http://www.bulletproofexec.com/4-evolutionary-psychiatry-with-emily-deans-paleo-brain-hacking/
Evolutionary Psychiatry with Emily Deans
Q&A Session
Dave Asprey: Today’s cool fact is that vegetarians can get almost 20% of their calories
from fats that get produced by the bacteria that ferment all the fiber that's in their gut. So
much for being a low-fat vegan, it’s simply not possible.
You’re listening to Episode Four of Upgraded Self Radio. This is Dave and Armi from
the Bulletproof Executive. We’re talking about how you can upgrade your mind, body
and life to levels you never thought possible.
Today, we have a great interview with Dr. Emily Deans. Emily is a Board Certified
Psychiatrist and she uses evolutionary clues to solve modern psychological problems.
We talk about the causes of ADHD, the role of ketogenic diets in mental disease and how
you can change your diet and lifestyle to avoid mental illness and keep your mind
bulletproof into old age. We have a lot going on in the blog. We released Part One of the
series on grass-fed meat yesterday and we will continue to publish articles on that topic
for a few weeks. We’re going to show you why it’s better, how to buy it, where to look
for it and a few secrets that people just don’t know about. This is really important even if
you’re not, say, a Paleo dieter or you just want to eat for your personal performance.
We’re going to explain exactly why you will do better at work and you’ll do better at
home when you eat grass-fed meat.
Our Biohacker report is jam-packed as usual. New studies have come out on how our
mental environment affects the type of fat we have, on mycotoxins in grains and the
importance of a healthy sleep cycle.
We’ve also got a great bonus this week. Last week’s podcast with Tim Noakes was really
popular. We also ran a Twitter contest then to award a new copy of Tim’s book to the
person who crafted the best tweet about the podcast. We’ll announce the winner at the
end of the show. Also, if you send out the best tweet about this podcast you’re hearing
now and you CC @bulletproofexec, our Twitter handle, you can win some one-on-one
advice from Armi and me at no charge. If you'd like to learn about us, you can find us on
Twitter, you can get in touch with us on Facebook or you can sign up for our email
newsletter which you’ll find on www.bulletproofexec.com.
So, Armi, what biohacks have you been working on this week?
Armi Legge: Well, this week I did a triathlon on Sunday and I went down to
Williamsburg and had a lot of fun there. I got second my age group, which is pretty
cool...
Dave Asprey: Nice.
Armi Legge: Yes. And the interesting thing I did after that was I did my longest fast
ever. I fasted for 44 total hours. I’m not talking about some stupid juice fast where you
drink maple syrup and lime juice or whatever. I’m talking about zero-calorie fast. I had a
cup of coffee and that was about it. And it was interesting; I did not get hungry so that
was interesting to me. I didn’t expect that and I’m still kind of rebounding from that. I’m
not sure if I want to do it again. It wasn’t super fun. I didn’t feel very productive the next
day when I was really getting deep into it, but it was interesting, so that was something to
play around with and what about you, man?
Dave Asprey: Well, I did some harm reduction biohacking this weekend. I ate some bad
seafood along with my wife on the California coast and normally you get really sick for
several days, you know, throwing up and stuff like that. Well, we both sort of felt it
coming on and using sort of the harm reduction techniques that I've learned over the year
or so traveling internationally and whatnot, right away, I took some of the toxin-binding
substances that I use on a regular basis including activated charcoal and bentonite clay
and other things like that and low and behold, the symptoms reversed themselves and we
were actually able to help a couple of other people who’d eaten the same stuff, so the
next morning I woke up, instead of being completely ill, I turned what would have been a
day or two of basically a food poisoning into about four hours of mild nausea and I was
able to have a very productive fun next day visiting several sets of friends and that’s the
sort of ethic behind resilience that comes from the Bulletproof Executive Program. It’s
not that you’re invincible. It’s that when something happens, you know what to do about
it and you become much more resilient. And so, this was just nice. I got to spend a day
with friends while I was traveling instead of a day doubled over in a hotel room.
Armi Legge: I think a lot of people would be amazed at how much more productive you
can be when you eliminate all those sick days and constantly just not feeling well and all
those small moments when you could be doing what you like, so, that sounds cool, man.
All right, are you ready to do some listener Q&A?
Dave Asprey: Its sounds like a plan, let’s do it.
Armi Legge: The first question is from Sherrie. "I find it odd that cayenne," I’m
guessing she means the powder version, "doesn't hold a place in your spices
recommendation as it is very effective at removing toxins from the body."
Dave Asprey: That is a really cool observation. It turns out cayenne isn’t that effective
at specifically removing toxins, what cayenne does though is it’s a subsegment of
cayenne called capsaicin which is the same thing you find in police pepper spray, the part
that makes it taste spicy. That part of cayenne removes something called substance P
which is a pain-signaling chemical in your body. That pain-signaling chemical is present
even in snails and slugs and bacteria. It’s the most primordial pain sensor possible and
it’s highly elevated in arthritis patients. In some arthritis patients and in some migraine
patients, cayenne can completely reverse those symptoms, but it’s not doing it necessarily
by removing toxins, it’s doing it by removing a pain-signaling thing that’s built up in
your bodies too much. So, why is it not in the Bulletproof diet? Well, it’s not in the
Bulletproof diet because cayenne essentially is a drug. So, it has those effects as a drug.
The other reason it’s not there, and you could say 'why, I always want the effects of this
drug.' The other reason it’s not there is most cayenne, especially red pepper flakes, the
crumbled ones, are incredibly, incredibly infected with very pathogenic molds. So, if
you’re going to eat cayenne, which is something that I do on a pretty regular basis, your
best bet is to find cayenne vitamin supplements that are in capsules and then you open the
capsule and dump it out. That stuff almost never has mold in it. If you have a bottle of
cayenne powder that you use to cook and you shake it over a steamy pot, the steam gets
in the cayenne, stuff starts growing, and pretty soon, you have something that actually,
over longer periods of time, is very unhealthy for you. That’s why we took it out because
you need to use it consciously, not just buy a bottle of it and sprinkle it on your food
because you’ll actually reduce your health that way.
Armi Legge: I have two questions about that. Does that mean that if you spoon cayenne
from a container and you put that in a soup or dish, something like that, without shaking
the bottle over it, is that a better way of doing that?
Dave Asprey: Probably better, but most of the time when you buy a bulk cayenne in a
bottle, even the organic stuff, you’re getting way more toxins from the mold that grows
on it than you'd like. There’s a reason that the spice industry fought really hard to
irradiate all their spices. They know how bad the toxins are from the molds that grow on
spices, but the public doesn't want irradiation. Frankly, I’m not a big fan of it either, but I
would rather have an irradiated spice with no mycotoxins than an organic spice that’s not
irradiated that has cancer-causing hormone mimicking toxins growing in it and that’s
pretty much this state for a lot of the spices in particular. Herbs tend to be safer than
spices.
Armi Legge: And my second question is, does that mean when police spray hippies and
other people with pepper spray, they’re actually calming their pain?
Dave Asprey: Somehow, having tested myself with pepper spray once when I was 19,
just to see what it was like, I would call that youthful indiscretion, it’s really painful,
pretty sure that maybe I felt better the next day.
Armi Legge: I would have to agree. My brother, when he was going through basic
training, they had a tester there in a sealed room and they started spraying pepper spray
and they had to pull off their gas masks, say their names, a lot of the guys were throwing
up and it wasn’t very cool.
Dave Asprey: Yeah, it’s amazing and that’s what’s in cayenne. So, it’s not there as a
recommendation on a regular basis because it has very strong effects and as long as you
know what they are, what they’re doing and you’re really getting just cayenne, it can be
good for you, I agree.
Armi Legge: Right. So, this next question is from Herb Kim. I’m not sure whether that’s
a comment handle or the person’s real name, but it’s kind of cool. "Dave, peanuts are
bad? Say it ain't so!"
Dave Asprey: It turns out that Herb is a special guy. Herb is the guy who came up with
the name the Bulletproof Executive. I met Herb on an international flight in the Virgin,
like, first class, upper class coming from Heathrow to San Francisco a few years ago and
he runs a Thinking Digital Conference, which is one of the more popular digital
conferences in the U.K. So, he’s become a friend and yeah, sorry, Herb, peanuts are bad
and there’s a variety of reasons for that, but the biggest reason is one that people have
oftentimes heard of. It’s called aflatoxin and aflatoxin is very common in peanuts. It’s
also something that’s controlled by law. There are allowable levels in things like peanut
butter; unfortunately, the levels in the US are set very high compared to other countries
and if you’re eating whole peanuts, there’s no way to test because peanut number one
maybe moldy, peanut number two may not be moldy. So, unless you test every individual
nut, you can’t really get a good feel for what’s going on. So, on top of that, you have
problems with the type of fats that are in peanuts which aren’t that good for us and you
have problems with phytic acid. So, as good as they taste, you really need to switch to
almonds. Preferably raw almonds and almond butter. If you make that one choice, your
chances of getting cancer will go down substantially, your health will go up and
particularly your prostate may thank you later in life.
Armi Legge: I’d also add to that peanut lectins, unlike a lot of other lectins, are not
broken down by heat so while the lectins from something like oats, which I still think are
horrible food, those are generally at least somewhat degraded by heat. But peanuts are
not. So, you still are going to get all that and, again, just to add to what Dave said, the
types of fats, they are high in omega-6, but also, if you’re getting something like roasted
peanuts, they’re going to be completely oxidized, which is probably going to increase
your chances of heart disease too.
