March Q&A: Breathwork, Stress Hacks, Combating Pre-Diabetes & More! – #293

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Intro voice:     Bulletproof Radio, a station of high performance.

Dave:  Hey, it’s Dave Asprey of Bullet Proof Radio. Today’s cool fact of the day is that the single most searched nutrient on the internet is vitamin C. It feels cool because it has some amazing powers a lot of people don’t know about.

One of the things that I do to make my life better is I remove the number of decisions, I remove complexity wherever I can. I’m militant about that and one of the areas where I pay attention is when I buy something online.

There’s a company called SeatGeek that’s taken all the work and hassle out of shopping for tickets. I don’t like clicking around to different websites not knowing to go and setting up profiles here and profiles there. It’s just a bother and it doesn’t add to my life. It takes away from the time I’m going to play with my kids or time that I’m going to use to write a new book or something.

SeatGeek puts all the tickets available on other sites into one place so you save time, you don’t miss a deal. You can set alerts for upcoming events and SeatGeek will let you know if tickets prices fall and even better every ticket that they have is ranked based on value so you can find underpriced seats which is cool. That saves you a lot of time if you’re going to click around on things.

Before you buy, you can use SeatGeek’s detailed maps to see the view from your seat and best of all they’re always honest and upfront about the price.

Unlike say Stubhub, they show you the full ticket price from start to finish and they don’t try to trick you of huge fees on the checkout page, which is some of these you’re getting. If you think you’re going to spend $100 on a ticket and it’s $150 when you walk out the door, what are you on an airplane or something or in a hotel? Those guys do it too.

Listeners to Bullet Proof get a $20 rebate off their first SeatGeek purchase because I like what they’re doing. To get your $20 rebate on tickets, download the free SeatGeek app, go to the settings tab and click “Add a promo code,” enter the promo code “Bullet,” you know how to spell bullet, B-u-l-l-e-t I think. SeatGeek will send you 20 bucks after you’ve made your first ticket purchase. Download the free SeatGeek app and enter the promo code “Bullet,” today.

Today’s show is one of the more fun ones because my guest/co-host here is in the show with me, Dr. Mark Atkinson and what we’re going to do today is answer questions that you’ve sent in via the blog, via social media and some of the questions are recorded live from the Bullet Proof biohacking conference.

Tons of questions come in every day and I totally appreciate it and I want to answer them all but there just isn’t time to answer all these. Even if I stop seeing my family and clystered myself here at Bullet Proof labs I still wouldn’t get to all of them, so if you’re an avid listener and I didn’t answer your question for you, join the Bullet Proof forums. You can just go to forums.bulletproofexec.com and there’s a whole community of people whose net knowledge is much greater than mine or Dr. Mark’s anyway.

If you’re not familiar with Dr. Mark he’s been on the show before but if you’re a first time listener, Mark is a British physician and really an internationally renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and he is the guy who is running the Bullet Proof coaching program on a day-to-day basis because what we wanted to when we put that program together was to have the perspective on functional medicine as a supportive pillar for the personal development, personal transformation side that happens. So it’s very different than here’s a holistic nutrition certificate.

If you have one of those, great. Come on over on the bullet proof coaching thing but we’re going to teach you actually how to be a coach and then how to coach people to have power by removing the things that make them weak wherever they are in their life and then by adding in the things to make them strong.

If you’re interested in coaching, this is a chance to get to know Dr. Mark and if not, Dr. Mark is just a cool guy in general and it’s awesome that we get to sit down here at bullet proof labs. If you watch us on YouTube you can go to bulletproofexec.com/YouTube to find our channel, it’s the easy way to do it and we’re just hanging out here on the set just to answer questions. This is one of my favorite things to do.

Mark, happy to see you again.

Mark:  Good to see you again. I love this, I love the fact that people take the time to write in with questions, to call in with questions because what it does it really makes me reflect in it because a lot of people listen to this and we’re very committed to making this as helpful as possible and we take it seriously. With this responsibility that comes with sharing information and knowledge, hopefully we can explain things in simple ways and can give people insights maybe they haven’t thought of it before. Let’s see what we can do.

Dave:  All right, this will be fun. Before we get started on questions actually, have you been working on anything for your own personal performance? Any cool biohacks, any big things you’ve figured out lately?

Mark:  A whole bunch of stuff. Maybe the biggest one for me is I’ve been learning a lot about using breath and I think this is going to be a theme for me this year.

I never fully appreciate how important it is to take charge of your breathing so twice a week I do a five-kilometer run. I live next to the ocean, I’m very privileged to be next to the ocean and I go for a run. I’ve been learning about the importance of actually synchronizing your breath as you place your foot down on the ground but focusing on breathing through your nose rather than your mouth.

Dave:  That makes a lot of difference.

Mark:  It looks like this, when I breathe I go … Every time there’s an in breath or out breath my feet get into a pattern and they basically synchronize. Here’s the deal, for ages my best time for 5,000 meters was about 28 minutes. I know what that’s good about.

I start this new style of breathing and I shed 90 seconds off my best time first time I go out there. He’s the other deal, I’m feeling all this energy while I’m running and after running as well.

What I’m starting to learn is that the way we breathe really matters. A lot of people chronically over-breathe, they mouth-breathe, they hyperventilate and you can actually train yourself to focus on breathing through your nose.

That’s really important, we’re designed to breathe through the nose. The hairs capture the particulate matter, we get nitrogen oxide from the nose as well which is a bronchodilator, vasodilator, has antimicrobial properties and you feel great.

That’s been a big breakthrough for me. Just by tweaking my breathing I can upgrade my physical performance and really enjoy running, just feeling that kind of energy in my body. That was just great and a very simple hack.

Dave:  That sounds a lot like the Tibetan breath of fire and I’ve done some meditative practices where you do the same thing where you have an in breath that’s punctuated and even some of the art of breathing is around very rapid, short things.

It’s something that’s not taught in almost any of the exercise things, even on some of the really aggressive exercise programs. They don’t talk about breath at all but it’s something where they might say take a deep breath and relax or focus but maybe it’s not always about a deep breath. It could be over-breathing, it could be under-breathing, it could be in the wrong hole, it could be at the wrong timing and the science of this has come a long way recently.

Mark:  We cover this in Bullet Proof Coach and we do the whole section on using breath. What I’m realizing is it’s really essential to everything. Anyone who practices meditational mindfulness you learn how to keep bringing attention back to your breath.

When you start to realize, “I breathe through my mouth a lot of the time,” that’s a very ineffective way of breathing or people breathe too quick or they don’t breathe into their lower belly. The bellows breathing is this amazing, energizing breath hack whereby if you’re noticing that your energy levels are low and you just want to pack yourself up pretty quickly, all you do for about 10, 15 seconds you go …

That sounds a little bit strange for people who can’t see what I’m doing.

Dave:  You space your breathing in and out through your nose very quickly through your mouth and nose.

Mark:  Very, very quickly, equal duration length of the in breath and out breath and it’s called bellows breathing because you’re literally using your diaphragm as a bellows and five, 10 seconds I’m feeling energized, more focused, more alert. This is the cool thing with biohacking, you learn how to take charge of your biology. If you show up in the state in which you’re not feeling fully energized and alert and that situation requires that of you, you can change your state and you can use your breath to so that.

