there's a nutrient that is currently used and shown to kill cancer cells it's uh endorsed by the United Nations as the answer to World of hunger because the highest protein it's endorsed by nasau as being the most nutrient-dense food in the world a thousand times more than any other fruit and vegetable I have never found anybody who doesn't enjoy the benefits of this CU it gets absorbed so quickly it determines everything uh about your longevity and your livelihood there's 25,000 studies proving that it stops heart disease Alzheimer's inflammation 25,000 studies you can't argue with that you're listening to the human upgrade with Dave asre today we're going to talk about the most annoying topic ever superfoods why do I say they're annoying because every company out there it seems like will find some weird Amazonian food that has one benefit and is full of toxins from plants that mess you up things like spinach or kale or even almonds are examples of this where they're not really superfoods and you can ignore all the negative aspects and you can just pay attention to one good thing and then you can get people to eat quinoa and not tell them they have to prepare it properly and all these things so I like to say coffee is a superfood because it has tons of evidence behind it and there's something else that I've been talking about since the very start of the biohacking movement and that is specific algae that have the ability to say pull toxins out of the body and there's an old story that I shared from back in my days when I was doing a lot of advanced yoga I would eat sushi and then I try to do a one-legged pose with my eyes closed and if you ever tried to do that you typically fall over and I could do this but I could not do it on the days after I ate sushi and it's because the Mercury from the sushi was affecting my balance and it's subtle but it's measurable so I don't want to give up Sushi because I like sushi so what do I do about it so I went for this little algae called chlorella and chlorella binds directly to Mercury so I would do that and my balance was improved with my eyes closed on one leg today our guest is Katherine arston who is founder and chief science officer of energy beds and a recently minted PhD which is awesome thank you and we're going to go deep on spirulina and chlorella because these are actually superfoods in that they don't have a strong downside and they have a very big upside and there's a bunch of new research on these specifically around mitochondria that makes it worth your attention so you're going to learn what are these things if you've never heard of them and when and how should you use them to improve your performance to affect longevity to affect energy in cell and Catherine's very knowledgeable on mitochondria and energy production in the body it'll be an interesting and fun conversation really about where she's focused her life's work in the last what 10 or so years 15 15 years all right why why why Al well I tell people I didn't discover algae it discovered me and and um I'm actually Canadian I've lived in Boston for 35 years but I mentioned the Canada piece because I had a corporate job like many of including yourself earlier on um and then so I was quite content with my career and then out of the blue my younger sister who I'm very close to in Canada develop breast cancer and her oncologist which is a cancer specialist told her to change her diet to an alkaline diet because it would be helpful with her healing she was going through chemo they didn't tell her what it was or what it was good for her she called me her big sister who loves her good researcher even then and I discovered that an alcaline diet was a plant-based diet because of the chlorophyll and the phytonutrients and blah blah blah so I helped her learn about plant-based nutrition which Levy to algae the most alkaline nutrient-dense food in the world also there was a German scientist back in the' 40s by the name of Auto warberg oh yeah who discovered that cancer cannot exist in cells that are slightly alkaline so I think that was the other reason why her oncologist wanted her to have an alkaline diet so so anyways I just learned about algae and discovered that because it has so many nutrients in it it's uh indorsed by the United Nations as the answer to World of hunger because the highest protein it's endorsed by nasau as being the most nutrient-dense food in the world a thousand times more than any other fruit and vegetable what about liver is it more nutrient-dense than liver has a which nutrients I guess I I actually stand corrected because their reference was fruits or vegetables which of course liver is not got it okay um but also it's been used safely in Daily in Asia for over 60 years where it is a multi-billion dollar agricultural crop so it had all these healing properties we're going to talk about some of them the mitochondria Health the reduced inflammation improved uh ATP production brain health uh but all these benefits have not been explained here in North America because it's not grown here people here don't know they know it's a superfood they know it's got protein and chlorophyll but they have no idea of the deep science behind what it does for mitochondrial health and you and I and all your community know mitochondria where the rubber hits the road it determines everything about your longevity and your Lively Ood and your ability to not have chronic disease or uh accelerate aging so I've been doing a deep di for 15 years um on mitochondria health and why the nutrients in algae particularly spirulina um are documented to um facilitate better mitochondria health and there's two in particular but we'll talk about a number of them but one is an um antioxidant called superoxide dismutase also known as sod and the other one is a blue pigment you spiruline is a blue pigment a blue green algae called ficoin super oxid dismas there's 25,000 studies proving that it stops heart disease Alzheimer's inflammation 25,000 studies you can't argue with that and same with ficoin they use it now to kill cancer cells they use it now so there's a couple things we need to chat about in the conversation yeah first one alkaline diets isn't that like 1970s stuff can I just take some baking soda you could I guess yes yeah but it's more the whole idea is that when your cells because this range goes from 0 to 14 and so anything not inside cells right your cells can't go from 0 to 14 but that is the range of alkalinity oh of course and your cells would never be 14 or zero or you would basically be dead but as long as uh your cells are your cells are slightly alkaline so 7.1 that indicates that there's oxygen in the cell that the mitochondria are functioning the cells are communica and so this is one of the reasons that helps prevent cancer cells from growing or frankly any cells how would we know if our cells were alkaline or not that's a good question well there are tests that you can do but there's there it's you know Ur consumers don't have access to those we can test our urine and saliva or sweat but