Dave Asprey: And plus, knowing that I met Herb on an international flight where they
tend to give you peanuts, if you look on the back of the envelope, there is usually MSG
and/or corn syrup on top of the roasted peanuts which are full of oxidized oils and they
oftentimes add hydrogenated cottonseed oil or hydrogenated Canola oil to make the salt
and sugar and MSG stick better with the peanuts. So, pretty bad stuff on almost every
dimension there, unfortunately. I suppose they’re better than eating corn puffs or corn
nuts, but not much.
Our next question here is from Charles. He says, "Interesting stuff about the Central
Governor Model." This was on our last podcast. "Are there any actionable techniques Dr.
Noakes believes helps improve the way you mentally approach certain things, whether
it's training or just things in everyday life?"
Armi Legge: This is a good question. What Tim Noakes was talking about last time is,
as Charles mentioned, the Central Governor Model. And that’s the idea that you’re body
or your brain, specifically, moderates how much stress and pain you can go through
before it stops and he mentioned athletes who’s bodies otherwise were fine, but were
literally paralyzed and they couldn’t move because their brains were making sure they
did not damage themselves. I believe we talked about this a little bit last time with
insulin-resistance and a high-fat diet, but your body is very smart and it's going to protect
itself, so when you’re going through really intense exercise, your brain doesn’t want the
body to feel pain, strangely enough, and despite what endurance athletes, like me, might
put ourselves through, it’s not really the smartest thing to do. So, your brain is going to
make sure you don’t damage yourself to the point of failure and so what this means to
you’re training is – you’re never going to be able to go as hard as you might want to, but
the cool thing is, it means you can always get faster and that means till you die, at least.
And it means that you can’t train this. And the ways I’ve been doing it – and I know this
is going to sound a little cheesy – but I tell myself, I believe I can and I know that’s like
the little train you could or whatever going up the hill, but it’s exactly what I do and it's
helped me reduce all my times, except in running because I was already pretty good
there, but my cycling and my swimming times have dropped substantially since I started
taking his advice and it works.
Dave Asprey: If I can add something in there, too, Charles also asked about things in
everyday life. The whole point of the Bulletproof Executive blog is about how you can
increase your resilience and how you can increase your performance including cognitive
performance and mental performance and if you don’t believe that you can do those
things, you don’t believe you’re capable of those things, you’re not. So, this is something
that applies to athletics, but it applies in hacking your sleep. If you don’t think you can
live with less than eight hours of sleep, or even better yet, you can be healthy with less
than eight hours of sleep, you probably won’t be. So, you can constantly improve across
every domain you can identify throughout your entire life as long as you’re conscious of
it, you believe you can do it and you apply appropriate techniques that help you train
yourself.
Armi Legge: I completely agree. And I am going to talk about the lifestyle and
hopefully you'll have some great stuff to add, I’m sure you will after that, too. I just want
to give Charles a few tips for his training, at least. One thing would be try NPR for most
of your workouts, really push yourself. And I’m not a huge fun of cross-fit endurance. I
think they have a lot of offer and I think they have a lot of problems as well, but
something with more intensity I do believe is important, and a lot of endurance athletes
you'll see out there are going round logging lots of miles at 50% or 70% of their
maximum heart rate. It’s really not doing a whole lot. It doesn’t improve their confidence
and that’s the biggest thing and it’s making yourself more confident in your abilities and
it’s going to depend on everyone. So, for me, that might mean going on sprinting as fast
as I can up this big hill near my house and just destroying myself that way. It might mean
running at a certain pace for a certain distance. It’s just training your brain or training
yourself to believe that you can do more than you currently can and really believing it.
Not just telling yourself that and that helps, just reminding yourself that you can
throughout the day before you go to bed, when you get up, just saying I can do whatever
your goal is, but you really have to believe. It’s more than just saying, “Well, I’m going
to do this or this” and what Dave was talking about with the sleeping hacking, I loved
your seven steps to hack to get bulletproof-sleep. Step one was convincing yourself that
you don’t need eight hours of sleep. I think that applies directly to endurance training as
well. One of the first things I think was fueling during exercise, a lot of people say that
you have to eat if you’re hanging more than an hour. I've even heard more than 30
minutes of exercise. And it’s ridiculous but unfortunately, there are some studies showing
that if you don’t eat over an hour of exercise, your performance goes down. That might
be true, but I think the main driving force there is the way these people have conditioned
themselves to believe they need food all the time while they’re working out and of course
that’s going to hurt their performance because there have been other studies that show
muscle glycogen is not affected for a long periods of time and they have just as much
energy, but it’s just their letting themselves get fatigued.
Dave, do you want to add anything to that, at least to the lifestyle and how people can
improve that in everyday life?
Dave Asprey: I would add that deciding that you can improve, that you can do a certain
thing, is the first step. After that, the self-experimentation thing is important. Even with
endurance exercise, you say, “Okay, I can do this,” and then you can do some tests and
say, “All right, if I do feel or I don’t feel, which one works better for my metabolism and
my health status where I am now?" And you may find "Wow, you know what, even
though I can do it without feeling, I might perform better by feeling," and that’s okay too
because then you can make a conscious decision as to whether you’re going to choose to
feel during an endurance event or whether you’re going to choose not to do it because
you know you can even though it might be harder and that’s a mindset thing that is now
within your control and it’s a conscious decision instead of an unconscious decision,
which is to tell yourself or just sort of believe without even telling yourself, that “I can't
do it or I won’t be as fast if I don’t do this.”
Armi Legge: I agree again. I think that’s very important. So, do you want me to go on to
the next question?
Dave Asprey: Yeah, definitely.
Armi Legge: Cool. This is from Evan. "You list chocolate as something that we can eat.
I found where you said that you like Lindt 90% Cocoa Bars. Should the quantity of
chocolate consumption be kept to a minimum or is there a recommended limit since 10%
of the bar is other ingredients? Also, are bars with less than 90% cocoa okay to eat, such
as Lindt 75% or 60% and is there a limit suggested for these?"
Dave Asprey: You know, chocolate is like bacon. It’s sort of one of those Bulletproof
foods that’s a bit like blowfish. Blowfish is the sushi that if it's prepared wrong, it can
actually kill you, so, you'll see that in movies where the James Bond-type-of-guy eats the
blowfish in sushi because he is so tough. Chocolate, it’s a question of how good is the
chocolate itself and particularly how it was processed and how it was fermented. The
reason why I recommend Lindt is that they go with European standards and their
chocolate is much less moldy than American chocolate. Keep in mind that a good
percentage, double digits, 10, 20, 30% of the total world chocolate crop is lost to fungal
infestation every year and that’s one of the reasons that cheap chocolate typically has
higher levels of toxins in it. So, I recommend Lindt for a specific reason. I recommend
90% because it’s not full of hydrogenated fat like some cheap chocolate and if it's 90%
chocolate that means, at most, it can be 10% sugar and, in practice, it’s less than that
because they add some other things like soy lecithin, which is not harmful in this context,
so, it’s also a small amount of it. The reason 90% works is because it’s low in sugar. You
can probably get away with 75 or 85%; 60% though, you’re starting to get a pretty good
amount of sugar in there, so, maybe you will only have a square of that. The upper limit
is, well, do you feel good? I can eat a good half a full-sized Lindt bar and I feel good. If I
eat more than that, I might feel a little bit ampy from the xanthines and if I eat chocolate
every day, I can easily do a whole Lindt bar, but I’m feeling pretty awake afterwards.
Kind of like a cup of coffee. So, I look at 90% dark chocolate as a source of healthy fat
and with a few performance enhancing psychoactive substances like caffeine and
theobromine and whatnot in it, but if you handed me a Hershey’s Special Dark, I would
politely say, “No, thank you, I’d rather fast.” It’s that important to eat good chocolate.
Armi Legge: I agree. I think that's one of the things I’ve noticed a lot is I never ate a
whole lot of chocolate anyway but it’s important to get the good stuff and you can eat a
lot of it. Which is cool because chocolate tastes good.
So, this last question is actually from me and it’s kind of interesting because my dad
recently broke his femur. He cracked the greater trochanter in his left leg in a bike crash.
He was 95 miles in a 100-mile bike race and he doesn't eat Paleo, but I think I can
convince him to alter his diet while he’s recovering and my thoughts were to reduce carb
intake obviously because he eats about 50 to 60% of his diet or more like 60% of his diet
from carbs right now and he’s not going to be doing all the endurance exercise, so, I think
it’s important, to increase fat intake and eat as close to Bulletproof as possible which is
kind of a recommendation I make for everyone, no matter what they’re doing. And for
supplementation, since he does not take any supplements right now, vitamin D, vitamin
K2, vitamin C, collagen and magnesium and I was wondering what your thoughts were
on that and I have a second question, too.
Dave Asprey: This is a really good question and it comes down to the Bulletproof
mindset here. So, obviously your dad is doing endurance exercise and he’s doing in a
Century bike ride. I’ve done a Century and I’ve done 150-mile ride when I was younger
before I sort of gave up long distance aerobics, it’s not being ideal for my long-term
health, but he’s doing it without taking basic precautions like taking vitamin D. There is
no reason that anyone who listens to this podcast, if you can afford the earbuds in your
ear, you can afford vitamin D. It's dirt cheap. A thousand IUs of vitamin D3, which is
called cholecalciferol, for every 25 pounds of your body weight, that’s what you should
do unless you live near the equator and you walk around without anything, but maybe a
loincloth or a little thong bikini or something, for most of the day when it's bright outside.
That’s what the blood test say and people get so much healthier and they get healthier
bones when they get vitamin D. So during his healing time, I would actually recommend
closer to 50,000 IUs of vitamin D for two weeks straight. So, 50,000 IUs per day in order
to ramp up the amount available in his tissues as much as humanly possible. That’s a very
safe thing to do, people do loading dose of vitamin D all the time. In East Germany they
used to inject kids with 500,000 IUs. So, taking 50,000 orally for a couple of weeks is not
a harmful thing.
