SHAWN STEVENSON: Welcome to the model health show. This is fitness and nutrition expert, Shawn Stevenson, and I'm so grateful for you tuning in with me today. Living to a hundred years old, that's easy. According to our special guest, his team of scientists and longevity experts haven't projected to live decades beyond that. And most importantly live functional. And healthy decades beyond that, because there's a big difference between lifespan and health span. We don't just want to live a long time. We want to live a long, healthy life where we have functionality and are able to do the things that we love. Yes, there are cutting edge technologies that our special guest is using and has been educating millions of people on for years.

But there are few things that matter for how long you're going to live. Then what you choose to eat on this episode. He's going to be sharing with you his top five foods for extending your lifespan. Keep in mind, these are his top five foods and he shares that he has colleagues that abide by different diet frameworks that have successfully reversed their biological age and slowed their rate of aging as much as he has.

And the thing about our special guests, he is neurotic about tracking. So all these different biomarkers, Looking at telomere length, looking at all these different biomarkers of aging. He's been on top of this stuff and has the facts to back it up that he has, in fact, reversed his biological age.

Chronological age is one thing. That's the calendar time. Biological age is the age of your cells, is the age of your biology. And he's been able to reverse his biological age. By many, many years and dramatically slow his rate of aging. And there are different diet frameworks that can help us to do some of the things that he's done.

And so hearing his perspective on these top five foods is incredibly valuable. And of course, with him being one of the real pioneers of longevity and the biohacking movement. His perspective is one that we definitely need to learn from and no matter what diet framework we subscribe to, which we really strive to bring on, different leading experts on different diet frameworks, so whether that's a keto protocol, whether it's a carnivore protocol or a vegetarian or vegan protocol, we want to hear these different voices and to be able to, as Bruce Lee says, to absorb what is useful and to discard what is not.

All right, that is very sage advice and we have more things that unite us and more similarities than differences when it comes to diet frameworks. And we want to take the dogma out of it. And of course, some of our experts can have very strong opinions, but we need to learn from these people who figure some things out and, to say that our special guest has figured out some things when it comes to nutrition and eating for longevity is an understatement. So I think you're going to get a lot of value out of this episode today. Before we get to our special guest, let's kick to the Apple Podcast Review of the Week. 

ITUNES REVIEW:Another five star review titled, So Grateful to Have Found This Podcast by Andrea Rafferty. I absolutely love this podcast. I found it around seven months ago on a search to find a podcast featuring Dr. Bruce Lipton and haven't stopped listening since. As someone who has suffered digestive issues for the past 20 years, healed by diet, I am so intrigued by the information I've learned from the show and I'm grateful to use it to help my children lead a healthier life.

SHAWN STEVENSON: I love that so much and the fact that you found the Model Health Show, by searching for one of my true mentors, Dr. Bruce Lipton is extra special. And of course, he's the world renowned author of the biology of belief. He's a cell biologist and has presented all of this phenomenal science on how our beliefs impact our biology, truly how our beliefs impact our rate of aging. This is another important part of this conversation, and this is affirmed by several other scientists as well, including Dr. Ellen Langer out of Harvard in establishing how our beliefs about aging impact. Our rate of aging and so we need to cultivate healthier beliefs around that subject matter if we want to age healthfully and still be able to enjoy our lives as we progress into our later years. It is super important to take back our mind from the larger culture scape that is programming us to believe that it's all degradation and downhill, and there's nothing that you can do about it.

We have cultures all over the world that are demonstrating what's possible in our senior years. Many cultures living into their 90s, into their 100s, right, centenarians and beyond. Demonstrating active lives, walking, participating in their community, working, right, being able to contribute, enjoy time with their family, the list goes on and on well into these age brackets. But unfortunately our models today in our modern quote, modern society here in the United States is demonstrating other than, but we can change that. And that's another reason I'm really excited about this episode today. Our guest today is a four time New York times bestselling author and host of an award winning top 100 podcast, The Human Upgrade, and he's considered to be the father of the modern biohacking movement.

Dave Asprey is on a mission to empower and enable people to lead happier, more conscious lives by using biohacking techniques and technology to improve the functioning and destiny of the body and mind. Let's dive into this conversation with the one and only Dave Asprey. All right, my guy. Thank you so much for coming to hang out with me.

DAVE ASPREY: It's always fun, man. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Listen, you are obviously iconic when it comes to the conversation of longevity. 

DAVE ASPREY: Oh, thanks. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And for me, being a nutritionist, food is a big deal. 

DAVE ASPREY: Hell Yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: You know, it makes up every cell of our bodies, the energy substrate to, to fuel this incredible organism. And I want to ask you about some foods that are correlated with a longer lifespan and because I know, you know. So let's go through five foods that have the potential to extend our lifespan. 

DAVE ASPREY: All right. One of them, grass fed butter could extend your lifespan. And this has been my predominant source of fat, has been either animal fat or dairy fat. And a tablespoon or two of olive oil for about 15 years.

Maybe some avocados here and there. And the reason you do that is saturated fats build your hormones. And you need to maintain young hormone levels as you age. And they do not cause heart disease. They're stable oils, and it's canola oil, and soybean oil, and safflower, and even the fake avocado oil everywhere that's causing problems. So I avoid those, and I eat the saturated fat from butter. There's also ...

SHAWN STEVENSON: Before you go on, you said fake avocado oil. What do you mean by that? 

DAVE ASPREY: Well, a recent study just came out. And it said that something like 80 percent of the avocado oil that you can buy is actually canola oil, or another oil that's cut in with it, or it's rancid and oxidized. So it's hard to make good quality avocado oil, and they're gonna take the avocados that are the ones they couldn't sell you to make avocado oil. So, just like olive oil, they're selling more avocado oil than we could produce, so you know a lot of it's fake. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And they can, of course, put the little tagline with avocado oil, the little health washing scheme.

DAVE ASPREY:  Oh yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And you also mentioned that these fats help to build our hormones. Can you talk a little bit more about that? 

DAVE ASPREY: This is a really big deal. There's only one saturated fat your body makes on its own. It's palmitic acid, which is a saturated fat. So, some people, maybe after having been bribed by the seed oil industry, are saying, oh no, saturated fats are good for you, but your body makes it because you need it.

And that kind of flies in the face of logic. haha So, cholesterol, which your body can manufacture from saturated fats. It is the building block for your stress hormones, which you need to handle stress and your sex hormones, which you need to feel motivation in your life. So if you're low on testosterone or estrogen or progesterone, then you just feel like you can't do it and you don't want to do it.

And it's okay to stay in grandma's basement and play video games. And all of a sudden, if you get your testosterone levels up because you're eating steak and eggs and butter and things like that, then you're saying, Wow. Funny enough, I have motivation and the motivation comes from dopamine. Dopamine is the motivation chemical and it rides with testosterone.

Most people today, men and women, are very low on testosterone because of crap in our food and crap in our air and even in our skin care and our cleaning products and things like that. So, if you're in your 20s and your testosterone is around 500, those are grandpa levels. Those are not okay for a 20 year old.

This is the time when you should be out there claiming your place in life, finding your partner, and building your career, building your life, building your community. And instead, you're like, God, I'm just so tired. I'm so anxious. You're just low dopamine because you're low testosterone because you're eating seed oils, because you're eating a lot of ultra processed carbs, because you're getting junk light by staring at bright screens till 2 in the morning.

And you're not eating the foods that are necessary for human thriving. And yeah, that's butter. And I stand by that because when you look at all the research, let's see, what's been happening recently? They're finding out that dairy fat is good for you in lots of studies. Dairy protein is a mixed bag. And then you look at traditional cultures.

