 diet sodas that are provably bad for you. And to sell you other junk foods, as long as you don't eat too much and you exercise off your potato chips, it doesn't work like that. It never did. And it was that advice that led me to weigh 300 pounds. That's why I'm like, I'm not gonna do this anymore. What's the issue with most of the coffee today? Well, it turns out that when coffee is fermented, which almost all coffee is, toxic mold will grow. And when it grows, it leaves behind something called a mycotoxin or a toxin similar to penicillin. Doesn't take very much to have a big effect on the body. In fact, penicillin is also a toxin from mold. So when you drink your coffee, you're getting a dose of something called ochrotoxin A. Now, most governments around the world, China, Japan, Europe and most of South America, put limits for how moldy coffee can be for their population to drink it. The US and Canada have no limits. So when it's illegal to sell it in China, they'll send it to the US, we'll drink it. And then an hour later, we feel jittery, cranky, we want sugar and really it has all kinds of systemic inflammatory effects. That sounds like a good business practice to me. It's a great one, because then you can put more extra sugar, caramel, frappe, whatever in your thing. And maybe we could just clean up our coffee act here in the US. Why do other governments regulate this? And ours doesn't. You know, I would never be one to say that commercial interests have any influence on the US government. That would be terrible. It turns out the levels in different countries vary based on economics. And bottom line is that in the US, we like to set levels that make stuff cheap. And if you want to make it better, sometimes it costs more. In fact, I have a former president of the Specialty Coffee Association on video at a plantation for one of the companies I started. And he says, oh, I was in Japan when the trade minister rejected a thousand shipping containers of coffee because it was too moldy. And I said, well, where did it go? He said, we send it to the US because it's legal there. So this is a real thing. And the coffee industry in the US gets very mad and they say, we solved this problem in the 90s. No, they didn't solve this problem in the 90s. They don't even measure it in the US because they don't have to. So there's no requirement. None whatsoever. Well, now what about the argument that high heat or a steam is going to deactivate these toxins? Like if we make espresso, we don't have to worry. Well, I've looked into this extensively because if that was the case, I would just make espresso and drink whatever coffee I could find. I never would have had to figure out how to do all this stuff. I've got 34 studies on my website, DaveAsbury.com. The post is called One Ugly Mug, if you want to search for it. And in it, there are three or four studies that talk about the fact that roasting does not break down the primary molotoxin, which is called OTA or Ochrotoxin A. There are others that show it is present in brewed coffee, including espresso brewed coffee. So sadly, it takes above about 450 degrees at sustained time in order to break down this toxin. And if you do that to coffee beans, they become ashes. So we don't know how to do that. Fortunately, we know how to test for this, and testing in coffee is also very difficult, but we figured it out finally. So you can get coffee that's clean, that's tested like danger coffee. And there are other things that you can do if you're not drinking danger coffee and you're saying, I don't know if I'm gonna get the jitter, the shakes, the heartburn, all the things that people think are caused by caffeine, no, for most people, those are caused by your body having an inflammatory mass cell reaction to Ochrotoxin A that's present in the coffee. It's also present, by the way, at high levels in beer and in grains. And your job is to get as little of it in your body as is reasonable, because we know this toxin interacts with other molotoxins that are present in our food, things like aflatoxin, things that we've heard about. In fact, a lot of them are most present in high-lectin foods. Who would have ever thought? The men. So that's a side benefit of cutting out lectins is when you get rid of all the peanuts and things like that. Magically, you don't get the mold either. And you realize that you feel so much better, you're calmer, you're more focused, and the inflammatory stuff goes away. I used to weigh 300 pounds. I used to have debilitating brain fog. I quit coffee for five long, dark years I can barely remember. And finally, I had to create a mold-free coffee in order to be able to do this. This is my second coffee company. My first company is called Bulletproof. It's still my baby, I love it. It launched mold-free coffee. Danger coffee is mold-free. It also contains trace minerals that actually bind to toxins, including mold toxins as well as toxins in the gut. So you get a boost in minerals because we're all getting mineral depleted because we're eating all these foods full of phytic acid, as you well know. So I'm looking to fix people to upgrade them with our coffee. Why call it danger coffee? That's scary. It is a little scary. And I am building people with so much energy, so much zest for life, that they're actually dangerous. Who knows what they might do? They might ask her out finally. They might ask for a raise. They might say no to eating junk food. They might say no to something that's wrong. So I want people like, I am full of power. I will do the right thing. Those, by definition, are dangerous people. I want peaceful, kind, dangerous people. That's what I'm surrounding myself. That's how we're transforming society. So everyone can handle their own stuff. Okay, all right, I'll buy that. You mentioned high temperature back when I was a surgeon. We would actually make coffee in the autoclave where we sterilize things. So I'm going, wow, we're way ahead of our time. You were. We were destroying microtubbies in the autoclave. So yeah, no, folks, don't do that at home. All right, now I see that we're having dark roast and I've got a warrant here that I was gonna call you on this. You and I both know that the roasting process, interestingly enough, lowers the polyphenol content of coffee and you and I both want the polyphenols from coffee and elsewhere. And we know that the darker the roast, the more the polyphenols are inactivated, destroyed. I love dark roast coffee, but I quite frankly don't drink it anymore. I drink medium roast. We talked light roast is probably really smart to drink, but it tastes terrible. Yeah, not worth it. So medium roast works pretty good. So why dark roast? I believe somewhere in the medium to medium dark has the most benefits. We've got a dark roast out because so many people have been trained to enjoy dark roast coffee. That's because you can take coffee from anywhere in the world with any toxin level. You can burn it to an even amount and you can standardize the flavor profile. At any one time, the largest coffee company in the U.S. with a green logo has about $800 million of coffee and inventory and they have to make it taste the same even if it grew in a different region. And the way you do that is you just get it really nice and dark. So if that's what people want, dark coffee is good for you. I just think medium roast is better for you and with a high quality coffee and this is very high-end coffee. It's ultra clean, it's lab tested, it's got the minerals that are built into it. And so that, why would you wanna burn it? But some people just like it that way. So I'm willing to help them drink coffee because