Dave:  Since we’re talking about breathe, we didn’t plan to do this at all, it’s kind of fun, there’s another thing I learned. For about five years I did the art of living breathe work every morning and every Saturday I’d go, most Saturdays, I’d go with a group of very successful entrepreneurs and we 7am on Saturday morning go do this crazy breathing because it’s like making a mental shower.

There’s a breath that we learned called, I think they call it the caffeine breathe and I’m sure there’s a name in science script that I don’t know for it.

You got to see this on video, if you’re driving your car I always try and describe what I’m doing. You put your arms up above your head and then, this will make weird noise on an iPhone probably too, and then as you’re lowering your arms down, you’re driving down almost into your ribs and you breathe out through the nose like this.

You do that just a few time. If you’re fading in a meeting you can actually go into the bathroom and do three of this and it totally wakes you up.

Mark:  Shifts your state, right?

Dave:  It shifts your stay in a major way. There’s all these breathing hacks that I think were mostly studied in probably India and China. Actually the Russians are super into this stuff too if you look at Russian Systema and some of the other martial arts there’s a lot of that. It’s fascinating and I think not enough attention has been paid in the biohacking community to breathing so we’ll make it the year of breathing.

Mark:  Same for the medical community as well is we never get told about how to breathe properly and I’m realizing if you care about your energy and performance and you care about training your mind to be able to pay attention and keep focus on things that matters most to you, you have to learn how to regulate your breathing.

Dave:  When we’re done with this we should head downstairs to Bullet Proof labs.

We could breathe 100% oxygen far beyond 10 liters a minute, well under an exercise load or we could breathe no oxygen under an exercise load and see what happens there. I’m spending a lot of time lately manipulating oxygen levels in the blood with some pretty profound effects that over the course of the year I’ll be talking about. It’s a neat time to be looking at all of this.

Mark:  It’s very cool, I’m pretty convinced is the cutting edge of the biohacking birth. There may be some people who have been using breath work for a long time going, “Yes, this is obvious stuff,” but I think we’re starting to learn a lot more about it and I think for anyone listening to this, you can tread about some of the things like buteyko breathe method, you mentioned the art of living. Look it up, Google it, just read around the subject of it, practice some of the breaths.

One of the breath techniques that I teach a lot of my clients particularly those who are stressed, feeling tense, feeling a bit anxious is a relaxation breath technique called four-seven breathing. You breathe in to the count of four through your nose, out to the count of seven through your nose, a much longer out breathe.

What happens when you focus on the prolonged expiration it triggers the body’s parasympathetic nervous system which triggers the relaxation response and press here like two, three breaths, you just got this wave of calm on the inside. You can energize yourself, you can calm yourself in pretty short time. It’s pretty cool.

Should we go on to the first question?

Dave:  Let’s get our first question. This looks like it’s Buren from Bangkok.

Buren:            Hello Dave and Mark, this is Buren calling in from Bangkok Thailand. Thanks for hosting a great show. I have a question regarding fat adaptation, is fat adaptation really black and white, meaning are you either fat adapted or not and is there a danger to eat too many carbs for ketosis but too few for optimal energy levels?

Dave:  That’s two questions and adaptation is not a binary state, it’s not a zero or a 1. It’s a sliding scale. Can you relatively easily burn fat or do you almost not burn fat at all?

If you’ve been a raw vegan or a low fat vegan for a while, you’re going to really not make lipase, the thing that you require, the enzyme that you require in order to digest fat and it’s probably going to make you have an upset stomach when you eat it and you’re going to need to take Betaine HCL and take lipase until you can turn your pancreas back on to make that enzyme and your liver. That takes at least six weeks.

Certainly you can be at one end of the spectrum or the other but you’re never going to be zero fat adapted. There’s a name for that, it’s called death, if you can’t metabolize fat you’re probably going to die eventual and not that far away.

I don’t know that there’s anyone out there who only burns fat without any protean consumption turning into glucose because you probably also die from that. You’re going to be somewhere in the middle between those extremes. What do you think?

Mark:  Basically you do what works and what energizes you. For a lot of people …

Dave:  Like heroine?

Mark:  A caveat is also whatever is legal as well. I should always do that caveat.

Here’s the deal, we can run off both fat and glucose and in reality that’s what a lot of that people do.

Dave:  We all do.

Mark:  We all do and that’s normal, that’s healthy and if you want to be strictly keto-adapted you have to significantly reduce your carbohydrate intake, it has to be normally be less than about 20 grams of carbohydrate per day.

I come from the clinical world, my experience in using ketogenic diet is people with cancer and what we found is that you have to get the carb levels right down, really low, even down to 12 grams per day. You have to restrict protein intake as well as excessive protein can convert into glucose as well but the reality is that’s really hard to stick at and do. Ninety-five percent who go into ketogenic diet will not stick with it because it’s too hard.

What you do is you bring on the exsanguinate sources of ketones such as brain octane.

Dave:  It’s also a question of what level of ketones you need and this is one where it depends on what your goals are. If it’s anticancer you need to be eating these very low things. Even then there’s a question of how long should you eat that. We have a bunch of Bullet Proof people going through the Dominic D’Agostino’s conference coming up here around ketosis and he’s one of the leading cancer researchers there.

I can say I don’t think we know. Is two weeks long enough? Is six weeks and if you come out how frequently should you come out for cancer? But I believe, and this is why the Bullet Proof diet is structured as a cyclical ketogenic diet, is that if you don’t come out occasionally there’s probably a biological cost of doing that.

That said there are people who have been in ketosis on very low carb diets for years and it totally works for them. My experiment didn’t succeed there, I’ll be an Eskimo, I’m fine with that. When I tried to do it, after about two and a half months I started getting really dry eyes. I started getting really dry sinuses and my sleep quality just went away. Something was clearly not right and what ended up happening was I developed some food allergies because I couldn’t make enough mucus to make the lining of my stomach or tears or basically mucus in the sinuses.

I was deficient and I couldn’t make enough carbohydrate from protein in order to make the polysaccharides that are there and my total carbohydrate consumption was one serving of broccoli a day. I ate some meat and just tons and tons of fat. I was very religious about this and it was not a good outcome for me. I’m still just about done with those food allergies. There’s a couple I’m working on.

That won’t happen to everyone but one reason a lot of people go on low carb or extremely low carb ketogenic diets is they’re going to starve the candida which is a form of yeast. It’s little known in alternative health circles but it’s well-documented in a study, yeast can eat ketones just fine.

You’re not going to starve the yeast by going on a low carb diet. You avoid sugar which can be really helpful but for proper immune system functioning you might even need a little bit of starch, not a lot, you don’t want to overfeed the yeast and there’s a great argument for going on a zero carb diet for a while while taking antifungals and then switching back to carbs.

But I think that long term ketosis without a break is maybe appropriate in some situations but for the average person having a break from ketosis even if it’s a one-meal break so your body has some building blocks, it’s probably worthwhile.

Mark:  I’m much more realistic for the average person. Most of the time I’m on low carbohydrate diet, once a week I increase my carbs. I feel great on that and that’s what you got to do, it’s about personalizing the diet. You eat what your goals are your energy, your performance using brain octane to supplement the ketones. You only need to increase the ketone levels just a very small amount in the blood. You eventually require that kind of much.

