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Fasting

An organic plant-based whole-food diet should be the first step to detox your body.

Detox method number two is fasting.
There are different types of fasting.

One is the water fast.

Water fasting is an incredible therapy. Fasting supercharges your immune system.
There’s a fascinating study that came out a couple of years ago (2016) where they found that during a three-day water fast old and damaged immune cells die off, stem cells awaken from their normal dormant state and start regenerating. Then when you start eating again your body ramps up production of new immune cells.

The 2016 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Japan’s Dr. Yoshinori Ohsumi for his discoveries of the underlying mechanisms of a physiological process called autophagy. Autophagy is a natural process by which the body degrades and recycles damaged cells, proteins and toxins. Autophagy comes from two Greek words, auto meaning “self” and phagy meaning “to eat.”

This is the body’s way of cleaning house. It happens during starvation, calorie restriction, and fasting. If the body fails to engage in autophagy, damaged cells and structures can accumulate dangerously. Autophagy is one method that the body uses to naturally neutralize cancer cells and degrade cells infected by harmful bacteria and viruses.

So fasting basically reboots and recharges your immune system. They found that when cancer patients water fasted 24hours before chemotherapy treatment, the treatment worked better, because water fasting weakened the cancer cells.

Reset your immune system by fasting

Water fasting can be very beneficial and I want to encourage you to do it. Most people can handle a three day water fast without any problems.
If you have a serious health condition, you should check with your doctor before attempting a fast.
Your doctor may not know anything about fasting. He may say you can’t do it or you shouldn’t do it. If that’s the case then you fast at your own risk.
For most people fasting is perfectly safe. I’ve done it many times and never had a problem.
Fasting gives your body a break from digestion and when you fast your body switches from normal daily operations to repair and regeneration mode.

Your body is constantly processing the foods that you’re bringing in and using them to create energy and maintain homeostasis to keep you alive. But when you fast you stop the conveyor belt, so food stops coming in. Now you’ve got all these workers that don’t have anything to do, because there’s nothing on the conveyor belt. There’s no food to process, so they’re like: “What do we do now? Well, let’s look around and see what needs repair!”

When you fast, your body switches gears into internal housecleaning mode. You’re giving it a break, which allows it to pay attention to things that have been overlooked. It will break down and recycle the useful parts from old and damaged cells. It will caused new cells to be born, effectively renewing the immune system.

During a fast your body will also break down fat for energy.
Fat is your body’s secondary energy reserve. You have two backup energy reserves. You have glycogen, which is stored in your liver and converted to glucose if you need extra energy. Then when that glucose runs out, your body starts burning fat.

It takes about 24 hours to burn through the glucose that’s stored in your liver. Once you burnt through that, your body will start burning through body fat. If you’re active the first day of your fast, your body will burn through the glucose faster and switch to fat-burning sooner.

Fat is a place that your body stores toxins. So when you start a fast, whether it’s a water fast or juice fast, as your body starts to break down the toxic fat, you’re going to feel bad. You will have detoxification symptoms. They are called ‘Herxheimer Effect’ or the ‘Healing Crisis’. Some people experience this just from converting from the standard Western diet to a raw food diet or a plant-based diet and there’s a few reasons why: food addiction and detoxification.

  • We’re addicted to a diet that’s high in protein, fat, sugar, and salt and when you remove the animal protein and the high levels of sugar, fat, and salt from your diet, you will experience withdrawal symptoms. You will also experience withdrawal from caffeine and other food additives like Aspartame if you’ve been drinking diet sodas or chewing gum all day.

  • The other reason you feel bad when you switch to a hardcore healthy diet is detoxification. So again, when you start burning through body fat, your body starts dumping toxins into your bloodstream and they circulate around and your body has to process them in order to excrete them. During that process you’re going to feel lousy. Some typical reactions are low energy, headaches, nausea, aches and pains. You could get diarrhoea. You might throw up.
    If any of those things happen, it’s because there’s some serious detox going on in your body. Just power through it, again under medical supervision if necessary.
    If you’re taking prescription drugs this could be dangerous, so you need to make sure you’re cautious about your approach.

