Speaker 1: 00:00 Welcome to The Dr. Gundry Podcast, the weekly podcast where Dr. G gives you the tools you need to boost your health and live your healthiest life.

Dr. Gundry: 00:14 Welcome to The Dr. Gundry podcast. Dave Asprey, the man behind Bulletproof Coffee is back on the show and he’s got a brand new book out. It’s called Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever, and it’s absolutely packed with tips for living your longest, healthiest life. Dave is a world famous bio hacker, and entrepreneur, and New York Times bestselling author, the founder of Bulletproof Coffee, and the host of the award-winning podcast Bulletproof Radio. On today’s episode, he and I are going to discuss heavy metals, not the bands, heavy metals, the latest longevity science and even virgin blood. I’m going to let Dave explain that one, so Dave Asprey, welcome back to The Dr. Gundry podcast.

Dave Asprey: 01:08 Dr. Gundry, I have so much respect and admiration for your work in multiple fields. It’s always an honor to get to talk with you. I really just appreciate your work. We have something in common. We have both written books that hit number one on the longevity list of books on Amazon, that just happened with Super Human, and so, when I click on the, New People Buy This With This, I always see The Longevity Paradox paired with Super Human, so that people who have come to know and admire your work are interested in longevity in general in the whole field and the field itself is just exploding.

Dr. Gundry: 01:46 Yeah, it is, and that’s great, and I think the two books are actually remarkably complimentary. They do not compete, which is good, but then, I really recommend that folks do get Super Human because-

Dave Asprey: 02:03 One thing, sorry I didn’t mean to cut you off there.

Dr. Gundry: 02:03 No, it’s okay.

Dave Asprey: 02:06 Is that I was really careful to not read the advanced copy of your book [inaudible 00:02:12] until my manuscript was in, because I didn’t want to pollute my mind, and when I read your book after I was like, oh, there’s nice correspondence, but different topics, so I was grateful because I would have felt bad if we were repeating each other too much. I don’t think we did, but we have a lot of just alignment.

Dr. Gundry: 02:29 Very true. You talk about, in Super Human, that you grew up with toxic mold in your home. How did you make the connection to that with your health problems? I know you talk about it in the book, but give our audience…

Dave Asprey: 02:44 Sure, when I was a kid, we didn’t know much about toxic mold, and I lived in a basement and it had been flooded, and I had wood paneling in my rooms, so it’s a classic wet basement sort of environment for mold, and I had these strange, I would get nosebleeds 10 times a day. It would gush. I remember even at prom. Like, man, people thought I got in a fight. I was like no, “This just happens three or four times a day. It’s just part of being me along with the obesity, the joint pain, the weird rashes, the asthma, the behavioral problems.” It turns out, it took until my late 20s to really understand when I lived in another house that I had Stachybotrys. I realized, you know what? This is an environmental problem, and all these things I thought were just emotional issues or anxiety, or I’m just unhealthy, or I’m just not trying hard enough, or I eat too many pieces of lettuce. It was an environmental thing, and now I’m an expert.
I filmed the documentary moldymovie.com. It’s a free thing, just anyone can watch it, but it’s with top experts in the field to say there’s 100 million homes that have this problem, and now, thanks to, you’ve discussed this, Dr. Dale Bredesen has discussed this. We know that mold toxins are one of those big things that contributes to mitochondrial dysfunction. Penicillin is also a mold toxin, and it kills bacteria and our cells are based on [inaudible 00:04:06] bacteria, so maybe we don’t want to be breathing that stuff, and the evidence is very strong, but man, if someone had told me when I was young, I might have been a lot more comfortable.

Dr. Gundry: 04:13 Now, you go into this a lot in the book, and I like that, your very exploration of yourself, and you always have been, and I think that’s why you become one of the great bio hackers.

Dave Asprey: 04:30 Thank you.

Dr. Gundry: 04:32 You talk a lot about heavy metals, and I think we ought to talk about that, because just this week, another study found that almost all of our baby foods are poisoning our kids with heavy metals. You want to talk about heavy metals for our listeners, and why that’s so important?

Dave Asprey: 04:54 It’s funny because people hear heavy metal, and like it, so they think it’s music, or they sort of have this idea of maybe mercury, or lead, or something, but it’s just out there, and haven’t been exposed, but if anyone listening to your show right now were to get tested, they are not going to have zero levels, and yet over the last 20 or so years, the Environmental Protection Agency said, “Oh, the safe level of mold was 20 parts per billion. I’m sorry, we meant 10. I mean, we meant five.” Now, the statement is, “There is no safe level of lead.” And, even a small increase in lead increases your cardiovascular disease risk very meaningfully. It lowers IQs in kids, and it’s synergistic. This is the bad thing about toxins if you have lead and mercury, or lead and cadmium, or lead and thallium, or nickel, or tin. All of these things, you might have a safe level, but not zero of this one, and a safe level of this one.
But together, they interfere with cellular biology to the point that it creates inflammation, and inflammation is at the root of pretty much every bad thing that happens starting with pre diabetes, then diabetes, which blows up your risk of all of the other, what I call in Super Human, the four killers. You’re very well familiar with this, what’s going to kill the average person who hasn’t read one of your books, who doesn’t do the basic stuff, it’s pretty much going to be diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer or Alzheimer’s. Like those are the big ones, or car accident, or something, but that’s so much lower likelihood.

Dr. Gundry: 06:24 What helps out? How can we limit our exposure to this? I know the number one thing you’re going to tell us is don’t eat kale.