Play around with it, one of the joys of biohacking is you’re experimenting and you experiment what works for you. What works for another human being is not necessarily good for you as well. Bring in flexibility to it, have that curiosity and experimental attitude as well.

Dave:  There’s some cool studies around the level of ketones. I used to be like, “I have to pee until the stick is purple,” on the ketone test strip. “I want a level of 2.0 or higher or it’s just not good,” 2.0 on a finger stick. But when I really dug in on this, I found that 0.5 which is technically you’re not really in ketosis but that’s an amazing limit and at 0.8 you go into officially nutritional ketosis.

But if you can raise your ketones to 0.5, two big hormones change. One of them is ghrelin which is your hunger hormone and the other one is CCK which is your satiety hormone. All of a sudden you reset your body’s hunger levels, your current body weight at 0.5 and the question is how do you get there?

The old way is eat no carbs for four days, lots of fat and you’ll get there. The new way is put brain octane in your Bullet Proof coffee and use a blood meter to see how much of it you require but it will metabolize.

I can eat 0.5, I can eat doughnuts. I don’t eat doughnuts, I haven’t had doughnuts in many years but if I did eat them or I can eat some other starch stores, it doesn’t matter, I can still hit 0.5 as long as I’m using enough brain octane. That has been a game changer for me because then I’m in control of my hunger and I’m not going to eat stuff I shouldn’t be eating or don’t want to eat.

Mark:  I think that’s the two biggest things, when you start having some extra ketones the cravings go away. If you struggle with cravings and particularly if you’re at the extreme end of food addiction, food sensitivity, carbs on your mind all the time, chocolate’s on your mind all the time, you have to use caffeine consistently to increase your energy, try adding some brain octane.

What it does is just the cravings disappear and you feel like a different person because when cravings are on, cravings are often in charge of you. They deplete your energy, they’re kryptonite. That’s the first thing cravings do but also you can get the smoother, more consistent energy as well because when people are whole day carb-dependent, that’s when they used to say when someone’s whole day carb-dependent you got to eat five times a day.

That’s true if you’re carb-dependent but if you’re not carb-dependent and you’re using healthy fats and you’ve got moderate amounts of protein and you’re adding in brain octane, you don’t need to eat five times a day. Actually you probably need to eat just probably twice a day in a compressed window period of time and you’re going to feel great on it.

Dave:  Assuming, at least in my experience especially for women in the morning, they probably want some protein and fat so they might do three times a day but they can certainly tolerate two times a day.

But intermittent fasting with nothing in the morning seems to be much harder for women, intermittent fasting, this new idea, the Bullet Proof intermittent fasting which is fundamentally different. In the morning you have Bullet Proof coffee which has calories, it has butter. It has no protein so you’re only activating your fat processing, not any of your protein or your sugar processing.

That’s just a different thing but those tend to work really well and that’s why the Bullet Proof diet sold substantially north of 100,000 copies now and it’s an ongoing thing where people are like, “Wait a minute, something big shifted for me when I started doing that,” and you’re seeing other heath people who maybe previously would have been recommending lentils and things like that for their energy density or something, they’re like, “Wait a minute, this idea of butter and coffee works,” and you’re seeing it now in lots of places because it’s so powerful.

Mark:  We’re hearing about it all the time and intermittent fasting is a great idea but in reality it’s pretty challenging because if you don’t have anything for breakfast, people’s moods go all over the place, energy crashes. That’s why having the Bullet Proof coffee with the healthy fats in the morning really stabilizes it. There’s always caveats to this, for example people with adrenal fatigue often will also need some cessments in the morning as well.

You’re going to have some protein and some healthy fats. You really got to work with your body and so we need to move away from this idea that there’s a fixed way of doing things right. There really isn’t, it’s about doing what’s right for you, having experimental attitude, doing safe things, reading around the subject, educating yourself.

But then really once you hack it, and most people do pretty early on, you’re just going to feel great. It is a game changer and it’s the foundation for mental health as well because there’s a lot of people listening to this who do not feel good.

Dave:  Right, I was like that for years.

Mark:  Likewise. I experienced depression for a whole period of time in my life, could never really understand why that was, went up to my head and so it’s a psychology thing and that’s where people tend to go, it’s a psychological issue. Actually you know what? Often it’s biological issue. It’s a blood sugar issue, it’s not enough healthy fats or quality protein issue. It’s a food allergy or sensitivity issue. It’s a mold issue.

If you do not feel good and you have mental health issues that are being labelled as depression or anxiety, throw away the label, put on your detective hat and actually say, “I’m going to start with my diet, I’m going to clean it up, I’m going to start hydrating myself,” and then see how that impacts you and you keep away from the kryptonite food, the kind of food that tweaks your sensitive or intolerance. The majority of people particularly when they come off processed foods and sugar will feel so much better.

Dave:  I think you must have read our mind here because Caroline who’s aged 32 just asked a question that you just have answered which is great. This is perfect, she says, “Do you have any good hacks for stress and anxiety? I’ve always been a stressed person and it’s starting to affect my work and relationships. Please help.”

You just nailed it there with what you said about kryptonite and if you’re having stress and anxiety there is always an energetic component to it. I don’t mean energetic like we’re meditating and imaging unicorns although there can be value in that.

What I mean is …

Mark:  I’m pleased you believe that as well.

Dave:  The rainbow-pooping unicorns are the best ones for squatty potty. If you haven’t seen that video you got to go on YouTube and look at that because it’s the funniest video I’ve ever seen. Anyway no we get out of our rainbow bathroom humor and back to stress and anxiety.

Energetic, I mean bioenergy as in fuel. If someone is experiencing stress and anxiety, there’s a really amazing things that can happen. This isn’t the only source of stress by a long shot but blood sugar goes down because you’re on stable blood sugar, body says, “There’s not enough blood sugar in the brain, survival emergency. I’m going to die. Let’s secrete some adrenaline which raises blood sugar.” It also raise cortisol which also raises blood sugar.

Now your adrenal hormones and your cortisol went up and when those go up, that now changed your thyroid hormones, so your T3 hormone goes into reverse T3 which is a bit of a problem. What ends up happening is let’s see, my blood sugar went back up and then my cortisol adrenaline is high so you end up creating a cycle where blood sugar goes up, blood sugar goes down.

When that happens you’re going to get food cravings and you’re going to feel stressed. In fact a lot of the stress and anxiety that people feel, when you learn to divorce the stress and anxiety from your body, from what’s actually going on in your mind, you’ll realize that the vast majority of the stress that you feel is coming at you right here from your chest or your gut or it’s actually physically in your body and it can be a response to a biological thing that has nothing to do with whether you’re mad at the person with you even if you treat them like crap because you don’t have enough glucose in the front of your brain.

This is my life, I used to be a total jerk and it happens and it’s when the kryptonite gets into you. The kryptonite can come from a water-damaged building. That’s why “Moldy” the documentary is out here. It can come from eating kryptonite foods or eating suspect foods that are okay for your friend but not okay for you. For me you give me bell peppers, I actually like red bell peppers but I eat those things, I feel stress and anxiety.