you gotta say drinking dark roast coffee versus no coffee, dark roast coffee still has way more benefits than just water. True. So that's why. Okay. Yeah, there is this certain very large coffee company that have had their probably feed-on content analyzed and it's kind of almost undetectable in chlorogenic acid. It's funny cause when you roast more chlorogenic acid goes down which is one of the primary reasons that you drink coffee. There aren't many others, but it's a good one. The thing though, as you roast it darker caffeine also goes down. So a dark roast is lower in caffeine and some people like that effect of it. There's also acrylamide. Now people would think, oh, acrylamide is a probable cancer causing toxin and if you have less of this in your coffee that would be a good thing and dark roast has less of it because surprisingly even though it's more roasted it burns off some of the acrylamide when you do that. But here's the thing about acrylamide in coffee. For years the state of California would torture coffee companies by making them put a sticker on that said warning that this contains a carcinogen. The amount of acrylamide in a cup of coffee is so tiny that if you drink a cup of coffee every day for a year you would get less acrylamide than you get from one piece of toasted rye bread. Don't eat rye bread. That's right, don't eat rye bread. Don't have toast. Exactly. Okay, one last thing on brewing since we're kind of on brewing. Oh yeah. There's a lot of talk that coffee raises your cholesterol levels because some of the acids in coffee are known to increase cholesterol production in the liver and that a paper filter will help with that and that we all, even if we say like espresso we should take our espresso and pour it through a paper filter before we drink it so we don't raise our cholesterol. What say you? Well, given that cholesterol is what all of your sex hormones are made out of and that you need it for life there's a great argument for lowering your cholesterol. Oh wait. So here's what's going on. The two compounds in question are called cafistol and cowahal. Actually it might be cafistol. There's probably not at the end of cafistol, thank you. And I've looked into the research on these. Now they can in some people raise cholesterol but not oxidize cholesterol and not the small particle size if you're into particle size but most interestingly they are shown in studies to reduce inflammation throughout the body especially in the brain. And that means if you use a metal filter instead of a paper filter and your cholesterol goes up a couple points and your bile flow increases which helps you get rid of toxins and your LP PLA2 doesn't go up which is a marker of damage to the arteries. I'm telling that to the audience you know all this better than I do. But then why the heck would you pour through a paper filter? Oh, there's also the bleaching agents from the paper filter. There's also the papery taste and there's the environmental destruction from that. It's better for the environment and better for you to drink your coffee through a metal filter including espresso or French press or any of the other metal ways to do it unless you have probably familial hypercholesteroemia in which case you are at a very, very small percentage. Yeah, and also in terms of longevity studies and dementia studies and Parkinson's studies it would appear that Turkish coffee which is basically coffee that boiled in grounds for hours and hours may have the best benefit. Who would have thought that a heat extraction, a maximal heat extraction would be better than just a little bit of extraction? I believe it is better. In fact, the way I make my coffee when I'm on the road is I have Turkish grind. I grind my danger beans at home to be super fine like flour. Then I boil water in my hotel room and I pour it over the beans and I just let it sit there for a while stirred around. Coffee settles out. I pour off the top and I drink it. It's not boiled as long as you'd boil Turkish coffee but it's as close as you can get, completely unfiltered. And if there's a little bit of fine coffee grounds in it it just gives it more body. So people really freak out about this I think because Mr. Coffee sells coffee filters or something but there's something else I wanna mention about brewing. When you buy a normal drip coffee maker it only heats the water up to 176 degrees. Proper coffee gets up to 199 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. And this gives you a much better extraction of all the beneficial things. You think about it, you're using an herbal preparation that has physiological effects so you should extract the good stuff right. So if you buy a good coffee maker that's certified by the SCAA Specialty Coffee Association of America it's gonna cost maybe twice as much as one of the bargain low-end coffee makers but it'll make much better coffee with more health benefits because the water got hot enough. Huh. Or you just do a French press and that costs eight bucks. We're gonna say are you an investor in the Specialty Coffee Company of America? No, this is an industry trade group that goes for high-end coffee. So not an investor all. This is, it's like a management body to make sure that high quality coffee actually is high quality coffee instead of street grade coffee. So it's more of a certifying agency. Yeah, yeah, but there is even a business law. I think it's just like everyone pays some amount of money to be a member. It's not a big business. All right, anything else we should know about coffee before we go on? There is. It turns out that fat enhances the absorption of polyphenols. I know that's news to you, right? So if you were to, I don't know, take a shot of olive oil which has its own polyphenols and then drink your coffee or you were to blend fat into your coffee, the good fats, magically you're gonna get even more benefits from your coffee. And one of the reasons is polyphenol absorption. Another one is the pharmacokinetics of caffeine, by the way, caffeine. Oh, wow. On my arm is a tattoo if you're just listening. Trimethylxanthine, go chemistry. What happens when you blend it with fat or even when your body does it is it changes the structure of the water that is in coffee so that your body can more quickly use it inside cells. And this was validated by Dr. Gerald Pollock at University of Washington. And I did fund that study but it was a basic biochemistry study, not a test my coffee. He tested MCT oil and ghee and found that they made a very large exclusion zone when you put water up against them, larger than he's seen from anything else. So what I think is happening when you have fat with your coffee is that in the gut as it gets mixed up you get some of that and if you just blend it or add some to it you get benefits from it. But if you add heavy cream to your coffee the amount of protein that you get from cream or even worse milk is sadly enough to bind to the polyphenols. And there are multiple studies that show that milk cancels out the benefits of all those good polyphenols. That's why Brits who'd put milk in their tea have three times the stomach cancer that you would predict given the amount of tea they drink. It's because they're canceling out their tea with milk. No, it's absolutely true. You're just doing yourself a huge disservice by picking up a latte or even a cappuccino. In fact, smart Italians will have a macchiato with just a tiny bit of foam instead of a cappuccino or a latte is the worst thing you can do. It really is the worst thing you can do. And I love it that you know all these details. You're the only medical doctor that I know who's got all