by Dave Asprey
But the more likely reason your cells fill up with junk is that you eat too many foods that your lysosomes are incapable of incinerating even if they are functioning perfectly. These are advanced glycation end products (AGEs) that you eat rather than the ones that are made by sugar inside your body. Remember when I said that when sugar and proteins link up inside your body, it is the same as caramelizing onions? Yeah, it also happens when you eat caramelized protein: aka charred meat (from grilling over an open flame, broiling, or cooking protein with sugars). The AGEs you consume get stuck inside your cells, and your lysosomes can’t clear them out.
Over time, these materials build up, making more and more of your cells dysfunctional, and this affects your ability to control blood sugar levels26 and increases your risk of cancer27 and heart disease.28 When it happens to neurons, it can contribute to Alzheimer’s.29
Fried, blackened, and charred meat all contain tons of AGEs that can overload your cellular waste system and leave your cells literally full of garbage. And this dramatically raises your risk of developing one or more of the Four Killers. A 2019 study published in BMJ looked at the dietary habits of over one hundred thousand women between the ages of fifty to seventy-nine over the course of several years. After taking into account potentially influential factors such as lifestyle, overall diet quality, education level, and income, the researchers found that regularly eating fried foods (which also contain AGEs, since frying produces a similar chemical process as charring meat) was associated with a heightened risk of death from any cause and, specifically, heart-related death. Those who ate just one or more servings of fried food a day had an 8 percent higher risk of death from heart disease than those who did not eat fried food. One or more servings of fried chicken a day specifically was linked to a 13 percent higher risk of death from any cause and a 12 percent higher risk of heart-related death than someone who ate no fried food.30
This one hurts, I understand. When I was in my twenties, I was the master of the grill. I loved charring meat over an open flame, but now I love my clean, highly efficient cells even more. It’s worth ordering grass-fed steak with no char.
PILLAR 7—TELOMERE SHORTENING
Take a moment to picture the plastic tips on the ends of shoelaces that protect them from fraying. Your telomeres serve a very similar function—they are the endcaps of your DNA that protect your chromosomes from fraying with wear and tear (aka age). An enzyme called telomerase is responsible for maintaining telomeres, but these caps naturally deteriorate over time because each time a cell copies itself, the telomeres shorten. As you age, they get shorter and shorter until they can no longer protect the cell. The cell then either stops growing or submits to apoptosis. In fact, there is a term for the number of times a cell can divide before it is no longer protected by telomeres and dies—it’s called the Hayflick limit.31
Shortened telomeres are linked to a weakened immune system and chronic and degenerative diseases like heart disease and heart failure,32 cancer,33 diabetes,34 and osteoporosis.35 The rate at which your telomeres shorten plays a huge role in determining the rate at which you age. Scientists view telomere length as a reliable marker of your biological age (as opposed to your chronological age). People with shorter than average telomere length for their age have a higher risk for serious disease and early death36 than their peers with longer telomeres. In one study, people over the age of sixty with shorter than average telomeres had three times the risk of dying from heart disease and eight times the risk of dying from an infectious disease37 as someone with average-sized telomeres for their age.
It’s clearly critical to keep your telomeres long. There are some studies showing ways to lengthen telomeres, but not enough evidence yet to say that we know for sure how to do it in every case. But we do know some things about what make telomeres shorter and how to protect them from shortening. Interestingly, there seems to be a direct connection between telomere shortening and stress. In one study, women with the highest levels of perceived stress had telomeres that were shorter by the equivalent of one full decade than women who said they experienced less stress.38 This is an important finding because it offers evidence that how you experience psychological stress has as much of a physiological impact as environmental stress. And this makes sense, since both psychological and physiological stresses are associated with increased oxidative stress in the body.
Exercise is another important way of preventing early telomere shortening. Researchers in Germany looked at telomere length in four groups of people: those who were young and sedentary, those who were young and active, those who were middle-aged and sedentary, and those who were middle-aged and active. There wasn’t much of a difference between the two groups of young people, but when the participants were middle-aged, the change in telomere lengths was striking. The sedentary middle-aged folks had telomeres that were 40 percent shorter than the young people, while the active middle-aged folks had telomeres that were only 10 percent shorter than the young people. In other words, the active group reduced their telomere shortening by 75 percent.39 Exercise significantly reduces perceived stress levels and inflammation,40 which may help to explain these results.
There are two promising lines of research about lengthening telomeres. One is a synthetic peptide called Epitalon that is modeled after a peptide your pineal gland produces (epithalamin). The research on Epitalon goes back to 2003, but no one has commercialized it. When researchers injected Epitalon into mice, it was shown to increase their life-span by up to 13.3 percent by activating telomerase41 while turning on apoptosis and slowing down tumor growth.42
Someone with identical biology to me (ahem) has been injecting Epitalon for ten days every few months for the past several years despite the fact that it is not yet approved for human use and may never be, even though it seems to work. In fact, anti-aging substances like Epitalon often exist in a strange limbo. The pharmaceutical companies don’t develop them because they’re not patentable, which means they won’t pay for the huge studies the FDA requires before approving them. The result is that you can find Epitalon affordably online, but it’s hard to know that you’re getting it from a reputable source. To me, the risk-reward ratio is worth it, but this may not be the case for you.
