Super Human
Restricting protein intake also helps boost autophagy, your all-important cellular recycling program. By occasionally limiting how much protein you eat (you can still have a nice steak every once in a while), you force your cells to find every possible way to recycle proteins. In their search, they excrete waste products hiding in your cells, slowing down energy production. Temporary protein deficiency is a type of hormetic (beneficial) stress. In response to protein restriction, your body looks for other sources of energy. It is the equivalent of burning your trash to stay warm.
The same thing happens when you use intermittent fasting (simply eating all of your food within a shortened period of the day, usually between six to eight hours) as a type of hormetic stress. Intermittent fasting is incredibly useful in aiding fat loss, preventing cancer, building muscle, and increasing resilience. Done correctly, it’s one of the most painless high-impact ways to live longer.
Until recently, we did not fully understand why fasting was so beneficial. Then in 2019, scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology discovered that just fifty-eight hours of fasting dramatically increases levels of forty-four different metabolites, including thirty that were previously unrecognized.13 Among other beneficial functions, these metabolites—substances formed during chemical processes—boost antioxidant levels in the body. And as we know, antioxidants are important for fighting off aging free radicals. All of these benefits can be explained by the fact that fasting dramatically boosts autophagy,14 keeping your cells young and healthy.
Fasting has profound effects, even at less than fifty-eight hours. Alternative day fasting, a form of intermittent fasting in which you eat every other day, helps prevent chronic disease and reduce triglyceride and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels in as little as eight weeks.15 Intermittent fasting also increases your brain’s ability to grow and evolve by boosting neuronal plasticity (the brain’s ability to change throughout your life) and neurogenesis (the birth of new neurons).16 This can help ward off Alzheimer’s and cognitive decline.
As you might expect, when I started experimenting with intermittent fasting ten years ago, I was often left feeling cranky and cold around lunchtime, before my eating window opened. This is because I had not yet developed the metabolic flexibility from teaching my body to efficiently burn carbohydrates or fat. Today I can effortlessly fast for twenty-four hours because my metabolism is younger and my blood sugar levels have stabilized. Thankfully, there are now well-understood ways to make intermittent fasting painless, which you’ll read about later.
A BIG FAT LEAP OF FAITH
So, when it comes to aging, grains are bad, sugar is bad, fried stuff is bad, and too much or too little protein is bad. What about fat? Can you eat too much of it? Sure. But we need fats for reproductive health, temperature regulation, brain function, and shock absorption. Fat helps build the outer lining of your cells, which protects them from damaging substances. It also makes up the bile acids you need to digest foods, and vitamins A, E, D, and K are fat soluble, meaning your body needs fat to absorb them. Additionally, several important hormones, including leptin, which helps you feel satiated, are made from saturated fat and cholesterol. Fat is also the basis for the lining of your nerves, called myelin, which allows electricity to flow efficiently between nerves and is essential for avoiding degenerative diseases like multiple sclerosis.
Saturated fat in particular is so important that your body converts carbs to palmitate, a type of saturated fat, in a process called de novo lipogenesis. Without this ability, you’d die. That’s how critical saturated fat is. Your body then converts palmitate into other saturated and monounsaturated fats necessary for cell membranes, but it can’t make enough polyunsaturated omega-6 and omega-3 fats. That’s why you have to eat them. Yet the myth that eating fat and cholesterol will make you fat and give you heart disease still somehow persists. You read earlier that it’s your gut bacteria and not dietary cholesterol that creates plaques that build up in arteries. The evidence is in, and the fats you eat that contain cholesterol are not the enemy, as we’ve been told.
When you eat enough of the right fats without excess carbs or protein, your body learns to efficiently burn fat for fuel. If you eat excess carbs or protein, your body burns those first. Normally, your body converts carbohydrates to make glucose, which your mitochondria use to produce energy. When you run out of carbohydrates, you start converting fat to glycerol for energy. The liver produces ketones as a by-product of this fat metabolism, and your mitochondria burn those ketones instead of glucose in a more efficient form of energy production. Ketosis is a state your body enters when you have a lot of ketones in your blood and are burning additional fat … or when you eat a special type of saturated fat that converts to ketones in your body. More on that later.