    You might even run a fever. Your immune system ramps up into high gear when you have a fever. A fever can wipe out a host of viruses, bacteria, and parasites in your body that you didn’t even know you had. And stuff is going to come out in a lot of different ways if you’re toxic, so this could cause, like I said, aches and pains, headaches, nausea, diarrhoea, vomiting, fever, pimples, rashes, any of the above, but hopefully not all of the above. The best case scenario is, you just feel lousy, no energy, maybe a bit of a headache for a few days. The worst case could be pretty rough for a few days, but remember, if and when you start feeling bad, just remind yourself: “This is normal. I will get better.”

    When you get over that detoxification hump, usually after a few days, worst case a week, you will feel amazing.

There might be a point in your fast where you feel so good that you may think to yourself that you never need to eat again, which, of course, is not true. Eventually you will get hungry and that’s a good time to eat.
Your immune system will generate new blood cells as soon as nutrients start flowing back into the body.

Now how long should you fast is something that you should determine. If you want to just get your feet wet, you can do a one day water fast – that’s pretty easy. A three day water fast is the optimal minimal length of time. There are people that have done forty day water fasts. That’s serious. You definitely need professional supervision if you go that long. The longest I’ve personally fasted on water, is five days. I haven’t gone for a longer fast, because I have a high metabolism, I’m really thin and struggle to put on body fat.

 

The next step down from water fasting, is juice cleansing.

Some people will start with the three day water fast and then do a three, five, or a ten day juice cleanse. And then, when they come out of the fast, they’ll transition to raw food or plant-based wholefood diet. Lots of fresh fruit first and incorporate vegetables as well. There’s all kinds of information online about different fasting methods, but I’m all about simplicity. I think the optimal starting point for most people is three days on water, then using juices (mainly vegetable, not fruit juices) to transition to a plant-based diet.

Now the more body fat you have, the longer you can fast.
All body fat is really just stored energy. In case there’s a food shortage, that’s good! But if you have a lot of extra body fat, it’s a burden to your entire body. We know that obesity is the second leading cause of cancer, so you need to get rid of the excess body fat. A nice benefit of fasting is a quick loss of body fat.
If you’re not sure what you’re supposed to weigh, you can do a Google search for a BMI calculator and just type in your height and your weight and it will tell you if you’re underweight, normal, overweight, or obese. That’s the best way to find your ideal weight range.

For the best podcast on fasting, listen to the podcast below with Dr. Sunil Pai and Dr. Michael Klaper.

Dr. KlaperMichael Klaper, M.D. is a graduate of the University of Illinois College of Medicine and received postgraduate training in internal medicine, surgery, anesthesiology, and orthopedics at UBC teaching hospitals in Vancouver and obstetrics at UCSF. He has practiced acute care medicine in Hawaii, Canada, California, Florida and New Zealand.
Dr. Klaper focuses on health-promoting food and lifestyle choices to help people prevent the need for hospitalization and surgery. He has authored numerous articles on plant-based nutrition and has been featured in several films including the award winning “Diet For A New America”, “What the Health”, and “Cowspiracy.”
A long-time radio host and a pilot, Dr. Klaper has served as nutrition advisor to NASA’s programs for space colonists on the Moon and Mars.
Dr. Klaper adopted a plant-based diet in 1981 and has helped thousands of patients with diet and use of fasting. Learn more about his videos and newsletter at DoctorKlaper.com.
 

What are the best wholefood supplements?

There’s a lot of uncharted territory when it comes to supplements and there is some risk involved. Typically not nearly  the risk of pharmaceutical drugs, but you could have a reaction to something you’ve never taken before and if you take too much of anything, it can make you sick.

If you drink six litres of water in one hour, it will kill you.

There are additional risks if you’re taking prescription drugs. Taking certain supplements with pharmaceuticals could cause serious side effects that may even be life threatening. I am not trying to scare you, but you should do further research beyond this blog post to be aware of any potential risks and be cautious.