Let's see. When India, which is largely, but not entirely vegetarian when they ate a lot of dairy fat, ghee is clarified butter. I'd made ghee famous in the US by putting in coffee. Well, they didn't have all this Diabetes, all this heart attack stuff. It was only when American companies came to India and then we convinced them to get rid of their traditional oils, to have healthy vegetable oil and charge them more for it, that obesity skyrocketed.

So we know that it's seed oils that are causing diabetes and even cancer. And there are other causes of those, but they are primary causes that make the cell membranes weaker. We can fix that and the deal is don't eat it if it's fried at a restaurant. There's a few restaurants that'll use a cultured oil, which is all monounsaturated, and a few that'll use beef tallow.

So if you want a beef tallow french fry, if you can find it, great. Every McDonald's had beef tallow french fries until the 70s. So this idea of cutting costs to, to save money on food, the last place where you should economize is on the quality of your food. You can still eat on a budget and you allocate just a tiny bit more for quality.

And instead of buying margarine, you buy butter. Maybe it's not grass fed, it's still better. And the grass fed butter is a dollar more. And that dollar, you go to Starbucks twice a week, you can afford, you know, a lot of butter for that. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And if you even think about how easy it is to make butter. You know, the ingredients required, the processing required versus something like canola oil. You see which one is closer to a whole real food versus something that's ultra, ultra processed. 

DAVE ASPREY: In fact, you can't eat canola oil. It's called rapeseed. And it makes humans and animals sick if you eat it. So what we used to do was squeeze the oil out of these rapeseeds. And then we would use it as lubricant in machines, because it was better than whale oil or something, you know.

And someone figured out, oh, well, if we bleach it and refine it and do all these other things that oxidize it, it's palatable. That means it tastes good, but that doesn't mean it's good for you, because they don't care. They only care if it's cheap and whether you'll eat it. And then, Instead of making it healthy, which might take research and innovation and investment, like, well, we'll just pay a marketing guy to tell you it's good for you.

And maybe we'll bribe a few government entities to put it in a pyramid that's based on economics. So we have this food pyramid that's upside down entirely. Um, I, uh, I have been doing this butter thing. I also eat a lot of red meat on purpose, and it's part of my longevity strategy. And there are people out there who will say you have to be vegan or somehow plant based for longevity.

It's nonsense. Uh, right now, my friend, Brian Johnson, um, who's done the longevity Olympics he's doing, which is how rapidly can you reverse your aging. He's tracking on his leaderboard the rate of aging, and he spends about 2 million a year. And he is almost vegan, although he eats 20 grams of beef collagen every day, which is definitely not vegan.

But, I'm doing 200 grams of protein that's all animal protein every day. I have exactly the same rate of aging. It's 72%. And there are studies that support high quality protein as necessary. Uh, even for longevity. So this, this weird blip in all of recorded history, where we're somehow eating malnutrition diets that would normally be reserved for the lowest class peasants, and we're trying to tell ourselves that it's going to make us live longer.

It's not, it depletes your minerals. It depletes your hormones. It messes with your thyroid. And I say this as a former vegan and a former raw vegan, who's really devout until I started shattering teeth and getting autoimmune issues. This is why 80 percent of people who fall for the propaganda from PETA and other groups, they with good intentions, attempt a plant based diet.

And they look down one day and like, I can't get an erection. I have love handles I didn't have. My joints hurt all the time. I have floaters in my eyes and I hate my life. And I probably hate my friends because I lost my dopamine. Then they quit. 80 percent of vegans quit being vegan because it makes you sick.

And you have to be really, really stubborn, like I am, to stick with it for a couple of years. Until it really punches you in the kidney. Because 70 percent of kidney stones are caused by plants, not meat. Isn't that weird? 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Alright, there's two things here. First of all, two things. So, number one. And that, and that statistic has been floating around for a while.

DAVE ASPREY: The kidney stones? 

SHAWN STEVENSON: No, not that. (laughter) 

DAVE ASPREY: I dropped a few there. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Right. But just the, the, the transition, you know, somebody goes vegan and then transitioning away from that eventually. And oftentimes it's looked at if you're in the vegan community as a weakness, you just gave up. But before you say anything,

DAVE ASPREY: I love it. I love it. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Before you say anything, understanding that the adherence to it is part of it, but also the potential for. Many of us to develop some or many deficiencies and I want to ask you specifically though. What about the people that can thrive on a vegan plant protocol who are 20 years Vegan and they've been able to put on muscle mass and all these different things. Are they unicorns? 

DAVE ASPREY: Both of those people you mean?

SHAWN STEVENSON: Oh my god. (laughter) There's like 10. 

DAVE ASPREY: Exactly. Okay. They're very, very few. And the fact that you can take someone who is capable of, we're going to call it thriving on that diet. And you just give them a stake and watch this ripple of power that emanates from like, holy cr*p, what have I been missing? That's what's going on there.

And there are people like I interviewed Sadhguru. Who's a very, very advanced spiritual guru and he says, you know, don't eat animals because, uh, you know, you'll absorb their energy and they'll take you out of your human energy. And I have a very advanced meditation practice. I've been to Nepal and Tibet and South America and learned from the masters and I run a neurofeedback meditation mystery school called 40 Years of Zen.

So I'm, I'm into that stuff and you can feel animals. So there's kind of three, three things you look at for why you would be vegan. And one of them is say, I don't want to harm animals, but it's like, this is for spiritual people who are bad at math because. I grew up in a farming country in the Central Valley in California.

And if you have almonds, which grew across the street from me, you also have shotguns and traps, and you kill an awful lot of ground squirrels. Anything that's out there wants to eat your nuts. You kill everything that eats your nuts, so you can't sell them. And if you have, you know, corn and soy, so you got some nice, you know, cruelty free tofu, dude, those tractors come through and they chop everything, including baby deer, bunnies, turtles, rabbits, salamanders.

Notice how when they pick the cute ones, there's a lot of ugly bugs that are really necessary for life. They get chopped up too. Oh, actually they don't, because they've been killed by the pesticides that were sprayed. So, the deaths per calorie from grains is absurd. And the deaths per calorie from grass fed large animals?

You can eat one cow for a whole year and what I believe from a shamanic perspective and my own explorations of the ethics of this domestic animals have an agreement with humans who call us a spiritual agreement between our species and they come here. to nourish us and we take care of them. And it's, it's actually very complete and it's a very spiritual circle.

And I say this, having built a regenerative farm with chickens and pigs and sheep and cows and looked them in the eye and fed them every morning and delivered their babies and all that kind of stuff. And when you do that right, they come here to experience gratitude. And they're willing and able and happy to nourish us.

And it is a crime to mistreat an animal, especially when you're butchering it or to mistreat animals the way we do. The answer is not to mistreat yourself by becoming vegan. The answer is to only eat ethically treated animals, which increases the number of farmers who will treat animals well. Otherwise we'll create a world where we're all eating.

Basically corn and soy and crickets probably all run by Bill Gates. I don't want to live in that world. In fact, I'm not going to live now. So there are farmers. There are lots of farmers You wouldn't know this if you're in the US, but right now across Europe there are Probably 50 to a hundred thousand farmers blocking roads in Germany, in Denmark, in France, spraying animal manure on their parliament buildings, completely shutting down society because governments are trying to take over farms.

So this is a call to number one, support farmers. Number two, support small distributed farmers. You want to know the guy who raised your cows. I promise you that if he raised those cows, he didn't treat them wrong. He stayed up all night because one of them got cut by barbed wire. And that's a fact of life.

It's, it's very. It's very spiritual and it's very humbling to live right next to animals and to see their lives and their cycle of life. This is what small farmers do and this is what I've done for a decade on Vancouver Island. And so when people say it's unethical, guys, you're not paying attention.