these tiny little details about it because it matters, right? If you're gonna do something every single day when I was young and a lot heavier than now I would have a triple shot extra hot latte from the green coffee logo company and I drink it every day and the caffeine was doing me some good but man, that milk was not doing me good. It was making me really tired. And when I realized, gee, maybe I should stop doing that. I got more benefits from my coffee and well, I feel a lot different. There you go. Well, it is fascinating that the casein molecule will absolutely bind to polyphenols and it unfortunately doesn't let go of them. There are other protein molecules particularly in plants that may also bind polyphenols but that may be a reversible binding and that the polyphenols are released by bacterial digestion of the phenols. So just because you may want a color in your coffee that happens to be white, something like coconut milk is probably vastly superior to white in your coffee. It's my recommendation, one without carrageenan which tends to open holes in your gut lining. There's all this stuff. I just did a video on Instagram about oat milk. Like seriously, it's a tiny bit of oats blended in water and they sell it to you for five or six bucks and tell you it's healthy and the oats have their phytic acid and all the bad things they do. That's not what you want to do to your coffee. No, in a hotel they have a protein molecule that cross reacts with gluten and I can't tell you the number of people that oatmeal in their oat milk is one of the reasons they have leaky gut and when we take their healthy oat milk and oatmeal away from them, everything gets a whole lot better. They get better so fast. Also, if you're monitoring your blood sugar, like I'm doing right here, I've got a DEXCOM blood sugar monitoring system and I've been doing this for about six years now where I periodically wear either on my arm or on my stomach, so it monitors my blood sugar. Oatmeal, spikes, blood sugar, just go eat ice cream. I mean, if you're gonna trash yourself, why would you choose oatmeal? Have a croissant. I mean, like seriously, I'm not saying either one's good for you. I'm just saying you might as well enjoy if you're gonna smack yourself in the face, make it feel good. Well, it's absolutely right. In fact, what the latest study out of Tufts University showed you're ice cream is a much healthier food than a whole grain bagel. Amen. I have given my kids ice cream for breakfast, but we make it ourselves either from raw milk or just from coconut milk and egg yolks from our own chickens. And as long as you don't put a lot of sugar in it or you put a safe sugar thing like stevia in it, magically, it's a perfectly good breakfast. Yeah. Hey, how about, would you allow me to put allulose in my coffee? You know, I am a fan of allulose. Me too. For years have said sugar alcohols are a pretty good choice. And xylitol has been the one that's been around for about 25 years, and it stops cavities and even stops sinus infections and ear infections. Problem is xylitol is associated if you eat too much of it with getting the runs. And so then most people switch to erythritol, which has issues because it may be from GMO corn with glyphosate, but also that stuff is like gas city. So you can have little sprinkles of it unless you just eat it all the time then you get used to it. But then allulose comes along. And allulose doesn't seem to have any negative metabolic effects. It's much easier on the gut. I can feel a change in my digestion, but nothing that's bad when I take even reasonable amounts of it. So for people who want a sweetener, I think allulose, monk fruit and stevia are the most likely ones to be beneficial. Yeah, and allulose is even better than that. Number one, there's some really good human studies that actually lowers blood sugar. And so it'll stop whatever blood sugar spike that you may get from drinking coffee. And some people do. Yeah, let's talk about that, why they do that, but keep going about allulose. I'll look at my blood sugar while we do that. Okay, but one of the cool things about allulose, allulose was actually approved by the FDA as a prebiotic. And that's the first time this has been granted by the FDA. What's really cool, nice. 74 blood sugar. So the other cool thing is that allulose makes your bacteria, because it's a prebiotic, make short chain fatty acids. So good. And it's been compared in one study that is almost as effective as metformin in long-term reduction of A1Cs. Allulose? Allulose. I did not see that study on. Yeah, I'll send it to you. Okay, that's exciting. It is exciting. Because it tastes good. Allulose in anything, I've seen pancake syrup made out of it even. Yeah, it's actually a good pancake syrup when it's got a maple leaf on it. Right, right. Even though it's not from maple. Yes, yeah. Great for kids, by the way. But I serve them gunnery pancakes, but that's a gunnery story. Yeah, no, so it turns out that allulose actually is the short chain fatty acids are mitochondrial encouplers. And they increase your metabolic rate and they're thermogenic. So this is the only sweetener that's ever been shown to do this. So I'm, but you're right. Make sure it says non-GMO. You can get it, look for it because you're right, we don't want it with a cute little corn mischief maker in it. Yeah, we do not need more glyphosate in our bodies. It's interesting too, if allulose turns into that butyric acid, the short chain fatty acid, that acid is twice as ketogenic as MCT oil. And I turn MCT oil into a billion-dollar category with bulletproof and all. So it's a thing everyone knows about it now. And it turns out that butyric acid tastes bad. It smells kind of like cheese. It was first discovered in butter. It's why it's called butyric acid, right? So if you can get your body to make that, it's twice as ketogenic. And that's strange. You put allulose in the coffee, then you get that benefit of ketogenesis. But there's a study out there that says that the amount of caffeine contained in two small cups of coffee, so basically what most of us drink in the morning, is enough to double ketone production in the morning. That research was from Dr. Kunane at UC San Diego. So this is interesting now. So you put some stuff in your coffee and you can do allulose and MCT oil, get the danger coffee. It's got some minerals in there. You drink it and you've got the caffeine boost. You've got the allulose butyric acid keto boost and the MCT boost all at once. And what ketones do for you and caffeine, even all by itself, is they reduce hunger. So then you had that for breakfast. You're like, wow, I feel like myself all morning and I'm focused and I'm feeling good. I did my intermittent fasting. This is a very meaningful hack for improving your health. I like not weighing 300 pounds. Yeah, it eats weighing 300 pounds. All right, let's go on to more biohacking. You are infamous or world famous or both for biohacking. Tell you what, for people who are maybe just tuning in, what the heck is biohacking? You're having a conference next week on biohacking and I think this segment is gonna air after that conference. But- It will, yeah. So what the heck is biohacking? Well, first, thank you for speaking at my conference. Thank you. I'm really excited to have you there. Biohacking is a movement that I started in 2011 and the definition, when I first put it out there, it's the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so you have full control of your own biology. So it encompasses lifestyle and some aspects of functional medicine. But the idea that's different from that and just being healthy