Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever

We know that the mitochondria in our cells, which themselves evolved from bacteria, communicate with the bacteria in our gut. Bacteria communicate with one another via chemicals (like hormones), light, or physical movement. They even gather around and trade bits of their genetic code in a microscopic swap meet for bacteria superpowers. This is called a plasmid level exchange. Imagine a group of Marvel superheroes hanging out at headquarters. Wolverine says to Spider-Man, “Do you want my ability to grow claws? I’ll trade you for your super speed.” This happens constantly in our guts and in the world around us, which is why drug-resistant bacteria spread so rapidly. It’s also why we must end industrial livestock practices that require antibiotics. The bad bacteria that evolve in that environment find their way into your gut and make it hard for you to live well for a long time.

So there is clearly an inflammatory and gut bacterial connection to heart disease. Plus, we know that when you have the right kind of bacteria in your gut they can actually transform the foods you eat into short-chain fatty acids, which are highly anti-inflammatory. Nurturing healthy gut bacteria is one of the most important things you can do to become Super Human, and you’ll learn how later.

Look, I remember what it felt like when my doctor, complete with white lab coat, looked right at me and said in a matter-of-fact voice, “You are at a high risk for heart attack and stroke.” I recall the bewilderment and fear in my gut as I stared my own mortality in the face. That happened when I was still in my twenties, and thanks to the information in this book, it is not an issue for me anymore. But even when I was just a kid, I had symptoms of cardiovascular issues, specifically blood pressure instability, a condition normally reserved for much older people. When I stood up quickly, my blood pressure was too low to keep oxygen in my brain. This caused me to start seeing stars and feel extremely fatigued. As a youngster, I would lean my head forward after getting out of a car in order to avoid seeing stars. I was so used to this that I thought it was how everybody lived.

Now I know these were symptoms of postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS, which is often triggered by toxic mold exposure but can also happen with age. In either case, inflammation disrupts the line of communication between the nervous system and the endocrine (hormonal) system. The disruption of these signals leads to fatigue and blood pressure instability, and can lead to symptoms of attention deficit disorder (ADD)

and Asperger’s syndrome,

which I certainly exhibited as well.

This manifested in my not knowing the names of most of the kids in my class, even at the end of the school year. I had zero facial recognition and no understanding of basic social skills. My body was filtering out those signals to conserve energy because my biology was so trashed. Our bodies will always prioritize survival over socialization, and I didn’t have enough energy to go around.

It may be hard to comprehend how cognitive symptoms could be connected to vascular issues, but as you will learn in this book, everything in the body is connected. And that includes the diseases that age us and too often lead to premature death.

DIABETES

While the idea of inflammation “causing” heart disease remains controversial, we have definitive proof that type 2 diabetes is an inflammatory disease,

and having diabetes dramatically increases your risk of cardiovascular issues. More than ten years ago, researchers discovered that when macrophages—immature white blood cells that play a key role in the immune response—find their way into otherwise healthy tissues, they release inflammatory substances called cytokines that cause nearby cells to become insulin resistant.

In insulin resistance, the body has an impaired response to insulin, which is normally responsible for moving sugar out of the blood and into your cells. The result is that your blood sugar levels are not well regulated and become chronically high. Because chronic high blood sugar will eventually lead to diabetes—a disease in which the pancreas is unable to produce enough insulin to keep up with the body’s demands—a diagnosis of insulin resistance is most often accompanied by the label prediabetic. Prediabetes is so common now that it almost seems like no big deal. The CDC says that more than one out of every three Americans is prediabetic. But it is actually a huge deal because having diabetes dramatically increases your risk of developing the other killers.

Excess blood sugar causes damage to the entire vasculature, so if you have diabetes, you’re more likely to have heart disease or a stroke. High blood sugar also causes dangerous nerve damage by injuring the walls of the capillaries that bring blood and nutrients to your nerves. This is called peripheral artery disease, and it is especially common in the legs and feet, which is why you may have heard of people suffering from diabetes needing foot or leg amputations. When this happens in the eyes, it causes blindness. If that’s not bad enough, diabetes can damage your kidneys’ filtering system, resulting in kidney disease. And finally, the higher your blood sugar, the greater your risk for Alzheimer’s disease, to the point that some researchers call Alzheimer’s “type 3 diabetes.” So you’ve got to keep your blood sugar levels stable, no matter what.