These animals are necessary for soil. They're necessary for the completeness of our biosphere. You want to pull carbon out of the air? Have more poop. That's what it takes. It needs to be cow poop. So we can do this, and we have plenty of land to do it. We just need to spread it out. And it doesn't all need to be run by Tyson or some other big company.

It's got to be run by you and me and families who say, you know, we're willing to work 20 hour days in spring when it's lambing season because it's the right thing to do for six weeks. And then we're going to watch these animals thrive, and we're going to take their wool, and we're going to make something out of it, and then we're going to eat the animals or make milk out of it.

But when you do it, Our sheep will walk to where they're being butchered, because they know. Because we practice gratitude every day. And it's so different. So when someone says you have to eat only plants, and malnourish yourself, and have weaker children, and become infertile, which is what happens when you're vegan, because they deplete your minerals.

It's not okay to treat humans that way. And it's not okay to take animals out of our existence, which is where that leads to. So the vegan philosophy is ultimately a death philosophy. They don't know it, but it is. It's either don't kill animals while you're killing more animals than someone who eats beef.

Okay, that's a bad idea. I'm going to do it for my health. Well, except it doesn't make you healthy. This oxalic acid problem is causing more kidney stones than ever, and gout, and a bunch of other health problems, and phytic acid that sucks minerals from your bones so you might break a hip when you're in your 20s.

And the third thing about, animal, animal cruelty, or is it environmentalism? I'm forgetting which one I'm on. But, uh, there's the environmental thing. You need animals to pull carbon out of the air. So, you don't win environmentally, you don't win animal cruelty, and you don't even win on a health perspective.

So, the three reasons They've all been created for a reason, and there's two forces doing that. One of them is, I'm just going to say religious radicals who've infiltrated our food recommendation system. This goes back to Kellogg and Post. You know, Reverend Kellogg was into forced enemas, circumcising boys and girls, and creating foods that lower testosterone, because if we would just stop masturbating, the world would be a better place.

That's why you eat Corn Flakes. Maybe we can do better, is all I'm saying. And I think it's time we do better. And I know, because my former wife, the mother of my children, was infertile when I met her. And my first book, people don't know this, it was on how do you take care of yourself before you even get pregnant so that you can have healthier, stronger babies.

Because I did not want to have kids as unhealthy as I was when I was a kid. And my kids are thriving, and I'm so grateful for that. And I'll tell you, they eat a lot of steak. And they don't eat a lot of soy burgers. In fact, they've never had a soy burger. They know better. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Man, thank you for sharing your perspective on this. You did say a dirty C word earlier, I want to circle back to. 

DAVE ASPREY: Oh man, I'm like, which dirty C word was I talking about? Calorie? 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Cholesterol. 

DAVE ASPREY: Oh, yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And you mentioned this being a building block of our sex hormones, and there's so much misinformation about cholesterol. This is something our bodies literally make it because it's so important, our liver can make some of it, but from a dietary perspective, this is something that we've been told to avoid.

But when we're. And instead, of course, number one, but number two, let's bring in a statin on top of that. And what happens when we're taking statins? Increase incidence of type two diabetes, muscle pain and weakness, more cancer, mitochondrial harm.

DAVE ASPREY: It goes on and on. It's really funny. Years ago, I had a conversation with my friend Nina and tickles. She's one of the big researchers about fat quality and types of fat. We had just had a phone call about potentially filing a class action lawsuit against the American Heart Association because they kept promoting this, this just. Like the exact opposite of what worked and it just, it was like, they're harming people and they're actually taking money to harm people.

It was a few years ago and I gave a talk in Malibu at a TV studio executive's house, you know, looking out over the water and there's some really, really big Hollywood names in. And I gave my full talk about cholesterol and thyroid and inflammation and how you need to have more saturated fat. And one of the people in the audience, she said, I'm a cardiothoracic surgeon.

And at the end of my talk, I said, ""well, what do you guys think? Got any questions? And she stands up, she goes, "I'm the former president of the American Heart Association." And I'm like, okay, this is going to be fun. And, and I just looked at her and I said, I really want to know what you think about this. And she looked around the room and she goes, everything you said was right.

I almost cried. I was like, Like I was in this combative thing like we're gonna have to stop it and she said two years ago We announced that cholesterol is a nutrient of non concern She said but no one will listen we were wrong we thought eating cholesterol raised cholesterol We found out that wasn't true and we told people that eating cholesterol isn't a problem now The AHA still says saturated fats a problem and it doesn't look like that's actually true at least for most people but it might be for some and So, she just said, I want people to listen, like, cholesterol is not the problem, eating an egg isn't a problem.

And I just felt this wave of relief that, you know, there are good doctors, even at these large organizations, and most of them are corrupt. There's evidence now, it's all over the place, that the cedar industry paid the regulatory or the private bodies like that, and so did Big Sugar. They've been manipulating us.

With media, and I wouldn't even call that misinformation. Misinformation is a very slippery word. It's like, it almost has like a smarmy-ness to it. Like, you know, oh, that's misinformation. And the reality is, there's truth, there's mistakes, and there's lies. And those are the only three things.

Misinformation is you saying you know what's going on in someone else's head and that they're doing it with intent to deceive. So it's a way of sounding holier than thou. And so anytime someone talks about misinformation in anything, I just laugh. I'm like, oh, is it a lie or is it a mistake? And we know damned well that our regulatory agencies have been lying to us.

They lie to you every time they say it's okay to spray glyphosate on the soil, knowing full well what it does. Knowing that Bayer slash Monsanto has been fined more than 10 billion for the harm caused by this, and they're still selling it and spraying it on our playgrounds and in our dog parks. It's wrong. And those people will be held accountable.

SHAWN STEVENSON: All right, we're just at one on this list. 

DAVE ASPREY: Oh man, how do you get the glyphosate from butter? This is very, very unusual. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: But this is so powerful. You're opening up so many different aspects of this that we'd overlook. So we've got butter slash ghee, 

DAVE ASPREY: Number one. For longevity. We've got butter and ghee. And by the way, olive oil? I have a little asterisk there. One or two tablespoons a day of olive oil, tons of health benefits. Eating all olive oil, uh, there isn't a lot of evidence for that, except if you feed polyunsaturated, which is the seed oils, or monounsaturated to animals, they will hibernate. But if you feed them butter, they don't hibernate.

Because polyunsaturated oils slow your metabolism the most. And the second most is monounsaturated. So an all monounsaturated diet is anti metabolic, which you don't want to do. That said, olive oil is good for you. One of the biggest mistakes we make as human beings is it's really easy to shortcut our thinking.

So if something is good, more is better. If something is bad, don't have any. And that means that, you know, cortisol, Oh, it's the stress death hormone. Yeah. Low cortisol is more dangerous than high cortisol. It'll actually kill you faster. So maybe. It's just the right amount and it's not more good, less good, it's the right amount good. And that's just a harder level of thinking. It requires more knowledge and more work to do that. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Since we've pulled into the olive oil driveway, let's talk a little bit more about it. Why is this correlated with longevity, specifically olive oil? 

DAVE ASPREY: There are several theories about olive oil. One of them is the polyphenols. But you can get olive polyphenols in supplements without all of the fats, including the linoleic acid, which is the big problem in our diets today. Olive oil is about 14-16 percent linoleic acid, which is something that I don't choose to eat, other than the 1. 6 percent found in grass fed beef fat. So, you don't want to overdo that because you'll naturally raise your levels of omega 6 oils, which just isn't a good idea.

The other reason that it's very likely good for you is a compound called hydroxytyrosol. And this is something you can buy, and it's something that actually, when I work for Bulletproof, and by the way, I have nothing, no association at all with Bulletproof anymore. Danger Coffee is my new coffee company, so whatever Bulletproof is doing, I'm, I don't know what it is, and I'm not accountable for it.