is that your body doesn't listen to you very well but it does listen to everything going around you and you can control those now. We can pick the kind of light we have. We can pick the temperature. We can pick when we wake up. We can pick whatever we wanna eat. So many things we can do but there's no manual with the human body. So this has become a vibrant global movement. There's biohackers in Japan. There's Latin American biohackers all over the US and this conference has been running for 10 years now and we have thousands of people who come every year and we're just learning from experts like you what are the things that work better than what we used to do? And it turns out because of all the big data because of the internet, because of things like sensing to be able to measure your sleep and all that, we're starting to crack the code on how to get way more of what you want out of your body so you look the way you want. You feel the way you want. You don't have brain fog. You're not in pain all the time. Your gut isn't all messed up the way mine used to be. I started this because I felt like I was a crazy person. It turns out there are millions of people who do this. We just have a name. So you're crazy people out there. You now have a name. Exactly. Good. All right, so we talked about coffee and how we can biohack with coffee. What other kind of energy tricks do you have that we can take advantage of? Like on a day-to-day basis? Well, the first thing to do is make sure that your mitochondria never uncouple. We have to do that to save energy in the world around us, right? Because if we burn less calories by just sitting there and growing large, wouldn't that work? Not a good idea. Not a good idea. So how do we make it so our cells do a better job of turning air and food into electricity and heat, which is the uncoupling thing. If you do that job really well, you're going to feel great. You're going to age less quickly and you're going to show up to the point that you could do whatever you want, which would make you dangerous. So one of the things that controls this is our circadian rhythm. I was fanatically opposed to sleep when I was a computer hacker and a tech entrepreneur. Like why would I want to do that? There's so much fun stuff to do. Sleep when you're dead. Exactly. And that didn't work very well. So I started tracking my sleep about 15 years ago, every single night. I used to sleep with a headband and I've got the whoop strap and things like that. Siding under here. Nice. I'm not wearing my whoop. My earring fell off in my luggage somewhere. So there you go. And what you find is that you can track your sleep to the point that you don't have to sleep more. And that was always my problem. I just want to sleep better. So studies show that the people who live the longest sleep six and a half hours a night. If you sleep eight hours a night, your odds of dying from all cause mortality go up, not down. Not saying to reduce sleep. What I'm saying is when you're healthy, you'll automatically need less sleep because your energy production works better. In one of the studies in my book on cognitive function, we actually showed that the glymphatic system that washes your brain when you're asleep, it's driven by mitochondria. And that means that if you're full of energy, when you go to sleep, not caffeine energy, but just biological energy, you'll do a better job of cleaning all the toxic proteins out of your brain. Stuff like that. So what do you do to go to sleep? Well, the full list of everything, and this is absolutely free, is at the favorite URL of my entire career. It's called sleepwithdave.com. So I'll teach you everything I know about sleep, because the world is a much better place when everyone gets good quality sleep. What you do before you go to bed? Don't eat after the sun goes down. Dim your lights or put on glasses, like the TrueDark glasses that block more than just blue light. And TrueDark is one of the companies I founded that wrote the patents for it. So what you'll find is that there's stuff you can do with temperature, with controlling the temperature of your mattress. And some of the stuff is very cheap. Some of it is free, and some of it costs a little bit of money. But most people at this point, if you have a phone, you can track your sleep without having to have any other devices and do a reasonably good job. Sleep space is the app that I use to do that. And you can invest in a monitor. But if you just fix that, even if you still eat that oatmeal for breakfast, seriously, you should stop. But even then, you're going to not have the blood sugar response to oatmeal that you did before. Because one night of bad sleep reduces your ability to regulate blood sugar by about 40%. So it's a big deal. What if we just start there? That's important. The other thing that I have been recommending to my community for, geez, a dozen years, is some form of cold exposure. And this is the cold shower in the morning. Water hits you on the forehead and chest where the most peripheral cold and temperature receptors are, and you do a one minute cold shower. You won't do it the first day. In fact, you'll swear and say, Dave's a jerk. And then- I hate this. Exactly. The second day, you might get up to 25, 30 seconds and still say Dave's a jerk and you're shivering and hate it. The third day you're going to do it and maybe you'll make a minute. In the fourth day, you'll feel amazing. And no one could quite explain this, but they did some studies in mice. And what they found was that three days of brief cold exposure was enough to change the levels of a compound called cardiolipin in the mitochondrial membrane. And as you and I both know, mitochondria, that's where uncoupling happens, right? That's where heat generation happens. So it takes three days to train yourselves to better make heat on demand. Okay, you can do three uncomfortable showers. After that, when you get out of the cold shower, you're like, man, I feel great. This was in big grading. It was not unpleasant. So that's a big thing. And if that's too much, before you go to bed, close your eyes, take a deep breath and stick your face in a bowl of ice water. Just face exposure to cold will do it for some people and that's a great way to get acclimated if you're just thinking you can never do it. It's a little bit of cold, learning how to sleep better and making sure it's dark at night and then don't eat all the time. Intermittent fasting has been a part of my nutritional recommendation since the beginning of biohacking. So the science says you should peak your calories at two in the afternoon, which is exactly the opposite of what society says. So for most people, a later breakfast and an earlier dinner is the best thing to do, but if you're going to have a later dinner, just try to make it not after 10 o'clock or something and you can have a later breakfast. And when you do that, magic happens. At least 12 hours of time without any food going into your body is enough, even just three days a week, to start shifting your body metabolically. And that's a study out of Australia. That was extra study on women and para-minipusal women, which are the hardest group to work with for weight loss. So if it works there, imagine what would happen if you did only 14 hours and you did that four days a week. So it's not that hard because the time you're asleep counts. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, it, you know, in my last book on logging the keto code, you know, the Italian athlete study that I just think is proves the point. And those of you who haven't read the book or heard me on the podcast, they take Italian cyclists, trained athletes, put them on a training table for three months. They all have to eat the same food. One group has a 12 hour eating window. The breakfast at eight o'clock in the morning, lunch at one o'clock in the afternoon, they have to finish dinner by eight o'clock in the night, 12 hours. So they have a 12 hour not eating cycle. The other group has a seven hour eating cycle. They eat break fast at one o'clock in the afternoon, lunch at four, have to finish dinner at eight. Same food, same gallery. The seven hour guys lose weight. The 12 hour guys don't lose weight, but the best part is the seven hour guys, they're insulin like growth factor one, IGF one, which is still one of the better markers for aging that we have, plummets, and the 12 hour guys stay the same. So just changing, you know, the time interval is one of those potent things. And in my practice, we measure IGF ones, and it's amazing how many people, if they'll commit to that, they're IGF one, plummet 50 points in some people, and they'll go, wow, okay, I can do this. And all I ask is just do it during the weekdays. Take time off from the weekend with family, you know. Have brunch, it's okay. Yeah, it's okay, just, yeah. But just do it during the week. It's amazing how potent that one thing is. And what that study should say in the body of your work, and certainly all the things I've seen, if someone looks you in the eye and says, you have to count calories to lose weight, they are simply not informed. Maybe they have a PhD in something from 30 years ago, but they are not up to date. That's actually dangerous advice that enables big food to sell you diet sodas that are provably bad for you, and to sell you other junk foods, as long as you don't eat too much and you exercise off your potato chips, it doesn't work like that, it never did. And it was that advice that led me to weigh 300 pounds. That's why I'm like, I'm not gonna do this anymore. The other thing though I wanna add in there is there's a new flavor of that calorie counting that's coming along, and it's protein counting. Oh yes. So this is when big food says, well, since you caught us on our calorie lie, we're gonna make up a new lie, and that is that all protein is the same. Which let me introduce to you the keto cookie, which is all protein and fat. It is gluten, which is protein. That's right. And canola oil, I'm not joking, this exists. Right, because hey, all proteins are the same. Crickets and soy, those are the same as beef and eggs. No, they're not. So when someone says how much protein you should have, it doesn't mean anything because pea protein, I don't know, any lectins in there? Not just a few. Right, is that the same as whey protein? No, they're completely different. I'm not saying one is even better for you because you might be allergic to whey, right? But you just can't say calories are the thing, or protein is the thing, or amount of fat is the thing, because different fats do different things, different proteins do different things, and calories are really not that important. And let's just say what they are and when they are, at which point they're not important. But if we just get that, we can all relax. We have to feel guilty if you eat something that has calories in it, because calories give you energy if you can use them. Yeah, if you can use them. Yeah. And we have a very bad system for using them, as you and I have written about and Breach and... Yeah. Oh well. You say that we can increase energy using nature's original medicine. Can you explain that? You aren't listeners and how they can utilize it? Sure. Well, nature's original medicine has been studied for at least 10,000 years of recorded history, depending on how long you think history's been recorded, maybe only 5,000 years. Maybe 5,000. But we do know that the first trading routes ever recorded were to trade salt. Well that's because sodium. No actually, it's because minerals. The salt that they were trading was from the ocean or from mines, and it's full of all the full spectrum of trace minerals that are required for your mitochondria to make energy. So the original mineral supplement was rock salt, and people would die going over the Himalayas to bring this precious substance. We would pay people with it, because it was so necessary for life. Let's see, can you think of a coffee that's full of trace minerals, more than 50 of them for that reason? I think herd of them. But it's dangerous. Exactly, right? So minerals are that important, and right now, because of all the junk food that people have been eating, and I say junk food, even if you think it's healthy, like oatmeal, it's full of phytic acid. And phytic acid pulls these precious minerals from your bones and from your mitochondria, from your cells, so you're depleted. And then even if you eat the right stuff, if you are depleted, you can't fire up those mitochondria at full power. You must get minerals back. So Mother Nature's original medicine was, oh my God, salt. And it turns out when it comes with the full complement of minerals, more salt helps you deal with stress. So I'm not saying everyone needs to go out and just take more salt than they want, but if your body's telling you to eat salt, there's really good evidence you should do that, because when you cut your sodium intake as low as the FDA recommends right now, it actually increases something called renin, which as you would know, given your profession, increases cardiovascular risk. So I'm not saying do a crazy on salt, but I'm not saying that you need to go low. Historically, we would have up to 20 grams a day. I get about six to eight grams to feel good and the FDA recommends 2.4. So salt is one, but the second of Mother Nature's medicine that they use the same trade routes for was something you're going to love. And it was for herbs and spices, right? And for tea and in some places, coffee and chocolate. Why would they do that? Because pound for pound, those are the substances highest in polyphenols. So let's see, you've got your minerals and you've got your polyphenols. These are the original compounds. People don't even know this about vanilla. So vanilla was originally an aphrodisiac and the vanilloid receptors in your cells are the things that are activated by capsaicin, which is the spicy part of peppers. And I don't eat peppers anymore even though I grew up in New Mexico because I am lectin sensitive to those lectins. They've shred me at arthritis to my knees since I was 14, thank you, green chili. But for people who can take a capsaicin capsule and not react to it in a bad way, you could do the same thing with vanilla. So over time, a lot of these things that we flavor our food with, you go back say, oh, was oregano helping with parasites? Were these helping with digestion of meat so you don't form TMAO? I didn't know about TMAO, which is something that probably causes heart disease if you don't put some herbs on your steak, if you have bad gut bacteria. It's one of the things I use when I try and get to eat crickets and soy instead of meat. No, that's not how it works. But these are the two original things. It's polyphenols and salt. Yeah, I mentioned on a podcast recently and I wrote in the book that the wise men brought three gifts to the little baby Jesus. One of them was gold. That sounds good. That's a good one. That's a good one. But the other was frankincense and myrrh. So they're bringing some gum from a tree and an herb and it's like, what the heck? What kind of gift is that? But these were great gifts of health. And so when the little baby Jesus got his gifts, two of them were polyphenol compounds. I love that story