Coconout Oil

7/22/2019 Coconout Oil

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Cool Fact

Dave Asprey: Todays cool fact of the day is about blushing. You can thank yoursympathetic nervous system for that rosy red hue that hits your cheeks when you trip inpublic or say something silly on your first date. Whenever youre embarrassed, adrenaline

in your body automatically speeds up your breathing and your heart rate and sends moreblood than normal to your face which is why you get that blush. But theres an upside to it.Recent studies that weve come across show that blushing actually helps strengthen yoursocial bonds and increases empathy from others meaning that people may actually judgeyour embarrassed response less harshly if they see you blush. So blushing is basically goodfor you.

Overview

Dave Asprey:You are listening to episode thirteen of Bulletproof Executive Radio. Todaywe have an awesome interview with Dr. Mary T. Newport. If you havent heard of her yet,

you will know her name soon. She cured her husbands Alzheimers using coconut oil andketones, which are basically the fat molecules that your body makes in response to coconutoil and your body can burn ketones for fuel. After she struggled to find a way to help herailing husband, Dr. Newport stumbled upon evidence that ketones and ketogenic diets, likeportions of the bulletproof diet, could be an effective treatment for degenerative diseaseseven beyond Alzheimers. She began testing her hypothesis on her husband and gotamazing results almost right away. After some more research, she realized that ketoneshave a host of other health improving effects, and if you want to improve your health orbecome more resilient to disease or just increase your cognitive abilities, youll definitelywant to hear what she has to say on our show today.

Dr. Newport did her training at the University of Cincinnati and spends her days practicingwith extremely young infants, which is kind of interesting because as you will hear in theshow that was her first time she had heard MCT oil was first used on babies.

We also have an awesome listener Q&A where we discussion dietary recommendations forautoimmune disease, healing extreme injuries, how you can improve you digestion, what Iactually eat, the problems with steel cut oat and other kinds of oats, mycotoxins in grains,ways to prevent and reverse prostate cancer, and using brain hacking techniques like TDCSto reduce cortisol. Well talk about MCT oil and some more about the actual statisticsbehind flu vaccines.

As always, we are going to close with our biohacker report where you are going to hear abrief summary of three new pieces of research that caught our attention this week. Youll


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hear about how to stay awake, how to stay lean and productive using protein, how toimprove your brain function using meditation, and how to insure optimal health using theright vitamins and supplements.

Dave Asprey: We also have a few announcements today. Im really, really stoked to tellyou that the Bulletproof forum is now live. Weve had requests for months for people tohave an area where they can discuss bulletproof techniques on the Bulletproof Executiveblog, so if you would like to get more in depth answers and ask longer questions, like thekind of questions you hear on the podcast, head on over to bulletproofexec.com/forum oryou can just click on the link that is now on top of our site. Every member of thebulletproof exec team will be actively moderating the forum and responding to yourquestions. Well also pull questions from there in order to answer them on the podcast. Ontop of that, we are now offering the Bulletproof Toolbox for people who join our email list.If you join, you get free guides and videos and other resources including a free copy of thebulletproof diet. Were building new content for that regularly. You can sign up atbulletproofexec.com/mail.

Alright, co-host. What have you been working on this week? Which biohacks are at the topof your list?Co-host:The biohack I have been working on is actually an accidental biohack. I use MCToil to fry my eggs often at low temperatures. I have a special method I have for cookingeggs that I actually wrote a post about which well be publishing sometime in the future,and what I always do is I use a spoon and spoon some MCT oil onto a pan. Because I oftenuse coconut oil for skin health, I figured MCT oil would be pretty similar so I rubbed theextra oil on my arm. Ive had a scar on my arm for a long time. I burned my arm cookingand its just a small one but afterawhile I realized the same spot where that scar is, is whereI was rubbing the MCT oil from my cooking on my arm. Lo and behold, after a few weeksof doing this, the scar is almost completely gone, so by accident I found that our MCT oilactually has some scar healing properties as well.Dave Asprey: Thats pretty cool. Ive never tried it specifically on a scar but I will tell youIve used MCT oil as a skin moisturizer hundreds and hundreds of times. Your skin justloves capric and caprylic triglycerides and the MCT oil that we use has an unusually highconcentration of those for MCT oil. You skin just loves it.Co-host: What have you been working on Dave?Dave Asprey: Its been a pretty interesting week. I have a bunch of exciting stuff butprobably top of my list is I just got a replacement whole body vibration unit. During mytwo year exercise fast, which Ive now officially ended, one where Ive should haveweighed 619 pounds when I was done but I didnt gain any weight on 4000 plus calories aday. I havent been doing much of the whole body vibration thing but Im a huge fan andIve used a variety of these machines. You stand on them and they vibrate pretty fast andyour whole body shakes. It sounds kind of ridiculous when you do it but as little as tenminutes a day of standing on one of these gives you more circulation of your intercellularfluid and your lymphatic system than walking around all day and a lot of these other


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practices that are based on moving but not burning calories. This is basically a whole daysworth of moving in ten minutes with skeletal and muscle and growth hormone effects. I justgot a new one because the one I had used before was broken and I had been intentionallynot doing that during my experiment to see what would happen. Im just stoked. Ive beenstanding on it for ten minutes a day and the differences in body composition that have

happened in three sessions of it are almost unbelievable. I feel leaner and tighter andmuscles all over my body are getting bigger.Co-host: Cool. Now we are going to have our exclusive interview with Dr. Mary T.Newport about coconut oil and ketones.

Interview

Dave Asprey: Dr. Mary T. Newport cured her husbands Alzheimers disease with coconutoil and ketones. After struggling to find a way to help her ailing husband, Dr. Newportstumbled upon evidence that ketones and ketogenic diets could be an effective fordegenerative diseases. She began testing her hypothesis on her husband and got amazingresults and after some more research, she realized that ketones had a host of other healthimproving effects. In fact, if you want to improve your health, become more resilient todisease, and increase your cognitive abilities youll want to listen to our interview with Dr.Newport, who did her training at the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Newport, welcome to theshow.Mary Newport:Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me.Dave Asprey: Tell us how you got interested in treating Alzheimers disease and how didthis affect your husband?

Mary Newport: I am an neonatologist so I take care of sick and premature newborns sothis seems like it is out of my area, but my husband, Steve, has early onset Alzheimersdisease and hes going to be 62 this coming February but he was having symptoms when hewas about 51. He was an accountant that worked for my practice and started havingproblems with making payroll errors and procrastinating on getting tax returns done andthen when he started having trouble remembering that he had been to the bank and the postoffice we knew something serious was going on. He was also depressed at that time soinitially it was thought that his memory problems might be related to depression. But astime went on, he continued to get worse and his accounting skills, even though he wasusing them every day, he gradually loss all of that and around 2004 he was officiallydiagnosed with Alzheimers disease and started on Aricept at that time and about a yearlater he was started on Namenda. Hes been on those drugs for quite a long time.

By 2008, he was actually doing very poorly. He had an MRI that showed that there wasquite a bit of atrophy of the brain and specifically in the areas that are consistent withAlzheimers disease as well as the rest of the cerebrum with shrinking and he was losingweight. He had lost ten pounds over three weeks. I realized he was unable to fix meals for


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himself when I was working even though he said he had and thought he had eaten, hehadnt eaten and things were getting kind of bleak. I was always on the outlook for clinicaltrials and in May of 2008, there was a new drug that was becoming available and it was avaccine. The whole point of the vaccine was to clear the beta amyloid plaques from thebrain.

We set him up for screening at the University of South Florida, there was a center called theByrd Alzheimers Institute there. He had been evaluated there before and we went for thescreening and there was a test called the Mini Mental Status Exam (MMSE). Its a 30 pointtest and he needed to get a score of at least16 to qualify for the study and he qualified inevery other respect except that he only got a 12 out of 30 points and needed 16 to qualifyfor the study, so we were disappointed but we were told to come back a couple weeks laterand try again. In the meantime there was another drug study that became available and itwas an oral medication instead of an IV medication to help remove beta amyloid plaquesfrom the brain. I set him up for screening two days in a row for these two drugs and thething that happened was the night before the first screening I started thinking what if hegets accepted into both studies? You can only be in one and were going to have to choose,so I decided to get on the internet and look up the risks and benefits and learn as much as Icould about these two drugs and I happened upon a press release for a third treatment.

