Super Human

PART I

DON’T DIE

Widen your relationship to time, slow it down. Don’t see time as an enemy but an ally. It provides you with perspective. Aging doesn’t frighten you. Time is your teacher.

—Robert Greene, The Laws of Human Nature

1

THE FOUR KILLERS

THE CURIOUS CASE OF DAVE ASPREY

Until the age of five, I was a normal kid with few health problems. Then my family moved from California to New Mexico, and something in my biology changed. I started acquiring health problems normally reserved for people far older than I was. Today I recognize that my bedroom, which was in the basement of our new house and covered in water-damaged wood paneling (it was the 1970s), was full of toxic black mold. My own home was silently aging me, but nobody, least of all me, was aware of this at the time.

For the next two decades, I suffered from joint pain, muscle pain, asthma, brain fog, extreme emotions, and even weird, frequent nosebleeds. Out of nowhere, my nose would start gushing, and I had unending strep throat that came back every time I finished yet another round of antibiotics. After I got my tonsils out, I started getting chronic sinus infections instead. My body didn’t properly maintain blood pressure, so I often got dizzy, and I was easily fatigued.

At the age of fourteen, I was diagnosed with full-blown arthritis in both of my knees. I remember going home after receiving the diagnosis from my doctor, thinking, How can I have arthritis? That’s for old people. I had always been chubby, but now I was becoming obese. I developed tons of stretch marks, which also disturbed me. Weren’t those for pregnant women? I was just a kid!

And can we talk about man boobs? I grew mine when I was sixteen, which would make anyone self-conscious, especially a teenager. The only other guy I knew with a matching set was my grandfather. My hormones were dysfunctional, just like those of my aging relatives. Between the stretch marks and the man boobs, you’d never catch me with a shirt off. The very thought terrified me, and I’d never in a thousand years imagine that thirty years later, there would be a full-page shirtless photo of me in Men’s Health magazine talking about how I used the techniques in this book to get rid of that flab and replace it with abs.

When I got to college, I kept putting on weight until I had grown a size 46 waist. And my knees got even worse. I played intramural soccer, and my kneecap would become dislocated, so my leg would suddenly fold sideways in a sickening way. I got used to falling over unexpectedly when it happened. Besides the pain, this made dating really awkward. Who wants to date an obese twenty-year-old who might fall down at any moment, with stretch marks, man boobs, arthritis, and the lack of confidence that comes with having such things? Oh, and someone who was so fatigued that he often forgot names, was socially awkward, and could barely focus, even when he really tried? Not too many people, unsurprisingly.

More important than my lackluster social life was the fact that my body was aging before its time. I was well on my way to prematurely developing all four of the diseases most likely to kill you as you age—heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and cancer—or, as I call them, the Four Killers. These diseases are all deadly, and each of them is on the rise.

Right now, about one in four deaths in the United States is connected to heart disease—that’s roughly 610,000 people who die from heart disease each year. Meanwhile, more than 9 percent of the population of the United States has diabetes, and that number rises to 25 percent for people over the age of sixty-five. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 5 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s, and this number is going up, too. The death rate due to Alzheimer’s disease increased a full 55 percent between 1999 and 2014. And last but not least, 1.73 million people in the United States are diagnosed with cancer each year, and more than 600,000 of them die from it.

Suffice it to say that if you don’t die in a car crash or from an opioid addiction, chances are that one of these Four Killers is going to drain your life and your energy (and your retirement fund) before you die in a hospital. It was certainly looking like that would be the case for me—and sooner than most people, given how sick I was.

In the 1990s when I was in my twenties, my doctor used blood tests to determine that I was at a high risk then for developing a heart attack or stroke. My fasting blood sugar was a whopping 117, which put me solidly in the range of prediabetic. I didn’t have Alzheimer’s, but I was experiencing significant cognitive dysfunction and often left my car keys in the refrigerator. And I may not have been at an obvious risk of cancer, but guess what nearly doubles your risk of certain cancers (including those of the liver and pancreas)? Diabetes1—which is also a risk factor for Alzheimer’s.2 Guess what else dramatically raises your cancer risk? Toxic mold exposure, which I had also experienced.

Even obesity itself is the second largest preventable cause of cancer. Your risk goes up the more overweight you are and the longer you stay that way.3 Bad news—75 percent of American men are obese, and so are 60 percent of women and 30 percent of kids.4 No wonder the Four Killers are on the rise. Are you going to let them take you out?