You may think you’re off the hook if you are not overweight, but you can be thin and still be prediabetic (or even fully diabetic). Those problematic macrophages are most likely to trigger inflammation in adipose tissue, aka fat. So the more excess fat you’re carrying, the higher your chance of becoming insulin resistant and developing type 2 diabetes. But the same thing can happen if you are not overweight but have excess visceral fat, which is the type of fat that’s packed around your internal organs instead of underneath the skin. This “skinny fat” is even more dangerous than fat you can see.

There is new evidence that maintaining normal amounts of muscle strength as you age can help ward off this killer. In a study following five thousand people for over twenty-five years, participants were given regular strength tests. The risk of diabetes was slashed by 32 percent in those with even moderate muscle strength as opposed to those with low muscle strength.

The reduced risk did not change if the participants were even stronger, so you don’t have to get ripped to live longer, but you should avoid carrying excess fat.

I had no idea as an obese teenager that inflammation was making it difficult for me to control my blood sugar. Instead, I bought into the myth that I just wasn’t trying hard enough to lose weight. I exercised a ton and constantly watched what I ate. For breakfast, I had Grape-Nuts, which were supposed to give me energy, and skim milk, which was meant to do my body good. But they did neither of those things. I distinctly remember one morning in ninth grade eating a bowl of Grape-Nuts with skim milk to prepare for a big soccer match. I was convinced this was a healthy breakfast, but I didn’t perform very well in the game. I thought to myself afterward, Well, that didn’t work the way it was supposed to.

This was the first time I questioned conventional wisdom about what was actually good for me. It would be many more years before I started to get real answers, but in my desperation I started experimenting with things that no teenager should need to explore. I was sick of feeling like an old man. So I started reading everything I could get my hands on that offered some advice for how to feel and perform better. While my peers were (I assume) out drinking and having fun, I was at home biohacking.

For my knee pain, I tried the glucosamine pills from the health food store, and they brought some serious relief. I didn’t know it then, but glucosamine inhibits glycolysis, your body’s breakdown of glucose (sugar). As a result, your body has to get energy from fat instead of sugar, which helps prevent insulin resistance. Recent research on mice has found that glucosamine promotes mitochondrial biogenesis (the birth of new mitochondria) and mimics the effects of calorie restriction.

And there are plenty of studies to show that calorie restriction (a diet consisting of fewer than 1,200 calories a day) in conjunction with good nutrition extends life-span. In mice, calorie restriction can extend life-span by as much as 40 percent. Most researchers estimate that the impact on humans is more like 10 percent, which is still pretty amazing

—if you’re willing to be hungry, anyway.

If you’re like most people, you don’t enjoy feeling hungry, and you don’t want to restrict your calories to fewer than 1,200 a day. The good news is that researchers have been testing compounds that mimic the benefits of calorie restriction without the starvation. Glucosamine is one of those compounds. In one study, glucosamine extended the life-span of mice by 10 percent.

And it most likely helped with my knee pain because of the way it impacted my body’s sugar metabolism.

Despite this small win, I was heavier than ever and fed up. In college I spent eighteen months working out six days a week for an hour and a half at a time while on a low-calorie, low-fat semi-vegetarian diet with lots of rice and beans and everything that was supposed to be good for me. I got really strong, but I was still covered in blubber, and later blood tests revealed that I was prediabetic thanks to all that fat and the inflammation it was fueling.

I knew something had to change, but I had no idea what that thing was. Then one day while I was at a coffee shop getting my daily fix, I spotted a weightlifting magazine on a rack. No one I knew in my small farming town read weightlifting magazines, but something on the cover caught my eye. It said, “How to grow abs!” Looking down at what I had grown—which you could more accurately call flabs—I thought, I have to read this. The goal seemed impossible in the world I lived in.

As I sipped a triple latte, I read an article by a body builder with impressive abs who said that sugar and carbohydrates make you fat. That advice was radical at the time and is still mildly controversial today, but it has become much more widely accepted since we know for a fact that sugar causes inflammation.