There are thousands of supplements on the market and it is easy to get overwhelmed. What to take, what brand is best, how much to take…

There s a lot of scientific research on certain compounds proven to have significant health promoting effects.

If you’re on a tight budget and it s a stretch just to afford to eat an organic plant-based diet and juice, that’s ok. Forget supplements, just remember nutrition is the foundation of health and healing. You’ve got to get the diet right.

If you think you re going to take a bunch of supplements and keep eating burgers, pizza and ice-cream washing it down with cans of beer and continue smoking, then you are fooling yourself and you’re wasting your money.

A lot of us have been brainwashed. We’ve been conditioned to put our faith in magic bullets (which are pharmaceutical drugs). And then we bring that same mentality into the natural world and we just want one pill, one natural supplement, one natural cure to fix our problem.

In most cases, one pharmaceutical drug isn’t going to fix your problem and neither will one natural supplement.

In order to find out which supplements to take, you should get the nutrient levels in your blood plasma tested and then supplement what you’re not getting in your diet.
If you don’t have access to blood plasma nutrient analysis or if you just want to get more nutrients into your body with the approach to overdose on nutrition, giving your body more than enough and letting it use what it needs, I recommend taking whole-food supplements.

Wholefood supplements in contrast to nutraceuticals do not just give you one isolated compound in high dosage, but a whole plethora of compounds including phyto-chemicals, micro nutrients, vitamins, amino-acids, minerals, antioxidants, fatty acids etc.

Here are three of my favourites:

Amla/Amalaki/The Indian Gooseberry

Amla is the highest antioxidant food on planet Earth, and it has the second highest concentration of Vitamin C.
It’s very hard to find Amla fresh, almost impossible. It’s bitter and sour and pithy and just awful. Buy organic amalaki powder instead (on Amazon).
It’s super potent, so start with 1/4 teaspoon mixed into water or juice, smoothie or oat meal and get it into your body.
I add it to about 20 ounces of water that I drink first thing in the morning.

Moringa leaf powder

Moringa is one of the most nutrient dense plants on planet Earth. If you compare gram-for-gram, it has: 10x the vitamin A of carrots, 17x the calcium of milk, 15x the potassium of bananas, 25x the iron of spinach, 9x protein of yoghurt. It actually contains all the essential amino acids. It’s an amazing superfood.
You just add 1/2 a teaspoon or a teaspoon to water, juice, smoothie or you can add it to your oat meal in the morning.

Vitamin D3:
Vitamin D3 is the #1 anti-cancer vitamin. I can’t say enough good things about Vitamin D3. More than 3,500 studies have examined this vitamin, and overall they have shown the following:

The lower the levels in the body, the worse and more degenerative any health condition will be. That’s any condition from Alzheimer’s to astma, dermatitis to depression, and colitis and cancer. The higher levels of Vitamin D3, the better you feel and the fewer symptoms you have.
A landmark study came out in 2016 which found that women over 55 with blood concentrations of vitamin D higher than 40 nanogram per millilitre had a 67% lower risk of cancer compared to women with blood levels lower than 20 ng/ml.

The researchers concluded that the optimal levels for cancer prevention are between 40 and 60 nanogram per millilitre. The study also found that most cancers occur in people with vitamin D blood levels between 10 and 40 ng/ml.

A 2005 study in the European Journal of Cancer found that women with blood concentrations higher than 60 ng/ml had an 83% reduction in breast cancer compared with those lower than 20.

Some cancer experts say that 60-80 ng/ml is really the best range for your blood level for Vitamin D3 leading to an 80 percent reduction in diabetes occurrence and 77 percent reduction in all cancers.

Now the best source of vitamin D is sunshine.
If you’re living outside the tropics it might be difficult to get enough sunshine to get your blood levels that high, so that’s why supplementation makes sense. You may have read that you need vitamin K2 to absorb D3, which is why some vitamin D3 supplements also contain K2, but many clinical studies have shown, it’s not necessary and that D3 is easily absorbed in gelcap, liquid drops and oral spray form without K2.

