COPYRIGHT

This book contains advice and information relating to health care. It should be used to supplement rather than replace the advice of your doctor or another trained health professional. If you know or suspect you have a health problem, it is recommended that you seek your physician’s advice before embarking on any medical programme or treatment. All efforts have been made to assure the accuracy of the information contained in this book as of the date of publication. This publisher and the author disclaim liability for any medical outcomes that may occur as a result of applying the methods suggested in this book.

A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book have been donated to the XPRIZE Foundation to support the creation of a better world in the future … because we’re going to be here to enjoy it.

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First published in the US by Harper Wave, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

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FIRST EDITION

© Dave Asprey 2019

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DEDICATION

To my children, Anna (twelve) and Alan (nine), who diligently sat by my side and edited this book in a way that genuinely helped make it better. It’s my sincere hope that when you are both over a hundred years old, you’ll let me help you edit whatever you’re creating. I plan to be there for you.

EPIGRAPH

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

—Dylan Thomas

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

INTRODUCTION: YOUR ANCESTORS WERE BIOHACKERS

PART I: DON’T DIE

1 THE FOUR KILLERS

2 THE SEVEN PILLARS OF AGING

3 FOOD IS AN ANTI-AGING DRUG

4 SLEEP OR DIE

5 USING LIGHT TO GAIN SUPERPOWERS

PART II: AGE BACKWARD

6 TURN YOUR BRAIN BACK ON

7 METAL BASHING

8 POLLUTING YOUR BODY WITH OZONE

9 FERTILITY = LONGEVITY

10 YOUR TEETH ARE A WINDOW TO THE NERVOUS SYSTEM

11 HUMANS ARE WALKING PETRI DISHES

PART III: HEAL LIKE A DEITY

12 VIRGIN CELLS AND VAMPIRE BLOOD

13 DON’T LOOK LIKE AN ALIEN: AVOIDING BALDNESS, GRAYS, AND WRINKLES

14 HACK YOUR LONGEVITY LIKE A RUSSIAN

AFTERWORD

NOTES

LIST OF SEARCHABLE TERMS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY DAVE ASPREY

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

INTRODUCTION: YOUR ANCESTORS WERE BIOHACKERS

A hundred thousand years ago, two cavemen struggled to keep their families alive during a particularly harsh winter. As the wind howled, one wrapped himself in animal skins, checked that the fire was big enough to keep his family from freezing, and made the dangerous trek to a neighboring cave. He ducked his head to avoid banging his overhanging brow at the entrance, shivered as he noticed the dark cave was scarcely warmer than the air outside, and shouted excitedly, “Thog, I have discovered something amazing. You have to see this!” Thog reluctantly wrapped himself in animal skins and ventured into his neighbor’s impossibly warm and well-lit cave, where he saw the world’s very first man-made fire. “Isn’t this incredible?” the caveman said. “I am using this right now to keep my cave warm. See how happy my kids are? Do you want me to show you how I am doing it?”

Thog was skeptical. He knew fire was dangerous. When lightning struck a tree, the resulting wildfire could burn forests, not to mention humans who were dumb enough to get too close. He and all the other cave dwellers had survived winter (for the most part) without fire. They huddled together and shared their food, and everyone got along. Fire might be harder to share. What if only some cavemen had access to its warmth? “No thanks,” Thog grunted. “I’m good.” And he shivered his way back to his cold, dark cave.

One of those guys is our ancestor. And—spoiler alert—it’s not Thog.

Fire was one of the first tools humans discovered to help extend our life-spans, and we’ve been searching for new and increasingly complicated tools ever since. We have a hardwired instinct to avoid death that predates written language and even our ability to stand upright. Our awareness of our own mortality has led us to innovate throughout millennia to avoid dying, which of course means living longer. It is the fundamental drive of the human race, it is what has allowed us to evolve as a species, and we are nowhere near done.

Fast-forward from our caveman ancestor to the beginnings of recorded history, and we find proof that humans have been seeking immortality since we started writing things down. About 2,400 years ago, the pharaohs of Egypt in Alexandria devoted an enormous amount of their wealth and power to a quest for “eternal life.” In China, Taoist philosophers placed a tremendous amount of value on longevity. To achieve it, they focused on internal alchemy (visualizations, nutrition, meditation, self-control, and even sexual exercises) and external alchemy (breathing techniques, physical exercises, yoga, medical skills, and producing an “elixir of immortality” using various purified metals and complex compounds). In India, the theme of prolonged life emerged in Ayurvedic texts as rasayana, the science of lengthening life-span.

You could say to yourself, “Great, a couple thousand years ago, some crazy people wanted to live a long time. They’re dead now.” Except … these life-extending self-proclaimed alchemists are part of a lineage of biohackers that includes some of the most influential forefathers of modern science and medicine, such as Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, Paracelsus, Tycho Brahe, and Robert Boyle. (Unfortunately, most female alchemists are not well known because they were accused of practicing witchcraft and killed.) The quest to live longer drove the scientific revolution, and it’s reasonable to say that the technology you rely on today would not exist without our core drive to live longer.

Along the way, charlatans and con artists took advantage of the burgeoning market of life-span extension by selling people on the idea of turning lead into gold. Soon alchemy itself was redefined as “false magic.” Today it conjures images of wizards in pointy hats. But the reality is that early alchemists were seeking something most of us would gladly trade our gold for: immortality. Humans have literally been working on transmuting our species from mortal to immortal for thousands of years. I’m one of them, and this book is about what it’s been like to work on extending my own life for the past twenty years.

The game has changed now that we have access to more knowledge and data than ever before. Not dying is still the number one motivator for all humans, and it isn’t because we choose it. This desire is baked into us at the subcellular level to the point that avoiding death is automatic. As I was researching my last science book, Head Strong, it became clear that our innate drive to avoid death comes from deeper within us than you might expect.

Your mitochondria, the power plants in your cells that evolved from ancient bacteria, have the same basic goal of any successful life-form—to stay alive. The human body has at least a quadrillion mitochondria scurrying around inside it, each one of them running a program that says, “Don’t die.” Is it any wonder, then, that you don’t want to die? Those ancient bacteria drive you to focus on behaviors that will keep your meat alive and able to reproduce. I call these behaviors the three Fs: fear (fight off or flee from things that might kill you), feed (eat everything in sight so you have energy to fight off or flee from things that might kill you), and the other f-word that propagates the species. You spend a lot of time on these three priorities, don’t you?

All life-forms—from bacteria to fruit flies to tigers—share the same basic instincts, but we’re the only ones with big enough brains to also make long-term decisions to support our goal of not dying. Ironically, we are often distracted from making good long-term decisions for our longevity by the very instincts that are meant to keep us alive. For example, our desire not to die from starvation leads us to consume too much sugar for a quick boost of energy. This keeps us alive in the short term and increases our chance of dying in the long term. To have a perfectly functioning body and mind long past the age when you can no longer reproduce (at which point you essentially become useless to your mitochondria), you must build practices that prevent you from falling prey to those base instincts that make you a short-term thinker.

So if we’ve been seeking immortality for centuries and this drive comes from deep within our biology, why do people laugh when they hear I’m planning to live to at least a hundred and eighty? Some people stop laughing when they see I’m dead serious (no pun intended), but many act like Thog, shivering their way back to their dank caves.

We’ve already seen that it’s possible to live to a hundred and twenty. The longest verified living person made it to a hundred and twenty-two, and there are scattered but unverified reports of a hundred and forty. Over the last twenty years, the rules in the anti-aging field have clearly changed. If you make good daily decisions that benefit longevity and pair those choices with new technologies that can prevent and reverse disease and aging, it is becoming possible to add at least 50 percent to the age of the longest-lived human. Hence, living to a hundred and eighty is a realistic and achievable goal, at least if you’re willing to do the work along the way to get there. The good news is that even if I’m wrong, I’ll get to enjoy however many years I do have a whole lot more thanks to these practices. If in the end they only help me avoid Alzheimer’s or buy me an extra year with the people I care about, it’s still a win in my book.

These daily decisions and interventions are investments in my future, but they also power my performance right now. Each has its own return on investment (ROI). Some, like eating the right foods and getting quality sleep, may provide a longevity return of 3 percent, along with a better brain right now. Others, like fixing my jaw alignment or strategically using lasers on my brain, might yield closer to a 6 percent return on longevity. Some of the most radical, such as consuming oil containing an unusually shaped carbon molecule that helped rats in a lab live 90 percent longer than expected, may have incredibly high returns … if they work at all and don’t cause unintended harm if they fail. Today it is difficult to calculate exactly what longevity return you might receive on a specific intervention, but we do know the ROI comes in the form of more energy now and years of better health later. These are not just any years, but quality years filled with energy and mobility and brainpower, plus the wisdom that comes with living well for so long.

This type of energetic, productive old age is difficult to imagine, which is why many people shudder at the thought of living to a hundred and eighty. When I interviewed Maria Shriver on my podcast, Bulletproof Radio, her response to my mission was “I don’t want to live to a hundred and eighty. You can have that!” Most of us so badly want to avoid the picture we have of old age—suffering from chronic pain, becoming house- or wheelchair-bound, helplessly relying on care from others, forgetting our loved ones’ names—that we would rather die. Me too. But it doesn’t have to be that way, and I’ve been blessed to interview and befriend a great number of Super Humans who are not only thriving, but also happily giving back to society in their seventies, eighties, and even nineties.

See, not dying will only get you so far. That’s step one. But living longer doesn’t necessarily mean living better. Step two is gaining the energy you need to stop aging in its tracks and start aging backward. Step three is the icing on the cake that takes you from mere mortal to Super Human: someone with the wisdom of age but who heals and regenerates like a teenager. This, too, has been a human goal throughout history. Look no further than the Fountain of Youth, which first appeared in writings by Herodotus, an ancient Greek historian, in the fifth century BC. Herodotus claimed there was a fountain with magical, longevity-promoting water in the land of the Macrobians, a legendary race of people who all lived to be … a hundred and twenty. There’s that number again.

Interestingly, in his writings, Herodotus focused on the Macrobians’ diet, which allegedly consisted exclusively of boiled flesh and milk. While I wouldn’t consider those foods Bulletproof, it is fascinating that even back then people had an intuitive awareness that longevity stemmed not just from good genes or good luck, but rather from the environment inside of and around us. And they were willing to make changes to those environments if it meant living longer.

If you’ve read my other work, you’ve probably already noticed that the ancient Greeks were biohackers, as were the cavemen before them. When I created the groundswell movement around biohacking, I defined it as changing the environment inside of and around you to gain control of your own biology. (In 2018, Merriam-Webster added biohacking to the list of new words in the English language!)

Today there’s scientific proof that we can make changes on the subcellular level (aka changes that affect the makeup of our cells, including our mitochondria) that will dramatically extend life-span. When I interviewed stem cell biologist Bruce Lipton, he told me that he was able to keep a line of cells alive in his lab for much longer than usual simply by changing the water in their growth medium every day. In other words, he made sure those cells had a clean environment, and as a result they gained longevity. But they did eventually die because one of Bruce’s lab assistants fell prey to short-term thinking and forgot to change the water in the growth medium. Maybe he was hungry …

If you want to live to a hundred and eighty, or even to an energetic eighty, it’s essential to look at your life and ask, “What’s going to make me forget to change the (proverbial) water?” The answer is, the messages from your mitochondria telling you to fight, to flee, to feed, and … you know. Your mitochondria pay attention to the environment around them, and you can hack that environment so those little guys don’t keep you stuck making poor short-term decisions. Unlike Thog or the Macrobians, we now have technology that allows us to change every element of your environment—from your hormones to your nutrition, to the light you’re exposed to, to your temperature, to the very vibration of your cells.

Are these “cheats”? No. They are tools we can use to control our biology. And what’s the first thing any one of us would do once we gained control of our biology? Not die. The second thing? Age backward. And finally? Heal like a deity so you can keep getting better with age instead of suffering an inevitable decline.

This is exactly what this book will teach you to do. First, we’ll look at the biological factors that cause most of the diseases of aging and how you can stop them. Once you’ve learned how not to die, you’ll learn how to age backward with strategies ranging from simple to cutting edge that will add more years to your life and more life to your years. Finally, we’ll explore some truly radical anti-aging techniques to help you achieve Super Human status. We tell ourselves that the one thing we can’t have more of is time, but that’s simply not true. I’ve seen firsthand how much more life these hacks can give you, both now and in the future.

In case you’re wondering, no, we’re not going to carefully change one variable at a time while we die waiting to see results. I am an engineer and a biohacker focused on outcome, and I want to feel good now. A research scientist or a medical doctor would approach the problem differently. Scientists get old picking apart every detail to gain a complete understanding of something, a venerable use of time that improves the world. Medical doctors most often focus on treating disease (according to medicine, aging itself isn’t a disease) rather than preventing it. However, you are in charge of your own body, and you have the freedom to pick a goal and change multiple factors in your life that might affect the outcome until you get what you’re looking for.

Besides, testing out one variable at a time is nearly impossible. If you were to take one supplement for a month to see how it works but you decided to take a different route to work one day, you accidentally changed a variable … did that impact the outcome? What about the breakfast you ate or the socks you wore? There are countless variables in our environments that are changing all the time, and I have no interest in keeping track of them all. I want more energy now and for the next hundred and thirty-four years, and I’m willing to change however many variables I need to in order to increase my chances of getting that result.

This is personal for me. Until a decade ago, I never thought I’d make it past eighty, never mind aim for a hundred and eighty. Starting at a young age I was overweight and chronically ill, with arthritis in my knees when I was just fourteen. By the time I was in my twenties I was prediabetic and suffered from brain fog, fatigue, and dozens of other issues we normally associate with aging. My doctors told me I was at a high risk of heart attack or stroke before I was thirty. In short, there was no reason to believe I was going to live a long and/or healthy life.

Thanks to some wise elders I began working with in the nonprofit anti-aging field, I learned it was possible to prevent additional damage to my cells and even reverse some of the damage that had already occurred. In my late twenties, I decided to invest 20 percent of my net income each year into hacking my biology with nutrition, supplements, lab tests, treatments, technologies, and whatever it took to learn more. There were some years when this was more difficult than others, but there is no higher return on investment than more energy now, likely with additional years of functional life later.

With the help of amazing anti-aging doctors and a community of folks who’ve been studying longevity since I was in diapers, I was able to take my biology into my own hands. I reversed my diseases and symptoms and began literally aging backward. If I can turn things around after such a poor start, you probably can, too. And the good news is, as these interventions gain popularity and demand for them goes up, the price of them is going down. One of my main goals with this book is to bring these little-known methods out of the shadows of anti-aging circles and into the mainstream so they will become even more accessible.

Not only can you make changes that allow you to live longer than you think possible, but you must. We all have a moral obligation to live well for as long as we can to develop our own wisdom and share it with future generations. By choosing to live longer, you are not taking anything away from anyone. Instead, you are giving yourself an opportunity to share more with the people and the world around you. I see it as our duty to ensure that we are able to share our life experiences, and—just as important—to make them worth sharing.

This, too, is not a new concept. We used to value the wisdom of tribal elders who taught young people how to avoid the mistakes of past generations. If you made it to old age, you were considered a great source of knowledge. But now the people who’ve lived long enough to develop that wisdom are usually too sick or tired to share it, or else they don’t even remember it! This is a crime against humanity. But we can change it.

When you have as much energy at eighty or ninety as you did at twenty-five, you have a tremendous potential to positively impact the world by sharing your wealth of information gleaned from relationships, experiences, successes, and mistakes. If you take that kind of energy and intelligence and put it to work, you can literally improve the world for future generations. Now you’re the tribal elder who’s leading the hunt because you’re full of energy and you’ve been around a long time, so you know where all the animals are hiding.

Contrary to common fears, our living longer won’t lead to overpopulation and environmental ruin. If we use our advanced wisdom and energy to create a world in which everyone had access to a quality education and reproductive health care, we’d actually start to see negative population growth.

Americans may struggle to envision a world where we live past a hundred years old, but the governments of countries like China and Russia are investing in anti-aging technologies because they realize that it gives them a tremendous competitive advantage in the world economy. It costs a lot of money to keep reeducating new generations of workers, not to mention caring for a sick and aging population. What if instead of being sick, old people were productive and happy citizens who could contribute to society in their final years?

