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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ and alert and begin what is called exploratory activity. Of course exploratory activity is more pleasant than desperately wanting to hit the snooze button in the morning.

      This makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective. Just a couple hundred years ago, our ancestors fasted all night and then had to hunt for food in the morning. Their brains and muscles had to work really well in that hungry state in order to successfully find food, and ketones were the answer. This is why we are programmed to build up ketones during the last couple of hours of our fasting period. Those ketones give our brains, muscles, and hearts more energy so we can hunt—exactly what Satchin has seen in his lab rats. An hour or two before they were fed in the morning, they got up and started looking around, exploring, and getting ready to hunt.

      The problem is that most people don’t fast long enough to take full advantage of this biological phenomenon. According to Satchin, there are tremendous health benefits to extending our daily (or nightly) fast. He says that when people limit their eating window to ten hours and make no other dietary changes, they see reductions in inflammation levels, triglyceride levels, and cancer risk, along with improvements in sleep within weeks. Is this because of the natural boost in ketones or because intermittent fasting boosts autophagy—or both?

      But remember, you do better when you practice ketosis intermittently. Staying in ketosis for long periods of time compromises your metabolic flexibility—your body’s ability to burn either glucose or ketones for fuel. Maintaining metabolic flexibility is incredibly important for your longevity. There are two states your body must be able to handle effortlessly. The first is periods with ketones and no carbs, and the second is periods with carbs and no ketones. To gain metabolic flexibility, the best thing you can do is cycle in and out of ketosis every week. To do this, you limit carbohydrate intake most days, and on one to two days per week you eat low-sugar carbs. While this works for die-hard biohackers, most people enjoy eating more carbs. With the power of technology, it is possible to have both ketones and carbohydrates present in your body at the same time, which can also generate metabolic flexibility. To do this, eat moderate low-sugar carbohydrates like white rice or sweet potatoes, and at the same time consume lots of energy fats. That way, you’ll have some ketones present for your neurons and some glucose present for your brain’s maintenance cells. Most people find this more sustainable than a pure cyclical ketogenic diet, but both work.

      There is no doubt that strategies like ketosis, intermittent fasting, and the maintenance of a healthy circadian rhythm play a critical role in our longevity. This leads to the next essential step on our quest to become Super Human—and that is getting enough highly efficient, good quality sleep.

      Bottom Line

      Want to not die? Do these things right now:

      • Avoid all conventionally grown grains, produce, and animal products. Even better, skip grains altogether and opt for tons of organic vegetables, limited organic fruit, and meat from pastured animals.

      • Don’t eat fried stuff. Ever.

      • Eat enough protein (from pastured animals, eggs, wild fish, or nonallergenic plants) for tissue repair and an additional 20 plus grams of grass-fed collagen, and don’t fry, char, blacken, or barbecue meat (sorry). For lean people, that’s 0.5 grams per pound of body weight. For obese people, that’s about 0.35 grams per pound of body weight. For pregnant women, elderly folks, or athletes, it’s 0.6 grams per pound.

      • No matter how much fat or how little fat you eat, eat the right ratios. Lean people eat about 50 percent saturated, 25 percent monounsaturated, and 15 to 20 percent undamaged omega-6 and 5 to 10 percent omega-3, including EPA and DHA. If you are fat like I used to be and want to live like a Super Human, eat 50 to 70 percent saturated, 25 to 30 percent monounsaturated, and only 10 percent undamaged omega-3 and omega-6, with added EPA and DHA so that you eat more omega-3 than omega-6.

      • On some days, limit your eating window to eight to ten hours a day based on what works best for your schedule. Good options are 12:00 P.M.–8:00 P.M., 9:00 A.M.–5:00 P.M., or 10:00 A.M.–7:00 P.M. Have breakfast sometimes, especially if you’re tired or stressed. Don’t eat after dark.

      • Teach your metabolism to be flexible by having ketones present in your system every week. Practice a cyclical ketogenic diet by fasting, avoiding carbohydrates for a few days, or adding “energy fats” to your food (or coffee) that convert directly to ketones.

       4

       SLEEP OR DIE

      Sleeping feels good, but ever since I was a kid, there was always something more fascinating and productive I’d rather do than go to bed. I resented having to dedicate so many hours each day to something I saw as basically a waste of time. So for most of my life I skimped on sleep. Even the first two years after founding Bulletproof, I slept for about four hours a night, at most a self-imposed five hours. I used the extra three hours a day to be a father, start Bulletproof, and still pay the bills with my day job.

      My sleep deficit almost certainly contributed to the diseases of aging I faced as a young man. It turns out that lack of quality sleep doesn’t just leave you tired and unable to perform in the moment; it also rapidly accelerates aging. The good news is that you can learn to be a Super Human sleeper and cram more high quality sleep into fewer hours and still get all the benefits. For the past five years, I have been getting progressively healthier, leaner, and younger on six hours and five minutes of sleep a night, but I use every technique in this chapter to sleep like a professional.

      Perhaps you will choose to get more sleep than I do. Regardless of how many hours you sleep, the information in this chapter is intended to help you make the most of the sleep you do get. It doesn’t matter how old you are, how busy you are, or how much money you have. Sleep is the ultimate tool to sharpen every skill and add more quality years to your life. So get better at it.

      HOW LACK OF SLEEP WILL KILL YOU

      Like it or not, a lack of good sleep directly increases your risk of dying from one of the Four Killers. Meanwhile, just one good night of sleep can improve your ability to learn new motor skills by 20 percent,¹ and getting regular quality sleep increases your ability to gain new insight into complex problems by 50 percent.² This improved brain function could potentially help ward off cognitive decline with age and is befitting of a true Super Human. Good quality sleep also promotes skin health and youthful appearance,³ controls optimal insulin secretion⁴ (making you less likely to develop diabetes), and encourages healthy cell division.⁵ Sleep is an essential strategy in protecting against all Seven Pillars of Aging.

      In the previous chapter we discussed Satchin Panda’s research on longevity and circadian rhythms. As part of my research for this book I went to his lab and had a great time with his PhD students looking at how the combination of food, light, and too little sleep affected rats. They walked me through new research showing that eating late at night dramatically reduced the quality of the rats’ sleep and that poor sleep impacted the rats’ ability to control blood sugar by up to 50 percent. That’s huge! In fact, it’s more than what most medications can do.

      In rats and humans, the pancreas is responsible for making insulin. Satchin has studied insulin-producing cells in the pancreas and found that they, too, have their own circadian rhythm. At night when melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate wake and sleep cycles, is released, insulin-producing cells shut down, too. So if you eat something sugary late at night, your body’s insulin response is not as effective as usual. So that late-night piece of cake leads to a blood sugar spike and then a crash that triggers the release of adrenaline … which keeps you awake СКАЧАТЬ