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FOOD IS AN ANTI-AGING DRUG

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE VEGAN TRAP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A BIG FAT LEAP OF FAITH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PIG’S EARS AND ENERGY FATS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COFFEE + TIME = KETONES

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bottom Line

Want to not die? Do these things right now:

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

• Don’t eat fried stuff. Ever.

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

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

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

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