Super Human

by Dave Asprey

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  Bottom Line

  Want to age backward? Do these things right now:

  •Up your intake of prebiotic fiber, resistant starch, and polyphenols, and cut way back on sugar. This alone will take you a long way toward balancing your gut biome.

  •If you have GI issues, cut back on fermented foods, including yogurt, sauerkraut, and kombucha, to see if it helps. You may be histamine sensitive.

  •Consider getting your stool tested by Viome to find out what’s really going on in your gut. Viome is generously offering a significantly discounted rate to readers at viome.com/superhuman.

  •You might also want to consider other at-home lab tests from reputable companies such as EverlyWell, which offers everything from food sensitivity tests to thyroid, inflammation, and other hormone panels. This is valuable information!

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  PART III

  HEAL LIKE A DEITY

  Remember Thog, the caveman who was skeptical of fire, and his friend who embraced that new technology? Perhaps their first glimpse of fire came from a naturally occurring forest fire, but according to Greek mythology, the Titan Prometheus, a champion of knowledge for the human race, gave mankind the gift of fire. To help enable our progress, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans.

  Any time you share new knowledge, there will be pushback. In this case, it really pissed off Zeus, the king of the gods. To punish Prometheus, Zeus tied him to a rock and sent an eagle to eat his liver every day. Being an immortal and all, Prometheus regrew his liver every single time. Infinite pain and suffering inflicted by the gods is harsh, but it’s a fascinating myth that ties together two major themes of this book: innovation and regeneration. Fortunately, modern anti-aging researchers don’t face liver-eating eagles, but they do face a never-ending army of naysayers and regulators seeking to slow the inevitable progress of this most important work.

  After I got my biology back to functional, my focus turned to finding a new level of youthfulness by helping my body regenerate—if not literally like Prometheus’s liver, then at least like a young person. Thanks to abundant active stem cells and growth factors, young people heal from injuries and everyday slights much more efficiently than most people do as they age. This is one of many reasons older people suffer from aches and pains that keep getting worse and never go away.

  To live to a hundred and eighty with all my faculties intact, I have to do whatever it takes to enhance my body’s healing mechanisms. Full disclosure: Not all of the things I’ve tested to improve my ability to regenerate are approved by regulators, and many are not regulated at all because they are too new. Some were also stupidly expensive at first, but the costs are falling rapidly. All interventions carry risk, as does a visit to your doctor. According to Johns Hopkins, medical errors are the third leading cause of death,1 which means it could rate as one of the Four Killers. I chose to try these interventions because they have good science behind them. I’ve compared the risks with the potential rewards and consciously decided to take on those risks in exchange for the rewards because it’s worth it to me.

  Your risk threshold might be lower, and we all have budgets. That’s why I’ve gone to great lengths to include options with less risk and/or more affordability; thus you can access some of the same benefits. But to become Super Human means venturing into uncharted territory, just as Prometheus did and the caveman who first accepted his gift of fire. I’m excited to share the tools I’ve used to start healing like a teenager and maybe even someday like a deity. It’s up to you to decide how far you’re willing to go to give death the finger once and for all.

  12

  VIRGIN CELLS AND VAMPIRE BLOOD

  Through my work in the anti-aging nonprofit field, I followed the research on stem cell treatments for years and desperately wanted to try it myself. In my early thirties, I had old injuries from my childhood that still bothered me, and of course I wanted to find new ways to help my body heal and regenerate. For about ten years, I couldn’t find a way to make it happen. At the time, these treatments cost upwards of $150,000 and required a trip overseas. Only professional athletes even considered it.

  This is because, unfortunately, most of the cutting-edge research on stem cell treatments has occurred outside the United States. Back in the 1980s, researchers here originally studied stem cells that came from an eight-cell human embryo. This raised a huge controversy from people concerned about experimenting on fetuses. In response, the government shut down much of the research on stem cells in general, even though stem cells are found throughout adult bodies, too. We just didn’t know it then.

