Why you should listen –
Your blood is trying to tell you something, and if you want to live longer and be healthier, you should listen to it. Dave welcomes Oz Garcia to the podcast this week. A nutritionist to the rich & famous, who will reveal the hundreds of messages hidden in your blood. Oz gives his valuable insight into the new tests and technology that are revolutionizing new nutritional guidelines and therapies that are not only helping people live longer and healthier, but also warning us about the deadly diseases and health issues lurking in the shadows of our bodies.
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Dave Asprey: You’re listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. This is a interview I’m conducting live in-person with a good friend, and before we get there, though, you know you want your cool fact of the day. So here’s the cool fact of the day: every 28 days your skin renews itself. You’re losing like 40,000 skin cells a minute: ah! There goes one right now. And that means that you can actually cause relatively rapid changes in how you look based on what you do with your skin.
Today’s interview is with Dr. Oz Garcia, who is a … it’s hard to say, ’cause you do a lot of stuff. You’re one of the original biohackers. You had debilitating migraines many years ago, you’re a nutritionist, and you treat Fortune 500 CEOs and celebrities and models and oligarchs and all the incredibly influential people, and they come in, ’cause you do stuff with intravenous nutrition that’s-
Dr. Oz Garcia: Correct.
Dave Asprey: That’s unheard of. Every time I come to New York, I come and I get an IV from you, ’cause you always have the latest stuff. How did you find that? During today’s show, you want to watch this one on YouTube, go to the bulletproof.com/youtube to find the channel, I’m actually getting an IV of Dr. Oz’s special stuff. They’re going to put the needle in and do the IV while I’m talking because well-
Dr. Oz Garcia: That’s correct.
Dave Asprey: [crosstalk 00:01:31] so much time. I’m about to head to Men’s Health for an interview after this, so we’re going to fit in an IV treatment and an interview and I just get to pick your brain and share some cool stuff.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Terrific!
Dave Asprey: All right, so let’s get a needle in.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Now first we’re going to draw your blood.
Dave Asprey: You’re going to have to get some blood first.
Dr. Oz Garcia: What we’re doing, [inaudible 00:01:47] be drawing your blood.
Dave Asprey: Getting some labs here.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Correct. And then we’re going to be doing the IV with the same needle in your arm.
Dave Asprey: Beautiful.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Okay?
Dave Asprey: And if you’re needle phobic, well, you’re not going to get much detail on that. It’ll just be a little blurry on the camera. We’re not going to do the zoom in on it.
Dr. Oz Garcia: You can also cover the nutrients and ingredients that are going into the IV so your audience knows exactly what you get.
Speaker 3: Make a fist, please.
Dave Asprey: Make a fist? All right. I thought you said make a face. I was going to grimace. I have the world’s biggest veins, they’re like-
Dr. Oz Garcia: No, they’re terrific.
Dave Asprey: Pipes, so every time phlebotomists see me at the grocery store they come over and want to, like, poke my elbows.
Dr. Oz Garcia: One of the things that we like to do, Dave, with our blood work, is drill really deep. So we’re going to capture an enormous amount of information, which you typically wouldn’t get with your doctor. In a way, what I’m going to do is x-ray your blood. So I get a lot of metrics in terms of what’s going on with your body. I can measure the rate of wear and tear, that’s one of the more critical things, through hormone levels, and in large measure the proportion and ratios of hormones, one to the other. So, the blood work and the way that we do it is a great revelation as to how your body is aging. I think that’s one of the more terrific things that we do, which you’re not going to get with most doctors.
Dave Asprey: Yeah, it’s unheard of … most of the time you go in, they have a standard panel. I go to the GP in Canada where I live, it’s like, “Well, there’s a standard test.” But they’re looking at really old metrics, not using labs that really tell you the nuances.
Dr. Oz Garcia: No, they’re not. They’re going to look at a CBC, a comprehensive blood count, they’re going to do a SMA, which is an SMA, standard medical analysis, they’ll do your cholesterol, and get a cursory look at what’s going on. For most people, it’s good enough, but for individuals who are interested in the distinctions that you’re interested in, and I am, you’ve got to go this deep.
Dave Asprey: I’m going to live to At least 180.
Dr. Oz Garcia: I’m going with you.
Dave Asprey: I don’t think that’s impossible. In fact, Peter Diamandis was just saying the other day that for every year you live, we’re adding a year to the possible lifespan right now. So people say that sounds crazy … a hundred years ago, we didn’t have cars, really.
Dr. Oz Garcia: A hundred years ago you wouldn’t live. You’d be lucky if you lived to 45. That was the average lifespan for a male in America.
