Super Human. Dave Asprey

are not evil people (except the people still making glyphosate … there must be a special place in hell for them). It’s just that we haven’t shown Big Food companies that we will actually pay a tiny amount more to get food that keeps us young. It’s okay. They’re coming over to our side as the data becomes clearer.

      Glyphosate is just one reason that where you get your food really matters. After years of thinking about it, I decided to make the difficult move to an organic farm where my family can grow our own produce and even raise our own animals (and trade with neighbors who raise animals we don’t). But even before I made the move, my health improved tremendously when I simply eliminated grains and switched to organic, grass-fed animal products from the grocery store and farmers’ markets.

      Despite these changes, I still had to learn how to control my blood sugar. More to the point, given how aging high blood sugar is, I learned how to kick its ass. On so many of the diets I’d tried in the past, I ate a low-fat, low-calorie, high-carb breakfast. My body secreted insulin to transport sugar to my cells so they could create energy. This caused a spike in blood sugar, then a quick drop until my base instincts yelled at me to eat something quick to get more energy. Sound familiar? Sugar cravings are how our biology evolved to keep us from starving to death, but they certainly weren’t helping me live longer! Even short spikes in blood sugar cause damage to the inside of your arteries, contributing to cardiovascular disease.

      Another common scenario was that I’d unknowingly eat something that contained toxins, requiring my liver to use extra energy to filter toxins out. This of course led to more sugar cravings as my liver struggled to make enough energy to oxidize the toxins. My entire life was ruled by sugar cravings! It had been for as long as I could remember. And when I gave in and ate the darn sugar (or refined carbs), of course it made things worse: More blood sugar means bigger energy crashes, more oxidative stress,⁹ and the constant formation of AGEs when all that sugar links up with protein in tissues. You already know that sugar ages you, but you may not know how to stop eating it or about the deadly combination of too much sugar and too much protein …

      THE VEGAN TRAP

      Then I read The China Study by T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell II, one of the first popular books that made the connection between eating animal products and many common diseases, including the Four Killers. According to an uncritical read of the book, the best way to avoid dying is to avoid animal products completely. Given that not dying is the first step to anti-aging, and not having done all the research, I decided to avoid animal foods.

      So I turned to a raw vegan diet, and I went all in. I bought sprouting trays and the world’s best blender and spent my days eating bowl after bowl of salad and entire blenders full of green smoothies trying to consume an adequate number of calories. It worked … for a little while. I got down to about 185 pounds—too low for a six-four guy—and I felt a burst of energy that also made me feel flighty and ungrounded. I convinced myself that the increase in pain and stiffness that came with this was just my body “detoxing.” But my friends said I looked gaunt, and pretty soon I wasn’t feeling so great. My teeth got sensitive and even started to break, and I felt cold all the time. It was pretty clear that I was suffering from malnutrition, despite knowing a ton about nutrition and spending two hours a day preparing food.

      Later I learned about what I call the “vegan trap.” When you switch from a diet containing animal fats to the mostly omega-6 polyunsaturated fats found in plants, you set yourself up for failure. Vegetable oils reduce your thyroid function by preventing thyroid hormone from binding to receptors.¹⁰ At first your thyroid hormones will temporarily increase to compensate for the lower energy, and you feel good. That’s what led to my ungrounded energy and initial weight loss. But if you continue to give your body the wrong building blocks, your health will suffer. Because your cells don’t have the right building blocks to make energy efficiently, your metabolism eventually slows down. That slow metabolism doesn’t just make you gain weight more easily; it slows down your brain, your energy, and everything you do.

      For about six weeks as a vegan, I felt great and grew convinced that my diet was the answer to all my problems. I had tons of energy and no idea it was the energy of a stressed animal that is starving and needs one last boost to catch its prey. Already convinced that being a vegan gave me more energy, I logically decided to “lean in” when I started to feel the ill effects. That is why it’s a trap—once you’re convinced that you feel good on a vegan diet (because you actually did for a short while), you don’t think to look at your diet when your energy or your health begin to suffer.

      Thankfully, it took me only about six months to realize what was going on, do more research, and decide to add meat back into my diet. By then I had learned about the dangers of consuming AGEs when eating overcooked meat, so for a brief period of time I became a raw omnivore. In addition to occasionally eating sushi, I marinated thin strips of steak in apple cider vinegar to kill harmful bacteria and added it to my salads. With that plus some raw egg yolks and raw butter, I started to feel better right away.

      When I reread The China Study, I realized it had some serious flaws. For example, the researchers conclude that all animal protein causes cancer simply because rats that were exposed to large amounts of casein (a dairy protein, one of thousands of animal proteins that each do different things) had a higher chance of developing liver cancer than rats that did not consume casein. But the study didn’t account for the type of animal product or the type of animal; nor did it consider what that animal ate or how the meat was stored or cooked. These factors truly determine whether or not an animal product is aging. So does the amount of meat you eat. If you want to live a long time, you want to avoid eating too much meat and avoid eating all low quality meat.

      My time as a raw vegan was not fun, but I am grateful for The China Study. Had I not cut out animal protein from my diet, I wouldn’t have become familiar with the research showing that most of us—including me before I went vegan—eat far too much protein in general. Eating a pound of steak or chicken every day has a different impact from eating a few ounces, which in turn has a different impact from eating none at all.

      After I started eating meat again, I wondered why my inflammation levels had decreased when I cut out animal products. It turns out excess protein—especially from animals—causes inflammation. Most animal protein contains specific amino acids such as methionine, which causes inflammation and aging when eaten in excess. (Except for collagen protein, which has far less methionine.) In pharmaceutical studies, this is called an inverted U-shaped response curve. It means there is a “Goldilocks zone” for dosing a substance, and either too little or too much does not work.

      This is no small consideration. When you eat a diet high in animal protein, you can expect a 75 percent increased risk of dying from all causes over eighteen years, a 400 percent increased risk of dying of cancer, and a 500 percent increased risk of diabetes compared to someone who restricts his or her animal protein.¹¹ Totally not Super Human. Another set of studies found that restricting protein can help increase maximum life-span by 20 percent, probably because less protein means less methionine.¹²

      The type of protein you eat is as important to consider as how much protein you eat. If the protein in question is charred or deep-fried, there is no good amount to eat. Same goes if it’s from industrially-raised animals treated with antibiotics. But if the protein is from gently cooked grass-fed animals, wild fish, or plants (hemp is best), then there is a simple formula for the correct daily allowance: about 0.5 grams per pound of body weight for lean people; and about 0.6 grams per pound for athletes, older people (the risks associated with overconsumption of protein decrease after age sixty-five), and pregnant women.

      If you’re obese like I was, sorry, but all that extra fat you’re carrying around doesn’t require protein, so subtract it from your body weight before figuring out how much protein to eat. For instance, when I weighed 300 pounds, let’s assume I was carrying an extra 100 pounds of fat. Take my weight (300), subtract my fat (100), and you end up with 200 pounds, so I should have aimed to eat 100 grams of protein (0.5 × 200 pounds). If you’re relatively heavy and have no idea of your body fat percentage or are just bad at math, assume you’re about 30 percent fat. So you’d eat 0.35 grams per pound of body weight.

      Collagen