That is the future I plan on sticking around to see. If you knew it was possible, how would you change your daily decisions and priorities now? In this future, it’s not your unborn grandchildren or great-grandchildren who are going to have to deal with the effects of the environmental problems we’ve created; it’s you. Instead of making a mess in your own sandbox, you’d invest in improving that sandbox so you can enjoy it for the unexpectedly large number of years to come.

This is why I am donating a portion of the advance from this book to organizations like the XPRIZE Foundation, which is funding massive initiatives to improve the world’s oceans, soil, food supply, and education system, not to mention exploration of space. Thanks to more computer power, more research, and more money going toward fixing the world’s biggest problems, change is happening at exponential rates. Whether you know it yet or not, you’re part of a race to fix the planet so it supports a population that can live beyond a hundred and eighty. It’s up to you to either participate in that race or get out of the way. Go back to your cave if you like, but don’t stand in the middle of the road slowing everyone else down.

My goal is to share the techniques with you that have given me the greatest return on my investment of energy, time, and money. It’s easy to spend eight hours a day on an anti-aging protocol, but then you’re not actually gaining time because you’re spending so much of it on these efforts. Instead, I want you to learn how to stop dying, reverse aging, and heal with Super Human speed in the least possible amount of time and with minimal effort.

As you read this book, I hope you’ll create your own prioritized list of things to do to live longer and better based on where you are now and where you want to go. Most likely, you won’t try everything in this book. And that’s fine—it’s not a contest. Perfection isn’t required. Even I haven’t tried out all of these strategies yet (but I’m getting close!).

Yes, some of these technologies are more expensive than others, although many of the most powerful are the least expensive. And while certain interventions are a rich person’s game today, that is changing; you can now access a lot of anti-aging technologies for a fraction of what they cost ten years ago, just like the smartphone you have now is far more capable and less expensive than the models that debuted a decade ago. When you start with the most accessible and simplest lifestyle hacks and selectively choose a few affordable technologies to extend your life (or even just your health), you’ll buy yourself time so you can afford to wait for the rest to come to you. What could possibly be a better investment than that?

The slope of innovation is steeper than ever, and change is unstoppable. Are you in or are you out? I’m all in. Join me.

PART I

DON’T DIE

Widen your relationship to time, slow it down. Don’t see time as an enemy but an ally. It provides you with perspective. Aging doesn’t frighten you. Time is your teacher.

—Robert Greene, The Laws of Human Nature

1

THE FOUR KILLERS

THE CURIOUS CASE OF DAVE ASPREY

Until the age of five, I was a normal kid with few health problems. Then my family moved from California to New Mexico, and something in my biology changed. I started acquiring health problems normally reserved for people far older than I was. Today I recognize that my bedroom, which was in the basement of our new house and covered in water-damaged wood paneling (it was the 1970s), was full of toxic black mold. My own home was silently aging me, but nobody, least of all me, was aware of this at the time.

For the next two decades, I suffered from joint pain, muscle pain, asthma, brain fog, extreme emotions, and even weird, frequent nosebleeds. Out of nowhere, my nose would start gushing, and I had unending strep throat that came back every time I finished yet another round of antibiotics. After I got my tonsils out, I started getting chronic sinus infections instead. My body didn’t properly maintain blood pressure, so I often got dizzy, and I was easily fatigued.

At the age of fourteen, I was diagnosed with full-blown arthritis in both of my knees. I remember going home after receiving the diagnosis from my doctor, thinking, How can I have arthritis? That’s for old people. I had always been chubby, but now I was becoming obese. I developed tons of stretch marks, which also disturbed me. Weren’t those for pregnant women? I was just a kid!

And can we talk about man boobs? I grew mine when I was sixteen, which would make anyone self-conscious, especially a teenager. The only other guy I knew with a matching set was my grandfather. My hormones were dysfunctional, just like those of my aging relatives. Between the stretch marks and the man boobs, you’d never catch me with a shirt off. The very thought terrified me, and I’d never in a thousand years imagine that thirty years later, there would be a full-page shirtless photo of me in Men’s Health magazine talking about how I used the techniques in this book to get rid of that flab and replace it with abs.

When I got to college, I kept putting on weight until I had grown a size 46 waist. And my knees got even worse. I played intramural soccer, and my kneecap would become dislocated, so my leg would suddenly fold sideways in a sickening way. I got used to falling over unexpectedly when it happened. Besides the pain, this made dating really awkward. Who wants to date an obese twenty-year-old who might fall down at any moment, with stretch marks, man boobs, arthritis, and the lack of confidence that comes with having such things? Oh, and someone who was so fatigued that he often forgot names, was socially awkward, and could barely focus, even when he really tried? Not too many people, unsurprisingly.

More important than my lackluster social life was the fact that my body was aging before its time. I was well on my way to prematurely developing all four of the diseases most likely to kill you as you age—heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and cancer—or, as I call them, the Four Killers. These diseases are all deadly, and each of them is on the rise.

Right now, about one in four deaths in the United States is connected to heart disease—that’s roughly 610,000 people who die from heart disease each year. Meanwhile, more than 9 percent of the population of the United States has diabetes, and that number rises to 25 percent for people over the age of sixty-five. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 5 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s, and this number is going up, too. The death rate due to Alzheimer’s disease increased a full 55 percent between 1999 and 2014. And last but not least, 1.73 million people in the United States are diagnosed with cancer each year, and more than 600,000 of them die from it.

Suffice it to say that if you don’t die in a car crash or from an opioid addiction, chances are that one of these Four Killers is going to drain your life and your energy (and your retirement fund) before you die in a hospital. It was certainly looking like that would be the case for me—and sooner than most people, given how sick I was.

In the 1990s when I was in my twenties, my doctor used blood tests to determine that I was at a high risk then for developing a heart attack or stroke. My fasting blood sugar was a whopping 117, which put me solidly in the range of prediabetic. I didn’t have Alzheimer’s, but I was experiencing significant cognitive dysfunction and often left my car keys in the refrigerator. And I may not have been at an obvious risk of cancer, but guess what nearly doubles your risk of certain cancers (including those of the liver and pancreas)? Diabetes¹—which is also a risk factor for Alzheimer’s.² Guess what else dramatically raises your cancer risk? Toxic mold exposure, which I had also experienced.

Even obesity itself is the second largest preventable cause of cancer. Your risk goes up the more overweight you are and the longer you stay that way.³ Bad news—75 percent of American men are obese, and so are 60 percent of women and 30 percent of kids.⁴ No wonder the Four Killers are on the rise. Are you going to let them take you out?

I still didn’t know what was causing me to age so quickly when I began a quest to discover how to fix my body. In the mid-1990s, we didn’t have Google yet, but we had AltaVista, and I worked at night teaching the engineers who were literally building the Internet. This meant I had the good fortune of having access to information that most people didn’t. I started doing a ton of research and buying whatever I could find that might help me slow down or even reverse my symptoms. I simply couldn’t imagine even more stretch marks or more joint pain as I got older.

An important part of this journey was connecting with one of the first medical doctors who specialized in the study of anti-aging, Dr. Philip Miller. Seeing him required what was a tremendous financial investment for me at the time, but I was desperate. My first visit with Dr. Miller was like nothing I’d ever experienced. He ran new kinds of lab tests that regular doctors at the time didn’t know existed, including the first real hormone workup I’d ever had. Then he sat me down and gave me the bad news: I had Hashimoto’s thyroiditis (an autoimmune condition that causes the body to attack the thyroid) and almost no thyroid hormones, and my testosterone levels were lower than my mom’s. (He had done a workup for my mom not long before, so he wasn’t exaggerating when he told me this.)

The news could have been devastating, but I was actually excited to have the hard data. I felt in control for the first time because I finally had real information and knew exactly what I needed to change. This was proof that it wasn’t just a deficiency in my effort or some sort of moral failing. It’s common to see your hormone levels drop off around middle age, but not in your twenties. Now I had proof that I was aging prematurely and not just lazy, and I was determined to turn things around.

Dr. Miller and I came up with a plan for me to restore my hormone levels to that of a young man using bioidentical hormones and continue to track my data. The hormones made an enormous difference right away. I got my energy back along with my zest for life. It gave me so much hope to know that I could actually reverse some of my health issues, which I now knew were common symptoms of aging. So when I heard about an anti-aging nonprofit group in Silicon Valley, now called the Silicon Valley Health Institute (SVHI), I decided to check it out.

As I sat there at the first SVHI meeting listening to people who were at least triple my age, I felt completely at home. These were my people, I realized. I had more in common with them than I did with most of my peers, except these people had decades of wisdom I didn’t. After the meeting, I stayed for a long time talking with a board member who at eighty-five years old was kicking ass and full of energy in a way that was amazing and seemed totally impossible to me—but that I was inspired to replicate.

For the next four years I focused completely on learning as much as I could about the human body. I studied medical literature, read thousands of studies, talked to researchers, and spent all my free time at SVHI learning from seniors who were actively reversing their own symptoms of aging. This completely changed the way I thought about health, as well as aging. I learned that there is no one thing that causes disease or that leads us to age. Instead, aging is death by a thousand cuts, the cumulative damage caused by little insults stemming mostly from our environment.

Then in the year 2000 I found a former Johns Hopkins surgeon who ordered a litany of tests, including some allergy tests that showed I was highly allergic to the eight most common types of toxic mold. That was the smoking gun. In order for my immune system to be sensitized to those toxic molds, I must have been exposed to high levels of them, which wreaked havoc on my cells. This was one of the unexplained environmental factors that had made me age so rapidly.

My premature aging makes complete sense to me now. Mitochondria, which are bacteria embedded in most of our cells, power our energy production. Back when we were single-celled creatures, we became host cells for ingested bacteria. Over millions of years of evolution, the host cell became humans, the ingested bacteria became mitochondria, and today neither of us can survive without the other. Mitochondria are not of human origin; they even have their own DNA. And what has posed a lethal threat to bacteria since the beginning of time? Mold.

This means the very powerhouses of my cells were constantly engaged in a battle with their mortal enemy, and this fight left behind many casualties. When cells are under chronic stress, their mitochondria cannot make energy efficiently. This leads to an increase in the production of molecules called reactive oxygen species (ROSs), also known as free radicals. ROSs are unstable molecules that contain atoms with unpaired electrons, making them highly reactive. When an excess of free radicals are present in cells, they cause a chemical reaction that damages your cellular structures in a process called oxidation.

This is exactly what happens as you age, whether or not toxic mold is present in your life: Mitochondria function steadily declines, leading to an increase in free radicals, which damage your cells. In response, your body sends vitamin C from food to the liver so it can produce antioxidants, which fight off free radicals. The problem with this process is that it leaves you without enough vitamin C to produce collagen, the protein in the connective tissue of your skin, teeth, bones, organs, and cartilage. Vitamin C interacts with amino acids to build collagen, but only if you have enough of it. Your body will gladly sacrifice healthy blood vessels and skin in favor of fighting off free radicals that are draining its energy source.

This is precisely why I had stretch marks and vascular issues (manifested as nosebleeds) and why most people don’t develop these symptoms until they’re much older. The fight in my body between my onboard bacteria and mold left me constantly depleted of antioxidants. And my mold-damaged mitochondria also laid the groundwork for prediabetes, poor blood flow to the brain, arthritis, cognitive dysfunction, and, according to one doctor, a high risk of stroke and heart attack. I was still in my twenties, but I was biologically old because my mitochondria were slowing down. And it really pissed me off.

MITOCHONDRIA AND THE FOUR KILLERS

As I fought my way back from experiencing the many symptoms of aging, my likelihood of dying from the Four Killers dropped dramatically. That’s because—surprise, surprise—they all have one underlying issue in common: the cumulative damage to your cells, and in particular, to your mitochondria, that takes place over the course of a lifetime. This damage occurs in all of us, though at varying rates. Some damage stems from the bad choices we make, but much of it is simply the price we pay for the basic functions that support life—like metabolizing food and breathing.

You die a little bit every day from these cuts that make you weaker in the short term and hasten your decline in the long term. Staying alive requires avoiding as many of those cuts as possible, but they are all around you—in your food, your air, your light sources, and throughout your environment. You may not associate these cuts with your likelihood of aging prematurely or of developing a degenerative disease, but like every other aspect of your biology, they are all connected. The cuts lead to aging, aging leads to disease, and disease leads to death.

If you’re in your twenties or thirties, you may think you’re in the clear—that these cumulative cuts aren’t affecting you yet. But the cuts from bad choices or a toxic environment begin to add up from an early age—and they’re hurting you even if you’re not currently feeling their effects (such as weight gain, brain fog, muffin top, and fatigue). And it’s a lot easier to avoid damage to your mitochondria than it is to reverse it later.

Your mitochondria are responsible for extracting energy from the food you eat, and then combining it with oxygen to produce a chemical called adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which stores the energy your cells need to function. When your mitochondria conduct this process efficiently, they produce lots of energy so you can perform at your greatest potential—like a young person. But if your mitochondria become damaged or dysfunctional as you age, they begin producing an excess of free radicals in the process, which leak into the surrounding cells and lay the groundwork for the Four Killers. Congratulations, you are now old.

Even young, efficient mitochondria produce some free radicals as by-products of creating ATP, but they also make antioxidants, compounds that inhibit the damaging effects of free radicals. This is why products containing antioxidants have “anti-aging” properties. While popping antioxidant supplements and using skin-care products containing antioxidant-rich ingredients are worthwhile interventions, they are, frankly, the low-hanging fruit of our Super Human tree. For you to truly remain young, those antioxidants have to be produced by your body—your mitochondria must create at least as many of them as it does free radicals. When your mitochondria become inefficient, they make an excess of free radicals and fewer antioxidants. And you can’t slather enough serums onto your skin to fully counteract the damage created by this imbalance.

Your mitochondria are also in charge of triggering cellular apoptosis, programmed cell death that occurs when a cell is old and/or dysfunctional. If your mitochondria are sluggish, they may not trigger apoptosis at the right times, which can result in healthy cells dying off before they should or dysfunctional cells sticking around past their prime and aging you before your time.

When you’re still young and exploding with mitochondrial energy, you can take some of these hits. You can eat garbage, drink too much cheap beer, forgo sleep, and still function pretty well because you’re producing lots of antioxidants and energy. As you get older, you start to see that you can’t stay out all night drinking and still really bring it at work the next day. By the time you wake up to this new reality, you’ve already taken a lot of hits that will age you in the long run. But you’re likely to keep running at the edge of what you can perceive, so the damage stacks up without you even knowing it.

Well, what if you made better choices throughout your life so you took fewer hits over the course of decades? Then when you got to the age of seventy you might look and feel more like fifty because you simply suffered less damage. You’re never going to be able to avoid all the cuts—again, simply breathing creates some amount of wear and tear over time. It’s a matter of preventing as much damage as possible, which happens to dovetail nicely with the first rule of biohacking: Remove the things that make you weak. This is in and of itself a powerful anti-aging strategy.

When your mitochondria start to slow down and create an excess of free radicals, the result is widespread chronic inflammation throughout your body. Inflammation is such a hot topic in the field of longevity that you probably already know how closely it’s linked to aging. When I was sick and old as a young man, I knew I was inflamed, but I had no clue this stemmed from mitochondrial dysfunction, nor did I know that inflammation was more than a painful annoyance. I had no idea that inflammation creates the ideal circumstances for each of the Four Killers to thrive.

HEART DISEASE

A condition known as atherosclerosis, hardening of the arteries, is the first obvious clinical sign that heart disease has started. But what causes this? A thin layer of cells called the endothelium lines your arteries. When the endothelium is damaged, fats can cross into the arterial wall and form plaques. This is bad enough, but when your immune system picks up on the fact that this is happening, it creates chemical messengers called inflammatory cytokines to attract white blood cells to those plaques. This is an inflammatory immune response. When those plaques rupture because they are so inflamed, blood clots form, and these clots are the real cause of most heart attacks and strokes.

While some doctors are hesitant to definitively state that inflammation causes heart disease, it’s hard to refute the evidence that inflammation is a big step in the disease’s process, and most functional medicine practitioners now identify inflammation as a bigger health risk than cholesterol levels. In a landmark study conducted by researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital that followed ten thousand participants for twenty-five years, the data revealed that participants who reduced their inflammation levels also significantly lowered their risk of cardiovascular disease and the need for heart surgery without any other medical interventions.⁵

A new study out of the University of Colorado at Boulder shows that your gut bacteria actually play a role in the inflammation behind atherosclerosis.⁶ As animals (and likely humans) age, changes to gut bacteria harm the vascular system and make arteries stiffer. That stiffening came from inflammation. The gut bacteria of older mice actually produced three times the normal amount of an inflammatory compound called trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO). When researchers used antibiotics to knock out the old mice’s gut bacteria, their vascular systems magically returned to those of young mice. The researchers concluded, “The fountain of youth may actually lie in the gut.” After following the lifestyle recommendations in this book, I am happy to report that my last test showed that I had zero species of gut bacteria that produce this harmful compound!