Dave Asprey: 06:35 Kale just tastes bad anyway, so we shouldn’t eat kale just because… who wants to live to 180 years if you eat kale every day, it’s probably not a good trade off. The number one thing wouldn’t be don’t eat kale, and you’ve explored this, and there are plant toxins, and you’re one of the major voices out there, 100% accurate, and one of the plant toxins aside from leptons is oxalic acid, which is not a heavy metal, but it’s a toxin in kale. It turns out though, there is one plant that is better than any other plants so far discovered that pulls thallium, which is toxic heavy metal out of the environment, and it is kale, so people eat a lot of kale in addition to kidney stones and gout, and vulvodynia and maybe other forms of inflammation from tiny crystals floating throughout your body. They actually can have elevated thallium levels.
And, thallium was called the poisonous poison, and it’s not something that we really had a problem with in our environment except when we figured out lead was bad for us, we pulled lead out of our gasoline, hallelujah, except they replaced it with thallium, which is 1000 times more toxic than lead. It’s just less famous, so I’m not saying don’t eat kale, but I am saying if you’re going to live on kale, it’s probably not going to help you, so if you love it, cook it, dump the water and eat it a couple times a week, and it’s just fine if you tolerate that well, but if you’re thinking that kale salad three times a week is going to save your life, it can increase your thallium levels. Functional medicine doctors who do testing regularly do see elevated thallium in kale levels.
But, the big smoking gun here is clearly lead paint chips. If you eat guacamole with those, that’s not how to do it though. Maybe that’s not it. It’s fish, and the reason for this is that we’ve been burning coal for a long time, especially this so called dirty coal, and it goes up into the air, and it rains down into the oceans, and then, it goes into the food chain at the very bottom of the food chain, and then, the small fish accumulate a little bit, and then, a big fish eats them and accumulates a little bit, and a big fish eats them, and these are things in us. We’re the same way. It goes into our tissues, and it stays there, so your job if you want to live to at least 180, which is my point in Super Human, it might be possible. In fact, I think given some advances that are coming our way and thanks to pioneering work including frankly robotic surgery is getting to that. There’s all kinds of cool tech coming in, that’s going to make humans live longer and longer, and we’re just at the beginning of a renaissance of this anti aging technology space.
But, if you were to go in, and expose yourself to 180 years of eating fish that have eaten fish, that have eaten fish, that have eaten fish, that have eaten fish, you’re going to be 20% mercury by body weight, not really, but you’re going to have enough of it that you will not have a brain that works. You will have Alzheimer’s disease and probably cancer, so should you not eat fish, or then you got no Omega-3s? What do you want to do about that? You don’t eat fish that didn’t eat that many other fish, sockeye salmon, sardines, anchovies, small fish, and when you do eat fish in the book, I talk about some things you can take that will stick to the mercury in the fish, in your gut so you can poop it out instead of having it go into your brain, and maybe eventually pulling it out. If you’re going to enjoy some fish, you might even have some sushi, but when you do, you can do some preventative stuff with it, and you don’t order the swordfish, you don’t order the shark, order the big tuna, although, frankly, I had a piece of tuna the other day.
I put it on Instagram, and I had a big handful of chlorella, which is a fractured cell wall algae, and the reason I know that chlorella works in addition to the studies that show it binds is that, years ago I had a very advanced yoga practice, and if I ate sushi that day, or the next day, if I tried to stand on a one legged pose with my eyes closed, I would tip over, but if I had chlorella I wouldn’t tip over. It was very repeatable. It’s like the change in your practice, the subtle changes at the edges of your capabilities. That’s where these toxins hit you. They’re sneaky, but they also take years off your life and they take, we’ll say life off your years, because if you end up with Parkinson’s or MS, or any of these other things associated with toxins, Alzheimer’s in particular, and your quality of life just went down whether or not you got more years. It doesn’t matter that much, because you can’t remember the last ones anyway.

Dr. Gundry: 10:56 That’s exactly right. Interesting, the two biggest offenders for mercury in my practice are dentists and sushi eaters, because they like their fatty tuna, and sashimi grade tuna, and I’ve used chlorella now for 20 years, and there’s not a person that I can’t get their mercury levels down using chlorella, and activated charcoal and I think you’re right. I take chlorella every day, and I think everybody should, but it’s a great way to bind mercury. It really is.

Dave Asprey: 11:43 Dr. Grundy hats off. You’re a surgeon, you’re a very well credentialed Western doctor, and you’ve been doing this for 20 years, and anyone who looks at you, just look at your skin, look at your body, look at the sharpness of your brain, and you are doing something different than average, and you have been for longer, and this is the point that I really want to get across in Super Human is that, look, you’re not going to look 20 years younger tomorrow, but if you just take less cuts, if aging is death by 1000 cuts, take less cuts, make them less deep and instead of just slapping band aids on them heal them better than mother nature intended, so you’re still going to take cuts, you might have some sushi and love it, but you took your chlorella, so you balance it out, and maybe you got a little bit of mercury, but you can deal with that. It’s just, you just slap yourself in the face over and over, but you can still have a fun life.
My horror movie is the caloric restriction people, the guys who say, “I’m going to eat one third less calories than my body really needs, because I think it’s going to make me live longer. I’m cold all the time, and I’m real thin. I’ve gotten a vegan size pants because I have no calves left…”

Dr. Gundry: 12:53 And, I’m really grouchy.

Dave Asprey: 12:55 Exactly, it’s not worth it. We don’t have to do that to live longer. You’re supposed to be just radiating energy, and you do. Every time I’ve ever talked with you in person or on the air, you’re living it. This is what it’s supposed to be like, and that’s something that metals will take away.