One last time: Your body requires fats for you to perform your best and live as long as possible. You just have to know which fats serve what purpose. Some fats you eat are building blocks for your body, and some are better used as fuel. Getting the mix right matters. But have you ever heard nutrition “experts” say exactly which of the many saturated (or other) fats to avoid? The typical buckets you hear (“plant based,” “animal fats,” “saturated,” “polyunsaturated”) are not very specific. Is it possible that the heated industrial polyunsaturated fat in French fries has a different effect on your biology than avocado oil, or that the fat in industrially-raised animals is different from the fat in an egg yolk or pastured beef? You bet it is.
Researchers in Australia have measured how different cells elegantly use each type of fat you eat. You can make sure your brain has the type of fuel it runs best on and that your body fat doesn’t create extra inflammation and make you old. Eating the right fats could add productive years to your life, which is why it’s worth a page or two of your time to dig a little deeper into details of how your body uses fats.
Scientists describe cell membranes as “the margin between life and death for individual cells.”17 These membranes are made of tiny droplets of fat. About 5 percent of your genes contain instructions telling your cells how to make the thousands of types of fat your body needs to survive. We now know so much about what each different type of fat does that French researchers have proposed the notion that “saturated fats should no longer be considered as a single group in terms of structure, metabolism, and functions.”18 In other words, we have grouped together a very diverse array of fats under one reductive and often misleading label. When your doctor tells you to eat less saturated fat, your response should be “Which one(s) do you mean?”
I’ve had the opportunity to interview lots of fat experts (or experts on fat), and most of us use an analogy from nutritionist and early trans fat researcher Mary Enig, PhD, who popularized two basic ways of thinking about the fat you eat. The first is to look at how long a fat molecule is. There are short-chain, medium-chain, and long-chain fats. As a general rule, the shorter the saturated fat, the more anti-inflammatory it is. For instance, butyric acid, which is anti-inflammatory, has only six molecules, while other types of fat may have twenty or more.
Some fats are easy to damage no matter how long they are. So the second way to understand your fat is to assess its stability. Oxygen drives very strong chemical reactions that damage fats through oxidation. Oxidized (damaged) fats cause you to age more quickly by creating inflammation in the body and building less effective cell membranes. When your body has no choice but to incorporate oxidized fats into cell membranes, those cells create excess free radicals that make you an average human, not super.
Your cells use saturated fats, which are the most stable of the fats, to make about 45 percent of the cell membranes in the brain and liver, and about 35 percent in heart and muscle cells.19 Yes, saturated fat is the dominant fat in your brain, so don’t demonize it! Energy-producing cells will hold their level of saturated fat at about this level no matter what type of fat you eat. The only type of tissue that meaningfully changes its composition of saturated fat is adipose tissue—aka your muffin top. When you eat more saturated fats, the cells in adipose tissue will change their makeup to contain more saturated fat and less unstable fats without changing in size. This is fantastic, as stable fats make for fewer free radicals.
Think of saturated fat as the stable waxy bricks building the “walls” for your cells. The problem is that your cell membranes have to flex in order to make energy and receive chemical signals, and those nice stable saturated fat “bricks” don’t bend. So while it’s fine to go ahead and eat butter and other forms of saturated fat, it’s also important to eat other types of fats. And those include the next most stable group of fats, monounsaturated fats. These fats—found in food sources like olive oil, avocados, and some nuts—are more flexible than saturated fats. You can think of them as the gel-like “mortar” that supports your saturated fat bricks in the cell wall. Your cell membranes are made up of about 20 percent monounsaturated fat.
Interestingly, brain cells have the most monounsaturated fat of any cells in the body, and they hold their level of monounsaturated fat constant no matter what types of fat you eat. Most other cells adjust their fat content slightly when you eat a lot of monounsaturated fats. But without changing how much fat you have on your body, fat cells will happily dump other stored fats and replace them with monounsaturated fat. This means you can transform your stored body fat to have a higher percentage of stable fats. Eat your olive oil!