Download “Food Detective,” this Caroline will be good for you, “Food Detective” gets your heart rate, it’s a free app from Bullet Proof and it gets your heart rate before you eat and then you measure it after you eat. If you eat a suspect food, something you’re sensitive to, your heart rate’s going to go up in a predictable way within 90 minutes after you finish eating. I’ve had this happen, I actually notice my heart rate is really high. You can feel it and like, “What did I just eat? Yes, there was some piece of something in there that I shouldn’t have eaten,” and it actually comes to you as a stress response.

Normal people when there is a stress in the body like, “I’m going to die stressed,” that the body is telling you, you believe it and then all of a sudden your significant other is a total jerk and you wish they’d stop bothering you but it was all about the food.

What other hacks for stress and anxiety do you think about?

Mark:  A whole bunch of things. This is an area that I’m really passionate about because a lot of people suffer unnecessarily. There’s a couple of things.

First of all Caroline I invite you to stop identifying yourself as a stressed person.

Dave:  That’s not going to work.

Mark:  Yes, it’s not going to work so we want to evolve it to someone who experience stress from time to time and it changes your relationship.

There’s many causes of stress, we’ve got the biological and you then you can have like thyroid issues, you can have adrenal fatigue can drive stress, you have food intolerance and food sensitivities, allergies. All those can drive stress.

But then there’s the psychological and what you find is that a lot of people who experience stress and anxiety often believe a lot of their thinking. Please do not believe your thinking particularly if it’s unhelpful. A really good hack is that start noticing the stories that go around your head, divide them into helpful, unhelpful. If it’s helpful, it empowers you, it energizes you, makes you a better human being, be fused by it, be energized by it, use that story.

If that story is depleting you as a human being and undermining your self-worth and leads to criticism of you or others or making you feel tired, lonely, then you want to what we call diffuse from the story. There’s a number of ways you can do that, the first thing is you can just tell yourself, “Wow, my head is creating a story that I’m not a good person.” By doing that you’re creating a gap between who you are and the story as opposed to I’m not a good person.

Dave:  There’s a psycho living in most people’s heads. If you take the voice in your head and you were to put it on your mom or a friend, you’ll be like, “That’s the worst mother on the planet, that is not my friend.” What I’ve learned through lie detector tests on my head the 40 years of zen kind of work as well as just advanced meditative practices is that there’s a separate intelligence that’s in the body that its only job is to keep the body alive and it doesn’t give a rat to ask about what you want.

If that’s sitting in there going, “You’re a stressed person, ha, ha, ha. Look at that, threat, threat, that person wants your job,” or whatever negative messages are going there, you can draw a line there and you can say, “There’s basically a crazy person who’s running in my head but it’s not me. It’s something that’s there, it keeps me from getting eaten by tigers. It has a role but I don’t have to believe it.”

Then there is another voice in your head which is like the voice of goodness, you’ve got the angel in each shoulder, there’s the nice one and the devil on the other one. Well, you’re the angel one on your shoulder and the devil one, there’s voices there. You can listen to them, you cannot.

The other tweak I would make on the language here Mark is instead of I experience stress from time to time, it’s actually that my body experiences stress from time to time because when the stress comes in, it can literally be stress for a purely physiological reason. But most people will believe that it’s actually a psychological reason and sometimes it is. You may have PTSD, you may get trigged by something and that’s all good too.

The other thing we didn’t talk about is heart rate viability training, I’m a huge fan. For anyone who experiences stress, I just tell clients all the time it’s like look, get our heart rate viability training equipment. There’s two ways to do it, the inner balance sensor we curate on the Bullet Proof website.

That thing works really, really well and you hook it up to your ear, works on your iPhone.

The other things that’s a little bit more affordable but works differently is called “Stress Detective.” It’s a Bullet Proof app and then you get a heart rate monitor, you wear it all day long for a few days and it will actually give you a graph all day long to tell you when are you stresses, when you’re not stressed.

When you do that you’ll certainly get a map of your stress throughout the day but the most powerful thing I know it to sit there and just spend 15, 20 minutes feeling what it’s like when the light turns red on this little sensor, it costs liker 99 bucks or something, and then feeling what it’s like to make it go green. Pretty soon you realize, “Wait a minute, my body is experiencing stress response and I don’t like that. I’m going to take my body with one breath out of stress mode into a sympathetic mode.”

You can do that, it’s totally within your power. It’s a learned skill, you spend two years sitting on a monastery learning or you spend six weeks with a sensor on your ear. It doesn’t really matter but it’s totally within your control.

Mark:  The great thing with heart rate viability training as biofeedback training, when you get moment-by-moment feedback, it accelerates your ability to master the skill. When it comes to stress it’s a couple of levels, it’s like dealing with stress in the moment, building healthy self-care as practice. That means you’re getting enough quality of sleep, it means you’re eating the right foods, it means taking downtime for rest and relaxation, fun stuff, that kind of thing and there’s also the deeper level of dealing with the big underlying drivers of stress.

For example if you’re in the grips of addictions, if you have a history of trauma and PTSD, if you experience codependency which means that you fuse with another human being and you lose your sense of self, these are big drivers of stress, if you’re in a job or being exposed to abuse or harm. We need to be able to deal with that stress in the moment, we need to take good care of our self-care but also we need to be able to deal with the big things.

Often then you may require the help of a trained professional to support you in that, that’s often the case.

If you’re under stress, learn how to deal with your stress but also ask yourself what’s the most significant contributor here? Is there something outside of me that I need to attend to? If you’re in a relationship that is demeaning to you then you need to move out of the relationship. If you are using drugs of abuse, if you use alcohol addictively then you need to get into addiction recovery and seek help with that.

There’s so many different levels to the stress.

Dave:  If you have PTSD or if you have codependence, the odds are about 100% that you don’t know you have them. In fact you probably get pissed off if someone tells you that you have them. I only know this because I’ve had them both. I used to have codependent relationships all the time and I don’t anymore because I did my work and I was born with a cord wrapped around my neck so literally I came into the world thinking something was chocking me because it actually was.

I has no idea this had any bearing at all on my stress levels or anxiety or any of that kind of stuff but it’s a chronic background stress and it’s just like being colorblind. If it’s always been there how would you know that it wasn’t normal? For me that was normal and all of a sudden it actually took two days of focused work before someone’s like, “You have to be feeling something in your body,” I’m like, “Yes, I’m just angry,” and like, “No, there’s something else.”

In fact this is Barbra Findeisen, she’s the head of the American Pre and Perinatal Psychology Association. She’s like, “No, there must be a feeling,” I’m like, “It’s in my gut,” she goes, “Yes, there is a name for that feeling.” I’m like, “Really?” She said, “Yes, it’s fear.” “So I’m experiencing fear for no good reason right now?” I had no clue because it had always been there and I could work on it.

If you’re stressed like that and these basic things around fixing your food don’t work, go to a professional. I recommend EMDR, is the fastest way I know and psychology if you’re not going to do neural feedback to just tweak that.

Mark:  Absolutely. The final thing I want to leave you with is this idea of whenever you have a stressed mind, take your attention off your head and the story, turn your attention into the body and notice what’s happening in the body and often you’re going to find a whole bunch of tension sitting there. Breathe into it, part of mindfulness meditation practice is learning how to simply be with and allow and welcome the experience and what it does is it automates stuff.

So heart rate viability training, mindfulness training, meditation training, yoga, tai chi, find some kind of discipline practice which you come back to yourself within yourself within your body seeking professional help wherever you need and not taking unhelpful stories personally.