It didnt say what it was but it was called AC1202 and it said that in their studies thatimproved the memory of half the people who took this treatment and I thought that wasvery interesting because none of the other Alzheimers drugs made that claim. You neverhear that with Alzheimers medications. I got on the internet again and tried to find outmore about AC1202 and happened upon their patent application and it was a very lengthyapplication and I learned a lot about Alzheimers while I was reading this. People arefamiliar with plaques and tangles that know about Alzheimers, but another reallyimportant feature of Alzheimers is that their brain develops insulin deficiency, insulinresistance, so effectively the brain becomes diabetic and its even been called Type IIIdiabetes or diabetes of the brain. This was first published around 2005 so its relatively newinformation in 2008 and I hadnt heard too much about it before. The whole point ofAC1202 was to address this problem of diabetes of the brain and what happens is that whenyou have diabetes, theres a problem with the insulin receptors and cells required insulin toget glucose into the cells. If you dont have enough insulin then youre going to havetrouble getting glucose into the cells and basically glucose or sugar is the primary fuel forthe brain and the other organs of the body most of the time unless youre starving or on aketogenic diet.

Back in the 1960s they discovered that the brain can use ketones. Dr. George Cahill andhis lab in the northeast learned that the brain can use ketones as an alternative fuel andthats what happens when were starving. We switch over to using ketones after we use our


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source of glucose and ketones can fuel our brain and other cells and other organs of thebody. Also in the late 1960s it was discovered if you consumed oils that contain mediumchain triglycerides or if you consume medium chain triglyceride oil also called MCT oilthat your liver will convert this to ketones and that these are taken up very quickly by thebrain and can be used by the brain for fuel. The people that were developing AC1202 were

basically studying MCT oil and what they found was that when people with Alzheimers ormild cognitive impairments were given AC1202 or MCT oil, in fact, even with the firstdose half of the people had an improvement in their cognitive scores and testing. Then theydid a longer study with 152 people showing that over a period of 45 days and 90 days andeven six months, people improved or at least stabilized and it was nearly half of the peoplethat improved.

Because I am a neonatologist, I was familiar with MCT oil. The reason being is because weadded it to the feedings of premature newborns back in the early 70s and through the early80s until they started adding it to infant formulas and its actually a component of everyinfant formula if you look at the ingredients, youll see that. One thing that, as I wasreading through this patent application, I didnt know up until that time was that MCT oilwas derived from coconut oil and we all know coconut oil is out there on the shelf. Thehealth food stores and grocery stores are carrying it. It was about 1 am as this point when Iwas reading all of this and his screening was scheduled at 9 am so I didnt have time to runout and buy coconut oil but we went down to the screening and again we were disappointedthat he had only scored 14 this time out of the 16 that he needed so he did not qualify forthe study and the doctor there said Lets have him draw a clock. Its a very specific testfor Alzheimers. So he drew a clock and you can see it on my website, I have pictures ofhis clocks on there and I have an article you can print out that tells about all this butbasically he drew a bunch of little circles, not even one big circle, but several little circlesand a few numbers. Just randomly, it did not really looked anything like a clock and thedoctor told me that he was bordering on severe Alzheimers at that point which was a shockin a way. He was worse than I thought. I was really surprised by how poorly he could drawthat so on the way home I thought what have we got to lose so I swung by the health foodstore where I had seen coconut oil and bought some.

When I got home I started researching more about coconut oil. I had to remind myself whatmedium chain triglycerides were and I got a fatty acid composition of coconut oil from agovernment website and figured out which were the medium chain fatty acids and whatpercentage of coconut oil was medium chain fatty acids and it was about 60 percent.Looking at the patent application they had given people 20 grams of MCT oil as the dosageso that equated to about 35 grams or a little over two tablespoons of coconut oil. The nextmorning I pulled out the jar of coconut oil and I made some oatmeal. Coconut oil is solid atroom temperature so it needed something to melt it and I put that into his oatmeal and heate that and his screening was scheduled for 1 pm and we drove down and I tried to prephim on the way down to remind him what the date and the day of the week and the seasonand he really wasnt remembering any of it on the way down so I was pretty discouraged. I


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thought that he probably wasnt going to do any better than he did yesterday but after wehad gotten down there; it was about four hours after he had eaten, and they took him awayto another room and they did the MMSE test and he came back.

He didnt think he had done very well and a nurse came in and checked his blood pressureand talked about drawing blood and I said Wait a minute. Whats happening and how didhe do? and she said he got an 18 on the study so he got two points higher than he neededto get into this clinical trial and he qualified in every other respect also so they werebasically going forward with the rest of the testing for the clinical trial. Obviously we wereelated and I didnt know at that point if it was really the coconut oil or if it was good luckor a lot of prayer or all of the above. So I decided to continue it. I got coconut oilcookbooks and I started giving him a measured amount for breakfast every day, at leastover two tablespoons and then started cooking with it at other times of the day. Really whatwe found was almost right away he was much more alert. He had been very sluggish in themorning, not very talkative, hed have trouble finding utensils andgetting water from thefridge and that kind of thing. Now he would come out of the bedroom alert and talkativeand joking and could find his utensils and it was like the light bulb came back on and thatwas exactly how he described it. He said it was like the light switch came back on the dayhe started coconut oil.Dave Asprey: I wanted to share something with you at this point a way of getting coconutoil or MCT oil in the morning. Oatmeal works for sure. On one of the most popular thingson my blog is called Bulletproof coffee and its a low toxin form of coffee that is blendedwith MCT oil and grass fed butter instead of milk or cream. In the morning Ill do 30 gramsof MCT oil and I used to weigh 300 pounds. I weigh about 200 pounds now after more thana decade but MCT oil is a major part of it but its interesting how itll blend into hot liquidand you actually get a foam on it when you do that with coconut oil so you might try that.When you said the lights went on, when you have a little caffeine and MCT oil helps thecaffeine get into the brain its not a bad morning. Mary Newport:That actually sounds like a good idea. We kind of abandoned the oatmealafter about a year. We were actually trying to get to a lower carb diet which hes been onfor quite some time and he actually got tired of oatmeal. He said can we do something elsewith this? He actually will take it straight sometimes because we started mixing MCT oiland coconut oil. There a little bit of a story to that too. Do you want to hear that?Dave Asprey: Yeah, lets talk about that and if you have any comments along the wayabout grass fed butter, MCT, or coconut oil, or any of the studies on memory and buttertoss those in too because we talk about those on the blog.Mary Newport:Interestingly, in butter 13 percent of the fatty acids are medium chain fattyacids and the short chains are also ketogenic so butter is much preferable to margarine ifyou eat one or the other. Butter is quite good for you and I often wonder, Id love to dosome type of study to see if people who drink whole milk and eat butter as oppose to skimmilk and margarine, if one group is more likely to develop dementia as they age.


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Dave Asprey: I think the biochemistry is pretty predictive there. I would like to see a studyprove from a biochemistry perspective. I advise people to avoid those things. I have aninfographic on things to eat and things not to eat and those are on the dont eat thembecause there is pretty good evidence that you dont want to do that.Mary Newport: The hydrogenated oils and margarine are not good for us.

Dave Asprey: So I dont have Alzheimers and I dont think it runs in my family, althoughsome dementia has happened usually later in life and probably related to blood pressurelowering medications, but are there other benefits that people without Alzheimers youveseen just in the work with MCT? Does it make people who are already healthy performbetter?Mary Newport: I think so. I have a history of Alzheimers on both sides of my familybut Idont feel like I have memory problems at least not yet. Im 59 at this point but I startedeating coconut oil right alongside Steve when we did this. He takes about twice as much asI do in a day but I have the equivalent of four or five tablespoons a day either as coconutoil, coconut milk, grated coconut. Weve really gotten into coconut. Well drink goat milk,that has some medium chain and human breast milk has a considerable amount of mediumchain fatty acids and goat milk is fairly equivalent to human breast milk in that regard andthe infant formulas have MCT and coconut oil to try to mimic human breast milk. Theres areason why medium chains are a part of our diet or should be a part of our diet. I noticedthat I felt I was able to read a lot more, to stay on task better and retain information bettersince I started using coconut oil. I remember every now and then I would have a subtlememory issue and then I thought it was because of my age but now I dont feel thatanymore.Dave Asprey:Thanks for saying that. I love hearing that. Ive had exactly the sameexperience. The whole point of the Bulletproof Executive is how to be more resilient andperform better and I recently gave a talk about how I hacked myself to deal withinformation overload and one of the things I mentioned was MCT oil. Hearing you, as amedical professional, say that you noticed that effect too is really cool. Im really glad thatyou mentioned that.Mary Newport:Yeah, one of my sisters had a similar response and she noticed that if shewent on vacation and didnt bring any with her for five or six days, when shed come shethought do I really need this or not. She would then start taking it again and she wouldrealize that she does much better. She can focus much better, write better, and think betterwhen shes taking this. She noticed a difference when she restarted it again. I thought waspretty interesting and she has a daughter whos in her twenties and she is a teacher and shestill says she can get through her lesson plans and focusing on that much better. And shesyoung.Dave Asprey: I travel internationally a lot and theres something I will not travel without ifall possible. I put a couple ounces of MCT oil in my little baggie you can carry through theX-ray machine at the airport, like in the little shampoo bottle.Mary Newport: Thats what we do too. Actually, I got to give a talk on this at theAlzheimers Disease International Conference in Greece about a year and a half ago and webrought Steve and our younger daughter who is now 25. I was really nervous because wewere going to be gone for 10 days and what if I couldnt get coconut oil or MCT oil inGreece so I put it into my suitcase and brought a lot of little bottles that I had made of themixture of the MCT and coconut oil. I brought enough to get us through the whole trip but Ialso had to keep extra doses on my person because of the duration of the airplane trip and I