And, hydroxytyrosol, when I was there, I put it into my krill oil formula, because it's such a potent longevity compound. So if I can get as much hydroxy tyrosol as a hundred bottles of olive oil, I'll just do that in a capsule, thank you very much. It's like, I'm going to drink my red wine and take all the biological hits to get resveratrol, or I could get a thousand bottles of red wine worth of resveratrol in a capsule.

So it turns out with technology, we can concentrate some nutrients. And so for olive oil, it's a hydroxy tyrosol and a polyphenol problem. You can get lots of polyphenols and lots of hydroxy tyrosol for very cheap without having to overload yourself with olive oil. And I love high quality, good olive oil, and I use it every day. Just don't use it extensively. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Got it. Now, moving on this list, are there any, just thinking about foods that we kind of gravitate towards, even when I was a kid, I used to. Walked to school with my little cousin Candy, and it was just a block away, but there was like a mulberry bush That was on our walk.

It's just like we would pick them all berries and eat. Are there any berries that are correlated with longevity? 

DAVE ASPREY: Blueberries are very highly correlated with mitochondrial health, with gut bacterial health, with brain function, and with longevity. So blueberries are a real superfood, but there's some interesting nuances and some of this We didn't know back when I first came out with a bulletproof diet, and that's my diet book People lost a couple million pounds, you know, the first intermittent fasting you put butter in your coffee kind of concept book.

I talked about red raspberries because they have some really good polyphenols, but it turns out red raspberries are up there with spinach and Actually a little bit ahead of kale even in the amount of oxalic acid they have And so red raspberries probably are not correlated. Because they're gonna cause system wide calcification of your tissues with tiny razor sharp crystals called oxalic acid or cal calcium oxalate.

And those are shown in studies to cause mitochondrial harm. And your mitochondria are the things you keep healthy if you wanna live a long time. So raspberries, if you two raspberries in raspberries season, I don't care if you do what I used to do when I was a vegan. I was able to eat a box or two of raspberries every day and strangely I had to pee 25 times a day literally I went to several doctors and they put a camera in that hole in men that should never have anything go in it to see what's going on in my bladder I'm still traumatized by that and they didn't find anything but the number of women I've met I'm still who are eating beets, spinach, kale, almonds, and raspberries every day.

And they say, Oh, I have interstitial cystitis. It's been with me for years. I'm like, stop. And three days later, like, Oh my God, my symptoms are gone. Yeah. You were forming little crystals in your urethra every single day because of your diet, your vegan plant based healthy diet. It just doesn't work. Blueberries for the win. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Blueberries for the win. So we've got butter slash ghee and we threw olive oil in there as well. A little bit on that. We got blueberries. What's another one? 

DAVE ASPREY: You know, another one. I'm going to say animal protein on this one. And there's really two kinds of animal protein to pay attention to. One is ruminant animals, grass fed ruminant animals. And this means cows and sheep, and if you're into it, goats, if you can find them where you live. And these have the most amount of minerals, the most micronutrients, and the best fatty acid ratio. And the other kind of animal based protein would be wild caught salmon, ideally sockeye.

It's getting harder and harder to find clean fish, including sockeye, because farmed Atlantic salmon is spreading parasites and viruses into wild populations of fish up on Vancouver Island, which is where I've lived for a very long time. So if you can find cold smoked sockeye salmon, it only lives for two years, it doesn't get very much mercury, it doesn't get very much plastic in it, and it spends part of its life in freshwater, the lowest amount of microplastics.

And you want to do that to get fish oil from it. But if you're saying, oh, I'm somehow holier than thou, so I'm going to be pescetarian, it's impossible to get one gram of fish protein per pound of body weight without filling your body with lead, mercury, and microplastics. So salmon is a once or twice a week thing. Grass fed, grass finished beef is as much as you want it thing. Those would be the two longevity proteins to look for the most. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Got it. Awesome. Um, what about the eggs of said salmon? Does that make the list? 

DAVE ASPREY: Salmon eggs would be in their own category. In the world of fish oil, we've all heard fish oil, Omega 3s are good for you. The vegans will tell you plant based Omega 3s work. They don't. You have to have 45 grams of plant based omega 3s for your body to make 1 gram of the useful omega 3s. If you can convert it, which would require having enough minerals, oh, but you're vegan, you don't have enough minerals, so you're screwed.

So what do we do? We either eat fish, which has some fish oil, and when you eat fish, it's something called SN2 fish oil, which is the arrangement of atoms in the fish oil itself. You want EPA and DHA. And when you do that, You get a lot of benefits, but if you look at salmon eggs, which you get at a sushi place, it's called Ikura.

That is the most precious source of fish oil, EPA, and DHA. And the reason is that when it's in eggs, it's phosphorylated, which means it can cross the blood brain barrier and be used directly in the brain. You're taking those oils partly to help mitochondria in your body, but mostly for your brain. About 15 percent of the fat in your brain.

is made of EPA and DHA, unless you don't eat it, in which case they'll get suppressed, and they'll get replaced with Omega 6 oils, and your brain doesn't work as well. So the studies around Alzheimer's and cognitive function say you should have some fish oil, but not too much. And there are people who are, I'm gonna say, fish oil fetishists right now, and they're like, oh, I just drank half a bottle, and you gotta have it, you gotta have it.

It can cause your blood to be too thin. It probably increases cancer risk when you're taking way too much for long periods of time because it's unstable just like the other omega 6 oils. Um, the thing is you need some but it doesn't mean you need a lot. So I like maybe up to 4 grams at the upper limit for most people.

And if you were to get it through eating Salmon eggs at the sushi place. These things are so precious that the indigenous people of North America, even when they were having tribal warfare, they, the people who had access to salmon would dry salmon eggs and trade them with the other tribes they were warring with.

Because they knew their pregnant women needed to have these. They would save them as multivitamins for pregnancy to have healthier children. And I think the logic was, we're at war right now, but we'll probably end up marrying half of their people anyway, so we might as well have healthy babies because we're going to be around for a long time.

So Ikura nigiri is what you should order if you want the healthiest thing. You can also buy krill oil, which is the same thing, or herring oil from a few companies. Those are superior to fish oil, which is itself superior to a manufactured product that you can get from algae, which is a similar form of fish oil. Adults need more EPA than DHA. Kids need more DHA than EPA. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Got a quick break coming up. We'll be right back. What are the most important nutrients for a healthy brain and great cognitive function? Well, many people are aware that our brains are mostly made of water, but the dry weight of the human brain is mostly made of fats.

Now the question is, what kind of fats do our brains really need to make a notable difference? Well, research published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition discovered that increasing dietary levels of omega 3 DHA, that's docosahexaenoic acid, DHA, was able to improve both memory And reaction time in healthy test subjects.

Now, just to be clear, if you want a great memory, we have to have DHA. Now, what happens when we don't get enough DHA in our diets? Well, another study that was published in the journal Neurology used MRIs and analyzed the brains of study participants. The scientists found that people who ate less than four grams of DHA per day showed the highest rate of a brain shrinkage, while those who were eating at least six grams a day had the healthiest, shrink proof brains.

Now, if you want to keep your brain thick And healthy, you want to make sure again that you're getting in plenty of DHA. And according to NYU neuroscientist, Dr. Lisa Moscone, the best natural food source of DHA is going to be found in fish roe. A. K. A. fish eggs have upwards of three times more DHA per gram than the best fish sources.

