Super Human. Dave Asprey

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СКАЧАТЬ cuts that make you weaker in the short term and hasten your decline in the long term. Staying alive requires avoiding as many of those cuts as possible, but they are all around you—in your food, your air, your light sources, and throughout your environment. You may not associate these cuts with your likelihood of aging prematurely or of developing a degenerative disease, but like every other aspect of your biology, they are all connected. The cuts lead to aging, aging leads to disease, and disease leads to death.

      If you’re in your twenties or thirties, you may think you’re in the clear—that these cumulative cuts aren’t affecting you yet. But the cuts from bad choices or a toxic environment begin to add up from an early age—and they’re hurting you even if you’re not currently feeling their effects (such as weight gain, brain fog, muffin top, and fatigue). And it’s a lot easier to avoid damage to your mitochondria than it is to reverse it later.

      Your mitochondria are responsible for extracting energy from the food you eat, and then combining it with oxygen to produce a chemical called adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which stores the energy your cells need to function. When your mitochondria conduct this process efficiently, they produce lots of energy so you can perform at your greatest potential—like a young person. But if your mitochondria become damaged or dysfunctional as you age, they begin producing an excess of free radicals in the process, which leak into the surrounding cells and lay the groundwork for the Four Killers. Congratulations, you are now old.

      Even young, efficient mitochondria produce some free radicals as by-products of creating ATP, but they also make antioxidants, compounds that inhibit the damaging effects of free radicals. This is why products containing antioxidants have “anti-aging” properties. While popping antioxidant supplements and using skin-care products containing antioxidant-rich ingredients are worthwhile interventions, they are, frankly, the low-hanging fruit of our Super Human tree. For you to truly remain young, those antioxidants have to be produced by your body—your mitochondria must create at least as many of them as it does free radicals. When your mitochondria become inefficient, they make an excess of free radicals and fewer antioxidants. And you can’t slather enough serums onto your skin to fully counteract the damage created by this imbalance.

      Your mitochondria are also in charge of triggering cellular apoptosis, programmed cell death that occurs when a cell is old and/or dysfunctional. If your mitochondria are sluggish, they may not trigger apoptosis at the right times, which can result in healthy cells dying off before they should or dysfunctional cells sticking around past their prime and aging you before your time.

      When you’re still young and exploding with mitochondrial energy, you can take some of these hits. You can eat garbage, drink too much cheap beer, forgo sleep, and still function pretty well because you’re producing lots of antioxidants and energy. As you get older, you start to see that you can’t stay out all night drinking and still really bring it at work the next day. By the time you wake up to this new reality, you’ve already taken a lot of hits that will age you in the long run. But you’re likely to keep running at the edge of what you can perceive, so the damage stacks up without you even knowing it.

      Well, what if you made better choices throughout your life so you took fewer hits over the course of decades? Then when you got to the age of seventy you might look and feel more like fifty because you simply suffered less damage. You’re never going to be able to avoid all the cuts—again, simply breathing creates some amount of wear and tear over time. It’s a matter of preventing as much damage as possible, which happens to dovetail nicely with the first rule of biohacking: Remove the things that make you weak. This is in and of itself a powerful anti-aging strategy.

      When your mitochondria start to slow down and create an excess of free radicals, the result is widespread chronic inflammation throughout your body. Inflammation is such a hot topic in the field of longevity that you probably already know how closely it’s linked to aging. When I was sick and old as a young man, I knew I was inflamed, but I had no clue this stemmed from mitochondrial dysfunction, nor did I know that inflammation was more than a painful annoyance. I had no idea that inflammation creates the ideal circumstances for each of the Four Killers to thrive.

      HEART DISEASE

      A condition known as atherosclerosis, hardening of the arteries, is the first obvious clinical sign that heart disease has started. But what causes this? A thin layer of cells called the endothelium lines your arteries. When the endothelium is damaged, fats can cross into the arterial wall and form plaques. This is bad enough, but when your immune system picks up on the fact that this is happening, it creates chemical messengers called inflammatory cytokines to attract white blood cells to those plaques. This is an inflammatory immune response. When those plaques rupture because they are so inflamed, blood clots form, and these clots are the real cause of most heart attacks and strokes.

      While some doctors are hesitant to definitively state that inflammation causes heart disease, it’s hard to refute the evidence that inflammation is a big step in the disease’s process, and most functional medicine practitioners now identify inflammation as a bigger health risk than cholesterol levels. In a landmark study conducted by researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital that followed ten thousand participants for twenty-five years, the data revealed that participants who reduced their inflammation levels also significantly lowered their risk of cardiovascular disease and the need for heart surgery without any other medical interventions.⁵

      A new study out of the University of Colorado at Boulder shows that your gut bacteria actually play a role in the inflammation behind atherosclerosis.⁶ As animals (and likely humans) age, changes to gut bacteria harm the vascular system and make arteries stiffer. That stiffening came from inflammation. The gut bacteria of older mice actually produced three times the normal amount of an inflammatory compound called trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO). When researchers used antibiotics to knock out the old mice’s gut bacteria, their vascular systems magically returned to those of young mice. The researchers concluded, “The fountain of youth may actually lie in the gut.” After following the lifestyle recommendations in this book, I am happy to report that my last test showed that I had zero species of gut bacteria that produce this harmful compound!

      Even more mind-blowing, a 2017 study out of the University of Connecticut in Storrs revealed that the fat molecules that form plaques in your arteries come not from the fat in the food you eat, but directly from bad gut bacteria.⁷ This turns everything that conventional doctors tell us about dietary cholesterol on its head and means you have permission to laugh when people repeat the myth that a “plant-based” diet is better because it doesn’t contain saturated fats like butter that will somehow “stick to” your arteries. It also shows the importance of healthy gut bacteria and mitochondria for a long and energetic life. (More on this in chapter 11.)

      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 СКАЧАТЬ