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did put it in the little shampoo bottles, the ones that hold up to three ounces and could put acouple doses in each bottle for Steve. That worked really well. Id just put little stickers onit that said it was MCT oil for Alzheimers. I just wrote on the labels and I put a copy of myarticle in the bag with it just in case they wanted to know what it was. We didnt have aproblem with it which was great.

Dave Asprey: Excellent. So youre having the same experience. A lot of the people whoread the blog or listen to the podcasts often times are sort of saying the same thing like Ireally dont want to go without it because once I get use to feeling like this I really like it.Im hearing this from college students, mothers who have young children, and of course forthem getting more MCT means better breast milk. Its so important. And theyre alsofeeling better. Their energy comes back faster. Its almost kind of ridiculous that mediumchain triglyceride oil has this profound effect but youve seen if for Alzheimers, youveseen it for some other things as well.Mary Newport:Yeah. Ive had people with Parkinsons. Theres a man with ALS, LouGehrigs disease, and to me thats the worst. Most of these people maintain normalcognition but they become weaker and weaker until finally they cant eat and breathe. Its ahorrible disease but this man had contacted me after he had been using coconut oil forabout a year. He watched a YouTube interview that I have and he got himself up to ninetablespoons a day and he contacted me after a year and he had actually stabilized overtime,and this is a disease that you do digress or a year. You get worse but he actually increasedthe muscle mass in his legs and now hes almost two years out and hes still stable. He hasnot gotten worse and his muscle mass has continued to increase in his legs. He said one ofhis legs felt like it was dead to him and the life came back to it. He could feel that leg againafter several months and his doctors decided that he cant have ALS. They told him that hecant have ALS because he would be getting worse.

I had another lady, same thing, where she was having an earlier stage of ALS but shestabilized also and her doctor told her that they had the wrong diagnosis. Ive had severalpeople lately with ALS contact me and I refer them to him because of his experience withit. Hes trying to do a little social-clinical trial with it. So its very interesting. Ive had alady with glaucoma and you might think how could that be related? The eyes are anextension of the brain and neurons are involved in diseases like glaucoma and maculardegeneration and this lady who has glaucoma she said she took MCT oil and she happenedto be sitting at her computer and she thought that the screen was shades of grey. Shethought that that was the normal screen and the screen became pink. She started seeingcolor on the screen and it was news to her that it was even in color. She thought it wasrather odd so she repeated the experiment several days in a row and every time shed takethe MCT oil about a half an hour later her screen would come in in color. I thought that waspretty interesting and shes kept in touch with me too, about a year and a half now herglaucomas been stabled, she hasnt gotten worse.Dave Asprey: The effect is noticeable within a half hour.Mary Newport: It is. Itsvery quick. The liver converts the MCT and the brain takes it up.


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In addition to the ketones, the medium chain fatty acids themselves can act as a fuel andthere are studies showing that its taken up by muscle and its oxidized by themitochondrial muscle and acts directly as fuel. It does cross the blood-brain barrieralthough studies havent been done to absolutely prove that its taken up by brainmitochondria but it might also be another alternative fuel for the brain, just the medium

chain fatty acids. So that could explain why even with relatively low levels of ketones, youhaving this kind of effect that the medium chains are also acting as a fuel.Co-host:Weve talked a little bit about Alzheimers and Lou Gehrigs disease. Are thereany other neurological conditions or diseases in general that can be treated with ketones,ketogenic dieting, or MCT oil supplementation?

Mary Newport: Ive heard from people with Parkinsons disease, MS, and its just ahandful of people from each but I think part of the problem is just getting it out there to theright people. My husband had Alzheimers and he responded so that was basically thepeople I was targeting right away. Various people with different conditions have tried thisand they benefited. Ive heardfrom people who were in early stages of Huntingtons thatfeel that they have stabilized, some of their symptoms improved.

The thing thats common to all of these diseases is that there is some part of the brain ornervous system that has trouble with picking up glucose into cells. Lets say they doglucose PET scans. They will find certain parts of the brain or spinal cord that dont take upglucose normally and these are people who might benefit by having ketones available as asource of energy. Theoretically Duchenne muscular dystrophy might respond to this but Ihave not heard from anyone with that yet. Autism, some forms of autism, I have heard fromabout some children who seem to respond. People with Downs syndrome will developAlzheimers when they get into middle age. The extra chromosome that they have has someof the genes that are involved in Alzheimers so they develop it prematurely and they allwill develop Alzheimers if they live into their 30s and 40s.

Acute brain injury, the brain has difficultly using glucose for a period of time after an acutebrain injury but could use ketones so that could be benefited. Of course, type I and IIdiabetes, all of the cells except the liver can use ketones. As the organs because insulinresistant, people develop problems with blindness and neuthropy which is the kidneydamage from diabetes. Those two things are very common. There was actually a papershowing in mice that had diabetic neuthropy or kidney disease that ketones were able tocompletely reverse it over a period of six weeks which is very interesting so other organsbesides the brain can benefit in people how have type I or II diabetes by taking mediumchain fatty acids.Co-host:Thats an excellent segway since you mentioned the study. Many listeners of ourpodcasts and readers of our blog are very critical thinkers and love to look up studies likewe all do about these kinds of things. Are there any particular studies that pop out to you


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that really just highlight to you how effective this kind of treatment is or any studies thatsupport what youre talking about that you can name off the top of your head that peoplecan look up after the interview?Mary Newport: On my website I have some hypothesis papers from Dr. Richard Veechand Dr. Theodore VanItallie. You can actually print them out. I have the PDFs there. Thats

a good place to start. The one by Dr. VanItallie is a very thorough, well written discussionand overview of how this would work and what types of diseases might respond to this. Mywebsite iswww.coconutketones.com.If you look under scientific references you can finda list of some of the articles that cover the basics and then there are articles by SamuelHenderson, Lauren Constantini. They are the ones who developed AC1202 so there arereferences on there. I believe I have a bibliography. Its over 150 references that you canprint out a copy of the references. I dont have all of the PDFs of the papers available but ifsomeone were to email me with a specific reference in mind, I could email back thecomplete article for most of the things that I have on the references there.Dave Asprey: That is an amazing offer and thank you for being so willing to share yourknowledge with people. Im pretty sure that some of the members of the Smart Life Forumor the Silicon Health Institute may have reached out to you in the past because we havebeen passing those papers around. Well make sure in our show notes to have links to yoursite. In fact well have a transcript for this entire session so people can search it and whatnot, and well make sure that people can find you and find these papers because thatsreally important stuff.

I have another question along those lines. I take 30 grams of MCT oil in the morning in mycoffee and I recommend different dosing protocols for people as a biohacker, which meansI work in computer security and I basically hacked my metabolism and a bunch of otherthings to raise my IQ and just change my performance profile pretty dramatically. The useis a little different but I have a guy who Im coaching who lost 75 pounds in 75 days usingMCT oil on a daily basis. I actually told him that maybe going slower would be smart butthat wasnt his goal. He did what he was going to do and it worked out very well. But whatis the normal dosing protocol? Lets say someone who is 40 or under whos interested infeeling better, getting a little more energy, having their brain work better. How much MCToil would you recommend that they start with and progress too?

