Team Asprey

Keto Film “The Magic Pill” Slammed For “Harmful” Ideas. Separate Fact From Fiction

May 7, 2018 by Team Asprey

Can a high-fat, low-carb diet prevent and even cure illnesses like cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and autism? “The Magic Pill”— an Australian documentary now streaming on Netflix — thinks so. The film, from celebrity chef Pete Evans, suggests that the modern diet is to blame for the majority of chronic diseases, an idea that has critics slamming the film for peddling “harmful” ideas.

“The Magic Pill” follows people in America and Australia suffering from different ailments to explore what effect, if any, the ketogenic diet has on their symptoms. The ketogenic, or keto diet, is a high-fat, low-carb diet that encourages your body to use fat for fuel instead of carbs.

The keto diet and autism: a case study

The film tracks the subjects for 10 weeks, then looks at whether the keto diet improved each person’s particular condition.

In the film, Abigail, a young girl with autism — who ate processed chicken fingers, goldfish crackers, and apple juice previously — appeared to make significant gains after five weeks of restricting carbs. Though she struggled to adjust to the diet initially, her parents were convinced it was working. Her father noted her belly was less bloated, she had more regular bowel movements (she took a laxative every day prior to the keto diet), and she communicated better.

“She’s able to concentrate, and she’s able to progress, because she’s not running all over the place and she’s not seizing,” her doctor says in the film. “Her seizures are going down, and we have tangible data from the school. We are actually starting to wean her off of the anti-convulsory narcotic that she’s on.”

Keto guidelines, according to “The Magic Pill”

The people profiled followed a diet based on keto principles. These include:

Eat whole and organic foods
Eliminate processed foods, dairy, grains, and legumes
Edge out bad fats (vegetable oils) with healthy fats (olive and coconut oils, animal fats, eggs, and avocados)
Aim to consume free-range animals and wild caught seafood
Introduce bone broths, organ meats, fermented foods, and intermittent fasting into your diet

The keto diet: backed up by science

While the keto diet is touted for its fat-burning effects, there’s growing evidence that it can help a range of diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.

“Being in a mild state of ketosis is really the place to be,” neurologist David Perlmutter says in the film, adding that fat powers the brain better than carbs do.

According to recent Bulletproof Radio (iTunes) podcast episode guest Kris Smith, MD, a top neurosurgeon who specializes in brain tumors at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, “I really think the ketogenic diet is going to be…part of that magic bullet, the holy grail of treating people with this disease.”

Critics fire back

Australian Medical Association (AMA) president Michael Gannon slammed the film, calling it “hurtful, harmful and mean.”

“The idea that a high-fat diet can change a child’s behavior in a month is just so patently ridiculous… and yet the reality is the parents of autistic children are so desperate they will reach for anything,” he told The Daily Telegraph. The AMA has called chef and filmmaker Evans to task before for his “extreme” health advice.

Some of the film’s criticism stems from confusion: News outlets covering the film have called the keto diet a paleo diet. While keto has paleo principles, keto is definitively high-fat, though not necessarily high-protein like paleo. Too much protein converts to glucose in the body, which takes you out of ketosis.

How to make your Bulletproof diet keto-friendly

If you’re interested in a Bulletproof version of the keto diet, follow these five steps:

Skip the carb refeed day. Bulletproof is a cyclical keto diet that puts your body in and out of ketosis once a week, to make the diet more sustainable and prevent common issues like dry eyes, cravings, and even unhealthy gut bacteria levels. But if you want to try full keto, increase your fat and limit your carbs. Aim for 70-85% of your calories from fat, every day.
Remember that it might take up to two weeks for your body to make the shift from burning carbs and sugar to fat. The keto flu can leave you feeling tired, achy, and irritable, but it should pass. Stay the course and you should soon feel better than before you started. Read Your Definitive Guide to Conquering the Keto Flu.
Monitor your ketone levels using urine strips, ketone breath meters, or blood meters.
Be mindful of hidden carbs in sources like Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cashews, chocolate, and leeks. Use a food tracker like MyKeto until you get clear on how much fat/carbs/protein you’re actually eating.
Watch your protein intake. It’s common for people on keto to consume too much meat. More than 20-30% protein in your diet, and your body will begin to convert protein to sugar, which bumps you out of ketosis. Go for moderate protein with a high-fat sauce of your choice to tide you over.

