1 Conference, 12 Experts, 24+ Trends to Watch
Slowing down aging. Reversing chronic disease. Erasing pain.
These were just a few of the topics under discussion at the 2016 Bulletproof Biohacking Conference. Yes, it’s that Bulletproof — entrepreneur Dave Asprey, creator of the Bulletproof Diet product line, has brought together the leading lights in human performance research at an annual conference for the last four years. This year, 24Life asked some of the experts at the conference — including founder Dave Asprey — what research, concepts and breakthroughs they think hold the most promise. Here’s what they had to say.
KNOW YOUR BODY IS LISTENING
Dave Asprey, Founder and CEO, Bulletproof
01. “Bio-hacking is the science of changing the environment around you so that you have more control over your own biology. The idea is that your body listens to the world around you. It listens to the stimulus it gets, like your workout, or going out into a park, or what you eat. It listens to that a lot more than it listens to you and what you’re thinking.”
02. “You have five easily accessible senses. You can smell, touch, taste, see and hear things. But there are many other senses you have via your cells, or more specifically, your mitochondria – the powerhouses of your cells that generate energy. Your mitochondria are listening to the world around you at all times. They’re sensitive to electromagnetic frequencies and to light. For instance, your skin is light sensitive, not just your eyes. Your mitochondria listen to the temperature, and to the availability of food. Even your stress levels can change how your genes express on a second-by-second basis.”
03. “If you have a craving, it’s your fault. That’s the message. [But it’s] not because you’re a bad person, it’s not because you don’t have enough will-power. You have cravings because of something in your environment or because something that you’re doing is triggering that craving. You just don’t know what it is yet. Instead of it being a personal weakness, it’s actually something you can control when you unlock the problem. If I find myself doing something or I find myself feeling less than I want to feel, I just ask, ‘Why?’ Then, thanks to the Internet, you can do incredible research on biochemistry and the way the body works. Start with that knowledge, experiment with your personal biology, and track your performance and how you feel. Then adjust what you’re doing as needed. Congratulations, you’re biohacking!”
CONTINUOUSLY QUESTION YOUR BELIEFS
Neil Strauss, Transformational Journalist and Author, “The Game” and “The Truth”
04. “So much in our culture [is] about fixing your behaviors, and tips to do this, and tips to do that, but to really to get change and growth and understanding, you have to understand and question your beliefs…. Living a conscious life is to [question] what degree you are in the driver’s seat of your own life, and to what degree your neuroses, complexes and wounds are driving you.”
05. “You can become a detective and investigate your own behavior. If you commit to a behavior, and you can’t do it, the problem isn’t the behavior. And the solution won’t be more will power. The problem is the belief behind the behavior. So if you want to really change, you’ll have to work the belief behind the behavior. If you work with your beliefs, your behaviors will automatically change for the better. It won’t even be a struggle anymore.”
FIGHT FOR YOUR POWER, NOT YOUR LIMITATIONS
Jim Kwik, CEO, Kwik Learning; Founder, SuperheroYou
06. “I think we are the superheroes that we’ve all been waiting for … and we have to be, because there so many supervillains. There’s information overload and digital dementia…. Everything is taking away from our level of productivity, our level of performance, our level of happiness and fulfillment.”
07. “My message to everybody is that they have genius inside of them. They have super powers beyond belief, and you just have to be able to make the decision and flip that light switch. End the trance that you’re not good enough. End the trance that you’re not smart enough, that you’re not strong enough, that you have all these limitations. Because when you fight for your limitations you get to keep them, so why not do the opposite?”
08. “The challenge is, a lot of people over-commit and they say ‘yes’ to everything. And when they say ‘yes’ to everything, they say ‘no’ to everything. And that’s the big challenge. How do you take care of everything and still take care of yourself also? I think part of it is the art of not doing.”
09. “Number one, make a ‘Do Not Do’ list. I think the best way to overcome procrastination is just to put it off.”
EMBRACE THE GIFTS OF OUR DIFFERENCES
John Gray, Relationship Counselor and Author, “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus”
10. “Biologically the limbic system of the brain is twice as big in women. It becomes eight times more active under moderate stress or under positive experiences. Men don’t have that capacity, but we can have strong emotions like women.”
11. “All aggression is not testosterone. The most recent research from Stanford [indicates] that it’s estrogen. When it goes too high in a man, it brings out the worst side of men. Just as when women suppress their female hormones, that brings the worst out in women.”