I still didn’t know what was causing me to age so quickly when I began a quest to discover how to fix my body. In the mid-1990s, we didn’t have Google yet, but we had AltaVista, and I worked at night teaching the engineers who were literally building the Internet. This meant I had the good fortune of having access to information that most people didn’t. I started doing a ton of research and buying whatever I could find that might help me slow down or even reverse my symptoms. I simply couldn’t imagine even more stretch marks or more joint pain as I got older.

An important part of this journey was connecting with one of the first medical doctors who specialized in the study of anti-aging, Dr. Philip Miller. Seeing him required what was a tremendous financial investment for me at the time, but I was desperate. My first visit with Dr. Miller was like nothing I’d ever experienced. He ran new kinds of lab tests that regular doctors at the time didn’t know existed, including the first real hormone workup I’d ever had. Then he sat me down and gave me the bad news: I had Hashimoto’s thyroiditis (an autoimmune condition that causes the body to attack the thyroid) and almost no thyroid hormones, and my testosterone levels were lower than my mom’s. (He had done a workup for my mom not long before, so he wasn’t exaggerating when he told me this.)

The news could have been devastating, but I was actually excited to have the hard data. I felt in control for the first time because I finally had real information and knew exactly what I needed to change. This was proof that it wasn’t just a deficiency in my effort or some sort of moral failing. It’s common to see your hormone levels drop off around middle age, but not in your twenties. Now I had proof that I was aging prematurely and not just lazy, and I was determined to turn things around.

Dr. Miller and I came up with a plan for me to restore my hormone levels to that of a young man using bioidentical hormones and continue to track my data. The hormones made an enormous difference right away. I got my energy back along with my zest for life. It gave me so much hope to know that I could actually reverse some of my health issues, which I now knew were common symptoms of aging. So when I heard about an anti-aging nonprofit group in Silicon Valley, now called the Silicon Valley Health Institute (SVHI), I decided to check it out.

As I sat there at the first SVHI meeting listening to people who were at least triple my age, I felt completely at home. These were my people, I realized. I had more in common with them than I did with most of my peers, except these people had decades of wisdom I didn’t. After the meeting, I stayed for a long time talking with a board member who at eighty-five years old was kicking ass and full of energy in a way that was amazing and seemed totally impossible to me—but that I was inspired to replicate.

For the next four years I focused completely on learning as much as I could about the human body. I studied medical literature, read thousands of studies, talked to researchers, and spent all my free time at SVHI learning from seniors who were actively reversing their own symptoms of aging. This completely changed the way I thought about health, as well as aging. I learned that there is no one thing that causes disease or that leads us to age. Instead, aging is death by a thousand cuts, the cumulative damage caused by little insults stemming mostly from our environment.

Then in the year 2000 I found a former Johns Hopkins surgeon who ordered a litany of tests, including some allergy tests that showed I was highly allergic to the eight most common types of toxic mold. That was the smoking gun. In order for my immune system to be sensitized to those toxic molds, I must have been exposed to high levels of them, which wreaked havoc on my cells. This was one of the unexplained environmental factors that had made me age so rapidly.

My premature aging makes complete sense to me now. Mitochondria, which are bacteria embedded in most of our cells, power our energy production. Back when we were single-celled creatures, we became host cells for ingested bacteria. Over millions of years of evolution, the host cell became humans, the ingested bacteria became mitochondria, and today neither of us can survive without the other. Mitochondria are not of human origin; they even have their own DNA. And what has posed a lethal threat to bacteria since the beginning of time? Mold.

This means the very powerhouses of my cells were constantly engaged in a battle with their mortal enemy, and this fight left behind many casualties. When cells are under chronic stress, their mitochondria cannot make energy efficiently. This leads to an increase in the production of molecules called reactive oxygen species (ROSs), also known as free radicals. ROSs are unstable molecules that contain atoms with unpaired electrons, making them highly reactive. When an excess of free radicals are present in cells, they cause a chemical reaction that damages your cellular structures in a process called oxidation.

This is exactly what happens as you age, whether or not toxic mold is present in your life: Mitochondria function steadily declines, leading to an increase in free radicals, which damage your cells. In response, your body sends vitamin C from food to the liver so it can produce antioxidants, which fight off free radicals. The problem with this process is that it leaves you without enough vitamin C to produce collagen, the protein in the connective tissue of your skin, teeth, bones, organs, and cartilage. Vitamin C interacts with amino acids to build collagen, but only if you have enough of it. Your body will gladly sacrifice healthy blood vessels and skin in favor of fighting off free radicals that are draining its energy source.