  Let me be clear: None of the treatments I’ve pursued have anything to do with embryonic stem cells. Current therapies use adult stem cells from the patient’s own body or placental or cord tissues left over from healthy pregnancies that we used to incinerate as waste until we learned about their healing powers. Yet only certain stem cell treatments are legal in the United States, and often those have restrictions that make them less effective and a lot more expensive than in other countries. While I appreciate having regulatory agencies looking out for bad actors, we have a basic human right to choose what we want to do with our own bodies whether or not a church, a specific doctor, or a regulatory agency has blessed that decision. My biology, my choice.

  CELLULAR FIRST RESPONDERS

  So why are stem cells so important? Stem cells are the body’s master regeneration cells. We have them in many tissues in our bodies. When they are specialized—like a neuron—they can only turn into other neural cells, which means they are differentiated. For instance, adult immune stem cells aren’t supposed to turn into muscle cells or neurons, but they can turn into various different types of immune cells. Of course we’ve already figured out how to break these biological rules, but more on that later. The most powerful type of stem cells are pluripotent, which means they have unlimited self-renewal capacity, and they can differentiate into any type of cell in your body. Embryonic stem cells (found in days-old embryos, not fetuses) are pluripotent, meaning they can divide and become any other type of cell.

  Researchers discovered stem cells in bone marrow sixty years ago, and we’ve been doing stem cell transplants using marrow to cure some types of cancers and other life-threatening diseases for forty years. Only relatively recently have we learned that there are also dedicated stem cells in your heart and brain. Stem cells are sneaky—they hide without dividing for long periods of time until an injury or the need to grow new cells as you age activates them.

  A stem cell’s job is to maintain and repair the tissues where it lives. It’s like a consultant that rolls up on the scene, assesses the situation, and then acts to make improvements. Whenever you heal from an injury or regenerate tissue, it is a stem-cell-mediated event. As a result, your stem cell function largely determines your overall health and longevity. Your tissues are constantly renewing, and this requires a healthy and robust population of stem cells. But as you age, that reserve of stem cells can become depleted. With fewer stem cells in the reserve, cells that die are not automatically replaced. The body loses the ability to heal itself, and injured tissues deteriorate. This is called stem cell exhaustion, and it’s why older people typically don’t heal from injuries as quickly as they did when they were young.

  In addition, stem cells themselves begin to show signs of age. They don’t replace dead cells as efficiently as they did before. This is not merely a superficial problem. When your body cannot heal itself efficiently, the result is nagging pain that ages you even more. You read earlier about how substance P leads to inflammation. Stem cell exhaustion causes pain and increased substance P levels, which leads to inflammation, which causes even more aging!

  In your own body, stem cells are greatly concentrated in subcutaneous fat and in bone marrow. A doctor can harvest a little bit of your fat or bone marrow, process out the stem cells, and then reinject them into your body, where they dial down inflammation and promote h
ealing. Of course an aggressive anti-aging strategy must include stem cell treatments. And mine sure has. But stem cells aren’t the only type of cell or compound that you can pull out of your body and reinject to promote deity-like levels of youthfulness. Several types of cells and growth factors are more prevalent in your blood when you are young. Boosting these levels through cutting-edge treatments may be one of the most impactful ways to reverse aging.

  For years I had been trying to find a very experienced stem cell doctor in the United States. Finally in 2015 a friend introduced me to Dr. Harry Adelson, who was an early adopter of stem cell therapies to treat the pain that too often comes with aging. For many years, his practice largely consisted of farmers, ranchers, oil field workers, and professional rodeo folks. These are people who often have arthritis throughout their entire bodies and need to heal from injuries to continue working or to enjoy retirement. As such, he frequently does large treatments, injecting stem cells into many body areas in a single sitting.