K2 is a cofactor for vitamin D absorption and bone growth, it’s very important and C is
one of the building blocks for collagen in your bones. It also speeds wound healing, in
general, so, yes, great advice. Collagen protein, there are studies that show that
hydrolyzed collagen that we have on Upgraded Self increases bone density by 15%
because collagen does scaffolding for bones, definitely do that.
Magnesium, another great recommendation. I would actually say one of the magnesium
aspartates or orotate forms or citrate would be better than magnesium oxide because
oxide isn’t well-absorbed, but again, most people think calcium, calcium, calcium but
we’re getting too much calcium if we drink milk or if we eat most foods. We’re not
getting enough magnesium. We want a 2 to 1 ratio.
In my case, I don’t eat milk. The only dairy products I do are grass-fed whey protein on
occasion and a lot of butter from grass-fed cows. I eat some vegetables and I eat a lot of
meat, but my calcium levels even without supplementation with calcium are still a little
bit high and I take 800 mg of magnesium every night which is a pretty hefty dose. That’s
what's shown to be healthy for me.
So, for bone density, extra magnesium helps because your body won’t have to suck
magnesium out of your bones in order to deal with an excess of calcium in the rest of
your body, but on top of that for bone formation, silicon and boron are also pretty darn
important and strontium surprisingly enough. I prefer the strontium from vitamin research
products at VRP.com. It’s also something that will make your bone heal faster. So, I
highly recommend that he do what you tell him to do even though it’s usually hard for
fathers to do what their sons tell them to do and this is one of those times when he should
listen.
Armi Legge: Yeah. I hope I wished he listened to me more and unfortunately, I think I
will probably be able to get him to at least take somethings like vitamin D and
magnesium, but his doctors are – and he’s the one of those people that are like, “I'll know
from a doctor." Whatever, hopefully, he'll at least give it a try.
Thank you so much for the advice. And then there’s one other part. What other ideas that
you have that might speed up the healing process because his doctors are worried the
blood supply to the injured area might be comprised, so, are there any techniques that he
could use to increase blood flow or vascularization to the injury site?
Dave Asprey: Absolutely. This reminds me of actually a next door neighbor of mine a
couple of year ago. She was 16 and she had an injury to her femur from playing soccer
and the doctors were concerned that there was not enough blood flow and vascularization
to the injury site. They were getting ready to drill into her femur repeatedly to aerate it
like you would sod on a field because they thought that gangrene was going to set in. It
was that bad. So, I put her on the Bulletproof diet and said you should just do this. By the
way, I had arthritis in my knees when I was 14 and I dealt with extensive knee injuries. I
have a screw in one of my knees. I have had multiple surgeries and it really does come
down to taking good care of yourself there. So, in her case, going on the Bulletproof diet
including and increasing raw foods as well as supplements including collagen and
vitamin D and K2; within ten days, her doctors were just blown away. She was actually
able to uncancel a trip to Europe that she had canceled because she was going to be
unable to walk and she healed incredibly dramatically and, interestingly enough, it was
very noticeable when her friends all commented on it too, that they said the whites of her
eyes got really, really light. Like whiter than they’d ever been and like her whole body
was – they said that it just felt like her eyes were glowing. So, that was a very fast
transition, but that was someone who was relatively young, so, for your father, going on
this diet really helps.
The other tricks would be Krill oil and there is an extract of Boswellia, which is an antiinflammatory that works on a different cox pathway than Motrin or something like that,
but if this was me and I had this problem going on, the first thing I would do, if it was
available to me, is hyperbaric oxygen which forces oxygen in without needing blood. It
actually hypersaturates the liquid around your tissues in. It turns out hyperbaric oxygen is
also really good for your brain and it's used in a lot of traumatic brain injuries now. And,
if it’s available in your neighborhood, there is also something called ozone therapy,
which is particularly helpful for blood flow, vascularization and injury healing and I’m
not going to go into the details of ozone therapy, but if there’s an ozone therapist near
you, it’s a little bit controversial, but it’s something that's had profound impact on my
performance and health throughout the entire system that is my body. So, those are the
kind of the additional things.
Armi Legge: Thank you so much. And one other thing I was thinking about, I’m not
sure if it would be quite as useful in this situation, was prolotherapy, where you inject
slightly or mildly inflammatory compound in the wound area to help stimulate a little
more healthy inflammation. I know those are usually used for joint injuries. What is your
opinion on that for something like this?
Dave Asprey: I don’t think you want to do that if there is a microvascularization
problem there because if you cause swelling, there will be a less blood flow there and
again, I’m not a doctor, but I’ve done a lot of crazy stuff. There’s another interesting
point here, I don’t know what your dad’s general health condition and all is, if he’s able
to ride a Century he's probably doing all right, but one of the first things that happens
when you eat a lot of mycotoxins, or if you particularly breathe them, is that your
microvasculature shuts down, like your very, very tiny capillaries close and that’s one of
the things that causes poor blood flow to an injury site. It’s not that the big arteries and
veins aren’t working, it’s that the super tiny things close off. So, I don’t know if that’s a
factor for him or not, but it is for about for 28% of the population who is genetically
susceptible to that effect.
Armi Legge: Wow, yeah, that is actually funny. He’s one of the freak of nature kind of
people who is extremely well-muscled. I mean he is really ripped, but he also does not try
endurance training and he only works out or lifts weights like once a week.
Dave Asprey: He’s not the one of the 28 % then, so, for him it’s a vascularization
problem. They need to address the inflammation.
Armi Legge: Yeah. Cool. So, if you have any questions for the podcast, you can contact
us on Twitter, Facebook, or on the contact form in the show notes to this episode. We
also pick through the comments to find good questions so be sure to leave one of your
comments on our articles and we might just put it in the podcast.
Now, we’re going to move on to our exclusive interview with Dr. Emily Deans.
Exclusive Interview with Emily Deans
Armi Legge: Hey folks, it’s Armi Legge and Dave Asprey here with Emily Deans from
EvolutionaryPsychology.com. Emily is a Board Certified Psychiatrist and she’s going to
be talking to us today about the relationship between nutrition, health and mental
disorders. Emily, thank you so much for being on.
Emily Deans: Hi, thanks for inviting me on. Really glad to be here.
Armi Legge: Cool. So, Dave do you want to start hacking away at these questions with
Emily?
Dave Asprey: Absolutely. Emily, thanks a lot for joining us this morning. The first
question that we wanted to ask you was how does evolution shape our mental
development?
Emily Deans: Well, evolution is kind of a funny thing. It’s sort of the bath water that we
all sort of lived in for generation, after generation, after generation and evolution is a
pretty random thing. It’s not necessarily directive. We don’t necessarily evolve to a
higher state, but we often evolve to a state of better adaptation to a particular
environment. So, for a long, long, long, long time, we have evolved in a sort of a hunter
or gatherer paradigm for many thousands of generations, and it’s really only been a last
10,000 years that we’ve been more agricultural, really only the last fifty to a hundred
years that we’ve been industrial and only the last few generations that we’ve been sort of
digital humans. So, there are a lot of different things about our lifestyles in many, many
respects. I focus mostly on the food, but there is also a lot about sleep, about electric
lights and sleeping differently and TV and exercise and all of these things are important
to our mental health and our physical health, but, again, I primarily focus on nutrition.
Dave Asprey: So, do you speak specifically about epigenetics or is that a part of what
you’re looking at? That’s a big part of a book that I’m publishing later this year for
pregnant women, looking at the effects of evolution and whatnot on how your children
come out, even how your children’s children come out. Is that part of the picture for you?
Emily Deans: Right. Epigenetics is a big part of what’s going on because that’s how we
sort of adapt in real time and it's an actual physical mechanism where we change the
expression of our DNA to sort of do the different interactions with our environment. So,
there was just a study out, a paper out, earlier this week from Brain Behavior and
Immunity talking about the theoretical implications of the plastic BPA on our epigenetics
and how it might change. It’s really actually quite interesting, our DNA, which eventually
gets expressed into proteins, which sort of codes who we are, what is working and not
working, and doing and not doing in our bodies. DNA is bound up sometimes in little
things called histones, which are these kind of balls that hold the DNA together and keeps
it from being transcribed. So, epigenetics is basically how these histones come on and off
the DNA. So, that’s the exact mechanism how in real time, you can kind of be changing
your genes even though we’re all sort of stuck with this set of chromosomes that our
parents gave us when we were conceived.
Dave Asprey: So, then, how does what we eat affect our mental performance?
Emily Deans: Well, our brains are very powerful, it’s quite small, its only 2-5% of our
total body weight, but it uses about 20% of our body’s total energy and it’s very hungry.
It also requires a little bit different fatty acid profile than a lot of the rest of our body. It
requires a lot of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids to work properly and it requires a lot all
these intergenic reactions, require a lot of mitochondria and clean up and things, need to
be working as efficiently as they can be. So, if you’re missing nutrients, if you’re not
getting enough magnesium, if you’re not getting enough zinc, if you’re not getting
enough of your B vitamins, you end up having an inefficient processing of energy in your
brain and this can lead to buildups of toxic byproducts and all sorts of stuff that makes
your brain not work as well. And this is pretty well understood. I don’t think too many
people have put it all together, but it’s pretty well understood and there are some
interesting evidences, for example, that older people with dementia who have more B
vitamins have less brain shrinkage than older people with dementia who had fewer B
vitamins in their diet. So, there are lots of different little strands of evidence like that that
tell us that nutrition is very important to how our brain works and it plays a role in
probably all the different types of major mental illness and neurologic disease also.