Dr. Gundry: 13:14 Great point. Speaking of living longer the right way you focus on mitochondria a lot in your new book, as I have, what’s so special about mitochondria? What are these little guys?

Dave Asprey: 13:29 Mitochondria are, we like to call them the power plants in our cells, and this is every author, every newscaster has said that, but they’re way more than that. In my view of them after having written out one full book on mitochondria in the brain, and then Super Human, focusing them as a major part of aging, these are also the batteries to a certain extent. They’re storing a certain amount of energy in them that they’re recycling very quickly, but they also sense the environment around you, and then, make decisions on how much energy or other chemicals. Mitochondria actually can manufacture things like neurotransmitters and hormones, and they’re embedded inside your cells anywhere from a few dozen at the very low end up to 10 or 15, 000 mitochondria in some cells, and in women, you can have 100, 000 mitochondria in the cells in the ovaries, because they have to sense the environment the most, to pick the right egg, and to provide all that energy, and they’re amazing.
They move themselves around inside the body, they shuttle little energy production, things back and forth, and we just found out in a study that came out two weeks ago, something that is a thesis for Super Human, but we didn’t have a study for it yet, which was that when your mitochondria work better, they provide enough energy to the nucleolus, which is a part of the cell, and that is responsible for your DNA repair. In other words, if your mitochondria can make the amount of energy they’re supposed to, air plus food equals energy, that energy will go into DNA repair. If they’re bad at taking food and air, and making energy, that means pre diabetic, it means toxic metals, it means mold toxins, it means any metabolic dysregulation, any inflammation, then you don’t have enough energy to repair your proteins.
Another study was published today that came out that said, “You know what? It turns out that errors in protein folding are an unacknowledged cause of aging.” You always theorized it, but some people proved it. You probably saw this study today too, and so, what’s going on here is, hey, what if your power was better? What if you were better at taking food and air and making energy, you’d have more energy right now even if you’re 25, even if you’re 105, and you’re not going to decline the way you think you will, and you get the benefits of more energy now. It’s kind of a good deal.

Dr. Gundry: 15:42 The benefits are more energy now, that sounds like a pitch.

Dave Asprey: 15:51 Just have some coffee, you’ll be fine.

Dr. Gundry: 15:55 We need to have our mitochondria happy and working, so listening to this podcast, is there anything our listeners can do right now to make their mitochondria happy?

Dave Asprey: 16:06 One of the things you can do that is very low cost is you can sleep effectively tonight, because the mitochondria, there’s a quadrillion of them or so sprinkled around in your body, and they all have to coordinate themselves. Think of it like a Tesla. These cars have thousands actually of little laptop batteries underneath the car, and they all have to work in unison. Well, you’re the same way, so what is the timing system? It turns out, there’s a part of the brain called the SCN, that is the major timing system for your mitochondria, and if they all know that it’s daytime, then they’ll all make energy, and if they all know that it’s nighttime, they’ll go into repair and reset mode, but if some of them think it’s daytime, some of them think it’s nighttime, you’re going to be all over the place both mentally, hormonally, metabolically, and it doesn’t work.
What do you do to fix that? Turns out, it’s all about light exposure at night, and to a certain extent it’s about food exposure, so tonight, instead of staring at your bright screen, turn your TV screen down, put on some sunglasses, you might notice I’m wearing glasses. I started a company called TrueDark that makes glasses specifically for sleep, but you don’t have to do that. Make sure you have the darkest curtains you can get. Most people don’t know this, the amount of street light that leaks around normal curtains, a very small amount of light increases depression by 63%, at least it did in a study in Japan of 800 adults, so make sure that your curtains aren’t leaking light. If you have to [inaudible 00:17:32] around the edges that’s okay. Unplug the LEDs, tape them over and sleep in a pitch black room, and you’re going to wake up even if you still got your normal six hours, seven hours, eight hours however much it is, your quality of sleep will be better.
In Super Human I write about how old people sleep versus how young people sleep, and I post my scores. I get more deep sleep and REM sleep than the average 20-year-old gets in eight hours, and I’m getting it in six and a half hours. Why? I measure it with my ring, and I blackout in my room, and you got your Oura ring on too?

Dr. Gundry: 18:01 Yeah.

Dave Asprey: 18:02 This doesn’t cost much to sleep in darkness, but man, it will change your mitochondria. You’ll wake up tomorrow with more energy and a better regulated system. The other thing you can do right now, as you could say, tomorrow morning, I am going to skip breakfast. You will not go into starvation mode, you will not die, you might get hungry, you might get [inaudible 00:18:24] and if either of those happens, then that means that your metabolism really needed you to do that, and you should the next day, have a nice breakfast, no carbs, no sugar, and the day after that try it again. What you do is you’re building metabolic flexibility, and you’re doing something called intermittent fasting, which is a very powerful technique for fixing all kinds of metabolic problems, so let’s see. Yes, slept better by turning off the lights, and dimming the lights, and you skipped breakfast, and you can do black coffee, you can do tea, you can do bulletproof coffee if you want the extra energy from that, but no sugar, no protein, not even collagen protein, and when you do that, you’re going to see changes.

Dr. Gundry: 19:02 Now, I think that’s great advice. Skipping breakfast, I think people say, “Well, gosh, I’m going to crash”. Well, if you crash skipping breakfast like you say, that’s a warning sign that holy mackerel you have no metabolic flexibility, and you ought to be scared to death that you can’t skip breakfast.