  Many stem cell treatments use stem cells from either the fat or the bone marrow of a patient, but Dr. Adelson prefers to use a combination of both. He calls the stem cells from bone marrow the workhorses of the stem cell world. They are not as plentiful as those found in fat, but they are potent and come with lots of beneficial growth factors. Adipose tissue, which stores fat, is rich in stem cells that are more plentiful but have fewer growth factors than those found in bone marrow. By combining both types of stem cells in one treatment, you can get the best of both worlds.

  I lay facedown on an exam table, and the doctor smeared numbing cream over the area best described as my love handles. This is where fat most often accumulates and is a rich source of stem cells. Some of the sweetest words I’ve ever heard were “Don’t lose any more fat, Dave—you barely have enough.” Then he injected a local anesthetic and performed what was essentially liposuction to remove a few ounces of fat and the stem cells living inside it.

  I actually did a Facebook live stream during the procedure, and in selfie mode, I could see everything that was happening behind me. (I made sure to keep my head up and used a strategically placed blanket so my butt wasn’t too visible.) It looked like the doctor was tenderizing a steak, but I couldn’t feel a thing. Over the course of a few minutes, he removed about a coffee cup’s worth of fat.

  Then it was time to get more stem cells from my bone marrow. I had heard this might be painful, so I was a tiny bit nervous, but it wasn’t actually that bad. After making sure I was completely numb, Dr. Adelson made a small incision at the top of a butt cheek, and then I felt a sense of pressure and heard the dink, dink of a hammer hitting up against something hard: my bone. I won’t lie, it was uncomfortable and sort of creepy, but I just kept reminding myself how badly I wanted to live well for a long time. It was nowhere near as painful as I’d heard, just really odd because your skeleton is not normally a source of noise and vibration.

  It was over quickly, and Dr. Adelson spun my fat and bone marrow in a centrifuge to extract the stem cells. Much to my delight, he commented on the fact that my bone marrow was a rich yellow color (similar to grass-fed butter … you are what you eat) and held more stem cells than he normally sees.

  I like to think this is thanks to all the work I’ve done to age backward. Before the stem cell treatment, I spent a lot of time in the Atmospheric Cell Trainer, a piece of technology from Upgrade Labs, the first biohacking facility in the world. The trainer looks like the cockpit of a jet fighter, and you sit in it while the air pressure rapidly changes from sea level to as high as Everest and back. This causes all the cells in the body to grow and shrink, impacting circulation and likely stem cells as well.1

  Did I have unusually high levels of stem cells because I used the Atmospheric Cell Trainer, because I wrote a book about how to make mitochondria work better and practice those lessons every day, or because I meditate? Who knows? And honestly, who cares as long as the results are there? Though we’ve made a lot of progress toward understanding the body over the last ten years thanks to computing and sharing information between fields, the body is still a black box. To a biohacker like me, a black box is a system. I don’t need to know everything that’s going on in there. All I know is that I can put something in the box and get something else out.

  While academics and engineers want to take apart the box and understand all the components, hackers say, “Let me know what you find. In the meantime, I’m going to keep changing things until I get what I want out of the box.” This is where we are with anti-aging right now, and probably will be for the next fifty years. At some point, someone will figure it all out down to the subatomic particles and flow of electrons. My goal is to stay alive long enough to benefit from that knowledge, and maybe even contribute to it.

  Once Dr. Adelson had all the stem cells processed, he began injecting them throughout my body. Using a 3-D X-ray machine to make sure he had exactly the right spot, he focused on injecting stem cells into old injury sites. As a fat nineteen-year-old soccer player, I once dove onto a ball to save a goal and landed on my right shoulder, damaging the rotator cuff. I had also suffered from upper back pain for years.

  With so many fresh stem cells, I decided to have some injected into my face to help keep my skin collagen- and elastin-rich and some put into my reproductive organs. While I’ve never had a problem with erectile dysfunction, this is a common and well-known symptom of aging. Stem cell treatments can help keep things flowing with increased blood flow and nerve response. Hopefully with this help, I won’t ever need a little blue pill, even when I’m a hundred and eighty.