Dave Asprey: It’s such a breath of fresh air to talk with you about this because one of
the main points of the Bulletproof diet is to reduce the number of toxins in your body and
to increase mitochondrial function specially for mental performance, which is something
that I’ve been doing for years myself, including overcoming some brain stuff that I
diagnosed with FMRI scans.
Emily Deans: Wow!
Dave Asprey: So, I love hearing this become more into the public’s sphere of
knowledge because it’s so effective at just making you feel better and perform better. Go
ahead.
Emily Deans: What I really like about it is that, I eat an evolutionary style diet and I've
found that it’s very good for performance in physical health and it’s also good for mental
health and I really like doing something that’s very healthy, but that can help in pretty
much in all directions at once.
Dave Asprey: I’ve definitely have seen the same effects, both with the people who have
tried this stuff on the blog as well as with about a dozen or so years of doing it myself,
what about people, though, who are taking statins, how does those effect our brains
versus to the evolutionary diet that you and I would both be fans of?
Emily Deans: Well, I worry about statins mostly because I think that the brain really
needs cholesterol. The brain has about, I think, 20-25% of our body's free-floating
cholesterol. You need fresh cholesterol all the time in your brain, especially for a rapid
turnover in the synapse, and statins, some of them do cross the blood brain barrier,
simvastatin is one that does. There is some evidence that it can cause sleep problems,
aggression, anxiety, and depression. I've had a few case studies of my own patients who
when they were put on statins, one of them became quite suicidally depressed. Another
one, nothing was really working and we took her off of her statin and she got a lot better.
Somebody else, actually two other people got quite paranoid, one to the point of hearing
voices and it went away when we took the statins away and those are just anecdotes, but
they certainly got my attention, of course. So, I really looked into more of a literature
about statins and the scary thing is even though they are recommended for the general
public for prevention, as we all know, most of the studies were actually never done in
people who struggle with mental illness.
According to the National Institutes of Health, it’s about 28% of people in the U.S. every
year struggle with some sort of, what are called the Axis 1 Mental Disorders, which
include anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD, and schizophrenia and those sorts
of things. So, in fact they are kind of recommended for all consumption, yet hadn’t been
really studied in this huge subpopulation, it bothers me especially as it’s very clear that
the brain needs cholesterol, that statin actually has been shown in some studies to
interfere directly with certain types of protein-binding and the serotonin receptor and also
decrease in cholesterol may have other untoward effects. So, I worry about statins.
There’s not a smoking gun if you really look at the literature very fairly and some of the
studies that have been done directly, they’re small, it did show that the statins that don’t
cross the blood-brain barrier, pravastatin is one that does not, have less of these kind of
mental health side effects, but this was one pretty small study and as far as I know, it’s
the only one that really looked at it very carefully and the interesting thing though about
statins is that, before we had statins, we had older classes of cholesterol-lowering drugs,
like gemfibrozil and those kinds of things, and they actually – when you look back at the
literature, definitely, there was an increase in depression and suicide when you look back
at kind of the epidemiologic studies and there are some large statin trials that also show
an increase, but it wasn’t statistically significant because suicide is pretty rare and you
have to have a pretty large group of people if you’re going to pick that up and it’s hard to
do a huge study on, say, 20,000 people for five years. That’s extraordinarily expensive,
so, we really have to rely on sort of retrospective epidemiologic studies, which don’t give
us exactly – it can’t tell us causality. It can just kind of give us a clue as to what’s going
on. But getting back to my point, those old fashioned drugs were probably worse for your
brain than the statins and it's not really clear why because statins actually lower
cholesterol more, but statins also, perhaps, the way that they help people when they do is
through an anti-inflammatory mechanism, not through lowering cholesterol, that
lowering cholesterol is sort of a secondary accidental side effects of the statin as it were.
So, it could be that anti-inflammatory mechanism keeps statins from being as detrimental
to the mental health as the old fashioned cholesterol drugs were. I hope that makes some
sense.
Dave Asprey: It makes great sense. I love hearing the idea that the cholesterol is good
for the brain. On the Bulletproof Executive diet, I recommend several raw eggs,
particularly raw egg yolks a day in order to help with mental performance. Are you
familiar, though, with the research about statins being anti-fungals actually as well and
how that may be a part of their mechanism of action?
Emily Deans: I just really touched on that. I haven’t looked at it in any depth, but yeah,
yeah, it’s certainly possible.
Dave Asprey: Okay, and what about the very old statin drugs like cholestyramine or
even, say, activated charcoal which lowers LDL about 15%. These are basically bile
sequestering agents that work to help detox the body by increasing bile turnover. I found
that they help a lot with mental performance in very short of timeframes, especially in
people like me who had problems with toxins or with fungus infections. Is that something
that you've come across in your practice?
Emily Deans: Well, cholestyramine is one of those drugs that was definitely associated
with an increased risk of depression and violent death and suicide, I mean, those old
studies looking back. So short-term usage, I don’t really know about so much though I
know it can be used for detox and fungal infections and that sort of thing. It’s not
something that is a part of conventional medicine surely, I don’t think, but the long-term
effects of cholestyramine, I would be concerned about.
Dave Asprey: On a regular basis, yeah, me too. I wouldn’t want artificially low
cholesterol unless there was a problem going on.
Emily Deans: Right.
Dave Asprey: Let’s move on with it. What are some of the foods that maybe would
cause the biggest problems in mental development or in mental function for our readers
or for our listeners?
Emily Deans: Well, I think probably the biggest problem and when we’ve seen the
biggest escalation in some of these mental illness categories is over the past 50 years and
it’s not just because we have recognized. Even though we do recognize it more and it's
certainly more in our radar that people have depression and anxiety and that these are
illnesses that we need to treat, it’s also definitely true besides just our increased
awareness that the incidences of these illnesses have been increasing quite a bit over the
last fifty to a hundred years and that really points to the time when we started to have a
lot of industrial processed food and a lot of fake fats. So, what I think is sort of the most
disastrous combination would be some sort of fried, very nutrient poor, but fairly calorie
dense processed food like a chip of some kind that really has very little in the way of
magnesium or any of our vitamins and vegetable oil which clearly is not an evolutionary
kind of thing that we were eating at all before 50 years ago and there’s a lot of evidence
to show that this omega-6 has displaced the omega-3s and we really need to be getting
enough omega-3s and that omega-6 can probably be disastrous for the brain if there’s too
much of it.
Dave Asprey: You know, hearing that stuff, I could just give you a hug. This is exactly
the sort of information that we’ve been promoting and also, just that I’ve seen such an
improvement in so many people in the anti-aging nonprofit I work with, when they
stopped their omega-6 consumption, you see people of all ages, even sometimes people
in their 80’s, who just have profound improvements across a broad range of health
parameters. It’s really incredible.
Emily Deans: Yeah. Omega-6 were sort of touted because they lower cholesterol and all
these things and they were touted as this is sort of health food of the poly-unsaturated
fatty acids and they are cheap and they’re plentiful and boy, our country sure does grow a
lot of them, but we never ate these kinds of things before and our bodies and brains just
aren't designed to have it as Stephan Guyenet said in a recent blog post, it’s basically an
unregulated experiment jacking up our percentages of omega-6 from vegetables oils to 10
or 12% of our calories. It’s not anything that human beings had ever experienced in the
entire history of our evolution. There are certainly omega-6 in poultry and in animal fats,
but it’s in fairly small amounts and we need some of them, but I personally don’t like
using my brain so far outside sort of the evolutionary design specs that have been there. I
want my brain to be working with the minerals and the vitamins and the fats that it was
sort of designed for, so to speak.
Dave Asprey: That makes so much sense. Do you have an opinion on Brian Peskin’s
work with Parent Essential Oils and that sort of recommendation for some omega-6’s? Is
that part of what you think about?
Emily Deans: I think there is so much complexity with regards to all these interacting
pathways and what goes on, I tend to do a fallback of a very natural approach. I’m a fan
of supplementing basic stuff like minerals for example, but unless you're pretty desperate,
I don't like the idea too much of supplementing all sorts of different essential oils. I prefer
to eat real food and eat real food that ate real food. So eat grass-fed beefs and for
example, eggs have a plenty of omega-6 in them, but they also have a plenty of other
good stuff, so they will give you all the omega-6 that you need and I eat pastured eggs
from chickens that have been around eating grubs and walking around the yard like
they're supposed to, so, it gives you a better fat profile and more nutrition, more
micronutrition, more vitamins and minerals.
Dave Asprey: It’s really kind of funny, one of the top six sort of self-upgrades we talk
about on the site is eat happy things that ate healthy things, essentially what you just said
there. Eat animals that were well-fed. I think, Armi, you had some questions around
ADHD and all you wanted to ask as well.
Armi Legge: I did. I’d like to add one thing about the eggs, too. I was actually looking
at several studies yesterday about how the pastured eggs have 19 times more omega-3s
than the regular factory-raised eggs. I thought that was an interesting thing.
My brother actually has ADHD, so, this is kind of a thing that’s close to home with me
and I was wondering how ADHD is related to diet and how people could possibly reduce
or treat ADHD by making dietary changes.
Emily Deans: Well, I think the most interesting work in ADHD and diet has been in
Britain. They did some very interesting studies that basically showed that if you took –
now these were kids without any kind of diagnosis or anything that I'm aware of, just kids
in the community – and you gave them food additives like yellow #5 and red #2 and
sodium benzoate in a combination, that some of these kids had significantly more
hyperactive behavior. Some kids were fine. They could drink all the yellow #5 they
wanted and their behavior was just fine, but some kids seem to be clearly vulnerable and
these same researches went back and checked out the genetics of these kids and they
found that the kids who are more likely to react to these sort of these fake industrial food
dyes where they had differences in their immune system and how they metabolize
histamine.
