How to Make Your Biology Bulletproof with Dave Asprey

JONATHAN: Hey everybody, Jonathan Bailor and I am really excited about today’s show. It is going to be – this session is going to be a good one. We’re going to get deep, we’re going to get a little bit silly and who knows we may even get a little bit controversial. Today’s guest is not afraid to say what he’s experienced personally, as well as what the research supports, which is not always what we’ve been told. He has an awesome story. He is a former and I think still current Silicon Valley investor. He’s a computer security expert, so cut from the same technology cloth as the geek speaking to you right now. He spent over 15 years and well over a quarter of a million dollars to hack his own biology — little personal experimentation lab on himself. He made himself smarter, thinner, happier and better performing and is now given a heck a lot of it away in a very passionate and accessible format. Dave Asprey, welcome brother.

DAVE: I’m always glad to get a chance to chat with another tech guy turned health hacker.

JONATHAN: Dave, why do you think – I actually think there might be a growing movement of Engineers entering this field because it really does seem like just like you can engineer any system, why can’t we just engineer our biology?

DAVE: You can engineer your biology to a certain extent. Maybe it helps that my background’s actually cloud computing. I went down the security rat hole and cloud computing is one of those things where there’s so many moving parts and you don’t even own half of them, so it’s hard to know, but somehow you still have to make it work and the human body is the same way. So, very complex, big systems are the ones that work best. The very mechanistic view of the body doesn’t work, like you have these soylent guys trying to make a mechanistic view of human nutrition and I kind of think that’s not going to be the right approach to making optimal human performance because well, if it was, that’s what the military would be feeding people because (tape mute 02:11), time doing that research and so have I and it’s not easy to make a meal replacement powder as a permanent meal replacement that doesn’t create deficiencies.

JONATHAN: Makes a lot of sense Dave, well, you are most well-known for your Bulletproof Executive brand and your Bulletproof Diet and your Bulletproof Coffee. Can you tell us a little bit about the unique approach and paradigm you bring to nutrition?

DAVE: Bulletproof Diet is something that I started creating around 2001. I lost 100 pounds in the late 90s and I struggled to keep it off. I struggled to get that last 30 pounds off and in the course of doing that I started applying computer science principles and what today we call quantified self. The idea that I should measure what I was doing and I realized that…hm…I’m working out basically every day, 6 days a week, for 18 months, 45 minutes of cardio, 45 minutes of weights, I’ve limited my calories, I’m eating low fat and I’m still fat. I haven’t lost a pound. I’m stronger than I was. My weights have gone up. I can bench press, but I’m still a fat ass.

One day I looked at my friends who were smaller than me, ate more than me, thinner than me and I just realized what I believe cannot possibly be true here and I started looking for what was true and what worked and that meant that I needed to learn a lot.

I went into my doctor and I said, my brain is foggy all the time, I’m 25, 26 and my – I just can’t think some days, I just don’t remember anything that happened and I just feel like I’m walking through mud all the time and he said maybe you should lose some weight. I just looked at the guy and I’m like really, yeah, I kind of know that, how would you recommend it? Oh, eat healthy. I’m like, and what does that mean? I don’t know, like eat less calories. I’m like yeah, I’ve tried that and he said maybe it’s your blood sugar. So I come back and my fingers are like bleeding because (tape mute 4:13) finger stick Diabetes meter things for two weeks and I have this graph and I’m like it’s not my blood sugar. He just looks at me like — yes it is. And then, I said Vitamin C seems to help me feel better and this guy, at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation looks at me right in the eye and says, you have to stop. Vitamin C could kill you.

I said what about Linus Pauling, a double Nobellawyer who took 90 grams a day and he looks at me he goes, Linus who? And I looked at the doctor and I said, you’re fired. I walked out and I never paid him. They sent it to credit collections and I’m like the service was not rendered in a satisfactory manner.

For four years I did not see a doctor. I just did the work myself. I’d work at the company that helped to create Cloud computing, Exodus Communications, Google’s first server, Hotmail’s first servers were in our buildings. I had finished work and I’d go home and study until I fell asleep in my desk chair and I just learned all this stuff about how to run myself, the operating manual for the Linux in our bodies, actually you work for Microsoft, sorry.

JONATHAN: It’s alright.