Dave Asprey: 19:24 That 11 o’clock or the 10:30 if I don’t have a muffin, I’m going to die, the 11:30, I can’t focus anymore. That is Alzheimer’s calling card right there, that is cancer’s calling card, and if that is happening to you, your top priority is to fix that, because normal, healthy biology of any form you should be able to skip that. Even a hummingbird can skip breakfast if it has to, and they have the fastest metabolism of anything we know of on Earth.

Dr. Gundry: 19:50 People forget that we took over the world, because we’re really the only primate that can go extended periods of time without eating, and If we couldn’t go extended periods of time without eating we couldn’t have taken over the world, because we wouldn’t have gotten to those places.

Dave Asprey: 20:09 That’s exactly right. If we were meant to eat fruit every two hours, we’d still be living in trees, and we wouldn’t have come down from the trees because there’s no fruit.

Dr. Gundry: 20:16 Right, and we are the fat ape for a reason, and we can access our fat, but I posted on Instagram, I think last week or the week before, our ancestor did not crawl out of the cave and said, “What’s for breakfast?” Because, there was no breakfast, there was no storage system, there wasn’t a cabinet, there wasn’t a refrigerator, and somehow, we forgot that.

Dave Asprey: 20:45 You had to wake up and go kill something before you could eat it.

Dr. Gundry: 20:48 That’s exactly right, or find something.

Speaker 1: 20:52 Okay, so let’s take a quick break.
If you’re listening to this podcast through your favorite podcast app, I’ve got some great news. You can also watch every episode of this podcast plus hundreds more special videos on my YouTube page. Just go to youtube.com/drgundry, and be sure to click the Subscribe button.

Dr. Gundry: 21:16 All right. Let’s talk about something in the book that I’ve been saying on this program for months now. Most people are eating too much protein. What’s going on? Why is too much protein bad for you? Come on, Dave.

Dave Asprey: 21:32 When I weighed 300 pounds, I went on the Atkins diet. This is in the 90s, the Atkins diet, I have the first Atkins book, which was the keto, basic [crosstalk 00:21:41]. I have it from the year I was born. I have the first edition that came out just to remind me this knowledge is not new about ketosis, but what the Atkins diet had wrong was lots of protein, and it didn’t matter what protein, and it didn’t matter what fat, and you could have artificial sugars. It was just don’t eat carbs, you’ll be okay, and you could lose, in fact, I did. I was [inaudible 00:22:00] pounds, and the other hundred pounds stuck around. Partly it was toxins, partly it was bad fats, but partly it was too much protein, and when you’re eating too much protein, look protein’s a terrible fuel source, it is a building block for your tissues, and you are meant to run on fat and carbs.
And, if you try to force yourself to run on protein you can, but you’re all-cause mortality goes up by four times, so as your risk of dying of anything is four times higher if more than 20% of your calories are from protein. If you’re going to go on a high protein diet, that’s 1980s terrible squeezed margarine, just intermittent’s, zero fat doughnut kind of advice. It is trashy, terrible advice. Do not do that if you want to live a long time.

Dr. Gundry: 22:47 But, come on the carnivore diet. I mean, isn’t that the key to long term success? Come on.

Dave Asprey: 22:57 I interviewed James Saladino, a doctor who’s a proponent of the carnivore diet, and in my own explorations on the Bulletproof Diet book, I went really deep on okay, how much fat should you have, and the type of protein really matters. The difference between a collagen protein or grass fed pastured protein versus industrial animals, and I’ll tell you right now, I don’t care if you’re eating more or less than 20% of your calories, if it’s from industrially raised animals on corn, and soy, and antibiotics, and glyphosate, that’s not food. If you eat those, they’re going to take years off your life, and they take quality from your life, so you’re like, “I’d rather be vegan than eat industrial animals.” But, having some, especially, fat from animals, things like butter, and ghee is going to really help your cell metabolism. Egg yolks, for instance, if you’re not allergic to them can be really powerful. It doesn’t mean don’t eat 5000 of them and get too much protein.
On the carnivore diet, what James does actually is he pours collagen, and he actually says he uses the bulletproof collagen. He pours it on his steak, and he does that because collagen is the only animal protein, they actually call it animal fiber that can metabolize into something called butyric acid. Your gut bacteria can eat that, and make the right kinds of short chain fatty acids out of it. Now, that said, for long term success, there is a very little evidence that you want to be using a carnivore diet for long periods of time. However, if you wanted to do it for a month or two to reset your gut bacteria, I have a dear friend who has been struggling with cancer in his blood for more than 10 years, full carnivore, cancer went away for the first time after chemo, after everything possible, so maybe for a short period of time.
You also might want to be a full vegan for a short period of time. It’s okay to do a strange dietary fast, but for long term success. There’s very little evidence that a high protein especially animal protein, but even plant protein. Protein is a building block, it is not fuel. If people just get that we would save a lot of stuff in the environment, and we would all perform better, feel better and be nicer to each other.

Dr. Gundry: 24:59 Yeah, the other thing that I think people miss, number one, Dr. Saladino does a lot of intermittent fasting, and it’s…

Dave Asprey: 25:11 Yes. Has he been on your show?

Dr. Gundry: 25:12 Yeah, he’s been on my show.

Dave Asprey: 25:14 Oh, [crosstalk 00:25:14].

Dr. Gundry: 25:14 And, that’s missing in what people hear, but that’s okay. Big things in your book, what’s the ultimate food upgrade, and even an anti aging food that’s a drug almost?