Even small spikes of blood sugar have a particularly bad effect on your vascular system (and raise your cancer risk, too).

I grabbed the magazine, went home, and made a smoothie out of cottage cheese and orange juice. I had no idea what I was doing! But that gross smoothie still had fewer carbs than I was used to eating in my efforts to get healthy.

I started eating more protein and avoiding grains and most obvious sources of sugar, for the first time focusing more on what I didn’t eat (carbs) than how much I ate. In three months I lost fifty pounds, but more surprising were the changes to my personality. Everyone in my life noticed that I was a lot nicer, and I actually started to develop friendships. I had changed my biology enough that I wasn’t exhausted all the time, and my brain was able to learn how to connect with people, even though it still didn’t come naturally to me. My focus in class also improved, and my GPA went up dramatically, from a 2.8 the previous semester to a double course load with a 3.9.

That’s right—avoiding grains and sugar helped me reduce inflammation, stabilize my blood sugar, get smarter, and change my personality for the better. Once again, everything is connected. Realizing I’d been fed a bunch of lies (literally) about what to eat for most of my life, I dug into the research and tried different strategies, evolving from the cottage cheese smoothie to the Zone diet to Atkins. (Though I never got anywhere close to the abs promised in that magazine.) Eventually I realized that there had to be a science to this. There were clearly foods out there that acted as kryptonite, caused inflammation, and completely threw me off of my game. And when I ate them, I not only felt awful, but I was also one step closer to developing type 2 diabetes. It took me years, but I finally discovered what those inflammatory foods were and how to avoid them. You’ll read more about this in chapter 3 (#u909a95e2-9d36-53b3-9d48-d6f284db9446).

ALZHEIMER’S

Just as immune cells in your body fat create inflammation that contributes to diabetes, there are specialized immune cells in the brain called microglia that perform similar functions. They control the brain’s immune and inflammatory response and are also in charge of killing off dysfunctional neurons in a process similar to apoptosis. The microglial cells constantly monitor the brain, and when they sense a threat, they trigger the release of inflammatory cytokines to attack and remove potential pathogens. This process causes inflammation, and if it becomes chronic this can damage or kill neurons, causing memory loss and other cognitive problems.

Many researchers now believe that this is the root of Alzheimer’s.

In my twenties I was already experiencing significant cognitive dysfunction, and I wondered in the back of my mind if I was on track for developing Alzheimer’s. When I was in business school in the 1990s, my performance on tests was horrible. On exams with math questions, my grades showed a linear decline in per-question scores—100 percent on the first question, 70 percent on the next, 30 percent on the next, and directly downhill from there. My brain got fatigued so easily, even when I studied and knew the answers.

This experience led me to imagine what would happen if I couldn’t rely on my brain to earn a living. I’d had a successful career so far, but suddenly I wondered if I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. I decided to undergo a then controversial brain imaging technique called a SPECT scan to see what was really going on in my brain. It showed that my prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain involved in complex thinking and decision-making—had essentially no activity when I tried to concentrate. Dr. Daniel Amen, who was one of the first people in this country to use SPECT scans, was shocked that I had been even remotely successful in my career with such clear cognitive dysfunction.

Once again, receiving bad news actually came as a relief. It was incredibly validating to hear that there was indeed a reason why everything felt like such a struggle. The issue wasn’t lack of effort or intelligence. It was an actual biological problem, a hardware problem. And there were lots of little-known things I could do to reduce inflammation and improve my brain function. When I found these interventions, the impact was immediate and allowed me to get smarter and faster with each passing year. The good news is that once you know them, the interventions are simple and practical.

If you’re in your twenties or thirties, it is much easier to reduce inflammation now to boost your brainpower and avoid cognitive decline with age, but even if you are older or experiencing symptoms of dementia, it is still possible to improve your brain function. The sooner you start, the better, but it’s never too late to begin growing a younger, more powerful, and more energetic brain. You’ll learn how to do this later in this book.

CANCER

More than 40 percent of Americans are diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime.

When mitochondria become dysfunctional and don’t produce energy efficiently—which, again, is typical of most people as they age—your risk of cancer increases. This is because an inflamed environment offers the perfect conditions for cancer cells to proliferate.

