 Welcome to the Dr. Gendry podcast. Dave Asprey, the man behind Bulletproof Coffee, is back on the show and he's got a brand new book out. It's called Superhuman, the bulletproof plan to age backward and maybe even live forever. And it's absolutely packed with tips for living your longest, healthiest life. Dave is a world famous bio hacker and entrepreneur and New York Times bestselling author, the founder of Bulletproof Coffee and the host of the award winning podcast, Bulletproof Radio. And on today's episode, he and I are going to discuss heavy metals, not the bands, heavy metals, the latest longevity science, and even virgin blood. I'm gonna let Dave explain that one. So Dave Asprey, welcome back to the Dr. Gendry podcast. Dr. Gendry, I have so much respect and admiration for your work in multiple fields. It's always an honor to get to talk with you. Really just appreciate your work. And we have something in common. We have both written books that hit number one on the longevity list of books on Amazon that just happened with Superhuman. And so when I click on the new people buy this with this, I always see the longevity paradox paired with Superhuman. So the people who have come to know and admire your work are interested in longevity in general in the whole field and the field itself is just exploding. Yeah, it is. And yeah, that's great. And I think the two books are actually remarkably complimentary. They do not compete, which is good. And I really recommend that folks do get Superhuman. Cause, and one thing, sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off there, is that I was really careful to not read the advanced copy of your book that the publisher sent until my manuscript was in cause I didn't want to pollute my mind. And when I read your book afterwards, I was like, oh, we like, like there's nice correspondence but different topics. So I was grateful cause I would have felt, you know, bad if we were repeating each other too much. I don't think we did, but we have a lot of just alignment. So, thank you. So you talk about in Superhuman that you grew up with toxic mold in your home. How did you make the connection to that with your health problems? I know you talk about it in the book, but give our audience. Sure. When I was a kid, we didn't know much about toxic mold and I lived in a basement and it had been flooded and I had wood paneling in my rooms. So it's a classic, you know, wet basement sort of environment for mold. And I had these strangers, I would get nosebleeds 10 times a day. I just, it would just gush. I remember even at prom, you know, like, man, people thought I got into fights. Like, no, this just happened three, four times a day. It's just a part of being me, along with the obesity, the joint pain, the weird rashes, the asthma, the behavioral problems. And it turns out it took until my late 20s to really understand when I lived in another house that had stacky botrists in it. I realized, you know what? This is an environmental problem. And all these things I thought were just, you know, emotional issues or anxiety, or I'm just unhealthy or I'm just not trying hard enough or I ate too many pieces of lettuce. It was an environmental thing. And now I'm an expert. I filmed a documentary, moldymovie.com. It's a free thing. Just anyone can watch it. But it's with top experts in the field to say there's 100 million homes that have this problem. And now, thanks to, you know, you've discussed this, Dr. Dale, Bredesen has discussed this. We know that mold toxins are one of those big things that contributes to mitochondrial dysfunction. Penicillin is also a mold toxin. And it kills bacteria. And our cells are based on ancient bacteria. So maybe we don't wanna be breathing that stuff and the evidence is very strong. But man, if someone had told me I was young, I might have been a lot more comfortable. Yeah. Now you go into this a lot in the book. And I like that your very exploration of yourself. And you always have been. And I think that's why you've become one of the great bio-hackers. Thank you. You talk a lot about heavy metals. And I think we ought to talk about that because just this week, another study found that almost all of our baby foods are poisoning our kids with heavy metals. You wanna talk about heavy metals for our listeners and why that's so important. It's funny because people hear heavy metal, like I said, they think it's music or they sort of have this idea that maybe mercury or lead or something, but it's just out there and I haven't been exposed. But if anyone listening to your show right now were to get tested, they are not going to have zero levels. And yet over the last 20 or so years, the Environmental Protection Agency says, oh, the safe level of mold was 20 parts per billion. Oh, I'm sorry, we meant 10. I mean, we meant five. And now the statement is there is no safe level of lead. And even a small increase in lead increases your cardiovascular disease risk very meaningfully. It lowers IQs in kids and it's synergistic. And this is the bad thing about toxins. If you have lead and mercury or lead and cadmium or lead and thallium or nickel or tin, all of these things, you might have a safe level but not zero of this one and a safe level of this one. But together, they interfere with cellular biology to the point that it creates inflammation and inflammation is at the root of pretty much every bad thing that happens. Starting with pre-diabetes, then diabetes, which blows up your risk of all of the other, what I call in superhuman, the four killers. And you're very well familiar with this. What's gonna kill the average person who hasn't read one of your books, who doesn't do the basic stuff? It's pretty much gonna be diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, or Alzheimer's. Like those are the big ones or a car accident or something. But that's a much lower likelihood. Yeah, so what, help us out. How can we limit our exposure to this? And I know the number one thing you're gonna tell us is don't eat kale. You know, kale just tastes bad anyway. So we shouldn't eat kale just because it wants to live to 180 years. If you have to eat kale every