So, check your blood work and depending on where your D3 level is, you may need to take between 5,000 – 10,000 international units per day to get your blood level over 60ng/ml. Make sure you retest in 30-60 days to see where you’re at and adjust your D3 intake accordingly.

Vitamin D3 is a fat-soluble vitamin, meaning it’s better absorbed (up to 60 percent better) when taken with a healthy fat, such as organic ghee, coconut oil, avocados, olive oil, or nut butters.

Prevention is key to lifelong health, and Vitamin D3 helps precisely that. Interestingly enough, one can also use Vitamin D3 for acute health problems. When you are coming down with a cold or flu, bronchitis, sinusitis, or some other minor illness, I recommend that, at the instant you feel  start to feel achy or have a sore throat  or a fever, start taking higher doses of Vitamin D3 for three to five days. For example, take 20,000 to 30,000 international units (IU) daily for three to five days and then return to 5,000 IU or your regular dose once the cold or flu has subsided enough. This increase in Vitamin D3 helps up-regulate the immune system and cause soldier cells to become more active  and help assist the body’s own innate abilities to heal itself.
D3 up-regulates the immune system so effectively that pharmaceutical companies are currently undertaking clinical trials to make Vitamin D3 a prescription drug.

Yes you read that right: in the future, Vitamin D3 may become a prescription drug.

Finally, make sure that whatever Vitamin D3 you take, does not contain fillers or unnecessary incredients. It should contain a vegetarian capsule, Vitamin D3, L-leucine, and silicon dioxide (to stabilize it).
Avoid D3 supplements that have multiple inappropriate ingredients, such as Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (SLS), colours, and other fillers. The same goes for Vitamin D3 in liquid form.

What is the best diet?

There are about 20,000 genes in the human genome. The genes are static and do not change, but they can lead to develop up to  4 million different bodies, because each gene can make over 200 different protein structures depending on its environment. The biggest environmental factor is nutrition. 

The biggest environmental factor on the human body is nutrition. 

So, don’t believe anybody, or any doctor in particular, who tries to tell you that it doesn’t matter what you eat.

This way of thinking is not only absurd, it is completely ignorant, and grossly uninformed.

Science understands that food fuels our body, giving us the ability to function appropriately. If your body were a car, you would be careful to give it the right type of fuel. 

You wouldn’t put kerosene or lighter fluid in your car, nor would you put cheap gas in a Ferrari.

But when it comes to what we eat, we do just that – choose the cheapest fuel possible. It’s easy to understand how kerosene would ruin your car, but when it comes to our bodies, we do not acknowledge the consequences of using the wrong fuel, partly because our bodies are too good. It just takes too long before bad food choices show their consequences.

What diet does fuel our bodies best?

In my eyes the best diet should be able to reverse any disease by tapping into the body’s ability to heal itself. The optimum nutrition should minimise the risk of developing diabetes, cardio vascular disease, cancer or any other disease of the western civilisation.

So, which diet do you think does just that? The standard American diet? Just joking.

Maybe the Mediterranean diet? All the studies on the Mediterranean diet have shown that, compared to the standard American diet, it is

able to reduce heart disease and related conditions by approximately 75%. That’s amazing, but what about the other 25%? Why did those people on the Mediterranean diet still get heart disease even though they were eating this incredibly healthy diet? Wasn’t there a diet that could prevent heart disease for everyone?

Yes, there is!

A plant based diet reduces heart disease and related conditions by 95 percent. It can reduce the risk of heart disease even more by increasing the intake of plant-based proteins, reducing the intake of animal-based proteins (even seafood) and eliminating the heavy use of refined oils.

The most comprehensive report on diet and cancer in history was published in 1997. This first report took over four years to complete, reviewing 4500 studies from thousands of researchers across the globe – a landmark scientific consensus document written by the top cancer researchers in the world. Download the summary of the third update of this report from 2018 here.

