletproof coffee you pour it on your salad in your smoothie the way I do I do it three times a day you always have ketones circulating in your body mm-hm and when ketones are present your mitochondria they're done a little bacteria like hey I got energy from fat that energy from whatever else reading some carbs from your vegetable house audacity all 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 MCT oil was giving me we called the disaster pants it was so common in the early days about great for constipation exactly and brain octane oil didn't do that but more I got a really strong mental edge from that that I didn't get from the other forms of MCT and that was why we built that into 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 lesson for everyone listening mark it's that if you feel a difference it's okay to believe what you feel and notice from your food right I did not have any data I made a decision based on oh I ran a self experiment I felt a difference I'm gonna do what works and if you apply that to your food in your life and if your doctor or your friend or your nutritionist or some online guru says this food is good for you and you eat it and you do what they said and you feel like crap yeah it's okay to do something different and does make you a bad person no I always say the smartest doctor in the room is your own body a man listen to your body because I'll tell you what works and doesn't yeah so they keep telling is fascinating because there's a whole spate of books out there now on ketogenic diets there's a whole spate of books on intermittent fasting yeah and fasting so this is a whole merging area that's really getting a lot of attention and I'm seeing this in the medical world we're looking at it for epilepsy for autism for Alzheimer's for diabetes for cancer even and having dramatic effects and it's and it's really the body switching from sugar burning to fat burning and when you do that it burns cleaner your mitochondria love it it actually does all the anti-aging stuff which is so cool like building your stem cells reducing inflammation increasing your the oxidant enzyme building muscle increasing bone density it's pretty striking and improving your cognitive function even your sex drive all improve when you switch to this which is something we've been doing for literally millions of years because we didn't have grocery stores we had to like hunt and gather and if we had a bad day we'd have to be able to function the ketogenic trend is interesting that the original bulletproof diet book had a section on intermittent fasting and how you could use brain octane or MCT or a fat only breakfast to increase the rate of ketosis during a fast alright so you're not technically fasting because there's some calories but there's no insulin no protein and things like that and the problem is during the research for that I ate a lot of different foods I tested a lot of things on myself and I went into extreme ketosis for 3 months straight and this is when you basically don't eat very many carbs at all 50 grams or 30 I said I'm gonna do one serving of broccoli day oh and he like an Eskimo so I'm eating just tons of fat and protein and you know what I'm eating moss if ya ever hass right well here's what happened I developed allergies to eggs which are an amazing superfood and I developed allergies to almonds what I didn't have before right and so what happened well if you go into ketosis and you stay in ketosis in that you have less than 15 or 30 grams of carbs a day where your body naturally produces these ketones your gut bacteria get wrecked like completely wrecked and they don't make something called butyric acid which is required for you to make energy in fact it also raises ketosis it turns out so I ended up coming out with a recommendation there that says being cyclical ketosis and this matters even more for women than for men which means you can be in ketosis for a week you can accelerate it using the brain octane and things like that or you can do it without any of that stuff you'll just with playing coconut oil but the deal is after you go in you need to go out and come back in why are you doing that it's because the body likes cycles and because your gut bacteria will completely slay your mitochondria here's what happens if you only eat fat and protein which some people try to do for months on end yeah and they have to dig themselves out of fiber that's what you're got back at the banya a fiber comes from foods its fiber and your gut bacteria they talk to other bacteria like your mitochondria and when they're unhappy they make something called LPS or Lippo polysaccharide and when you eat a high fat diet fat escorts Lippo polysaccharide passed the lining of the gut all fat or just certain fats it turns out all fats will do it but saturated fats specifically the long-chain saturated fats will do it even more well but it also just so happens that this amazing extract of coconut oil that might go by the name of brain octane protects protects the liver from local polysaccharides and one of the reasons I put that in the bulletproof coffee recipe was well if you do have this going on in your gut and it does go through at least like there's an oil that is shown in a study to provide a benefit and that said you want to have healthy gut bacteria that don't make these toxins because those toxins are direct mitochondria poisons so if your gut bacteria are off they will make your body's mitochondria also be off so we talked about toxins from mothers why'd you have internet 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 to 14 hours 16 hour fast but we don't do that anymore we'd all night we have bedtime snacks we eat first thing in the morning and we don't give our body 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 protein without any sugar or any artificial sweetener and when you do it either way it's no bulletproof mocha huh there's a talk on but if you put much chocolate and they're gonna get some carbs and you want like you want no carbs you want 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 do every des fast you know the work on fasting by making diets is it fascinating work which is sponsored by the NIH spend tens of millions dollars looking at this and what they just put people on a fast for a short period of time basically very low calorie diet where you'd go into ketosis and if you do it once a month or every couple 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 ten million dollars on something that wasn't a drug yeah and I I came up with something called the 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 get a really good brain fog from that argument of poisons your thyroid look yeah something 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 four bursts of time and