Mary Newport: One of the main adverse effects of taking MCT oil is diarrhea, so if youtry to take too much, too fast you are going to have this rather sudden explosive diarrhea.Even though my husband tolerated over two tablespoons of coconut oil, a lot of peopledont. I usually tell people to start with one teaspoon, two or three times a day, with food. Ifthey tolerate that, then increase that amount every couple of days. The other thing you wantto do is also substitute it in for other fat in the diet because if you just add it to what youreeating you could potentially gain weight even with MCT oil. It is used as energy but if youget too many calories in a day, you can put weight on. Basically as youreadding the MCTyou may want to subtract some other fats from the diet possibly and/or reduce carbohydrateintake to compensate for some of the calories. The thing about MCT is that it is used right
http://www.coconutketones.com/http://www.coconutketones.com/http://www.coconutketones.com/http://www.coconutketones.com/


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away as energy, its not stored as fat. I would say to try to get up to between three to fivetablespoons a day, somewhere along those lines, as MCT or coconut oil.Dave Asprey: I have two questions that arise from that; one is maybe more of a comment. Iwas concerned when I started using MCT about the higher fat and this was years and yearsago, but for the last two years I ran a self experiment where Ive been eating between 4000

and 4500 calories a day and at least five tablespoons from all sources of MCTs and Iveactually gained muscle and stayed lean like with a six pack without exercise.Mary Newport: Im jealous.Dave Asprey: I have a history of obesity. I have stretch marks. For the first half of my lifeI was 300 pounds. What it seems like is that there are some secondary things likemycotoxins. These are the toxins that come from molds that are found in the environmentand our food supply. These mycotoxins are linked to most of the degenerative diseases thatyouve mentioned in one or another study as well as to obesity. Have you come across anyresearch in what youre doing with coconut oil and MCTs about mycotoxin content ofcoconut oil? Ive found some brands have large amounts of mycotoxins and somemanufacturers test for it. The MCT oil I use is a pharmaceutical grade. Its very highlypurified but if youre eating raw coconut oil, is this a concern for you and have you noticeda difference between brands?Mary Newport: Yeah. There are different ways of processing coconut oil. I have beenlearning more and more about that but youll find refined versus unrefined coconut oils andtheres a process called DME. Its a micro-expeller process where they use fresh coconutsand extract the coconut oil from them immediately. Thats probably the best method toavoid getting contaminants from molds and that type of thing. There are other methodswhere they actually dry the coconut and its stored for awhile then shipped somewhere elseand in that process it can acquire mold. Then in the process they use chemicals to bleach itand process it so its probably best to stay away from refined coconut oil and look formicro-expeller pressed coconut oil. You would get fresher coconut thats less likely to havemold attached to it.

The MCTs, thats new to me but Im always learning new things about this. I hadntthought too much about the MCT actually containing mold but I imagine that would bepossible depending on where its taken from.Dave Asprey: Theres also a new source of MCT thats coming from non-coconut,genetically modified bacterial things. I believe its to canola oil as a source. Im kind ofconcerned about it. I havent tried it and Im not sure if I would want to try it but youhavent heard about that either?Mary Newport:No, I havent. I mean they would have to. There are no medium chains incanola oil so they would have to do something to the fatty acids themselves to shorten thelength of the fatty acids.Dave Asprey: In fact, theres no food in canola oil as far as I can tell.

Mary Newport: I know and its touted as a healthy oil. A lot of people deliberately takecanola oil because theyve been told its a healthy fat but its really not. Its very heavy in


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omega-6 and soybean oil is too. Its not particularly good. Polyunsaturated fats were, for somany years, touted as lowering cholesterol but they actually pick up free radicals. Theyhave sites on the fatty acid that are available to pick up free radicals that can damagemitochondria and damage the cells. People can definitely get too much omega-6 fatty acidsparticularly if they use canola oil and soybean oil and dont get enough omega-3. Omega-3

is also a polyunsaturated fatty acid and it also could pick up free radicals but we do need acertain amount of omega-3, its just that the average person in the United States tends tohave too much omega-6 and not enough omega-3 in the diet.Dave Asprey: Do you think that contributes to degenerative disease including or excludingAlzheimers?Mary Newport: I think it could. I think there are a lot of things like that in our diet likehydrogenated fats and trans fats that can contribute. For example, if soybean oil ishydrogenated, the polyunsaturated fats in it, the tiny amount of omega-3 that is in iseliminated. Omega-3 is the first to go when hydrogens are added to fatty acids. Omega-3means thats a site thats not occupied by hydrogen. When you hydrogenate it, those sitesare filled with hydrogen. You lose the omega-3 from soybean oil when you hydrogenate itand you lose some of the omega-6 as well but it also creates a molecule that is bent in thewrong direction, thats why its called a trans fat instead of a cis fat. These fats dont fitnormally into cell membranes and the cell membrane is important as far as what gets in andout of the cell. When you start inserting trans fats into the cell membrane, it makes themstiffer and the cell doesnt live as long and it affects what gets in and out of the cell. I dothink that those kinds of fats can contribute to neurodegenerative diseases over time and itsjust best to avoid them. You dont need to have those in your diet.Dave Asprey: I feel really fortunate that I just started mentoring a group of very highpotential young people, people under 20 who are backed by the Peter Thiel Foundation. Itscalled the 20 Under 20 and I just gave a lecture to them as well and Im sort of thinkingwhat is the impact going to be even before your 20 once you start cutting the bad stuff fromyour diet, you start adding MCT oil, and you go on a lower toxin, healthier fats kind ofprogram just for the entire duration of your adult life. I am suspecting that it is going tomake just huge differences in performance for someone in their 20s but also when theyre60, theyre going to be out there competing against 40 year olds. They are going tomaintain their cognitive and energy levels. You sort of see that same effect if you put onyour futuristic hat and making medical claims that doctors arent allowed to make?Mary Newport: I do. I do think that this could be a great preventative tool to preventdiseases like Alzheimers and Parkinsons. Theres a study by Cunnane, hes Canadian andthe main author, but they did ketone PET scans which is interesting. Most PET scans useglucose but this was a ketone PET scan and they found that the amount of energy used bythe brain as ketones is directly proportional to what your plasma levels are. He discusses alittle bit about using MCT as a strategy for prevention and by keeping a level of 0.5millimoles, which is what you get after taking a dose of MCT oil such as the 30 mL youwere talking about, that you could potentially provide 5 or 10 percent of the energy to thebrain as ketones. It just so happens that, for example, people who are at risk forAlzheimers that they have an energy deficit in the brain of about 5 to 10 percent even inyounger adulthood. By taking MCT oil you could make up that deficit by providing ketonesto the brain. Its a very interesting paper. Again I have copies of it on my computer that Ican send if anyone wants a copy of it.Dave Asprey: Thats going to be really interesting to dig into. I definitely want to check


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that paper out just for my own biohacking principles. Heres one more final question thatsa little bit geeky but I just have to ask it. There are four lengths of medium chain oils thatare considered medium chain. Are some of those lengths better than others in yourexperience?Mary Newport: The shorter the chain is the more that will be converted to ketones. Thats

kind of the generality but then again the body appears to be able to use the medium chains,whatever is left over. As far as other effects, for example lauric acid, its a C12 (12 carbon)chain, its about half of coconut oil and theres not very much of it in MCT oil but its veryantimicrobial and somewhat antiviral. Its shown to kill certain viruses in the herpes familyand HIV by dissolving the lipid capsule around the virus. Its antifungal. Its active againstthings like candida. Its antibacterial and a number of bacteria are killed by it andantiprotozoal. Of the medium chain fatty acids, apparently thats the most activeantimicrobial and its a medium chain fatty acid. When they say breast milk is anti -infective for a newborn, theyre referring to lauric acid in the breast milk. As you go fromC12 which is lauric acid to the C10, there are still antimicrobial effects but its not as strongas with the lauric acid so thats one of the reasons why I mix the MCT oil with coconut oilfor Steve. There have been several different microbes that have been implicated as possiblecauses of Alzheimers, one of them being herpes simplex virus type I. Thats the type whenyou have fever blisters on your mouth. Its caused by a herpes virus type I usually. It can betype II but its usually type I. People who are a certain genotype apolipoproteins E, E4,which my husband is, have a very high association with fever blisters with having thatgenetic type. The nerves that come out there to the mouth originate to the brain and happento be very close to where Alzheimers originates. Theres a group in England and severalother groups that have been studying this but they have been able to show that in the betaamyloid plaques in the brain, about 90% of these plaques contain the DNA of the herpessimplex virus. They contain other things too like heavy metals, even Chlamydia, but theyhave shown that if you infect mice with herpes simplex virus they will develop plaques andtangles just as Alzheimers patients have. They feel very strongly th at, at least for somepeople, herpes simplex virus might be the cause of Alzheimers disease. Thats one of thereasons why I keep the coconut oil because its anti-herpes simplex virus.Dave Asprey: That seems like a good recommendation to use some MCT and somecoconut oil. The reason why I do the same thing is MCT oil is mostly capric and capylicbut coconut oil is roughly 7 and 8 percent of those two substances so 15 percent of C8 andC10, so I basically put a hunk of butter, a little hunk of coconut oil, and a big squirt ofMCT oil in my morning coffee to blend and get a nice head of foam like a latte and it tasteslike a religious experience. I feel really good.