After all that work, what was the number one recommendation?

Choose a diet that is predominantly plant based, rich in a variety of fruits, vegetables, nuts, and beans with minimally processed starchy foods.

 

Chris Wark, a cancer survivor himself, promotes a whole-food plant-based diet as the centre piece for the radical lifestyle change necessary to survive a cancer diagnosis.

On his website Chris Beat Cancer you’ll find many testimonials from cancer survivors that used his programme, based on a whole food plant based diet, to recover their health.

There are no cancer survivor stories out there on the internet of people who survived cancer with a ketogenic, paleo or Atkins diet.

With every piece of food you put into your mouth you either promote disease or health.

Most people don’t understand, that what you put at the end of your fork, is more powerful than any drug you find in a pill bottle.

 

How to hydrate yourself in the morning…

The first sensation most of us register when we wake up is thirst. If you’ve managed to sleep well, you’ve just gone seven-plus hours without drinking a drop of water. If you’re in a dry climate, worked out the previous afternoon, or partied hard the night before, you likely hit the pillow at a fluid deficit out of the gate. Depending on the temperature of your room, you may have even accelerated the dehydration process through sweat. In combination, the vapour from respiration and perspiration can often amount to a pound of water lost overnight. As a result, we regularly wake up feeling like we’ve been nursing on a cotton ball.

You would think that the logical response to this condition would be to get up and drink some water, to lubricate all those critical internal components we need to fire correctly for our bodies to be most effective today and for the long haul. Instead, what most of us do is hide under the covers, hitting the snooze button like a snare drum until the last possible moment, at which point we hurry out of bed, strip our clothes off, step into the shower and pour gallons of water over our body, then dump three more quarts through a drip coffee maker. We rarely think to actually drink any of this water before it goes down the drain or through the filter, which is insane; if the physical sensations we experience when we wake up happened to us in the middle of our day, we’d say “Damn, I’m thirsty” and then crush a glass of water. Starting the day, though, it always ends with us holding a cup of coffee.

There are studies on both men and women showing that even mild dehydration resulting from fluid loss equaling roughly 1 percent of your body weight can cause headaches, moodiness, irritability, anxiety, and fatigue.

Decreases in mental performance and short-term memory loss can start at as little as a 2 percent loss in water. You ever find yourself being 1 or 2 percent lighter in the morning than before bed? That is enough.

But it isn’t just the water itself that is the problem. We lose electrolytes and minerals over the course of our sleep as well. Minerals are key to modulating and supporting numerous body processes, from the muscles to the organs and even the brain. Without adequate minerals, many of the body’s normal functions start to diminish. Well, guess what, we are just as bad at replacing our minerals on a regular basis as we are at getting ourselves moving and into the sunlight to start our days.

Hydration

Sixty percent of the average adult human body is made up of water. About the same percentage of Earth’s surface is covered by water. The world is water, we are water, yet here we are, every morning, essentially starving for it. And we wonder why we wake up feeling miserable so often.

A glass of water from the bathroom faucet or tipping your head back in the shower is not going to cut it, however. This isn’t just about curing cottonmouth. Health coach and sleep expert Shawn Stevenson calls that first glass of water in the morning “a cool bath for your organs.” Another way of putting it: it’s priming your internal fluids before hitting the road.

Just swap your first-thing-in-the-morning coffee for some water and minerals, in a drink Aubrey Marcus calls the morning mineral cocktail. You don’t have to eliminate coffee—God forbid, coffee is delicious—just hold off on it until you’ve hydrated properly and can mix it with some fats like butter or coconut oil to slow it down. The components of the morning mineral cocktail are water, sea salt, and a splash of lemon.

Morning Mineral Cocktail

0.4 to 0.7 litres of filtered water

3 grams sea salt (=flat tip of a tea spoon)

1/4 lemon, squeezed

  • The water should be room temperature. When you’re looking to maximize mineral absorption and aid digestion, room temperature is always best for any beverage.