Think about a time you got a cut and the wound became swollen—an obvious sign of inflammation (an immune response) at work. When the body is injured, your cells multiply quickly so the wound can heal. That process alone does not cause cancer. But when cells multiply rapidly in an environment that contains excess free radicals—which damage the DNA of cells—the risk is that damaged or mutated cells will proliferate. If these damaged cells continue to reproduce, the result can be cancer.

We often think that our risk of developing cancer is based mostly on our genetics, but the data shows that only about 2 to 5 percent of cancers are truly genetically based, and mitochondrial dysfunction causes most others. In 1931, a German biochemist named Otto Warburg won the Nobel Prize for discovering that highly dysfunctional mitochondria actually stop burning oxygen to make energy and turn instead to a much less efficient process called anaerobic metabolism, which is the combustion of carbohydrates in the absence of oxygen. Anaerobic metabolism is associated with the vast majority of cancers. But if your mitochondria are strong, they will not have to resort to anaerobic metabolism. This greatly reduces your cancer risk.

Cancer is something of a double-edged sword when it comes to anti-aging. Any time you do something that makes your cells grow faster or get younger, you are inherently increasing your cancer risk because cancer cells can potentially grow and rejuvenate along with the healthy ones. Then you end up with this weird dichotomy: You can grow old “normally” with a roughly 40 percent chance of getting cancer, or you can get younger and maybe as a result slightly increase your risk. My solution to this dilemma is to do everything I can to make sure my mitochondria run like superstars because that in and of itself will reduce my risk of cancer. I also take action to promote my body’s natural detoxification efforts.

In addition to apoptosis, which you read earlier is healthy, controlled cellular death that targets old or unstable cells, your body also has a built-in detox process to recycle damaged cellular components. This is called autophagy, a Greek word that translates as “self-eating.” During autophagy, your cells scan the body for pieces of dead, diseased, or worn-out cells, remove any useful components from these old cells, and then use the remaining molecules to either make energy or create parts for new cells. This recycling process removes unwanted toxins, reduces inflammation, and helps to slow the aging process.

When you activate autophagy, you slow down the aging process, reduce inflammation, reduce your cancer risk, and increase your body’s ability to function at its best. There are specific supplements and lifestyle modifications such as brief bouts of fasting that boost autophagy. You’ll learn how to do this as we get deeper into the techniques that make you Super Human.

SLASH YOUR RISK

Despite overwhelming evidence that mitochondrial dysfunction and the resulting inflammation leads to the Four Killers, we live in a society in which an inevitable decline in mitochondrial function is considered a normal part of aging. Of course we expect to die from one of these diseases! Between the ages of thirty and seventy, you experience a decrease in efficiency of the average mitochondrion by about 50 percent, setting the stage for you to develop these killers.

Since you’re reading this book, you obviously have no intention of aging like an average person, and you shouldn’t. By the time I discovered the importance of mitochondria, mine were already trashed from years of toxic mold exposure. The mold had weakened my system and aged me prematurely, so in many ways I was the canary in the coal mine. I felt the “cuts” that affect all of us much sooner than most people because I started off in a weaker spot. In order to get to a basic level of functionality, I had to find out what was causing these cuts and work on eliminating them.

Feeling the cuts so early and so deeply allowed me to experience real-time feedback and determine which environmental factors impacted my health and performance the most. This turned out to be an enormous gift because I was able to learn—and can now teach you—how to stop damaging your own body with thousands of invisible cuts by focusing on the basics: good nutrition, quality sleep, and a healthy environment free of toxins that cause more cuts.

Before we move on to learn how to do that, let’s take a closer look at exactly what these cuts do to our bodies. Obviously, you won’t go from eating an inflammatory meal to developing degenerative disease in one fell swoop. Instead, the cuts from your environment cause invisible damage on the subcellular level. This damage doesn’t age you at once, but it does so cumulatively, day after day, year after year. By the time you become aware of this damage, you’re old. But you can take action now to stop this damage before it stacks up. So after you take the steps to avoid the Four Killers, it’s time to focus on cheating death the way Super Humans do—by avoiding the Seven Pillars of Aging. These are the processes in your body that break as you age, and there’s a lot you can do to control them.