Dave:  If that doesn’t work you can always get a little doll of the person who is bothering you and just stab it over and over again, just kidding. Whatever that urge is you got to get on top of it and understand it.

Next one up.

Mark:  This is from Jennifer aged 39, “How can you adjust the Bullet Proof diet to work with professional cyclist for instance? Cyclists requiring that much calorie and carb intake to be able to ride the bike and race as hard as they do, the 15 to 18-hour fast doesn’t really work on a daily basis especially during the race season. Can you adjust the bullet proof diet to specifically elite level cyclist?”

Dave:  During race season or during times of high physical burden don’t do intermittent fasting, don’t do Bullet Proof intermittent fasting. I stay this to a lot of crossfitters I’m like, “Guys, I know you can get a little bit leaner that way and with Bullet Proof intermittent fasting at least you’ve got the calories but you’re taking something out of your physiological bank account when you’re pushing yourself that hard. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing endurance or just heavy training of any form without recovery.”

You’ll see this further in heart rate viability and you’ll see this in your inflammatory things, the blood markers. What you want to do is, this is going to be revolutionary, eat breakfast. What? It’s going to be a high fat moderate protein breakfast and I don’t recommend that you start out the ride with carbohydrates in the system. You don’t need to depending on how long the ride is.

What I’ve seen especially in tri athletes and all is starting out with that that carb being fat-adapted, having brain octane in the meal early on. Eat something that feels relatively light to you, collagen protein my work really well. Some vegetables may or may not work really well for you, you’re going to have to play around with that and then you can eat as much as you need to and yes you can raise your carb levels. Your carbohydrate requirements are going to be much higher during race season and it’s okay.

But because you have carbohydrates doesn’t mean you get to go have Gatorade and what that’s full of fructose and other sugar like that stuff. You want to still stick to the Bullet Proof template which is here are the suspect foods, eliminate the suspect food and what are the starches that work better? That means having some starch but not necessarily pure sugar.

However during a race, halfway during a race you want to switch over to burning sugar? I have no problem with straight glucose as long as it doesn’t make you fart all the time which you can’t.

Mark:  That’s a bit of a problem although for a pro cyclist it’s like jet propulsion so you’re okay.

Dave:  But that’s my take on it. I have not been a pro cyclist but I used to ride 20, 30 miles a day on red bike for years when I was fat. I stayed fat and my aerodynamic shutter wasn’t very good. But I had fun with it and it’s that time somewhere halfway through or a third of the way through a race depending on what you’re doing where you’re going to need to switchover to carbs. Just because you switch over to carbs you don’t have to give up having ketones, you want to be burning ketones.

Put brain octane in the water bottle, you can actually do that. You can shake it up with whatever else you put in there, there’s nothing wrong with having that and having even coffee during the race.

I don’t recommend bullet proof coffee though because the long chain fats that are in bullet proof coffee are not going to burn really efficiently. The brain octane which is one of the four kinds of MCT oils, this is not about generic MCT oil which causes a lot more gastric distress by the way, the last thing you want is disaster pants or I guess disaster shorts when you’re racing, but when you put brain octane in there it forms ketones more easily than coconut oil or MCT oil and it’s these ketones you can burn.

So in order to kick the most ass on a cycle you want to have a source of glucose halfway through the race and a consistent source of ketones so you can use both and that’s going to give you the best results.

Even if you’re eating bananas the whole race if that’s your race feel, that’s okay. Take some brain octane with them, that’s going to make a difference.

I know a few cyclists actually use the Bullet Proof collagen bars along the way, you’re going to have to test that one and see if that works for you or if it doesn’t work for you. Different people different ways but that general template, be fat-adapted, have lots of ketones in the system, burn out the glycogen you’ve got and then start refilling it at the same time you refill the fat stores with brain octane.

Anything else you’d say?

Mark:  No, you got it.

Dave:  Cool, that was easy.

Mark:  Yes that’s bang on.

Caroline Callister aged 32, “Hi Dave, just wondering if I’m breastfeeding if it is okay to drink Bullet Proof coffee. Is it also okay to take Glutathione Force and eat your chocolate?”

Dave:  This is a big question and if you’ve read the “Better Baby” book, I spent a lot of time looking at these issues and I don’t want to talk about them as much in Bullet Proof. My wife Dr. Lana has a fertility coaching practice and answers these questions all the time. Yes if you’re breastfeeding it’s okay to make bulletproof coffee. There’s just one problem, you might not want to drink it.

Here’s how to do it right. Caffeine specifically passes through breast milk and it can be simulating for a baby. Very few people who are breastfeeding are going to be happy if they drink coffee because their baby is going to not sleep as well which means you won’t sleep as well which means the coffee actually makes you tired in that case.

The simple hack is decaf but here’s the issue, when your baby is getting breast milk and around the time of pregnancy, any form of toxin affects babies far more than it does adults and decaf is well documented to be a higher toxin coffee. It’s higher in the toxins that are used to make the coffee to be decaf so there’s basically solvents that are used.

The second problem is that beans that you would never ever actually use to make good coffee, they’ll decaffeinate those because some of the flavor is removed anyway.

So I’m particularly cautious around recommending decaf during pregnancy because ochratoxin-A, the primary coffee toxin, the one that is present and even allowed to be more present per European regulations that don’t even in the US, that toxin causes mitochondrial problems. These are cellular energy problems that are going to be more important for a baby than they are for an adult. It’s important for women and babies to avoid the stuff.

So be very careful with the decaf you use. We use our Bullet Proof quality beans to do the decaf and we use a solvent-free process. There’s actually a lot more work that went into creating the decaf than there is the caffeinated coffee. Just be very careful there and it’s better to have no coffee than it is to drink moldy coffee.

If you have a few sips of someone’s coffee, it’s not going to be a problem. If you’re going to have Bullet Proof coffee every day you may see that there are issues with the milk. If you’re pumping, you’re also going to see that you may get caffeinated milk and then you get less for the baby at night. Your life is going to suck.

The other thing around Glutathione Force, absolutely. Glutathione Force is so good because you want to amplify your body’s detoxing systems. If your liver can take it out it will, if it can’t take it out it will put it into the breast milk. So having higher levels of Glutathione to help you get rid of the toxins from your diet and your body so you don’t pass on to the baby, I think that is a really good idea. Lana certainly took Glutathione the entire time she was pregnant and breastfeeding.

In terms of eating the Bullet Proof chocolate bars, they actually have some of the brain octane and MCT oil in them so you get some of that extra oil. That oil by the way is profoundly important when you’re breastfeeding. Up to 17% of breast milk can be the medium chain triglyceride, at least some of them but not all of them. This means you want to be eating butter, you want to be eating coconut oil and you want to be eating brain octane specifically to change the racial of fats in your breast milk.

If you eat the chocolate you’re going to get some of those fats, you’re going to get the amazing cacao powder. But a lot of babies are sensitive to the chocolate that the mother eats. Just test it, eat the chocolate, see how the baby does. See if there is changes in energy or rashes or anything like that.

By the way this could be true of any of the other suspect foods that are on the list where bell peppers, grains, things that you used to think you tolerated, eggs sometimes, they pass through some proteins into the milk and then it doesn’t work.