  • Sea salt contains upward of sixty trace minerals above and beyond the sodium, chloride, and iodine in regular table salt, including phosphorus, magnesium, calcium, potassium, bromine, boron, zinc, iron, manganese, and copper.

    Together they are essential for healthy bodily function and contribute meaningfully to optimal performance. Sodium binds to water in the body to maintain the proper level of hydration inside and outside our cells. Along with potassium, it also helps maintain electrical gradients across cell membranes, which are critical for nerve transmission, muscle contraction, and various other functions. Without it, needless to say, we would be toast.

This post is an extract about hydration from the first chapter of Aubrey Marcus‘ book:
“Own the Day, Own Your Life“

 

Aubrey Marcus is the founder and CEO of Onnit, a lifestyle brand based on a holistic health philosophy he calls Total Human Optimization. Onnit is an Inc. 500 company and an industry leader with products touching millions of lives, including many top professional athletes around the world.

To hear more from Aubrey Marcus, listen in on one of these podcasts:

Keeping healthy blood glucose levels

We should all be concerned about insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome X, and diabetes – different names for a health condition in which your blood glucose is elevated above normal levels.

One must understand that blood glucose is one of the most important things to keep within the normal range, and the most current scientific data indicates that keeping it in the lower part of the normal range is better.

Terms like “insulin resistance” and “metabolic syndrome” have been used to describe what is occurring prior to and up to the development of full-blown diabetes, which is when elevated blood glucose starts a cascade of other health problems. For example, with elevated blood glucose, one can develop high blood pressure, an increase in lipids (cholesterol), an increase in weight, and a host of other problems that are far better avoided.

If someone has elevated blood sugar or diabetes, they are at fourfold increased risk of developing heart disease. Why? Because when blood glucose is elevated, insulin (the well-known hormone secreted from the pancreas that helps bring glucose into the body to be utilised as fuel) resistance develops over time because of the continued consumption of highly refined carbohydrates and processed foods (e.g. white bread, white flour tortillas, doughnuts and pastries), highly sweetened snacks (e.g. candy bars) and sugary drinks (e.g. soft drinks), and other triggers that cause inflammation of the pancreatic cells.

This inflammation in turn causes an imbalance whereby the body cannot absorb glucose into its cells, muscles, and organs, and the glucose instead remains in the blood stream. This excess fuel – or energy – that the body cannot use is then converted to fats (both excess weight and elevated lipids/cholesterol).

Additionally, once blood sugar is elevated, there is an increase in the metabolic pathway to convert more omega-6s, triggering more inflammation – not only systemically but also in the internal lining of the arteries – leading to more cholesterol and plaque formation. This plaque formation is the body’s attempt to calm the inflammation initially, but when there is chronic inflammation, the repair becomes a hindrance. This pathway of inflammation and the complications from it become a vicious cycle.

If you obtain most of your calories from highly processed and refined foods, this creates spikes in your blood-glucose levels, and over time your insulin loses the ability to bring it down.

All food has a glucose number, called its glycemic index (GI), which tells how much your blood glucose will rise once you consume that food. White bread is the standard measurement to which other foods are compared, as it has one of the fastest glycemic indices.

Carbohydrates with a low GI (55 or less) will make your blood glucose rise slowly and fall gently over a longer time. Carbohydrates with a high GI (70 or more) are digested and absorbed quickly causing your blood glucose levels to spike and then crash.

White bread and similar highly refined grain foods have been “pre-digested”: The manufacturing process removes the whole-grain and fiber content in addition to other core nutrients. This makes the processed grain product easier to chew, cut, slice and pull apart, and it also increases the rate of absorption and conversion to glucose. As a result, blood glucose spikes immediately after consuming these refined foods. While that doesn’t sound very appetising, these types of foods are popular, because a glucose spike gives a quick, satisfied feeling of having instant energy. But soon thereafter, energy levels crash, and you feel hungry again. And so you eat again. This rapid cycle is part of what makes these foods so addictive.