because it's true and there are signs throughout any religious or spiritual tradition. You look at traditional Chinese medicine. You look at Ayurveda. You look at the indigenous practices in South America. There's always, even during a fast, there's always a T. Why are they making a T out of plants to get polyphenols because there's such powerful signalers for your gut bacteria and for your mitochondria directly. And it kind of makes me sad when I see these processed bars with junk protein, junk fat and no polyphenols whatsoever. And people wonder why they don't feel good. Well, maybe that's why. You claim that we can reverse our age. No, come, come, come. Well, I have been claiming this for a long time because in my mid-20s, I started hanging out with people three times my age who ran an anti-aging nonprofit group in Palo Alto. I was the only young person there and these guys are amazing. My friend Mike, who was 88, would call me at 11.30 at night. He's like, Dave, I have this great idea. We have to talk about it. I'm like, how does this guy have more energy than I do? Because I'm lagging. My mitochondria are broken. I'm dealing with toxic mold, fibromyalgia, a lack of mitochondrial uncoupling, all that kind of stuff. And I realized I can learn from these masters and I watched them get younger 20 years ago and they taught me how to do it. And I've been saying straight up, look, I'm starting early. I am going to do this now. And well, I felt vindicated when about three years ago, my friend David Sinclair at Harvard, a little institution. Not quite warden in my own school, but I'll give him some credit. He said, we can reverse aging, biological aging in cells. Now, when I started this nonprofit work, if any mainstream academic person said they were going to reverse aging in human cells, they would lose their tenure because they were crazy. It was like being a conspiracy theorist and believing in aliens and things like that. They would cancel you. Well, now we have billions of dollars flowing into this. I am more confident than ever that we can do it to the point that I'm predicting that I will live to at least 180, assuming that a bus doesn't fall out of the sky on me or something. The reason for that is that the world's best today is 120. And someone who's 120 today, they were born before the car. I think right about when the Pony Express was still running, World War I was going to be fought with biplanes and horses largely. They couldn't spell DNA. They didn't have antibiotics. Like the world was so different, they're still alive. So if they, oh, and by the way, they've survived through all the childhood diseases and all the things that we've largely solved. So if we can't do 50% better than today's best in the next 100 years, it's because we destroyed our top soil with glyphosate or because a comet hit the planet. So assuming we don't do those two things, I think we've got this in the bag. Do you think I'm nuts? No, I think I get more and more depressed that glyphosate just seems to keep going and going and going and may be the end of us as we know it. Did you see the study about earthworms? No, I am. Man. So people have been saying forever, like this is bad for the soil and there's all kinds of bacterial reasons for it. They just discovered that at levels 300 times below the allowable level, it causes seizures in earthworms. Our entire food web is based on earthworms and soil, but the EPA doesn't measure any pesticide or herbicide effect on any insect except honeybees. Honeybees don't touch soil ever unless they fall down. So they're saying it doesn't cause harm, but every creepy crawly that lives in dirt that makes life, that makes forests rich, they're all based on that. And if levels 300 times below what's allowed causes earthworm seizures, that means even if there's no spray where you are, your worms are already sick, which means your soil is sick, which means the food from your garden will have less minerals. This is a big problem. The people who are doing this, it is my sincere hope that we put them up on charges for crimes against humanity. There is no excuse. And this is why Monsanto tried to change its name. This is why Bayer bought Monsanto and I hope lawsuit's buried at that company. It is evil and it needs to be stopped. Well, that's what you really think. I was trying to hold back because I failed too much coffee. No, you know, when I give lectures to doctors, one of the slides I put up is a U.S. Senate document. And it says our soil is so depleted now of minerals and other substances that we could eat as much food as possible and we would never have the proper amount of minerals. Yes, thank you. And so I asked the audience, I said, okay, when was this in the Senate? And people would go, oh yeah, 2000, 1990. It was 1936. Whoa. Coming up on 100 years ago, we knew what we had done to our soils, almost 100 years ago. And you and I both know it. I mean, the nutritional value of any food 50 years ago, when I was younger, was so much better than it is now. But in 1936, they knew that we were in big trouble. Because one of my favorite sayings is you are what you eat but you are what the thing you're eating ate. And that includes our plants. And our plants get their nutrition delivered to them via the soil microbiome. And that microbiome gets the nutrients that makes the plant. So you could have a stock of corn that looks like corn, but it isn't corn anymore. Not that we have corn, but in any vegetable. You might actually be able to make kale that wouldn't kill you if you worked at it. I think with a little bit of genetic engineering, I'm sure we could genetic engineer kale to taste good and be good for you, but maybe there wouldn't be kale anymore. But I live on a 32 acre organic farm that we started. And we got our soil from the bottom of a pond from an organic farm that had been there for 100 years. So it's this black, rich, amazing soil. Everything explodes with growth. It tastes so different. The animals that eat things from our farm, our sheep and our cows and our pigs and our chickens, they taste different. They're full of minerals. People will go to the local market and they'll buy a pork chop or something and they'll come back the next day and they'll buy all of it because they feel different when they eat it. It's the minerals in the soil. And I'm like, I gotta put these back in my body. I travel all the time and everyone needs more minerals, which is why just doing it in your coffee makes sense. This is a call to action for everyone is make sure you get your macro minerals. It's particularly magnesium and potassium are lacking in all of us. And maybe calcium, but probably not. And some sodium, which we don't have a problem getting. But then it's the trace minerals and even the ultra trace minerals that are lacking, which is why we've got all of them in the coffee here. And the way I did that is ancient beds of plants that over the course of millions of years, all of the lectins and other bad plant compounds have been taken out. And what's left is just the ionic minerals that are there. And you can take those. And when we coat the coffee with those, they have all kinds of beneficial effects in the body. So I'm a big fan of doing it. All right, getting back to age reversal. Any tests that you've been using? The original tests that we all relied on about eight years ago was a telomere test. And I've seen over and over that it's not very reliable. And the reason is that, well, your blood has different telomere length than all the other tissues in your body. So it doesn't tell you what tissues are aging when. And your blood is replaced every four months. I've seen