Mary Newport: The interesting thing we found out about it right away is that it seems toenhance the flavors for foods. Its hard to explain. You just have to try it. Dave Asprey: It is and in fact if youve never tried this try straight MCT oil on sushi with alittle bit of rice on it. It will make sushi the most satisfying tasty thing. I know people fromJapan who really know their sushi whove tried this and their eyes get big.Mary Newport: I put MCT oil on salad and I just put a little of another salad dressing, butits amazing. You could just put the MCT oil on it and Id be perfectly happywith it. In thepast, unless it had salad dressing of some kind on it, I wasnt just going to eat a handful oflettuce. MCT oil does really bring out the flavor. Its interesting. Dave Asprey: It sounds like youve discovered all the little things about MCT oil that Ive


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stumbled upon and a lot of things I didnt know about particularly the things you justmentioned about Alzheimers.

Id like to thank you for being on our podcast. Its been very fascinating and you are one ofthe leaders in helping educate people about how healthy MCT can be for them, not just ifthey have Alzheimers but even whether theyre prenatal babies or all the way through towhen theyre older. Thank you for all the work youve done, all the research, and all theenergy youve put into helping people learn about the benefits of this. I personallyappreciate it.Mary Newport: Youre very welcome. Thank you for making those comments.

Listener Q&A

Dave Asprey:Now well start with the Upgraded Self Listener Q&A. Our first questioncomes from Andy. He asks What are your recommendations for someone with anautoimmune diseasespecifically ulcerative colitis? Im looking for both general ideas andin terms of the Bulletproof diet? Currently I follow the LEF foundations protocol vitaminwise.

I take a bunch of supplements. I live in Japan and follow a fairly Bulletproof diet, lowwheat, Bulletproof coffee every day, lots of raw egg yolks, etc. I have actually found thehigher saturated fat, lower carb diet to be great for my symptoms, contrary to what theexperts would tell you! I also culture my own raw milk, organic probiotic enhanced kefir,which works awesomely well. One thing I havent yet tried is removing nightshades frommy diet. What do you think?Co-host:The first thing I would suggest is following the same protocol that Matt Lalondeand others like Robb Wolf recommend which is a pretty strict elimination diet. If you havean autoimmune disease whether its rheumatoid arthritis or ulcerative colitis like Andy thenI think your best bet is to eat meat and vegetables for awhile. That would includeeliminating all grains including grain like compounds like kenwa and oats. I woulddefinitely suggest cutting out nightshades for awhile and even eggs can have someproblematic properties for some people. I would be eating pretty much meat, fat, andvegetables for awhile and then maybe introduce some things back into your diet. You sayyoure eating some raw milk and culturing your own probiotic kefir. I would ditch it. Ithink you need to go zero dairy for awhile even maybe not eating grass fed butter forawhile if you have something like an autoimmune disease which is extremely serious. Youshould also be eating all pastured eggs yolks, if you have any egg yolks, and I wouldsuggest that all your meat and seafood be wild caught or grass fed or fed a natural diet.In terms of supplements, I think Dave probably knows more about that than I do so Dave,what do you think?Dave Asprey:In terms of supplements, the number one would be L-glutamine. Having aton of this main amino acid, the most common one in your body, can do profound thingsfor gut healing. Were talking somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 grams per day maybeeven more. This is something that, surprisingly, Tim Ferriss recommended in his book and


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it is well known, even in hospitals, that L-glutamine speeds gut healing. I recommend thatto anyone on the Bulletproof diet especially if youre getting any kind of cravings orheadaches, L-glutamine can be an absolute godsend.

This is a pretty specific question and the Bulletproof diet has more than a thousandreferences that I built in from the book thats getting published from Wiley and I built theminto that single infographic in order to help make those decisions on what to eat and whatnot to eat. The problem here though is if you got an autoimmune disease of the gut and yougot even a little bit of wheat, youre probably really causing some big problems there.Certainly the idea of following an elimination diet is a really good idea and Ive done thatmyself. The problem there is that you really need to look at following a rotation diet, notjust an elimination diet. This is something well blog about some more but a huge numberof people who are listening to this podcast, people who do not necessarily know they havefood allergies, actually do have food allergies and the symptoms are kind of strangebecause if you eat something youre allergic to everyday, it actually feels energizing. Itdoesnt feel like its doing damage even though it is. This is one of those things where youcan buy a book on rotation diets. Theres lots of them out there and they say about the samething which is group foods into categories where they are related and then eliminate themfor a little while and see how you feel when you add them back in. It was that approach thatactually led me years ago to conclude that I was having cognitive problems that werecaused by eating wheat two days before I had the cognitive problem. Things like that arelikely playing a role here and like we just mentioned, eliminating eggs even though eggsare on the Bulletproof diet, nothing youre allergic to is on the Bulletproof diet and eggs area common allergen especially well cooked eggs. If youre doing the eggs, you should dothem raw which is exactly what youre doing.Co-host: Sounds good. The next question is from Sean. Do you have experience withhealing extreme injuries like bone fractures (broken bones)? Diets similar to yours willmanage inflammation, but dollar for dollar, which supplements and/or foods have youfound to be most valuable in healing?Dave Asprey: Its kind of funny to say the same thing twice but for healing, L-glutamine isjust about unmatched. If you have that amino acid which you take as a powder and mix it inwater or you can take is as capsules but you need a lot of it, it really helps. Branched chainamino acids are also really effective for maintaining muscle mass while youre recovering.You can take about 5 grams a day. In fact if youre not going to be exercising or you aregoing to be fasting, taking a little bit of that every day helps a lot. It can also help yourimmune function. There are also, in terms of foods, raw egg yolks are profoundly healingfor the body and I know a lot of people who are listening to this might think Thats gross.Im going to get salmonella. Youre probably not going to get salmonella. Well cover thatduring the show but in terms of being gross, you like ice cream, dont you? If you like icecream, you like raw egg yolks because thats what good ice cream is made with. Theyactually pasteurize them in commercial things because theyre using low quality eggs but ifyou make your own, an egg yolk and a smoothie, it makes it taste like ice cream. Its not anunpleasant flavor whatsoever.


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Co-host:What other supplements would you recommend like boron or some of these otherthings you recommended when my dad broke his femur?Dave Asprey:Thats a good point. There are bone specific things here that I guess Im notcovering. Theres a lot of muscle stuff that goes around it. Theres boron, silica, andsurprisingly, unless youre testing low on a blood test, you probably dont need more

calcium. Most people get too much calcium but getting magnesium and phosphorus may bereally important for you, particularly magnesium. Theres another couple things that belongon this list. The obvious one would be vitamin D, which we write about extensively on theblog, as well as vitamin K too, which a lot of people havent heard of. K is centergistic withD and if youre not getting enough K, they probably wont heal as well as they should.