Fish sources are notably high in DHA, but fish eggs or fish roe is actually quite higher. Now, this is one of the big reasons why things like caviar are so expensive and also considered a delicacy, considered to be very valuable. But, with the price point and also the quality and the freshness, keeping all of those factors in mind to make sure that we're taking advantage of these benefits that can be found in fish roe, I recommend the fish roe from PaleoValley.

It's made from 100 percent wild caught fish from fish runs in pristine waters, sourced from sustainable minded fishermen committed to preserving fish runs for future generations. Their wild caught fish roe is gently freeze dried to keep the full range of nutrients and omegas intact and undamaged. It also, in addition to the DHA content, it's high in choline, selenium, vitamin E, C, and D, and valuable phospholipids for your brain.

It's 100 percent pure with no binders or fillers. And, the coolest part is that you're going to get 15 percent off exclusively at paleovalley. com forward slash model, go to p a l e o v a l l e y. com forward slash model and get 15 percent off their incredible wild caught fish roe. You're going to get 15 percent off automatically applied at checkout.

So head over there, check them out, get your DHA needs met. Paleovalley. com forward slash model. Now back to the show. All right. So on our list, let's count them down. We've got butter slash ghee. Olive oil was thrown in there a little bit as well. We've got blueberries. We've got animal proteins. We've got salmon roe. What's number five? 

DAVE ASPREY: Number five. You might think I'm biased, I am biased by the research only, it's coffee. The number of studies out there that correlate coffee with longevity, like, pick any medical condition you can think of, go to any search engine but Google, Google's not useful for medical stuff anymore, it's owned essentially by Big Pharma as far as I can tell.

So go to DuckDuckGo or someone, and just search for medical conditions, coffee, research, and just look at what you find. Coffee helps your mitochondria directly. But there's something else people don't know about coffee. You might have heard about toxic mold in coffee. It's a major problem around the world. 30, 36 studies support what I'm saying. I didn't pay for those studies. Most governments have regulations. The U. S. does not have any regulations protecting us from mold in coffee, which is a known problem since the 90s. So, when coffee's illegal to sell in Japan or China or South America, Or Europe, they send it to the U S and then we drink it and then we get cranky and jittery and angry and you know, just yell at people and then need sugar and have another coffee later.

This is why I created the mold free coffee industry. It's why danger coffee is my new coffee brand. But there's something else I haven't talked about on a podcast ever. You want to know that one? Absolutely. Earlier we talked about oxalic acid and how these plant compounds build up. They cause kidney stones.

They cause systemic pain and inflammation. And. You can handle about 200 milligrams a day in your diet. But if you're eating oatmeal and nuts and seeds and grains and all these so-called healthy vegetables, by the way, some veggies are healthy. I'm not throwing all veggies under the bus. If you're eating those, you're probably getting five times the amount your body can handle.

And it builds up over time. So people go vegan two years later, like they were wrecked and then they stopped being vegan. It takes them 10 years to recover. Well. So, green tea, which is supposed to be really, really healthy for you, it has a lot of benefits in longevity studies. It also has a lot of oxalic acid.

So if you're drinking 10 cups of green tea a day, you're overloading your kidneys and other things with oxalate. Coffee has no oxalic acid in it naturally. It's safe from that. So the reason is green tea is protecting itself from bugs, partly with caffeine and partly with oxalate. Coffee is protecting itself from bugs with caffeine.

And what that means is that when we drink it, caffeine, up to 400 mg a day, has beneficial effects on our biology. They're pretty well studied at this point, too. Too much caffeine is not good for you. But some, for most people, depending on your genetics, actually improves your performance in a good way. 90 percent of the global population now drinks coffee for a reason. It's not because we're stupid. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Heh heh. So What are some of the unique compounds in coffee that make it so special? Like, what about antioxidants? 

DAVE ASPREY: Well, coffee has two things in it that people don't think about. One of them is soluble fiber, prebiotic fiber. So if you're not using a paper filter, I don't recommend paper filters. Uh, if you're doing that, you get the coffee fines that just give more body to the cup of coffee, it tastes really good. Well, it turns out that feeds your gut bacteria. There's also the stuff that makes coffee dark, and it's called Polyphenols and you've probably heard of melanin, right? This is the stuff that gives you darker skin.

Well, there's also melanin behind your eyes and in your brain. And neuroscientists used to call it junk melanin because they didn't understand that one of the things melanin can do is it can convert sunlight or heat and vibration directly into electricity. So it's serving an electrical function in your skin.

And this is why if you look at a 90 year old White person and a 90 year old darker skinned person who has the better skin and doesn't look like they aged black don't crack. They exactly black don't crack. He said at first And so that's because melanin is actually a superpower biologically. It does stuff in the realms of quantum biology So let's unpack.

What is melanin melanin is just cross linked polyphenols. What's in coffee? They're called melanoids, the precursors to melanin. So if you're drinking coffee, you're actually getting melanin Levels that can be used inside your eyes where you can't see it. No ultraviolet light gets to the back of your eyeball where there's melanin.

And it gets into neuromelanin, which is good for your brain. It's good for your biology. Coffee, then also those polyphenols are a source of prebiotics. When you put prebiotic polyphenols in the gut, your gut bacteria flourish. The good ones flourish, and then they make beneficial compounds from them. So, you just have a cup of good quality, mold free black coffee, and say that's pretty good for you.

But then people say, Oh, no, no, I heard caffeine's a diuretic. It's an exceptionally weak diuretic, but moldy coffee is a strong diuretic because your body says, Oh, okra toxin A, that's really bad for kidneys and bladder. You ever drink a cup of bad coffee and then you really have to pee and you feel like half a cup.

Like why did you have to pee when your bladder wasn't full? It's your body going, get that sh*t out of me. It's bad for me. And if you drink good coffee, you have to pee and then your bladder is full. So this is your body protecting you from the toxins in coffee that are specifically bad for your kidneys and bladder.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Little not so fun fact, coffee is one of the most pesticide laden crops in our country as well. Um, now I'm going to ask you this because I, I bet people are wondering this very question. So of course there's like a, you know, longer term benefit on digestion with coffee with the polyphenols. But what about the instantaneous effect for some people?

They have the sip of coffee and then it's like. Their cheeks are telling them to get to a bathroom quickly. What's going on there? 

DAVE ASPREY: Oh, got it So the instant disaster pants effect that happens when you have coffee for some people Most people listening don't get it Some people listening are getting it because it's the coffee they're drinking, right?

And the body's like, get this out of here. This is not good for you. And other people, it is an effect of caffeine. It happens in a minority of people. You might find that having coffee with food will change that effect. And you may find that you're just sensitive to it, in which case you can drink something else.

You might have a cup of green tea, but probably not ten cups the way I used to like to. If you're putting MCT oil and butter in your coffee the way I invented, today I use Danger Coffee. It's my new coffee. It has a large dose of trace minerals and electrolytes that are in it. So it tastes really good.

You can't tell they're in there, but your body knows when you drink it. Because it has electrolytes, it hits your system very differently. And I haven't heard anyone tell me that Danger Coffee is causing this instant poop. Problem that they're getting from drinking dirty coffee. So I'm open to feedback on that.

So I'll ask my audience as well like hey guys, are you noticing a difference. What people do feel when there's the electrolytes that are in danger coffee is they feel a sense of clarity that comes on, I believe, and I don't have studies to support this, but I'm pretty good at figuring out biology, that because there's so many minerals and electrolytes, the body is allowing this to enter more quickly.

Electrolytes do in our cells better. So the way that you just feel this like sense of grounding that comes from Danger Coffee is it's different than regular coffee and I enjoy a mold free regular coffee. I sometimes I'll buy a real high end coffee and try it and like, oh man, I wish I didn't drink that one.