day, it's probably not a good trade-off. All right, the number one thing wouldn't be don't eat kale, but, and you've explored this. I mean, there are plant toxins and you're one of the major voices out there, 100% accurate. And one of the plant toxins, aside from lectins, is oxalic acid, which is not a heavy metal, but it's a toxin in kale. It turns out, though, there was one plant that is better than any other plant so far discovered that pulls thallium, which is a toxic heavy metal, out of the environment, and it is kale. So people who eat a lot of kale, in addition to kidney stones and gout and vulva denia, and maybe other forms of inflammation from tiny crystals floating throughout your body, they actually can have elevated thallium levels. And thallium is called the poisoner's poison. And it's not something that we really had a problem with in our environment, except, when we figured out lead was bad for us, we pulled lead out of our gasoline, hallelujah, except they replaced it with thallium, which is 1,000 times more toxic than lead. It's just less famous. So I'm not saying don't eat kale, but I am saying if you're gonna live on kale, it's probably not gonna help you. So if you love it, cook it, dump the water, and eat it a couple times a week. And it's just fine if you tolerate that well, but if you're thinking the kale salad three times a week is going to save your life, it can increase your thallium levels. Functional medicine doctors who do testing regularly do see elevated thallium in kale lovers. But the big smoking gun here is clearly lead paint chips. If you eat guacamole with those, that's not how to do it. Maybe that's not it. It's fish. And the reason for this is that we've been burning coal for a long time, especially this so-called dirty coal. And it goes up into the air and it rains down into the oceans. And then it goes into the food chain at the very bottom of the food chain. And then the small fish accumulate a little bit and then a big fish eats them and accumulates a little bit and a big fish eats them. And these are things in us, we're the same way. It goes into our tissues and it stays there. So your job, if you want to live to at least 180, which is my point in superhuman, it might be possible. In fact, I think given some advances that are coming our way, thanks to pioneering work, including frankly robotic surgery is getting to that, there's all kinds of cool tech coming in that's going to make humans live longer and longer. And we're just the beginning of a renaissance of this anti-aging technology space. But if you were to go in and expose yourself to 180 years of eating fish that have eaten fish, that have eaten fish, that have eaten fish, you're going to be 20% mercury by body weight. Not really, but you're going to have enough of it that you will not have a brain that works. You will have Alzheimer's disease and probably cancer. So should you not eat fish? Well, you got no omega-3s. So what do you want to do about that? You only eat fish that didn't eat that many other fish, sockeye salmon, sardines, anchovies, small fish. And when you do eat fish in the book, I talk about some things you can take that will stick to the mercury in the fish in your gut. So you can poop it out instead of having it go into your brain and maybe eventually pulling it out. So there's a, you know, if you're going to enjoy some fish, you might even have some sushi. But when you do, you can do some preventative stuff with it and you don't order the swordfish. You don't order the shark. You don't order the big tuna. Although frankly, I had a piece of tuna the other day. I put it on Instagram and I had a big handful of chlorella which is a fractured cell wall algae. And the reason I know that chlorella works in addition to the studies that show it binds is that years ago I had a very advanced yoga practice and if I ate sushi that day, or the next day, if I tried to stand when a one-legged pose with my eyes closed, I would tip over. But if I had chlorella, I wouldn't tip over. It was very repeatable. It's like the change in your practice, the subtle changes at the edges of your capabilities. That's where these toxins hit you. They're sneaky, but they also take years off your life and they take, we'll say life off your years because if you end up with Parkinson's or MS or any of these other things associated with toxins, Alzheimer's in particular, and your quality of life just went down. Whether or not you got more years, it doesn't matter that much because you can't remember the last ones anyway. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, I've been, interesting, the two biggest offenders for mercury in my practice are dentists and sushi eaters. Because they like the fatty tuna and shashimi grade tuna. And I've used chlorella now for 20 years and there's not a person that I can't get their mercury levels down using chlorella and activated charcoal. And I think you're right. I take chlorella every day and I think everybody should but it's a great way to bind mercury. It really is. Dr. Kanji, hats off. You're a surgeon, you're a very well-credential Western doctor and you've been doing this for 20 years and anyone who looks at you, just look at your skin, look at your body, look at the sharpness of your brain and you are doing something different than average and you have been for longer. And this is the point that I really wanted to get across in superhuman is that look, you're not gonna look 20 years younger tomorrow but if you just take less cuts, if aging is death by a thousand cuts, take less cuts, make them less deep and instead of just slapping band-aids on them, heal them better than mother nature intended. So you're still gonna take cuts. You might have some sushi and love it but you took your chlorella. So you balance it out and maybe you got a little bit of mercury but you can deal with that. So you don't slap yourself in the face over and over but you can still have a fun life. And so my horror movie is the Chloric Restriction People. The guys who say, I'm gonna eat one third less calories than my body really needs because I think it's gonna make me live longer. I'm cold all the time