After you account for the saturated and monounsaturated fats in the membranes of energy-producing cells like muscle, you’re left with about 35 percent of a combination of polyunsaturated omega-6 and omega-3 fats, as well as some conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), a type of fat produced by microbes in your gut. (CLA also happens to be found in grass-fed butter—more on this in a bit.) While omega-3 and omega-6 fats fall under the same category, they are not the same.
Omega-3s are anti-inflammatory and thus beneficial to your anti-aging efforts. The best omega-3 fats are found in food sources like cold-water fish (salmon, mackerel). You can also get omega-3s from walnuts and olive oil, but vegetable omega-3s are only 15 percent as effective as those found in fish.20
Unfortunately, omega-3 fats are far outnumbered by omega-6s in the standard Western diet—and omega-6 fats are highly inflammatory. Poultry, the most common protein in Western diets, is high in omega-6s. Most refined vegetable oils are also polyunsaturated omega-6s, and they are so unstable and inflammatory that eating excess canola, corn, cottonseed, peanut, safflower, soybean, sunflower, and all other vegetable oils is likely to contribute to cancer and metabolic problems. Oxidized omega-6 fats damage your DNA, inflame your heart tissues, raise your risk of several types of cancer, and don’t support optimal brain metabolism.21 Anything that increases inflammation decreases brain function.
When you cook with those fats, they are even more aging because they become oxidized so easily. Remember how aging oxidative stress is? Eating oxidized fats speeds this process way up. Additionally, trans fats are a category of omega-6 fats that are the most dangerous of all. Decades ago, when food manufacturers needed a shelf-stable fat for processed foods, they created hydrogenated omega-6s, or trans fats. These fats are linked to many health problems and cause obesity, and it took the food industry only forty years from the time they learned about this to begin phasing them out. When you ingest man-made trans fats, your body tries to use them to build cells, but cell membranes made of these trans fats cannot function properly. And without healthy membranes, you’ll never make it to a hundred and eighty—or even a comfortable seventy-five.
Artificial trans fats also form when you use polyunsaturated fats for frying.22 Fortunately, trans fats won’t likely cause problems if you use the oil for frying only once, but restaurants often use the same oil over and over all day or all week, which creates oxidized oil and trans fats. So put down the French fries, no matter how lean you are. Seriously—you’re better off having some rum or smoking a cigar. Super Humans don’t eat fried food, even if it’s crispy and delicious. You know what’s not delicious? Eating from a tube later because you couldn’t put down the chicken wings when you were younger.
Your body does need some omega-6s, but there are so many of them in a standard Western diet that you would have to work really hard to consume too few. Ideally, you should consume no more than four times as many omega-6s as omega-3s, but most people today eat an average of twenty to fifty times more omega-6s than omega-3s. This is a hugely underreported source of accelerated aging. Changing the balance of omega-3s to omega-6s you consume can give you a Super Human metabolism because your stored fat cells change dramatically when you eat omega-6 fats. No matter how much (or how little) body fat you have, anywhere from 7 percent to 55 percent of it is made of inflammatory omega-6 fat, depending solely on how much of each type of fat you eat.
If you are lean, you want to eat the same composition of fats that you want stored in your body. That means that whether you’re on the high-fat Bulletproof Diet or a low-fat diet, stick to about 50 percent saturated, 25 percent monounsaturated, 15 to 20 percent undamaged (meaning not oxidized) omega-6, and 5 to 10 percent omega-3 fats, including EPA and DHA. If you are obese and have a good amount of excess body fat (like I used to have!), right now your body is probably storing too many unstable fats. To shift your fat composition, temporarily eat an even higher percentage of the type of fats you want in your body. Of the fat you eat, 50 to 70 percent should be saturated, 25 to 30 percent monounsaturated, and only 10 percent undamaged omega-3 and omega-6.
The challenging thing is that the most common blood tests doctors use to measure things like cholesterol and triglyceride levels do not offer an accurate picture of the type of fats in your brain, heart, or muscle cells, which is different than fat in your blood cells. So there is good reason to distrust the fat ratios found in the blood tests that most doctors rely on. Looking at inflammation markers in your blood work, such as C-reactive protein (CRP) and homocysteine, will give you a much more accurate sense of how you’re aging.