And sometimes like I found one that was pretty clean. And then, you know, you taste something different. To solve that problem of wanting variety, what I started doing is every couple months I'm making ceremonial grade Danger Coffee. And we go to micro lots, these tiny farmers, they might only make 2, 000 bags in the whole year.

And this is like super premium wine, but it's coffee. And then we'll look at their cupping score, 86, 87. And then we test it with our lab testing to make sure it's mold free. And quite often it's not. And then we remineralize it with the process reason for danger coffee. And we send these out in these special canisters to subscribers.

It's ceremonial grade because it's coffee that's specifically meant for sharing with a friend and you don't want to just throw it in your coffee maker and rush off to work. It's like, no, it's a weekend, like I'm going to make coffee for my family. I'm going to have some friends over and you drink really good.

Like if you were to go to a restaurant and you're celebrating new rays and you get, you know, a 500 bottle of wine or something, you don't drink it every day, but it's like, it's a special thing. So coffee is one of these things that it fueled the enlightenment in Europe. It's been a part of. Of culture forever.

People don't know this, but during World War II, we set up coffee roasters all over Europe just to make coffee for allied troops. Right? Because it was so important, even going back to the civil war, there were like riots over getting coffee to troops. So this is something that's just been a part of how we power our minds going back... a very long time and so just understanding the ritual and the richness of coffee culture and coffee history and being grateful and sharing it. I think it's a thousand times better for your brain than drinking wine and I don't drink on a regular basis at all. It's very, very rare for me to have a drink like twice a year maybe because of the longevity effects of alcohol.

They're not good for you. But coffee, I'll share it with someone. And I think it just deserves its own place in our culture. It's not a convenience food. It's not, you know, a seven 11 thing. it's, it's a vital part of my morning ritual. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: So if you're rolling up to McDonald's for a McCafe, you might be McF ing yourself up.

DAVE ASPREY: You know, it's hard to pick on McDonald's, uh, for that. You can pick on them for the oils they use and other chemicals and, you know, mono. Their coffee quality in the last 20 years has gone through the roof. I still don't drink it, but compared to 20 year old McDonald's coffee, they made great strides. And what this is doing, when you look at You know, Starbucks and McDonald's and Dunkin Donuts, you know, they're kind of in this war to see who's gonna sell the most street grade coffee to people with the most sugar in it the most quickly, right?

There is some aspect of some of those companies where they're trying to improve coffee quality, and what that means is paying more to coffee growers, but they don't do that. Uh, what I do With danger coffee is I'm buying straight from the grower. So they're getting a lot more money. And I look for, uh, Rainforest Alliance certified or fair trade Alliance certified coffee.

It's far more important than organic certification. Uh, you wouldn't know this in the coffee business, but organic coffee is only grown by large companies because the amount of money it takes to certify your farm to be organic. is more than a small farm makes in a year. They can never do it. So you have to sell your farm, get rid of your ancestral lands, and live in a small apartment in a city so that the coffee plantation that your ancestors grew coffee on can be run by a big company and put an organic sticker and charge a dollar more per pound at wholesale. So I'd rather give that dollar per pound straight to that farmer. You stay on your land. And that just feels cleaner to me. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: I love that you called it street grade coffee. Talking about Starbucks and McDonald's, do you ever feel like your brain is running on low battery? Well, batteries themselves provide energy from chemical reactions that involve electrolytes. Electrolytes are minerals that carry an electric charge. And electrolytes play a major role in providing energy for your brain. Take sodium for example.

Sodium is an electrolyte that actually enables your brain to maintain proper hydration. Our brains are mostly made of water. It is so important for the form and function of our brains, but we can't maintain that hydration to do all the things that our brain does without an adequate supply of sodium.

Not only does sodium help to maintain proper water balance, a study conducted by researchers at McGill University found that sodium functions as a quote, on off switch in the brain for specific neurotransmitters that support optimal function and protect the brain against numerous diseases. That's just one important electrolyte for the brain.

Another critical electrolyte for your brain for providing that electrical energy for your brain is magnesium. A fascinating study published in the journal Neuron found that magnesium is able to restore critical brain plasticity and improve cognitive function. In a double blind, placebo controlled study published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, found that improving magnesium levels in adult test subjects who were in an at risk population for Alzheimer's.

These folks were between 50 and 70. Improving magnesium levels was found to potentially reverse brain aging by over nine years. Getting a functionally and structurally younger brain. Electrolytes are that important. Now, there's one company that has hundreds of thousands of data points for the optimal ratios of electrolytes.

And that company is Element. Go to drinklmnt.com forward slash model, and you're going to get hooked up with a free gift pack, a free sample pack with every single electrolyte purchase. Hook yourself with any of their electrolyte flavors, and you're going to get a free bonus pack. It's an awesome opportunity to get the very best electrolytes in the world.

Without any artificial colors, without any binders and fillers, no nefarious sweeteners, anything like that. Just the highest quality electrolytes on the planet. And by the way, Element is actually fueling athletes in every single professional sport, many professional sports teams from the NHL, the NBA, especially the NFL.

Have now switched their teams over to utilizing Element for their team's electrolytes. Even though they might have NFL contracts to have those other brands like the Gatorades, the Powerades, the Haterades. They might have contracts to have their containers on the sidelines. But many of these teams are now utilizing element again, go to drink L M N T.com four/model with every electrolyte purchase, we're going to get a free sample pack, head over there and check them out.

And now back to the show. 

You know, for the past 10 years now you're at your 10 year anniversary, you've created the most. Iconic and the biggest biohacking event in the world and you're at your 10 year anniversary Congratulations on that and it's just a it's a it's one of those things you truly have to experience It is an absolute feast for your senses.

You learn so much the experiences I think I mean time has flown by I mean it might have been five years ago that I spoke at the event and The 10 year anniversary event is coming up in a couple of months. 

DAVE ASPREY: End of May in Dallas. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: With this being said, .I know that you personally have learned so much over this period and I'm Assuming we didn't talk about this I'm assuming you're gonna be talking about what's happening right now in longevity and also what people can look forward to So, can you give us a little glimpse?

DAVE ASPREY: Sure. 

SHAWN STEVENSON:  Into what that's gonna be. 

DAVE ASPREY: The theme of the 10th annual biohacking conference. It's at biohackingconference. com obviously It's living beyond 180 And when I wrote my big longevity book, I talked about the fact that that wasn't. An unreasonable goal. And we're bringing in the people who are doing that.

Brian Johnson's going to be presenting, but I'm also bringing in the other side of this that we don't talk about enough. And it's the spiritual side. Joe Dispenza is going to be talking about science. Behind his work. So he's not going to be leading a bunch of breathwork stuff. You go to a Joe Dispenza event for that and Joe's awesome.

And I go to his events and they're transformational. He's going to be talking on stage potentially with one of the primary researchers from UCSD about the mitochondrial effects of meditation and mindset that are working better than pharmaceuticals. We're talking about studies of thousands of people with regular meditation practice with EEGs on their heads, measuring their saliva and measuring their poop and their blood. I mean, these are hardcore scientific studies showing that what you do with your breathing, what you do with your mindset, what you do with your heart, actually affects longevity. It's causing changes in gene expression that are undeniable and that are better than pharmaceutical companies.

And the thing is, you can't regulate meditation. So come to the biohacking conference. We're going to teach you about that. And we're going to teach you about some of the other brain things. My dear friend, Dr. Daniel Amen. I'm on his board of directors for Amen Clinics, 20 plus years after his work changed my life and showed me I had a hardware problem in my brain, not a moral failing, and it let me heal my brain.

He'll be on stage to share his latest work, one of the more passionate guys I know. Dr. Mercola will be there, who's the most censored man in America, and always, every year, presenting the latest. thing. He's kind of a little rabbit hole. He's going to run down, and you'll hear stuff you've never heard before at this conference.