Dave Asprey: Yeah.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Right? And a hundred years ago, women would barely make it to 30. They would die in childbirth often enough. We’ve come remarkable far in all those ways. We’ll make it 180 if we can avoid an accident along the way. In fact, that’s the biggest threat to life extension.
Dave Asprey: I’m going to piss off some listeners here, but one of my biggest life extension strategies is, I drive a heavy pickup truck. I’m sorry, physics is your friend and I like hybrids and all that stuff, but let me just tell you, I’m five out of five on every safety thing because of mass.
Dr. Oz Garcia: You got it, you know. That’s the most important thing. Some of the better studies that have been done on life extension, as you know, on different animals. One has been done on a species of a mouse-like creatures that lives in the Carolinas. There’s an island-
Dave Asprey: Is that the politicians, or … ?
Dr. Oz Garcia: They should talk about accident [inaudible 00:05:29] for heaven’s sakes. But as it turns out, we have an island off on the Carolinas, and just like in the Galapagos, you have a large population of this particular mammal that lives there, and they live extremely long lives, this particular kind of mammal, because there are no predators that would go after them. The same species of animals, in terms of living in the Carolinas, on land, have much shorter lifespans because they live with a higher amount of cortisol, avoiding being consumed, so what we do want to do is avoid accidents at all means possible.
Dave Asprey: Well it sounds like for this kind of animal, they’re living longer ’cause they’re less stressed.
Dr. Oz Garcia: That’s correct.
Dave Asprey: In addition to not getting eaten, which is bad for you.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Exactly!
Dave Asprey: I’m going to pause here for a second. It looks like we’ve got seven or eight vials of blood for the labs. I’m going to run some advanced hormone panels and things.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Please.
Dave Asprey: And let’s see if I can hold that up to the camera without dropping it. Come on camera, follow me. There were go. And now we’re putting some pink fluid from a giant needle into my arm. What am I getting?
Dr. Oz Garcia: Now, this is what we would call a push, as opposed to an IV. An IV would be hanging off a pole for instance, and the amount of time to deliver an IV would be about 45 minutes to an hour and a half. In a push, which is what this is, we’ve been able to economize a number of things. The number of nutrients that I can get into you within a very short period of time, in about 10-15 minutes I can get glutathione into you, about 10-15,000 milligrams of Vitamin C, N-acetyl cysteine, which I hope your listeners know the value of-
Dave Asprey: Yeah.
Dr. Oz Garcia: We’ve been able to compound artichoke, so we’ve got sterile artichoke, phenomenal for your liver-
Dave Asprey: Liver detox, okay.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Specifically, we’ve got sterile licorice, the original studies go back I’d say about 25-30 years to Japan, of all places-
Dave Asprey: This is Twizzlers, just going in? What does licorice do [inaudible 00:07:41]
Dr. Oz Garcia: It’s one of the best anti-inflammatories in the world. We’ve got resveratrol, we’ve got quercetin, we’ve got DMA, we’ve got acetyl-L carnitine, we’ve got piracetam, so you’re getting-
Dave Asprey: Hang on one second there. IV piracetam. So people who listen to Bulletproof Radio a lot know I’ve been taking piracetam or its sister, aniracetam, for over 15 years.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Aniracetam we love.
Dave Asprey: You’re the only guy who does intravenous piracetam, and you feel like a great golden god for three days. I’m interviewing Ariana Huffington this afternoon, going to her Thrive Global pop-up-
Dr. Oz Garcia: Tell her I say hello! I’ve taken care of Ariana.
Dave Asprey: Oh, beautiful. I love Ariana. And so I just love that my brain’s going to be so on for that, so thanks. I didn’t realize you put piracetam in this.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Remarkable!
Dave Asprey: That’s cool.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Remarkable. And then we’ll do some very basic things too. We use some bicarbonate, magnesium citrate, and just to kind of top it all off, a little bit of B-12.
Dave Asprey: So when we first met about three, four years ago, I went to this really cool dinner party that was put on by a mutual friend, and I met you for the first time. I was losing my voice.
Dr. Oz Garcia: I recall, yeah.
Dave Asprey: Really intense travel schedule.
Dr. Oz Garcia: You were in really bad shape, yeah.
Dave Asprey: And you were like, “Dave. Come to my office tomorrow.” And you gave me sterile sea water in an IV, and you brought my voice back, you brought my brain back, because I had a big talk at an autism conference, it was just a brutal schedule.
Dr. Oz Garcia: I remember! You were promoting your book.
Dave Asprey: You saved me. You saved me with these IVs. They’re really powerful things.
Dr. Oz Garcia: They are, and not to oversell them, but you’re able to accomplish a great deal with things that interest you, like living to 180 years of age. It is one hell of a bio pack, I’ll tell you that.
Dave Asprey: How did you get into IVs? You’ve been doing this for longer than almost anyone else I can think of.