Even more mind-blowing, a 2017 study out of the University of Connecticut in Storrs revealed that the fat molecules that form plaques in your arteries come not from the fat in the food you eat, but directly from bad gut bacteria.⁷ This turns everything that conventional doctors tell us about dietary cholesterol on its head and means you have permission to laugh when people repeat the myth that a “plant-based” diet is better because it doesn’t contain saturated fats like butter that will somehow “stick to” your arteries. It also shows the importance of healthy gut bacteria and mitochondria for a long and energetic life. (More on this in chapter 11.)

We know that the mitochondria in our cells, which themselves evolved from bacteria, communicate with the bacteria in our gut. Bacteria communicate with one another via chemicals (like hormones), light, or physical movement. They even gather around and trade bits of their genetic code in a microscopic swap meet for bacteria superpowers. This is called a plasmid level exchange. Imagine a group of Marvel superheroes hanging out at headquarters. Wolverine says to Spider-Man, “Do you want my ability to grow claws? I’ll trade you for your super speed.” This happens constantly in our guts and in the world around us, which is why drug-resistant bacteria spread so rapidly. It’s also why we must end industrial livestock practices that require antibiotics. The bad bacteria that evolve in that environment find their way into your gut and make it hard for you to live well for a long time.

So there is clearly an inflammatory and gut bacterial connection to heart disease. Plus, we know that when you have the right kind of bacteria in your gut they can actually transform the foods you eat into short-chain fatty acids, which are highly anti-inflammatory. Nurturing healthy gut bacteria is one of the most important things you can do to become Super Human, and you’ll learn how later.

Look, I remember what it felt like when my doctor, complete with white lab coat, looked right at me and said in a matter-of-fact voice, “You are at a high risk for heart attack and stroke.” I recall the bewilderment and fear in my gut as I stared my own mortality in the face. That happened when I was still in my twenties, and thanks to the information in this book, it is not an issue for me anymore. But even when I was just a kid, I had symptoms of cardiovascular issues, specifically blood pressure instability, a condition normally reserved for much older people. When I stood up quickly, my blood pressure was too low to keep oxygen in my brain. This caused me to start seeing stars and feel extremely fatigued. As a youngster, I would lean my head forward after getting out of a car in order to avoid seeing stars. I was so used to this that I thought it was how everybody lived.

Now I know these were symptoms of postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS, which is often triggered by toxic mold exposure but can also happen with age. In either case, inflammation disrupts the line of communication between the nervous system and the endocrine (hormonal) system. The disruption of these signals leads to fatigue and blood pressure instability, and can lead to symptoms of attention deficit disorder (ADD)⁸ and Asperger’s syndrome,⁹ which I certainly exhibited as well.

This manifested in my not knowing the names of most of the kids in my class, even at the end of the school year. I had zero facial recognition and no understanding of basic social skills. My body was filtering out those signals to conserve energy because my biology was so trashed. Our bodies will always prioritize survival over socialization, and I didn’t have enough energy to go around.

It may be hard to comprehend how cognitive symptoms could be connected to vascular issues, but as you will learn in this book, everything in the body is connected. And that includes the diseases that age us and too often lead to premature death.

DIABETES

While the idea of inflammation “causing” heart disease remains controversial, we have definitive proof that type 2 diabetes is an inflammatory disease,¹⁰ and having diabetes dramatically increases your risk of cardiovascular issues. More than ten years ago, researchers discovered that when macrophages—immature white blood cells that play a key role in the immune response—find their way into otherwise healthy tissues, they release inflammatory substances called cytokines that cause nearby cells to become insulin resistant.¹¹

In insulin resistance, the body has an impaired response to insulin, which is normally responsible for moving sugar out of the blood and into your cells. The result is that your blood sugar levels are not well regulated and become chronically high. Because chronic high blood sugar will eventually lead to diabetes—a disease in which the pancreas is unable to produce enough insulin to keep up with the body’s demands—a diagnosis of insulin resistance is most often accompanied by the label prediabetic. Prediabetes is so common now that it almost seems like no big deal. The CDC says that more than one out of every three Americans is prediabetic. But it is actually a huge deal because having diabetes dramatically increases your risk of developing the other killers.

Excess blood sugar causes damage to the entire vasculature, so if you have diabetes, you’re more likely to have heart disease or a stroke. High blood sugar also causes dangerous nerve damage by injuring the walls of the capillaries that bring blood and nutrients to your nerves. This is called peripheral artery disease, and it is especially common in the legs and feet, which is why you may have heard of people suffering from diabetes needing foot or leg amputations. When this happens in the eyes, it causes blindness. If that’s not bad enough, diabetes can damage your kidneys’ filtering system, resulting in kidney disease. And finally, the higher your blood sugar, the greater your risk for Alzheimer’s disease, to the point that some researchers call Alzheimer’s “type 3 diabetes.” So you’ve got to keep your blood sugar levels stable, no matter what.

You may think you’re off the hook if you are not overweight, but you can be thin and still be prediabetic (or even fully diabetic). Those problematic macrophages are most likely to trigger inflammation in adipose tissue, aka fat. So the more excess fat you’re carrying, the higher your chance of becoming insulin resistant and developing type 2 diabetes. But the same thing can happen if you are not overweight but have excess visceral fat, which is the type of fat that’s packed around your internal organs instead of underneath the skin. This “skinny fat” is even more dangerous than fat you can see.

There is new evidence that maintaining normal amounts of muscle strength as you age can help ward off this killer. In a study following five thousand people for over twenty-five years, participants were given regular strength tests. The risk of diabetes was slashed by 32 percent in those with even moderate muscle strength as opposed to those with low muscle strength.¹² The reduced risk did not change if the participants were even stronger, so you don’t have to get ripped to live longer, but you should avoid carrying excess fat.

I had no idea as an obese teenager that inflammation was making it difficult for me to control my blood sugar. Instead, I bought into the myth that I just wasn’t trying hard enough to lose weight. I exercised a ton and constantly watched what I ate. For breakfast, I had Grape-Nuts, which were supposed to give me energy, and skim milk, which was meant to do my body good. But they did neither of those things. I distinctly remember one morning in ninth grade eating a bowl of Grape-Nuts with skim milk to prepare for a big soccer match. I was convinced this was a healthy breakfast, but I didn’t perform very well in the game. I thought to myself afterward, Well, that didn’t work the way it was supposed to.

This was the first time I questioned conventional wisdom about what was actually good for me. It would be many more years before I started to get real answers, but in my desperation I started experimenting with things that no teenager should need to explore. I was sick of feeling like an old man. So I started reading everything I could get my hands on that offered some advice for how to feel and perform better. While my peers were (I assume) out drinking and having fun, I was at home biohacking.

For my knee pain, I tried the glucosamine pills from the health food store, and they brought some serious relief. I didn’t know it then, but glucosamine inhibits glycolysis, your body’s breakdown of glucose (sugar). As a result, your body has to get energy from fat instead of sugar, which helps prevent insulin resistance. Recent research on mice has found that glucosamine promotes mitochondrial biogenesis (the birth of new mitochondria) and mimics the effects of calorie restriction.¹³ And there are plenty of studies to show that calorie restriction (a diet consisting of fewer than 1,200 calories a day) in conjunction with good nutrition extends life-span. In mice, calorie restriction can extend life-span by as much as 40 percent. Most researchers estimate that the impact on humans is more like 10 percent, which is still pretty amazing¹⁴—if you’re willing to be hungry, anyway.

If you’re like most people, you don’t enjoy feeling hungry, and you don’t want to restrict your calories to fewer than 1,200 a day. The good news is that researchers have been testing compounds that mimic the benefits of calorie restriction without the starvation. Glucosamine is one of those compounds. In one study, glucosamine extended the life-span of mice by 10 percent.¹⁵ And it most likely helped with my knee pain because of the way it impacted my body’s sugar metabolism.

Despite this small win, I was heavier than ever and fed up. In college I spent eighteen months working out six days a week for an hour and a half at a time while on a low-calorie, low-fat semi-vegetarian diet with lots of rice and beans and everything that was supposed to be good for me. I got really strong, but I was still covered in blubber, and later blood tests revealed that I was prediabetic thanks to all that fat and the inflammation it was fueling.

I knew something had to change, but I had no idea what that thing was. Then one day while I was at a coffee shop getting my daily fix, I spotted a weightlifting magazine on a rack. No one I knew in my small farming town read weightlifting magazines, but something on the cover caught my eye. It said, “How to grow abs!” Looking down at what I had grown—which you could more accurately call flabs—I thought, I have to read this. The goal seemed impossible in the world I lived in.

As I sipped a triple latte, I read an article by a body builder with impressive abs who said that sugar and carbohydrates make you fat. That advice was radical at the time and is still mildly controversial today, but it has become much more widely accepted since we know for a fact that sugar causes inflammation.¹⁶ Even small spikes of blood sugar have a particularly bad effect on your vascular system (and raise your cancer risk, too).¹⁷ I grabbed the magazine, went home, and made a smoothie out of cottage cheese and orange juice. I had no idea what I was doing! But that gross smoothie still had fewer carbs than I was used to eating in my efforts to get healthy.

I started eating more protein and avoiding grains and most obvious sources of sugar, for the first time focusing more on what I didn’t eat (carbs) than how much I ate. In three months I lost fifty pounds, but more surprising were the changes to my personality. Everyone in my life noticed that I was a lot nicer, and I actually started to develop friendships. I had changed my biology enough that I wasn’t exhausted all the time, and my brain was able to learn how to connect with people, even though it still didn’t come naturally to me. My focus in class also improved, and my GPA went up dramatically, from a 2.8 the previous semester to a double course load with a 3.9.

That’s right—avoiding grains and sugar helped me reduce inflammation, stabilize my blood sugar, get smarter, and change my personality for the better. Once again, everything is connected. Realizing I’d been fed a bunch of lies (literally) about what to eat for most of my life, I dug into the research and tried different strategies, evolving from the cottage cheese smoothie to the Zone diet to Atkins. (Though I never got anywhere close to the abs promised in that magazine.) Eventually I realized that there had to be a science to this. There were clearly foods out there that acted as kryptonite, caused inflammation, and completely threw me off of my game. And when I ate them, I not only felt awful, but I was also one step closer to developing type 2 diabetes. It took me years, but I finally discovered what those inflammatory foods were and how to avoid them. You’ll read more about this in chapter 3.

ALZHEIMER’S

Just as immune cells in your body fat create inflammation that contributes to diabetes, there are specialized immune cells in the brain called microglia that perform similar functions. They control the brain’s immune and inflammatory response and are also in charge of killing off dysfunctional neurons in a process similar to apoptosis. The microglial cells constantly monitor the brain, and when they sense a threat, they trigger the release of inflammatory cytokines to attack and remove potential pathogens. This process causes inflammation, and if it becomes chronic this can damage or kill neurons, causing memory loss and other cognitive problems.¹⁸ Many researchers now believe that this is the root of Alzheimer’s.

In my twenties I was already experiencing significant cognitive dysfunction, and I wondered in the back of my mind if I was on track for developing Alzheimer’s. When I was in business school in the 1990s, my performance on tests was horrible. On exams with math questions, my grades showed a linear decline in per-question scores—100 percent on the first question, 70 percent on the next, 30 percent on the next, and directly downhill from there. My brain got fatigued so easily, even when I studied and knew the answers.

This experience led me to imagine what would happen if I couldn’t rely on my brain to earn a living. I’d had a successful career so far, but suddenly I wondered if I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. I decided to undergo a then controversial brain imaging technique called a SPECT scan to see what was really going on in my brain. It showed that my prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain involved in complex thinking and decision-making—had essentially no activity when I tried to concentrate. Dr. Daniel Amen, who was one of the first people in this country to use SPECT scans, was shocked that I had been even remotely successful in my career with such clear cognitive dysfunction.

Once again, receiving bad news actually came as a relief. It was incredibly validating to hear that there was indeed a reason why everything felt like such a struggle. The issue wasn’t lack of effort or intelligence. It was an actual biological problem, a hardware problem. And there were lots of little-known things I could do to reduce inflammation and improve my brain function. When I found these interventions, the impact was immediate and allowed me to get smarter and faster with each passing year. The good news is that once you know them, the interventions are simple and practical.

If you’re in your twenties or thirties, it is much easier to reduce inflammation now to boost your brainpower and avoid cognitive decline with age, but even if you are older or experiencing symptoms of dementia, it is still possible to improve your brain function. The sooner you start, the better, but it’s never too late to begin growing a younger, more powerful, and more energetic brain. You’ll learn how to do this later in this book.

CANCER

More than 40 percent of Americans are diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime.¹⁹ When mitochondria become dysfunctional and don’t produce energy efficiently—which, again, is typical of most people as they age—your risk of cancer increases. This is because an inflamed environment offers the perfect conditions for cancer cells to proliferate.

Think about a time you got a cut and the wound became swollen—an obvious sign of inflammation (an immune response) at work. When the body is injured, your cells multiply quickly so the wound can heal. That process alone does not cause cancer. But when cells multiply rapidly in an environment that contains excess free radicals—which damage the DNA of cells—the risk is that damaged or mutated cells will proliferate. If these damaged cells continue to reproduce, the result can be cancer.²⁰

We often think that our risk of developing cancer is based mostly on our genetics, but the data shows that only about 2 to 5 percent of cancers are truly genetically based, and mitochondrial dysfunction causes most others. In 1931, a German biochemist named Otto Warburg won the Nobel Prize for discovering that highly dysfunctional mitochondria actually stop burning oxygen to make energy and turn instead to a much less efficient process called anaerobic metabolism, which is the combustion of carbohydrates in the absence of oxygen. Anaerobic metabolism is associated with the vast majority of cancers. But if your mitochondria are strong, they will not have to resort to anaerobic metabolism. This greatly reduces your cancer risk.

Cancer is something of a double-edged sword when it comes to anti-aging. Any time you do something that makes your cells grow faster or get younger, you are inherently increasing your cancer risk because cancer cells can potentially grow and rejuvenate along with the healthy ones. Then you end up with this weird dichotomy: You can grow old “normally” with a roughly 40 percent chance of getting cancer, or you can get younger and maybe as a result slightly increase your risk. My solution to this dilemma is to do everything I can to make sure my mitochondria run like superstars because that in and of itself will reduce my risk of cancer. I also take action to promote my body’s natural detoxification efforts.

In addition to apoptosis, which you read earlier is healthy, controlled cellular death that targets old or unstable cells, your body also has a built-in detox process to recycle damaged cellular components. This is called autophagy, a Greek word that translates as “self-eating.” During autophagy, your cells scan the body for pieces of dead, diseased, or worn-out cells, remove any useful components from these old cells, and then use the remaining molecules to either make energy or create parts for new cells. This recycling process removes unwanted toxins, reduces inflammation, and helps to slow the aging process.

When you activate autophagy, you slow down the aging process, reduce inflammation, reduce your cancer risk, and increase your body’s ability to function at its best. There are specific supplements and lifestyle modifications such as brief bouts of fasting that boost autophagy. You’ll learn how to do this as we get deeper into the techniques that make you Super Human.

SLASH YOUR RISK

Despite overwhelming evidence that mitochondrial dysfunction and the resulting inflammation leads to the Four Killers, we live in a society in which an inevitable decline in mitochondrial function is considered a normal part of aging. Of course we expect to die from one of these diseases! Between the ages of thirty and seventy, you experience a decrease in efficiency of the average mitochondrion by about 50 percent, setting the stage for you to develop these killers.

Since you’re reading this book, you obviously have no intention of aging like an average person, and you shouldn’t. By the time I discovered the importance of mitochondria, mine were already trashed from years of toxic mold exposure. The mold had weakened my system and aged me prematurely, so in many ways I was the canary in the coal mine. I felt the “cuts” that affect all of us much sooner than most people because I started off in a weaker spot. In order to get to a basic level of functionality, I had to find out what was causing these cuts and work on eliminating them.