BE STRATEGIC WITH SMALL WINS THAT MATTER
Kelly and Juliet Starrett, Founders, MobilityWOD
12. “The revolution in human performance right now is recognizing that the administration of positional mechanics of teaching of health is at the coach level, on every level. The average person is training very, very hard and has become quite sophisticated over the last decade, which has really given us permission to talk about the next conversation. How do we improve mechanics? How do I, as an average athlete, expand my definition of fitness to include positional competency, include addressing soreness or stiffness, or problems in my day-to-day life? The key is to get informed and take responsibility. This is the start.”
13. “Ultimately, a conversation about fitness or physical practice is really about changing behavior and changing pattern. Instead of being very heroic, we just want people to be consistent. You start turning small wrenches. Over the long, long haul, you see massive change. We’re here to remind people not to forget about the basics, [to] not forget to eat vegetables, and sleep, and actually play and hang out with your kids, and move more, and do those basic things.”
LEARN PAIN IS NOT A LIFE SENTENCE
Harry Adelson, ND, Docere Clinics
14. “Regenerative pain medicine is the use of stem cells from bone marrow and fat for the treatment of musculoskeletal pain conditions. So we [can] treat everything from low back pain and degenerated, dehydrated disks, to arthritic knees, shoulders and hips. [This includes] platelet-rich plasma, or PRP, [which] is a normal blood draw. You concentrate down the platelets from the blood, so you get a hyper-concentration of platelets. Now platelets are what are responsible for clotting after you have an injury, but they also release growth factors that trigger the body’s natural healing response. [There is also] bone marrow aspiration and concentrating the bone marrow similar to what you do with the platelet-rich plasma and injecting it. Now you’re getting a platelet-rich plasma but also a dense concentration of your own stem cells directly into the damaged area.”
15. “We have stem cells in all the musculoskeletal tissues in the body — and all the joints, the muscles, the ligaments, the tendons − and their job…is to maintain the health of their environment. So, they’re able to sense when there’s been an injury, then in response they release proteins that control the inflammation, kill invading microbes and then trigger the healing of the damaged tissue. So when you have sub-optimal healing – you’ve had an injury and you don’t completely heal – you’re left with a form of scar tissue. You don’t have great circulation, the nerve endings are irritated, they’re constantly firing pain signals, and that’s what chronic pain is. Chronic pain occurs on the microscopic level.”
FIND STRESS RELIEF FROM THE INSIDE OUT
Kristin Comella, Chief Science Officer, U.S. Stem Cell, Inc.
16. “The field of regenerative medicine is really growing and it’s growing at a rapid pace. This is everything from stem cell treatments to even gene therapies, and really hacking the cells inside your body to make them perform better and to make the tissues function better. And looking at it from a cellular level and getting down to the basic biology. Harnessing your body’s own healing potential. The power to heal comes from within.”
17. “Stem cells can be sourced from a variety of different locations. Oftentimes we hear about on the media embryonic stem cells, which can be associated with controversy. What we use are adult stem cells. And these are stem cells that are obtained from the patients themselves. So they’re not associated with the controversies that surround some of the embryonic type tissues. These are your own cells that are delivered back to you. Nobody knows how to heal your body better than you.”
18. “There’s actually a lot of evidence indicating that stress, as well as depression, is linked to brain inflammation, and so what we can do is utilize stem cells and get them close to the brain to allow for the reduction of the inflammation that is occurring. What we discovered is the cells were very angiogenic in nature, which means that they can help produce new blood supply. And oftentimes, many of the diseases that we combat in our body have to do with a lack of blood supply. When blood’s not flowing to the area, there’s no cells going there to help heal. So the ability to create new blood supply can really help to change the course of a disease.”
END THE SEARCH FOR A PERFECT DIET
Mark Sisson, Author, Creator of the Primal Blueprint
19. “As we look at ancestral patterns and we go back to the paleo model, we see that our ancestors spent a fair amount of time in the sun. They didn’t avoid it, clearly. They made vitamin D; vitamin D is one of the most important vitamins in regards to our immune system, and keeping us from getting cancer. So, it’s kind of ironic to think that you could almost make an argument that more people have gotten cancer from staying out of the sun and compromising their immune systems, than have gotten cancer from being in the sun too long… The bottom line is that … there probably are no concrete answers. There are just lifestyle choices.”