Dr. Oz Garcia: We’ve been doing IVs now for close to 25 years, maybe a little bit longer. I learned about IVs originally from a really brilliant naturopath, he’s passed away now, Sydney [Saffron 00:09:43] back in the 1980s. Sydney was one of the few naturopaths in New York doing IVs in the early 1980s, when you didn’t have flexitubes and hardly any of the ingredients that we now have available, and I started getting them, they helped me a lot, and little by little over the years, we began to refine them.
Also with the advent of compounding pharmacies, which did not exist in the 80s, once compounding pharmacies started to come into their own in the 1990s we were able to work with them to actually say, “Hey, can you do this for me? Can you put this together? What about quercetin, you know, for its anti-inflammatory effects?” And bit by bit, we’ve been able to put together a repertoire, a portfolio, of different nutrients that go into IVs over the course of about two and a half decades. So this is something that you’re rarely going to find anywhere else.
Dave Asprey: It’s been transformative. I did my first IV with EDTA and then DMSA. EDTA-
Dr. Oz Garcia: Beautiful.
Dave Asprey: I had high lead, but more importantly, high mercury, but my blood was so sticky, that I had a … This is when I was a beast in Silicon Valley. I had kind of a gray complexion, and I did EDTA one time, and my skin turned pink instead of gray. It was remarkable. So I started doing vitamin C. This was almost 20 years ago.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Correct.
Dave Asprey: It’s like going from black and white, back then, to what you’re doing is like 3D multicolor TV, ’cause you’ve got ingredients that … what are the … For people listening, in their-
Dr. Oz Garcia: Sure.
Dave Asprey: Most of them have never tried IV nutrients at all. And this is, compared to the cost of a massage, this is better investment.
Dr. Oz Garcia: I would think so, yeah.
Dave Asprey: You’re a very high-end, very unusual things, but in most cities in the country, it’s a couple hundred bucks in order to do this.
Dr. Oz Garcia: That’s correct.
Dave Asprey: And of course if you’re right next to Central Park here in New York, it’s always going to [crosstalk 00:11:41] thing. [crosstalk 00:11:41] Yeah, and also you have exclusive formulas and you deal with celebrities, but the impact on people is strong. Where do you see this going? You’re at the very leading edge of this thing. Do you think IV nutrients are going to become mainstream soon?
Dr. Oz Garcia: I got to be very fair about this. You know, I don’t think this is a very democratic treatment protocol.
Dave Asprey: Yeah.
Dr. Oz Garcia: I would hope that in time, as the nutrients become more affordable, certainly for us, you can get a fair exchange of value, and bring it to the masses. There are IVs that I think people would benefit from that don’t have to be so exotic and so novel in terms of all the nutrients I [crosstalk 00:12:27] to them. Those we also have too. If somebody’s getting sick, for instance, coming down with the flu, really bad cold, we’ve already crafted an IV that’s perfect to get your immune system working, like [crosstalk 00:12:42]. There’s a version of that which is a lot less complex, and I think much more affordable.
Where I see things going in terms of IVs is, it’s probably going to stay more or less like this, it’s going to be available to people that can afford a premium because they’re looking for something unique and is going to give them the kind of performance that you’re just not going to get by getting vitamin C with B complex, like the old-day Myers Cocktails, for instance. We’ve left Myers Cocktails in the dust by two decades and a half.
Dave Asprey: So the Myers Cocktail is the standard thing. You get that at most IV places.
Dr. Oz Garcia: That’s correct.
Dave Asprey: And it’s still … B vitamins and vitamin C going in, it’s a lot better than taking a multivitamin.
Dr. Oz Garcia: I would totally agree.
Dave Asprey: But this is another level there, and part of my job at Bulletproof is to find the stuff, find the experts, and then increase demand so much that the supply comes up. So maybe we can democratize this just because more people go to the doctor and say, “You’re only giving me vitamin C and vitamin B? Like, come on. Step up your game! Give Oz a call!” Or whatever the right way to do it is.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Exactly.
Dave Asprey: What about the regulatory side? These are nutrients, not drugs, that are going in, but it’s a drug delivery … it’s a needle, the FDA believes that they should have control over that.
Dr. Oz Garcia: That’s fair.
Dave Asprey: Do you think that’s an impediment to adoption, or is that actually helping to protect people? What’s the regulatory side of this [crosstalk 00:14:17]
Dr. Oz Garcia: I’ll be very frank with you. I think that it does protect people. You know, we stay within all the guidelines that New York boards require, and we won’t go outside of them. There’s some nutrients I’d love to have here, that would go into an IV, that you just can’t have in New York state.
Dave Asprey: What’s an example of one of those?
Dr. Oz Garcia: Let me think for a minute. Not MSM, something similar to it.