they're not good indicators of the cell pH I'm not an expert on on alkalinity I I just know that's what got me started in my research and I didn't stay in alkaline research it was just a milestone to get me I am now so got it so for listeners I also went down the acid alkaline thing for a long period of time is one of the reasons I even tried a disastrous 18 months of becoming a vegan then a raw vegan and the reality is that your body regulates your blood alkalinity very very carefully because you die if it's off a little bit correct and it's called breathing that does that it's carbon dioxide is how you do it so people will say well this food which is acidic like lemon or lime oh but eventually it becomes alkaline in the cell and it's true citric acid does that and so do a lot of the fruit acids like those you find in coffee and many other things so I find so much nonsense online about acid and alkaline or drinking alkaline water which turns off stomach acid um but there's also evidence that says taking a quarter to half a teaspoon of baking soda which is very highly alkaline away from meals extends lifespan in mammals by about 10% yeah so clearly having an alkaline buffer is important so that your cells can have a slightly alkaline thing and the type of food you eat is an influencer yeah the reason that I'm really interested in algae and with the work you're doing has more to do with s so yes you mentioned that a little while ago when your cells make energy this Ox redox reaction inside your mitochondria they also make free radicals correct the role of sod is to clean up those free radicals so they don't cause damage right so what is does algae do for sod well spirulina algae at least ours has the highest concentration of sod in the world and we have lab tests that that that prove that so the there's so much research and you're right about the sod the reason why s so superoxides is so important is because as you mentioned it it uh neutralizes free radicals the most damaging free radical is called super oxide and I I was curious that well what makes it so damaging is because it has three unpaired electrons most free radicals have one so super oxide which is predominantly produced I think only produced in the mitochondria is extraordinarily damaging so when you have this antioxidant called suboxide dismutase that neutralizes it better than anything else it has a great impact but the problem is well here's the good news your body makes super oxid dismutase from the moment you're born but just like a lot as like a lot of things like melatonin hormone B your body slows down the production of super oxidises after you hit 30 and by the time you're 40 there's virtually zero so up until then your mitochondria DNA which are inside the mitochondria themselves have been protected from these free radicals thanks to your body generating super oxid dismutase but after 40 the way I describe it think of super oxid dismutase like a big golf umbrella a byproduct of ATP is free radicals you can't stop it but if you have the super oxy dismutase it behaves like a large umbrella basically protecting you because if you've had one of those big golf umbrellas you're middle of a rainstorm you're good to go so while you're up to 30 you're protected from these free radicals once you hit 40 there's fewer of the superoxides being produced so that big golf umbrella is now about the size of a totes umbrella and then by the time you hit 40 it's like a cocktail umbrella no more protection and the problem is you can't find it in in therapeutic amounts in food and there are a few sod supplements but they have found that they get damaged in the stomach gut lining now spirulina is a bacteria it's a cob bacteria and why is that important with when the conversation of sod because as a bacteria it has no cidus wall so there's nothing for your body to break down to get access to it if you Che it like I do although most people do swallow it it's absorbed into your bloodstream instantly swall following takes about maybe 5 or 10 minutes so all the nutrients including the 40 vitamins and minerals but particularly the super oxidises gets into the bloodstream and gets directed to the mitochondria so where it can do amazing things is the sod directly present in spirina or is it causing my body to make more no it's directly present but here's the catch super oxid dismutase which is an antioxidant is also an enzyme and so what happens with the other LG companies that are lower price and lower quality they need to get to Market quickly so they've been always using high heat to dry their algae so they can cut corners and get to Market quickly we have never used high heat and I have scientific paper that shows that the functionality of superoxides is is completely reversed damaged unfunctional after the temperature of 114 degrees all right th this is worth mentioning a lot of people don't have a good picture of what an enzyme does we all heard about enzymes so in normal physical chemistry what happens is you mix two chemicals together it takes a certain amount of heat for that reaction to happen when you have an enzyme present it takes far less energy for the same reaction to happen because it makes the reaction happen more easily that's why life exists it's why biochemistry is different than regular chemistry and I'm saying this because my grandfather actually wrote Under The General chemistry heading for encyclopedia britanica so kind of comes from my family and the difference in the Two Worlds is because enzymes and enzymes are notoriously sensitive to heat yes they don't work if your body is two degrees too high or too low and they're damaged permanently at temperatures that are not very high 114 degrees so what you're doing is you're drying your spirulina at low temperatures so that the enzyme activity is present and since sod is the primary enzyme yes okay that makes sense yes and actually there's places like um Healing Centers like The hypocrates Institute and the Gerson hypocrates has been around for 50 50 years and they have a remarkable success older than that I thought hypocrates like just kidding uh and a Wigmore started the hypog S but yes yes he's the you know f um but they um they have a huge success rates with people who are very sick say three and four cancer and one of the first and things they do is give them raw spirulina why because the superoxide dismy Tas has not been damaged by high heat um we hope to be working with them because once the patients leave it's hard for them to continue taking raw spirulina so because ours is raw we're hoping to be able to work with them but yeah this is a very very critical antioxidant and when you see that there are 25,000 studies that have proven the the validity of superoxides to protect against chronic disease heart disease Alzheimers protect telr but nobody knows that you can find it in spirulina if it's raw is there an issue with getting too much sod uh I don't I can't imagine that ever happening because what happens in the mitochondria as you know is it's a very tightly controlled and the