Dave Asprey: 25:36 I’ve coined the term in Super Human, I called it energy fats, and going a little bit deeper than you might think, I like to think it’s a [inaudible 00:25:45] way, talking about, okay, when you eat a fat what is it going to do to the composition of your cells? We like to say oh, I drew my red blood cells, and [inaudible 00:25:53] Omega-3 and Omega-6, but what your brain does, what your white fat around your middle does, and what the cells in your heart, or in your muscle tissue, or in your nerves, it doesn’t all do the same thing when you eat something, so the fat is both a building block, and a fuel source, but there’s a unique kind of fat. These energy fats that only convert to energy, and they do it with more energy than sugar does, and they don’t get stored in the body in any meaningful way.
There’s a broad category called medium chain fats, or medium chain triglycerides. Some medium chain triglycerides have that special energy fat. However, the most common and affordable medium chain fat lauric acid doesn’t actually do that, so the one that I recommend, I made it popular as Brain Octane. It’s part of Bulletproof Coffee, and this is the one that in studies from UC San Diego raises ketones higher than anything else, even if you had some rice, or some sugar the night before, which isn’t always a good idea, a little bit of carbs, not a problem. You don’t have to be on a zero carb diet forever. Just don’t be on [inaudible 00:26:56] sugar diet.
But, if you put these energy fats in your coffee in the morning, you pour it on your salad at lunch, what happens is your energy levels go up in a very noticeable profound way. When your ketones boost a little bit in your blood, there’s two things that really shift. One is called CCK, and this is the satiety fullness hormone, and the other one is called ghrelin, which is the hunger hormones. If you get your ketones up 0.48, which is below the keto brow nutritional ketosis, “I haven’t had any carbs in a year.” Kind of guys, what you’re going to get is your CCK goes up, and your ghrelin goes down, and all a sudden you don’t care about the bagel, and the willpower you think it takes to skip breakfast is gone. There’s no willpower, and if you pour that stuff in your coffee in the morning, the bagel loses its siren call at 10:30, you don’t want the bran muffin, you just don’t care.
If someone puts in front of you the big Krispy Kreme doughnuts, “I have no desire for this.” Which is a very different thing than my 300 pound life where I’d sit there in the meeting go, “I am a good person. I am going to resist this doughnut with all of my willpower.” And then, I’m like, “I’ll just have half the donut.” You will lose if this is how you’re doing it, and that’s the secret there, is if you learn intermittent fasting, make metabolic flexibility, or use energy fats, you don’t have to think about food all the time.

Dr. Gundry: 28:13 You mean, so I don’t have to have a personal mantra, I’m not a person that eats bread.

Dave Asprey: 28:19 I just said, I am one with the donut.

Dr. Gundry: 28:23 Okay, so let’s quickly hit some of the more out there topics you explore in the book, ozone therapy, what the heck is that? Are you at from the ozone layer? Are we depleting our ozone?

Dave Asprey: 28:38 We are not depleting our ozone with the ozone therapy. This is an up and coming thing that is undeniably effective that is going to take the world of medicine by storm over the next five years. It’s been around for, geez, since World War I when we first started using ozone to treat infections in wounds, and ozone as a gas, if you breathe it will make you cough, wretch, throw up or die, if you breathe a lot of it. It is really, really noxious. It’s also that beautiful smell after a rainstorm. It’s all about the dose. What you do with ozone therapy is you introduce ozone into the blood, into the vagina, into the rectum, or even just against the skin with cupping, and it has broad spectrum antimicrobial, so the antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral properties, but it does something very interesting that your mitochondria are sitting there, and when they see ozone, ozone is a signaling molecule that tells them, “Hey, make more antioxidants.”
And, the mitochondria that are not capable of making more antioxidants, those are the old weak ones, and you know what they do? They die, they get out of dodge, and fresh new young ones form in something called mitochondrial [inaudible 00:29:47], the old ones die and get replaced, or mitobiogenesis or mitogenesis are the other terms for that. What I’m saying here is that for people like me who had toxic mold poisoning, or Lyme disease, or aging, regular exposure in a medical setting to ozone will tell your cells in a very strong way like an intermittent, or like a high intensity interval training, like a strong exercise for your cell membranes, this is something that brought me back from serious brain fog from mold poisoning, and I have seen thousands of people who are really ill as well as people who just use it prophylactically.
For me, I get off an airplane, I come home, and I do ozone therapy, and you know what? It tells my cells, “Here’s some oxygen, here’s some extra electrons, and you better behave yourselves, and if not get out of the way.”

Dr. Gundry: 30:35 Wow, so cupping that odd practice increases ozone?

Dave Asprey: 30:44 Well, cupping only works if you’re pumping ozone into the cup itself, so you can have a cup with an ozone tube coming off a generator, and this sounds like, “Dave, what are you talking about?” My daughter had an infection on the outer part of her ear, she scratched on a rosebush. Her ear was three times its normal size. You don’t want to take antibiotics if you can avoid them, but you do want to take them to save your life. It’s one of those things [crosstalk 00:31:10].

Dr. Gundry: 31:11 Good point.

Dave Asprey: 31:13 We did ozone cupping. We took a funnel, attached a hose to it, and ran a small amount of ozone to it, ran a fan on her, so she wouldn’t have to breathe any little escapings and she sat there watching Netflix for 20 minutes, three times. Infection totally cleared. She was literally going to go to urgent care and get antibiotics, and it resolves that quickly, deep wounds, burn healing, and it has been pioneered even for things like tuberculosis, drug resistant diseases, but it’s pioneered in Cuba and Russia, places that are not really cool in the West, and they did it, because they didn’t have access to antibiotics, and they found a way. Fortunately, it’s old, but it’s well studied.