DAVE: Blue screen of death – just kidding.

JONATHAN: Oh, wow, okay, this interview is over. No, I’m just kidding.

DAVE: So, I just realized like there is a rhyme and a reason to the way the body works, it’s just a very complex system and by knowing which variables to tweak, you can have profound improvements in how your brain works and when you get your brain turned on your body will start working much, much better including things for weight loss. So, I started focusing on things like how do I get more energy into the cells? How do I build healthier cells? How do I build healthier hormones and fast forward, I got invited to be the President and then Chairman of the Silicon Valley Health Institute, a 20 year old anti-aging research group. Every month in Palo Alto we have a meeting where we invite luminaries in the field, like anti-aging or medicine or nutrition to come in and give a lecture for two hours. So, I’ve had a chance to meet with more than 100 of these guys and to sit down one-on-one and talk to them and learn from them in addition to all the research I’ve done and that’s been transformational because I have access to knowledge and experts, I have access to analysis tools and the most sensitive tool of all is actually this right here. If you just ask yourself every second, how am I doing right now? And you note, why is my foot hurt now? Why am I tired right now? Why are my eyes itching? Why do I have a canker sore? That question about why is what drove me to create the Bulletproof Diet because every single thing has a reason. If you can figure it out and you can test it, you can write it down and when I wrote it down I learned some core truths about the way nutrition works in the body and I applied them to myself, I measured the results, I started sharing them with other people for free on the Bulletproof Executive site and what happened is kind of a movement formed. People who lost massive amounts of weight as a side effect of making their brains work better and when you do that, man all I want you to do is just feel one day where you have total clarity and you can think whatever you want to think and you have the energy to do whatever you want to do and if you feel that one day, that’s your new bar, that’s how you want to feel every day and I can tell you Jonathan, I never felt like that, ever, until I finally got rid of a whole class of toxins that were messing with my performance, until I got my nutrition in the right order. I got mostly the right kinds of fat in my diet and when I got all those things together at the same time, not just changing one variable, but all the variables, right? That’s when transformation happens and that’s when everything gets easier from weight loss to career success to relationships, just a self-regulation and I have more control of my body, my biology, my brain now, at age 40, almost 41 in a week or two, then I had when I was 20, or 25 or 30 and that’s amazing.

JONATHAN: It’s absolutely amazing, Dave, and in your very engaging story there, you mentioned three things that I really want to highlight, one was focusing on yourself, how you feel, talking with these independent experts. When we say experts, we mean people who spend their lives doing research not in spandex or writing magazine articles and then also looking at the firsthand peer review to research and the conclusion both you and I have drawn after having those experiences is so radically different from what the mainstream tells us and the theories of like 40 or 50 years ago, why do you think it is taking so long for something that is so effective and so proven to permeate the mainstream?

DAVE: You can blame coffee companies. I don’t just say that lightly. People don’t really know this, but almost every one of the big industrial processed food manufacturers started out as a coffee company, 80 to 150 years ago. Some of the original brands that started (tape mute 9:12) coffee more, how do we sell stuff and then they morph into how do we sell stuff with the longest shelf life, with the lowest cost and in the last especially 20 years, how do we sell less stuff by charging for things with less food in them, this low calorie crap, right? So, I can charge $3.00 for 100 calories worth of food, whereas, before I had to put 200 calories worth of food in the same bar, which one is more economically profitable for the company? Well, which one would they put marketing dollars behind?