So, in some respects, what they basically found was these kids were having an allergic
reaction to put it generally and they were having a type of allergic reaction to these food
dyes and that was manifesting as hyperactive and sort of bad behavior, which is very
interesting. It was an amazing piece of work and so continuing on that, these researchers
in Belgium published a paper earlier this year where they took hundred kids who were
diagnosed with ADHD and they put them on an anti-inflammatory diet meant to really
decrease any exposure to food allergens in any kind of fake foods or any industrial dyes
or anything like that and in this study, for the most part the kids ate white rice, which is
obviously not an evolutionary food, but it’s thought to be pretty non-toxic, they ate pears,
they ate meat, they ate vegetables, and they had water. So, no dairy. Some of them were
allowed a little bit of wheat, but not very much. There are few exceptions, but in these
kids on this special anti-inflammatory diet, actually 60% of them had significant
improvement in their ADHD symptoms and they continued on this diet for nine weeks
and then they crossed over the arms. So, they had 50 kids on sort of a standard diet and
then 50 kids on this anti-inflammatory diet and they switched arms. The kids that
switched over to the standard diet, which was basically what the government will
consider a healthy diet because it was the control, and these kids, their symptoms got
worse again and the kids you had been on the controlled diet and were switched over to
the anti-inflammatory diet, their symptoms got much better. So, it was a well-designed
study. It was pretty big for it's kind because it was 18 weeks and, actually, there was
another arm where they were adding back in foods that they thought the kids might be
allergic to and that actually had no difference. Adding back the foods that they thought
that the kids might be allergic to didn’t necessarily cause a resumption of symptoms. It
seemed to be the whole diet change was the important thing, not any specific food for a
lot of these kids, which was interesting, and it kind of goes to show us that that type of
diet without very much meat, without dairy, without these modern processed foods is
probably very anti-inflammatory and that these kids weren’t having a so-called allergic
reaction to it and their behavior was better and it showed a very clear interaction between
diet and ADHD symptoms.
Armi Legge: So, do you think a lot of psychiatric disorders and bad behavior might be
caused by poor nutrition and, especially, I have heard that gluten is particularly
problematic and casein is also problematic in some individuals.
Emily Deans: Yeah. Well, I think there is evidence and specially in some very
susceptible individuals that there could be huge problems and there are certainly lots of
anecdotes of people doing a lot better once they’ve taken these things out of their diets,
but it can be very tricky because just a gluten-free, casein-free diet might have a lots of
other fake inflammatory stuff in it, so, the study that you’re asking about or how to prove
this, let’s put everybody, say, on a Paleo style, anti-inflammatory diet. This really hasn't
been done. So, we can only speculate, but it just seems to make sense that with all of
these disorders increasing over the last 50 years along with our consumption of these
omega-6 vegetable oils and these sort of nutrient poor fried food and getting away from
animal fats and real food and local food that’s grown near you, so that hopefully they’re
pretty fresh, so the vitamins and minerals are pretty fresh, I guess the minerals doesn’t
matter that much, but with vitamins, I think it’s better to eat them pretty fresh, but it
depends on the vitamin when you look at that, but it just seems that we need to address
the entire picture rather than some of the specifics. Unfortunately, that’s a heck a lot
harder to study and if you just look at specifics, often you come up with no difference or
no change, especially in the more serious conditions. For example, omega-3 has been
looked out extensively for depression and anxiety and dementia and in severe depression
with anxiety and in severe dementia, adding omega-3 supplementation alone didn’t make
much of a difference. I’m not that surprised by that, there has been already a lot of
damage and lots going on and omega-3 isn’t going to be probably enough on it's own to
really turn those things around. However, when you look at people with mild cognitive
impairment and in some studies, people with depression without complicating anxiety,
they responded quite favorably to the omega-3. So, it kind of shows you that a little bit of
intervention can be perhaps preventative and help with the milder cases and we have
some more work to do when we’re looking at more serious cases where there's already
been a lot of damage done and some of this stuff we aren't going to be able to undo.
Armi Legge: Right. So, basically what might happen, let's say you do fix somebody's
omega-6 to omega 3 ratio but then they’re still eating gluten or something else and it kind
of overrides the positive effects. I think Dave had some cool questions about
inflammation, how it influences the brain. You want to hack those, Dave?
Dave Asprey: Absolutely. The overriding question is how does inflammation affect our
minds and the reason I’m asking it is that I’ve been able to, through self-experimenting
and whatnot, understand that I definitely have brain inflammation when I eat the wrong
foods to the point that sometimes you can even measure it in the changes in the size of
my head, for instance, a gluten and casein and MSG all will cause inflammation in the
head. Sometimes it's blood flow cause, sometimes it’s actually something else, which is, I
think, core inflammation. Any thoughts on how big of an impact inflammation has on our
minds?
Emily Deans: Well, if we're talking about inflammation inside the brain, it’s very clear
that inflammation is a big part of pretty much all of our mental illnesses. You can look at
levels of interleukins, which are chemicals that are made by the body in sort of a
inflammatory response, so there is IL-6 and IL-2 and TNF-alpha and all sorts of
interestingly named chemicals and you can find them right at the warzone in the brain
where all these different mental illnesses take place. So, for example, in depression, it's
well-known that one of the main places where there is a problem in depression is in the
area of the brain called the hippocampus and people with depression have increased
levels of TNF-alpha and IL-2 and kinetic and different chemicals that are associated with
inflammation in the hippocampus. So, it’s right there. It’s definitely a part of what’s
going on. In dementia also, you can see the inflammation. It is also true of autism. So,
inflammation is a part of the pathologic piece of what’s going on in the brain to cause the
symptoms.
Dave Asprey: It's really cool to hear you mention autism there. In the Better Baby Book,
the book I mentioned before that’s coming out later this year from Whiley, one of our
goals in creating a nutrition plan for pregnancy was to reduce the incidence of autism. My
wife is a physician and she and I used a program like what we’re talking about here with
appropriate fatty acids and with very low amounts of inflammatory chemicals, to do
everything we could to reduce the likelihood that we would have autistic children
ourselves, given that I had all the symptoms of Asperger’s till I was 25 when I radically
sort of rewired my brain and changed my nutrition and things like that. So, the core idea
that brain inflammation is involved was one of our kind of core ideas where we then said
what are all the things that we know can affect it and let’s move those in the right
direction and hopefully have a positive effect on outcomes.
Emily Deans: Inflammation is definitely a part of autism with that seen in autopsy
studies directly. You can see the activation of the immune systems in the brain in certain
areas that are very adversely effected in autism. It’s not controversial, it’s not really a
question at all, it’s known.
Dave Asprey: It’s really great to hear you talking about that even though with the
Bulletproof Executive, our typical audience isn't someone with autism. A very significant
number of business people, even business leaders, are dealing with ADHD and ADDtype of things going on in their brains and it’s been my personal experience and my
experience working with other people in a business context that when they start getting
their nutrition under control, they get their inflammation under control. Quality of life
goes up, but quality of decision making and basically their ability to perform in an
entrepreneurial setting improves as well, even if they didn't recognize that they had
inflammatory problems going on. Does your experience reflect that same of sort of
pattern that maybe some people have this going on and don’t recognize it?
Emily Deans: Oh, yeah. I think a lot of times, I'll see adults who have kind of ADHD
their whole life, wasn't bad enough that it caught anybody’s attention so much when they
were younger. They weren’t the kid who was in the back of the room jumping around on
top of the desks and driving everybody crazy, but they might have been daydreaming and
not doing very well and not living up to their potential, but that is a lot less obvious than
jumping around on the desks. So, they were never really diagnosed, but just a low level
of the ADHD symptoms can cause so much stress over your life because again, you know
you’re smart, you know you can put these things together, when you’re emotionally
driven you can really produce outstanding work because if you have ADHD you actually
have the ability to hyperfocus on things that are emotionally interesting to you. So, it’s
very common to see very successful people with ADHD because they’ve been able to
ride on that hyperfocus during some times and then you have some disasters times, but
have been able to kind of overcome that or get some help or cover it somehow, but then
over time, it just becomes so stressful, over the years to do that, so I'll see many adults
who come with anxiety and depression, but this is basically secondary to all the stress
that's been caused by living with low-grade ADD their whole lives and it's very common,
as you said in executives. It’s common in surgeons. ADD is one of those disorders that
kind of takes away, but it also gives too with the hyperfocus ability.
Dave Asprey: So, what about physical activity? And I’m at the verge of saying that I
spent a lot of time exercising, I used to weigh 300 pounds. I weigh 200 pounds now and
have for more than 10 years, but for the last two years, kind of as an experiment and also
because I’ve been writing a book, working full-time as an executive and just had two
kids, I’ve actually not exercised and I have had improvement in muscle mass, I have a
six-pack and I’m ready to exercise if I have to for mental performance, but it looks like
on a really low inflammation, carefully designed high-fat Paleo friendly kind of diet,
exercise may not be as important for mental performance. Is that true and what should
people be thinking about when it comes to mental ability and physical activity together?
Emily Deans: Well, that’s kind of a hard question to answer because studies haven’t
been done in the Paleo anti-inflammatory crowd. The studies have been done in people of
a standard crowd and some of the studies definitely show that physical activity is a great
antidepressant. Some of these studies haven’t been clear and I think a recent Cochrane
review showed that it was pretty much awash. However, I know talking to some peeople,
and I know, I think, in my own case, if I do some regular exercise, not marathon running,
but, let’s say, run a 5K a couple of times a week or do crossfit which is what I do now,
that in general, I just kind of feel better and I have more energy, but nothing terribly
excessive and certainly there are studies in mice that massive amounts of physical
activity causes anxiety and inflammation, I don’t know.