The other thing that really makes a difference is taking collagen. People often thinkcollagen is for skin and hair, but predigested collagen like the stuff that we recommend onthe blog is really effective for growing the scaffolding for the bones so I take that stuffevery day and I have for quite awhile because it helps with flexibility and helps with skinand hair. Its also shown in a study to increase bone density by as much at 15 percent ifmemory serves right, so if you want to be able to heal right, all of the vitamins and all ofthe nutrients that are going to be important for building the scaffolding and mineralizing thebone. On top of that, I would look at using laser therapy to speed healing, which is kind ofoutside the scope of your question which is really about supplements and foods. Low levellaser therapy can speed healing to the point that you have NFL quarterbacks who have kneesurgery and are playing professionally two weeks later. Those guys are using far-infraredlasers. I have one on my desk sitting in front of me. Its pretty amazing.Co-host:The next question comes from Sasho. I am trying the bulletproof diet and I havetried a high-fat diet in the past, but every time I do it, I feel weird, spacey, un-grounded etc.You know, the low blood/brain sugar symptoms. So how do I approach this to get results? Ihave tried to stick for 2-3 weeks, hoping to adapt and start converting fat for energy. Mybody just doesnt seem to like processing fat. Do you have any ideas that can help withthis?Dave Asprey: Youre probably dealing with a sluggish liver or some sort of bile problem.There are some people out there that believe there are protein types and carb types based onyour blood type and things like that. That isnt the case in my experience. I know somepeople who tolerate carbs and tolerate a low fat diet better than others but when thosepeople go on a higher, healthy fat diet like the Bulletproof diet, their performance generallyimproves and they feel better than they normally do. Just because youre resilient enough totolerate a low fat diet, doesnt mean thats the right choice for you. In this case, if youredealing with liver issues, you might want to try N-acetyl-cysteine and vitamin C for awhilewhich will help you build your levels of glutathione. However the best and fastest way ofgetting your glutathione levels up, glutathione being that master antioxidant detoxer in theliver, is to take lipoceutical glutathione. Lipoceutical glutathione is a pretty amazingsubstance. Its glutathione, which is a complex molecule that gets destroyed in your gut.Its very hard to supplement but the lipoceutical form surrounds it in a fat molecule thatgoes right through your GI tract. Its actually a method of delivery for advance drugs buthere were using it for a vitamin. This is one of those things I recommended in the recentpiece on what to do if youre going to go out and have a few drinks on Thanksgiving.


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Glutathione in this form is what lets your liver detox the fastest, so get your liver running.If its still not working theres something called a liver flush you can do. Well put somelinks to some of that here. Its an old herbalist trick. Its been going on for hundreds ofyears and it involves grapefruit juice and olive oil and its relatively unpleasant for about 24hours but the impact on your liver function and your metabolism and how you feel and

your skin is kind of unmatched. Its something Ive done probably 20 times in the lastdozen years and it always makes me feel better.

After that, its time to look as some lab tests. Your body absolutely should like processingfat unless you have something wrong with your gallbladder or your liver or something elsewith your digestion. Also, betaine HCL, which is hydrochloric acid, is a really goodsupplement to take with fat. Most people who go on the diet for a couple weeks and have ahard time like you, arent processing enough fat because their pancreas hasnt learned howto digest fat yet. You forgot how to do it because youve been eating sticks and twigs fortoo long. In order to help your body during the adjustment period, you take betaine HCL.You can also take several pills per meal as long as it doesnt give you strong indigestion.Thats how you know youve hit too much. You can also take the fat digesting enzymelipase.

Co-host: Ox bile extract might help too.Dave Asprey: Certainly. If its a gallbladder issue then Ox bile is recommended. In factanyone who has had their gallbladder taken out and a surprising number of people have,youre basically not going to live very long if you dont take ox bile when you eat fat. Itsreally important.

Our next question is from Mike. I am interested in starting the Bulletproof Diet. I see thefood charts and the number of recommended servings per day, but can you give me an ideaof what and when you eat on a daily basis? Right now I eat on average every 2.5 3hrs. Ieats steel cut oats now, is the something you recommend I stop eating? Co-host:First of all, I would definitely stop eating steel cut oats. Theres nothing healthyabout them. While most oats are gluten free, they are often processed on the samemanufacturing facilities as the other gluten containing grains so they often are contaminatedwith small amounts of gluten. They also have horrible problems with mycotoxins, phyticacid, and lectins, and theres no nutrient value in them anyway, so there are basically acheap source of refined carbs. Theres just no point in eating them. They are probablydoing a lot of damage to your body.

I think Mark Sisson has said something like fiber is not technically good for you, but sayingthat is like saying carbs arent good for you. There are some carbs that are good for you and


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some carbs that are bad for you. For most people they are still bad and toxic unlikesaturated fat and MCT oil.

So the fiber from grains, just like the carbs from grains, is bad for you. The fiber fromthings like broccoli and sweet potatoes is good for you and there are also health promotingeffects like butyrate formation. The other thing I noticed is that youre eating two and halfto three hours a day. I have no idea why. Theres no benefit to doing that. Theres actuallysome evidence that that can be damaging to your liver just because youre overstressing itby putting nutrients into it all the time. There are a lot of benefits to intermittent fastingsuch as reduced oxidative damage, autophagy, and there are even more benefits toBulletproof fasting, so thats what I would try.

In terms of what I eat on a daily basis, I eat pretty boring foods: meat, vegetables, and everynow and then Ill make some kind of weird stuff and fat.Dave Asprey: I pretty much try to eat the green side of the Bulletproof diet and a lot ofpeople say How do you make stuff out of that? The core dishes are meat and meat can beprepared lots of ways. My favorite way of making it is in one of those things youll see onlate night, Sharper Image infomercials. Its called the Flavorwave. Its basically a halogenbased, infrared light convection oven that sits on your counter about the size of a crockpot.Itll cook a frozen piece of steak or hamburger to perfectly medium rare in about 20minutes or less. It doesnt use microwaves. It just uses radiant heat combined with a littlefan. Its very energy efficient too so that lets me take something that would take a long timeto prepare, I toss it in there and its done.

In terms of vegetables, sometimes I just have meat because Im in a hurry. If Im going tohave vegetables with a meal, which I try to do most of the time, I will steam the vegetables.I will, more often than not, toss them into a blender with a big hunk (several tablespoons)of butter and MCT oil, maybe some spices. You blend it and you can have creamedbroccoli or creamed spinach or whatever you like. There is no vegetable on earth thatdoesnt taste really good when you mix it with butter and salt and maybe a couple drops ofvinegar. What youre doing is making the equivalent of mashed potatoes except its not apotato or a starchy carb. Its cauliflower or broccoli.

Those are the most common things and for breakfast I usually have Bulletproof coffee andthats plenty of fat to make me feel really full and good all morning long. If Im going toeat breakfast, its usually eggs and pastured or low mycotoxin bacon. Sometimes with theeggs, if I have carbs, my favorite Saturday-morning-with-the-kids meal is something calledmochi. You can buy it at whole foods. Its a white rice that has been pounded into a flatbrick. When you toss it in the oven, it puffs up and its chewy and crunchy and reminds you


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just like eating a good piece of toast. If you want that traditional breakfast feeling, thatswhat you can do but overall meat, vegetables, you add different spices, you prepare them indifferent ways, you do salads with avocado and MCT oil based dressings and life is good.

Co-host: The next question comes from D Almeida. There is a lot of epidemiologicalevidence that wheat products arent that great for health, but the research of paleo-typesusually focus on gluten, though research on that has been less than conclusive. Have youever considered that the mold/mycotoxins from wheat could be what everyone should befocusing on?

Dave Asprey: I think, first of all, that the research on gluten is really conclusive. We knowexactly what happens to about 70% of the population when they try to digest wheat. They

dont thrive on it for sure. We look at historical evidence at what happens when wheat isintroduced to a society. People get shorter, their palates get deformed. I have extensiveresearch in my upcoming book on the effects of wheat on pregnancy and on your baby andits not positive. Its not just gluten. Mycotoxins in grain are a major issue and differentparts of the world have different types and amounts of mycotoxins in their grain. When Iwas first troubleshooting this, maybe a decade ago, I noticed when I was still eating wheatthat I didnt do well on wheat in the U.S. but I might eat it once a week. When I went toEurope, I could eat a croissant and have no symptoms whatsoever and it would just driveme nuts. The difference there was the prevalence of mycotoxins in Europe, the standardsare better there but also the ones that grow there are different than the ones that grow in theU.S.

I know now from blood tests and from paying attention to these things that fusarium isparticularly damaging for me. Thats a mold that grows on corn very commonly found inthe U.S. It also grows on grains but far less common in Europe. Thats an example but eventhen thats not the only source of mycotoxins because almost all wheat that you eat is madewith yeast and yeast is a mold. People are not going to like hearing this but saccharomyces,which is the name for the type of brewers and bakers yeast that we use all the time is welllinked to cancer and cardiovascular disease. In fact I have references to a fewcardiovascular ties to mold in the lecture video that I have on the website. If youre eatingwheat youre getting all of the defense mechanisms that the yeast in your bread has, youregetting gluten from the wheat, the mold that grew on the wheat as it was in the field, as itwas processed, and maybe a little phytic acid thrown in to boot. Its just not a good food forpeople.Co-host:I would totally agree with everything you said. There is also the lectin issue andthere are many kinds of lectins. Again, its kind of like bacteria. Its a huge, very broadsubject of compounds. The other problem, as we talked about, is fiber. Fiber in wheat isactually damaging. There are all sorts of problems with it.