This is precisely why I had stretch marks and vascular issues (manifested as nosebleeds) and why most people don’t develop these symptoms until they’re much older. The fight in my body between my onboard bacteria and mold left me constantly depleted of antioxidants. And my mold-damaged mitochondria also laid the groundwork for prediabetes, poor blood flow to the brain, arthritis, cognitive dysfunction, and, according to one doctor, a high risk of stroke and heart attack. I was still in my twenties, but I was biologically old because my mitochondria were slowing down. And it really pissed me off.

MITOCHONDRIA AND THE FOUR KILLERS

As I fought my way back from experiencing the many symptoms of aging, my likelihood of dying from the Four Killers dropped dramatically. That’s because—surprise, surprise—they all have one underlying issue in common: the cumulative damage to your cells, and in particular, to your mitochondria, that takes place over the course of a lifetime. This damage occurs in all of us, though at varying rates. Some damage stems from the bad choices we make, but much of it is simply the price we pay for the basic functions that support life—like metabolizing food and breathing.

You die a little bit every day from these cuts that make you weaker in the short term and hasten your decline in the long term. Staying alive requires avoiding as many of those cuts as possible, but they are all around you—in your food, your air, your light sources, and throughout your environment. You may not associate these cuts with your likelihood of aging prematurely or of developing a degenerative disease, but like every other aspect of your biology, they are all connected. The cuts lead to aging, aging leads to disease, and disease leads to death.

If you’re in your twenties or thirties, you may think you’re in the clear—that these cumulative cuts aren’t affecting you yet. But the cuts from bad choices or a toxic environment begin to add up from an early age—and they’re hurting you even if you’re not currently feeling their effects (such as weight gain, brain fog, muffin top, and fatigue). And it’s a lot easier to avoid damage to your mitochondria than it is to reverse it later.

Your mitochondria are responsible for extracting energy from the food you eat, and then combining it with oxygen to produce a chemical called adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which stores the energy your cells need to function. When your mitochondria conduct this process efficiently, they produce lots of energy so you can perform at your greatest potential—like a young person. But if your mitochondria become damaged or dysfunctional as you age, they begin producing an excess of free radicals in the process, which leak into the surrounding cells and lay the groundwork for the Four Killers. Congratulations, you are now old.

Even young, efficient mitochondria produce some free radicals as by-products of creating ATP, but they also make antioxidants, compounds that inhibit the damaging effects of free radicals. This is why products containing antioxidants have “anti-aging” properties. While popping antioxidant supplements and using skin-care products containing antioxidant-rich ingredients are worthwhile interventions, they are, frankly, the low-hanging fruit of our Super Human tree. For you to truly remain young, those antioxidants have to be produced by your body—your mitochondria must create at least as many of them as it does free radicals. When your mitochondria become inefficient, they make an excess of free radicals and fewer antioxidants. And you can’t slather enough serums onto your skin to fully counteract the damage created by this imbalance.

Your mitochondria are also in charge of triggering cellular apoptosis, programmed cell death that occurs when a cell is old and/or dysfunctional. If your mitochondria are sluggish, they may not trigger apoptosis at the right times, which can result in healthy cells dying off before they should or dysfunctional cells sticking around past their prime and aging you before your time.

When you’re still young and exploding with mitochondrial energy, you can take some of these hits. You can eat garbage, drink too much cheap beer, forgo sleep, and still function pretty well because you’re producing lots of antioxidants and energy. As you get older, you start to see that you can’t stay out all night drinking and still really bring it at work the next day. By the time you wake up to this new reality, you’ve already taken a lot of hits that will age you in the long run. But you’re likely to keep running at the edge of what you can perceive, so the damage stacks up without you even knowing it.

Well, what if you made better choices throughout your life so you took fewer hits over the course of decades? Then when you got to the age of seventy you might look and feel more like fifty because you simply suffered less damage. You’re never going to be able to avoid all the cuts—again, simply breathing creates some amount of wear and tear over time. It’s a matter of preventing as much damage as possible, which happens to dovetail nicely with the first rule of biohacking: Remove the things that make you weak. This is in and of itself a powerful anti-aging strategy.