electron transporting is where the actual cellid energy is generated and so it's very tightly controlled through calcium and there's a molecule I want to talk about called cytochrom c um and so um this is why what happens when people start to um they they're eating the wrong food they're not um they're they're aging they're not having the protection the mitochondria there's so many free radicals it gets out of control you always want some free radicals because the Ros keeps the balance of the Redux so uh but it I've never ever heard or read about there ever being too much um subarid dism so everyone's in deficit oh yes 99.99% of people are in deficit except me a fair point and and it's because there's lots of studies that show you take excessive amounts of antioxidants you don't get the benefit of oxidative molecules uh so there was a time when I had high levels of toxic mold I was fat my brain wasn't working and I was taking like fistfuls of vitamin C way too much vitamin E like every antioxidant I could find and then I started taking a stupidly high dose of sod right and that combination of all that together definitely suppressed the ox redox this is how you make just because if you have no free radicals present you can't have oxidation so I don't think you could get there from spirulina but I would just say some people who listen to the show will just go all in on something so don't go all in on antioxidants and is spirulina very well documented to have all sorts of health effects yes is sod behind it yes if you have an inflammatory condition or you have cancer or any of these things that produce extra super oxide which is most inflammatory things you're going to need a source of sod right the other thing I want to be sure people understand is all antioxidants are not created equal particularly when it comes to mitochondria and I'm sure you're aware too there was a lot of research done about 10 years ago looking at predominantly vitamin E and vitamin C and to see if it would help with longevity issues or recovery from Fitness and they got zero benefits zero and here's why the mitochondria are the only cell in your body organel in your body have two membranes it has a lipid membrane around the outside like all your other cells but has the second inner membrane which is impenetrable by most antioxidants vitamin C can't get in there vitamin E can't get in there and so the ones that can get in there that have these amazing antioxidant capabilities include super oxide dismutase glutathione and chlorophyll and algae spiruline algae has the highest concentration of all three so and and by the way the reason why the MIT Andria have that second inner membrane and the reason why things can't get in there is because normally your cells have something called porin which are little channels that allow proteins and enzymes and other things in and out no porins in the inner membrane of the mitochondria and why is this because algae a cob bacteria like spirulina was the first life on earth almost four billion years ago and then after in a released oxygen while it was growing and after a billion years there was more oxygen on Earth so larger cells could grow but but they were generating ATP very well so the large cell basically absorbed the small cell which was the Sino bacteria and it became your mitochondria so it's all documented in something called endosymbiotic Theory it was discovered by an MIT Professor uh back in the 60s she was ridiculed by her colleagues for 10 years until they realized she was right um and uh so anyways she was very right and in the world of biohacking uh I teach now that the ancient bacteria mitochondri yeah that they're actually still controlling a huge number of your behaviors invis oh absolutely well because they're the highest amount so you you have mitochondria in all of your cells except for blood cells except for blood cells correct um but uh your brain the highest number of them are where your greatest energy needs are and your your brain has the most there's 2 million mitochondria per cell the next highest is women's eggs there's about 700,000 per cell after that it's your Hearts which is about 7,000 per cell and then muscles so the first thing that improves in the brain cells did you what was the two million mitochondria per cell oh per cell in your brain that is a much higher number and and when I wrote my brain mitochondria book I found 15,000 in heart and brain cells and a similar number in ovaries 8,000 in no no it's I can I can find you the the research I'm curious I always always like learning new things yeah so Chris Palmer a psychiatrist at the Harvard Business School wrote a book two years ago called um brain energy and in the book he documents how all brain issues anxiety post-traumatic stress disorder doesn't matter what it is ultimately are due to damaged mitochondria Y and he's absolutely right and so one this is why I love the spirulina in particular so much because and I do want to talk about some of the other nutrients in it it facilitates your mitochondri to start functioning better it stops stop the um the damage and it allows it to um re uh to regrow through fusion um and so it's amazing the first thing that improves when you improve your mitochondria is your brain functionality it's funny I wrote headstrong which is my big brain in mitochondria book and like if you want your brain to work better there's two things you have to do first upregulate mitochondrial function more energy you're going to feel in the brain first and number two is increased neuroplasticity via bdnf which is controlled by mitochondria as well right right the mitochondria control hormones they so there's with women who are going through per menopause or menopause there's so much new research coming out about how the mitochondria and diabetes there's so many um uh connections to the mitochondria because they drive the the hormonal um the creation of hormones and as you get older that's another thing that drops as you get older especially both for men and women so I tell people compare your body to a building and in a a building you have cells or a building you have offices and that's where the work is done and in your body the cells are where the work is done now in the building the thing that allows you to do the work are the lights now in your body the thing that allows you work to be done in your cells are the mitochondria now in the building when the cells go or the lights go out you just pick up the phone you call maintenance they come and replace it easy peasy in your body that's not happening well what could be the maintenance people would be the Super oxid dismutates but after 40 they they all just they strike and they leave they never come back so and it gets even worse because in the building the lights are powered by electricity in your body the lights are not just the mitochondria they are powered by the mitochondria so I tell people we got to get your lights back on because as you get older your lights go out which diminishes your ability to generate cellular energy which