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You also mentioned the epidemiological evidence isnt great. Youre right. Theepidemiological evidence is horrible as Dave just mentioned about shorter height,decreased growth, even organ shrinkage, but the clinical evidence is even worse. Theres

tons of evidence showing that wheat causes tremendous gut damage, inflammation,interferes with vitamin D synthesis and mineral absorption, and a host of other problems.Mycotoxins are a part of it but theres no reason you should try to limit it to justmycotoxins or just gluten. Its just bad for you so theres no reason to eat it. Period.

The next question comes from Mike. Im curious if any of your readers had success withyour diet for prostate cancer. I have low grade prostate cancer and eat kind of like anAmericanized, macrobiotic diet. I do eat little fish, (wild salmon-sardines mostly) grass-fedmeat only on occasions. My grains are brown rice, amaranth, quinoa, yams and rootvegetables. The rest is plenty veggies, some beans, some fruits, (mostly berries). The fats Iconsume are avocados, coconut oil, a little pasteurized grass fed butter, and nuts, mostlyalmonds and walnuts. Not afraid of fats but I do not want to overdo it. My blood testnumbers are really good. The only supplement I take vitamineral greens, and citrus pectinplus vitamin D in water.Dave Asprey:Its kind of a long list of foods there but the ones that stand out as being pro-inflammatory and potentially problematic for prostate cancer would be some of your grainchoices. Brown rice is inferior to white rice, and amaranth and quinoa are grains andprobably have mycotoxins, and certainly not as good for you as yams and root vegetableswould be so youd want to minimize those. Beans, same things. Beans are pretty irritatingand they really are not a health food. Theyre a food of last resort. If youre going to eatbeans, you will want to soak them for a long time and probably ferment them for awhileand even then youre getting a lot of starch that just isnt necessary. With the berries youreeating, quite often prostate irritation can happen from molds that grow on berries. You wantto eat fresh, frozen berries, not ones that have sat around for a week at the store and youneed to eat high end frozen berries, not ones that come from some amassed store becauseoften times the ones that are relatively cheap were also the ones that were end of season andmoldy. Thats why theyre cheap. This is a major problem with frozen berries or freshberries.In terms of other risky things for prostate cancer, nuts surprisingly. If youre eating nutsthat are not fresh, you are going to get oxidized oils and youre probably gettingmycotoxins, particularly lately, cashews have been having a ton of problems. Walnuts arealso a very high omega-6 nut. Theyre actually one of the highest so you might want to tiltyour intake more towards raw almonds and away from walnuts. If youre having realconcerns with prostate cancer, technically you should soak and/or sprout the almonds to getmaximum health there, but straight almonds are probably going to be okay for you.

You say your blood test numbers are good. Were not sure which blood test youre talkingabout and I think you should definitely do the citrus pectin. You might also want to add


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activated charcoal for additional toxin binding over time. I think thats helpful for almostanyone whos dealing with any type of cancer. Given that you have low grade prostatecancer, we dont know your age but a lot of t ime people with prostate cancer, over age 60,the odds of prostate cancer causing you to die are very low because its low grade. Its therea lot of the time but is doesnt do anything. So unless its a very aggressive form, a lot of

people over treat it and if they over treat it with surgery and radiation, you could end up in adiaper and not having sex again. This is one of those areas where proceeding cautiously formost prostate cancers seems like what the people I talk to in my anti-aging group do.Co-host:Agreed. One other thing we should definitely mention is a post that went out onthe Bulletproof Executive about a week ago about Steve Jobs diet. The whole article wasabout a very good study recently showing that low carb diets could be extremely effectivefor treating any kind of cancer for numerous reasons. I think there were six or sevendifferent reasons. Even more importantly than just low carb was getting rid of grain basedcarbs and all sorts of possible food toxins. I think Dave should mention a little more aboutthat since he has even more experience with it.

Dave Asprey: Thats a good point. I built that in the Bulletproof diet to the point where Idont think about it as much as I should. Cancer cells have 28 times more insulin receptorsthan healthy cells in your body. Theres actually a form of chemotherapy with far less sideeffects called Insulin Potentiated Therapy (IPT) and what they do there is they mix theadministration of these really potent, questionably effective chemotherapy agents withinsulin so that the cancer cells open up and take in more of the chemotherapy agents thanthe other cells so you dont need as much of it and you dont get as sick. That actually, if Iwas dealing with cancer and I went down the chemotherapy route, would be the way Iwould approach almost any cancer should I come down with it. Obviously I would want tomake sure that the cancer had insulin receptors. By eating a Bulletproof diet, you can keepyou blood sugars lows and are not giving the cancer all that sugar it wants in order to help itgrow.Co-host: You should definitely read that post. What it sounds like hes eating is anAmericanized, macrobiotic diet, which sounds to me like really high carb diet. He sayshe eats a little fish, some grass fed meat, only on occasions, and coconut oil every now andthen. It sounds like youre eating probably 60-70 percent of your diet from carbs which, ifyou want to have cancer, is a great idea.Dave Asprey: Well said.Co-host:The next question is from Andy. What do you think of the recent hype aroundtDCS. Have you tried it? Would you recommend it? It would seem to be a rather cheap,safe and effective means of lowering cortisol and boosting concentration for a number ofhours.Dave Asprey: I got quoted recently in a big piece, the equivalent of Science magazine,basically Italys version of the American publication and they talked about tDCS and itssomething that Im pretty eager to try but the comparisons between CES or cerebral electrostimulation, which is what I used on stage when I gave that talk in Sweden about how toupgrade your brain. Theres a lot of similarities between those two and Ill walk throughthose real quick for readers who are interested in real biohacking using electronics toupgrade your head.


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This transcranial direct current stimulation is relatively new and what theyre doing there istheyre sticking two electrodes on your head, one of them is positive, the other negative,and they just let the current flow through your brain. When I say the current, were talking

about really small amounts, much less than a nine volt battery. This isnt likeelectrotherapy, there are no convulsions and you might feel a little tingling but theres nopain and theres not meant to be pain. Theeffects of doing this are pretty neat. With tDCS,where you put the electrodes matters enormously so its very focused. One part of the braincan be stimulated more than another part of the brain and it is very effective at loweringcortisol and boosting concentration depending on where you put the electrodes and thatsthe problem. Most people arent very good at putting electrodes on their own head andknowing exactly where to put it for your own head is a bit of an art. I dont think yourelikely to do a lot of damage to yourself with tDCS.

However, what I use, CES is simpler because the placement of electrodes is much lessimportant and the difference between CES and tDCS is that tDCS has current flowing inone direction only and with CES, we alternate the current going back and forth. So I havetwo electrodes, one on each ear or one on each temple if youre doing it more frontally, andit goes plus-minus, plus-minus and the polarity shifts and the current goes back and forth.Theres lots of research, much more on CES than tDCS going back to the Russian spaceprogram in the 50s when they invented this so astronauts could get less sleep withouthaving physical or mental degeneration. With CES you get the same sustainedconcentration the whole front of you brain basically gets more alpha and its sustained forhours and hours and thats been confirmed using EEG studies and I believe even someFMRI studies. So the bottom line is the recent hype around tDCS, I love it. Its cheap.Someone out there will probably start selling home tDCS units at some point and Illprobably buy it and play with it but Im convinced for the average person whos not reallyinto playing around with their brain, tDCS will be harder to administer because youll putthe electrodes in the wrong place.Co-host:Since it is the Christmas season, nothing says I love you like a CES unit.

Dave Asprey: Thats a totally fair point. We do have those on the site. They actually canbe kind of expensive. A lot of the ones out there are more than $1000 so I did a bunch ofresearch and found one that was reasonably priced and relatively accessible. If you live inthe U.S. you need to work with your doctor. Say that you would like to have some stressrelief and ask if they can write up a script for one of these. If you live anywhere else in theworld, we just ship them directly and this is one of those things where its about $300 andthe benefits you get for sleep and stress control are so large that Ive been doing this formore than a decade and I do it regularly.Co-host: Its like one of those Mastercard commercials. Getting your doctor to write aprescription, takes five minutes. Getting a CES, $350. Sleep hacking and mentalperformance, priceless.