and I'm real thin. I've got vegan-sized pants because I have no calves left. And I'm really grouchy. Exactly, it's not worth it. We don't have to do that to live longer. You're supposed to be just radiating energy and you do every time I've ever talked with you in person or on the air. You're like, you're living it. This is what it's supposed to be like. And that's something that metals will take away. Yeah, no, great point. So speaking of living longer the right way, you focus on mitochondria a lot in your new book as I have. What's so special about mitochondria? What are these little guys? Well, mitochondria are, we like to call them the power plants in ourselves. And this is every author, every newscaster has said that. But they are way more than that. In my view of them after having written out one full book on mitochondria in the brain and then superhuman focusing them as a major part of aging, these are also the batteries to a certain extent. They're storing a certain amount of energy in them that they're recycling very quickly. But they also sense the environment around you and then make decisions on how much energy or other chemicals mitochondria actually can manufacture things like neurotransmitters and hormones. And they're embedded inside your cells anywhere from a few dozen at the very low end up to 10 or 15,000 mitochondria in some cells and women you can have 100,000 mitochondria in the cells in the ovaries because they have to send the environment the most to pick the right egg and to provide all that energy. And they're amazing. They move themselves around inside the body. They shuttle a little energy production things back and forth. And we just found out in a study that came out two weeks ago something that is a thesis for superhuman but we didn't have a study for it yet which was that when your mitochondria work better they provide enough energy to the nucleolus which is a part of the cell and that is responsible for your DNA repair. In other words, if your mitochondria can make the amount of energy they're supposed to air plus food equals energy that energy will go into DNA repair. And if they're bad at taking food in air and making energy that means pre-diabetic means toxic metals, it means bull toxins it means any metabolic dysregulation any inflammation then you don't have enough energy to repair your proteins. And another study was published today that came out that said, you know what that turns out that errors in protein folding are an unacknowledged cause of aging. We always theorized it but some people proved it. You probably saw the study today too. And so what's going on here is, hey, what if your power was better? What if you were better at taking food and air and making energy? You'd have more energy right now even if you're 25, even if you're 105 and you are not going to decline the way you think you will. And you get the benefits of more energy now. It's kind of a good deal. The benefits are more energy now. That sounds like a pitch. Just have some coffee, you'll be fine. All right, so okay, so we need to have our mitochondria happy and working. So listening to this podcast, is there anything our listeners can do right now to make their mitochondria happy? One of the things you can do that is very low cost is you can sleep effectively tonight because the mitochondria, there's a quadrillion of them or so sprinkled around in your body and they all have to coordinate themselves. Think of it like a Tesla. These cars have thousands actually of little laptop batteries underneath the car and they all have to work in unison. Well, you're the same way. So what is the timing system? It turns out there's a part of the brain called the SCN that is the major timing system for your mitochondria. And if they all know that it's daytime then they'll all make energy and if they all know that it's nighttime they'll go into repair and reset mode. But if some of them think it's daytime some of them think it's nighttime you're gonna be all over the place both mentally, hormonally, metabolically and it doesn't work. So what do you do to fix that? Turns out it's all about light exposure at night and to a certain extent it's about food exposure. So tonight instead of staring at your bright screen turn your TV screen down. Put on some sunglasses. You might notice I'm wearing glasses. I started a company called True Dark that makes glasses specifically for sleep but you don't have to do that. Make sure you have the darkest curtains you can get. Most people don't know this. The amount of street light that leaks around normal curtains, a very small amount of light increases depression by 63%. At least it did in a study in Japan of 800 adults. So make sure that your curtains aren't leaking light. If you have to have a bulk around the edges, that's okay. Unplug the LEDs, tape them over and sleep in a pitch black room and you're gonna wake up even if you still got your normal six hours, seven hours, eight hours, however much it is your quality of sleep will be better. And in Superhuman, I write about how old people sleep versus how young people sleep. And I post my scores. I get more deep sleep and REM sleep than the average 20 year old gets in eight hours and I'm getting it in six and a half hours. Why? Well, I measure it with my ring and I black out my room once you got your ring on too. So this doesn't cost much to sleep in darkness but man, it will change your mitochondria. You'll wake up tomorrow with more energy and a better regulated system. The other thing you can do right now as you can say tomorrow morning I am going to skip breakfast. You will not go into starvation mode. You will not die. You might get hangry. You might get hypolabitchy. And if either of those happens then that means that your metabolism really needed you to do that. And you should the next day have a nice breakfast with no carbs, no sugar. And the day after that try it again. So what you're doing is you're building metabolic flexibility and you're doing something called intermittent fasting which is a very powerful technique for fixing all kinds of metabolic problems. So let's see. You slept better by turning off the lights and