people also lose 20 years in two weeks. That doesn't actually happen. That's not a real number. So I don't look at telomeres as anything, but sort of like, huh. But what I do look at is DNA methylation. And you can look at about 400,000 different data points from a small sample. And that'll tell you pretty well how old you are using something called the Horvath clock. And I've spoken with Steve Horvath for a couple of days actually about this. And there are many different lenses to look through your data to see how old you are. But using the most trusted one right now, I am 11 and a quarter years younger than my chronological age. You're 12 now. I'm having a problem with Dr. Gunder. Maybe you can help. I'm having a hard time finding age-affirming care. Doctors keep telling me that I'm almost 50. And I keep, no, no, no, guys, I'm almost 40. And this won't recognize my reality. So I'm working on that. Any advice? Stay away from doctors. I didn't think you'd say that. That's awesome. I saw a friend of my wife who was being treated for atrial fibrillation that she didn't have. I bet that's another story. And they put her on a blood thinner. And they put her on a blood pressure pill. And she is a fitness freak. And she said, gee, I don't feel comfortable doing this. And I said, well, they told you, you had me, you skipped heartbeats. Did they look at your magnesium level? No. Did they look at your potassium level? No. And I said, well, even if they had, we'll preserve our serum magnesium and serum potassium at that incredible cost to intracellular magnesium and potassium. So one of the things I learned as a heart surgeon is that people were so depleted of magnesium that we would put them for 48 hours after heart surgery on a magnesium IV drip to keep them from having these extra beats and to get their magnesium, their total body magnesium stores, depleted. That's interesting. And so the first thing I do when I see somebody with skipped heartbeats, atrial fibrillation, atrial flutter is I put them on potassium and magnesium supplements. Just, okay, here's your prescription. Go down to the health food store. Start taking this. I'll see you in a few weeks. We'll repeat the halter. And oh, by the way, get leptins out of your diet. That's right. I became very good friends. It's a true story. With a professor at Cedar Sinai in LA, who's a cardiologist, world-renowned, smart guy, who I was treating a fellow patient. And this guy swore that every time he ate leptins, he went into atrial fibrillation. And when he avoided them for a few days, he'd flip out of atrial fibrillation. And the guy didn't know me and he called me a quack and blah, blah, blah. And then his patient proved it to him. He said, you're coming to lunch with me right now and I'm gonna have some bread and I'm gonna have some pasta and I'm gonna have some tomatoes and we're going back to the office and hooked me up to the EKG. And he went into atrial fibrillation. And so he called me up, he said, okay, can we talk? So we're gonna become really good friends. I love doctors and scientists who are willing to consider their beliefs and their assumptions because that's how progress happens. So what an admirable guy. I've got a good AFib story for you. Okay. A little biohacking one. So we've all heard that melatonin is good for you, right? When you go to bed? Well, I've been experimenting with it for years because I'm a sleep hacker and I know that your body makes about 0.3 milligrams of melatonin and a lot of commercial preparations have three or six or nine milligrams. So a lot more. So 10 times more up to 30 times more. And there's a few health proponents saying that you should take 20 or 30 milligrams, at least for a brief period of time to help with the brain and because it's anti-inflammatory and especially if you had some kind of a viral infection it could help with that. So I said, you know, I'm gonna try doing just 30 milligrams. And the next day I had atrial fibrillation. And I know, because I have my own EKG equipment because I'm a biohacker, I can monitor all sorts of stuff, right? And so I went into the hospital like, what the heck is going on just to double check things? And yes, I did have AFib, but it went away after a little while and it's not a problem. And I figured out that's what it was. And I found a couple of things on PubMed about that. So very high-dose melatonin can cause atrial fibrillation. So for people who are listening, if you're taking really large doses of melatonin, maybe you don't need them that high, especially if you're having cardiac issues. Interesting. I have some cancer patients own 100 milligrams of melatonin a day and divided doses. I think it's a good idea for cancer patients in particular. That's probably Dr. Cowan's recommendation. That was actually the book that I read for that. So if any of those patients suddenly gets AFib, they may be melatonin sensitive. All right. So far it's working on their cancer. I think it does work. We don't cure cancer folks, at least on this program. How's that? There you go. Drugs can cure cancer. That's what it says in the law. So that must be true. That must be true. It must be true. All right. So is there a supplement you most recommend to support longevity or are they too numerous to mention? There are a lot of supplements. And what it comes down to is you have to decide whether you've got your basics covered first. And there's really two things that are non-negotiable. One of them is vitamin Dake, D-A-K-N-E. If you're low on those, even if you have minerals, you won't absorb the minerals. So the fat soluble vitamins used to come from eating grass-fed animals and grass-fed animal fat from dairy, but that's largely missing from our diet. So you need to supplement vitamin D. If you do that, you'll go low on preformed vitamin A, retinol, which is not the same as beta-carotene. Plant-based vitamin A is largely marketing. It's not actually a thing. Just like plant-based meat isn't actually meat and makes you hungry and tired after you eat it. So real vitamin D, real vitamin A, vitamin K2 is critically important if you supplement vitamin D. Been recommending this for many years to keep calcium where it goes. And some amount of real vitamin E that includes all the tocoferyls and toco-tranols. And if you get those three things, then that's your first anti-aging thing. Your second thing is going to be your mineral supplementation. You've got to have your macrominerals, including magnesium that we just talked about, and you've got to have your trace minerals. If you just get those right, you're likely to have less of all the things that kill you. And from there, we can talk about biohacks and sleep and all. And from there, there's all kinds of things that you can take that increase mitochondrial function. In fact, my anti-aging book is called Superhuman. And I list about a dozen things that are shown in animal studies of mammals to increase lifespan by 20%. Things like Ashitaba, which is a Japanese herb. Yeah, I get it every day. There you go, right? Not me too, right? But most people listening probably don't take Ashitaba, but you might say, you know, that one's worth it, but activated charcoal's a lot cheaper and it also has a 10 to 12% lifespan extension because it binds gut toxins as long as you take it away from other stuff you want to absorb. So what's going on here is you're saying, well, how many of them am I willing to do and can I afford to do and are going to work for me? And how do I do that over time sustainably so that you just don't get tired of doing it? And I'd maximize as much as I can, but there's a limit to the number of pills I'm gonna take