Dr. Gundry: 31:54 All right, how about taking boron for stem cells? I mean, 20 Mule Team Borax, or what’s going on here?

Dave Asprey: 32:03 It turns out that stem cell exhaustion is one of the seven pillars of aging, and the deal is, if you look in Super Human, there’s just seven things that now we understand are happening with aging, and think about your car. If you were to change the tires regularly, but not the oil, your car is not going to last very long. You change only the oil, but not the tires, you got to do all of them at least a little bit. You don’t have to be perfect there, and as we age we start losing tissues, because we run out of stem cells, the stem cells aren’t very good. What if you could prop up, and enhance, and make your stem cells healthier? It turns out there are studies showing boron can do this, and there are different forms of it.
But, yeah, the 20 Mule Team Borax is not food grade, but you can’t get food grade boron supplements that are better, but there are people who use, for instance, a borax bath, and there are even borax suppositories for yeast infections in women, vaginal suppositories that are noticeably effective, but those aren’t the best ways to get it. I would say look at a boron supplement, because the studies show if you want your stem cells to be around 20 years from now, you’re going to need some boron plus bone density is always your friend, and you need boron for that too.

Dr. Gundry: 33:10 Yeah, I’ve been digging a boron supplement for many years now. Yeah, thank you for pointing that out in Super Human, because, good trick. What-

Dave Asprey: 33:21 Thank you, it’s a missing thing. I wanted to call this stuff out. Everyone knows, eat healthy, but one of the things that actually matter that aren’t expensive you can do that’s one of them.

Dr. Gundry: 33:30 Substance P. What the [inaudible 00:33:33]?

Dave Asprey: 33:35 Substance P is the primordial pain sensing molecule slugs habit. I think slime mold probably has it, so this is our first wave as any kind of life to say, “Oh, that is bad move away from it.” And, it turns out that when your substance P levels go up in the body, your inflammation goes up. Basically, your cells realize something’s wrong, and they start getting inflammation. When you have things like irritated inflamed joints, arthritis, your substance P levels are high, and when you rub that like cayenne, and cayenne ointments, and things like that, or capsaicin is the active ingredient. You rub it on your joints, you’re actually depleting substance P, so the inflammation will go down, and you can manipulate substance P in the body with cayenne, and if you’re sensitive to the nightshade vegetables like I am, as you and I are both very [inaudible 00:34:27] leptons actually matter.
I had joint pain with the Arthritis in my knees since I was 14, leptons and toxic mold trigger that stuff, and to this day if I eat cayenne, which I dearly love, I get my neck pain back that I thought was a condition of being alive. There you go, what are you going to do? It turns out that they’re targeting vanilloid receptors. They’re called that because they’re named after vanilla, which is not a nightshade, but also triggers the same substance P reduction, using some vanilla is not a bad idea, but one of the biggest contributors to substance P as we age that most people have no idea about is that you grind your teeth little bit, and you chew, and as you chew your back molars, they get shorter, and shorter, and shorter, and it changes the angle of your bite, which causes the trigeminal nerve along your jaw to get inflamed with higher substance P levels, which then share themselves with the vagus nerve that runs right through there.
And, as you and I know, I’ve interviewed Stephen Porges, you probably have too, the father of Polyvagal theory, we know that this vagus nerve it’s kind of a big control system nerve for the whole body, and we just smacked it with substance P. You do that, you probably aren’t going to feel that good, and your systemic inflammation goes up. Oh my god, it’s a $15 bite guard from the drugstore if you grind your teeth even a little bit, if you have jaw tension sleep with a bite guard, you’ll actually live longer, and if you have the job tension, TMJ stuff I used to have, you can actually realign your jaw without breaking it, or without surgery, without any that. It’s just by going to a neurological dentist, and getting a splint so that your jaw can be naturally positioned.
It’s not about cavities, it’s not about root canals, both of those matters, not about gingivitis, that’ll give you a heart disease, you know that very well. This is just about neurological alignment, and inflammation from substance P, and that’s in the book, and the science is clear, but $15 per rubbery bite guard, we can all afford this.

Dr. Gundry: 36:18 VSEL treatment?

Dave Asprey: 36:23 V cells are fascinating. We know, and I’ve had these bone marrow and fat derived stem cells, where they pull my bone marrow, my fat, they spin them, grow stem cells, all that stuff, put them back into the body. These are advanced procedures, but V cells are these stem cell like cells that circulate in your blood, and what you can do with these, you can pull them out of your blood, which is a much easier procedure than bone marrow. Trust me on that. Actually, you don’t have to trust me, you’ve pulled enough bone marrow [crosstalk 00:36:53].

Dr. Gundry: 36:54 Days, yeah.