dimming the lights and you skipped breakfast. And you can do black coffee, you can do tea. You can do bulletproof coffee if you want the extra energy from that but no sugar, no protein. Not even collagen protein. And when you do that you're going to see changes. No, I think that's great advice. Skipping breakfast. I think people say, well, gosh, I'm gonna crash. Well, if you crash skipping breakfast like you say, that's a warning sign that holy mackerel, you have no metabolic flexibility and you ought to be scared to death that you can't skip breakfast. That 11 o'clock or the 10 30 if I don't have a muffin, I'm gonna die at 11 30. I just, I can't focus anymore. That is Alzheimer's calling card right there. That is cancer's calling card. And if that is happening to you your top priority is to fix that because normal healthy biology of any form you should be able to skip that. Even a hummingbird can skip breakfast if it has to and they have the fastest metabolism of anything we know of on earth. Yeah, and you know, and people forget that we took over the world because we're really the only primate that can go extended periods of time without eating. And if we couldn't go extended periods of time without eating we couldn't have taken over the world because we wouldn't have gotten to those places. That's exactly right. If you, if we were meant to eat fruit every two hours we'd still be living in trees and we wouldn't have come down from the trees because there's no fruit. Right. Yeah, and we're, we are the fat ape for a reason and we can access our fat. But, you know, I posted on Instagram I think last week of the week before, you know our ancestor did not crawl out of the cave and said, what's for breakfast? Because there was no breakfast. There was no storage system. There wasn't a cabinet. There wasn't a refrigerator. And somehow we forgot that. Yes, you had to wake up and go kill something before you could eat it. That's exactly right. Or find something. Yeah. All right, let's talk about something in the book that I've been seeing on this program for months now. Most people are eating too much protein. So what's going on? Why is too much protein bad for you? Come on, Dave. When I weighed 300 pounds, I went on the Atkins diet. This is in the 90s. The Atkins diet, I have the first Atkins book which is the keto, basically dirty keto. Yeah, it was. Oh, keto today. I have it from the year I was born. I have the first edition that came out. Just to remind me, this knowledge is not new about ketosis, but what the Atkins diet had wrong was lots of protein and it didn't matter what protein and it didn't matter what fat and you could have artificial sugars. It was just don't eat carbs. You'll be okay. And you know what? You could lose, in fact I did. I lost 50 of my 100 pounds and the other 100 pounds stuck around. Partly it was toxins, partly it was bad fats, but partly it was too much protein. And when you're eating too much protein, look, protein is a terrible fuel source. It is a building block for your tissues and you are meant to run on fat and carbs. And if you try to force yourself to run on protein, you can, but your all cause mortality goes up by four times. So it was your risk of dying of anything is four times higher if more than 20% of your calories are from protein. So if you're gonna go on a high protein diet, that's like 1980s, terrible, squeezed margarine, just, you know, intimans, zero fat donut kind of advice. It is trashy, terrible advice. Do not do that if you wanna live a long time. But come on, the carnivore diet. I mean, isn't that the key to long term success? Come on. I interviewed James Saladino, doctor who was a proponent of the carnivore diet. And in my own explorations on the Bulletproof Diet book, I went really deep on, okay, how much fat should you have? And the type of protein really matters. You know, the difference between a collagen protein or grass-fed, pasture protein versus industrial animals. And I'll tell you right now, I don't care if you're eating more or less than 20% of your calories. If it's from industrially raised animals on corn and soy and antibiotics and glyphosate, that's not food. And if you eat those, they're going to take years off your life and they're gonna take quality from your life. So you just, you're like, oh, I'd rather be vegan than eat industrial animals, but having some especially fat from animals, things like butter and ghee, is going to really help your cell metabolism. Egg yolks, for instance, if you're not allergic to them, can be really powerful. Doesn't mean you only eat 5,000 of them and get too much protein. And on the carnivore diet, what James does actually is he pours collagen, and he actually says he uses the Bulletproof collagen. He pours it on his steak. And he does that because collagen is the only animal protein. They actually call it animal fiber that can metabolize into something called butyric acid. Your gut bacteria can eat that and make the right kinds of short-chain fatty acids out of it. Now that said, for long-term success, there's very little evidence that you wanna be using a carnivore diet for long periods of time. However, if you wanted to do it for a month or two to reset your gut bacteria, have a dear friend who has been struggling with cancer in his blood for more than 10 years, full carnivore, cancer went away for the first time after chemo, after everything possible. So maybe for a short period of time, you also might wanna be a full vegan for a short period of time. It's okay to do a strange dietary fast, but for long-term success, there's very little evidence that a high protein, especially animal protein, but even plant protein. Protein is a building block. It is not fuel. If people would just get that, we would save a lot of stuff in the environment and we would all perform better, feel better, and be nicer to each other. Yeah, and the other thing that I think people miss, number one, Dr. Saladino does a lot of intermittent fasting and that's... Yes. So, and that's... Has he been on your show? Yeah, he's been on my show. Oh, excellent. And that's missing in what people hear, but that's okay. So, big things in your