Dave Asprey: One of those sulfur compounds?
Dr. Oz Garcia: You’re going to have to give me a second-
Dave Asprey: No problem.
Dr. Oz Garcia: [inaudible 00:14:53] in here. But there are certain nutrients that we just cannot use at all.
Dave Asprey: Because New York has weird laws about vitamins and lab tests.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Exactly, with lab testing. There are certain saliva tests that we can’t do here. You can’t do hair biopsies in New York, which is unfortunate.
Dave Asprey: There’s a certain medical freedom thing that New York state actually pisses me off, and I used to run a lab testing company years ago with my wife-
Dr. Oz Garcia: Okay.
Dave Asprey: [inaudible 00:15:16] we did immune response to metal implants. So if people were allergic to titanium, you get that in your hip and you’re allergic, you’ll be inflamed for the rest of your life.
Dr. Oz Garcia: By the way I just thought of some of the things-
Dave Asprey: Oh cool.
Dr. Oz Garcia: That you can’t do in New York.
Dave Asprey: So the problem is: New York has weird laws. And my belief here, is like, “It’s my data. It’s my biology. It- I have a fundamental right, like an inalienable right, to know what’s going on in my body.” And anytime anyone says that they have a right to stop me from having data about how I’m functioning-
Dr. Oz Garcia: That’s correct.
Dave Asprey: It’s like, “You are my enemy!” You are a bad person if you want to do that to someone. So whoever wrote those laws, those are people who have no business writing laws.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Well, New York state is one of two states, I forget which is the other one, where the regulations are extremely high in terms of what you can and can’t do. It would be great if we could have, like I said, hair testing, for a number of things, for heavy metal testing: you can’t do that in New York state. You have to go to Connecticut, get your hair done there, go to Philadelphia, do it in Miami, and that’s really too bad, because when that test is available, you can get a really quick look at how much mercury’s your body carrying, how much lead do you got, how much arsenic you got, how much formaldehyde is in your tissue. And that’s a very unfortunate thing that we cannot have that here because hair tests are highly regulated.
Dave Asprey: It’s something that I hope will change, and some of the new blood spot testing is becoming really interesting, where you don’t need a doctor in New York to recommend it, you can get a test kit, you can prick your finger-
Dr. Oz Garcia: That you can do now.
Dave Asprey: And you can do that and it doesn’t matter if the New York state doesn’t like it.
Dr. Oz Garcia: That’s correct.
Dave Asprey: Do it anyway.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Exactly. Well we found that out also with Biophysical250. Here you have a remarkable blood test that will give you 250 very unique panels and for long time we couldn’t get that test in New York. You could not collect the blood here and send it out, so it was unfortunate because the data that you would get from that was terrific. Talk about drilling deep: the genetic information that you got from Biophysical250 would give you so much in terms of how you could craft your eating, your practice and so on. We now found a way around it, and we’re able to get that data, and again, contributes a lot to the well-being of our clients.
Dave Asprey: It’s a huge thing. So recommendation for everyone listening: getting basic lab tests. Even if you’re mid-20s, you want to get your baselines.
Dr. Oz Garcia: You got to, yeah.
Dave Asprey: What would you say is most important for someone under 30 to get tested, assuming that they’re feeling okay but maybe not amazing all the time?
Dr. Oz Garcia: You know, I tend to err on the side of caution, so even with somebody under 30, I mean, depending on where they live, if they’re highly urbanized, if they’re working on Wall Street, if they’re a New York City Resident, I’m going to try and capture as much data as I can. So we toss out a big net, and see what comes in. So the test varies very little between somebody who’s 30 and somebody who’s 65, with the exception that, if you’re past 50, I’m going to look at all your cancer markers. I’ll likely not do that with somebody under 30.
Dave Asprey: The thing is, when you’re under 30, unless you’re-
Dr. Oz Garcia: Hormones, for sure, under 30, no matter what.
Dave Asprey: I gotta say, I never had healthy hormones under 30, but knowing what your 25 year old hormones look like, and that’s about a 300-400 dollar test for the [crosstalk 00:18:46] person.
Dr. Oz Garcia: That’s correct.
Dave Asprey: That data is precious, because when you’re 45, like I’ll be 45 next year, I want-
Dr. Oz Garcia: You’re a kid! I’m going to be 66 next month.
Dave Asprey: You don’t look anywhere near 66, Oz. If you guys get a chance to see him on the internet, on YouTube, you are an example of what 25 years of anti-aging does.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Thank you. Thank you.
Dave Asprey: Because it’s not like you just walk in, I’m young again. That’s hard, that’s expensive, and just difficult biologically-
Dr. Oz Garcia: That’s correct.