Dave Asprey: Hallelujah. Yes.
Emily Deans: I don’t know if these studies have been done on marathon runners. I
haven’t looked at that literature specifically, but I would suspect that there’s a lot of
distress and anxiety in general if you’re just putting your body through that day, after
day, after day and mile, after mile, after mile.
Dave Asprey: In fact, just an anecdotal thing, have you seen any long-term triathlete or
marathon male over 30 who’s not completely bald? I think that’s interesting.
Emily Deans: That’s interesting. Yeah, I think, I have seen a few, but a lot them are
losing their hair, that’s very interesting. My husband used to be a marathon and he has
lost a lot of his hair.
Dave Asprey: There we have it. Fortunately, I still have mine, but I gave up the extreme
endurance things before I was 20 and I’m almost 40, so I think, by the way, cross-fit
style, you know, the high intensity, short duration exercise seems to be exactly the most
effective in the smallest amount of time which is what I will be doing as soon as I kind of
break my exercise fast, so to speak.
Emily Deans: Well, certainly in my life, I also have two young children and I’m a
physician and things are pretty busy, so I have to get up at 5:30 in the morning because
that’s my only time to go exercise and I can only do that a few days a week because if my
husband happens to be working that day, I can’t do it, so if I only have a couple of hours
a week, I’m going to be doing cross-fit or something similar to that rather than – you
know, I’m not going to run 10 miles because I don’t think that would do me nearly as
much good as lifting heavy things for 30 minutes.
Dave Asprey: I love that part. I think we may have to excerpt that in the show note, but,
yeah, lifting heavy things just gives you more in a smaller amount of time and let’s face
it, it’s a waste of time to go out and run long distances unless you’re doing just because
you love it and you really want to, but if you’re doing it because you’re trying to lose
weight, wow, it’s not the fast path to losing weight, we’ll put it that way.
Emily Deans: It’s interesting because I do have a lot of experience with trying sort of
different diets in the past along with different sorts of exercise and personal training and I
have to say that a combination of this sort of Paleo style diet with the cross-fit, I've had
the best results as far as body composition and how I’m feeling and those kinds of things
as far as physical health, just in my own personal experience.
Armi Legge: Cool. So, Emily, I'd like to ask you a question that is getting a lot of
interest nowadays on ketogenic diets. I know this has been touted as an experimental
treatment for autism and numerous other disorders, I believe Parkinson’s and, as we talk
about Asperger’s. So, what are your experiences with ketogenic diets and improved
mental performance and are there any major studies that you’re aware of that really show
a good connection?
Emily Deans: I would say there are no major studies. The only studies – there are a
couple of pilot studies in autism. There’s one pilot study in autism. There were only 23
people, I think, and there is one pilot study in Alzheimer’s dementia, again a similar
number of folks, I think, so really only 11 or 12 who were on the diet and then maybe 11
or 12 who were controls. They both showed some positive results and we certainly need
more research. I worry about the research of ketogenic diets because they’re not generally
coconut oil. They’re generally sort of these horrible soybean oil things that they would
use in kids with epilepsy. So, I would certainly be more interested in a ketogenic diet
based on whole foods, coconut oil, perhaps adding some MCT oil, but theoretically they
work on improving the energetics of the brain and can bypass the major complex in
mitochondria so that you can have again increased energy efficiency and if your brain is
kind of shorting out and not doing so well, for example, if you have autism or if you have
seizures or if you have dementia, then increasing energy efficiency can really do a lot to
help your symptoms because people with Alzheimer’s dementia have a terrible time
metabolizing glucose, so, if you switch over to a ketogenic diet where your brain is only
burning the minimal amount glucose that it has to and the rest of the brain is burning
ketones, you’re going to theoretically do a lot of good.
Also, it’s interesting in bipolar disorder, the study has not been done, though. I’m aware
of some case studies. People have emailed me who have had symptoms very consistent
with bipolar disorder and went on zero carb ketogenic diets and they had vast
improvement in their symptoms. There are two case studies in the literature. There were
no randomized controlled trials at all for bipolar disorder, but since a lot of medications
for bipolar disorder also are medications for seizures and there’s definitely a lot of
evidence that the ketogenic diets are very effective for seizures, so, it makes sense that
they would also be effective for bipolar disorder, but as I said, there were two case
studies in literature and both of them were failures for trying to treat bipolar disorder with
a ketogenic diet and then there are no randomized controlled trials. But it's very, very
interesting theoretically and again, the case studies that I know about out there are not
published, but just anecdotes, people had some positive results. So, it’s not something
that I, as an M.D, I had to kind of go with evidence-based medicine, so someone comes
up to me and says, “Hey" with all the symptoms of a bipolar disorder, I can't first off say,
“Oh, go on this ketogenic diet,” because we just don't have the evidence, but if someone
had wanted to work with me with respect to ketogenic diet and figure out how to do that
and some of the other options that we already have more evidence for, though they have
drawbacks too, certainly medication of course has a lot of drawbacks, but, for example,
didn’t want to do that, then I certainly would be glad to work with someone with that, but
it would have to be a kind of a special case.
Armi Legge: So let’s say somebody was trying a ketogenic diet that did not have autism
or Asperger’s or Alzheimer’s or some disease, they just wanted to experience better
mental performance, maybe they’re getting ready for big test or they just like being a
little bit smarter, do you know of any possible mechanism by which a ketogenic diet may
improve mental performance in healthy individuals and could adding things like MCT oil
or coconut oil and these other things that improve ketone production possibly improve
their mental performance as well?
Emily Deans: You know, that’s been highly variable when you hear. I don’t think,
again, it’s not been systematically studied. I’m really more talking about what you sort of
see and hear on the internet, which you got to take that with kind of a grain of salt, but
people have very variable reactions to a ketogenic diet. Almost everybody is going to be
a little bit groggy or not feel as good at the beginning. It’s called the low-carb flu. It’s not
something that I’ve actually experienced when I’ve done fasting or anything like that, but
a lot of people say they have it. It may be an issue with omega-3s and may be an issue
with serotonin, who knows, but if you get past that, then some people report they’re
thinking more clearly, they've lost their cravings, they’re not distractible and they’re
dealing really well. Other people feel really sluggish and horrible for a quite a long time.
So, I really think it depends on the person as to whether they’re going to respond. In a
fasting situation, which will definitely get into ketosis, not as probably as deep a ketosis
as several weeks of a ketogenic diet, there’s an increase in norepinephrine, which can
indirectly increase dopamine about, let’s say, 16 hours in to it, probably 16 to 24 hours
into it, and so you can definitely have an increase in mental acuity and kind of a buzz
from fasting for about 16 to 24 hours into it, but I’m not entirely sure how good that is for
you, but it feels good anyway.
Dave Asprey: I’ve noticed that with people who go on the Bulletproof diet, which is
essentially is a ketogenic diet, but it's low toxin and it doesn't have omega-6 oils in it,
they say, "Yes, I have this burst of energy, but also, I need less sleep." Usually people
want one to two hours less sleep just because they have more energy and it seems to be
consistent, like, for longer periods of time. Have you noticed any effect on sleep quality
or sleep duration from your patients or from your research around on MCT oil or just on
ketogenic diets in general?
Emily Deans: Again, I'm going to have to go to my own personal experience because
I’m not aware of any specific research addressing that or I haven’t seen it or looked for it,
but I know on my own personal experience, I do sleep less if I’m eating very low carb
and sometimes there are times that I felt like I didn’t quite need as much sleep, but that’s
the only experience that I have. I still needed sleep, definitely, I wasn’t manic or
anything, but it seemed that I could go on six hours instead of eight, for example, and feel
fine.
Dave Asprey: Okay. So that’s pretty typical with the people who are commenting on my
blog and certainly my experience where I talk about sleep hacking and ways to
intentionally sleep less, but still maintain mental performance and physical health and not
put your health at risk. In other words, get more efficient sleep and eating this way, for
me has been pretty profound in that and that has unlocked a couple of extra hours a day.
So, you have noticed something similar, but you haven't seen studies and you’re going on
personal experience, not medical research, which is appropriate when there is no medical
research. I’ve not seen it anyway.
Emily Deans: Right. I have an alert out for PubMed for ketogenic diets and so every
week or couple of weeks, I'll get emailed every study about ketogenic diets and I’ve been
doing this for probably about a year and I haven’t seen anything of that nature. Most of
the stuff's in rats and things like that anyway, but I haven't seen anything like that in
humans.
Dave Asprey: I was really impressed when you mentioned that a lot of the research was
done with omega-6 oils and horrible things like that around ketosis. I’ve been
recommending MCT oil for quite a while because of its effect on ketosis even in the
presence of carbohydrates and because on the studies that show niacinamide and MCT oil
have such a profound effect on the brains of people with Alzheimer’s. Do you have any
other thoughts on MCT oil and why it might be so effective or, kind of what it does?
Emily Deans: Well, actually there’s a good blog called Primal Med Ed, I don’t know if
you’ve seen it. It’s done by an Australian medical student. She's a 4th year medical
student named Anastasia and I believe she's at primalmeded.com. She just did a post on
MCT oils, I believe. It was my friend Jamie. I hope I don’t get them mixed up. My friend
Jamie is a Paleo guy. It basically shows that MCT oils because they’re shorter than our
long-chain fatty acids like palmitic acid and the mono and saturated fatty acids that we
eat, but MCT oil is going to be a little bit shorter, so it bypasses some of the digestion and
it kind of basically gets sort of shunted right into your bloodstream as instant ketone
energy. So, in order to make ketones in a standard ketogenic diet, you basically need very
low carb and very low protein and that forces your body to take whatever fats you have
and make it into protein and make it into ketones and with MCT oil, it kind of bypasses
all that and becomes ketones directly and so that’s how you can actually eat a higher carb
and higher protein diet supplementing with MCT oil and you can get more ketones in
your circulation.