When I started experimenting with eating more fat, I was nervous—it went against everything I’d been told about healthy eating. One of the biggest leaps I took was to begin eating more grass-fed butter. When I took a deep breath and stopped holding back on butter, magical things started to happen. My focus increased, I had more energy, and my blood panels showed that my levels of inflammation had decreased.
Like any good biohacker, I kept experimenting until I knew I had taken things too far. I heard that some Inuit populations survived on no carbohydrates at all, so I decided to subsist on a diet of almost entirely fat and animal protein and see what it would do for my health and performance. The result of that experiment was a host of new food allergies because the bacteria in my gut were literally starving and out of desperation began eating my own gut lining. Sadly, a diet of only steak and butter won’t work for the long term. But it was delicious in the short term.
PIG’S EARS AND ENERGY FATS
By implementing everything I’d learned about nutrition, I was able to dramatically decelerate my aging. My knees were still a mess, but I weighed less and had more energy than ever before, and I managed to (barely) graduate from business school while working full time despite my cognitive dysfunction. I decided to celebrate with a trip to Tibet to learn meditation from the masters there, something I never would have been able to do when I was old, obese, and inflamed because it involved a lot of hiking and steep terrain.
I had just descended 7,500 vertical feet in one day in Nepal when I knew there was something terribly wrong with the cartilage in my knees. The cartilage itself was bruised from all that hiking, and I could barely walk across the street even using two trekking poles. I had exactly one week to recover before setting out on a rugged 26-mile walk at 18,000-feet elevation around Mount Kailash, which is considered to be the holiest mountain in the world. I knew that eating some extra collagen would be beneficial for my joints, but at the time collagen supplements didn’t exist and there was no bone broth to be found in Tibet. I had to get creative.
The next day, the bus I was in stopped about halfway between Kathmandu and Lhasa in a town with only one restaurant. It had mud walls and a dirt floor and was filled with locals. I asked a Chinese friend from the bus to read the menu for me and quickly ascertained that the best source of collagen in the place was … pig’s ears. Without hesitation, I ordered it, and a few minutes later I came face-to-face with a giant bowl of cold boiled pig’s ears. I looked around to see if Joe Rogan, the host of Fear Factor, was hiding to challenge me to eat them for an absurd cash prize, but he was nowhere to be seen.
I had the idea that the pig’s ears would somehow be more palatable if I could find a way to warm them up, so I ordered some watery soup and dipped the ears in one at a time before biting into their rubbery blandness. It was the second worst meal of my life. (The winner, during that same trip, was Chinese military ration sardines heated over a yak dung fire.) The pig’s ears didn’t have much taste, but the texture was wholly unappealing. However, I was shocked when I woke up the next morning and could walk without using trekking poles. Two days later, I could jog up a short hill. That is the magic of collagen. But I didn’t want to have to eat pig’s ears every time my knees hurt, so I worked hard to bring collagen to the market years later. I just couldn’t see blending pig’s ears into yak butter tea!
While I was in Tibet I met many old yet vital, energetic people and learned about their practices for pursuing a long, rich life. As I sat with meditation masters and Buddhist monks, I saw that a mind that can control its response to stress is the world’s most advanced anti-aging technology. If you’re walking around in a perfect environment eating all the right foods but your fight-or-flight response is always switched on like mine used to be, there is no doubt you’ll age more quickly.
I made it to Mount Kailash thanks in part to the collagen in those pig’s ears, but between the elevation and below-zero temperatures, I was hurting. Chilled, hypoxic, and exhausted, I staggered into a small guesthouse, where a kind Tibetan woman handed me a creamy cup of traditional yak butter tea. It was delicious, but more important, I felt like it brought me back to life. I even wrote about it in my travel journal. The air was still thin, but I was suddenly and remarkably full of energy, and I had to understand why. You’re not supposed to want to dance when you’re at 18,000 feet.