Dave Asprey: But if you prevent all these little cuts over time, you-
Dr. Oz Garcia: Exactly.
Dave Asprey: It’s much easier. But if you’re 45 or 65, and you know your 25 year old hormone levels, this is where I am where I’m young. So I want to maintain those hormone levels using a lifestyle, using supplements, and using hormone treatments if that’s useful.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Well, you know, what you’re finding with individuals under 30 years of age is so much disruption. And I don’t mean-
Dave Asprey: Yeah!
Dr. Oz Garcia: Within hormone levels. You get men with higher levels of estrogen.
Dave Asprey: I had tons! I had more than my mom when I was 26.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Unbelievable! And I could go on and on and on. Depleted levels of DHEA, [pregnenolone 00:19:54], in large measure because of the levels of stress that they’re under.
Dave Asprey: Yeah.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Consequentially, you’re battling with your weight, women, you’ll also get a fine high disruption with your hormones, contributing to, as you know, lots of problems with everything from PMS to fertility problems these days. So doing a hormone panel, I think, is critical at any age. Certainly under 30.
Dave Asprey: So you do a hormone panel. What else would you recommend for someone like at a baseline? And the reason I’m asking is, when you’re under 30, you’re usually just building your career, you’re building your assets. When I was under 30, I’m spending, you know, 15% of my monthly budget … I was sick, and I was 300 pounds.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Got it. Wow.
Dave Asprey: And I was spending 15, even maybe sometimes 20% of my budget on tests, treatments, there’s a reason I spent half a million dollars on hacking myself, more than that now, probably. But I went through all this because, I’m like, “I feel like I’m old and my brain isn’t working and I want to continue being able to pay my bills, I won’t be able to work, so I’m- I’m gonna fix this, or I’m basically going to go broke trying.”
Dr. Oz Garcia: I got to tell you, you know, something as rudimentary as complete thyroid panel could’ve put any-
Dave Asprey: Yes!
Dr. Oz Garcia: Complete thyroid, you know, looking at thyroid antibodies, looking at reverse T3. You know, if you go to your doctor and you’re not feeling well, and your energy’s low and you’ve got problems with your moods and so on, I’m shocked at the number of individuals that will go see, let’s say, a psychopharmacologist because they’re not feeling well or they’re depressed or they’re anxious, and they won’t run a blood test, and if they do, they leave a thyroid panel out. And that’s really disturbing, because you’re going to find so often so many problems is the thyroid alone. A complete adrenal profile, a complete steroidal and adrenal panel, just so you can look at what’s going on with cortisol, what’s going on with norepinephrine, what’s going on with DHEA in particular. And like I said before with pregnenolone, from those panels alone, just from pregnenolone alone, you can tell the amount of pressure a person is under. And the rate at which they’re burning through their actual physical nutrient base from the amount of stress that they’re under.
Dave Asprey: It’s remarkable to do that, and I know people are always tracking, “How much of an investment am I going to make in my biology versus into my own car, or in my house, and you know, buying a ring for someone,” or whatever phase of life you’re in. I wish I had been less destructive when I was younger, and that I’d had more data when I was younger. I’m encouraging people to get started. And a lot of people listening, too, they’re like, “Okay, I’m already 50. Like, like what do I do now?” But you’re saying there’s these same set of panels. Do you have anything on your website … I write about panels on Bulletproof, but you have a different clinical perspective than I do, given that I’m not a clinician, I’m just biohacker. So do you have a list on your website of panels that are useful?
Dr. Oz Garcia: The list is in a [crosstalk 00:23:03]-
Dave Asprey: I can type out what you said. They’ll be a transcription, then.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Terrific. And I do think, you and I both know, the whole self-optimization movement, you can go crazy with that shit. You can measure just about any aspect of what’s going on with your biology, and keep refining inside of that. And we can go that far if we want to, but I think with this kind of blood test, you’re getting enough data, enough intelligence that you can optimize efficiently, without having to go to every aspect of how you sleep, and so on. And you can go that far. But the way that we’ve been able to interpret blood now, after almost four decades of looking at blood tests, well over 10,000 of them, the amount of information you can glean is really quite remarkable.
Dave Asprey: You can do so much with the data.
Dr. Oz Garcia: That’s right.
Dave Asprey: Now, one of the things that you do, because you’re a nutritionist, in the way you think about things … You have one of the most enviable vitamin collections over here, and this is what you use for your clients. So every time I come to New York, I come see Oz, and I always get an IV, and I always go in there and go, “That- that- you got something … I haven’t tried that one yet.” Some kind of Russian thing I hadn’t tried before.
And there aren’t a lot of people on earth … If you go to my house, it looks a lot like your vitamin thing in there. [crosstalk 00:24:39]
Dr. Oz Garcia: Got it. You should see my apartment.