SHAWN STEVENSON: First it was NWA. Now, Dr. McCullough.

DAVE ASPREY: It's, it's all of it. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Censored. (laughter) 

DAVE ASPREY: Oh man. The, I haven't thought about NWA in a long time, man. You're taking me back to high school. I like that. It's old school stuff. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: We're in, we're in LA, man. 

DAVE ASPREY: Yeah, we're in LA. All right. The. The idea here is, I just want people to be free and if you want to be free, you gotta have enough energy and that means you gotta have enough minerals, you gotta have enough energy from food, and you have to have all the other micronutrients and not a lot of toxins breaking energy.

If you do that, Your energy doesn't go into fear, it goes into overcoming fear, and it goes into overcoming cravings for hunger, and it goes into overcoming, um, your desires that aren't serving you. And what's left is, we're wired in our bones without thinking to be of service to our community and to our planet.

So all you have to do is fill up your energy reserves, and it brings you peace, but it also makes you dangerous. Because it's called danger coffee, because who knows what you might do. There's you have enough energy. So you're going to choose to be peaceful unless someone gets in your way. And then you're going to choose to, in a peaceful way, run right through them because they tried to keep you from getting the peptides that keep you feeling good. Or they tried to limit your access to red meat or to grass fed butter or any other nutrient you choose, including you want to live off, you know, tofu balls. Good for you. You have a right to buy tofu balls.

Anyone tries to stop you. If you have enough energy, you should stop them from stopping you, but I'm sorry, you won't have enough energy. So bottom line is our job is to just feel so good all the time. That it doesn't matter if it's your kids yelling at you, your boss yelling at you, or something on the TV yelling at you, or some non elected governmental people trying to take over your government through treaties to force you to eat crickets and get, um, medical procedures you don't want.

Any of those kinds of hypothetical situations that of course have never happened, any of those things, if you have enough energy, they're not your problem because they have no hold over you. And that's why it's called danger coffee, because what you're going to do is you're going to be awesome and you're not going to be programmable.

And that's just the world I want to live in. It's full of people who choose peace because they can choose it. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Amazing. Amazing. So the Danger coffee is going to be flowing. 

DAVE ASPREY: Oh yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: We're going to have the greatest thinkers in longevity. Speaking and also that you've got a bunch of different workshops as well that are more intimate and people can get information on the event one more time to 

DAVE ASPREY: biohackingconference. com. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Awesome. Awesome. Now, I don't want to let you go without asking you about this because it was sandwiched into this. 

DAVE ASPREY: Can't wait. What is it?

SHAWN STEVENSON: This, this, uh, this submarine sandwich that we've had here today. You mentioned alcohol. 

DAVE ASPREY: Yep. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: All right. A lot. Daniel Ayman really changed my perspective on this substantially.

DAVE ASPREY:  He's the man with the research. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: But now there's so many different areas of health that are speaking out about this, but in particular, people who are in the neuroscience space, really bringing more attention to some of the Ramifications of drinking alcohol. Can you talk a little bit about that?

DAVE ASPREY: There's two things that are going to trigger people a lot. When I say, you know, this probably isn't really good for you. One of them is alcohol, the other one is ejaculation. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Damn. And they usually go together. 

DAVE ASPREY: Exactly. So, uh, truly, Look, they both feel good. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna lie. I'll just tell you that if you choose not to do it very often, your quality of life, your desire for life, and the length of your life, they all improve.

It only takes one drink to ruin your sleep. And we know anyone who has a sleep tracker, just go out there and have a glass of really good red wine and look at what your sleep score is. It's not going to be good. There's no way around that. You can do something called Z biotic. That was the thousandth episode of my show.

The first genetically engineered probiotic that helps you metabolize alcohol. That'll help a little bit. You take fistfuls of glutathione, it'll help a little bit. End of the day, if you stack everything in your, in your direction, and you have a few glasses of wine, you're going to wake up the next morning and go, Ah, I feel okay.

But you don't feel great. And if you look at your data, Oh man, my heart rate variability dropped by 10 points. Huh, it's almost like alcohol is bad for me. Because it is. And if you look at Daniel Amon's work, he's got almost a half a million brain scans now, maybe a little bit more than that. And he wrote a very famous book that changed my life, it's called Change Your Brain, Change Your Life.

When he looks at alcohol, he says, here's people who drink one drink a night and their brains have metabolic holes in them. Here's people who don't drink and they don't have it. So sorry, I want alcohol to be good for you. So what do you do? Kava. And. And. The South Pacific, you can use a traditional plant medicine that activates GABA receptors like alcohol.

So it's got the smooth social feeling. And it's not very buzzy like alcohol, but it doesn't make you aggressive, and it doesn't give you a hangover, and it's actually good for your brain cells. I use a brand called True Kava. I've actually helped them get into sprouts recently, and I've been advising them because they're doing lab tested kava to make sure that it's clean.

There was a time in the 80s where people were selling species of kava you shouldn't actually consume. So there were issues with liver toxicity, but this is just a third party validated brand. And What I do at my parties is I, I say, Hey guys, can you send me a few, either a keg or a few cases of true kava?

And I put that out. And yeah, there's a bottle of tequila if people want it, but at least where I am in Austin, I got more people drinking kava at parties. Like if you're under 35, yeah, okay, maybe I'll have some alcohol, but the kava's like, alright, I'll do that. And they're much more likely to have a microdose and a true kava than they are alcohol.

And the alcohol industry is freaking out. Because young people like, no, it's not that it's wine or beer. Like, I don't want either one. And like, well, what do we do? What do we do? And well, what you should do is probably stop making alcohol such an industry. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: So deeply ingrained into everything though, Dave, that's a quite undertaking, but you know, it's just important just to understand it's an, it's inherently toxic. That's what it's, that's what it does. It's some of the effects that you experience from that. And also our body doesn't store alcohol, right? It's one of those things where it's coming in your body's like. Shifting everything over possible using that in trying to get rid of it. And there's this phenomenon called fat sparing that takes place where all the, all the attempts at burning the stored fat that a lot of people want to do, all that shuts down. Your body focuses on, we've got to get this alcohol out of our system. 

DAVE ASPREY: It's funny. There's one time alcohol is good for you. You ever see those old videos of like a St Bernard with a little collar with a barrel of rum? 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. 

DAVE ASPREY: Why is it rum? Well, what they're doing, it might've been brandy. I don't know, some kind of alcohol, but what they're doing is if you drink alcohol, your body immediately stops burning sugar and stops burning fat because it has to burn the alcohol first because it's toxic.

It's just, how do I get this crap out of here? So if you're. In a hypothermic state and you drink alcohol, it's going to cause a wave of mitochondrial respiration that will heat up your tissues. This is why some people get flushed. Not the flushing that Asian people experience because they don't have liver enzymes, but people just get like a burst of energy from the first drink or two.

It's because you're getting a little short term mitochondrial boost. It could save you if you're freezing to death. So if you're in that situation, have a couple of drinks on me. Otherwise don't do it because there's this other compounds that are better for your brain, better for your social interactions, and you won't wake up one day with Alzheimer's cancer, heart disease, and looking really old because you had a healthy couple of glasses of wine every night, that's what happens. If you don't believe me, go to PubMed and look at the studies. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: You just changed my life. I just rolled back to my cartoon watching days, watching Looney Tunes. Yes. Yes. How many low key like they had the dog with the barrel around his neck. That's why come on, man Yeah, there's a reason and first of all those cartoons were a little bit spicy back then all kinds of stuff We're no, do you know if you was definitely like you need to chill he would definitely would have been brought to 

DAVE ASPREY: yeah He'd have been HR for sure. Yeah, it gets a little bit worse thing about Mighty Mouse 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Oh, not Mighty Mouse. Now, 

DAVE ASPREY: There's two of them that we gotta talk about real quick here. I know this is what you thought we'd talk about. So, Mighty Mouse got cancelled in the early 80s. Because there was an episode where, you know, he's a normal mouse and he turns into Mighty Mouse. He snorted a line of white powder and became. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Bro. 