too. It's just a very large limit. Yeah, yeah. If you, I know you talk about that you, you know, you and I take a lot of supplements and you said that you kind of reduce those maybe in the interest of time or you get bored or you just run out of money. Do you like to cycle supplements? This is really important. I'm so glad that we're talking about it. Taking the same thing every day is the opposite of what your body likes. If you want to maintain strength and you want to maintain resilience and the ability to handle what life brings your way, don't give your body exactly the same thing. So what I do in the morning, there's some things that are non-negotiable like my vitamin Dake, I'm gonna get those. My minerals, I'm gonna get those. Those are just regular things. But the other stuff, if I reach for the bottle and I feel meh, I just don't take it that day. Some days I take glutathione, some days I don't. And this I think is a great practice for most supplements is to just mix them up a little bit. When I travel, I tend to just take baggies I make that have, you know, 45 or 50 pills in them and that's just what I do in the morning. When I'm at home, some days I take 12 pills and some days I take 70 and that's okay. Yeah, no, I think, you know, really our ancient ancestors acquired different vitamins, different polyphenol compounds on a rotating basis. And we know that the microbiome in these hunter-gatherers changes on a circadian basis depending on what these people are eating. And I think it's important to cycle these compounds. So we're talking about that. It seems like it's missing. Everyone says, look, I wanna do the same thing every day cause it's easy to make a habit. If you wake up every morning and you do 45 minutes of cardio, you're probably not gonna end well. You're gonna wear out your joints, you're gonna feel bad and you're gonna teach your heart to have a small ejection fraction instead of a large one, which is what a healthy heart should have. I mean, you correct me if I'm wrong, you're the heart doctor, not me. Okay, so maybe doing cardio, once or twice a week is good and the other days you should have done some yoga or you should have picked up something after you've done some squats. So for us psychologically and mentally, daily repetition is simple, but for us to actually work right, we have to mix it up every day and it's that friction that causes a lot of trouble. My work now and my next book that comes out is around what have we learned from AI? What have we learned from studying human physiology from the cells all the way up so that we can spend less time doing those maintenance cycles and still get outstanding results. We can beat normal spin class by about 12 times in efficiency without sweating. So we can increase your VO2 max by about 12% in six to eight weeks and it's gonna take 15 minutes a week to do that. And this is at Upgrade Labs, which is my new franchise for bringing this biohacking thing to the world. Ownandupgradelabs.com if you're interested in franchising. See that, just slid that right in there. Truly noted. True marketer. All right, we gotta wrap it up. But before we say goodbye, I'd like to toss the audience question of the week to you first day. Are you ready? Yes. All right. This one comes from Libby Morgan on Instagram. She asks, what are your thoughts on Botox and facial fillers? Parentheses, I do understand that young skin can be promoted through diet in parentheses. Do you think our bodies will have a reaction to an unnatural substance or object? Kind of like the story you mentioned in the longevity paradox where the children that needed replacements for their heart had negative inflammatory responses. All right, Dave, what do you think about these things? Well, Botox is a natural compound. It is, that's true. It's found in botulism, which is just a bacteria. So we don't have to worry about whether a compound is natural or unnatural. My favorite plant-based protein is serine nerve gas. Yeah, it comes from beans, right? So maybe we don't need to worry about if it's natural or not because it just doesn't work and what are the side effects, right? So with Botox, I've been opposed to it just on principle for a very long time because why would you wanna do that to your nervous system? Except there's a new compound which is Botox with all the protein removed. And so Botox itself can have allergenic effects that are not good. And I even had a family member who likely had a very large clot in her leg because of an injection of Botox that likely hit a vein. And so there can be side effects from that. But the newer versions that aren't actually Botox, something called zeoman, is the pure toxin without all the protein stuff around it and it's shown to increase collagen thickness. And they say that it doesn't migrate around. I think it does, but it's probably tolerable. I've tried it. I try almost everything once. So I had some injected up here. And for about two days, my mental acuity was off. And I can feel this because I spent six months with the electrodes on my head doing advanced meditation. I've traveled around the world to learn meditation for master. So you feel when you're off, when you're really tuned in. And so I don't think it's without harm but I think the harm is relatively low and it's been studied for 35 years. Not opposed to it, but I don't think you wanna do it all the time. And if you do it too much, you're gonna look weird and have droopy face and all that. It's not a regular practice for me. From a filler perspective, I have zero issues with doing hyaluronic acid based fillers. This is a natural compound that's found in collagen. I'm the guy who made collagen protein, a big thing, right? So I like hyaluronic acid, even it for joints. If you screw it up, you can dissolve it with an enzyme. So the risk is relatively low. But some of the other ones like hydroxyapatite or some of the calcium based ones can do very weird things. So if it's a preservative free hyaluronic acid, it's gonna last for six months or something. And if you wanna have chipmunk cheeks, I don't really oppose doing it. What are your take? I've tried to get my wife not to do these things. And she doesn't actually, she doesn't do the fillers. She'll occasionally fiddle around with Botox. But then for instance, we live in Palm Springs and in Santa Barbara. And Palm Springs is one of the Botox plastic surgery capitals of the world, like Santa Monica, Orange County. And Santa Barbara is quite the opposite. People actually have wrinkles and sun damage. So every time she says, you know, I think it's time to get some fillers because all my friends in Palm Springs, you know, they're fantastic. Let's just head up to Santa Barbara, spend a few days, look around. And she goes, you know, you're right. This is, so it's probably not gonna hurt you, but you've got better things to worry about. You do, and before you do that, do some red light therapy. Yeah. I mean, I have a company that does that one of the earliest red light therapy things called True Light. But even without that, you can do laser treatment of your skin, which really provably increases collagen thickness. True. And you don't need to even do a chemical peel. So I would say, hold off on the Botox and Botox-like things and the fillers. But if you really feel like you need them to be happy with yourself, given the caveats I just said, it's not the end of the world, but it's probably not the best thing either. You're definitely gonna wanna see this one. Goat and sheep yogurt have generous amounts of MCT oil, medium chain triglycerides, which are one of the key healthy ingredients in many of the blue zones.