Dave Asprey: So you have some amazing stuff, what are the types of supplements that you use on high end Wall Street, celebrity and movie star types? What are the big supplement recommendations, like nutritional recommendations that you make for them?
Dr. Oz Garcia: Let me see how I can put this together. I’m a big proponent of intermittent fasts. And let’s start there. [crosstalk 00:25:06] intermittent fasting now for about 20 years. No matter who I’m working with, whatever the problem may be, the concerns may be, at some point, that’s going to be built into their practices. I’m very high on mixing: tricking intermittent fasting out with moving into high ketosis, and then stabilizing. So it’s never about one way or another.
Dave Asprey: The cyclical stuff. The Bulletproof recommendations are very similar on that front, yeah.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Exactly. And I’ve learned a lot from you, and from a number of people that we both like and admire and have studied over the years. But intermittent fasting came to my attention through Ori Hofmekler almost 20 years ago.
Dave Asprey: He’s a great … you’ve been intermittent fasting a lot longer than I have, full credit there. The Bulletproof coffee hack is new. And Ori is one of the original guys who talk about how coffee and mTOR work, right?
Dr. Oz Garcia: That’s correct.
Dave Asprey: And do you want to talk about mTOR real quick? Listeners would probably [crosstalk 00:26:02]
Dr. Oz Garcia: I think mTOR is a game-changer.
Dave Asprey: So explain what it is.
Dr. Oz Garcia: You know, we’re looking at a kind of quasi-nutrient that has remarkable impact on the way that the body performs and it may have an impact on how long you may live. Very possibly, on the quality of your life, so long as you’re alive. We’re looking at mTOR now with studies on dogs, for heaven’s sakes, and the fact that it may extend the lives of your pets.
Dave Asprey: Speaking of dogs, where’s your dachshund?
Dr. Oz Garcia: Oh, he’s … I kept him home today. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to do this interview.
Dave Asprey: I was going to hold him up on the interview. We both have dachshunds, which is kind of cool.
Dr. Oz Garcia: He would be all over us. So, mTOR is coming into the picture now, as I get to know more about it, how it works better, and looking at the clinical data, you know, terribly impressive and very relevant.
Dave Asprey: One of the techniques that made a difference for me in just putting on more muscle and losing all the fat and all, is a million target of rapamycin, this strange compound-
Dr. Oz Garcia: Please.
Dave Asprey: And to build muscle, you need to have small amounts, small periods of high amounts of mTOR. So you want to have spikes in mTOR, but if you have mTOR high all the time you might get cancer.
Dr. Oz Garcia: That’s correct.
Dave Asprey: So it’s this weird thing, kind of like fasting: if you fast all the time, that’s called starvation. But if you do intermittent fasting, that’s a good thing. And so mTOR appears to be the same way.
Dr. Oz Garcia: mTOR has kind of a tipping point, you’re correct.
Dave Asprey: And the three things that push mTOR down, the way I think of it, and this is influenced by Ori, to be honest-
Dr. Oz Garcia: Please.
Dave Asprey: Is you can suppress mTOR by fasting, you can suppress it by exercise, and you can suppress it by coffee. And then as soon as your stop suppressing it, it bounds up, and that’s when you put on all the muscle. So you could do just one of those three things, but what if you did intermittent fasting, Bulletproof coffee, and then you exercised? ‘Cause then you suppress the hell out of this stuff, and it bounds really back, and you get more benefits in less time, and like, I’m lazy! Right? I call it mTOR stacking, but you’re obviously [crosstalk 00:28:17] as well.
Dr. Oz Garcia: No I love it, I love it. And also, too, when I do do my intermittent fasting … I’m Cuban, I mean, I’ve been a coffee drinker since I was a kid, I take periods of time off it because it also makes me a little bit nuts. But that being said, caffeine is something that I’m going to use when I’m doing intermittent fasting.
Dave Asprey: Yeah.
Dr. Oz Garcia: I do caffeine in some form or another almost every day anyway. But if you’re going through an 8-12 hour spell, an intermittent fast, you need caffeine. We were talking earlier about the different kinds of caffeine that are now available. One of our products, for instance, where we’ve kind of tricked it out, so it’s bit a smoother during the day, and you’re not spiking so much with the ups and downs of being on caffeine. But using, say, Bulletproof in the middle of the day where you’re up 5-5:30, you did your workout, maybe had your morning high-protein smoothie. We had a little conversation about beta-hydroxybutyrate: but let’s say that you want to use exogenous ketones. You get that out of the way in the morning, and you know you’re not going to have a meal until eight or nine that evening. I’m going to have caffeine during the day. And cup of Bulletproof in the afternoon, with … I’m going to skip the butter-
Dave Asprey: You put the Brain Octane in to get the BHP from the Brain Octane.