Another supplement called TA-65, the name brand of cycloastragenol, also activates telomerase.43 It is incredibly concentrated extract of an Ayurvedic herb called astragalus. By law, the makers of TA-65 can’t call it an “anti-aging” drug because it hasn’t been proved to extend life-span. But studies on this molecule show that in humans, it improves biological markers associated with health span through the lengthening of telomeres and rescuing of old cells. The downside here is that it is quite expensive. If you’ve experienced a lot of stress and/or feel that you are aging more quickly than you’d like and it’s in your budget, this might be worth considering. There are generic versions available, too.
Until we know more about how to maintain telomere length, avoiding excessive environmental stress and taking measures to reduce your psychological stress is a good start, along with getting good quality sleep to recover from stress that is truly unavoidable.
You’ve probably noticed that these simple interventions—good food, the right environment, moderate exercise, stress control, and quality sleep—are the best and most effective ways of avoiding all Four Killers and even slowing down or reversing many of the Seven Pillars of Aging. And you’re right! The vast majority of the hits to your mitochondria that cause aging come from your food, your environment, and your lack of quality sleep. So, before we move on to aging backward, let’s take a closer look at the most important ways to avoid dying. After all, what’s the point of being a Super Human if you’re dead?
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Bottom Line
Want to not die? Do these things right now:
•Kill off death-resistant cells with natural or pharmaceutical compounds such as AEP, fisetin, and piperlongumine.
•Consider getting anti-aging drugs l
ike rapamycin or metformin from your doctor.
•Stop eating fried, grilled, or charred meat. It’s just not worth it if you want to live a long, high quality life.
•Manage stress—meditate, practice yoga, get good quality sleep, and/or delegate tasks that are draining you. This is not indulgent or selfish—it will literally help you live a longer and fuller life.
•Consider supplementing with vitamin D to help your body avoid forming dangerous misshapen proteins.
•Do what it takes to find out which foods are not compatible with your biology, either through an elimination diet or a food sensitivity panel, and stop eating those foods.
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3
FOOD IS AN ANTI-AGING DRUG
By the time it became clear that inflammation made me feel like crap and was aging me rapidly, I had conducted enough semi-successful experiments on myself to know that of all the things I could control, food had the biggest impact on how I felt, how I performed, how inflamed I was, and therefore how quickly my body aged. Armed with this experience and the lifetimes of knowledge distilled from medical reports, biochemistry, and experts at SVHI, I set out to determine once and for all which foods and compounds supercharged my mitochondria and reduced inflammation and which led to inflammation, dysfunctional mitochondria, and rapid aging. Fortunately, most of the good stuff also tasted good!
Years later, I wrote Game Changers, based on a survey of almost five hundred people who had done big things in the world—I wanted to figure out what made them tick, what qualities these superstars had in common. The results showed that high-performing people know that getting their food right is the number one human upgrade, even though different people found that different foods worked best for their individual biology. Nutrition is essential not only for Super Human biology but also for Super Human success.
GRAINS, GLUTEN, GLUCOSE, AND GLYPHOSATE (OH MY)
In my mid-twenties, I figured out how to lose fifty pounds of fat, decrease inflammation, gain energy, and gain positive changes to my personality using multiple versions of a low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet. I was happier and less angry, and had more friends and more energy. It was clear that something in my diet had caused these drastic changes. As I experimented with different types of carbs, I realized that for me, gluten was the number one culprit. Even though I do not have celiac disease, a condition that makes the small intestine hypersensitive to gluten, my body did not tolerate gluten well, and responded with chronic inflammation and changes to my personality that were far from positive.
Chances are you’ve already heard about the damaging effects of gluten, along with strident, shrill misinformation about how only people with celiac disease should avoid it. The sad truth is there is plenty of research to show that eating wheat—not just gluten, the protein found in wheat—is aging for the rest of us, too. Wheat causes inflammation and gastrointestinal distress and contributes to autoimmune disease and a host of other issues by stimulating an over-release of zonulin, a protein that controls the permeability of the tight junctions between the cells lining your gut. It does that whether or not you tell yourself that you tolerate wheat just fine.
With excess zonulin, the gaps between your intestinal cells open, allowing bacteria, undigested food, and bacterial toxins to flood into your bloodstream. Those toxins, called lipopolysaccharides, or LPSs, lead to inflammation throughout your body. They make you old,1 and as you get older, the accumulation of hits from LPSs impacts your health more and more.2 They do this no matter what you think about gluten.
Gluten also reduces blood flow to the brain, interferes with thyroid function,3 and depletes your vitamin D stores.4 As you read earlier, vitamin D deficiency can cause proteins to lose their shape and clump together, forming dangerous and aging plaque deposits.