book, what's the ultimate food upgrade and even an anti-aging food that's a drug almost? I've coined the term in superhuman. I call it energy fats. And go a little bit deeper than you might think. And I like to think it's a readable way. Talking about, okay, when you eat a fat, what is it going to do to the composition of your cells? And we like to say, oh, I drew my red blood cells and I had this much Omega-3 and Omega-6, but what your brain does, what your white fat around your middle does and what the fat that's the cells in your heart or in your muscle tissue and your nerves, it doesn't all do the same thing when you eat something. So, the fat is both a building block and a fuel source, but there's a unique kind of fat, these energy fats that only convert to energy and they do it with more energy than sugar does and they don't get stored in the body in any meaningful way. And there's a broad category called medium chain fats. Some, or medium chain chain glycerides, some medium chain glycerides have that special energy fat. However, the most common and affordable medium chain fat, lower acid, doesn't actually do that. So the one I recommend, I made it popular is brain octane, it's part of Bulletproof Coffee. And this is the one that in studies from UC San Diego raises ketones higher than anything else even if you had some rice or some sugar the night before, which isn't always a good idea, a little bit of carbs, not a problem. You don't have to be on a zero carb diet forever, just don't be on bonker, sugar diet. But if you put these energy fats in your coffee in the morning, you pour it on your salad at lunch, what happens is your energy levels go up in a very noticeable, profound way. And when your ketones boost a little bit in your blood, there's two things that really shift. One is called CCK and this is the satiety fullness hormone and the other one is called ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone. So if you get your ketones up to 0.48, which is below the keto bro nutritional ketosis, I haven't had any carbs in a year kind of guys. What you're going to get is your CCK goes up and your ghrelin goes down and all of a sudden you don't care about the bagel and the willpower you think it takes to skip breakfast is gone, there's no willpower. And if you pour that stuff in your coffee in the morning, the bagel loses its siren, call it 1030, you don't want the brand muffin, you just don't care. So when it puts it in front of you, the big Krispy Kreme donut, I have no desire for this, which is a very different thing than my 300 pound life where I'd sit there in the meeting and go, I am a good person, I am going to resist this donut with all of my willpower. And then I'm like, I'll just have half the donut, right? And you will lose if this is how you're doing it. And that's the secret there is if you learn intermittent fasting, make metabolic flexibility or use energy fats, you don't have to think about food all the time. You mean, so I don't have to have a personal mantra. I'm not a person that eats bread. I'm just, I am one with the donut. Okay, so let's quickly get some of the more out there topics you explore in the book. Ozone therapy, what the heck is that? Are you from the ozone layer? Are we depleting our ozone? We are not depleting our ozone with the ozone therapy. This is an up and coming thing that is undeniably effective, that is going to take the world of medicine by storm over the next five years. It's just, it's been around for, geez, since World War I, when we first started using ozone to treat infections in wounds. And ozone as a gas, if you breathe it, will make you cough, wretch, throw up or die if you breathe a lot of it. It is really, really noxious. It's also that beautiful smell after a rainstorm. It's all about the dose. So what you do with ozone therapy is you introduce ozone into the blood, into the vagina, into the rectum, or even just against the skin with cupping. And it has broad spectrum antimicrobial, so the antibacterial, anti-fungal, anti-viral properties, but it does something very interesting that your mitochondria are sitting there and when they see ozone, ozone is a signaling molecule that tells them, hey, make more antioxidants. And the mitochondria that are not capable of making more antioxidants, those are the old weak ones. And you know what they do? Die, they get out of dodge and fresh new young ones form in something called mitochondrial autophagy. The old ones die and get replaced, or mitobiogenesis or mitogenesis or the other terms for that. So what I'm saying here is that for people like me who had toxic mold poisoning or Lyme disease or aging at regular exposure in a medical setting to ozone will tell your cells in a very strong way like an intermittent or like a high-intensity interval training, like a strong exercise for your cell membranes. This is something that brought me back from serious brain fog, from mold poisoning. And I have seen thousands of people who are really ill as well as people just use it prophylactically. For me, I get off an airplane, I come home and I do ozone therapy. And you know what? It tells my cells, here's some oxygen, here's some extra electrons and you better behave yourselves and if not, get out of the way. Wow. So cupping that odd practice increases ozone, huh? Well, cupping only works if you're pumping ozone into the cup itself. So you can have a cup with an ozone tube coming off a generator. And this sounds like Dave, what are you talking about? My daughter had an infection on the outer part of her ear. She scratched it on the rose bush. Her ear was three times its normal size. You don't want to take antibiotics if you can avoid them but you do want to take them to save your life. It's one of those things I don't want to overuse. Good point, good point. So we did ozone cupping. So we took a funnel, attached a hose to it and ran a small amount of ozone to it, ran a fan on her so she wouldn't have to breathe any little scaphings. And she sat there watching Netflix for 20 minutes, three times, infection totally cleared. She was literally going to go to urgent care and get antibiotics. And it resolves that quickly. Deep