Dr. Oz Garcia: [crosstalk 00:29:40] I’m going to put the MCT oil in.
Dave Asprey: Well, you’re using Brain Octane though. Because MCT-
Dr. Oz Garcia: Exactly.
Dave Asprey: MCT’s a different compound.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Yes! Contribute!
Dave Asprey: No, it’s just its own … We’re getting our five-minute warning. MCT oil, there’s four different types of it, and most of the MCT out there, they’re putting in the cheap stuff that doesn’t raise ketones.
Dr. Oz Garcia: That’s correct.
Dave Asprey: So the Brain Octane raises ketones four times or sometimes five times higher than coconut oil, but it’s at least twice as high as MCT oil. It’s a big difference. [crosstalk 00:30:08]
Dr. Oz Garcia: Caprylic acid too.
Dave Asprey: That’s all that’s in it. [crosstalk 00:30:12] But caprylic acid blunts the effects. So people are putting lauric acid in there, which actually doesn’t raise ketones at all.
Dr. Oz Garcia: That I did not know.
Dave Asprey: Yeah, it’s a big problem, because I popularized MCT oil, so then they’re like, it’s legal to say this is MCT oil, even though it doesn’t have any effect on ketones in laboratory tests.
Dr. Oz Garcia: That’s incredible. I hope you guys are following this. The use of MCT oil on an intermittent fasting day is critical.
Dave Asprey: It is, except the MCT won’t raise the ketones, and it makes you poop on yourself.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Got it.
Dave Asprey: That’s why I switched to Brain Octane [crosstalk 00:30:46] from MCT oil.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Actually that’s what I meant.
Dave Asprey: Okay, cool.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Let’s be precise about that.
Dave Asprey: Yeah.
Dr. Oz Garcia: I’m going to use Brain Octane.
Dave Asprey: You do use … I know you have it in the vitamin cabinet back there.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Correct. I just grabbed it off the shelf.
Dave Asprey: Yeah. I do know that there are people out there buying generic MCT, but they get the runs, and they don’t get the ketones, and then they’re like, “It doesn’t work.” I’m like, “Well, you kind of have to do it right.”
Dr. Oz Garcia: Correct.
Dave Asprey: Sort of like if you stick a needle in your arm and pump in some vitamin C, and say, “I didn’t get all the benefits,” it’s like, “Yeah, you didn’t do it right.” So you’ve got some cool caffeine derivatives that you’re working with.
Dr. Oz Garcia: That’s correct.
Dave Asprey: That’s pretty cool. What about sleep? What’s your latest thinking on sleep?
Dr. Oz Garcia: You can’t get enough.
Dave Asprey: Okay. Enough, or enough quality?
Dr. Oz Garcia: You just can’t get enough. I mean, when you were talking about meeting Ariana Huffington, when I was working with her, her whole thing that actually I think may have moved her into this whole new space was the problems with sleep.
Dave Asprey: She really needed her sleep.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Yeah, and as you get older, you and I both know that different levels of brain nutrients are depleting, and your sleep can go off its rails. So unless you’re getting a good seven to eight hours of sleep you’re going to pay a higher price. We’ve worked very carefully with certain nutrients that you can kind of trick out and take before bedtime, even during the day, that make a tremendous difference in terms of your ability to stay asleep at night. With men too, as you get older, if you’re not taking care of your prostate, that’s getting you up every several hours, you’re peeing and that’s making you sleep poorly.
You’ve got to get your eight hour sleep, and you and I both know you’re going to get so many things that occur during a very dynamic period of your day, which is your night when you’re asleep. Memory consolidation occurs during sleep, levels of growth hormone that you’re producing, so eight hours no matter what. And I think finding out about the nutrients that’s going to work best for you: for some people it’s melatonin, for some people it’s cysteine, for some people it’s magnolia, for some people it’s any number of other things, even tumeric for some people works really well to help them sleep.
Dave Asprey: There’s a couple blog posts, if you google “Bulletproof sleep hacking,” I’ve written pretty much every ingredient that’s known to improve sleep is there. All right. We’re coming up on the amount of time that we have-
Dr. Oz Garcia: Okay.
Dave Asprey: And you’ve written four books on anti-aging, and I certainly have them on my shelf at home.
Dr. Oz Garcia: We’ve got a fifth coming up, and it will be an e-book the next time.
Dave Asprey: Okay cool.
Dr. Oz Garcia: It’s about what you and I are thinking about. It’s called, “How to be a Rock Star at 120.”
Dave Asprey: Nice. Well when that comes out, let me know, I’ll tell listeners about it.