We have very carefully and not necessarily intentionally brainwashed several generations of people to ignore their hunger, to ignore their cravings and to believe they are doing the right thing when they have to look at food and go I want to eat that, I’m shaking with desire to eat that, but I’m going to just say no and if I say, yes, it’s because I’m a bad person. And I should feel guilt and shame and all those things, like screw that noise. Put butter on the low calorie bar, make sure it doesn’t have soy and gluten and a bunch of other grains and crap in it and then it might be okay to eat and you know, that’s the way my world works and I do not go through days without eating fat because that’s the cornerstone of human performance. We have these giant brains made out of fat and we have hormones made of fat, we have cells made of fat. If you don’t eat enough of it or you eat the wrong kinds of it in excess, it will mess you up and I spend a lot of my life messed up because of making those mistakes. I’ve been a raw vegan. I’ve been a vegetarian and a semi-vegetarian, I’ve been a low fat dieter, I’ve taken handfuls of bran pills, and god knows what else, but the bottom line it’s not just my experience, it’s the understanding of how does it work and when you get to that point, how does the system of the human body work and how does it interact with the environment around you, that becomes something that’s critically important to understand and when you get to that point, you realized it’s painfully obvious and if you do it right you feel a massive difference, not in a month or a year, you don’t lose a half a pound every two weeks, you feel amazing within a few days. You start losing weight within a few days, which is simple, that’s water weight, but you keep losing weight far beyond what water weight would be and you realize, I can’t believe it, but I can see my ribs for the first time, or maybe it’s not the first time, but two weeks ago, I didn’t look this and I looked, I look like this now, but I don’t have food cravings. I have all this extra energy because I didn’t spend all my energy telling myself not to eat the things that my body was craving because I wasn’t getting enough fat. That’s kind of big.

JONATHAN: It’s very big, Dave, and can you help our viewers and listeners? I think we need to empower them because this fat phobia is so pernicious and the people who preach it and preach this dogma, this low calorie, low fat dogma from 40 years ago, are as certain that they are right and are as convicted as you and I are, but it seems that every time they speak they might cite observational studies or they may make analogies like well saturated fat is solid at room temperature and you can see that it will clog your sink, therefore, it would clog your arteries, these very flaccid and achedodal (?? 12:20) arguments so how, but they’re so many of them and it’s so constant, how can we protect ourselves from that?

DAVE: You just used the word flaccid (tape mute 12:27) and or I’m not sure how I feel about this Jonathan, but alright, I can – it’s – you should get a t-shirt with a (tape mute 12:38) and that’s all you need to do to talk to people like that.

JONATHAN: What was it? Your audio cut out there. A t-shirt with what?

DAVE: T-shirt with a mirror on it.

JONATHAN: Oh, okay.

DAVE: (tape mute 12:49) seriously, I met this guy at the Life Extension Conference, I won’t name drop out of politeness, but he has a very large social media following and every single day, he would post like three things about run more miles, and exercise more and I did all this exercise every single day.

I have lots of my Executive Performance coaching clients who used to do that stuff and they all have adrenal burnout and they all quit doing it and they all feel better. So I met this guy and I didn’t know who he was because he was round, even though he ran 40 miles a week and did all this other stuff, and as politely as I could – like – okay, so your advice isn’t working because look at me and my relatively V-shaped figure for a guy who sleeps not very much and exercises about 15 minutes a week, I’m one of the more muscular people in the room because of my nutrition, not because of physical activity, if you’re going to stand up and say exercise every day, you better look good and feel good and have the inflammatory markers in your blood that look good, otherwise, I’m sorry the advice is religious advice, it is not scientific advice and it’s not even good advice.

JONATHAN: And that distinction between religious or ideological advice, and one of the things I really value about you and your message, Dave, is this idea of always check in with yourself. You even offer a free app which enables people to check in with themselves and I’ve heard so often from so many people that they do everything except look inward for what they should be eating. Like they are always looking for expert or some guru and even if they feel terrible, they think they’re at fault, not that advice.

DAVE: Here’s the simplest trick (tape mute 14:33) at a core part of the Bulletproof Diet, if what you ate made you hungry, it was the wrong food. Like foods that cause food cravings contain toxins or they’re the wrong foods. (tape mute 14:45) you should feel full from many hours. If you have to snack, then you ate the wrong foods. I don’t snack anymore, snacking makes me weak. Even when someone offers me like an attractive looking snack that would fit within the Bulletproof Diet, I’m like no thanks and they’re like why not, it’s bacon or whatever it is and I’ll say, because I ate three or four hours ago and it’s not time to eat yet and if you keep smacking your liver around with these snacks all day long to turn on digestion machinery that honestly should be working on cellular repair or detoxing, why do you need to snack all the time? Eat more or eat more of the right stuff or eat less of the wrong stuff and when you do that you will find your performance and your mental focus change. That’s all I wanted was a brain that would focus effortlessly all day long, as much as I wanted.