Cancer-linked Weedkiller Glyphosate Found in Common Foods, Says New Report

May 2, 2018 by Team Asprey

The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) reportedly found traces of glyphosate, the active ingredient commonly used in herbicide products like Roundup, in a variety of foods, including crackers and granola, according to internal emails obtained by The Guardian through a Freedom of Information Act request. Glyphosate, which kills off weeds without killing crops, presents numerous health risks to consumers[ref url=”https://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12302-016-0070-0″], including celiac disease[ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24678255″], hormone disruption[ref url=”https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0300483X09003047″], and even cancer[ref url=”https://www.thelancet.com/action/showFullTextImages?pii=S1470-2045%2815%2970134-8″]. Learn what the Guardian reported on the FDA findings, as well as how to protect yourself from glyphosate and detox from it.

Internal emails reveal glyphosate is in a variety of common foods

The FDA has been testing glyphosate in food samples for the past two years but hasn’t released any official reports, according to The Guardian.

In an internal email dated January 2017, FDA chemist Richard Thompson wrote to colleagues: “I have brought wheat crackers, granola cereal, and cornmeal from home and there’s a fair amount in all of them.” Broccoli was the only food he found to be free of glyphosate.

Another FDA chemist, Narong Chamkasem, found “over-the-tolerance” (6.5 parts per million) levels of glyphosate in corn — the legal limit is 5.0 ppm. Normally, illegal levels are reported to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). However, in a separate email from an FDA supervisor to an EPA official, it was noted the corn was not considered an “official sample.”

An FDA spokesman told The Guardian that the agency did not find any illegal glyphosate levels in corn, soy, milk or eggs — the four foods of their “special assignment.” He didn’t speak to the unofficial findings contained in the emails.

The FDA will release its official findings later this year or in early 2019, since reports are typically released at least two years after the data is collected, according to the Guardian.

Glyphosate in the US and Europe

In this Bulletproof Radio (iTunes) podcast episode, Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Stephanie Seneff, PhD, said glyphosate is hard to avoid since it’s everywhere. In fact, annual use of glyphosate in the US exceeds 200 million pounds, according to the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know[ref url=”https://usrtk.org/pesticides/not-just-for-corn-and-soy-a-look-at-glyphosate-use-in-food-crops/”]. “There’s glyphosate in the air, in the rain, on the fields next door. [You] can’t avoid it, so you’re not going to be glyphosate-free in this country, unless you’re in some wilderness area and living off of local animals, remote from any civilization.” Meanwhile, despite a petition from more than 1 million EU citizens, Europe voted last year to reauthorize the pesticide for another five years.

How to limit glyphosate exposure

Although it’s hard to avoid glyphosate completely, there are steps you can take to minimize your exposure and flush the controversial herbicide from your system.

Eat organic

The foundation of a Bulletproof Diet is organic food, which helps you steer clear of environmental toxins like glyphosate. An organic diet rooted in sustainable farming practices doesn’t allow for chemicals in soil and water. For a vibrant body and mind, do your best to keep glyphosate out of your food, away from your skin, and clear of your soil.

5 steps to glyphosate detoxification

Since it’s nearly impossible to avoid glyphosate entirely these days – even if you do eat organic most of the time — knowing how to detox from it is key. These steps not only help you to detox from glyphosate, but they also help repair gut lining damage from the chemical.

Take activated charcoal. After eating a meal with questionable ingredients, take one to two charcoal pills to help your body bind and excrete any possible toxins.
Drink water. Your liver, kidneys, and skin will thank you if you keep them hydrated. Water helps them do their job to excrete chemicals from your body, so drink up.
Eat a high-fat diet of undamaged fats. Glyphosate irritates your gut and causes unnatural gut permeability. A high-fat, low-carb, low-sugar diet is key to gut health, so learn more about how to restore your gut with diet.
Support bile flow and heal your gut. Try Restore, a soil-derived supplement designed to support the health of your intestinal walls that are damaged by glyphosate exposure.
Buy organic as much as possible, though get to know which conventional produce carries the highest toxic loads. Review EWG’s 2018 Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce.