Feeling the cuts so early and so deeply allowed me to experience real-time feedback and determine which environmental factors impacted my health and performance the most. This turned out to be an enormous gift because I was able to learn—and can now teach you—how to stop damaging your own body with thousands of invisible cuts by focusing on the basics: good nutrition, quality sleep, and a healthy environment free of toxins that cause more cuts.

Before we move on to learn how to do that, let’s take a closer look at exactly what these cuts do to our bodies. Obviously, you won’t go from eating an inflammatory meal to developing degenerative disease in one fell swoop. Instead, the cuts from your environment cause invisible damage on the subcellular level. This damage doesn’t age you at once, but it does so cumulatively, day after day, year after year. By the time you become aware of this damage, you’re old. But you can take action now to stop this damage before it stacks up. So after you take the steps to avoid the Four Killers, it’s time to focus on cheating death the way Super Humans do—by avoiding the Seven Pillars of Aging. These are the processes in your body that break as you age, and there’s a lot you can do to control them.

Bottom Line

If you are average …

• You have a 23 percent risk of dying from heart disease.

• You have a 25 percent risk of diabetes.

• You have a 10 percent risk of developing Alzheimer’s.

• You have a 40 percent risk of cancer and a 20 percent risk of dying from it.

So start hacking. Do these things right now:

• If you have joint pain or blood sugar issues, consider taking glucosamine, which helps control blood sugar and extends the life-span of mice (and probably humans).

• Consume more antioxidants to fight off free radicals. Berries, herbs, spices, coffee, tea, and dark chocolate are good sources. There are also medical spas in most cities that offer antioxidant therapy via IV. It may be worth looking into if you travel frequently or need an energy boost.

• Short periods of fasting stimulate autophagy. You’ll read more about the longevity benefits of fasting and how to do it without hunger later, but it’s worth starting now to benefit right away from increased autophagy.

• To help with cardiovascular issues, try the Zona Plus, a digitally controlled handheld device that uses the science behind isometric exercise to increase both vascular flexibility (thus decreasing blood pressure) and the production and flow of nitric oxide throughout the body, which is linked to treating various cardiovascular conditions, erectile dysfunction, and muscle fatigue. It’s a cool biohack for anyone who wants to improve their cardiovascular health.

• While it is most useful to look at how the environment will control your energy levels and your aging, it’s not like your DNA is meaningless. The area of functional genomics is just getting going. Like functional medicine, it is the study of what you can actually do to influence risk besides worry about it. For instance, a functional review of my genome from the DNA Company revealed that I should take extra steps to take care of the tight membranes in my arteries, including taking the supplements in this book. Check out their tests to discover your weaknesses and learn how to combat them.

2

THE SEVEN PILLARS OF AGING

Okay, now you’ve decided not to let the Four Killers take you out. That means it’s time to shore up the Seven Pillars of Aging. When I was working to reverse my early aging as a young man, I learned that there are specific forms of cellular aging that drive all forms of aging and disease, even my premature symptoms of aging. Later, I gleaned more detail from longevity experts such as Aubrey de Grey, who is the chief science officer at the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Research Foundation, which has the ambitious mission of curing aging by funding anti-aging research around the world. A lot of my elite anti-aging longevity friends (yes, I have weird and awesome friends) are focused on what SENS calls the “classes of cellular and molecular damage that constitute aging.” I call them the Seven Pillars of Aging.

THE SEVEN PILLARS OF AGING

It’s important to understand how the Seven Pillars of Aging affect your body on the cellular level. While some degeneration over time is a given, there’s a lot you can do to protect yourself from the worst of it. From simple and inexpensive lifestyle changes and nutritional modifications to high-end technologies that are rapidly becoming more affordable, I’ll outline multiple strategies to hack the aging process—most of which I’ve tried out myself.

Is this anti-aging science still nascent? Yes. Do we have ironclad evidence that these strategies work perfectly? No. But we do have some pretty compelling research that suggests they will help you spend more quality years on this planet. Plus, they’re not going to kill you—and aging definitely will. So why not give them a shot?

First, let’s take a closer look at each of the aging pathways and how they affect us.

PILLAR 1—SHRINKING TISSUES

When you are young, your body has a multitude of stem cells—undifferentiated cells that are capable of giving rise to many more cells of the same type. When cells die via apoptosis, your stem cells spring into action to replace them. As you age, however, a few things happen. Your stem cell reserves dwindle, your stem cells themselves age and thus become less efficient at replacing dead cells, and your mitochondria may not trigger apoptosis at the right times. Some cells die before they’re supposed to. Others aren’t quickly replaced. As a result, tissues throughout your body lose more and more cells and begin to atrophy, or break down.

Quick, picture a stereotypical “old person.” In your mind’s eye you probably see a frail person with loose skin, no muscle tone, shaky hands, and a foggy memory—right? The truth is that these things happen as we age and cells die and are not replaced. In fact, loss of muscle tissue is so common that it has its own name, sarcopenia, a condition that can lead to falls and broken bones and even impairs the body from fully recovering after those tumbles (or a surgery).¹ In most people, sarcopenia sets in as early as age thirty and gets worse with each passing decade.²

When neurons in the brain die and your body isn’t able to replace them, your brain literally shrinks. And yes, this typically happens as we age. This contributes to cognitive decline and dementia, as well as a decrease in fine motor skills. In particular, when that neuron loss takes place in the hippocampus—the part of the brain that controls emotion, memory, and the nervous system—you begin to look and sound a lot like that old person you just imagined. Since hippocampal atrophy is so common, the size of your hippocampus is considered a key marker of aging.³ But there is nothing normal about it—at least, there shouldn’t be.

So the big question becomes, What can you do to make sure those dead cells get replaced (or don’t die in the first place)?

It turns out that if you keep your mitochondria healthy, you can avoid a lot of unnecessary cell loss. The biggest game changer here is eating foods that boost the efficiency of your mitochondria so they can make more energy and your body has the raw goods it needs to manufacture all the proteins, hormones, and fatty acids they require to function. We’ll cover those foods in the next chapter.

It is possible to reverse atrophy by taking advantage of stem cell therapy—a medical treatment in which stem cells are injected into your body. I’ve had more stem cell treatments than probably anyone on Earth (more on this later), and it’s been a game changer for me. I went from having chemical-toxin-induced brain damage as a young man to having a hippocampal volume that’s in the 87th percentile for someone my age. But stem cell therapy does not come cheaply or easily, so it’s better to prevent atrophy in the first place!

The key to success with any of these interventions is to start them now, even if you don’t think you need them. After all, humans are good at avoiding things that hurt. You don’t step on nails or burn yourself because you feel the impact of those cuts immediately. But when it comes to aging, you’re the proverbial frog in a pot of slowly heating water. You keep taking the hits because you don’t feel the impact right away. But cutting down on just a few of those hits by making small changes in your environment can really ramp up what’s possible for you. Perfection not required.

PILLAR 2—MITOCHONDRIAL MUTATIONS

Mitochondrial mutations—aka damaged mitochondria—are the second pillar of aging. The importance of this aging pathway cannot be overstated. When the power plants of your cells—the very things that create the energy that keeps you alive—start mutating, is it any wonder everything goes haywire?

Unfortunately, this is a cause of aging that is often overlooked. Even those on the forefront of biotechnology have been so focused over the past several decades on mapping the human genome that they have paid little attention to mutations in mitochondrial DNA. Don’t get me wrong—the sequencing of the human genome changed the world, and I’m grateful for the scientists who accomplished this monumental task. But unless you have a significant genetic disorder, it turns out that the human genome is not usually of great value in predicting how you’ll age compared to your mitochondrial DNA status.

You can think of your genetic code as the building plans for your body—but who wants a body that doesn’t have any energy? (Hint: That’s called death.) Remember, your mitochondrial genome is separate from your human genome—mitochondria evolved from bacteria and have their own genetic code. But your mitochondrial DNA serves a very important function—it controls how your body makes energy. Unfortunately, your mitochondrial DNA is a lot more susceptible to mutations than your human DNA because mitochondrial DNA has a limited ability to repair itself when it is damaged. So you’re going to want to take fewer hits to your mitochondria.

Think of it like this: Your DNA provides a picture of how a building (your body) will look—how many rooms, how many windows, what kind of roof, how tall, etc. Your mitochondrial DNA describes what kind of wiring, heating, lighting, and air conditioning will be in the building. The building itself is going to be there for a while, but if the wiring goes bad, the air conditioner breaks, and the bulbs burn out, it’s not going to be a building you want to live in. Mitochondrial DNA breaks and mutates easily, which is why it’s so important.

When it comes to aging, it’s helpful to look at epigenetics, the science of how the environment in and around our bodies influences genetic expression, and how these changes are passed down from generation to generation. A 2018 review from leading stem cell researchers found that mitochondrial epigenetic mechanisms influence cell fate, cell division, cell cycle, physiological homeostasis, and even pathologies.⁴ In other words, your ancestors’ environment controls the mitochondria in your cells. And of course problems with those important cell functions can lead to every one of the Four Killers.

As you read in chapter 1, mitochondrial DNA can become damaged when excess free radicals are present. Damage to mitochondrial DNA from free radicals causes deletions in the mitochondria’s genetic code. The damaged mitochondria produce energy inefficiently, generating huge amounts of additional free radicals and less of the energy that you would rather put toward your Super Human efforts. And as we know, damaged mitochondria generate inflammation and accelerate aging throughout the body.

Remember, this cycle all started with an excess of free radicals, which are created by … dysfunctional mitochondria! So the more efficient your mitochondria, the less likely you are to suffer damage to your mitochondrial DNA, regardless of the genetic code you inherited from your parents. This is one of many reasons my anti-aging protocol focuses so heavily on making sure my mitochondria are running like rock stars for the long term.

PILLAR 3—ZOMBIE CELLS

Death-resistant cells, aka senescent cells, are cells that won’t die when they’re worn out, and they are a major focus of anti-aging research today. These cells no longer divide or function properly. These cells literally become dead weight. They do not function, yet they persist and secrete inflammatory proteins, causing all the problems that stem from chronic inflammation,⁵ including an increased risk of the Four Killers. Even worse, the mitochondria in senescent cells become dysfunctional and release huge amounts of reactive oxygen species. This is called senescence-associated mitochondrial dysfunction (SAMD), and it will age your body very quickly.⁶

Over time, you gain more and more senescent cells, and the accumulation of the damage they create is a major cause of aging and disease. For one thing, when you have too many zombie cells in your tissues, your body becomes less efficient at responding to the hormone insulin. This is the definition of insulin resistance, which as we discussed earlier is a precursor to type 2 diabetes. Zombie cells also lead to an increase in visceral body fat, the type of fat that is stored around important organs in the abdominal cavity and is associated with an increased risk of many diseases, particularly type 2 diabetes.

Zombie cells also contribute to many symptoms of aging that won’t kill you but will make your later years a lot less comfortable. For instance, doctors have known for years that patients who need knee transplants have excess senescent cells in their knee cartilage. In fact, injecting just a few senescent cells into your knees can actually cause arthritis.⁷ Did senescent cells in my joints cause my arthritis when I was fourteen? Possibly.

Some senescent cells are easy enough to kill off. Others persist like a Netflix binge of The Walking Dead. Perhaps the most damaging types of zombie cells are immune cells. Remember, when you get a cut or an infection, your immune cells proliferate to promote rapid healing. Once you have healed, those extra immune cells are supposed to die off. When they don’t die, they inhibit your immune system’s ability to respond to new infections or injuries. This is one reason the immune system usually becomes weaker as we age. Talk about not dying—pneumonia and the flu together are the eighth leading cause of death in the United States and are both much more common and deadly in people over sixty-five. This is in part because of senescent cells weakening the immune system.

The good news is that there are many things you can do to prevent damage from zombie cells. One of the most important is to keep your cell membranes strong so the cells can function well for as long as possible. I take a supplement comprising calcium, magnesium, and potassium salts of amino ethanol phosphate (AEP)—which helps to support healthy cell membrane function.

The common diabetes drug metformin is also believed to kill senescent cells. In studies, metformin has been shown to alleviate a range of age-related disorders in animals and humans, including metabolic dysfunction, cardiovascular disease, cancer development, and cognitive dysfunction.⁸ In elderly humans, it has been shown to increase life-span by an additional five years.⁹ Studies on mice show that these effects stem from reduced cellular senescence and fewer free radicals.¹⁰

Another exciting zombie killer is rapamycin. This drug inhibits a growth pathway called mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR), which is responsible for regulating critical cellular functions such as cell growth, cell death, cell proliferation, and autophagy. Inhibiting mTOR appears to prevent the growth of senescent cells. In mice, rapamycin increases life-span, improves immune response, delays tissue loss, alleviates frailty with age, and decreases risk of heart failure, cancer, and cognitive impairment.¹¹ Not bad. Some doctors have quietly been using it as an anti-senescence drug since 2015.

I’m currently planning to experiment with taking rapamycin intermittently. It is not without risk—as we’ve discussed, any time you take a drug that accelerates cell turnover, there is a risk of accelerating cancer cell growth. In a couple more years, we’ll know more about the risk-reward ratio, and it will be a lot more affordable. I’m always happy to be a guinea pig, and cutting-edge anti-aging people are using it today. However, unless you’re in desperate straits, this is one hack you might want to hold off on for a little while as new research comes in.

And besides, there are other more affordable and more accessible natural compounds for fighting zombie cells. My favorite is fisetin, a polyphenol found in seaweed and strawberries. One study showed that high doses of fisetin could kill up to 50 percent of senescent cells in a particular organ.¹² While research on how to use fisetin to most effectively destroy zombie cells isn’t complete, research indicates that it is a cognitive enhancer.¹³ This is likely thanks to its direct antioxidant activity and ability to increase levels of other antioxidants in your cells. More antioxidants equals less oxidative stress and more energy throughout the body, including your brain!

It’s not uncommon for researchers to discover that traditional herbs and plant compounds that have been used for thousands of years have anti-aging properties. A prime example is the Japanese herb ashitaba, which is available as a tea or powder and helps prevent zombie cells. It is traditionally used to treat high blood pressure, hay fever, gout, and digestive issues, but researchers recently discovered a compound in the plant called dimethoxychalcone (DMC—no relation to the famous rappers), which slows senescence. In worms and fruit flies, DMC increases life-span by 20 percent.¹⁴ We don’t know yet if it will have the same impact on humans, but it may be worth trying this tea to help with one of the Seven Pillars of Aging. I do.

Finally, there’s piperlongumine (PPL), a pepper root extract that’s commonly used in Ayurvedic medicine. It looks promising for reducing senescence, but this knowledge is so new that researchers don’t yet understand the mechanism of action.¹⁵ PPL may also have cancer-fighting properties, too, although research hasn’t yet confirmed that benefit.¹⁶ It is likely safe to use, but taking it all the time or taking high doses could put a load on the liver. If you do decide to use PPL consistently, your body might have a reduced capacity for detoxing¹⁷—so it’s a good idea to take it for a limited period (one to two months) in conjunction with a liver-supporting supplement like glutathione.

It boils down to this: If you don’t want to die, you must make sure your cells do die when they’re supposed to and stay alive when they’re supposed to.

PILLAR 4—CELLULAR STRAITJACKETS

The space in between your cells contains a network of proteins called the extracellular matrix, which protects your tissues from stress, trauma, and even gravity while allowing them to do their jobs. Visualize a perfect wobbling bowl of Jell-O. Without the matrix, you’d just have weird red liquid. Now imagine that same bowl of Jell-O, but so hardened that it won’t wobble and you can’t even spoon it. That’s what anti-aging scientists call extracellular matrix stiffening.

Not only does the matrix literally hold your cells together, but it also gives your tissues their elasticity. This is incredibly important, especially when it comes to certain tissues such as those that make up the arteries. When these tissues lose their elasticity, they become stiff, and your body has to work harder to push blood throughout your circulatory system. This can of course lead to high blood pressure and heart disease.

So why does the matrix become so stiff? When sugar in your blood circulates throughout your system, it permanently binds with proteins, creating inflammatory advanced glycation end products, or AGEs. Glycation is the process of sugar bonding to protein. AGEs are aptly named, as these end products accelerate the aging process and create oxidative stress in the body.¹⁸

Think about it this way. When you eat something that contains sugar, glucose molecules travel through your body and look for proteins to bind with. Once stuck together, the glucose actually browns the proteins. This is the exact same chemical reaction that takes place when you brown onions in a pan and the sugar and onions become caramelized. When you have high blood sugar, it is at least partially because you made decisions that literally caramelized your insides. Yum. Not really.