I’ve been diagnosed with ADD. I had the symptoms of Asperger Syndrome earlier in my life and to the point that I used to stutter a little bit, enough that it bothered me and I had – I used to do the stemming thing where I count all the time, it was very classical symptoms of these things. I don’t have those anymore because I fixed my metabolism and a brain that has a broken metabolism will do anything it can to try and stay awake, including counting on your fingers all day long.

I’m really grateful that I can stand on stage as I did for CreativeLive, I was there eight hours a day, turned on the whole time talking and then after that I went out and I had a bunch of meetings and I met with people and I socialize – I can bring it – I have that energy all day long and it’s amazing and I’m grateful for that because I wasn’t born with that. I didn’t have it as a young man and I have it now and at the end of the day, if what you eat does not make you feel like that, it’s not that you did something wrong, it’s not that you just randomly feel that way, it’s like look on your plate and then look in the world around you and there’s something there that makes you feel less than amazing.

JONATHAN: Brilliant, Dave and one of the things – unique things you bring to this dialogue is we’ve all heard a lot about protein, carbohydrate, fat, food quality, but you get into toxins, really unlike anyone else I’ve seen so, can you take us to that level of depth around what are toxins, how do we rid ourselves of them and not the mainstream media version, but the science version.

DAVE: Let’s talk first a little bit about food toxins. If I – if I told you, eat 30 grams of protein, you would say, okay, I could go down that path, I’ll just eat it, but if I said here’s 30 grams of eggs and here’s 30 grams of spider venom. Spider venom is a protein, I’m pretty sure that you like most people would choose the eggs. Now, why is that? Because innately, you know that some proteins are toxic and some are not, yet, look at things like the Zone Diet or the Adkins Diet, where you have to eat this amount of protein, this percentage of protein, it’s BS. It doesn’t matter. Some proteins are bad for you, some are good for you and if you say eat protein, it’s no different than saying eat a calorie. Different calories do different things. Different proteins do different things.

Let’s say even that you took that beautiful grass fed steak, which has good quality protein in it, and then you throw it on a 900 degree grill to sear the outside and you sprinkle a really high end spice mix that has one of the 75 different names for MSG in it and now all of a sudden you’ve taken what was a good source of protein and you’ve denatured the outside of it, you’ve added heterocyclic amines which cause food cravings, and they cause inflammation in the body because you burn the crap out of it. You oxidize the fats which creates fats to your liver now has to treat as toxins so it can excrete them and you added MSG, which does penetrate the blood barrier and does cause excess firing of the synapse because you have too much glutamate for your glutamate for your glutamate reuptake system to work. So all of a sudden you took what was going to be a nice amazing juicy grass fed steak and you turned it into something that’s going to cause food cravings or tiredness later. That’s an example of how toxins can be formed in something that would have been good, but it’s a lot more pernicious than that because a lot of foods – well, if you’re a food, you didn’t actually want to be a food, you have to put yourself in let’s say — pretend like you’re a bell pepper.

JONATHAN: Alright, hold on, give me a second – okay – I’m a bell pepper, go ahead.

DAVE: So you’re sitting on this big juicy thing on a plant, the last thing you want is for a goat to come along and eat you. Right? The last thing you want is for bugs to eat you. So, over the course of many millennia, your ancestors have developed defense systems to make sure that animals don’t want to eat you because your job as a bell pepper is to ripen, form seeds, drop the seeds so the next generation of bell peppers can form, so your offspring can be there. Now, if you fail in this don’t be eaten thing, then your species is at risk, so there’s a lot of evolutionary pressure to not get eaten.

How do you respond to that pressure? Defense systems. Naturally occurring repellents for animals. Naturally occurring repellents for fungi, for bugs, and it turns out the night shade family is pretty good at that, so night shade is a poison, however, members of that poisonous family include potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants, bell peppers, wow. That’s kind of a big list. Does that mean we shouldn’t eat those foods? Hm…maybe. Maybe not, but those foods contain a toxin, the toxin I’m referring to here is called a lectin. And a lectin is a type of protein that is very attracted to certain types of sugars and this lectin can penetrate the gut lining very easily and then it goes throughout the body looking for the kind of sugar to stick to.