Build Better Muscle Memory, Faster

May 2, 2018 by Team Asprey

Silly as it sounds, your muscles have an amazing capacity to remember. Let’s say you’re weight training and you take some time off. Days or even weeks later, you get back into the gym and fall right back into your groove. Your muscles respond positively to the weights, as if they’re on autopilot. After a few days of training, you might even lift more than you could previously.

Muscle memory, a type of motor learning called procedural memory, happens in the brain, of course. Through the act of repetition, your brain cements that action into its neural pathways so that the movement becomes second nature. It’s the science behind why you never forget how to ride a bike. Even if you haven’t pedaled in decades, your brain remembers which muscles to fire next. With enough practice, you shift from conscious activity to automatic movement.

Likewise, your muscles retain core information. However, if you want your muscle to grow, you must continue to challenge them. Muscular adaptation, or the increase in muscle strength due to lifting a heavier load is shown to be common to every human being[ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1827108″]. Study after study reports that muscle cells gained through training sessions are not lost if training stops for up to three months[ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20713720″][ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18440990″]. Instead, when training resumes, your muscles grow more rapidly because you’ve already built muscle cells from your previous workout sessions.

Well, your brain works in a similar fashion when learning new skills. Though it takes mindful concentration to learn a new skill. While experts don’t necessarily agree on how long it takes to master a new skill, in the book “Outliers: The Story of Success,” Malcolm Gladwell asserts that it takes 10,000 hours or nearly 10 years.However, much like building a new muscle, there are some hacks you can take to expedite the process.

In fact, if you want to train your brain to play the piano, swing a golf club, or even practice archery, Daniel Chao, co-founder and CEO of Halo Neuroscience, has a new technique which primes the brain to drastically reduce how long it takes to master skills.

In a recent Bulletproof Radio (iTunes) podcast episode, Chao explained how his wearable device called Halo Sport delivers electrical stimulation to your brain to build muscle memory faster. Worn before or during practice, the headset sends electrical currents into the brain’s motor cortex — the area that controls movement — and puts neurons into a state of heightened receptivity. This helps your brain and muscles work together more efficiently.

The process, called neuropriming, builds brain plasticity[ref url=”https://elifesciences.org/articles/02798″] – that’s what enables your mind and body to work together. Double-blind trials with the U.S. ski team show the Halo can build skill faster and even improve muscle strength.

Intrigued to test out Halo Sport for himself, Dave met up with Chao for a series of physical exercises that Dave had never done before. To see how Dave did under neurostimulation, watch the video above.

Even if you don’t have access to external stimulation like the Halo Sport to activate your brain’s circuitry, you can still improve your ability to learn new skills simply by challenging it. Tomorrow, try driving a different way to work or brush your teeth with your non-dominant hand. By doing so, you’ll set yourself up to problem solve and creatively find solutions toward mastery. As these activities trigger your brain to expand with possibility, much like training your muscles, your mind (and muscles) adapt to the challenges and grow. So keep building that brain plasticity and you’ll reap rewards for years to come.

Use This Guided Meditation to Clear Your Mind and Find Happiness

April 27, 2018 by Team Asprey

Meditation, the practice of focusing your attention on your breath, a fixed point, or a phrase (called a mantra), helps eliminate stressful and distracting thoughts, so you can be present, calmer, and more aware of your surroundings. From this place of clarity, you connect more easily to the present, instead of dwelling on the past or worrying about the future. This kind of mindfulness practice has been shown to bolster happiness by reducing negative thinking.

Guided meditation, a particular form of meditation in which someone else leads you through a visualization or breathing exercise, helps to get you into the practice and remain focused, particularly if you’re new to it.