What I’d say there is you have to test the chocolate, there isn’t that much caffeine in there. I think you’ll probably be fine but also beware, if the milk is pumped after the chocolate there’s a little caffeine, there’s theobromine and that may affect the baby if you give it to the baby at night. So I’d say chocolate maybe, coffee decaf and make it Bullet Proof and Glutathione Force all the time.

Mark:  Good, just on the Glutathione footing, just to stress how important Glutathione is, it really is and you know what? There is some good evidence correlating autistic spectrum disorder with low levels of Glutathione as well.

Dave:  In the mother or in the baby?

Mark:  In the baby. That’s being correlated. We know that Glutathione is really important in deactivating toxins, reducing oxidative stress. We know that Glutathione is really important for you. It’s also really important to take in liposomal form so it’s properly absorbed.

Dave:  There is different science there, right? If you take Glutathione you can just buy it, it will digest in the stomach and you don’t get it, just a bunch of expensive amino acids that way. The first generation was to make lithosomal Glutathione which means you wrap the Glutathione in a shell of fat so it absorbs but that shell of fat only absorbs in the top like five and a half inches of the GI tract.

It sits onto your tongue and up here but it goes into the stomach and it doesn’t absorb very well. What we do with Glutathione Force is we use a lithesome and we have a patented technology that adds lactoferrin to it. It absorbs throughout the GI tract.

You get in a steady this delivery system not for Glutathione but it’s actually used exclusively in pharmaceuticals except for us. We stole that from the pharmaceutical industry instead of the other way round like it normally is. In those studies you get five to eight times better absorption of whatever the molecule is using this technology versus lithosomes. The idea is how do we get into the system?

Frankly if it’s within your means especially if you’re struggling or you’re just really tired or something like that, get intravenous Glutathione. That’s a game changer, I do that whenever I get a chance. I was in New York last week and after that long flight out there I slept three hours, was on “Squawk Box,” the CNBC show and right afterwards I saw a friend of mine, a physician nutritionist who does IVs and got Glutathione IV because it recharges you.

Mark:  It’s safe, it’s cheap, you feel the benefits pretty much straight away. One thing on the caffeine, just some interesting facts around the caffeine, from mom drinking caffeinated drink to caffeine showing up in the breast milk, just 15 minutes, it peaks at one hour. The half-life of caffeine for an adult is between two and six hours but for a new born baby it’s three to four days.

Dave:  Interesting.

Mark:  What happens is the caffeine goes into the baby and the studies that looked at it show they get up to 10% of the doze of caffeine ingested by the mother but they have such a long half-life that stays in the system for significant periods of time.

Dave:  Do you remember how long that is after birth?

Mark:  I just remember it is a new born baby.

Dave:  The first three months babies don’t even make melatonin, they have to get melatonin from their mother’s breast milk. That’s a need-hack. If you take milk that you pump at night and you give it to the baby in the morning, the baby’s going to fall asleep. But if you take morning milk which is high in cortisol and you give it to the baby at night, the baby’s going to be up all night and so are you.

It’s amazing how these systems have evolved and I know that for children but I don’t know where the cutoff is between newborn and children but it might be around three months, children metabolize caffeine twice as much as adults which is why people say, “Oh my God you give your kids Bullet Proof coffee.” When they turn on year old and they both actually actively are fighting me to get even black coffee because apparently my kids always like coffee with no sugar and no nothing but when we do a Bullet Proof they just love it, they get a little espresso cup, it’s like one or two ounces and they get it every morning.

The caffeine is negligible for their system but the fat is not and they like the taste, they like how they feel because they’re getting the brain octane and then then they go to school and they don’t need a snack although their friends are all eating snacks. They might have one, they might not but, “I have to eat,” the children’s cranky crush doesn’t happen and it’s totally liberating as a parent.

Mark:  Just one thing I thought around the caffeine, I know we shared around Bullet Proof decaffeinated is the ideal but there’s going to be a whole bunch of moms that are still going to have coffee because they’re going to feel tired.

I just want to say to you I’ve looked the literature of this and the general consent is that the 300 milligrams a day almost certainly does no harm to the baby. I want you to know if you do have your cup of coffee in the morning, it’s almost certain you’re not going to do any harm. Just monitor your baby, see what happens but you’re pretty safe as long as you keep it to one or two cups particularly early on in the morning.

Dave:  It’s also interesting Postum which is this coffee, a burned grain full of really unusual toxins, that was promoted as a counter drink against coffee back in the early 1900s, the people who did Postum came out with these huge campaigns against coffee and one of them was coffee stunts the growth of children. There’s no evidence for that, they made this up in a marketing campaign so they could sell burned grains which actually do stunt the growth of children.

I don’t think there is a safety issue, there is just a mother sanity issue and here’s the deal, if you’re going to yell at your family, you’re completely non-functional and you’re like, “You know what? A cup of coffee is what I need right now,” it doesn’t mean you’re a bad mother. It actually means that you’re human and if you decide, “I’m going to have this,” even if the baby doesn’t sleep as well,” you know what? You got everything done that you need to get done, this is the world we live in. We don’t have two hours a day to sit and meditate and Om all the time and eat perfectly.

You got to live and even the same with adrenal fatigue. If you’re drinking one cup of mold-freer coffee in the morning and you have adrenal fatigue and it gives you your life back while you’re recovering, I did. I’ve had really bad adrenal fatigue. Don’t do it all day everyday but a little bit in combination with adrenal hormone, you’re okay.

Mark:  Next question, Becky aged 29, “My husband is a lean guy. He’s six foot nine, 200 pounds. He exercises three to five times a week. We found out he has pre-diabetes. His HBA1C is 5.8,” I’ll explain what that is in a minute, “This was 11 years as his mother has type two diabetes. What would you recommend for someone who has pre-diabetes but is not overweight and is already exercising?”

I’d love to start on this if I may.

Dave:  Go for it.

Mark:  Let’s explain a bit by what pre-diabetes is. Pre-diabetes is essentially a condition in which your blood sugar levels are higher than what they should be i.e. normal but less than that which will diagnose you as being diabetic.

The reason we’re concerned about this is because a lot of people with pre-diabetes will eventually convert to diabetes so pretty much within 10 years most people pre-diabetics will become diabetic.

There’s an estimated 37 million American people have pre-diabetes the majority of which do not know that they have it. It is a symptomless kind of illness. However there’s some clues that you might be at risk of it. If you’re overweight or obese i.e. your body mass index is 25 and above unless you’re pretty muscular, then you want to get checked for pre-diabetes. How do you do that? You get a blood test, the blood test is called HBA1C which is glycated hemoglobin.

You get the blood test done, it comes back. If it’ between 5.7 and 6.4 inclusive, that provides a diagnosis of pre-diabetes, 6.5 or above is diabetes, you really want it below 5.4.

For your husband Becky, your husband had 5.8. I want to reassure you because it is a fully reversible condition and I want to be respectful when I say this, I get excited when people come to me and say, “I’ve been diagnosed with pre-diabetes” and the reason I’m excited is I’m saying, “This is great because you’ve picked this up before it’s progressed to diabetes and it is fully reversible through diet, lifestyle change, change in the way you exercise, through supplementation.”