There are multiple classes of AGEs. The most abundant in collagen is called glucosepane, and it contributes to diseases of aging from diabetes to vascular dysfunction. Thankfully, researchers are beginning to look for ways to break down AGEs and prevent them from stiffening the extracellular matrix. In 2018, the journal Diabetes reported that scientists had identified four enzymes that are able to break glucosepane cross-links.¹⁹ They are still looking at the exact mechanism of action and whether or not the process of degrading AGEs creates other harmful metabolites, but this is a very promising area of research if you have type 2 diabetes or heart disease or just want to avoid this pillar of aging.

Even if, as I predict, glucosepane-degrading enzymes do prove to be safe and effective, it’s better to just avoid extracellular matrix stiffening in the first place. To do that, you must reduce your blood sugar levels, particularly the spike in blood sugar you experience after meals. A study looking at glucosepane levels showed that this harmful AGE pretty much universally increases with age. In a nondiabetic control group, continuous high blood sugar more than doubled levels of this aging substance. Reducing blood sugar is not optional if you want to become Super Human. Fortunately, it’s not as hard as you might think. You’ll learn more about how to do this in chapter 3.

Chronic inflammation of any type is also associated with an increase in cross-linked proteins. This makes sense, since you already know that high blood sugar causes inflammation and high blood sugar causes these cross-links. In addition to managing your blood sugar levels, you should avoid eating foods that make you inflamed. When you are sensitive to a certain food, your body initiates an immune response that triggers inflammation. If this happens consistently, you end up with chronic inflammation and excess AGEs. There are good at-home tests that can help you pinpoint which foods you are sensitive to. I recommend Viome, which you’ll read more about later, and EverlyWell. (Disclosure: While I use both services, I’m an investor in and advisor to Viome, and EverlyWell has advertised on Bulletproof Radio.)

PILLAR 5—EXTRACELLULAR JUNK

As you age, waste products called extracellular aggregates build up both inside and outside your cells. Of the waste products that accumulate outside your cells, the main culprits are dysfunctional, misshapen proteins usually called amyloids. When amyloids start to accumulate, they stick together and form plaques that cause aging and disease by “gumming up the works” and getting in the way of healthy cellular interaction.

You can think of amyloids like the gunk clogging a sink. When you’re young, you won’t notice the impact—a single hair slips easily down a drain. But eventually, as more and more gunk accumulates in the pipes, water dissipates more and more slowly. It’s that gradual process that slowly wears you down as you age.

You’ve probably heard that patients with Alzheimer’s disease have a type of plaque (in this case called beta-amyloids, a type of protein aggregate) in their brains. But long before you develop Alzheimer’s, these same plaques can impair cognitive function. In the case of type 2 diabetes, one type of protein aggregate called islet amyloid inhibits insulin secretion. Protein aggregates also cause stiffening in the heart. This is called senile cardiac amyloidosis and is a major cause of heart failure.

So what causes proteins to stick together in the first place? The problem with amyloids is that they build up in different tissues for different reasons, and we don’t know all the reasons yet. We do know that autoimmunity, when the immune system attacks its own healthy cells, makes it worse, and at least 30 percent of people have some form of autoimmune disease. And recent research on mice links low insulin levels to the formation of amyloids in your brain.²⁰ This is one reason you don’t want to be on an unending low-carb diet that keeps you in ketosis without pause. You’ll live longer if you sometimes eat low carbs, sometimes eat moderate carbs, and always avoid sugar and bad fats. Low insulin is worse than high insulin in this case, but neither will keep you running at your peak.

Even if you don’t have full-blown autoimmunity, inflammation stemming from food sensitivities or even unending emotional stress can lead to amyloid buildup (in addition to AGEs). It appears that amyloids form during long periods of chronic inflammation from any cause. The smart strategy is to reduce your inflammation levels by avoiding foods you are sensitive to and learning how to chill out. If you’re eating food that’s not compatible with your biology, you’re going to end up inflamed, and that will age you in multiple ways. Same deal if you spend a lot of time in a state of stress.

The good news is there are simple strategies you can use to partially break down or reduce the formation of these proteins that age you prematurely. One of the best things you can do is to boost autophagy, your body’s recycling program, by consuming more of the foods you will read about in the next chapter. This will help break down these proteins so they don’t end up forming harmful plaques. So will fasting.

Gordon Lithgow, PhD, a professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, has also found that vitamin D helps prevent proteins from losing their shape and sticking together. With vitamin D deficiency so widespread,²¹ this raises the question of whether Alzheimer’s rates are increasing in part because people do not have enough vitamin D to slow amyloid plaque formation.

There is also a clear connection between toxic heavy metals and amyloids. A study from the Society for Neuroscience found that excess copper prevented the body from clearing protein aggregates on its own.²² You need copper for many functions in the body, but too much of it is toxic. Medical research shows that the blood vessels and brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease contain excess copper. Cadmium, another heavy metal, increases the formation of protein aggregates in the brain and appears in greater amounts in brain tissues of patients with Alzheimer’s disease than in healthy brains.²³ You’ll learn how to avoid and detox from these metals and others later in this book.

In his lab, Lithgow has demonstrated that chelators, small molecules that bind with heavy metals and help you detox, protect mice from developing protein aggregates. You won’t be surprised to hear that chelating from heavy metals has been a priority of mine for years. You’ll read all about how to do this later. Heavy metal exposure has been on the rise for decades, and no matter where you live or how clean you eat, chances are that you still have higher than ideal levels of metals like lead and mercury. Approximately 6 million pounds of mercury is released into the environment each year, and lead, arsenic, and cadmium are present in detectable levels in our air, water, food, medicine, and industrial products. Even organic kale is high in one heavy metal.

In addition to contributing to the buildup of amyloids, heavy metals also cause mitochondrial dysfunction.²⁴ A small amount of exposure to lead, mercury, nickel, uranium, arsenic, or cadmium for a short amount of time can impair mitochondrial energy production and increase mitochondrial death.²⁵ Even if you don’t realize it, the heavy metals already in your body are likely aging you right now. You’ll learn about how to detox them later.

PILLAR 6—JUNK BUILDUP INSIDE CELLS

Okay, so waste products can build up outside of your cells, but the good news is that nearly all the cells in your body have their own built-in waste disposal system called a lysosome. Your lysosomes incinerate unwanted materials of all kinds, keeping your cells free of junk and able to function optimally.

You knew there was a but coming, right? When the lysosome can’t break down certain materials to incinerate them, the waste products end up just sitting there, clogging up the cell until it can no longer function. The name for this is intracellular aggregation. If this happens to too many of your cells, you end up with Pillar 1—loss of cells and tissue atrophy.

There are two reasons this might happen. The first is if the lysosome itself is damaged and can’t function properly. Lysosomes rely on over sixty types of enzymes to break down waste products, and mutations in the genes for these enzymes can prevent the lysosome from doing its job. These organelles can also be damaged by an excess of reactive oxygen species—free radicals—which happens when your mitochondria aren’t working efficiently.

But the more likely reason your cells fill up with junk is that you eat too many foods that your lysosomes are incapable of incinerating even if they are functioning perfectly. These are advanced glycation end products (AGEs) that you eat rather than the ones that are made by sugar inside your body. Remember when I said that when sugar and proteins link up inside your body, it is the same as caramelizing onions? Yeah, it also happens when you eat caramelized protein: aka charred meat (from grilling over an open flame, broiling, or cooking protein with sugars). The AGEs you consume get stuck inside your cells, and your lysosomes can’t clear them out.

Over time, these materials build up, making more and more of your cells dysfunctional, and this affects your ability to control blood sugar levels²⁶ and increases your risk of cancer²⁷ and heart disease.²⁸ When it happens to neurons, it can contribute to Alzheimer’s.²⁹

Fried, blackened, and charred meat all contain tons of AGEs that can overload your cellular waste system and leave your cells literally full of garbage. And this dramatically raises your risk of developing one or more of the Four Killers. A 2019 study published in BMJ looked at the dietary habits of over one hundred thousand women between the ages of fifty to seventy-nine over the course of several years. After taking into account potentially influential factors such as lifestyle, overall diet quality, education level, and income, the researchers found that regularly eating fried foods (which also contain AGEs, since frying produces a similar chemical process as charring meat) was associated with a heightened risk of death from any cause and, specifically, heart-related death. Those who ate just one or more servings of fried food a day had an 8 percent higher risk of death from heart disease than those who did not eat fried food. One or more servings of fried chicken a day specifically was linked to a 13 percent higher risk of death from any cause and a 12 percent higher risk of heart-related death than someone who ate no fried food.³⁰

This one hurts, I understand. When I was in my twenties, I was the master of the grill. I loved charring meat over an open flame, but now I love my clean, highly efficient cells even more. It’s worth ordering grass-fed steak with no char.

PILLAR 7—TELOMERE SHORTENING

Take a moment to picture the plastic tips on the ends of shoelaces that protect them from fraying. Your telomeres serve a very similar function—they are the endcaps of your DNA that protect your chromosomes from fraying with wear and tear (aka age). An enzyme called telomerase is responsible for maintaining telomeres, but these caps naturally deteriorate over time because each time a cell copies itself, the telomeres shorten. As you age, they get shorter and shorter until they can no longer protect the cell. The cell then either stops growing or submits to apoptosis. In fact, there is a term for the number of times a cell can divide before it is no longer protected by telomeres and dies—it’s called the Hayflick limit.³¹

Shortened telomeres are linked to a weakened immune system and chronic and degenerative diseases like heart disease and heart failure,³² cancer,³³ diabetes,³⁴ and osteoporosis.³⁵ The rate at which your telomeres shorten plays a huge role in determining the rate at which you age. Scientists view telomere length as a reliable marker of your biological age (as opposed to your chronological age). People with shorter than average telomere length for their age have a higher risk for serious disease and early death³⁶ than their peers with longer telomeres. In one study, people over the age of sixty with shorter than average telomeres had three times the risk of dying from heart disease and eight times the risk of dying from an infectious disease³⁷ as someone with average-sized telomeres for their age.

It’s clearly critical to keep your telomeres long. There are some studies showing ways to lengthen telomeres, but not enough evidence yet to say that we know for sure how to do it in every case. But we do know some things about what make telomeres shorter and how to protect them from shortening. Interestingly, there seems to be a direct connection between telomere shortening and stress. In one study, women with the highest levels of perceived stress had telomeres that were shorter by the equivalent of one full decade than women who said they experienced less stress.³⁸ This is an important finding because it offers evidence that how you experience psychological stress has as much of a physiological impact as environmental stress. And this makes sense, since both psychological and physiological stresses are associated with increased oxidative stress in the body.

Exercise is another important way of preventing early telomere shortening. Researchers in Germany looked at telomere length in four groups of people: those who were young and sedentary, those who were young and active, those who were middle-aged and sedentary, and those who were middle-aged and active. There wasn’t much of a difference between the two groups of young people, but when the participants were middle-aged, the change in telomere lengths was striking. The sedentary middle-aged folks had telomeres that were 40 percent shorter than the young people, while the active middle-aged folks had telomeres that were only 10 percent shorter than the young people. In other words, the active group reduced their telomere shortening by 75 percent.³⁹ Exercise significantly reduces perceived stress levels and inflammation,⁴⁰ which may help to explain these results.

There are two promising lines of research about lengthening telomeres. One is a synthetic peptide called Epitalon that is modeled after a peptide your pineal gland produces (epithalamin). The research on Epitalon goes back to 2003, but no one has commercialized it. When researchers injected Epitalon into mice, it was shown to increase their life-span by up to 13.3 percent by activating telomerase⁴¹ while turning on apoptosis and slowing down tumor growth.⁴²

Someone with identical biology to me (ahem) has been injecting Epitalon for ten days every few months for the past several years despite the fact that it is not yet approved for human use and may never be, even though it seems to work. In fact, anti-aging substances like Epitalon often exist in a strange limbo. The pharmaceutical companies don’t develop them because they’re not patentable, which means they won’t pay for the huge studies the FDA requires before approving them. The result is that you can find Epitalon affordably online, but it’s hard to know that you’re getting it from a reputable source. To me, the risk-reward ratio is worth it, but this may not be the case for you.

Another supplement called TA-65, the name brand of cycloastragenol, also activates telomerase.⁴³ It is incredibly concentrated extract of an Ayurvedic herb called astragalus. By law, the makers of TA-65 can’t call it an “anti-aging” drug because it hasn’t been proved to extend life-span. But studies on this molecule show that in humans, it improves biological markers associated with health span through the lengthening of telomeres and rescuing of old cells. The downside here is that it is quite expensive. If you’ve experienced a lot of stress and/or feel that you are aging more quickly than you’d like and it’s in your budget, this might be worth considering. There are generic versions available, too.

Until we know more about how to maintain telomere length, avoiding excessive environmental stress and taking measures to reduce your psychological stress is a good start, along with getting good quality sleep to recover from stress that is truly unavoidable.

You’ve probably noticed that these simple interventions—good food, the right environment, moderate exercise, stress control, and quality sleep—are the best and most effective ways of avoiding all Four Killers and even slowing down or reversing many of the Seven Pillars of Aging. And you’re right! The vast majority of the hits to your mitochondria that cause aging come from your food, your environment, and your lack of quality sleep. So, before we move on to aging backward, let’s take a closer look at the most important ways to avoid dying. After all, what’s the point of being a Super Human if you’re dead?

Bottom Line

Want to not die? Do these things right now:

• Kill off death-resistant cells with natural or pharmaceutical compounds such as AEP, fisetin, and piperlongumine.

• Consider getting anti-aging drugs like rapamycin or metformin from your doctor.

• Stop eating fried, grilled, or charred meat. It’s just not worth it if you want to live a long, high quality life.

• Manage stress—meditate, practice yoga, get good quality sleep, and/or delegate tasks that are draining you. This is not indulgent or selfish—it will literally help you live a longer and fuller life.

• Consider supplementing with vitamin D to help your body avoid forming dangerous misshapen proteins.

• Do what it takes to find out which foods are not compatible with your biology, either through an elimination diet or a food sensitivity panel, and stop eating those foods.

3

FOOD IS AN ANTI-AGING DRUG

By the time it became clear that inflammation made me feel like crap and was aging me rapidly, I had conducted enough semi-successful experiments on myself to know that of all the things I could control, food had the biggest impact on how I felt, how I performed, how inflamed I was, and therefore how quickly my body aged. Armed with this experience and the lifetimes of knowledge distilled from medical reports, biochemistry, and experts at SVHI, I set out to determine once and for all which foods and compounds supercharged my mitochondria and reduced inflammation and which led to inflammation, dysfunctional mitochondria, and rapid aging. Fortunately, most of the good stuff also tasted good!

Years later, I wrote Game Changers, based on a survey of almost five hundred people who had done big things in the world—I wanted to figure out what made them tick, what qualities these superstars had in common. The results showed that high-performing people know that getting their food right is the number one human upgrade, even though different people found that different foods worked best for their individual biology. Nutrition is essential not only for Super Human biology but also for Super Human success.

GRAINS, GLUTEN, GLUCOSE, AND GLYPHOSATE (OH MY)

In my mid-twenties, I figured out how to lose fifty pounds of fat, decrease inflammation, gain energy, and gain positive changes to my personality using multiple versions of a low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet. I was happier and less angry, and had more friends and more energy. It was clear that something in my diet had caused these drastic changes. As I experimented with different types of carbs, I realized that for me, gluten was the number one culprit. Even though I do not have celiac disease, a condition that makes the small intestine hypersensitive to gluten, my body did not tolerate gluten well, and responded with chronic inflammation and changes to my personality that were far from positive.

Chances are you’ve already heard about the damaging effects of gluten, along with strident, shrill misinformation about how only people with celiac disease should avoid it. The sad truth is there is plenty of research to show that eating wheat—not just gluten, the protein found in wheat—is aging for the rest of us, too. Wheat causes inflammation and gastrointestinal distress and contributes to autoimmune disease and a host of other issues by stimulating an over-release of zonulin, a protein that controls the permeability of the tight junctions between the cells lining your gut. It does that whether or not you tell yourself that you tolerate wheat just fine.

With excess zonulin, the gaps between your intestinal cells open, allowing bacteria, undigested food, and bacterial toxins to flood into your bloodstream. Those toxins, called lipopolysaccharides, or LPSs, lead to inflammation throughout your body. They make you old,¹ and as you get older, the accumulation of hits from LPSs impacts your health more and more.² They do this no matter what you think about gluten.