diminishes the ability of your body to to prevent any kind of chronic disease accelerated aging you you don't sleep well you don't digest well you don't think well weight gain everything everything everything is due to mitochondria damage uh we are aligned on that we'll say the whole biohacking movement is very mitochondria Centric you talk about FICO cyanin what is that well I'm going to spell it for people because I'm sure most of you have never heard of it and I want people to really know about it because it's a very powerful nutrient in spiruline as well and it's called it's a phy c c y o n i n FICO science in so what is it well it's a pigment um and it's only found in spirulina it's not found in any other food source or anywhere else in the world what is so special about ficoin it's proven to kill cancer cells proven so you can Google ficoin and Cancer Treatments and you'll see the same research that I have I have found so what does ficoin do and how is it working to kill these cancer cells I talk about spirulina um as being intelligent food for two reasons first of all you need to be intelligent to take it and number two it knows what to do in your body and I'm going to explain this right now one of these nutrients ficoin is the gatekeeper of determining whether you have energy and life or whether you kill a cell and what it does is it triggers a little helper molecule in the electron transport chain called the cytochrome C molecule it's a little helper molecule that moves between the molecules between three and four in the um in the electron transport chain and if you're not familiar with the electron transport chain I tell people it's sort of like a relay race you've seen a relay race you have a runner who has a baton and they run a distance to pass the Baton to the next Runner who then runs a distance and then they hope to win and cross the finish line in your electron transport chain instead of Runners you have molecules and instead of a baton you have electrons so the goal instead of we're crossing the finish line is to generate ATP now the good thing is there's two helper molecules one's called coq1 and one is called cyome C and I'm going to talk about cyome C in a healthy cell this blue pigment called ficoin speeds up that that helper cell so that more energy more ATP can be generated that's one of the many reasons why spirulina gives you energy because it's speeding up this little hydrochrome C molecule so you generate you cross the finish line faster however this is the cool part if you have a ccent cell or a cancer cell the ficoin detects that and instead of moving the cytochrom C molecule along it ejects it which triggers something called CAP ases which kills the cell in the in the chemotherapy industry they are using cytochrom C they're measuring it they're using fosy in their treatments and they determine if the it if the treatment is working by how much cytochrome C molecules are in the plasma raise your hand if you'd like chemotherapy yeah yeah right I didn't think so Mother Nature has given us our own capability of killing cancer cells because you know we have cancer cells in us at all times whether or not they spread is determined by the health of your mitochondria the health of your immune system and many other factors but you need to keep them under control and if and if I think ficoin is the answer and I just to be careful because I don't want the f da to shut me down I'm not saying that algae kills cancer cells I'm just saying that the science has shown there's a nutrient in spirulina called ficoin that has been C is currently used and shown to kill cancer cells okay if you look at the mitochondria as making well it makes heat electricity a bunch of mitochondrial stuff that it needs actually doesn't make glutathion it makes energy to make glutathion that it takes back into itself but once it makes the R it has to do something with them and it needs an intact transport chain correct and so it's like produce and then get it where it needs to go uh for each electron and that part especially in chronic fatigue long covid and I did have chronic fatigue from toxic mold exposure it messes you up you're just really really tired and listeners who are big fans might have picked up something this is a blue green pigment it is there another blue dye that people have been talking about for mitochondrial function called methylene blue I don't know if it has the same impact on cytochrome C ionly don't it doesn't have the exact same but it has a very similar one what you'll find when you're using uh spirulina is that spirulina is helping the normal setrum C Pathways work methylene blue which is not a a natural molecule but something that can be helpful for mitochondrial function it overrides some of the body's natural ways of routing electrons which is good if you have broken electron transport and maybe not good if you have if you have it working or a more natural molecule that your body is designed to use like spirulina with ficoin uh is probably going to be a better one I'm sorry you're saying that methylene blue would be better than F no say would would be better because yeah uh spine is going to allow your body to choose how electrons are transported and what methylene blue does is it overrides that yeah and I think there's room for both to be perfectly honest but so this isn't like you know one is better than the other just that they're both just do different things yeah they do different things in a similar part of the body yeah uh and I I use both at different times right so there's nothing wrong with that yeah but the most interesting thing if you get into the nerdy bits is you should have a product called nerdy bits what be funny that was nauy yeah that would s that's another that's another podcast that's very long time ago I'm sure you have naughty pits now oh no not me Heavens no there's there's crazy behavior inside the cells in the body so when the body senses free ATP which means a mitochondria somewhere blew up and spit out its ATP it causes it's basically a signal throughout the body that causes changes in all of the mitochondria yeah and when there's a dysfunctional mitochondria that goes through the process you just described it's basically tossing out pieces of itself which is a signal to all the others because mitochondria are distributed intelligence they're ancient bacteria but they all vote and they all talk to each other and they can fuse together and they can move around where you need more energy it's actually incredibly complex and Brilliant and elegant and if you're saying well here's more of a compound that you need in order to transport electrons it just logically follows that of course you're going to have more energy and the interesting thing is that well I'm just going to be blunt I kind of maybe I have a little bit of a bias I fell for the vegan nonsense like it broke my health it took me a long time to recover vegan I'm not vegan you're not don't worry about that give me a good Ste but so you know the spirulina algae is like part of that like weird I'll