Our cell membranes are coated with a layer of polysaccharides, these are sugars. So, protein sticks to sugar, they bind inexorably. They are stuck together and then they create a bunch of free radicals. That’s a problem because now you’ve made your joints inflamed. 20 percent of all cases of rheumatoid arthritis are caused by night shade family. If you have RA or other autoimmune conditions, which an enormous number of people like 50 or 60 million people in the U.S. alone have autoimmune conditions. These foods are probably not for you. Some of them may be, some of them may not be. I tolerate hot peppers pretty darn well, but potatoes for me, I wake up with sore joints and stiffness because I am sensitive to those lectins. You may or you may not be, but if you don’t know that your potatoes and tomatoes have self-defense systems in them that are affecting your biology and you just eat them every day and you feel like crap all the time, you’re making a mistake and that’s why these are in the orange zone of the Bulletproof Diet. They’re not in the green zone, they’re not in the, oh, my god those are in the toxin zone, they’re in the, you better watch out, these are risky, but they may be fine for you and everyone likes a good tomato sauce. I’m not complaining about that.

On top of this, we have man-made toxins, pesticides, pollutants, plasticizers, things like that that are added to our food or accidentally added to our food, during the industrial food creation process. On top of that though, we have another thing that happens when we industrialize our food supply and this is we have less careful attention to what happens in farms and in crops, so because of genetic engineering and largely because of spraying of certain types of fungicides and pesticides, we’ve created super strains of molds that infest grains in particular and corn in the field and grow even stronger during storage.

Then we feed those toxic things to our cows where they further accumulate the toxins into our chickens and other things and then we eat those animals and we get the effects of these toxins. They are very potent estrogens, they’re protein synthesis inhibitors, they contribute to cancer and they contribute to brain fog and brain fog is one of the first signs you ate something that was toxic. Food cravings and brain fog equals I did something wrong. The trick most people don’t understand is well, I ate that yesterday and I was fine, I ate it today and I was not fine, therefore, it’s not that? No.

The quality of the production process for your coffee, which is a big fetish of mine or your grains, if you eat those things, which I don’t recommend or whatever else it is dramatically affects how it will affect you. This is why quality is so terribly important for what you’re going to eat.

JONATHAN: Dave, what can – let’s say I’m a single parent with three children and I’m currently eating these standard American diet of just processed starches and sweets and garbage. Is there an 80/20 here?

DAVE: The more you can reduce the harmful toxins in your diet the better off you are. So, you can choose foods that are less toxic and I’ll tell you organic is better, but some foods, it doesn’t matter as much, like avocados. Buy organic if you can because it supports our soil, which supports life on our planet, but if you didn’t have the money or the store only had non-organic avocados, okay, do it, you can buy them for dirt cheap at Costco and you’re going to get some very high quality fat that way. So, that’s a good choice, but if you’re going to buy soy milk from genetically modified soy, don’t buy that crap. You can make your own nutmilk for cheaper anyway and it will be better for you. Better yet, buy a can of coconut milk and use that.

So, there’s a spectrum of things you can do that focus on getting the right fats in the diet. People say the Bulletproof Diet or even just a plain Paleo Diet with the toxins that are allowed in Paleo — that they come at a very high price and they can – certainly I don’t skimp on food because I think it prevents medical costs later in life, but, what happens when we eat foods that are completely toxic or completely non-toxic to us, you’ll find just a major difference in how you feel and how you perform when you get it exactly right.

JONATHAN: And what are some of other sources of toxins – you already mentioned cooking. You mentioned seasoning, so non-obvious sources of toxins, such as those.

DAVE: One of my favorite areas of research is mold toxins and this is something that even on that sort of limited diet we talked about before, eggs and butter and all, avoiding common sources of things like aflatoxin, which is the most famous of the mold toxins except for penicillin, which is another mold toxin, and you know a tiny little penicillin dose can have a profound effect on your body if you’re eating foods that have penicillium growing in them, in trace amounts, or what we think are trace amounts, you’re still going to be getting those effects, so mold toxins are one of the things you can avoid.

Here’s an example, when’s the last time you didn’t see a recipe for a main dish that said, add black pepper? It’s always there. Black pepper is the spice in your cabinet most likely to be contaminated with aflatoxin. It is endemic, I’ve never been able to find mold toxin free black pepper, even the very highest in gourmet stuff. So, what you’re doing, especially if you buy pre-ground black pepper and you let it sit in your cabinet in those big plastic containers that don’t seal very well, it’s probably above your stove where all the fumes come up and what you’re doing then is you’ve got the spores in the pepper and the longer it sits there the more it grows.