Gluten also reduces blood flow to the brain, interferes with thyroid function,³ and depletes your vitamin D stores.⁴ As you read earlier, vitamin D deficiency can cause proteins to lose their shape and clump together, forming dangerous and aging plaque deposits.

If you’ve been following the latest news about gluten, you’re probably confused. On one hand, the Big Food industry says to eat it, but if you’re listening to the frontline anti-aging doctors on Bulletproof Radio, you hear clear advice to avoid gluten. You may have even switched to other grains besides wheat to avoid gluten. Unfortunately, most grains contain plant compounds designed to weaken animals like us who eat them. They also commonly contain storage toxins and field toxins from mold that grows on crops, and grains are commonly sprayed with glyphosate, the main ingredient in the herbicide Roundup.

In May 2015, the World Health Organization (WHO) classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” based on animal studies showing that glyphosate caused tumor growth and higher incidents of cancer. The WHO investigation also found that glyphosate is probably genotoxic (meaning it causes mutations in DNA) and increases oxidative stress, which triggers inflammation and speeds up aging. Glyphosate also mimics estrogen, which might explain why it causes human breast cancer cells to grow in vitro.⁵ Roundup itself is directly toxic to mitochondria⁶ and even more toxic to human placental cells than glyphosate⁷ alone.

Even more worrisome, the gly- in glyphosate stands for glycine, an amino acid prevalent in collagen, the protein in your skin’s connective tissue. Glyphosate is actually a glycine molecule attached to a methylphosphonyl group (which happens to be a precursor to chemical weapons). This means that when you consume glyphosate it can be incorporated into your collagen matrix just like glycine. In 2017, the Boston University School of Public Health released research showing that glyphosate substituting for glycine disrupts multiple proteins necessary for kidney health and may contribute to kidney disease.⁸ Plus, your skin is made of collagen. Extra wrinkles won’t necessarily keep you from living longer … but it’s always nice to look as young as you feel.

Before we spread another 18.9 billion pounds of glyphosate on our planet, we simply must conduct more research on how glyphosate contributes to other diseases when the body uses it as a substitute for glycine. For now, suffice it to say that if you want to avoid the painful, slow decline we now associate with aging, avoid glyphosate, which means avoid grains (at least in the United States). That’s not as easy as it may seem. Not only are the vast majority of conventionally grown grains sprayed with Roundup, but so is much of our conventionally grown produce and the grains that are fed to conventionally raised animals. This means glyphosate is hiding in most products containing corn and other grains, industrial feedlot meat, and animal products like nonorganic milk, yogurt, cheese, and so on.

Many parents were rightfully horrified when a 2018 report showed small but meaningful amounts of glyphosate in name brand breakfast cereals and other products marketed as healthy choices for families. I am equally horrified when I see advertisements for bone broth made from nonorganic industrial chickens. While bone broth is a great source of collagen, when it is made from the bones of conventionally raised chickens, it is a glyphosate land mine.

The good news is that the executives running Big Food companies will change how they make food when you demand it. After all, they have kids and don’t want to get old, just like the rest of us. This is simply about getting the science into the hands of decision-makers and getting them to believe it. Having had the opportunity to sit down with the heads of many of the largest food companies, I can attest that they feel a moral and personal obligation to feed you the healthiest food that you will actually eat at the lowest possible cost. They are good people who want to do the right thing. That is real. These are not evil people (except the people still making glyphosate … there must be a special place in hell for them). It’s just that we haven’t shown Big Food companies that we will actually pay a tiny amount more to get food that keeps us young. It’s okay. They’re coming over to our side as the data becomes clearer.

Glyphosate is just one reason that where you get your food really matters. After years of thinking about it, I decided to make the difficult move to an organic farm where my family can grow our own produce and even raise our own animals (and trade with neighbors who raise animals we don’t). But even before I made the move, my health improved tremendously when I simply eliminated grains and switched to organic, grass-fed animal products from the grocery store and farmers’ markets.

Despite these changes, I still had to learn how to control my blood sugar. More to the point, given how aging high blood sugar is, I learned how to kick its ass. On so many of the diets I’d tried in the past, I ate a low-fat, low-calorie, high-carb breakfast. My body secreted insulin to transport sugar to my cells so they could create energy. This caused a spike in blood sugar, then a quick drop until my base instincts yelled at me to eat something quick to get more energy. Sound familiar? Sugar cravings are how our biology evolved to keep us from starving to death, but they certainly weren’t helping me live longer! Even short spikes in blood sugar cause damage to the inside of your arteries, contributing to cardiovascular disease.

Another common scenario was that I’d unknowingly eat something that contained toxins, requiring my liver to use extra energy to filter toxins out. This of course led to more sugar cravings as my liver struggled to make enough energy to oxidize the toxins. My entire life was ruled by sugar cravings! It had been for as long as I could remember. And when I gave in and ate the darn sugar (or refined carbs), of course it made things worse: More blood sugar means bigger energy crashes, more oxidative stress,⁹ and the constant formation of AGEs when all that sugar links up with protein in tissues. You already know that sugar ages you, but you may not know how to stop eating it or about the deadly combination of too much sugar and too much protein …

THE VEGAN TRAP

Then I read The China Study by T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell II, one of the first popular books that made the connection between eating animal products and many common diseases, including the Four Killers. According to an uncritical read of the book, the best way to avoid dying is to avoid animal products completely. Given that not dying is the first step to anti-aging, and not having done all the research, I decided to avoid animal foods.

So I turned to a raw vegan diet, and I went all in. I bought sprouting trays and the world’s best blender and spent my days eating bowl after bowl of salad and entire blenders full of green smoothies trying to consume an adequate number of calories. It worked … for a little while. I got down to about 185 pounds—too low for a six-four guy—and I felt a burst of energy that also made me feel flighty and ungrounded. I convinced myself that the increase in pain and stiffness that came with this was just my body “detoxing.” But my friends said I looked gaunt, and pretty soon I wasn’t feeling so great. My teeth got sensitive and even started to break, and I felt cold all the time. It was pretty clear that I was suffering from malnutrition, despite knowing a ton about nutrition and spending two hours a day preparing food.

Later I learned about what I call the “vegan trap.” When you switch from a diet containing animal fats to the mostly omega-6 polyunsaturated fats found in plants, you set yourself up for failure. Vegetable oils reduce your thyroid function by preventing thyroid hormone from binding to receptors.¹⁰ At first your thyroid hormones will temporarily increase to compensate for the lower energy, and you feel good. That’s what led to my ungrounded energy and initial weight loss. But if you continue to give your body the wrong building blocks, your health will suffer. Because your cells don’t have the right building blocks to make energy efficiently, your metabolism eventually slows down. That slow metabolism doesn’t just make you gain weight more easily; it slows down your brain, your energy, and everything you do.

For about six weeks as a vegan, I felt great and grew convinced that my diet was the answer to all my problems. I had tons of energy and no idea it was the energy of a stressed animal that is starving and needs one last boost to catch its prey. Already convinced that being a vegan gave me more energy, I logically decided to “lean in” when I started to feel the ill effects. That is why it’s a trap—once you’re convinced that you feel good on a vegan diet (because you actually did for a short while), you don’t think to look at your diet when your energy or your health begin to suffer.

Thankfully, it took me only about six months to realize what was going on, do more research, and decide to add meat back into my diet. By then I had learned about the dangers of consuming AGEs when eating overcooked meat, so for a brief period of time I became a raw omnivore. In addition to occasionally eating sushi, I marinated thin strips of steak in apple cider vinegar to kill harmful bacteria and added it to my salads. With that plus some raw egg yolks and raw butter, I started to feel better right away.

When I reread The China Study, I realized it had some serious flaws. For example, the researchers conclude that all animal protein causes cancer simply because rats that were exposed to large amounts of casein (a dairy protein, one of thousands of animal proteins that each do different things) had a higher chance of developing liver cancer than rats that did not consume casein. But the study didn’t account for the type of animal product or the type of animal; nor did it consider what that animal ate or how the meat was stored or cooked. These factors truly determine whether or not an animal product is aging. So does the amount of meat you eat. If you want to live a long time, you want to avoid eating too much meat and avoid eating all low quality meat.

My time as a raw vegan was not fun, but I am grateful for The China Study. Had I not cut out animal protein from my diet, I wouldn’t have become familiar with the research showing that most of us—including me before I went vegan—eat far too much protein in general. Eating a pound of steak or chicken every day has a different impact from eating a few ounces, which in turn has a different impact from eating none at all.

After I started eating meat again, I wondered why my inflammation levels had decreased when I cut out animal products. It turns out excess protein—especially from animals—causes inflammation. Most animal protein contains specific amino acids such as methionine, which causes inflammation and aging when eaten in excess. (Except for collagen protein, which has far less methionine.) In pharmaceutical studies, this is called an inverted U-shaped response curve. It means there is a “Goldilocks zone” for dosing a substance, and either too little or too much does not work.

This is no small consideration. When you eat a diet high in animal protein, you can expect a 75 percent increased risk of dying from all causes over eighteen years, a 400 percent increased risk of dying of cancer, and a 500 percent increased risk of diabetes compared to someone who restricts his or her animal protein.¹¹ Totally not Super Human. Another set of studies found that restricting protein can help increase maximum life-span by 20 percent, probably because less protein means less methionine.¹²

The type of protein you eat is as important to consider as how much protein you eat. If the protein in question is charred or deep-fried, there is no good amount to eat. Same goes if it’s from industrially-raised animals treated with antibiotics. But if the protein is from gently cooked grass-fed animals, wild fish, or plants (hemp is best), then there is a simple formula for the correct daily allowance: about 0.5 grams per pound of body weight for lean people; and about 0.6 grams per pound for athletes, older people (the risks associated with overconsumption of protein decrease after age sixty-five), and pregnant women.

If you’re obese like I was, sorry, but all that extra fat you’re carrying around doesn’t require protein, so subtract it from your body weight before figuring out how much protein to eat. For instance, when I weighed 300 pounds, let’s assume I was carrying an extra 100 pounds of fat. Take my weight (300), subtract my fat (100), and you end up with 200 pounds, so I should have aimed to eat 100 grams of protein (0.5 × 200 pounds). If you’re relatively heavy and have no idea of your body fat percentage or are just bad at math, assume you’re about 30 percent fat. So you’d eat 0.35 grams per pound of body weight.

Collagen protein is a special case. Given that it lacks the most aging amino acids and has all sorts of benefits for connective tissue, you can add another 20 or more grams of grass-fed collagen on top of your protein intake or use it as part of that number. Some days up to 50 percent of my protein comes from Bulletproof collagen.

Eating less protein will not give you less energy. Contrary to everything you’ve heard from most popular diets (even keto), protein is actually a terrible last-ditch fuel source for humans, worse than fat or carbohydrates. The process of turning amino acids from protein into energy creates a lot more waste than fat or carbs, and excess protein ferments in the gut and produces ammonia and nitrogen. This puts a huge load on the kidneys and liver. Instead of getting energy from protein, you want to consume just enough protein as building blocks to repair your tissues and maintain muscle mass, and then get energy from fat, fiber, and a few carbs, instead.

When you get this right, your cells can rebuild themselves with clean animal fats and protein (notice, you’re an animal, too), and your gut bacteria will actually transform fiber from vegetables into fatty acids, an ideal fuel source for your mitochondria. Add in excess protein, antibiotic-contaminated meat, and/or sugar, and your gut bacteria just won’t do the same thing.

Restricting protein intake also helps boost autophagy, your all-important cellular recycling program. By occasionally limiting how much protein you eat (you can still have a nice steak every once in a while), you force your cells to find every possible way to recycle proteins. In their search, they excrete waste products hiding in your cells, slowing down energy production. Temporary protein deficiency is a type of hormetic (beneficial) stress. In response to protein restriction, your body looks for other sources of energy. It is the equivalent of burning your trash to stay warm.

The same thing happens when you use intermittent fasting (simply eating all of your food within a shortened period of the day, usually between six to eight hours) as a type of hormetic stress. Intermittent fasting is incredibly useful in aiding fat loss, preventing cancer, building muscle, and increasing resilience. Done correctly, it’s one of the most painless high-impact ways to live longer.

Until recently, we did not fully understand why fasting was so beneficial. Then in 2019, scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology discovered that just fifty-eight hours of fasting dramatically increases levels of forty-four different metabolites, including thirty that were previously unrecognized.¹³ Among other beneficial functions, these metabolites—substances formed during chemical processes—boost antioxidant levels in the body. And as we know, antioxidants are important for fighting off aging free radicals. All of these benefits can be explained by the fact that fasting dramatically boosts autophagy,¹⁴ keeping your cells young and healthy.

Fasting has profound effects, even at less than fifty-eight hours. Alternative day fasting, a form of intermittent fasting in which you eat every other day, helps prevent chronic disease and reduce triglyceride and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels in as little as eight weeks.¹⁵ Intermittent fasting also increases your brain’s ability to grow and evolve by boosting neuronal plasticity (the brain’s ability to change throughout your life) and neurogenesis (the birth of new neurons).¹⁶ This can help ward off Alzheimer’s and cognitive decline.

As you might expect, when I started experimenting with intermittent fasting ten years ago, I was often left feeling cranky and cold around lunchtime, before my eating window opened. This is because I had not yet developed the metabolic flexibility from teaching my body to efficiently burn carbohydrates or fat. Today I can effortlessly fast for twenty-four hours because my metabolism is younger and my blood sugar levels have stabilized. Thankfully, there are now well-understood ways to make intermittent fasting painless, which you’ll read about later.

A BIG FAT LEAP OF FAITH

So, when it comes to aging, grains are bad, sugar is bad, fried stuff is bad, and too much or too little protein is bad. What about fat? Can you eat too much of it? Sure. But we need fats for reproductive health, temperature regulation, brain function, and shock absorption. Fat helps build the outer lining of your cells, which protects them from damaging substances. It also makes up the bile acids you need to digest foods, and vitamins A, E, D, and K are fat soluble, meaning your body needs fat to absorb them. Additionally, several important hormones, including leptin, which helps you feel satiated, are made from saturated fat and cholesterol. Fat is also the basis for the lining of your nerves, called myelin, which allows electricity to flow efficiently between nerves and is essential for avoiding degenerative diseases like multiple sclerosis.

Saturated fat in particular is so important that your body converts carbs to palmitate, a type of saturated fat, in a process called de novo lipogenesis. Without this ability, you’d die. That’s how critical saturated fat is. Your body then converts palmitate into other saturated and monounsaturated fats necessary for cell membranes, but it can’t make enough polyunsaturated omega-6 and omega-3 fats. That’s why you have to eat them. Yet the myth that eating fat and cholesterol will make you fat and give you heart disease still somehow persists. You read earlier that it’s your gut bacteria and not dietary cholesterol that creates plaques that build up in arteries. The evidence is in, and the fats you eat that contain cholesterol are not the enemy, as we’ve been told.

When you eat enough of the right fats without excess carbs or protein, your body learns to efficiently burn fat for fuel. If you eat excess carbs or protein, your body burns those first. Normally, your body converts carbohydrates to make glucose, which your mitochondria use to produce energy. When you run out of carbohydrates, you start converting fat to glycerol for energy. The liver produces ketones as a by-product of this fat metabolism, and your mitochondria burn those ketones instead of glucose in a more efficient form of energy production. Ketosis is a state your body enters when you have a lot of ketones in your blood and are burning additional fat … or when you eat a special type of saturated fat that converts to ketones in your body. More on that later.

One last time: Your body requires fats for you to perform your best and live as long as possible. You just have to know which fats serve what purpose. Some fats you eat are building blocks for your body, and some are better used as fuel. Getting the mix right matters. But have you ever heard nutrition “experts” say exactly which of the many saturated (or other) fats to avoid? The typical buckets you hear (“plant based,” “animal fats,” “saturated,” “polyunsaturated”) are not very specific. Is it possible that the heated industrial polyunsaturated fat in French fries has a different effect on your biology than avocado oil, or that the fat in industrially-raised animals is different from the fat in an egg yolk or pastured beef? You bet it is.

Researchers in Australia have measured how different cells elegantly use each type of fat you eat. You can make sure your brain has the type of fuel it runs best on and that your body fat doesn’t create extra inflammation and make you old. Eating the right fats could add productive years to your life, which is why it’s worth a page or two of your time to dig a little deeper into details of how your body uses fats.