be BL weird 1970s like jog until you drop and like drink some green juice kind of vibe so I've always had this like H I don't really know but in addition to all the science you just talked about you did a new clinical trial and this is a trial using technology that we talked about at the biohacking conference right and this is out of UC San Diego Dr H Patel who's been on the show correct he's just a brilliant biologist I've personally visited his lab I've done the mehealth screening so you looked at what happens when people take the energy bed spirulina right and after seven days what did you guys find I know it's not published yet but you can probably tell me yeah so um after reading literally 60,000 studies on Sci the different benefits of spiruline including the mitochondria health and inflammation I thought well I need my own science I need my own clinical trial because everything we do at energy vits is is science based and I'm very science based so um I met the folks from me screen at your conference live sweet yeah they were right beside me that's biohacking conference.com biing yes join us in Austin next year absolutely we'll be there we're already signed up we've been there for years and um they have developed this unique unbelievable study or capability using a simple blood test that you can go online to buy at mre.com and it will determine uh there's different markers that will tell you the health of your mitochondria so I said I want to work with you so we we lined up a small clinical trial we wanted to do a larger one but we needed to get something quickly under our belt so it was a small group of people they got were over 50 off over 55 half women Half Men and all we did was give them spir allergy tablets every day for 30 days so they did a miscreen test these were specifically your energy bits R our particular brand because there's lots of science out there but I needed to know for sure about my brand because we are the ones that don't use high heat so I knew there was some greater efficacy or I sense there was even antidot we have people just telling us all these great things so we did this test we did a miscreen test first to get a baseline of their mitochondria Health then they took the spiran algae every day for 30 days but we did a miscreen test at seven days and another one after 30 days and so we have the data back now from the first 7 days and HL Patel's team has been analyzing the data for us um and what he has found is that the um there's a a variety of different markers um but the U production of energy through ATP production versus glycolysis was dramatically improved the maximum mitochondria respiration increased almost 20% the spare capacity of mitochondria respiration in increased almost 20% we mentioned the The increased in mondria ATP versus glycolysis increased almost 15% and then the number of Ros decreased both at a basal and a stressed uh level and what I want to do is read the summary that I a quote from from Dr battel Who gave me the authority to to share this with people um and he said the only other time I have seen such dramatic improvements in mitochondria Health was in an intermittent fasting clinical trial we did last year in that study it took three months for the 70 participants to achieve the same level of improved mitochondria Health that was achieved in just seven days by participants taking energy bits spirulina towas so and now this is the early research and we don't know what the results are going to be but um and because the thing with intermittent fasting is you're shortening your eating windows so there is Le fewer free radicals being released in the ATP production so that allows the the cell to go through autophagy and also to stimulate apoptosis which is the you know healthy non-inflammatory growth of of your mitochondria um so now not only does the ficoin improve the cell Health the co the super oxid dismutase in the in the super in the spirulina increase the um uh the ability of the electron transport chain to work better there's glutathione that reduces um Ros fosin is also an antioxidant which reduces Ros so and all of these things work together to also improve uh autophagy and apoptosis so I was pretty excited I was like you know it was like Christmas for me it's like oh my gosh all the stuff that you've seen now has some more data behind it yes it's funny the first major book on intermittent fasting was called the bulletproof diet and it's it's somewhere near a million copies I think at this point yeah and it helped to kick off the intermittent fasting Trend and it does work there's abundant evidence that it works but like I said it takes three months and I just I have a pretty good track record of figuring out what improves mitochondrial function right and throughout the last couple years I've had several different companies come on with new molecules or new data on Old molecules or molecules in energy bits case where it's processed differently where you can get a 10 or a 20% increase in condal function without having to skip breakfast without having to skip dinner and so you might want to do all the above but you might not need to and frankly if you can get it in less work and less time U there's nothing says you can't smarter not harder right exactly right I think we're we're checking all your boxes of all your books so this is great yeah and so there there's so many things that we know now and that are available now and if you're like I feel like crap all the time and my brain doesn't work 20% better will try the stuff for a week and see if you notice a difference yeah but here's the weird thing many people won't notice a difference you know why um they're stupid not at all they're dead well that's part of it they won't notice a difference because when something comes back online you're like oh this is how I always feel yeah and so what I found I first Le this experimenting with neut Tropics or actually smart Pharmaceuticals um back in the 90s uh when my brain was really dysfunctional I took a compound called things so what it feels like unless you're really chronic fatigued out when your energy comes back online you just feel more like yourself and then I would say try it for a week or two and then if you're doubting you say I don't feel anything go cold turkey wait three or four days how many times did you forget a word how many times did you get emotionally disregulated so sometimes turning it back on is hard to feel but then losing it again is more noticeable we found that people when they notice that Plunge in um brain Focus efficacy energy after a day of stopping to take we and we have we have people writing in testimonials we don't even ask from this one woman she had terrible um uh Alzheimer's she wrote it said I couldn't even remember to you know where I lived I couldn't function the microwave and I had been taking your algae and then I even forgot I stopped and then I forgot about them so she said my partner reminded me to take them and she said within 24 hours her brain was functioning again and uh so it doesn't take long