When I returned home I brewed some tea, tossed it in the blender with some butter, and was left with a greasy cup of tea that most certainly did not impart any mental clarity, unless you count the adrenaline from mild revulsion. Clearly, something different was happening back in Tibet. Figuring my problem was the tea, I spent a ridiculous $200 on a variety of high-end teas from a local Chinese merchant, but none of them had the magical effect I remembered. So I went to my local Whole Foods and another gourmet store, where I bought every single brand of butter from around the world to see if that was the variable that mattered. I tested twenty-four butters, and learned the trick was to use unsalted butter from grass-fed cows. You simply don’t get the same results using butter from cows that eat corn and soy, because those oils end up in the butter, giving you more omega-6 fats. The yaks that provided the milk for the butter I had in Tibet certainly didn’t eat any corn, because it doesn’t grow there!
From my anti-aging work, I knew about the healthy fat in coconut oil, so I began experimenting with adding coconut milk and oil along with the butter, but the coconut flavor was too strong, and it didn’t add any more energy than butter alone. So I switched from tea to coffee, my first love. The coffee stood up to the coconut oil better than tea, but the real magic happened when I switched from coconut oil to concentrated oil that is extracted from coconut oil called medium-chain triglyceride (MCT) oil. More than 50 percent of the fat in coconut oil comes from the different subtypes of medium-chain triglycerides. There are four types of MCT oils. All are flavorless, but the rare types convert effectively into ketones, your mitochondria’s preferred fuel source. This was the genesis of Bulletproof Coffee.
The only problem was that MCT oil caused “disaster pants” even though it helped my brain. I should have bought stock in Charmin as I worked through that problem … The solution was to remove certain types of MCT using triple distillation and then use a special filtration process, leaving only one type (eight-chain MCT), which became Brain Octane Oil. (Yes, I sell it. I use it. I give it to my kids. It works. Someone had to do it! It created a revolution in food.)
You may think that avoiding carbs or fasting for a few days are the only ways to enter ketosis (the state in which your body burns fat for fuel), but adding MCT or Brain Octane Oil to your diet hacks ketosis. Brain Octane turns into ketones when you consume it, even if carbs are present. Research that came out after I launched Brain Octane shows that it raises ketone levels four times more than coconut oil and twice as much as normal MCT oil.23 In fact, the study says, “In healthy adults, C8 [the exact triple distilled version in Brain Octane] alone had the highest net ketogenic effect over 8 hours,” and it could “help in developing ketogenic supplements designed to counteract deteriorating brain glucose uptake associated with aging.”
Normal MCT oil is a conundrum for oil chemists. There are four different lengths of fats that are called MCT. All four are technically saturated fats, but unlike other saturated fats, your body won’t use MCTs to make cell membranes. It’s as if they are meant to be burned for energy. It is more accurate and useful to start calling MCTs “energy fats” instead of saturated fats. That’s why I do not count MCT oil as a saturated fat and why you can laugh at anyone who says to avoid MCT because it’s saturated. Sadly, the most abundant and cheap MCT, lauric acid, which makes up half of coconut oil, does not have these special energy powers.
To live longer and heal faster, I recommend adding either C8, its weaker cousin MCT, or its even weaker cousin coconut oil to your coffee, your salad dressings, smoothies, and so on. My kids love it drizzled on sushi! These “energy fats” do not count in the recommended ratios of fat in your anti-aging diet, as they will convert to energy instead of being stored on your body. These are extra/unlimited sources of fat. Also, when it comes to sourcing, I recommend purchasing MCT oil made from coconut oil, not palm oil. Most MCT is derived from palm oil, and palm deforestation poses a serious threat to the environment and kills orangutans. I switched to a coconut-derived MCT oil several years ago, because I simply couldn’t imagine feeding oil to my kids that was created from practices that harm the environment they will inherit.
The discovery of using energy fats in the morning helped me benefit from autophagy because I was able to fast without getting cold or hangry (which, by the way, was added to the dictionary in 2018, the same year as biohacking). Because butter and MCT oil do not contain any appreciable quantity of protein, I was able to feel full and burn ketones while temporarily stressing my cells, which thought I was fasting and started recycling protein more rapidly. This boost in autophagy without hunger is one of the most profound benefits of Bulletproof Coffee. It is a permanent part of my quest to live to at least a hundred and eighty.