Scientists describe cell membranes as “the margin between life and death for individual cells.”¹⁷ These membranes are made of tiny droplets of fat. About 5 percent of your genes contain instructions telling your cells how to make the thousands of types of fat your body needs to survive. We now know so much about what each different type of fat does that French researchers have proposed the notion that “saturated fats should no longer be considered as a single group in terms of structure, metabolism, and functions.”¹⁸ In other words, we have grouped together a very diverse array of fats under one reductive and often misleading label. When your doctor tells you to eat less saturated fat, your response should be “Which one(s) do you mean?”

I’ve had the opportunity to interview lots of fat experts (or experts on fat), and most of us use an analogy from nutritionist and early trans fat researcher Mary Enig, PhD, who popularized two basic ways of thinking about the fat you eat. The first is to look at how long a fat molecule is. There are short-chain, medium-chain, and long-chain fats. As a general rule, the shorter the saturated fat, the more anti-inflammatory it is. For instance, butyric acid, which is anti-inflammatory, has only six molecules, while other types of fat may have twenty or more.

Some fats are easy to damage no matter how long they are. So the second way to understand your fat is to assess its stability. Oxygen drives very strong chemical reactions that damage fats through oxidation. Oxidized (damaged) fats cause you to age more quickly by creating inflammation in the body and building less effective cell membranes. When your body has no choice but to incorporate oxidized fats into cell membranes, those cells create excess free radicals that make you an average human, not super.

Your cells use saturated fats, which are the most stable of the fats, to make about 45 percent of the cell membranes in the brain and liver, and about 35 percent in heart and muscle cells.¹⁹ Yes, saturated fat is the dominant fat in your brain, so don’t demonize it! Energy-producing cells will hold their level of saturated fat at about this level no matter what type of fat you eat. The only type of tissue that meaningfully changes its composition of saturated fat is adipose tissue—aka your muffin top. When you eat more saturated fats, the cells in adipose tissue will change their makeup to contain more saturated fat and less unstable fats without changing in size. This is fantastic, as stable fats make for fewer free radicals.

Think of saturated fat as the stable waxy bricks building the “walls” for your cells. The problem is that your cell membranes have to flex in order to make energy and receive chemical signals, and those nice stable saturated fat “bricks” don’t bend. So while it’s fine to go ahead and eat butter and other forms of saturated fat, it’s also important to eat other types of fats. And those include the next most stable group of fats, monounsaturated fats. These fats—found in food sources like olive oil, avocados, and some nuts—are more flexible than saturated fats. You can think of them as the gel-like “mortar” that supports your saturated fat bricks in the cell wall. Your cell membranes are made up of about 20 percent monounsaturated fat.

Interestingly, brain cells have the most monounsaturated fat of any cells in the body, and they hold their level of monounsaturated fat constant no matter what types of fat you eat. Most other cells adjust their fat content slightly when you eat a lot of monounsaturated fats. But without changing how much fat you have on your body, fat cells will happily dump other stored fats and replace them with monounsaturated fat. This means you can transform your stored body fat to have a higher percentage of stable fats. Eat your olive oil!

After you account for the saturated and monounsaturated fats in the membranes of energy-producing cells like muscle, you’re left with about 35 percent of a combination of polyunsaturated omega-6 and omega-3 fats, as well as some conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), a type of fat produced by microbes in your gut. (CLA also happens to be found in grass-fed butter—more on this in a bit.) While omega-3 and omega-6 fats fall under the same category, they are not the same.

Omega-3s are anti-inflammatory and thus beneficial to your anti-aging efforts. The best omega-3 fats are found in food sources like cold-water fish (salmon, mackerel). You can also get omega-3s from walnuts and olive oil, but vegetable omega-3s are only 15 percent as effective as those found in fish.²⁰

Unfortunately, omega-3 fats are far outnumbered by omega-6s in the standard Western diet—and omega-6 fats are highly inflammatory. Poultry, the most common protein in Western diets, is high in omega-6s. Most refined vegetable oils are also polyunsaturated omega-6s, and they are so unstable and inflammatory that eating excess canola, corn, cottonseed, peanut, safflower, soybean, sunflower, and all other vegetable oils is likely to contribute to cancer and metabolic problems. Oxidized omega-6 fats damage your DNA, inflame your heart tissues, raise your risk of several types of cancer, and don’t support optimal brain metabolism.²¹ Anything that increases inflammation decreases brain function.

When you cook with those fats, they are even more aging because they become oxidized so easily. Remember how aging oxidative stress is? Eating oxidized fats speeds this process way up. Additionally, trans fats are a category of omega-6 fats that are the most dangerous of all. Decades ago, when food manufacturers needed a shelf-stable fat for processed foods, they created hydrogenated omega-6s, or trans fats. These fats are linked to many health problems and cause obesity, and it took the food industry only forty years from the time they learned about this to begin phasing them out. When you ingest man-made trans fats, your body tries to use them to build cells, but cell membranes made of these trans fats cannot function properly. And without healthy membranes, you’ll never make it to a hundred and eighty—or even a comfortable seventy-five.

Artificial trans fats also form when you use polyunsaturated fats for frying.²² Fortunately, trans fats won’t likely cause problems if you use the oil for frying only once, but restaurants often use the same oil over and over all day or all week, which creates oxidized oil and trans fats. So put down the French fries, no matter how lean you are. Seriously—you’re better off having some rum or smoking a cigar. Super Humans don’t eat fried food, even if it’s crispy and delicious. You know what’s not delicious? Eating from a tube later because you couldn’t put down the chicken wings when you were younger.

Your body does need some omega-6s, but there are so many of them in a standard Western diet that you would have to work really hard to consume too few. Ideally, you should consume no more than four times as many omega-6s as omega-3s, but most people today eat an average of twenty to fifty times more omega-6s than omega-3s. This is a hugely underreported source of accelerated aging. Changing the balance of omega-3s to omega-6s you consume can give you a Super Human metabolism because your stored fat cells change dramatically when you eat omega-6 fats. No matter how much (or how little) body fat you have, anywhere from 7 percent to 55 percent of it is made of inflammatory omega-6 fat, depending solely on how much of each type of fat you eat.

If you are lean, you want to eat the same composition of fats that you want stored in your body. That means that whether you’re on the high-fat Bulletproof Diet or a low-fat diet, stick to about 50 percent saturated, 25 percent monounsaturated, 15 to 20 percent undamaged (meaning not oxidized) omega-6, and 5 to 10 percent omega-3 fats, including EPA and DHA. If you are obese and have a good amount of excess body fat (like I used to have!), right now your body is probably storing too many unstable fats. To shift your fat composition, temporarily eat an even higher percentage of the type of fats you want in your body. Of the fat you eat, 50 to 70 percent should be saturated, 25 to 30 percent monounsaturated, and only 10 percent undamaged omega-3 and omega-6.

The challenging thing is that the most common blood tests doctors use to measure things like cholesterol and triglyceride levels do not offer an accurate picture of the type of fats in your brain, heart, or muscle cells, which is different than fat in your blood cells. So there is good reason to distrust the fat ratios found in the blood tests that most doctors rely on. Looking at inflammation markers in your blood work, such as C-reactive protein (CRP) and homocysteine, will give you a much more accurate sense of how you’re aging.

When I started experimenting with eating more fat, I was nervous—it went against everything I’d been told about healthy eating. One of the biggest leaps I took was to begin eating more grass-fed butter. When I took a deep breath and stopped holding back on butter, magical things started to happen. My focus increased, I had more energy, and my blood panels showed that my levels of inflammation had decreased.

Like any good biohacker, I kept experimenting until I knew I had taken things too far. I heard that some Inuit populations survived on no carbohydrates at all, so I decided to subsist on a diet of almost entirely fat and animal protein and see what it would do for my health and performance. The result of that experiment was a host of new food allergies because the bacteria in my gut were literally starving and out of desperation began eating my own gut lining. Sadly, a diet of only steak and butter won’t work for the long term. But it was delicious in the short term.

PIG’S EARS AND ENERGY FATS

By implementing everything I’d learned about nutrition, I was able to dramatically decelerate my aging. My knees were still a mess, but I weighed less and had more energy than ever before, and I managed to (barely) graduate from business school while working full time despite my cognitive dysfunction. I decided to celebrate with a trip to Tibet to learn meditation from the masters there, something I never would have been able to do when I was old, obese, and inflamed because it involved a lot of hiking and steep terrain.

I had just descended 7,500 vertical feet in one day in Nepal when I knew there was something terribly wrong with the cartilage in my knees. The cartilage itself was bruised from all that hiking, and I could barely walk across the street even using two trekking poles. I had exactly one week to recover before setting out on a rugged 26-mile walk at 18,000-feet elevation around Mount Kailash, which is considered to be the holiest mountain in the world. I knew that eating some extra collagen would be beneficial for my joints, but at the time collagen supplements didn’t exist and there was no bone broth to be found in Tibet. I had to get creative.

The next day, the bus I was in stopped about halfway between Kathmandu and Lhasa in a town with only one restaurant. It had mud walls and a dirt floor and was filled with locals. I asked a Chinese friend from the bus to read the menu for me and quickly ascertained that the best source of collagen in the place was … pig’s ears. Without hesitation, I ordered it, and a few minutes later I came face-to-face with a giant bowl of cold boiled pig’s ears. I looked around to see if Joe Rogan, the host of Fear Factor, was hiding to challenge me to eat them for an absurd cash prize, but he was nowhere to be seen.

I had the idea that the pig’s ears would somehow be more palatable if I could find a way to warm them up, so I ordered some watery soup and dipped the ears in one at a time before biting into their rubbery blandness. It was the second worst meal of my life. (The winner, during that same trip, was Chinese military ration sardines heated over a yak dung fire.) The pig’s ears didn’t have much taste, but the texture was wholly unappealing. However, I was shocked when I woke up the next morning and could walk without using trekking poles. Two days later, I could jog up a short hill. That is the magic of collagen. But I didn’t want to have to eat pig’s ears every time my knees hurt, so I worked hard to bring collagen to the market years later. I just couldn’t see blending pig’s ears into yak butter tea!

While I was in Tibet I met many old yet vital, energetic people and learned about their practices for pursuing a long, rich life. As I sat with meditation masters and Buddhist monks, I saw that a mind that can control its response to stress is the world’s most advanced anti-aging technology. If you’re walking around in a perfect environment eating all the right foods but your fight-or-flight response is always switched on like mine used to be, there is no doubt you’ll age more quickly.

I made it to Mount Kailash thanks in part to the collagen in those pig’s ears, but between the elevation and below-zero temperatures, I was hurting. Chilled, hypoxic, and exhausted, I staggered into a small guesthouse, where a kind Tibetan woman handed me a creamy cup of traditional yak butter tea. It was delicious, but more important, I felt like it brought me back to life. I even wrote about it in my travel journal. The air was still thin, but I was suddenly and remarkably full of energy, and I had to understand why. You’re not supposed to want to dance when you’re at 18,000 feet.

When I returned home I brewed some tea, tossed it in the blender with some butter, and was left with a greasy cup of tea that most certainly did not impart any mental clarity, unless you count the adrenaline from mild revulsion. Clearly, something different was happening back in Tibet. Figuring my problem was the tea, I spent a ridiculous $200 on a variety of high-end teas from a local Chinese merchant, but none of them had the magical effect I remembered. So I went to my local Whole Foods and another gourmet store, where I bought every single brand of butter from around the world to see if that was the variable that mattered. I tested twenty-four butters, and learned the trick was to use unsalted butter from grass-fed cows. You simply don’t get the same results using butter from cows that eat corn and soy, because those oils end up in the butter, giving you more omega-6 fats. The yaks that provided the milk for the butter I had in Tibet certainly didn’t eat any corn, because it doesn’t grow there!

From my anti-aging work, I knew about the healthy fat in coconut oil, so I began experimenting with adding coconut milk and oil along with the butter, but the coconut flavor was too strong, and it didn’t add any more energy than butter alone. So I switched from tea to coffee, my first love. The coffee stood up to the coconut oil better than tea, but the real magic happened when I switched from coconut oil to concentrated oil that is extracted from coconut oil called medium-chain triglyceride (MCT) oil. More than 50 percent of the fat in coconut oil comes from the different subtypes of medium-chain triglycerides. There are four types of MCT oils. All are flavorless, but the rare types convert effectively into ketones, your mitochondria’s preferred fuel source. This was the genesis of Bulletproof Coffee.

The only problem was that MCT oil caused “disaster pants” even though it helped my brain. I should have bought stock in Charmin as I worked through that problem … The solution was to remove certain types of MCT using triple distillation and then use a special filtration process, leaving only one type (eight-chain MCT), which became Brain Octane Oil. (Yes, I sell it. I use it. I give it to my kids. It works. Someone had to do it! It created a revolution in food.)

You may think that avoiding carbs or fasting for a few days are the only ways to enter ketosis (the state in which your body burns fat for fuel), but adding MCT or Brain Octane Oil to your diet hacks ketosis. Brain Octane turns into ketones when you consume it, even if carbs are present. Research that came out after I launched Brain Octane shows that it raises ketone levels four times more than coconut oil and twice as much as normal MCT oil.²³ In fact, the study says, “In healthy adults, C8 [the exact triple distilled version in Brain Octane] alone had the highest net ketogenic effect over 8 hours,” and it could “help in developing ketogenic supplements designed to counteract deteriorating brain glucose uptake associated with aging.”

Normal MCT oil is a conundrum for oil chemists. There are four different lengths of fats that are called MCT. All four are technically saturated fats, but unlike other saturated fats, your body won’t use MCTs to make cell membranes. It’s as if they are meant to be burned for energy. It is more accurate and useful to start calling MCTs “energy fats” instead of saturated fats. That’s why I do not count MCT oil as a saturated fat and why you can laugh at anyone who says to avoid MCT because it’s saturated. Sadly, the most abundant and cheap MCT, lauric acid, which makes up half of coconut oil, does not have these special energy powers.

To live longer and heal faster, I recommend adding either C8, its weaker cousin MCT, or its even weaker cousin coconut oil to your coffee, your salad dressings, smoothies, and so on. My kids love it drizzled on sushi! These “energy fats” do not count in the recommended ratios of fat in your anti-aging diet, as they will convert to energy instead of being stored on your body. These are extra/unlimited sources of fat. Also, when it comes to sourcing, I recommend purchasing MCT oil made from coconut oil, not palm oil. Most MCT is derived from palm oil, and palm deforestation poses a serious threat to the environment and kills orangutans. I switched to a coconut-derived MCT oil several years ago, because I simply couldn’t imagine feeding oil to my kids that was created from practices that harm the environment they will inherit.

The discovery of using energy fats in the morning helped me benefit from autophagy because I was able to fast without getting cold or hangry (which, by the way, was added to the dictionary in 2018, the same year as biohacking). Because butter and MCT oil do not contain any appreciable quantity of protein, I was able to feel full and burn ketones while temporarily stressing my cells, which thought I was fasting and started recycling protein more rapidly. This boost in autophagy without hunger is one of the most profound benefits of Bulletproof Coffee. It is a permanent part of my quest to live to at least a hundred and eighty.

Yet, since I made my first cup in 2004, I’ve continued to discover more reasons why it works. To my surprise, one of them has to do with melanin, the pigment in your skin, which also exists in other parts of the body. When exposed to sunlight or mechanical vibration, new research indicates that melanin likely has the power to break apart water molecules, freeing up oxygen and electrons that your mitochondria can use to make energy.²⁴ Our bodies actually create melanin by linking together polyphenols, chemicals that occur naturally in plants. Polyphenols are packed with antioxidants and thus offer us a powerful defense against aging. The best ways to stimulate melanin production are to eat plenty of leafy green plants and herbs, drink tea and coffee, get adequate sun exposure, and exercise regularly.

This new information about melanin made me think back to my time in Tibet. I noticed that locals who carried all their belongings on the backs of yaks made sure to always have blenders hooked to portable batteries just to make yak butter tea. They were clearly onto something. Tea and coffee contain large amounts of polyphenols. Coffee also contains melanin and similar compounds called melanoids. Is it possible that Bulletproof Coffee and yak butter tea are so energizing because the mechanical vibrations from the blender break up the melanin and melanoids,²⁵ providing free oxygen and electrons for your mitochondria? Is this why the yak butter tea made me feel so much better in high altitudes where there was less oxygen? I think so.