and we had another woman who was 86 WR us and she said she had been in continent and she couldn't sleep longer than an hour she had no energy and then she started taking these and her condence went away she was able to sleep 5 hours and she wrote us this is a exact testimonial she said today I um walked three miles I went to see my great-grandson at school I went to visit a friend in nursing home I came home and I cleaned out my garage started painting my kitchen and at 5:00 I decided to have dinner because all she had had was a spirulina she says my B grocery bill has gone down my health is improved my energy is improved and I just joined CrossFit God bless her right it's amazing what happens when you when you resuscitate your mitochondria but here's the scary thing 48% of people under age 40 have early onset mitochondrial dysfunction according to studies in one of my books and everyone over age 40 has it we just call it aging yeah but you can resuscitate them and and this is an effective way to do that and I want to be clear there are many ways in biohacking you can use red light you can use sunlight biology stack them all but 20% in seven days is very impressive yes that's that's why himo came up with this quote and um we can't wait to get the rest of the data we can't wait to do another one and again it was about our particular brand uh there's lots of other science out there but and I'm going to be you know because I'm so science-based I can't wait to do even more research with but we've been a small company so we had rather limited resources but I'm I want evidence for everything and so that's that's our future trajectory for sure I want to make a contribution to the science-based the the knowledge that's out there because the reality is Mother Nature created algae I did not I so I can't take credit for spirulina or chlorella what I can take credit for is growing it so carefully that we preserve the nutrients and ensure there aren't any toxins I told people growing algae isn't like growing broccoli it's like making wine it's the production processes that are so critical so there's lots of garbage out there but don't cheat yourself there there's something worth noting uh one of the reasons I'm cautious around spirulina unless I know where it comes from is that there's a toxic form of Blu green algae yes and some of the places where they grow even some of the fancy Brands they're in the same water that has the toxic strains and these are really bad for you in fact they make a toxin similar to mold toxins and I've had experiences where I've tried a spirulina drink at some vegan place and then like my brain just shut down like what just happened because I'm sensitive to those toxins and I've never had that experience at all with energy bits because you control your production we grow it in fresh water so the toxin in particular talking about it's called are they microt toxins and they are found in Wild bodies of water like the ocean and like clamus Lake I won't there's a company that grows it in clth Lake I have signed scientific papers that tested algae grown in clth Lake and it shows there are microt toxins took me two years to find a lab that tests for microt toxins we send ours every every batch to them and we never have any because we sell through doctor's offices biohacking clinics uh online of course but we want PE you know we have People's Health uh is our priority and so we we make sure that there are none because it's grown in fresh water and it's also important you're talking about micro toxins yes these are very small molec toxins it's different thano toxins which are fungal derived toxins but the mot toxins are also small molecules so technically fungus makes microt toxins that are micro toxins and algae makes microt toxins that have a similar effect so just to avoid confusing people and and it's funny because you're talking about this Precision growing of algae well what do you think makes danger coffee different Precision growing and processing of the beans where you control the whole process so that you don't get toxin formation and then you feel good when you when you drink it yeah so it's a similar mindset you just have to really pay almost an absurd level of attention yeah including the temperature that you're drying and at and everything to get the results and that's why I I have so much admiration for you Dave and your conference because every vendor who's at your conference and so far that I've observed and certainly the people there have gone the extra ex ra mile to make sure they are very careful the wor the food supply that's out there now it's a Minefield I mean I literally even Whole Foods I can't buy almost anything there anymore there's everything is so toxic it's uh full of you know seed oils um I'm I'm amazed everybody does isn't isn't dead in America because the food supply is just is harming us there's no question well there's there's such strong evidence for it and it's different in the US than it is in other countries too that's a very weird situation so maybe there's some kind of political solution for that if not it's just going to come from people not buying stuff with seed oils and a lot of toxins well we have to educate them because they just don't know and that's why I'm so proud of what I do and what my team does and what you I'm so grateful for what you do and what you're encouraging in the community which is to you know Focus primarily on that excessively not just perent excessively on that quality it will take a while for the rest of the world to catch up we're in the early adopter stage there's no question but that's okay there's a lot of us and because we're so healthy hopefully we'll we'll continue multiplying and there'll be more of us in another five years well speaking of of healthy I want to ask you about one more thing talk to me about skin health and the algae they you make well skin has uh mitochondria in it just like every other body part uh there's only about aund a thousand mitochondria in a fat or skin cell but you have free radicals that are causing damage um so spirulina is Beauty from we could say it's Beauty from the inside because it's nourishing your body at the cellular level people pay so much money for creams and lotions uh topically some of them it's a joke because like a collagen molecule so large can't get through the skin cell to be uh functional but when you nourish your body and your SK from the inside it's helping we stop free radical damage uh the chlorophyll is Al alkaline it kills blemishes the back because blemishes are caused by bacter from the inside it has a vitamin called uh K2 which moves excess calcium out of soft tissue your brain your blood vessels your heart and your skin and K2 uh excess K2 will damage your elastin and your um and your and your collagen excess you mean excess calcium excess calcium so you need K2 to move it and other cool thing because we know collagen helps with our our our skin uh algae I did I did the analysis has more collagen in it than cagen powder I did the analysis on a per amino acid