So, if you were to sample those spices that you’ve had for three or four years or ten years in your cabinet and look at what those are doing to your brain fog and your cravings, you’d be shocked how often black pepper is to blame to the point where we don’t even have black pepper in my house. I just don’t use it enough because it doesn’t make people feel as good. I’d rather use a really high quality red pepper flake like cayenne — even those are also one of the top moldy types of spice, but you can control that with quality, whereas, in black pepper you can’t.

Am I like the most anal guy on earth? I don’t think so. I just want to feel good every single time after I eat, so I’m going to find the variables no matter how weird they are, I’m going to find if there’s a reason for this, I’m going to see what the reason is.

And check this –you want to test if that’s what’s going on? I made something called coconut charcoal. This is a toxin binding substance that’s been used for 10,000 years in (Inaudible 00:27:20) and things like that and we make an ultra- fine particle version of it. Electrically it attracts microtoxins or these mold toxins I just talked about and a whole host of other protein toxins. If you prepare the same meal like in the same pan in the same exact ingredients and you eat one set of the meal for breakfast and you feel a certain way and you eat the other half of the meal for lunch and take charcoal with it, and you feel a different way, well, it could be the time of day, but more likely, it’s because you put black pepper or whatever else it was in there that had toxins and you used the charcoal to bind them. So, that’s a pretty neat little experiment. If you feel much better after you eat because you take charcoal, red alert here, you’re eating food toxins and by binding them in the gut you feel better, therefore, you know they were in your food.

JONATHAN: So, Dave, after hearing all of this, I can’t help but think that’s it’s really just about eating fewer calories and burning more off through exercise, right? I’m just kidding. That – it’s just the common denominator, it sound just like eat fewer calories and burn more off, right? That’s all you have to do.

DAVE: Well, it’s funny. I’m a fan of intermittent fasting. Right? That’s the idea of eating all of your calories in an eight hour window every day and I do not skim on calories – I did like 4,000 plus calories a day for two years to see if I could gain weight and I only gained a little bit. I should have gained 616 pounds and I actually grew a six-pack by doing that and the only picture of my six-pack I’ll ever post on my website because I’m just not the six-pack kind of guy was that photo. And to be perfectly honest, when I was obese, I still have stretch marks, like I’m not a big fan of lifting up my shirt because like zebra stripes, right, but at least they’re like washboard zebra stripes, right? It’s kind of like crocodile plus a zebra, you know?

JONATHAN: I love it. Oh, man, that’s good stuff, Dave, well, one other area I wanted to cover with you because you have just a mastery of nuance and detail that only someone who with your background, with your mental clarity could possibly retain in their brain – when it comes to supplementation, so I know we could talk about this for an hour, but all of your research, all of your experimentation in terms of return on investment – for the average person, what kind of supplement should we be looking into?

DAVE: The most important two supplements on earth and I have a top ten list on the Bulletproof Executive site, but the two that are worth talking about the most are magnesium and Vitamin D. It turns out you need magnesium to use Vitamin D in a lot of kind of the Me Too bloggers out there, well, oh, Vitamin D, like that’s a Paleo supplement and we all know we need more Vitamin D, but you need magnesium as a co-factor to properly use it. So, I recommend up to 800 milligrams of magnesium on a daily basis. If you take too much magnesium there’s a very clear and present sign. Too much magnesium causes what we affectionately call disaster pants – aka the runs — if you want a less creative word, so you can titrate and measure, take 400, if you don’t get the runs, take 800. If you don’t get the runs, great. If you do, back off to 600 and see what your number is. I can actually do more than a gram and it doesn’t cause problems.

On top of that you want Vitamin D and your best way to get Vitamin D is by being mostly naked without sunscreen at noon, near the equator in the sun, so every day, at lunch hour, go to the equator and take off your clothes.

JONATHAN: And make sure you’re not overdosing magnesium because if you don’t even have pants on and you have the runs, then you’re really in a disaster state.