Dave Asprey: 36:55 Right, so that’s an invasive procedure, and blood isn’t, and you take it, you expose it to the things that activate things that were always in blood that we didn’t know about. When you put it back in, they act like stem cells. They go and they can be pulled apart, and they can stick to areas of the body that have inflammation, and cause tissue regrowth. This is a much more affordable way of getting some of the benefits of stem cells, and it’s just coming online from a regulatory perspective. It’s still in a gray zone, but there are practitioners who do it, and I certainly did it. All of these hacks I did, I tried on myself to write Super Human. I went out, and was a sort of a anti aging tourist. I’ve run an anti aging group, non-profit group for 20 years, so this is my passion, but I wanted to feel it, and write about the experience of it.
And, this is about a $2, 000 procedure versus the very entry level stem cells are 5000, and quite often 10, 20, 30, 000 even though your insurance company should cover them if they’re willing to give you a new knee or a new hip. Like try these stem cells, they’re a lot less painful. This is about creating that change, and if now you know that a V cell treatment might stop one of these big procedures from happening, or might cause systemic regeneration. You can put them along your sinuses, and they can go into the brain, so if you’re dealing with Alzheimer’s, or you’re worried about it, or you want to add those years to your life, you might say, “Okay, I couldn’t afford 5000, but I can afford 2000, and if I wait a little while it’ll probably be 200.” All these are coming down in price, almost like cell phones do. I don’t know if we’re ever going to get down that far, but the stuff that’s crazy expensive that I write about, it’s not going to be that expensive as time goes on.

Dr. Gundry: 38:33 All right, I can’t leave you without asking about virgin bloods since I brought it up at the beginning.

Dave Asprey: 38:39 What it comes down to is that scientists long ago were talking in the dawn of the enlightenment, weird things like, so the blood circulation systems from two mice, or at first they would do with dogs together, and realized while they would share these things a young dog stuck to an old dog will make the old dog new. This is a horrific thing to do to an animal, or to a person, and I don’t recommend it. We did learn something from it though, and then, you talk to people who’ve had blood transfusions, and they say, “Oh, I got young blood today.” These people get them a lot, because they feel it, and so, we know there’s something going on there. There’s even a company that started, that was doing $6, 000 procedures where you’d get blood from a college student without any clinical trials, and it was effective.
You could say, “All right, this is crazy. I do not have a college student locked under my bed for blood giving.” But, we know some of the compounds present in young people’s blood, and you can get those compounds that are manufactured in a lab, and you can use those orally, or even you can inject them, and the studies show that those make you live longer, and we’re talking things that cost 50 bucks, but you have to be willing to inject them or find a doctor who’s willing, and because these are not registered pharmaceuticals, this is a cutting edge anti aging therapy, but here’s the deal, we know what the compounds are. We have the studies that show they work, and we should demand access to these in a fully legal, fully licensed way, and we should demand studies for them. If not, the studies I’ve seen so far are enough to tell me they’re worth using.
I write about them, I identify these compounds, things like DHK, which is a copper peptide, that also if you rub it on your skin, we’ve all seen copper or collagen peptide. It’s the same thing that’s in young people’s blood. There’s tiny little things from your thymus gland that makes little tiny protein fragments, and if those are higher, you tend to live longer, and you may even have longer telomeres. All this stuff is, we know this now, this isn’t the future, this isn’t science fiction, this is in our set of knowledge as human beings, but most of us don’t know about it, and don’t have access. Super Human’s there to tell you about them, and tell you where to get them.

Dr. Gundry: 40:46 Now, should we take this with a proviso that you are a professional bio hacker on a closed course, and do not attempt this at home, or what say you? T

Dave Asprey: 40:59 It’s controversial. Here’s the thing, you know because you have a medical license. There are things that you would do to yourself, there are things you would do for your parents that you cannot tell a patient to do, because you put your entire livelihood at risk, and I have stood on stage in front of 3000 doctors at the American Academy of Anti Aging Medicine where you’ve also stood, and as I guess, I’m [inaudible 00:41:20] bio hacker, so I’m just going to tell you what I can tell you, and you can have my license, right?

Dr. Gundry: 41:24 That’s right.

Dave Asprey: 41:24 And, some people flip me off, some people laugh, but the deal here is, there are things that you can do that do not require a doctor. It’s like what you put on your plate, what you do when you go to bed, and the supplements you take are all within your control. Now, if you decided to use some of this knowledge, I would say go ask your doctor about it. We owe it to ourselves to tell our care providers what we are interested in doing, and to ask for their help, and if your doctor says, “That is off the menu, I cannot do that because of my license, but let me know how it goes.” I wouldn’t be surprised. There are things that are in Super Human, there are things that are all over the internet, where if you do something without medical advice, and I do my very best say, look, you shouldn’t do this, like this is a possible thing, but go to a practitioner.
But, we all have a fundamental human right. It’s our biology, and if you want to do something crazy, you want to try bloodletting, you’re allowed by law to do your own bloodletting. It’s just probably not a good idea, so be cautious, be careful, make the mistakes on the side of caution, but do not ignore all this technology, because it’s going to keep you alive a lot longer.

Dr. Gundry: 42:29 Interesting that you brought up bloodletting, because I used to give an hour long lecture on why bloodletting prevailed, and was popular, and it actually started barber surgeons, and all surgeons were barbers originally, but bloodletting got rid of iron, and bacteria actually have to have iron to reproduce, so interesting how bloodletting caught on?

Dave Asprey: 42:56 Yes.

Dr. Gundry: 42:56 Yeah.

Dave Asprey: 42:57 In fact, I believe that we’re also, this isn’t even in Super Human, it’s so new, but you know about dialysis, because it’s very common, but dialysis pulls a lot of interesting stuff out of the blood, and one thing that happens if you’re going to be 180, and you’re still recirculating that same blood that was in there since you were 18, it’s not really the same blood. Your cells are replaced every four months right thereabouts, however, the plasma, the toxins that are omnipresent, they accumulate, so there’s probably an argument for washing your blood every year, or two to keep some of the immune molecules, and some of the signaling molecules, and even bacteria and infectious toxin levels down, and there’s also a huge argument for bloodletting, or donating blood to keep your ferritin levels down. You want to get old fast have too much iron, you’re a 100% right about that.