basis so do have more collagen has more collagen building blocks in it yes more amino acids so up to 400% more of some of them so um that's just the reason I'm I'm cing that out is there are Brands so I'm the guy who made collagen a billion dollar industry right and there are now companies out there saying this is vegan collagen but it contains no collagen it just has has amino acids right which is a problem because one of the things collagen does is it has D and tripeptides where the aminos are stuck together in a certain way that that performs a signaling mechanism so it does have strong amino acid availability within spirulina but it's not the same as collagen no because it has all of the nutrients also that your body needs to make collagen and in collagen powder it's missing tryptophan and it's also missing zinc I believe so they add it in it's all um maybe you don't but I've you don't want trypan it's one of the reasons you want collagen well it's not a complete protein so no but you're getting other protein the idea is to change the ratio of tryptophan and methionine to Glycine and collagen is high and glycine so what we're doing is we're manipulating ratios so you want about 20 gram of collagen to do that and does this have methionine and tripan yes it has yes it has um 18 of the 20 Amino including the nine your body can't make which are the two that aren't in there do you know I don't know actually I'm so curious now yeah but it does have all the nine that your body can't make so so it does it it counts as a complete protein absolutely which is super cool and the other important thing is that it's bioavailable because spiruline again is a bacteria nothing no celus wall for your body to break down it's uh absorbed almost instantly chlorella does have a hard cell wall that hard cell is what attaches to toxins like Mercury that allows you to do your your tree pose in uh in yoga um but it takes about an hour and a half to be fully absorbed and for anyone uh who is listening who is still having the occasional cocktail um wine beer Spirits one of the toxins chlorella pulls out is alcohol because your body converts it into toxins so so I always talked mostly about spirulina uh chlorella is equally powerful for different reasons it's very much a cleansing detoxing gut health algae whereas spirulina is a mitochondrial brain function energizing algae and very nourishing I call spirulina your nutritional Insurance because whatever you eat afterwards you take 10 taas a day um you've covered your covered your bases 30 a day would be for um s therapeutic dose and for chlorella 10 a day will give you the chlorophyll and all the other um uh glut high glutos iion but 30 would be for detox purposes let's talk about dose timing so with spirulina you take 10 normally or 30 if you're on an aggressive protocol do you take this empty stomach in the morning at night when do you do it empty stomach is fantastic and I and most people I've talked to can't take supplements on an empty stomach it's going to make them nauseous including myself but you have to remember this is not a supplement this is food so I have never found anybody who doesn't enjoy the benefits of this because it gets absorbed so quickly either one of them so 10 uh we have NHL players who take 75 spirulina before a game because they need all that focus on the ice and they take 75 chlorella after the game to pull all the lat gasd so they have a faster um recovery there's something else really important there's a lot of pro athletes who listen to the show I'm reminded of of Nick FES who took almost all of the stuff I made when he won the Super Bowl who become a friend and if you in a sport where you're going to hit your head um say maybe you're in MMA um this is for uh for Joe Rogan and friends um you're going to get hit and head you know it for hockey players one of the things that causes the most damage isn't actually the hit itself it's the inflam Cascade which includes superide so if you have things like ketones present and there's lots of ways to do I've been talking about that for years and you have the ability to have extra sod if you do get hit in the head you don't get the inflammatory problems that happen after it right and so you're going to have less of the long-term damage to the brain that Daniel aan has has talked about so we actually did a small clinical trial on that too last last year I didn't know about that one yeah yeah we did it with a nonprofit group called gry team they're based in Florida and then their goal gry team.org is to reduce the suicide rate of veterans which is at a heartbreaking 35 or um 50% very very high so they've been trying all sorts of modalities they use brain um brain Tab and they I met them again at your show your show is where everybody goes so um they said let's do a small clinical trial so we did a small group of military veterans who had been discharged for up to 10 years because they'd had post-traumatic stress disorder and once again all we did um was give them 30 t one pouch of 30 tablets of Spirulina a day we used a wave um the wav Mach um we did a brain scan beforehand we attached they were attached to devices to measure the HRV sleep um and all other activities and then we did a brain scan after the 30 days of taking just the 30 tablets of Spirulina the brain scan before showed everybody's brain was completely inflamed it was all blue and when it's blue it indicates there's no brain AC ity you want multiple colors after the 30 days both the parietal and the orbital um brain were completely colored back the inflammation was completely gone one gentleman had mom uh Ms his tremors went away somebody's HRV increased 50% remarkable improvements in again 30 days so it's a great organization I I shout out to them for thanking for working with them we hope to do more with them uh U any kind of um brain um contact sport please please start taking spirulina because it will help with that recoveries um or and Veterans um anybody who's got any kind of health issue yeah mitochondria are Central to brain function so it makes sense a final question for you if you're willing to answer it okay we talked about skin earlier and you have great skin thank you do you talk about your age yeah uh in fact I want to tell you something because I am 68 I just turned 68 about a week ago and uh I a couple of years ago also o at your show I met at the brain I'm very close to the brain T folks Patrick and normally they do these tests to to establish some markers of someone's chronologic biological age and then they use the brain tap to see how it improves but in my case they said let's do a test with you then uh then take your spirulina and your cha and come back an hour later and we'll test you again so we did that and with using their device and their markers my biological age was 30 my chronological age at the time was 65 biological 30 so um I want to have a showdown with Brian Johnson who's been spending $5 million you know I plot him for doing all this great stuff or two million a year but five million collectively and he's