DAVE: I don’t know what vacation spots you go to, but I want to go to those Jonathan. That’s epic. I think – I think what you want to do there is follow the Vitamin D Research Counsel recommendations. We’ve had these guys come and speak at the Silicon Valley Health Institute, an anti-aging research group that I’ve been running for quite a while now and what they recommend is 25 — it’s for every 25 pounds of body weight, a 1,000 IUs of Vitamin D. That’s a good baseline. It’s way higher than you might think, but get a blood test. It will cost about $45.00 to get your 25 (OH) D levels and when I work with my Executive Performance clients, I tend to suggest that they aim for 70 to 90 as a blood level for Vitamin D. If you’re not there, then supplementing that is likely to give you increased cognitive function, better sleep, but most of all, you’ll get sick less and if you want to perform better, having less sick time at work or at home is a pretty good way to perform better on an annual basis, but it’s not even like oh, I missed a day of work, or I spent the day in bed, because I was throwing up, it’s more about the days when you were not necessarily sick, but you weren’t well either. You don’t want as many of those. You want vibrant health and vigor and just that limitless energy and being a little sick just doesn’t hack it, so Vitamin D is going to help you avoid those states and be in a higher performance state more of the time.

JONATHAN: Brilliant, Dave well, you are like a walking encyclopedia and I love it, what is next for you and where can listeners go to access all of these free resources that you have.

DAVE: Well, if you go to bulletproofdietbook.com, you can sign up for the Bulletproof Diet infographic which is the heart of the book. I give that away for free because it’s knowledge everyone should have. It’s the roadmap for how to eat and it’s one page you can print out and put on your fridge. When you sign up just give me your email address so I can tell you when the book comes out. I’ll give you that and I’ll also give you the first chapter of the book as soon as it’s ready. This book has been a labor of love and it’s got a lot of research and information that has not been written about before by me or anyone else that you’ll find. There’s a lot of reasons why a high fat diet works, there’s lots of reasons why this diet works and it’s not even a diet, it’s a sustainable way of eating.

I’ve been eating this way for going on nearly a decade with constant improvement and this is actually the third version and it’s truly the Bulletproof Diet 3.0, because just like a software guy, we have dot-releases and when I make a change and add something or move something, then I announce it and we change the diet, so this is not final. It will never be final because we’ll continue learning and continue updating it, but the infographic let you save an awful lot of time.

JONATHAN: And then in terms of staying up to date and getting those dot-releases, where should we be going to get that information?

DAVE: Go to bulletproofexe.com. This is the main blog. It’s a million people a month go there, (tape mute 34:28) people might want to check on my podcast Bulletproof Radio, which just passed a Jillian Michaels for number one spot on iTunes health, thank you, Jonathan, for supporting me by interviewing me and thank you for whoever listens and has heard the podcast, I’m so honored by that. And it’s an amazing thing to know that hundreds of thousands of people are hearing my words so I do my very best to make sure every damn one counts, so.

JONATHAN: That’s awesome, Dave, so we have to get I want the episode where Jillian Michaels comes on your show because that would be the single great – I would fly out to watch the recording of that episode.

DAVE: If she hears this and she’s down, I’m down, in fact I’ll fly there with a camera crew to do it, but the bottom line it is great TV to watch fat people chasing bags of Cheetos on a stick until they throw up or cry and having been a fat person I get it, and having been obese and have some emotional issues around food, but for god’s sake, if you are using your willpower for your food, you’re doing it wrong. Flat – your willpower is a precious resource. You have a limited amount every day to use and if you use it to say no to bagels and chocolate chip cookies because you’re malnourished, because of what you’re eating, you are doing it wrong. Save your willpower for things that matter, and just choose foods that don’t require any willpower after you eat them.

JONATHAN: Brilliant.

DAVE: That will (tape mute 35:55) Bulletproof Diet.

JONATHAN: Dave Asprey, ladies and gentlemen, check out the Bulletproof Diet book and of course check out Dave’s awesome podcast and website at bulletproofexecutive.com. Dave, thank you so much for joining us today.

DAVE: Jonathan, brother, I love your book as well. And I am so excited to have gotten an early release version of it to read. That was quite an honor and thank you for the work you’re doing.

JONATHAN: Oh, well, thank you brother and listeners, again, Dave Asprey, the Bulletproof Executive and remember, this week and every week after in addition to all the great information Dave shared with you, just eat smarter, exercise smarter, and then live better. Chat with you soon.