Dr. Gundry: 43:46 Yeah, and the studies that I talked about in The Longevity Paradox of blood donors, living significantly longer than non-blood donors, age match controls. Iron rusts us.

Dave Asprey: 43:58 In fact, where I live up on Vancouver Island when I moved up here about 10 years ago, there is no way to donate blood. It was an hour and a half drive, you ended up once a month, I could not work it out. I have IVF here, my wife’s an emergency room doctor too, so it’s not like I don’t have a backup medical system if I need it. I would literally do my own bloodletting. I would rather donate it, but it wasn’t feasible, so I would sit there, and I would let blood out, again, I’d measure my ferritin levels. They were too high, I would do my own bloodletting, so there is great science behind that. Yeah, that can freak people out or something like that, but look, if you’re not donating blood, you probably won’t live as long, and you aren’t helping other people anyway, so that’s worth doing.

Dr. Gundry: 44:43 It’s a win-win. All right, last question, how close are we to living to 180 year goal. I’m trying to get to 150, but you’re younger than me, so you have more time.

Dave Asprey: 44:57 Look, I know and you know that we can do 120 today, and you’re a better example, because you’re older than I am, and anyone who has seen you can look at you, and compare you to the average person your age, and you’ve been doing this stuff for 20 years. There is a noticeable quantifiable difference, and the skeptics who are mostly really, really overweight, and unhealthy are going to look at you, and say, “We [inaudible 00:45:23] end of one, how do you know?” The bottom line is, it’s pretty obvious we have the mechanisms of action, you’re like, here’s why it works, I did it, I’m proof that it works, and here’s the other people who’ve done it in the hundreds of studies. The people who lived to 120 didn’t have any of this stuff you have. We know that’s a possibility for you and for me, and what about that extra 30 years you’re looking for? The extra, however many it is for me, 120 up to 180 [crosstalk 00:45:53] 60 years.
I’m just saying, you and I both know David Sinclair. We know all of the other doctors, or at least some of them who are cracking the code of aging. I’ve talked to the people in Super Human, the doctors who’ve done the research identifying these seven pillars, and now we know why we age biologically, and what hasn’t happened in all that medical research, so what we have the cause, but my favorite term ever, more research is needed. This is how you protect yourself academically from losing tenure, and being made fun up. Since I don’t have to deal with any of that, like hey, if we know that amyloid formation throughout the body is correlated with every bad thing that’s going to happen to you, what are the known environmental and behavioral causes of amyloids? And, how do you do less of that now?
The plan in Super Human says, “How do you do that, given what we know?” Next year, some guy may come along, and say, “Hey, here’s a new drug.” A woman researcher at [Reckers 00:46:48] might say, “Hey, look, I’ve got this new thing.” And, these people exist, they’re working on it. They’ve spent decades doing this work, and they’re [inaudible 00:46:55] I can talk about it. I feel safe saying that we’re going to extend life, and that we don’t have a drug for this, but we’re going to. In the meantime, here’s what to do, and it’s at, what do you do now while we wait for the tech to come online? You won’t have to wait long, because we have machine learning, we have Google, we have PubMed. Like it’s the best time ever to create change in human biology, and it’s happening right in front of our faces. We just can’t see it unless you’re plugged in, and I put all that together in Super Human, because it’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen.

Dr. Gundry: 47:25 With that in mind, Dave, where do we find Super Human and you as if we didn’t know, but tell my listeners?

Dave Asprey: 47:35 Just head on over to daveasprey.com and all of my good stuff is there. You can pick up Super Human anywhere you like to buy books. It just debuted on the New York Times list at number seven.

Dr. Gundry: 47:46 Congratulations.

Dave Asprey: 47:46 It was the eighth most purchased book on Amazon, about eight million books, and what that means [inaudible 00:47:52] this is now a topic of global interest, so just pick it up wherever you like to buy books, and if you send me your receipt on daveasprey.com, I’ve recorded a series of interviews with stellar people in the field, and I’m not going to disclose their names right now, but they’re people that you know, and love, and want to learn from, and I’ll give you those interviews as one of the gifts for just showing me that you supported my work, so I’m grateful for that.

Dr. Gundry: 48:23 Wow. Okay, so that sounds good. All right. Well, it’s always great to talk to you, this book I thoroughly enjoyed. I got a lot of tips that I didn’t know, imagine that, so get it. I can’t recommend it highly enough, and Dave, we’ll cross paths soon, and keep hacking, and I’ll keep testing patients on your hacks, and we’ll go from there, and me.

Dave Asprey: 48:55 Dr. Gundry, thank you for that praise. Just thank you for your work. You’ve pioneered so many things. I have so much respect for what you’re doing, and the fact that you live it. Thanks for having me on, and just keep doing what you do, and anyone who’s listening to your show who hasn’t read your book, like seriously, you got to read The Longevity Paradox. I read it. It is a great pleasure.

Dr. Gundry: 49:14 That’s right, the companion books, Longevity Paradox, and Super Human.

Dave Asprey: 49:14 There you go.

Dr. Gundry: 49:18 Perfect, good pitch. All right. Take care, so that’s all from Dr. Gundry’s Podcast. We’ll see you next week. Thanks, Dave.
Thanks for joining me on this episode of The Dr. Gundry Podcast. Before you go, I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts, and if you want to watch each episode of The Dr. Gundry Podcast, you could always find me on YouTube at youtube.com/drgundry, because I’m Dr. Gundry, and I’m always looking out for you.