rever he's taken a year and a half off his age no way more than that oh he well well maybe I'm reading an old old article but in the equivalent of an hour and the per and $112 I knocked 30 years off my age so as measure by heart rate variability um there were lots of different markers that I'd have to check with the um brain tab works but I'm going to do the test with um true age yes yes cool and I'm gonna because they have a leaderboard so I'm gonna I'm going to do my tests with him and I'm gonna get on the leaderboard and then I'm gonna see if Brian Johnson wants to have a showdown well I mean well we'll get you involved too it it's not really about a showdown with that in the the Aging Olympics the way you the way it's set up is that you how rapidly can you reverse your age correct and I'm very interested in how cost effectively and with as much convenience as possible can you reverse your age so I spent two and a half million dollar reversing my age over 20 something years which is still a huge amount of money yeah uh but I I don't think most people are going to to spend a couple a year and half of that is probably measuring it versus just doing it yeah and so Kudos is a Brian he's been on the show a couple times he's a friend we text no no I think it's great but not everybody has his resources and so this is a great segue for me to tell people that you know when you take 10 tablets a day and I did the math because we sell them in these large bags of a thousand tablets and we have a discount for your community upgrade to give them 20% off oh okay let's let's make that official so go to energy bits.com use code upgrade and here's what we worked out for you it'll cost a dollar day if you take the doses we just talked about in order to give this a try 20% mitochondrial Improvement totally worth doing and I think you'll feel a difference and if you do you probably want to keep taking it because this is a coste effective way to have more energy now and probably a live a lot longer there's a lot of science behind this and if for all it's worth I'm evidence that it works you really are it it's hard to imagine that you're 68 me your skin is ridic ridiculously good and you've been doing this for 15 years 15 years I've I don't think I've missed a single day in 15 years and uh I have it in my handbags my gym bags my my suitcases I do eat real food I I do intermittent fasting and I try to eat now one one big meal a day but this is my go-to and I really want to help people understand the science of why it's working and then get it out to them so there's a little add-on point I'm going to make here most women over 50 a single meal a day is not good for you because you can't get enough protein the reason it's working for you is you're getting a lot of amino acid availability from spirina correct so you're basically getting a protein boost y otherwise um You probably weigh somewhere around 100ish pounds so you would need a 100 grams of animal protein per day try and eat that in one meal it's it's possible I do it but it's hard and I'm a little bigger than you yeah so I don't want to encourage most women over 50 to do one meal a day every day it's probably going to age you because C will go up but if you're getting appropriate amino acids you probably could do it or you might do two meals a day and add some spirulina because free aminos they're actually more available than you're going to get from food unless you take enzymes with your food right so just to make sure that we're we're covering all bases yes and and these are my personal choices I'm not recommending them necessarily again this is why I call spirulina your nutritional Insurance it just gets you where you need to go and then everything else is a bonus and then chorella I call it your health insurance and sort make sure that you've got your immune system looked after and your chlorophyll needs U by the way both of them are keto uh they're great for um um carnivores why you may ask because they have zero lectin or oxalates I don't know they're they're not an animal these carnivore people are pretty radical but they part of the reason they went carnivore was because they had stomach issues and a lot of that came from lectins and oxalates so lectin and oxalates from chapter one of the bul diet yeah well I know you had I just saw something about that recently so it's so I just want to ensure people whether you're carnivore vegan paleo ancestral you don't get any older than algae low carb low cal yeah it's it fits with every lifestyle if we talk about carnivore I did a carnivore thing for like three or six months before it was called carnivore when I was Edge testing the bulletproof Diet before I published it yeah and I felt great for a while and then I started getting some autoimmune things when my got bacteria got a little aggressive and gave me gut so I gave myself an egery that way and I see this happen reliably and one way to help deal with that is your gut actually can ferment um gelatin or collagen which could help but there are medicinal nutrients from plants that your body benefits from and the reason we feel better eating meat and less plants is because most plants are really not that good for you but some plants are useful and I would say even necessary and so I like spirulina in particular because it has all the good stuff and there aren't any antinutrients or toxins that I'm aware of in it yeah and so even something like oregano which I'm a huge fan of right it has some anti-nutrients but the benefits are so much higher that it's worth it so this is one of those things if you're carnivore is like I think this would be the right approach for you because it's got the green stuff and specifically you're not going to get polyphenols except in spir you do yeah so carnivore plus polyphenols equals way better than just carniv yeah and that's why Dr Steven grund's um endorsed us and I've been on his podcast two or three times he spoke at your conference again recently that was actually that was in Beverly Hills I think so um he loves our product so I'm very grateful for him helping to share the benefits of it as well so I will see you at the next biohacking conference guys absolutely biohacking conference.com in May in Austin we're expecting about 4,000 people in the biggest and best show ever and so you can meet Katherine and you can hang out and ask her questions and she'll Force spirulina on you aggressively without apology as she should oh well thank you Dave and and a final note as we went down the show if you buy bulk spirina powder it doesn't work you just need to understand what we're talking about here is raw and it enzymes that are the reason it works so sometimes you're saying well I'm going to stretch my budget which I fully support stretching your budget just stretch it in a way that works with a discount code it's a dollar a day try it for a month and see if it's worth a dollar a day it probably is and that's energy bits.com use code upgrade and 20% discount I'll see you on the next episode see you next time on the human upgrade podcast