wounds, burn healing, and it has been pioneered, even for things like tuberculosis, drug-resistant diseases, but it's pioneered in Cuba and Russia, places that are not really cool in the West. And they did it because they didn't have access to antibiotics and they found a way. Fortunately, it's old but it's well studied. All right, how about taking boron for stem cells? I mean, 20-multin borax or what's going on here? It turns out that stem cell exhaustion is one of the seven pillars of aging. And the deal is if you look in superhuman, there's just seven things that now we understand are happening with aging. Think about your car. If you were to change the tires regularly but you're not the oil, your car is not gonna last very long. You change only the oil but not the tires, you gotta do all of them at least a little bit. You don't have to be perfect there. And as we age, we start losing tissues because we run out of stem cells and the stem cells aren't very good. So what if you could prop up and enhance and make your stem cells healthier? It turns out there are studies showing boron can do this. And there are different forms of it but yeah, the 20-multin borax is not food grade but you can get food grade boron supplements that are better but there are people who use, for instance, a borax bath and there are even borax suppositories for yeast infections in women, vaginal suppositories that are noticeably effective but those aren't the best ways to get it. So I would say look at a boron supplement because the study showed if you want your stem cells to be around 20 years from now, you're gonna need some boron plus bone density is always your friend and you'd boron for that too. Yeah, I've been taking a boron supplement for many years now. So yeah, thank you for pouring that out in Superhuman because good trick. Thank you, it's a missing thing. I wanted to call this stuff out. Everyone knows you eat healthy but what are the things that actually matter that aren't expensive you can do? That's one of them. Substance P. What the? Come on. Substance P is the primordial pain sensing molecule. Slugs have it. I think slime mold probably has it. So this is our first wave as any kind of life to say, oh, that is bad move away from it. And it turns out that when your substance P levels go up in the body, your inflammation goes up. Basically your cells realize something's wrong and they start getting inflammation. So when you have things like irritated, inflamed joints, arthritis, your substance P levels are high. And when you rub that cayenne on the cayenne ointments and things like that or capsaicin is the active ingredient, you rub it on your joints, you're actually depleting substance P so the inflammation will go down. And you can manipulate substance P in the body with cayenne. And if you're sensitive to the nightshade vegetables like I am, you and I are both very into this. Look, lectins actually matter. I had joint pain with the arthritis of my knees since I was 14, lectins and toxic bold trigger that stuff. And to this day, if I eat cayenne, which I dearly love, I get my neck pain back that I thought was a condition of being alive. So there you go. What are you gonna do? It turns out that they're targeting vanilloid receptors. They're called that because they're named after vanilla, which is not a nightshade, but also triggers the same substance P reduction. So using some vanilla is not a bad idea, but one of the biggest contributors to substance P as we age that most people have no idea about is that you grind your teeth a little bit and you chew. And as you chew your back molars, they get shorter and shorter and shorter. And it changes the angle of your bite, which causes the trigeminal nerve along your jaw to get inflamed with higher substance P levels, which then share themselves with the vagus nerve that runs right through there. And as you and I know, I've interviewed Stephen Porges, you probably have too, the father of polyvagal theory. We know that this vagus nerve is kind of the big control system nerve for the whole body. And we just smacked it with substance P. You do that, you probably aren't gonna feel that good and your systemic inflammation goes up. So oh my God, it's a $15 bite guard from the drug store. If you grind your teeth even a little bit, if you have jaw tension, sleep with a bite guard. You will actually live longer. And if you have the jaw tension TMJ stuff I used to have, you can actually realign your jaw without breaking it, without surgery, without any of that. It's just by going to a neurological dentist and getting a splint so that your jaw can be naturally positioned. It's not about cavities, it's not about root canals, both of those matter, not about gingivitis, that'll give you heart disease, you know that very well. This is just about neurological alignment and inflammation from substance P. And that's in the book and the science is clear. But $15 for a rubbery bite guard. We can all afford this. V-S-E-L treatment? V-Cells are fascinating. So we know, and I've had these bone marrow and fat-derived stem cells where they pull my bone marrow, my fat, they spin them, grow stem cells, all that stuff and put them back into the body. These are advanced procedures. But V-Cells are these stem cell-like cells that circulate in your blood. And what you can do with these, you can pull them out of your blood, which is a much easier procedure than bone marrow. Trust me on that. And actually you don't have to trust me, you've pulled enough bone marrow and you're just right in my old days. Right, so that's an invasive procedure and blood isn't. And you take it, you expose it to some things that activate things that were always in blood that we didn't know about. When you put it back in, they act like stem cells, they go in, they can be pluripotent, they can stick to areas of the body that have inflammation and cause tissue regrowth. So this is a much more affordable way of getting some of the benefits of stem cells. And it's just coming online from a regulatory perspective, it's still in a gray zone but there are practitioners who do it. And I certainly did it, all of these hacks I did, I