Dave Asprey: So, now I’m going to go out on a limb here and expose myself to public
ridicule. I’ve been promoting something called Bulletproof coffee. It’s a recipe that I’ve
just titrated for myself for over quite a while and a lot of readers on the blog are just
raving about it and I just had it for breakfast this morning and what it is, it’s a cup of
coffee with unsalted grass-fed Kerrygold butter, about 70 grams maybe, mixed with 30 or
so grams of MCT oil. You basically blend it to get a nice head of foam and it tastes like a
creamy latte, but I drink that and I feel really good for six or eight hours, stable blood
sugar and no energy dip and then I go and have a normal kind of Paleo friendly, but with
lower toxin Bulletproof kind of lunch. In your understanding of how all this stuff works,
what do you think about that idea that, "Okay, I’m going ketosis in the morning using
MCT oil, using some butter and having no carbs and no glucose, not even dextrose."
Why is that so mentally effective or should it be and any comments on that?
Emily Deans: I think you are probably cutting into the effective – you’re sort of super
supplementing your overnight fast, so you are already probably in ketosis because you
are probably eating a healthy diet and you’ve lost that extra hundred pounds, so you’re
probably pretty metabolically flexible so almost anybody in good metabolic health is
going to be in ketosis when they wake up in the morning, whether they eat a high carb or
low carb diet. So, you add ketones to that and you’re sort of doing a sort of super duper
fast, but obviously it's not been studied. It’s also not something that we did in our
evolutionary history. We didn’t need Kerrygold butter with MCT oil and coffee. So, I
can’t speak to how that will work in sort in the long term or what the possible
consequences might be, but it’s definitely an interesting biochemical thing and I can see
how it would help for specific situations, tests, those kinds of things. Interestingly
enough, there are also studies showing that glucose, as you mentioned, or dextrose, they
sort of cross between studies of sugar and cross between studies of starch or glucose that
you have increased mental acuity almost immediately to about two hours after consuming
it, after which you have a big slump, as we’re all aware, I’m sure because we’ve all done
that to ourselves, eating sort of high sugary breakfast with skim milk or something and
then two hours, maybe we really, really do great on out first morning task, but then two
hours in to it, you’re just kind of, “Oh, I need an apple,” or something like that, so, it
seems to me that using the ketones instead of the glucose, you end up with a longer
period, but again, it’s not something that's been studied in humans so much, so you’re
sort of self-experimenting.
Dave Asprey: That’s definitely one of the theories of the blog that if I think something
is unlikely to cause significant permanent harm and I think it may have really good
effects, I’m willing to experiment and gather as much data as I can and then publish the
data. Along those lines, I’ve also tried putting three teaspoons of glucose in the coffee,
enough to not throw myself out of ketosis, and I seem to get that two-hour kick from the
higher glucose levels and no dip afterwards, so I can still go the six or eight hours and
one of the people I coached specifically approached me about "what I can I do while I am
preparing for the LSAT tests? How can I get my brain where I want it to be while I am
studying and what should I eat the morning of?" And we settled on that glucose plus
MCT and butter coffee thing and he had just fantastic results. Obviously, it’s a one-case
thing. There isn’t a clear pattern and certainly no study there, but from my understating of
biochemistry and all, it seemed like a really interesting effect to not get that slump
because god knows when I was in college, that slump killed me every time.
Emily Deans: Well, it is interesting. Again, we’re going back to my own personal
experience because we’re really out of the range of the medical literature obviously, here,
but when I switched to this sort of Paleo higher fat diet myself, I used to really struggle a
lot with hypoglycemia symptoms and I would always have to have food with me
wherever I went. It’s kind of a pain, always having, "what are my six meals today?" And
packing it and you’re running off to the hospital where you might be awake for the next
32 hours and you’re going to the hospital and stealing Graham crackers from the nutrition
section because you have to be up and you’re having a sugar crash and it’s just not fun at
all, so, in switching to Paleo diet, I've noticed that I can get away with, maybe in the
morning, I am feeling a little hungry, I don’t quite want to fast, but I’m running up to the
door, I’ve got the two kids, I really don’t have time to eat a real meal, but I might grab a
banana and just with this banana three years ago, I would have had a crash a couple of
hours later and now I certainly have no problems eating a banana in the morning and
feeling fine until noon, which is a very different experience for me because I've struggled
with kind of hypoglycemic symptoms since I was in my mid-teens, so it’s very
interesting.
Dave Asprey: That’s a shared experience as well where after fixing health and fixing
diet, you can do things that would have been almost disabling before, from a
hypoglycemic perspective. I went five years with no fruit because whenever I ate it, I felt
so bad, I couldn’t perform at work and now, yeah, I can eat fruit, I just don’t think it’s a
great to do it very often, but when I do, I feel okay.
One other question, and this is going a little beyond the metabolic stuff we’ve talked
about so far, but it’s a question that comes up quite often on the blog and something that I
researched for my own book. What about electromagnetic fields and brain cancer or
mental performance, where are you on from what you’ve seen from research and your
own experience as a practicing physician, do have a thought there?
Emily Deans: You probably have more of an idea of that than I do because it’s not
something that I have researched too much specifically and when I have looked at it, I’ve
seen both sides because there actually is a kind of an interesting study in a mouse model
of Alzheimer’s where they were exposed to the equivalent of cell phone radiation of
talking on the phone for 2 hours a day, which is a lot of cell phone usage, I would think,
for any mouse, and it actually prevented them developing Alzheimer’s plaques. So, that
was kind of a positive. And I’ve also seen other studies where the talking on the phone
disrupted some of the magnets in the energetics, certain areas into the brain and that's
pretty disturbing. That’s something we never did before. However, sticking a magnet on
your head is one of the newer treatments for resistant depression with the transcranial
magnetic stimulation. It’s an FDA-approved treatment now for resistant depression where
you go every day for, I think, three to six weeks and basically put a very powerful magnet
on one side of your head and it helps. So, again, we don't know much about the long-term
side effects of that and that's something that you wouldn’t do unless you have a very
severe resistant depression, but I have sort of a mixed opinion, it’s obviously, again, not
anything that we are exposed to quite a lot. On the other side of that, people are worried it
was the microwave oven, "is it getting to me?" But a lot of these waves decay sort of
exponentially. So, if I am standing upright next to the microwave like a little kid
watching popcorn pop like you might have when you were young, probably not a great
idea, but you’re three feet away from the microwave, the waves are exponentially less
powerful. So, I try not to worry too much about that because I really like my Wi-Fi, I like
having a cell phone. Well, what do you think about that?
Dave Asprey: I saw some pretty scary stuff. A friend and a physician, a pretty wellknown in the autism community, name Dietrich Klinghardt, showed flat out, he said, "I
can predict the likelihood of autism based on EMF levels in the bedroom where a mother
slept while she was pregnant," which is a pretty big claim, but it’s one that I believe and
he’s got the data for it. Obviously, you could say there’s a selection bias or something
else, but I’ve also looked at the work of Robert Becker in Electromagnetism and Life,
who spent his whole career looking at cell regeneration and how a cell differentiates and
there’re certainly very small EMF effects that affect which direction a cell goes, but like
you said, Wi-Fi and cell phones are a part of life, so, what we did ourselves is we said,
"Okay, where can we reduce these things and potentially block them without likely
causing any damage, so blocking them isn't going to hurt us?" So we put electrical filters
in the house.
Emily Deans: Is there a Faraday cage in your bedrooms?
Dave Asprey: Not quite that bad. We thought about it. I did build an office once with
Faraday cage just because it was just kind of cool and I was building the office, I didn’t
noticed any effects from it, but we have the electrical filters, so that we have less chaotic
electrical stuff. We sleep with it electrically grounded, which basically means the EMF
waves don’t penetrate as far and we turn off our Wi-Fi when we’re asleep and we don’t
carry cell phone right next to pregnant tummies or gonads, but other than that, you’ve got
to live, right?
Emily Deans: Yeah. We certainly are in a sort of a Wi-Fi world nowadays.
Dave Asprey: Great. I appreciate your thoughts on that and I know that it’s one of those
things I don’t think there is enough evidence yet, but I’m concerned, but I’m not willing
to go and live in a cave somewhere because I don’t think that that concern is necessarily
warranted and it’s not practical, but it looks like we’re coming up onto the end of the
hour of the interview. I think Armi, we had another one or two questions?
Armi Legge: Yeah, one thing I’d like to ask is for the people who can kind of take away
something good from this interview, Emily, is what are some of your general
recommendations for people who want to keep their mental performance high on a daily
basis as well as decrease their chances of developing debilitating brain disorders later on
in life? What are the some of the basic things that most people can do?
Emily Deans: Armi, probably the most important thing from a population standpoint is
to really decrease that processed food and eat more whole, real food and I think that
would pretty much work for mental health and general health. If there are more specific
problems, sometimes we need to do obviously a lot more tweaking, and I prefer, myself,
a gluten-free and I also eat a casein-free diet for the most part, Paleolithic-style, sort of
evolutionary medicine diet. I really vary whether its high-carb or low-carb because I can’t
be bothered with counting grams and macronutrients and that kind of thing. And
personally, it doesn’t seem to matter that much to me whether I’m having kind of a high
carb day or low carb day, but I would say doing that and really trying to maximize your
whole real foods, so that you get plenty of vitamins and minerals and choline and
saturated fat and all these things that are good for us and the omega-3s and throwing in
some fish every now and again, preferably wild-caught from clean waters and in general,
trying to do that and trying to have good sleep hygiene, so you get really good, deep,
restorative sleep, trying to be closer to the ideal weight to prevent things like sleep apnea,
insulin resistance, lack of metabolic flexibility, so that your brain is in better shape and
on top of that, a bit of exercise, so that we can live and lift and be happy in the world and
do what we need to do and feel good and not be hurt by just trying to move our office
around or something like that and then getting plenty of playtime and trying to live low
stress if you can and living sort of more in that evolutionary paradigm to some extent. So,
lots of play, lots of time with your family, not working yourself to death all the time. It’s
a pretty general recommendation and again, that paradigm has never wholly been tested
so we have got to take that into consideration, but it makes commonsense to me and I
think that’s where we have to start.