When your mitochondria start to slow down and create an excess of free radicals, the result is widespread chronic inflammation throughout your body. Inflammation is such a hot topic in the field of longevity that you probably already know how closely it’s linked to aging. When I was sick and old as a young man, I knew I was inflamed, but I had no clue this stemmed from mitochondrial dysfunction, nor did I know that inflammation was more than a painful annoyance. I had no idea that inflammation creates the ideal circumstances for each of the Four Killers to thrive.

HEART DISEASE

A condition known as atherosclerosis, hardening of the arteries, is the first obvious clinical sign that heart disease has started. But what causes this? A thin layer of cells called the endothelium lines your arteries. When the endothelium is damaged, fats can cross into the arterial wall and form plaques. This is bad enough, but when your immune system picks up on the fact that this is happening, it creates chemical messengers called inflammatory cytokines to attract white blood cells to those plaques. This is an inflammatory immune response. When those plaques rupture because they are so inflamed, blood clots form, and these clots are the real cause of most heart attacks and strokes.

While some doctors are hesitant to definitively state that inflammation causes heart disease, it’s hard to refute the evidence that inflammation is a big step in the disease’s process, and most functional medicine practitioners now identify inflammation as a bigger health risk than cholesterol levels. In a landmark study conducted by researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital that followed ten thousand participants for twenty-five years, the data revealed that participants who reduced their inflammation levels also significantly lowered their risk of cardiovascular disease and the need for heart surgery without any other medical interventions.5

A new study out of the University of Colorado at Boulder shows that your gut bacteria actually play a role in the inflammation behind atherosclerosis.6 As animals (and likely humans) age, changes to gut bacteria harm the vascular system and make arteries stiffer. That stiffening came from inflammation. The gut bacteria of older mice actually produced three times the normal amount of an inflammatory compound called trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO). When researchers used antibiotics to knock out the old mice’s gut bacteria, their vascular systems magically returned to those of young mice. The researchers concluded, “The fountain of youth may actually lie in the gut.” After following the lifestyle recommendations in this book, I am happy to report that my last test showed that I had zero species of gut bacteria that produce this harmful compound!

Even more mind-blowing, a 2017 study out of the University of Connecticut in Storrs revealed that the fat molecules that form plaques in your arteries come not from the fat in the food you eat, but directly from bad gut bacteria.7 This turns everything that conventional doctors tell us about dietary cholesterol on its head and means you have permission to laugh when people repeat the myth that a “plant-based” diet is better because it doesn’t contain saturated fats like butter that will somehow “stick to” your arteries. It also shows the importance of healthy gut bacteria and mitochondria for a long and energetic life. (More on this in chapter 11.)

We know that the mitochondria in our cells, which themselves evolved from bacteria, communicate with the bacteria in our gut. Bacteria communicate with one another via chemicals (like hormones), light, or physical movement. They even gather around and trade bits of their genetic code in a microscopic swap meet for bacteria superpowers. This is called a plasmid level exchange. Imagine a group of Marvel superheroes hanging out at headquarters. Wolverine says to Spider-Man, “Do you want my ability to grow claws? I’ll trade you for your super speed.” This happens constantly in our guts and in the world around us, which is why drug-resistant bacteria spread so rapidly. It’s also why we must end industrial livestock practices that require antibiotics. The bad bacteria that evolve in that environment find their way into your gut and make it hard for you to live well for a long time.

So there is clearly an inflammatory and gut bacterial connection to heart disease. Plus, we know that when you have the right kind of bacteria in your gut they can actually transform the foods you eat into short-chain fatty acids, which are highly anti-inflammatory. Nurturing healthy gut bacteria is one of the most important things you can do to become Super Human, and you’ll learn how later.

Look, I remember what it felt like when my doctor, complete with white lab coat, looked right at me and said in a matter-of-fact voice, “You are at a high risk for heart attack and stroke.” I recall the bewilderment and fear in my gut as I stared my own mortality in the face. That happened when I was still in my twenties, and thanks to the information in this book, it is not an issue for me anymore. But even when I was just a kid, I had symptoms of cardiovascular issues, specifically blood pressure instability, a condition normally reserved for much older people. When I stood up quickly, my blood pressure was too low to keep oxygen in my brain. This caused me to start seeing stars and feel extremely fatigued. As a youngster, I would lean my head forward after getting out of a car in order to avoid seeing stars. I was so used to this that I thought it was how everybody lived.