COFFEE + TIME = KETONES

Recently I interviewed Satchin Panda, a leading researcher on circadian rhythms, the natural twenty-four-hour cycles of all living beings, and learned something new about Bulletproof Coffee. According to Satchin, it’s part of our natural rhythm to start producing ketones at the end of our fasting cycle. For most of us, that would be in the morning before we break our fast with the aptly named meal, breakfast.

Those ketones have a huge impact on our cardiovascular and brain health. Satchin observed that when mice produce ketones toward the end of their fasting cycle, those ketones go directly to brain cells called clock neurons, which monitor the environment in the brain and help to regulate circadian rhythm. When ketones reach those clock neurons, they receive a signal to become awake and alert and begin what is called exploratory activity. Of course exploratory activity is more pleasant than desperately wanting to hit the snooze button in the morning.

This makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective. Just a couple hundred years ago, our ancestors fasted all night and then had to hunt for food in the morning. Their brains and muscles had to work really well in that hungry state in order to successfully find food, and ketones were the answer. This is why we are programmed to build up ketones during the last couple of hours of our fasting period. Those ketones give our brains, muscles, and hearts more energy so we can hunt—exactly what Satchin has seen in his lab rats. An hour or two before they were fed in the morning, they got up and started looking around, exploring, and getting ready to hunt.

The problem is that most people don’t fast long enough to take full advantage of this biological phenomenon. According to Satchin, there are tremendous health benefits to extending our daily (or nightly) fast. He says that when people limit their eating window to ten hours and make no other dietary changes, they see reductions in inflammation levels, triglyceride levels, and cancer risk, along with improvements in sleep within weeks. Is this because of the natural boost in ketones or because intermittent fasting boosts autophagy—or both?

But remember, you do better when you practice ketosis intermittently. Staying in ketosis for long periods of time compromises your metabolic flexibility—your body’s ability to burn either glucose or ketones for fuel. Maintaining metabolic flexibility is incredibly important for your longevity. There are two states your body must be able to handle effortlessly. The first is periods with ketones and no carbs, and the second is periods with carbs and no ketones. To gain metabolic flexibility, the best thing you can do is cycle in and out of ketosis every week. To do this, you limit carbohydrate intake most days, and on one to two days per week you eat low-sugar carbs. While this works for die-hard biohackers, most people enjoy eating more carbs. With the power of technology, it is possible to have both ketones and carbohydrates present in your body at the same time, which can also generate metabolic flexibility. To do this, eat moderate low-sugar carbohydrates like white rice or sweet potatoes, and at the same time consume lots of energy fats. That way, you’ll have some ketones present for your neurons and some glucose present for your brain’s maintenance cells. Most people find this more sustainable than a pure cyclical ketogenic diet, but both work.

There is no doubt that strategies like ketosis, intermittent fasting, and the maintenance of a healthy circadian rhythm play a critical role in our longevity. This leads to the next essential step on our quest to become Super Human—and that is getting enough highly efficient, good quality sleep.

Bottom Line

Want to not die? Do these things right now:

• Avoid all conventionally grown grains, produce, and animal products. Even better, skip grains altogether and opt for tons of organic vegetables, limited organic fruit, and meat from pastured animals.

• Don’t eat fried stuff. Ever.

• Eat enough protein (from pastured animals, eggs, wild fish, or nonallergenic plants) for tissue repair and an additional 20 plus grams of grass-fed collagen, and don’t fry, char, blacken, or barbecue meat (sorry). For lean people, that’s 0.5 grams per pound of body weight. For obese people, that’s about 0.35 grams per pound of body weight. For pregnant women, elderly folks, or athletes, it’s 0.6 grams per pound.

• No matter how much fat or how little fat you eat, eat the right ratios. Lean people eat about 50 percent saturated, 25 percent monounsaturated, and 15 to 20 percent undamaged omega-6 and 5 to 10 percent omega-3, including EPA and DHA. If you are fat like I used to be and want to live like a Super Human, eat 50 to 70 percent saturated, 25 to 30 percent monounsaturated, and only 10 percent undamaged omega-3 and omega-6, with added EPA and DHA so that you eat more omega-3 than omega-6.

• On some days, limit your eating window to eight to ten hours a day based on what works best for your schedule. Good options are 12:00 P.M.–8:00 P.M., 9:00 A.M.–5:00 P.M., or 10:00 A.M.–7:00 P.M. Have breakfast sometimes, especially if you’re tired or stressed. Don’t eat after dark.

• Teach your metabolism to be flexible by having ketones present in your system every week. Practice a cyclical ketogenic diet by fasting, avoiding carbohydrates for a few days, or adding “energy fats” to your food (or coffee) that convert directly to ketones.

4

SLEEP OR DIE

Sleeping feels good, but ever since I was a kid, there was always something more fascinating and productive I’d rather do than go to bed. I resented having to dedicate so many hours each day to something I saw as basically a waste of time. So for most of my life I skimped on sleep. Even the first two years after founding Bulletproof, I slept for about four hours a night, at most a self-imposed five hours. I used the extra three hours a day to be a father, start Bulletproof, and still pay the bills with my day job.

My sleep deficit almost certainly contributed to the diseases of aging I faced as a young man. It turns out that lack of quality sleep doesn’t just leave you tired and unable to perform in the moment; it also rapidly accelerates aging. The good news is that you can learn to be a Super Human sleeper and cram more high quality sleep into fewer hours and still get all the benefits. For the past five years, I have been getting progressively healthier, leaner, and younger on six hours and five minutes of sleep a night, but I use every technique in this chapter to sleep like a professional.

Perhaps you will choose to get more sleep than I do. Regardless of how many hours you sleep, the information in this chapter is intended to help you make the most of the sleep you do get. It doesn’t matter how old you are, how busy you are, or how much money you have. Sleep is the ultimate tool to sharpen every skill and add more quality years to your life. So get better at it.

HOW LACK OF SLEEP WILL KILL YOU

Like it or not, a lack of good sleep directly increases your risk of dying from one of the Four Killers. Meanwhile, just one good night of sleep can improve your ability to learn new motor skills by 20 percent,¹ and getting regular quality sleep increases your ability to gain new insight into complex problems by 50 percent.² This improved brain function could potentially help ward off cognitive decline with age and is befitting of a true Super Human. Good quality sleep also promotes skin health and youthful appearance,³ controls optimal insulin secretion⁴ (making you less likely to develop diabetes), and encourages healthy cell division.⁵ Sleep is an essential strategy in protecting against all Seven Pillars of Aging.

In the previous chapter we discussed Satchin Panda’s research on longevity and circadian rhythms. As part of my research for this book I went to his lab and had a great time with his PhD students looking at how the combination of food, light, and too little sleep affected rats. They walked me through new research showing that eating late at night dramatically reduced the quality of the rats’ sleep and that poor sleep impacted the rats’ ability to control blood sugar by up to 50 percent. That’s huge! In fact, it’s more than what most medications can do.

In rats and humans, the pancreas is responsible for making insulin. Satchin has studied insulin-producing cells in the pancreas and found that they, too, have their own circadian rhythm. At night when melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate wake and sleep cycles, is released, insulin-producing cells shut down, too. So if you eat something sugary late at night, your body’s insulin response is not as effective as usual. So that late-night piece of cake leads to a blood sugar spike and then a crash that triggers the release of adrenaline … which keeps you awake at three A.M.

If you get less than six hours of sleep, the hormones that control how hungry and/or satiated you feel (ghrelin and leptin, respectively) start to work against you. Ghrelin increases, making you feel hungry, and leptin decreases, making it more difficult for you to feel satiated. This is one reason that sleep loss leads to obesity and all the many health problems that go along with it.⁶

Sleep is also incredibly important for warding off Alzheimer’s disease, the killer many of us fear most as aging begins its silent creep. When you are asleep, your brain undergoes a natural detoxification process. The glymphatic system, a waste clearance pathway comparable to the lymphatic system, which drains fluids from tissues in the body, sends cerebral spinal fluid through the brain’s tissue and flushes out cellular waste and neurotoxins.⁷

This is a big deal, as the glymphatic system clears out the amyloid proteins that are the hallmark of Alzheimer’s when they build up in the brain. While we don’t yet have hard evidence that Alzheimer’s disease is caused by a lack of sleep and thus not enough time for the glymphatic system to work its magic, I would wager that it’s a contributing factor. In fact there is some evidence of this. A small study on twenty human participants showed that losing just one night of sleep causes an increase in amyloid proteins in the brain.⁸ That may be a small sample, but it’s enough to convince me to make sure my glymphatic system has a chance to fully detox my brain each night. That doesn’t mean sleeping for eight hours; it means sleeping like a boss.

Since mitochondria play a role in the glymphatic system process and sleep in general, everything you do to strengthen your mitochondria can also help you sleep better and thus keep your brain clear of amyloid plaques. There are also simple things you can do to enhance your glymphatic system function. For example, studies on rats show that sleeping on one’s side improves glymphatic clearance compared to sleeping on the stomach or the back.⁹ While we don’t have studies proving that this transfers to humans, we know that side-sleeping humans have lower blood pressure and heart rate.¹⁰ Sadly, they also get more vertical wrinkles than back sleepers, but sleeping on your back increases your risk of sleep apnea, a condition in which the upper airway becomes blocked during sleep. Sleeping on your back will make you less wrinkled but more likely to die. Not a great trade-off. I’d opt to stay alive and hit those wrinkles with other hacks in this book.

Apnea in and of itself puts you at a much higher risk of dying from one of the Four Killers. Sleep apnea is often the result of dysfunctional mitochondria, and it can be deadly.¹¹ If you snore, your risk of developing diabetes, obesity, and high blood pressure is nearly double that of someone who does not. And if you snore and you wake up feeling groggy and/or have trouble falling asleep, your risk goes up 70 to 80 percent, respectively.¹²

As you read earlier, bad quality sleep causes poor blood sugar regulation. It’s also true that dysfunctional mitochondria cause bad sleep, which then causes poor blood sugar regulation! No matter how you slice it, if you don’t get enough good quality sleep, you will age faster and die sooner. Which begs the question …

HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?

When I learned about how critical good quality sleep is to aging well, my perspective on sleep changed for good. Instead of seeing it as something to skimp on, I made it my goal to hack my sleep so I could get all of the benefits of a good night’s sleep without having to sacrifice eight hours of my life every night. Some of these efforts have been more successful than others.

In the year 2000, when Google was just eighteen months old, an early biohacker posted the Uberman Sleep Schedule in a dark corner of the Internet. This was the first writing to propose that you could get away with only three hours of sleep per day as long as you were willing to sleep in several carefully timed, precise naps at exactly the same times each day. This technique is now called polyphasic sleep.

Intrigued by the approximately eleven years of my life I’d reclaim from this schedule, I tried it. The amount of time and energy it takes to do this is absurd, not to mention the social and professional interruption from napping at the same time every day and feeling wrecked if you miss one nap. Polyphasic sleep is not compatible with having either a career or a social life. Some people have success with it, but personally I felt like an unproductive, antisocial zombie. The idea of getting by on a couple of hours of sleep at a time is a beautiful dream (get it?), but it just didn’t work. I was starting to feel resigned to having to sleep eight hours a night …

Then I came across a study from the Keck School of Medicine of USC and the American Cancer Society that looked at over 1 million adults ranging in age from thirty to a hundred and two and correlated how much they slept with their mortality rates.¹³ The results of this study changed the way I thought about sleep forever. The data was actually collected in the 1980s, but it was so complex, showing differences in outcomes with just a half-hour difference in sleep length, that they couldn’t crunch it all with 1980s computing, so the information sat there for years until researchers could use high-speed computing. The researchers found that the people who lived the longest slept six and a half hours a night, while people who slept eight hours a night consistently died more from any cause. Ha! Take that, all you doctors who told me I had to sleep at least eight hours each night!

You might hear this and draw the conclusion that in order to live longer you should simply sleep less, but that is unfortunately the wrong conclusion. What you can take away from that study instead is the fact that the people who lived the longest were the healthiest people. They required less sleep because they didn’t need as much time to recover from chronic illness, inflammation, and/or everyday stress. If aging is “death by a thousand cuts,” sleep equals recovery from many of those “cuts.” The fewer cuts you need to recover from, the less sleep you need.

I started using my sleep length and corresponding energy levels to measure whether I was doing things during the day that made me older. I knew that if I jumped out of bed ready to bring it after six hours of sleep, I was on the right track. But if I felt groggy after a solid eight hours of sleep, that meant I was probably doing something that made me sick and inflamed. This explains why I needed less sleep when I started following the Bulletproof Diet. I was taking fewer hits from the foods I ate, so I didn’t need as much recovery time.

This became a two-step process. Step one: Reduce the number of hits I took so my body required less recovery time. Step two: Increase the return on my sleep investment by improving its quality. Bottom line—if you’re healthy enough, you can use sleep strategically as a performance-enhancing drug instead of a drag. You still have to get enough sleep, but the other hacks you’ll use to become Super Human will reduce the number of hours of rest you actually need.

HOW WELL DID YOU RECOVER LAST NIGHT?

In order to work on improving the quality of my sleep, I began a long journey of understanding my sleep, a journey that is still going strong after nineteen years. There are all sorts of reasons to pay attention to your sleep. If sleep is recovery, you need to know how well you recovered last night so you can make an informed choice about what actions to take today. For instance, if you know you slept poorly, a heavy workout will age you instead of making you stronger; a high-sugar meal will impact your blood sugar even more than usual; and even small amounts of stress will be damaging.

Quality sleep is like having money in your recovery bank account. Can you imagine not checking your bank account on a regular basis? If you can see where your sleep stands today, you can zero in on small changes you can make to improve your sleep, recover better, and stay young tomorrow.

In 2004, I was finishing a brutal two years that had me working full time while enrolled at an Ivy League business school. Sleep was in short supply, as you’d imagine. So I became one of the first purchasers of an expensive headband that tracked my sleep and told me exactly how well I did every night. The data was enlightening and helped inform many of my early biohacking practices. Unfortunately, Victoria’s Secret definitely did not approve of these early tracking devices (and neither did my wife). Thankfully, there has been quite an evolution in the quality and attractiveness of sleep trackers since then.

Seven years later, I became the chief technology officer for a wristband sleep and exercise tracking company called Basis (which Intel has since acquired). Before most people were wearing wrist trackers, I was able to track my sleep, make strategic changes, and get more out of the time I spent with my eyes closed. In fact, I’ve purchased and tried just about every sleep tracker on the market. A sleep tracker is an anti-aging device with one of the highest ROIs. I promise that you have no idea what your brain is doing while you sleep. Before we get to what technology to use, ranging from free to a few hundred dollars, it’s important to know what you are looking for when you track your sleep.

SLEEP BASICS

Of course you want to know exactly what time you fell asleep, what time you woke up, and how this information varies over time. Did it take you a long time to fall asleep after you went to bed? Did you wake up several times during the night even if you don’t remember them? Are you wasting your night with light sleep? These are all important factors in determining the quality of your sleep. When I did the crazy “zero carbs for nineteen days” experiment, my unattractive headband sleep tracker showed me I was waking up eight to twelve times every night, yet I had no recollection of waking at all. I did feel like a zombie in the morning, though. It was my sleep data that eventually made me quit that experiment!

It’s also worth paying attention to snoring when tracking your sleep for all the reasons mentioned above, particularly because snoring is a sign of inflammation. I used to snore terribly because the back of my throat was inflamed and partially blocked my airway. Now I don’t normally snore more than a couple of minutes a night, and I am usually able to connect it to something I ate the day before that caused inflammation. I also get a handy recording of my snoring so I can’t deny that it’s happening! This is incredibly valuable information because food that inflames your throat also causes aging inflammation throughout your body.

REM/SLOW-WAVE SLEEP

When you’re sleeping, you cycle through two types of sleep each night—rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which is when you dream, and non-REM (NREM) sleep. NREM sleep comes in three flavors: crappy (stage 1 useless light sleep), decent (stage 2 middle sleep that is still considered light sleep), and awesome (stage 3 deep delta sleep). To age or perform like a Super Human, it’s your job to spend as much time as possible in deep or slow-wave delta sleep. This is when your breathing and heart rate drop to their lowest levels and your brain waves slow down and get wider (as measured by a test called an electroencephalogram, or EEG). These slow waves are known as delta waves, and your brain produces them at a frequency of 1 to 4 hertz, a unit of measurement that is equal to one per second. To put that into context, gamma waves, the fastest brain waves, have an average frequency of above 40 hertz.

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