Armi Legge: Well, I think that’s pretty good advice and for pretty much anyone, eat
good food, move more and take a chill pill though. Yeah.
Emily Deans: Right. Yeah.
Armi Legge:
everything?
Cool. So, Dave, do you want to wrap things up with Emily and
Dave Asprey: Sure. Emily, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with people
who are listening to our podcast today. Can you tell them where they can find more
information about you, to maybe schedule an appointment or read the things that you
write?
Emily Deans: My blog is at evolutionarypsychiatry.blogspot.com and I’m also a blogger
on Psychology Today which if you go to the main Psychology Today website and you
search for evolutionary psychiatry, you will find my blog and those are sort of the more
updated, more complete, prettier versions of my articles, I would say, but I have, I don’t
know, now maybe 240 articles on my Blogspot blog, so there’s a lot of information now
at this point to go through if you’re interested in this kind of stuff. I have a map page on
my Blogspot blog that kind of references things by nutrient or anti-nutrient or condition.
It’s not perfect and it’s not 100% up-to-date at this point, but it’s a good starting point if
you’re interested in dementia, if you’re interested in depression. I have list of the articles
that pertain to that and everything links to everything else. So, I have a lot of link backs
to some of my articles and some of them are important to understand, understating about
ketosis, understanding about brain energetics and that’s why I think I’m on the right track
because I keep finding entirely different things. I’m looking up about mitochondria, I’m
looking at longevity research, I’m looking up about ADD, I’m looking up about autism
and I'll find the same things over and over with respect to not having micronutrient
deficiencies and having good brain energetics. These seem to be the most important thing
is to keep us healthy and that’s where I'd like to see a lot more research done, so we can
really have sophisticated answers to these questions.
Dave Asprey: I think that we both share that same goal and I really am a fan of the way
you’re approaching the problems, the way you’re using commonsense and you’re
backing it up with good data. We will make sure to include links to all of your various
sources of information, the ones you just listed in the show notes that accompany the blog
and we will also have a transcript of this on the website, so people can sort of search it
and learn about all the things we talked about today. Thanks again, Emily.
Emily Deans: Oh, thank you.
Armi Legge: Right. Bye, Emily.
Emily Deans: Bye. Have a great day.
Armi Legge: Oh, you too.
Emily Deans: I got to go to work now.
Armi Legge: All right.
Dave Asprey: All right.
Dave Asprey: Bye.
Dave Asprey: All right it’s time for the Biohacker report.
Biohacker Report
Dave Asprey: This is a part of this show where we bring you some of the latest research
that caught our attention. The first one that caught our attention, and we’ve got all these
in the show notes if you want to follow the links, is there’s a new study out that shows
that in more socially engaging environments, in mice anyway, white fat turns to brown
fat. That’s really cool. What they found out here is that mice that had access to unlimited
amounts of healthy food as well as socialization and basically the things make mice
happy, that they magically turn white fat, which is basically one of the things that make
you fat into brown fat. Brown fat is one of the things that burns fat for energy in your
body. All of us have some brown fat between our shoulder blades and some near out
heart, but greater amounts of brown fat indicate that you have a healthier fat burning
metabolism. I believe, I don’t have the biopsies of my fat done like that, but I believe it’s
entirely possible this idea that doing things that make you happy and having access to
very healthy amounts of very good food could easily turn white fat to brown in people
and certainly, I have the symptoms of someone with high amounts of brown fat in that
I’m able to be lean and ripped and muscular without needing to work out or even sleep
that much.
Armi Legge: Yeah, I would have to agree. One of the things that I’ve noticed in my
swimming is that I would get in to an 81 degree temperature pool and I would be pretty
cold and even when I’d already put on a lot of extra muscle by following a more
Bulletproof diet, I was still pretty cold for a little while, but then as I adapted to it and I
ate more and more and just got more used to it, I actually feel pretty hot now and I went
swimming today and it was the same thing. So, I think that’s really cool, I think it was
my favorite part of the study was showing how they had unlimited food. They weren’t
calorically restricted or anything like that, so I thought that was awesome.
Dave Asprey: We all know that if you have unlimited access to food that you’re going
to eat it which then means you’re going to be obese, right, so these mice were all obese in
this study, weren’t they?
Armi Legge: No, not really. Yeah.
Dave Asprey: It’s amazing how this works. The whole idea that eat more food equals
you get fat, it’s not just right. It’s a mean lie and it’s crafted to make you feel hungry and
weak all the time. It doesn’t work and it never works, it’s just not how the body is built.
Armi Legge: Right. There were actually some good questions we have on our list of
questions and I’m keeping them for next time and I thought they were pretty good, so you
all have to listen to the next episode to hear those. You want to bring us to the next one? I
thought this was cool, too.
Dave Asprey: Yeah. The next one has to do some with mycotoxins and if you listen to
the podcast or read the blog, I talk about those and these are the toxins that are made by
fungal growth in the environment or in the food supply and this is one of the things that
makes the Bulletproof diet different than Paleo even though there is probably 80-85%
overlap. If you look at the info graphic for the Bulletproof diet, there were foods on there
where people say, "Wait, that seems like it should be Paleo, you should be able to eat
that," and the bottom line is why you probably don’t want to eat that is because it’s got
mycotoxin contamination in it.
This new study that we’re talking about here is some research where a group of scientists
genetically engineered yeast in order to reduce the amount of toxins that were in grains
that they use to make ethanol. Now, here’s kind of a dirty secret. They take grains that are
not suitable for human consumption, particularly barley or corn, whatever, and then
throw them into a vat and they ferment them and they boil off the ethanol if they’re
making it for fuel or they use that same barley in beer and particularly ochratoxin is the
name of the mycotoxin that’s highest in beer and that is one of the toxins that's one of the
contributors anyway to the formation of gout in the body. It’s certainly not the only one,
but it’s a big smoking gun. So, after they create the ethanol, there’s something left, sort of
scum of the bottom of the fermentation tank, and that’s what we call barley malt and
you’ll find barley malt in that yummy breakfast cereal that you eat and you’ll find it as a
substrate for a lot of junk processed foods. Malts tends to concentrate toxins that were in
the grains that were fermented and if you feed that barley malt to animals which is a very
common practice in factory farms, those animals get large doses of these toxins. It also
turns out that farmers don’t like that, ranchers don’t like that because if you give too
many toxins to their animals they make less money because the animals die, because they
don’t put on weight very quickly or they fall over and they get big tumors and things like
that. So, the trick as a rancher who’s not organic or grass-fed or anything is to make sure
that you feed your animals just enough toxins that you can feed them cheap food, but not
so many toxins that they fall over and die and the fact those toxins will accumulate in the
animal’s tissues and people will eat them is not your problem.
So, these new researchers said "What if we make a new kind of yeast that ate mycotoxins
for lunch, so as you’re making your barley malt scum, you could actually then maybe
lower the toxins levels in it so it would be worth more as an animal feed." They
succeeded. They cut the amount of two toxins, trichothecene and DON, by up to 60%
almost, which is awesome. I would dance a jig if people made better yeast for fermenting
things that pull toxins out of the food supply before we gave these foods at animals
because then people who don’t even eat a Bulletproof diet at least won't be exposed to
same levels of toxins. So, thumbs up for this research and I hope these guys do a lot more
of it because this is one of those things that’s profoundly impacting human health and
performance throughout the globe and it’s unnecessary. It just comes about from not
paying pay attention to the details.
Armi Legge: Right, we’re not necessarily advocating you eat grains of any form because
when you really think about it they’re still just carbohydrate dense, nutrient void sugar.
Dave Asprey: Hey man, I’m not saying you should eat barley malt if it's mycotoxin free.
In fact, don’t eat grains, don’t eat things that ate grains is a pretty darn good rule, but
given that for the foreseeable, at least 20 years, there will be people eating grains and
things that ate grains, if that’s going to happen, let’s lower the amount of toxins in those
as much as we can and it’s refreshing to see science moving in that direction.
Armi Legge: Absolutely.
Dave Asprey: Now, that’s the end of our Biohacker report and I want to remind
everyone that you can find links to everything we talked about in the show notes at
bulletproofexec.com. If you enjoy this podcast, you can help us just by leaving a positive
ranking on iTunes, so more people can find this. The winner of last week’s Twitter
contests for Dr. Noakes’ book was Naomi Most who goes by @nthmost on Twitter. She
also writes for several different blogs as well including Deltaself.
If you want to learn more about biohacking, you can follow us on twitter with
@bulletproofexec or check the blog and we would also appreciate it if you would
consider ordering yourself upgrades from our very small sister site which is called
upgradedself.com. You can find the things like the collagen we recommend. Everything
on that store is something that I use personally and have sort of developed over the course
of last 15 years of biohacking. It’s not a big business and nothing on the blog or in the
podcast is ever there to try and sell things. This is just a site where you can actually find
some things that are very hard to find, but are very performant.
Armi Legge: Cool. So, I will talk to you soon, Dave.
Dave Asprey. Thanks Armi, we’ll see you next week for the next podcast.
Armi Legge: Right man, bye.