I’ll talk a little bit about supplements then we can talk about maybe change in the way your husband exercises. You key supplements for pre-diabetes are vitamin D, alpha-lipoic acid which is an antioxidant, chromium, magnesium, Omega 3, essential fatty acids.

Dave:  Maybe some cinnamon?

Mark:  You can add cinnamon, that improves insulin sensitivity as well. There’s your core ones, any functional integrated medicine they know all about that. It’s a good idea to work with someone who is pretty skilled in this area as well. I’d encourage your husband to do that.

But let’s talk about exercise, intermittent fasting, dietary stuff as well.

Dave:  There’s two other things that will be cool, in normal studies drugs can give you about a 1% improvement in HBA1C and exercise done normally can do about a 1% improvement. Those are relatively small things. The question here from you Becky is you’re like, “He’s been exercising three to five times a week and this is happening.” I don’t know how else to put it, exercise isn’t what you do when you’re fat and exercise isn’t what you do when the energy systems in the body are broken. It’s actually how you spend energy and it’s possible for exercise to make it worse, not better.

It doesn’t always make it worse, exercise is generally good for you but water is good for you too, however you can drown. So it’s actually not okay to say exercise is good or bad, it’s the right amount of right kind of exercise at the right time is going to be beneficial and the other side of it is probably not.

What I would want to know is I’m guessing there’s a lot of cardio involved here which can affect your cortisol levels, which can also cause blood sugar swings that aren’t necessarily beneficial. We also don’t know what he’s doing in terms of diet. My guess is if he’s exercising three to five times a week he’s probably eating a lot of carbs. People who believe in the exercise paradigm as that’s what you do to get healthy, I can eat what I want, it’s not true.

A guy who was one of the inventors of blade servers, this is one of the fundamental technologies that let data centers scale in the evolution of the cloud. I guarantee you that some of the people listening right now are going through servers that are controlled by the pattern this guy made. He was a semi-pro cyclist, a friend of mine in Silicon Valley. His name is Chris and he died on Sand Hill road I believe he was 43, my age.

He was a semi-pro cyclist and he’d ride 50 miles before work, just a guy made out of steel and then he’d go have beer and pizza because that’s okay, the exercise cancels it out.

Actually Lance Armstrong tweeted when he passed away just an amazing, super energy guy. But what I’m saying there is actually exercise doesn’t cancel out diet, diet trumps exercise every single time. You got to look at three, five time a week is actually heavy exercise schedule. Maybe more intense but less frequent exercise and very specifically weight-bearing high intensity exercise.

I have a machine downstairs that is actually shown to improve HBA1C by 8.2%. Keep in mind drugs are 1%, exercise is 1% and this machine does 8%.

What does it do? It cause your bones to flex. It’s called a bio density machine and they’re usually seen at very high end doctor’s offices or something. But you do four exercises that causes bone flexion which is replicating high impact exercise. You don’t want to do high impact exercise, it’s going to wreck your joints if you do it regularly.

But essentially you can get close to this by lifting as heavy as you can with your core muscles, so squats, deadlifts, things like that. Those are going to actually stimulate a little bit of bone flexion and that changes your hormones so that your blood sugar can correct itself better. This isn’t really well understood but you can actually beat things.

Finally I would absolutely consider, I know I piss some people off with this, I’d consider Metformin, the anti-diabetes drug.

Mark:  I’m a big fan of Metformin.

Dave:  I’ve taken it for about five or six years, I’m not on it right now and I did it not because … I did have pre-diabetes when I first was like, “I got to fix this.” I believe my fasting blood sugar was around 112 or something, not so good, 117. The reason I started taking Metformin had nothing to do with that, I’d already lost the weight. It was because Metformin mimics the effects of restricting calories on your genes. If you want to live a long time Metformin is considered to be anti-aging drug.

The reason though that I’m concerned about Metformin, there’s two reasons. One is that if you Google Metformin and mitochondria, it actually inhibits mitochondrial respiration. Maybe that’s why you live longer but I actually want my mitochondria to just kick ass. That’s also an anti-aging strategy.

The second reason to think about Metformin is Metformin is shown to make permanent changes to your ability to absorb vitamin B12 from your diet. Your B12 receptors could be modified and it may be irreversible. I’ve been on it for six years but if I had pre-diabetes and it didn’t respond within three months to improved exercise, eating the Bullet Proof diet and things like that, I would then consider Metformin and it wouldn’t make me a bad person, it would me a bio hacker.

Mark:  Absolutely and I have a whole bunch of patients who … I tend to attract patients who are anti-medications and then what I do is to say, “Hold a sec, this is an open field, we got an intelligent look at what’s best for you.”

Dave:  Do what works.

Mark:  “Do what works and what is more safe,” and a lot of them I would recommend taking Metformin because of its anti-aging effects and it can reduce B12 levels so you got to supplement with Methylcobalamin as well but it’s a great hack and I’m pretty convinced that between exercising intensely and infrequently, maybe twice a week rather than three to five times a week, intermittent fasting of course, doing the Bullet Proof intermittent fast.

Dave:  That’s a huge we didn’t even get to say that one that’s a requirement at this point.

Mark:  It is absolutely essential that he experiments with that. One he’ll feel great on it but two is that it just really improves insulin sensitivity or bring down HBA1C, you’ll feel much better. One thing I want to finish on just for people listening, a lot of the people don’t know they’re pre-diabetic or even diabetic and so I just want to put out some of the symptoms to watch out for.

Dave:  Yes, let’s do that.

Mark:  There’s a couple of hallmarked symptoms that indicate you have moved beyond pre-diabetes to diabetes and they tend to be blurred vision, fatigue, thirst, increased urination. Those are the four hallmarked signs.

If you’re listening to this and anything rings true here or you’re overweight in the age over 45 or overweight under the age of 45 but you have a family history of diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol, you’re of African American origin, native American origin, if any of that is true for you, I really strongly recommend you check in with your doctor to get your HBA1C checked along with other bloods as well as Vitamin D.

Dave:  Like vitamin D, you should get those too.

Mark:  Core things like vitamin D, HACFP which is a mark of information will be good.

There’s loads like homocysteine but as a bare minimum you could be doing yourself a huge favor because if you pick this up quick, often my experience is it really motivates people to change the diet, change the way they exercise, add in some supplements. It’s fully reversible and then in a short period of time, three to six months, most people see a good reversal.

Dave:  The other thing I’d add Becky, your husband is six-nine and 200 pounds, he’s relatively thin so not all people with pre-diabetes are going to be fat at all. In fact it’s more dangerous to have fat packed in around your organs than it is to have love handle but the other thing he should really probably take up is yoga and that’s because it’s the only way he’s ever going to fit on an airplane just like me.

Let’s go to Charlie age 40.

Mark:  Charlie age 40, there’s a lot of exclamation marks in here. I was really pissed to see this question because it says, “Please help! I’ve met my kryptonite. Someone broke a CFL light bulb,” that’s a compact fluorescent light bulb, “I cleaned it up and I was exposed to mercury. I don’t know the best way to detox this? Help!!”

I’ve got a whole bunch of things to say on this.

Dave:  I do too, why don’t you start?

Mark:  There’s a couple of things, there’s a whole bunch of different light bulbs, let’s just maybe do a review around that. There is the traditional incandescent light bulbs which unfortunately are becoming a ban threat in North America, stock it now while it lasts. The ban was introduced the last couple of years.