DAVE ASPREY: I'm not joking. That's why you don't see Mighty Mouse anymore. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: No. 

DAVE ASPREY: And they asked the, the, the illustrators, and they're like, It was ground up flowers. (laughter) I'm not joking. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Of course it was. This is real. That's what they did to write Mighty Mouse. 

DAVE ASPREY: That's what they did to write Mighty Mouse. And then you got Popeye. You think that was spinach? That was testosterone. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Come on. 

DAVE ASPREY: He was juicing. He was juicing spinach. That's all I'm saying. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Man, Dave, this has been an adventure, man, as usual. And I appreciate you so much. Thank you for sharing your passion, your insights. And of course, you mentioned where people can get tickets to the event. Danger coffee, is there anything else you want to share where people can come and connect with you? Social media? 

DAVE ASPREY: I just, I just redid Dave Asprey. com.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Awesome. 

DAVE ASPREY:  So it's got all 3, 000 articles, 1, 200 podcasts and a bunch of other free info and all that stuff just organized so you can find things. I just, there's so much there. I'm also about to launch an AI model. I had to custom build it. I've written too much to put into chat GPT. So I'm building my own model that has everything I've ever said, every written, all of my research library so that I can help people get to the root of what works for them.

Instead of saying, just do what I do, don't do what I do. What I do is, I test things that should work, I see if they do work, and I do more of those. And I want to teach people to do that. I don't think you can follow any one protocol. Don't eat what I eat. Eat what works for you using the same principles that I use.

It's a very different idea than following a specific regiment that someone else follows. I don't think you're going to get the results you want. I never did. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Alright, we can't leave anybody hanging on this one, by the way. You mentioned earlier, just in closing, I got to get this in here. I want to make sure I put a little note not to miss this. You mentioned EJAC. You mentioned the EJAC. 

DAVE ASPREY: You want me to leave you hanging? 

SHAWN STEVENSON: I was thinking of the all kinds of puns. I was trying to say it in a way that didn't just blatantly. But how is that correlated with longevity? 

DAVE ASPREY: It turns out that in Taoism, they were studying immortality. They were looking for ways to extend human life so that you could live for hundreds of years.

And there's some evidence that a few of them probably achieve that, probably more evidence than there is for blue zones, to be honest. But one of the most important practices was just for men and it was following a specific equation. You can have as many orgasms as you want, but don't ejaculate each time you have an orgasm.

And most men don't know this. And it's been really transformative for me about 15 years ago, I learned these techniques because I was trying to disprove the equation. And the equation for min looks like this. It's age in years minus 7 divided by 4. So how old are you?

SHAWN STEVENSON: Uh, 44. 

DAVE ASPREY: So 44 minus 7 is 38. 38 divided by 4 is about 9. Right? So that means you ejaculate once every 9 days or less. And that you're going to maintain your health, but they also said, if you want to live forever for men only ejaculate, not more than once every 30 days and keep the length of your orgasm to less than an hour. Now, that's what I said. I was like, what?

This is impossible. It's BS. And I love biohacking because we're proving so much ancient wisdom with data. Like actually, they weren't crazy. Acupuncture is real. Breathwork is real. Meditation is real. So I said, I got to disprove this cause I hate it. And I went for a year, I published all my data on the blog.

Um, it's kind of embarrassing. I tried to go 30 days, but you know, day 22, oops, you know, I got to start that experiment over again. And there's a very clear orgasm hangover for men, or more to be, to be really straight forward, an ejaculation hangover for men. The day after you ejaculate, you don't like your job as much, you don't like your partner as much, you don't like your life as much.

And the reason for this is a hormone called prolactin. So, when you ejaculate, your prolactin levels soar, and this causes, essentially, the orgasm hangover. Will you respect me in the morning thing? No! Because my prolactin levels are high, and they hack my brain, and make me, just, I'm lower dopamine, things are not as good.

I didn't know this, I didn't recognize this, but I tracked my daily happiness for a year. I ran the 30 day experiments multiple times, and I ran the ejaculate whenever you want. And what you'll find is really straightforward if you have a regular partner. The less you ejaculate, the more you make love.

Makes sense. Like, I'm ready to go again. Can we go again? And because you're not focused on ejaculating, like, can we just go for two hours this time? And like, since I know I'm not going to ejaculate today, what else am I going to do? I'm going to make her cum over and over and over. Until she can't speak and so part of the difficulty for me is I scoured the literature in Daoism.

All they say is a woman walks away undiminished. So I calculated the ideal number of orgasms and frequency for women. And it took a lot of research, but I finally got it. And it's the number of orgasms until the woman feels like she's going to die plus two. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: That's, that's where we got to close it. That's what we got to close it. Dave Asprey, my guy. Thank you so much for sharing your genius. That is crazy, man. Amazing. Amazing. And again, one more time for the event. 

DAVE ASPREY: Go to biohackingconverge. com. You might hear me talk about that last little hint. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Come hang out with us. My guy, Dave Asprey. Thank you so much. Thanks brother. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode.

We went through so much longevity related information today. Of course, those top five foods from Dave's experience and also bringing up the caboose there, the conversation around ejaculation. All right. So keeping this in mind that there's definitely some interesting terrain for us to swim through. And by the way, just a little note, when he meant not ejaculating, he was also not saying not having sex.

And so it's really interesting, you know, it's a whole different conversation there. There's some science around this belief, but there are also some other camps that believe ejaculating several times each week, regardless of the age bracket, is critical for prostate health. And so there's different Ways to look at this, but most importantly, we know that human connection, love, and of course a healthy sexual relationship and healthy sex life.

Even as we age it is in some ways even more important. And so we get more benefits than just the big O. We also get that increase in oxytocin. We get a shift over in our nervous system. And there are many different benefits for us to extract. And so that's another aspect of longevity that isn't talked about much.

So I'm glad that he added that in there. Little, little dabble at the end. And most importantly, again, we take what we Need from these conversations, utilize them, most importantly put them into play for ourselves, and discard what doesn't fit. Right, because as mentioned in the beginning, there are many different diet frameworks.

Right, and we want to honor them, we want to pay attention to the wins that people are getting with those different diet frameworks, and not ignore them. And also, Not put ourselves in a prison because we are missing out on something that might be valuable for us and make us even more healthy But because our diet framework doesn't believe that that is appropriate We might brush it off and we might be denying ourself something that can give us an even greater level of health So we need to make sure that we're making choices based on our own personal beliefs our own Personal ethics and also paying attention to our body's feedback, which for me, that is the most Valuable feedback in the universe what feels good to us And so I appreciate you so much for tuning into this episode If you got a lot of value out of this, please share it out with your friends and family Of course, you could share this on social media take a screenshot And tag me, tag Dave as well on Instagram.

I'm sure he would love to see a shout out. And we've got some epic masterclasses and world class guests coming your way very, very soon. So make sure to stay tuned. Take care, have an amazing day, and I'll talk with you soon. And for more after the show, make sure to head over to TheModelHealthShow. com.

That's where you can find all of the show notes. You can find transcriptions, videos for each episode. And if you've got a comment, you can leave me a comment there as well. And please make sure to head over to iTunes and leave us a rating to let everybody know that the show is awesome. And I appreciate that so much and take care. I promise to keep giving you more powerful, empowering, great content to help you transform your life. Thanks for tuning in.