  Dr. Lana observed the entire treatment. As a physician who is excellent at evaluating medical procedures and who of course wants to grow young with me, she decided to get the same treatment. She, too, had a lot of old injury sites to heal. When she was eight years old, she fell about thirty feet out of a tree and landed on her back. And just two years later, she was playing on the second story of a construction site when a friend accidentally pushed her out the window. She had pain in her neck and limited motion for four decades.

  Lana also decided to get the equivalent female sexual health treatment, which included stem cell injections into the clitoris and the upper vaginal walls. Most women know that as they age or have babies, it’s common to see a thinning of tissue thanks to cell loss, which causes a decrease in sexual pleasure. The stem cell treatment helped those tissues regenerate. Within days, Lana’s neck pain was completely gone, and she could turn her head with full range of motion for the first time in her adult life. My shoulder and back pain went away. It was incredible.

  I was so impressed with the results that I recommended Dr. Adelson’s treatment to many more family members. One was scheduled to have surgery on a damaged heart valve. Beforehand, he had his own stem cells pulled out and reinjected through an IV for anti-aging purposes and in preparation for the surgery. Soon after, he went to the hospital to have a routine heart scan prior to the surgery, and his doctor told him, “You have no damage in your heart. It’s gone. There’s no need for the surgery.”

  Not long after this, my mother fell down, and her glasses cut her face right under her eye. It required eight stitches and left a large, noticeable scar. About three months after the fall, I gifted stem cells to her and my father, who had them introduced intravenously so they could go to sites of inflammation. Very quickly, her scar shrunk to the point that you could barely see it. When a nearly seventy-year-old woman magically heals from what would have been a disfiguring scar, we’re getting close to deity-like powers.

  FULL-BODY MAKEOVER WITH STEM CELLS

  Since I’m always looking to up my game and I wanted to share the experience with you in this book, I recently went back to Dr. Adelson for a treatment he pioneered called the full-body stem cell makeover. In fact, I was the first person on Earth to receive the highest level, which he calls the six-hand full-body stem cell makeover. For this treatment, I was sedated via IV. This is slightly different from bein
g put under general anesthesia, which uses drugs that tax the brain and liver. The IV sedation is the same kind that is typically used when you get a colonoscopy or during certain dental procedures.

  Once again Dr. Adelson removed and then reinjected a combination of stem cells from my bone marrow and adipose tissue. This time, he added exosomes, which are vesicles (fluid-filled sacs) filled with growth factors made by stem cells. These exosomes came from umbilical cord stem cells cultured in a lab. When placed in a stressful culture medium, these stem cells believe their host is under duress, so they manufacture and release vesicles filled with growth factors to help fight off whatever threat is coming.

  These exosomes are essentially the active ingredients in stem cells. You can think of them as stem cell juice (yum!) with all of the stem cells strained out. They are responsible for the intercellular communication that triggers the growth of new tissues and new blood vessels, controls inflammation, and fights off infection. When our stem cells age, they lose the ability to manufacture these very exosomes. The lab forces very young, robust stem cells to sprout exosomes. Then they separate the exosomes from the stem cells and discard the cells that contain the other person’s genetic material. The exosomes themselves do not contain any genetic material, and their membranes are identical to the membranes of our own stem cells. So researchers believe that our stem cells are able to absorb exosomes, effectively making the stem cells themselves younger. This assumption is based on scientific literature on the use of exosomes for kidney function.

  As a side note, some people consider the use of umbilical cord blood controversial, but there is currently a thriving market for both umbilical cord blood and amniotic fluid, which contain growth factors such as exosomes that promote rapid healing. It may seem icky or unethical for women to donate (or even sell) their cord blood or placenta after delivering a child. When you consider that these tissues were previously incinerated but are now helping people heal faster, however, the ethics are clear.