20. “I think too often people get caught up in this assumption that if it’s not perfectly paleo, then it doesn’t work at all. Food exists on a spectrum of really bad choices to really good choices, and it doesn’t have to be a black-or-white, either-or situation. There can be anything in between that gets you through this little time period now until the better choice arrives.”
EAT LESS, LIVE LONGER
Alan Cash, CEO, Terra Biological LLC
21. “Over the last 70 to 80 years, we’ve seen that calorie restriction is the only thing we know of that … increases survival by anywhere from 10 to 25 percent throughout the animal kingdom. Eating just less food — not different food, not vitamins, not anything else but just less food — will actually change the genes that are expressed in your body by about 10 percent.”
22. “We’ve only done [human clinical] trials with calorie restrictions for about two, maybe three years. And what we see is a reduction in atherosclerosis, the hardening of the arteries. We see a reduction in blood pressure. We see a reduction in glucose, fasting glucose levels. So all those things are tied to heart disease, diabetes, cancer. So it makes sense that we would live longer if we see these reductions in just a year or two. But we don’t know for sure because people live a long time.”
23. “There is a growing feeling that long-term inflammation is the cornerstone of many diseases… We can’t recommend any supplement to prevent, treat or cure any disease. But certainly keeping inflammation under control is a great place to start. Oxaloacetate has been shown to reduce two inflammation pathways — mTOR and NF-kB. This alone is very, very exciting. And there are other compounds that will do that too. Turmeric is a good one. Taking vitamin D daily is also a great thing to do.”
FIND HEALTHY FATS, LOSE THE BAD FAT
24. “Butter is an amazing food. Because, if you think about where it comes from, if you’ve got a grass-fed cow, it’s grazing over all this grass and it’s bio-concentrating all the fat-soluble antioxidants and vitamins like vitamin K2 and even things like omega-3. Grass-fed butter actually has as much omega-3 fat as cod liver oil on a milliliter per milliliter basis. It also has not just omega-3 but conjugated linoleic acid, which is so powerfully anti-cancer that you can give a woman who’s had a breast biopsy that showed cancer … one single dose, and by the time she comes back for the surgery, the cancer cells look less malignant.”
25. “[Traditionally,] people used to eat everything. They used to eat heart and eyeballs… We don’t go quite that far, but eggs — and egg yolks, in particular — can give you a lot of the benefits that you would get from organ meats.”
26. “To upgrade [your] diet is to become a conscious consumer and what that means is really paying attention to the natural world that your food is coming from, and it should be coming from the natural world as opposed to a factory where some of these dark calories, the vegetable oils, come from. ‘Dark calorie’ is a term to describe what this mysterious substance is that is the foundation of many Americans’ diet that is actually leading to a lot of diseases, diseases that are not related to obesity … like Alzheimer’s disease, and auto-immune disorders, and even cancer. Dark calories come from vegetable oils, corn, cottonseed, canola, soy, sunflower, safflower. They contain toxins, and they comprise around 50 percent of most people’s calories, and the fact is that they’re bad for you. It’s the last thing we should be basing our diet on, yet we do.”
INVESTIGATE HOW YOUR HEALTH IS PERSONAL
Matt Riemann, Founding Director, Ultimate Human Health Foundation, ph360.me
27. “Generic health advice isn’t right for anyone. There are 7 Billion people on the planet and not one single person is the same. There’s not one thing that works for everybody. One size does not fit all. We now have advanced health technologies like ph360.me and Shae to help you find out how unique you are, and what really works for you and your body, so you can move towards a space of health and wellness. Take, for example, the fact that tomatoes are now proven to both cause cancer and also to prevent cancer. Which is right? Well, when you look at the person instead of the tomato, you can understand how each unique biology and physiology interacts with the tomato and whether this will contribute towards health or disease — as opposed to the tomato itself being great or not great. It’s not about the tomato. It’s about the person. The key is knowing how YOU interact with certain foods, exercises and lifestyle choices. It’s never been about the tomato, we just got a little lost along the way.”
28. “Your phenotype is the expression of your genes, and it reveals all the different things that influence the way your genes are switched on or off at any point in time. It’s not so much about having good or bad genes. Genes just hold information; they don’t actually have any function at all. It’s the things outside of your genes — your epigenetics: driven from your environment and lifestyle — that actually interact with your genes and dictate what happens with the functioning of your genes. If you want to thrive in the world, become interested in personalized health and epigenetics. Because once you know clearly how the things outside of your genes (epigenes) are influencing their activity, then you can take action to influence your health, your behaviors, and your state of wellness or disease at any point in time.”