tried on myself to write Superhuman. I went out and was a sort of an anti-aging tourist. I've run an anti-aging group, a non-profit group for 20 years. So this is my passion, but I wanted to feel it and write about the experience of it. And this is about a $2,000 procedure versus the very entry-level stem cells are 5,000 and quite often 10, 20, 30,000, even though your insurance company should cover them if they're willing to give you a new knee or a new hip, like try the stem cells, they're a lot less painful. So this is about creating that change and if now you know that a V-cell treatment might stop one of these big procedures from happening or might cause systemic regeneration, you can put them in along your sinuses and they can go into the brain. So if you're dealing with Alzheimer's or you're worried about it or you wanna add those years to your life, you might say, okay, I couldn't afford 5,000 but I can afford 2,000 and if I wait a little while, it'll probably be 200. So all of these are coming down in price almost like cell phones do. I don't know if we're ever gonna get down that far but the stuff that's crazy expensive that I write about, it's not going to be that expensive as time goes on. All right, I can't leave you without asking about virgin blood since I brought it up at the beginning. What it comes down to is that scientists long ago, we're talking in the dawn of the enlightenment would weird things like sow the blood circulation systems from two mice or at first they would do with dogs together and realize, well, when they share these things, a young dog stuck to an old dog would make the old dog new. This is a horrific thing to do to an animal or to a person and I don't recommend it. We did learn something from it though. And then you talk to people who've had blood transfusions and they say, oh, I got young blood today. Do people get them a lot? Because they feel it. And so we know there's something going on there. There's even a company that started was doing $6,000 procedures where you get blood from a college student without any clinical trials showing it was effective. So you could say, all right, this is crazy. I do not have a college student locked under my bed for blood giving, but we know some of the compounds present in young people's blood and you can get those compounds that are manufactured in a lab and you can use those orally or even you can inject them and the studies show that those make you live longer. And we're talking things that cost 50 bucks, but you have to be willing to inject them or find a doctor who's willing. And because these are not registered pharmaceuticals, this is a cutting edge anti-aging therapy. But here's the deal. We know what the compounds are. We have the studies that show they work and we should demand access to these in a fully legal, fully licensed way and we should demand studies for them. And if not, the studies I've seen so far are enough to tell me they're worth using. So I write about them, I identify these compounds. Things like GHK, which is a copper peptide that also, if you rub it on your skin, we've all seen copper or collagen peptide. It's the same thing that's in young people's blood. There's tiny little things from your thymus gland that makes little thymic protein fragments. And if those are higher, you tend to live longer and you might even have longer telomeres. So all this stuff is, we know this now, this isn't the future, this isn't science fiction. This is in our set of knowledge as human beings, but most of us don't know about it and don't have access. Superhuman's there to tell you about them and tell you where to get them. Now, should we take this with a proviso that you are a professional biohacker on a closed course and do not attempt this at home? Or what say you? That is, it's controversial. Here's the thing, you know, because you have a medical license. There are things that you would do to yourself. There are things you would do for your parents that you cannot tell a patient to do because you put your entire livelihood at risk. And I've stood on stage in front of 3,000 doctors at the American Academy of Anti-Age Medicine where you've also stood. And I said, guys, I'm an unlicensed biohacker, so I'm just gonna tell you what I can tell you. And you can have my license, right? And some people flip me off, some people laugh. But the deal here is there are things that you can do that do not require a doctor. It's like what you put on your plate, what you do when you go to bed. And the supplements you take are all within your control. Now, if you decided to use some of this knowledge, I would say, go ask your doctor about it. We owe it to ourselves to tell our care providers what we are interested in doing and to ask for their help. And if your doctor says that is off the menu, I cannot do that because of my license, but let me know how it goes. I wouldn't be surprised. And there are things that are in superhuman. There are things that are all over the internet where if you do something without medical advice, and I do my very best to say, look, you shouldn't do this. Like this is a possible thing, but go to a practitioner. But we all have a fundamental human right. It's our biology. And if you wanna do something crazy, you wanna try bloodletting, you're allowed by law to do your own bloodletting, right? It's just probably not a good idea. So be cautious, be careful, make the mistakes on the side of caution, but do not ignore all this technology because it's gonna keep you alive a lot longer. Interesting that you brought up bloodletting because I used to give an hour long lecture on why bloodletting prevailed and was popular and it actually started barber surgeons and all surgeons were barbers originally, but bloodletting got rid of iron and bacteria actually have to have iron to reproduce. So interesting how bloodletting caught on. Yeah. In fact, I believe that we're also on the, this isn't even in superhuman, it's so new, but you know about dialysis, because it's very common, but dialysis pulls a lot of interesting stuff out of the blood. And one thing that happens, if you're gonna beat 180 and you're still recirculating