Incandescent light bulbs work when an electrical current goes to wire filament, heats the wire filament, emits light.

Dave:  It glows consistently.

Mark:  Glows consistently and then along came high energy efficiency bulbs which this compact fluorescent bulb is. This works very differently, electrical current goes through a small tube containing argon and mercury vapor that then emits ultraviolet light which interacts with a phosphorous lining on the inside of the light bulb and then that emits light. You know you’ve got a compact fluorescent light bulb because it takes ages to warm up to light up the lights like that. The problem is it contains mercury.

Dave:  It looks curly too, a stupid, a curly bulb, you should not allow in your house those ones.

Mark:  There you go, that’s the one. Those are the compact fluorescent bulbs and then you got LED bulbs which are light-emitting diodes. With diodes you’ve got this positive-negative charge that brought together creates energy distributed as light, high, high efficiency. The problem with the compact fluorescent light bulbs is they contain mercury and insignificant light as well.

Dave:  They also make light that’s toxic to our bodies in the absence of all the other spectrums but we don’t even talk about that side of them, let’s just go into the mercury side.

Mark:  I want to talk about that side but we’ll come back.

Dave:  Not on this episode, we’ll run out of time.

Mark:  Here’s the deal, if a compact fluorescent bulb is broken it is a hazardous situation to be in and needs to be taken seriously. There’s a couple of things you need to do and I know I’m not quite answering your question yet but I just want to give the heads-up to people listening to this. The first thing is you got to get out of the room, you got to open the windows, you got to put fresh air into the room. What’s happening is the mercury vapor is being releases.

Dave:  In fact it needs to be more specific than that. I teach my kids this, if one of those bulbs breaks you run, literally you run out of the room, I’m not kidding.

You don’t take one breath because the concentration is highest right where it breaks. It’s like someone dropped a really bad nerve agent, you don’t want to breathe that. You just get the hell out. You can come back and clean it up but let it disperse so it’s diluted before you expose yourself to it.

Mark:  You got to take it that seriously particularly if you’re pregnant, young children, babies, you just grab and go and you leave to someone else to sort out. You just don’t return …

Dave:  Or if you’re nursing just don’t do it.

Mark:  You’re right. Then you’re going to go back and you’re going to clean it up and often use stiff cardboards or whatever it is and whatever you do don’t use a vacuum cleaner. I hear this a lot where people say I used the vacuum cleaner because what’s going to happen is that mercury is going to get into the vacuum and then you’re going to distribute it round the house.

So stay away from suing the vacuum cleaner.

You need to tidy using stiff cardboard, ideally you then put it into a glass container that is sealable but if you put it into a plastic bag, just realize the mercury vapor will still come off and then you should dispose of it responsibly. Depending on where you live the local authority will recycle it et cetera but it needs to be taken serious.

But there’s a whole bunch of things you need to do to protect yourself. The number one thing is to get out then the number two thing is you got to take liposomal Glutathione because liposomal Glutathione is a magnet.

Dave:  Or Glutathione Force which is better than liposomal.

Mark:  Yes, got it. That’s a magnet for mercury. That’s how you support yourself and you live.

Dave:  There’s some evidence that activated charcoal can be good for mercury and you should regulate your anti-oxidants. Vitamin C will be really, really important, alpha-lipoic acid and even high polyphenol foods, things like that can be really helpful, turmeric, things like that. Cilantro may be a good idea when you first get exposed to it, cilantro is another cleaning agent, also has been used.

The idea here is to bind these things. I’m a little concerned because Charlie here who broke the bulb doesn’t say what happened, “I’ve met my kryptonite, someone broke a bulb and I cleaned it up and I was exposed.” We don’t know what symptoms.

He’s the thing, you may clean it up and just be like, “Oh my God, I have brain fog, my joints hurt, I feel terrible.” You may also have no symptoms at all and you could just have stress and anxiety. The degree of variance here is very high.

There are studies of people who work in mercury mines, in fact mercury polluters love to use these studies. They go, “See, there’s no problems at all.”

What actually happens is that people who work in the mercury mines quit after six weeks because they’re too sick to keep working if they’re susceptible to mercury. The ones who have unusual genetics who can basically swim in mercury, they keep working there and they think everyone else is crazy. The degree of susceptibility is different.

The other thing that you mentioned that’s really important is getting rid of the broken glass. There is one case I know about, it’s anecdotal but it’s still evidence because it’s an observation is a parent had a broken CFL in their young child’s bedroom. “It’s broken,” they swapped it up, tossed it into the trash can in the bedroom and the child was exposed to the vapor that the light broke and slept with the child in the room and woke up neurologically changed. The baby ended up having autism and just profound behavioral changes from one day to the next that were almost certainly related to that.

What this means for you is get that out of your house. Don’t use those bulbs, there’s no biological reason. They’re hard on your eyes, they create oxidative stress on your cell membranes throughout your body, they’ll probably give you macular degeneration if you use them for many, many years.

They flicker at a rate that is imperceptible to you but causes stress in your body. They have no place in your house and any time they break in a room, which does happen with light bulbs regularly, they actually create an EPA toxic site. You should have people in hazmat suits come and clean it up if you believe the regulations of our own government about mercury exposure.

Why are you putting this in your house? It’s an unconscious act and it’s time to stop. What’s better, halogen and incandescent provide the most biologically compatible light. Halogen is more effective, about 30% more efficient than incandescent bulbs and from there LEDs are way more energy efficient, they’re also five times more suppressive of melatonin than even fluorescent bulbs.

So in my house I have halogen lights, the 12 bulbs regular halogen lights most of the time and I have LED bulbs outside the house but those are red LED bulbs because if you put LED bulbs outside because they’re cheap, guess what lives outside, birds and stars and you kill both of them. If you want to be killing stars as in no one can see them because of your light pollution, just put LED bulbs all over your backyard.

Otherwise dim exterior lighting, red spectrum you can see and it doesn’t affect insects, doesn’t affect birds. I’m not going to affect the bald eagles and the owls and the sea creatures that can actually see my house. At night I look like I’m a vampire but I’m biologically healthier and so is the world around me.

Mark:  A really good question, huge, important subject.

Dave:  That was a fun way to end things talking about red lights on the outside of your house, didn’t think we’d get there in today’s episode but Mark it’s always fun to do this. We’re going to do a few more of these because the feedback that I hear on this is really good and that people just like to ask questions.

If you like this, head on over to Facebook, head on over to pour forums and ask a question. We’ve got full instructions there on how you can actually leave us a question with voice mail as well which is cool so we can play the question out loud.

However you do it though, ask the good stuff and if lots of people are interested I’ll go there or Mark will go there and we’ll answer it.

Thanks for listening. Check this out on iTunes. Just head on over and leave a review. It’s one of the biggest thing you can do. Something else that you can do that might be fun is not very long ago I just finally joined Instagram personally. We have the Bullet Proof account on Instagram where you’ll see all kinds of cool stuff that’s related to Bullet Proof and on the Dave.Asprey Instagram accounting I’m posting all sorts of crazy pictures of stuff that I’m doing that probably won’t make it to the level of Bullet Proof but it’s still a lot of fun.

That’s Dave.Asprey on Instagram, have an awesome day and we’ll see you soon.

Mark:  Bye-bye.