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Dave Asprey: I love it and its totally right. I do think its priceless and throughout myentire adult life, I have prioritized health wellness and performance in my spending becauseits an investment that pays you back way more than putting something in the bank.Co-host: Right. The next question comes from Shane. There are a lot of differentcompanies that sell MCT oil, and Im trying to figure out what the difference is. Is there

anything special about the MCT oil on Upgraded Self, or is it all pretty much the same?Dave Asprey: If it was all pretty much the same stuff, ours would be lower priced and itwould be much higher margined than it is. Its actually one of the products we sell wherewe dont even do very well on it. Its more there because I want to make sure I have accessto this MCT oil personally and I want my family to have access to it, so were helping itgrow. There is actually MCT oil on the market today that comes from heavily modifiedcanola oil, believe it or not. Its not even coconut oil. Thats part of it. The other part is howyou filter your oil matters enormously because it turns out theres four links of mediumchain triglyceride oils and ours has extremely high percentages of the two middle oils,much higher than typical MCT oil so as long as you got those four links of oils you can saythis is medium chain and youre technically correct. When youre getting ours, yourebasically getting a much higher concentration of two of those types of oils capric andcaprylic triglyceridesthe ones that are having the most effect. Thats why if you were todo a comparison of our MCT oil versus coconut oil, coconut oil is only 7 and 8 percentcapric and caprylic triglycerides whereas our MCT oil is predominantly those things.Youre getting, essentially in a tablespoon of our MCT oil, youre getting a substantiallylarger amount of these oils than you would get from 12 tablespoons of coconut oil to get thesame amount of capric and caprylic. Its really that much more effective. Thats one of thereasons I use it. I dont like wasting money either.Co-host: Think of it as upgraded coconut oil.Dave Asprey: I love it.Co-host:The next and last question is from Zingbo. Since were entering sniffle seasonand I seem to be the only person in my office healthy enough to not be bedridden rightnow, I have a question for you guys: are flu shots bulletproof?Dave Asprey:Im going to anger some substantial portion of listeners right now. No,theyre not. I love the idea of going out and getting a shot and saying There. Now Iminvincible to the flu. The problem is if you look at results from flu shots they are far, farinferior to adequate vitamin D supplementation. I will tell you flat out there is no reason foryou to take the risks that come from artificially simulating your immune system to aspecific type of flu versus just turning up your immune system with vitamin D so that yourwhole body functions better. The numbers dont lie here but the financial numbers givelarge incentive to flu vaccine manufacturing companies to fudge the numbers but if youlook at outcomes, no, there is no data that says flu shots are Bulletproof and half of the timeyoure getting the flu shot for a flu that doesnt end up emerging anyway because theyretrying to predict which flu is going to happen based on what birds are pooping in Asia sixmonths before flu season. Its an old industry and basically nutritional technology has farexceed the effectiveness of flu vaccines so dont waste your time and dont take the risk oftaking whatever else is in that needle. We have a long history of contaminated flu shots inthe U.S. The data is out there about it, so dont stick needles in yourself unless theres agood reason. In this case, theres a better technique and it involves vitamin D. Co-host:If you want to avoid the flu, follow the Bulletproof diet, take the supplements we


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recommend, get good sleep whether youre hacking it or not and youll probably live a longtime and never get the flu.

If you have questions for the podcast, you can contact us on Twitter @bulletproofexec,Facebook at facebook.com/bulletproofexecutive, or by leaving a comment to the shownotes for this episode. Also since this is the first episode where the Bulletproof forum isnow live, you should go over and leave your questions there.

The show notes will be displayed at the bulletproofexec.com along with links to everythingwe talked about today, whether youre looking for the supplements or articles wementioned. That will all be displayed on the page.

Biohacker Report

Dave Asprey: Its time for one of my favorite parts of the show, the biohacker report. Thisis where we bring you some of the latest research that caught our attention this week.

The first study talks about how protein, not sugar, stimulates cells that keep us thin andawake. What this study showed was that protein activates what are responsible for keepingus awake and active and basically in a high performance state. The reason it works is that

protein activates orexin cells which secrete orexin in the brain and reducing output of thischemical orexin is linked to narcolepsy and to weight gain. Researchers at the University ofCambridge monitored mouse brains with fluorescence imaging and found that animalprotein caused the highest output of orexin. What the studies showed that, at least in mice,eating a high protein meal (not a high carb meal) is best for getting through energy drops. Iwould also add, even though they didnt test it in the study, that a high healthy fat diet willgo very well with the protein and that if you get too much protein in the diet, you canactually deal with excess ammonia in the body. Having high amounts of protein is good.Having excess amounts of protein is bad but having high amounts of healthy fat is going tobe centergistic with this type of treatment.

The second study we came across talked about dietary supplements and the illusion ofinvincibility. Now, Im all over invincibility. This is the Bulletproof Executive, but whatinvincibility or bulletproofness actually means to me is actually more about resilience thatsays things are going to happen and its how you deal with them and how you recover fromthem that actually makes you bulletproof. Its not the idea that they bounce off of youbecause things that are invincible eventually sort of break. The old oak tree versus the


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willow sort of story. In this research, researchers in Taiwan found that people who takemultivitamins are more likely to choose a buffet meal over smaller meals, theyre morelikely to smoke more cigarettes and eat lower quality food. This is one of those classicthings that says if you have car insurance youll probably drive more recklessly and this is apsychological phenomenon that everyone has and I have it as well. The idea here is that if

youre doing something for you health, you may choose to unconsciously do somethingelse thats not good for it. The idea that you drank a diet coke so now you can eat aSnickers bar where in reality, both of those are bad for you. In this case, supplements areuseful but you also need to have a healthy diet and you cannot use multivitamins tocounteract a bad lifestyle. What you can do is use nutrition and vitamins and evenpharmaceutical things to help yourself to recover faster or perform better but if youre usingthem to patch over something that youre doing that is unhealthy, your net benefit will bezero. You might not go backwards but you might not get the advantages you thought youwere going to get so this comes down to cognitive and psychological awareness of whatyoure actually doing versus what you should be doing. The next study was about tuning out and how our brains benefit from mediation. Here,researchers from Yale University looked at experienced meditators and found that theyactually switch off areas of the brain that are associated with wandering thoughts or anxietyor even some psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia. They used FMRI scans to determinehow the brains of meditators differed from the brains of people who werent meditatingandthey could color code parts of the brain that had decreased activity in the brains ofmeditators. From personal experience, when I did 40 years of Zen meditation in seven days,not that I actually compressed time but using an $11 million dollar EEG set up, I was ableto achieve the same brain state of someone whos been meditating for at least up to 21 or 40years doing Zen meditation. I learned how to turn off those parts of my brain that werecausing anxiety and wandering thoughts and psychiatric disorders. I cant say Ive ever hadschizophrenia before or at least not that Im aware of but I can say that ever since I wentthrough that as well as ever since Ive taken up breath work including the most effectiveand cost effective emWave, Ive not had those wandering thoughts. All of those things aregone and theres just blissful silence when Im not using my brain and thats one of thereasons I believe that Ive been substantially higher performing in my career.

It was kind of gratifying that the Yale researchers found that people who are meditating,even without the benefits of using an EEG machine in order to help them guide theirmeditation into the most effective types, but people who just do the practice with noequipment are still having noticeable, measurable, real changes in the brain. This is prettycool too because a lot of people still believe that mediation is a form of prayer andsomething that you should be wearing a purple robe and have a topknot on your head andbasically be in an ashram somewhere. What this is showing, if you dont like wanderingthoughts, you dont like being stressed and you dont like schizophrenia, that having anyform of meditative practice that you do regularly is going to train your brain to work better.Ill say it really straight up if you want to be bulletproof or just want to be an effectivehuman being having some practice like this is going to help your brain. Its terriblyimportant whether youre an executive, a parent, a student, an entrepreneur. You just getmore out of every day if you spend a few minutes meditating.


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Conclusion

That concludes our show for today. You can find links to everything we talked about in theshow notes at bulletproofexec.com and we post a full transcript of every one of these showsso everything you hear so far is available and searchable as sort of a public service for freeon bulletproofexec.com.

If you enjoyed our show, you can help us by leaving a positive ranking on iTunes or giventhat it is going to be the holiday season, we run a sister site call UpgradeSelf.com which hassome of the things like MCT oil or collagen or CES machines that we talk about on the

show and if youre thinking about purchasing one of those anyway, wed certainlyappreciate it if you purchased them to help cover the cost of the show. Its a very smallbusiness and we always appreciate your time and attention.

Co-host, thanks a ton, see you next week

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