that same blood that was in there since you were 18, it's not really the same blood. Your cells are replaced every, oh, every four months or thereabouts. However, the plasma, the toxins that are omnipresent, they accumulate. So there's probably an argument for washing your blood every year or two to keep some of the immune molecules and some of the signaling molecules and some of the other, even bacteria and infectious toxin levels down. And there's also a huge argument for bloodletting or donating blood to keep your ferritin levels down. You wanna get old fast to have too much iron. You're 100% right about that. Yeah, and the studies that I talked about in the longevity paradox of blood donors living significantly longer than non-blood donors, age-mesh controls. Yeah, iron is, in fact, iron rusts us. Where I live up on Vancouver Island, when I moved up here about 10 years ago, there is no way to donate blood. It was an hour and a half drive. You went to that once a month, I could not work it out. So I have IVs here. My wife's an emergency room doctor too. So it's not like I don't have a backup medical system if I need it. So I would literally do my own bloodletting. I would have rather donated, but it wasn't feasible. So I would sit there and I would let blood out and I'd measure my ferritin levels. They were too high. I would do my own bloodletting. So there is great science behind that. Yeah, that can freak people out or something like that. But look, if you're not donating blood, you probably won't live as long and you aren't helping other people anyway. So it's worth doing. That's a win-win. All right, last question. How close are we to living to 180-year goal? I'm trying to get to 150, but you're younger than me, so you'll have more time. Look, I know and you know that we can do 120 today. Right, and you're a better example because you're older than I am. And anyone who has seen you can look at you and compare you to the average person your age. And you've been doing this stuff for 20 years. And there is a noticeable quantifiable difference. And the skeptics who are mostly really, really overweight and unhealthy are going to, we're gonna look at you and say, that's an end of one. How do you know? And the bottom line is it's pretty obvious. We have the mechanisms of action. You're like, here's why it works. I did it. I'm proof that it works. And here's the other people who've done it and the hundreds of studies. So the people up to 120 didn't have any of this stuff you have. Okay, so we know that's a possibility for you and for me. And what about that extra 30 years you're looking for? The extra, however many it is for me, 120 up to 180 and 60 years. So I'm just saying you and I both know David Sinclair. We know all of the other doctors, or at least some of them, who are cracking the code of aging. I've talked to the people in superhuman, the doctors who've done the research, identifying these seven pillars. And now we know why we age biologically. And what hasn't happened in all that medical research is, well, we have the cause, but my favorite term ever, more research is needed. Okay, this is how you protect yourself academically from losing tenure and being made fun of. Since I don't have to deal with any of that stuff. Like, hey, if we know that amyloid formation throughout the body is correlated with every bad thing that's gonna happen to you, what are the known environmental and behavioral causes of amyloids and how do you do less of that now? So the plan in superhuman says, how do you do that? Given what we know. And next year, some guy may come along and say, hey, here's a new drug, right? A woman researcher at Rutgers might say, look, I've got this new thing. And these people exist, they're working on it. They spent decades doing this work. And they're now finally saying, I can talk about it. I feel safe saying that we're gonna extend life and that we don't have a drug for this, but we're going to, in the meantime, here's what to do. And it's that, what do you do now? While we wait for the tech to come online, you won't have to wait long because we have machine learning, we have Google, we have PubMed. Like it's the best time ever to create change in human biology. And it's happening right in front of our faces. We just can't see it unless you're plugged in. And I put all that together in Superhuman because it's the most exciting thing I've ever seen. With that in mind, Dave, where do we find a super human and you as if we didn't know, but tell my listeners. Just head on over to davaspery.com and all of my good stuff is there. You can pick up Superhuman anywhere you like to buy books. It just debuted on the New York Times list at number seven. Congratulations. The eighth most purchased book on Amazon of all eight million books. And what that means is like, look, this is now a topic of global interest. So just pick it up wherever you like to buy books. And if you send me your receipt on davaspery.com, I've recorded a series of interviews with stellar people in the field. And I'm not gonna disclose their names right now but they're people that you know and love and want to learn from. And I'll give you those interviews as one of the gifts for just showing me that you supported my work. So I'm grateful for that. Wow, okay. So that sounds good. All right, well, it's always great to talk to you. This book I thoroughly enjoyed. I got a lot of tips that I didn't know. Imagine that. So get it. I can't recommend it highly enough. And Dave will cross pass soon and keep hacking. And I'll keep testing patients on your hacks and we'll go from there. And me. Dr. Gundry, thank you for that praise. Thank you for your work. You've pioneered so many things. I have so much respect for what you're doing and the fact that you live it. So thanks for having me on and just keep doing what you do. And anyone who's listening to your show who hasn't read your book, like seriously, go read the longevity paradox. I read it. It is a great book. The companion books, longevity paradox and superhuman. Perfect, good pitch. All right, take care. So that's all from Dr. Gundry's podcast. We'll see you next week. Thanks, Dave.