then you stop yeah and and that stuff it has a merit and just if you're listening to this and you have like I did a hundred pounds or 50 pounds of weight to lose it's not supposed to cause you pain to lose the weight it's not supposed to be hard you're not supposed to be hungry if you do this right what happens is you just have to buy new pants every three weeks like that's it and you're like wow this is amazing I had a patient complaining to me dr. Hyman I'm really upset with you why well I keep losing so much weight I have to keep buying new clothes yeah like you and I should invest in like Dockers and Levi's 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 have all these fat pants because like I do I always go up you know 2 or 4 inches I've gone from a 46 to a 34 inch way there you go right but I have been a 34 inch waist for the past four years without any very yeah younger healthier better fitter more muscular your skin's better I mean it's pretty impressive to see it's like keto he's doing his work what's my the stuff in that's like mitochondrial support ketosis collagen protein the brain octane bulletproof coffee sick low ketosis all those things when you stack them up yeah I can't even believe how I feel I'm 45 so great I'm 58 and I'm like I'm working on you're looking at 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 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 rava canned everything possible I really want to tell you that you could live on gravel and that because they're thinking imagine this even the plants wouldn't suffer if you ate just gravel but it doesn't work and I mean are there some people who it works for because you say that guys like rich role and he's like a ultra marathoner and he's moving game changers coming out where you see all these elite athletes for vegans how does that work well it's interesting and 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 yeah he's mentioned this and having been a very focused very well educated raw vegan and then even in a raw omnivore for a while before I did the whole bulletproof thing I have seen thousands of people including myself who were made ill by a vegan diet so do you need to eat a ton of vegetables in order to be healthy actually you do is 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 here 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 mmm-hmm the real problem with with a vegan approach is that it's the fat you do not get saturated fat if please have some butter on your vegetables like broccoli Ivar oil coconut oil doesn't have the same time so fat it doesn't have conjugated linoleic acid our cells are not made out of coconut uric acid that's got a butter that's what your name right right so you need some of that stuff and I gave a talk at David Wolf's conference who's a well-known vegan and 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 an for 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 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 worried about equation yes yeah butter vegan if you're going and you will like your life more okay last question you are travelling 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 one of 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 computer assisted neurofeedback driven five-day personal development retreat but instead of using the 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 you my mom or my dad 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 experience huge hard openings with measurable changes in their brainwaves 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 that 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 that this is an image 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 can spend 25 years in a monastery yeah or you could actually spend a couple weeks with some focus 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 mmm I think mark were 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 I'm bulletproof is a my biggest and like it we have to disrupt big food and to get the stuff that makes us feel good in but once you have enough energy what do you do with it well maybe you should apply it to like your brain to turn on happiness turn on gratitude would be law here and all that we can do that and the science is happening right now it's the coolest time ever to be alive that's pretty amazing so so I meditate 20 minutes twice a day that would mean I'd have to like live to be 400 I 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 like you've always known this because I know you show up in the world I know about the work you've done with Paul Farmer your nonprofit work there's a 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 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 the so true so so much of our suffering is related to how we care for our organism that doesn't allow us to thrive and be present and connected so beautifully all right so last question if you were king for a day and you could change anything in the world about health or food where 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 when you have to prove that it's safe and effective oh right right now it turns out that as a company at least the CEO of a company that manufactures food I am NOT allowed to cite some of the scientific research that shows that the things I make are better for you then 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 with heart attacks and core into 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 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 judgement but at least here's what we know transparency transparency in our science and transparency a little bit okay well Dave thank you for sharing your wisdom your knowledge your expertise your heart your soul with us it's been an extraordinary conversation here and the doctors Pharmacy thank you all for listening and if you like this podcast please share this with your friends and family leave a review really matters to us and you can subscribe on iTunes or wherever else you subscribe to your podcast and we'll see you next time on the doctors pharmacy Thank You mark thanks for your work in the world thank you you [Music]

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 343,770

Rating: 4.823359 out of 5

Keywords: dave asprey, dave asprey interview, biohacking, what is biohacking, doctors farmacy, dr mark hyman, doctors farmacy podcast, dr mark hyman podcast, mark hyman, mark hyman md, mark hyman podcast, dr hyman podcast, mark hyman and dave asprey, orthorexia, how to biohack, bulletproof, bulletproof coffee, how to biohack your body, dave asprey advice, dave asprey joe rogan, dave asprey ted talk, bulletproof coffee keto

Id: qCj8hYu33mM

Length: 52min 59sec (3179 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 27 2018