Dr. Oz Garcia: It’s totally, totally inspired by Mick Jagger, at 72, having an eighth kid [inaudible 00:33:31]
Dave Asprey: You’re one of those kind of maverick guys who’s gone out there, you’ve found stuff that works, and you’ve applied it to some of the world’s elite performers, and you’ve done it for 25 years. And they keep coming back, because … I’m feeling the stuff that was in my IV right now, I’m feeling really good. I landed last night, we were out ’til almost 2 AM, at least I was up ’til 2 AM, because you land late, you’ve got to have dinner, and you’ve got to work on your presentations and all that.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Tell me about it.
Dave Asprey: So it’s pretty cool you’ve done all that. And based on all that knowledge, I want to ask you this question that’s in every interview.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Sure, go for it.
Dave Asprey: If someone came to you tomorrow, and they said, “Oz, I want to perform better at everything I do,” what are the three most important pieces of advice you’d have for me? What would you tell them?
Dr. Oz Garcia: Gosh. The first thing that comes to my mind is you’ve got to get fit. Being someone who’s going to turn 66 in less than a month now, and being a runner for over 40 years, four decades, I can’t imagine a life without being a runner, how it’s made me who I am. So I think number one is, you’ve got to find what’s going to work for you. You don’t have to be a runner, you don’t have to run the way that I do, you and I both know if you’re looking at Ben Ferguson or whoever’s out there talking about fitness, your 20 minutes a day is going to make a huge difference in terms of quality of life.
Second is sleep. Had you asked me this question 20 years ago, I would have completely jumped over sleep. There were often many times where I would do four hours, five hours, go to work, power through it, and maybe catch up on a weekend. Little did I know the price that I was paying. So I would say, secondarily, sleep.
Third is a bit more philosophical. You could say, it’s the quality of food that you eat, it’s what you eat, and so on, but I think having a means by which you can actually center yourself on a daily basis, a more existential perspective on yourself, on your life. Meditation has reentered my life now, after 20 years of not doing it. I studied with Jon Kabat-Zinn two decades ago at Omega Institute, and I kept it up for about a year or two. And now, listening to you, listening to Tim, reading what I’m reading, and buying … getting a hacking device to actually get me to meditate all over again. I love Spire-
Dave Asprey: Nice.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Or Muse, and I think-
Dave Asprey: Melon is another one, the low end, the entry-level home use ones.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Exactly! But what they do is they kick you into it. I think being able to go into your space every day makes a huge difference. So those are three top things I would recommend right now.
Dave Asprey: Beautiful. And one of these days I’ll get you out to … I opened a neuroscience training institute in Seattle.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Well you told me. I want to go.
Dave Asprey: We’ll get you hooked up. We’ll have to find a five day time when you want to travel-
Dr. Oz Garcia: Deal!
Dave Asprey: That’s always the trouble. It’s pretty powerful stuff. And that’s been a game-changer for me. I doubled down on the meditation one. Even if you’re just meditating in a cave, without any technology, it’s okay!
Dr. Oz Garcia: Yes!
Dave Asprey: Or meditating in a bed, even. Awesome. Well, Oz, where can people find out more about your practice? I’m sure there’s some people in New York who want to come see you.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Have them to go my website: www.ozgarcia.com. I think that’s the best thing.
Dave Asprey: Ozgarcia.com is pretty easy.
Dr. Oz Garcia: And they can always call the office at 212-362-5569, but go to the website, that’ll set you up right away.
Dave Asprey: Awesome, beautiful, and thanks for the IV, thanks for just being here-
Dr. Oz Garcia: You’re welcome.
Dave Asprey: Thanks for 25 years of breaking rules in IV nutrients, because the stuff you do is pretty powerful. It totally works.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Thanks [inaudible 00:37:26] I’m very very happy that we did this today. Very proud to be with you.
Dave Asprey: Awesome. If you enjoyed today’s episode, you know what to you. You can head on over to Oz’s website, you can learn some more, you can pick out one of his books. You can head on over to Amazon and look at “Headstrong,” my new book about mitochondria. In fact, I’m going to get Oz an advance copy of that as soon as we get our proofs.
Dr. Oz Garcia: I can’t wait.
Dave Asprey: And then there’s a bunch of new supplements from Bulletproof that are just out. I’m going to be shipping a bunch of those to Oz-
Dr. Oz Garcia: I can’t wait.
Dave Asprey: We’ve got the calcium D-glucarate, we’ve got some methylated B vitamins like folic acid and B 12 and things like that, stuff that I take every day anyway, I just want the pure stuff, so I’m going to make it, and if I could get it all intravenously every day I would, but that’s kind of not really …
Dr. Oz Garcia: I think we may have gotten some folic acid into you today too.
Dave Asprey: Beautiful. Well thanks again Oz, have a beautiful day.
Dr. Oz Garcia: Thanks Dave.
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