If you’ve been following the latest news about gluten, you’re probably confused. On one hand, the Big Food industry says to eat it, but if you’re listening to the frontline anti-aging doctors on Bulletproof Radio, you hear clear advice to avoid gluten. You may have even switched to other grains besides wheat to avoid gluten. Unfortunately, most grains contain plant compounds designed to weaken animals like us who eat them. They also commonly contain storage toxins and field toxins from mold that grows on crops, and grains are commonly sprayed with glyphosate, the main ingredient in the herbicide Roundup.
In May 2015, the World Health Organization (WHO) classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” based on animal studies showing that glyphosate caused tumor growth and higher incidents of cancer. The WHO investigation also found that glyphosate is probably genotoxic (meaning it causes mutations in DNA) and increases oxidative stress, which triggers inflammation and speeds up aging. Glyphosate also mimics estrogen, which might explain why it causes human breast cancer cells to grow in vitro.5 Roundup itself is directly toxic to mitochondria6 and even more toxic to human placental cells than glyphosate7 alone.
Even more worrisome, the gly- in glyphosate stands for glycine, an amino acid prevalent in collagen, the protein in your skin’s connective tissue. Glyphosate is actually a glycine molecule attached to a methylphosphonyl group (which happens to be a precursor to chemical weapons). This means that when you consume glyphosate it can be incorporated into your collagen matrix just like glycine. In 2017, the Boston University School of Public Health released research showing that glyphosate substituting for glycine disrupts multiple proteins necessary for kidney health and may contribute to kidney disease.8 Plus, your skin is made of collagen. Extra wrinkles won’t necessarily keep you from living longer … but it’s always nice to look as young as you feel.
Before we spread another 18.9 billion pounds of glyphosate on our planet, we simply must conduct more research on how glyphosate contributes to other diseases when the body uses it as a substitute for glycine. For now, suffice it to say that if you want to avoid the painful, slow decline we now associate with aging, avoid glyphosate, which means avoid grains (at least in the United States). That’s not as easy as it may seem. Not only are the vast majority of conventionally grown grains sprayed with Roundup, but so is much of our conventionally grown produce and the grains that are fed to conventionally raised animals. This means glyphosate is hiding in most products containing corn and other grains, industrial feedlot meat, and animal products like nonorganic milk, yogurt, cheese, and so on.
Many parents were rightfully horrified when a 2018 report showed small but meaningful amounts of glyphosate in name brand breakfast cereals and other products marketed as healthy choices for families. I am equally horrified when I see advertisements for bone broth made from nonorganic industrial chickens. While bone broth is a great source of collagen, when it is made from the bones of conventionally raised chickens, it is a glyphosate land mine.
The good news is that the executives running Big Food companies will change how they make food when you demand it. After all, they have kids and don’t want to get old, just like the rest of us. This is simply about getting the science into the hands of decision-makers and getting them to believe it. Having had the opportunity to sit down with the heads of many of the largest food companies, I can attest that they feel a moral and personal obligation to feed you the healthiest food that you will actually eat at the lowest possible cost. They are good people who want to do the right thing. That is real. These are not evil people (except the people still making glyphosate … there must be a special place in hell for them). It’s just that we haven’t shown Big Food companies that we will actually pay a tiny amount more to get food that keeps us young. It’s okay. They’re coming over to our side as the data becomes clearer.
Glyphosate is just one reason that where you get your food really matters. After years of thinking about it, I decided to make the difficult move to an organic farm where my family can grow our own produce and even raise our own animals (and trade with neighbors who raise animals we don’t). But even before I made the move, my health improved tremendously when I simply elimi
nated grains and switched to organic, grass-fed animal products from the grocery store and farmers’ markets.
Despite these changes, I still had to learn how to control my blood sugar. More to the point, given how aging high blood sugar is, I learned how to kick its ass. On so many of the diets I’d tried in the past, I ate a low-fat, low-calorie, high-carb breakfast. My body secreted insulin to transport sugar to my cells so they could create energy. This caused a spike in blood sugar, then a quick drop until my base instincts yelled at me to eat something quick to get more energy. Sound familiar? Sugar cravings are how our biology evolved to keep us from starving to death, but they certainly weren’t helping me live longer! Even short spikes in blood sugar cause damage to the inside of your arteries, contributing to cardiovascular disease.
Another common scenario was that I’d unknowingly eat something that contained toxins, requiring my liver to use extra energy to filter toxins out. This of course led to more sugar cravings as my liver struggled to make enough energy to oxidize the toxins. My entire life was ruled by sugar cravings! It had been for as long as I could remember. And when I gave in and ate the darn sugar (or refined carbs), of course it made things worse: More blood sugar means bigger energy crashes, more oxidative stress,9 and the constant formation of AGEs when all that sugar links up with protein in tissues. You already know that sugar ages you, but you may not know how to stop eating it or about the deadly combination of too much sugar and too much protein …
THE VEGAN TRAP
Then I read The China Study by T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell II, one of the first popular books that made the connection between eating animal products and many common diseases, including the Four Killers. According to an uncritical read of the book, the best way to avoid dying is to avoid animal products completely. Given that not dying is the first step to anti-aging, and not having done all the research, I decided to avoid animal foods.