The benefits of meditation abound, as there are nearly 3,000 studies demonstrating its powerful effects on the mind and body. Here are some of the most intriguing findings of meditation:

Reduces anxiety[ref url=”https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/da.21964″]
Treats depression[ref url=”https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/248807.php”]
Increases concentration[ref url=”https://www.psyn-journal.com/article/S0925-4927%2810%2900288-X/abstract”]
Improves attention to detail under stress[ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1361002/]”]
Increases threshold for pain[ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3090218/”]
Benefits memory recall[ref url=”https://psychcentral.com/news/2013/06/23/meditations-effects-on-emotion-shown-to-persist/56372.html”]
Fosters creativity[ref url=”https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00116/full”]

To learn how to meditate or even deepen your practice, check out this free guided meditation with Barry Morguelan, MD, a double-board certified gastroenterologist and internal medicine doctor, who believes in the healing efficacy of mindfulness practices. As Morguelan articulates in a recent Bulletproof Radio (iTunes) podcast episode, you can use the increased energy gained from this particular meditation to set clear and intentional goals afterward. If you are ready to start now, turn off the lights, get comfortable, close your eyes, and dive inside.

Guided meditation video above, the audio-only version below.

Viral Comedian Ali Spagnola Says More Women Should Be Biohacking

April 27, 2018 by Team Asprey

Ali Spagnola, a musician and performer known for her viral videos that give fans so much to laugh about, has a fabulous daily habit. Every morning, without fail, she makes Bulletproof Coffee while she calls her mom. Some days may be more chit-than-chat, though they talk regardless.

Two years ago, Spagnola moved to Los Angeles and proclaimed she’d be an online artist. She began with the goal of publishing one musical performance video online every Thursday. She hasn’t missed a day yet, and now posts twice a week. Her content includes livestreams of her performances as well as livestreams of her entire day. Spagnola commits to making art daily and professes that her love for creating and making people laugh reward her most.

Spagnola is also her own personal health guru. She loves Olympic lifting to the point where she’s sworn off cardio entirely. When she hits the gym, she heads straight for the big weights. To that end, Spagnola believes that finding the right answer to your health goal is a personal quest. “You really need to try things out until your body responds to figure out your own formula.”

If you didn’t guess, Spagnola is an ardent biohacker and believes there’s a place for women in what some people perceive to be a boys’ clubs. “Women are taught to absolutely avoid fat. I was living a life of only protein and carbs and eating a lot of carrots to get my vegetables in. But the belief that fat is bad for you is absolutely not true,” says Spagnola.

With a high-fat diet as her mainstay, Spagnola works all morning on her creative endeavors and works out in the afternoons. When it comes to what allows her to get through her days with all that vigor and zest, Spagnola tips her hat to Bulletproof Coffee.

Why The Secret To Weight Loss Could Lie In Your Genes — And How To Unlock It

April 26, 2018 by Team Asprey

If you’ve tried in vain to shed extra pounds, you can blame the struggle on your parents. A growing body of evidence[ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3884103/”] shows that your parents’ exposure to environmental toxins called obesogens can influence your own ability to lose weight. These chemicals can be passed down in the genes for generations.

What are obesogens?

Obesogens — also known as endocrine disruptors — are chemicals that increase fat, slow your metabolism, and change your hunger signals.[ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4297575/”][ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4101898/”]

Obesogens are everywhere, and can be found in plastics, pesticides, cosmetics, and in tap water.

Obesogens and weight loss resistance

In a recent Bulletproof Radio (iTunes) podcast episode, Dave chatted with Dan Pompa, PSC.D, who practices pastoral medicine, an alternative, Bible-based approach to health care. Pompa talks about “generational toxicity” — when you inherit obesogens and other so-called “physical toxins” from your mother. It’s part of a larger phenomenon known as transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, when information in the genes is passed between generations.

Pompa believes this bodily toxicity is to blame for inflammatory conditions, including weight loss resistance. “The reason why people struggle to lose weight today — it’s a hormone issue — but then we have to back up and say, ‘What’s disrupting the hormones?’ Toxins are definitely the number one thing.”

How obesogens impact your genes

Obesogens are transferred from one generation to the next at the cellular level.[ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25253098″] The chemicals latch onto your DNA and turn your genes on or off like a switch. [ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4297575/”] Obesogen exposure can also occur in the womb.

“When animals are exposed prenatally to these chemicals, their metabolism is reprogrammed so that even if they are never exposed again in their lives, they gain weight,” said Bruce Blumberg, associate professor of developmental and cell biology at the University of California, Irvine, in a review by the National Cancer Institute. “Even with normal diet and normal exercise, they become obese.”[ref url=”https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/99/11/835/2544314″]

The 4 most common obesogens you need to know about

Bisphenol-A (BPA): A synthetic compound found in plastics like baby bottles, plastic food and beverage containers, and metal food cans, BPA leads to weight gain and obesity even with low-grade exposure.[ref url=”https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935111001435″]
Phthalates: These chemicals make plastics soft and are found in food containers, shower curtains, paint, toys, and beauty products. Like BPAs, phthalates affect your body’s hormone balance and lead to weight gain.[ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14715905″] Specifically, phthalates affect hormone receptors known as PPARs that regulate metabolism.[ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19433246″] High phthalate levels in the body are linked to increased waist circumference.[ref url=”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27822670″]
Atrazine: A widely-used herbicide, atrazine disrupts the endocrine system. Chronic exposure leads to a decreased metabolic rate – the baseline rate of caloric burn doing sedentary, daily activities — and increased abdominal obesity.[ref url=”http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0005186″] Exposure to tributyltin in the womb increases the number of fat cells too.[ref url=”http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0005186″]
Perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS): These compounds are found in fast-food wrappers, non-stick pots and pans, textile coatings, and even paper. One study[ref url=”http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002502″] found that people with the highest PFAS levels had lower resting metabolic rate. The researchers also found that people with the highest levels of PFAS in their bloodstream had the hardest time keeping weight off after dieting.

How you can rid your body of inherited obesogens

During the podcast, Pompa said he believes there’s a key to tackling the obesogens that linger inside you from your parents’ genes: Fix yourself on a cellular level. He suggests a deep cleansing to heal, which he calls the 5R’s of True Cellular Detox and Healing:

R1: Remove the source. Determine which toxic sources cause damage to you and remove them. (Refer to the obesogens above for a kickstart on this step, then get tested to see what you toxins you may have inherited from your parents, like mercury or lead, that you still need to address.)

R2: Regenerate the cell membrane. The cell membrane turns genes on and off and regulates hormones. If the lipid bilayer of the cell membrane shuts down, the entire cell deteriorates. As the cell membrane is fat-based, consuming good fats regenerates it. This includes saturated fats with cholesterol such as grass-fed animal protein and healthy oils like coconut oil.

R3: Restore cellular energy. Akin to the gasoline of a car, nothing functions without cellular energy — cells aren’t able to detoxify naturally. Your mitochondria — the energy production centers in your cells — need energy to produce ATP. Without it, weight gain and numerous other side effects ensue. Here’s how to upgrade your mitochondria and restore cellular energy with sleep, exercise, and supplements.

R4: Reduce cellular inflammation. Inflammation impacts the way cells communicate, detox, and express good or bad genes. Dietary sugars and grains, bad fats that corrode at high heating temperatures, and any number of environmental chemicals, like those listed above, inflame your body at a cellular level. To combat this inflammatory onslaught, you can kick yourself into high gear with autophagy, a detox process that cleans out damaged cells and regenerate new ones.

R5: Re-establish methylation. Methylation is a biochemical process that turns good genes on and bad genes off. It’s also responsible for removing environmental toxins from your body. Read more about how to reconfigure your methylation process with supplements and diet here.

How to avoid obesogen exposure in your daily life

While it may seem that obesogens are too common to avoid, there are steps you can take to limit your exposure.

Eat pesticide-free fruit and vegetables. Avoid foods and beverages stored in plastic containers.
Reduce your overall use of plastics. Opt for stainless steel or high-quality aluminum water bottles. Use glass bottles for babies. Don’t ever put plastics in the microwave, causing them to leach.
Use ceramic non-stick pots and pans instead of non-stick cookware. Keep in mind the ceramics should not be heated above 450 degrees.
Buy furniture that hasn’t been treated with chemical flame retardants.
Use organic, fragrance-free cosmetics.

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