Food companies create their foods so precisely, that once the average teenager at school or adult in the workplace eats a snack, his or her physiology is basically on a timed cycle to spike and crash exactly as food companies want it to. Most of these packaged products have been calculated to create that specific rollercoaster of soaring highs followed by a massive crash – timed to happen right before the next class or workplace break.

Avoid this rollercoaster ride by not allowing yourself to get on it to begin with. That is the willpower you need. Try to learn not to put these foods into your grocery cart when you go shopping. Do what you can to replace these quick-fix foods with something that you really like that is genuinely satisfying – generally foods that don’t come in a box.

And when you eat, stick to three meals per day. One of the worst dietary advice in the last years has been to eat whenever you feel hungry. As a result you are having snacks every couple of hours sending your blood glucose levels on rollercoaster rides all day long.

 

This post is a summary of the relevant chapters of Sunil Pai‘s book:
“An Inflammation Nation – The Definitive 10-Step Guide to Preventing and Treating All Diseases through Diet, Lifestyle, and Use of Natural Anti-Inflammatories“

 

Dr. Sunil Pai, MD is the founder and medical director of Sanjevani Integrative Medicine and Lifestyle Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was one of the first physicians to become a Fellow of the Program in Integrative Medicine at University of Arizona directed by Dr. Andrew Weil, the “father” of Integrative Medicine and was one of the first Board Certified MD’s in Holistic Integrative Medicine in the United States.

To hear more from Dr. Pai, listen in on one of these podcasts:

Why should you start drinking Bulletproof Coffee?

I like a cup of coffee – Cappuccino preferably.

Since watching “Cowspiracy” drinking regular milk from the carton to froth for my Cappuccino is not an option anymore.  Milk also has a negative effect on polyphenols, the good antioxidants in coffee. It makes them less likely to be absorbed.
Therefore I started making my own almond milk. It worked, it tastes good, but it’s pretty expensive (200g of almonds cost about USD 5.5 in Sri Lanka) and it takes planning – from start to finish you need two days of preparation before you can enjoy the milk. Apart from that it tends to separate when heated and can hardly be frothed – so, all in all not a great alternative!

Bulletproof Coffee in a handmade Tallentire House cup

Bulletproof Coffee in a handmade Tallentire House cup

I didn’t want to give up coffee entirely!
Caffeine actually has many health benefits:

  • regulates your insulin sensitivity
  • blocks inflammation to the brain

That’s when I remembered our favourite restaurant in Unawatuna, Bedspace, offered Bulletproof Coffee on their menu…

So how do you make Bulletproof Coffee?

  1. Brew  hot coffee.
  2. Using a blender, blend in
    – 2 tablespoons unsalted, grass-fed butter,
    – 2 tablespoons of C8 MCT oil or regular coconut oil,
    – a pinch of ground cinnamon,
    – a few drops of organic vanilla extract and
    – stevia or wild honey to enhance the taste.
  3. Blend for a few seconds.
  4. Enjoy.

That sounds like a fairly easy procedure. Not time consuming at all, even faster then my old habit of heating up regular milk, frothing etc.

To get grass-fed butter in Sri Lanka was a problem. I don’t know where you live, but you might be facing the same problem…
Then I found out that Anchor butter from New Zealand is pretty much only made from grass-fed cows. It’s not 100%, so they can’t advertise it on the label – still, good enough for me.

What are the benefits of Bulletproof coffee?

  • When you switch out your milk for butter in your coffee, you get 3.4 times more antioxidants
  • Butter contains butyric acid, which lowers inflamation and heals your gut.

Not convinced yet?

  • A study on rats found that coffee combined with a high fat diet, led to decreases in body weight, fat and liver triglycerides
  • Adding fat to your coffee helps you reach ketosis.

If you want to know more about how to bulletproof your life instead of just your coffee, read “Bulletproof Diet” by David Asprey on Blinkist in 15 minutes!

Blinkist is the greatest app I discovered recently on the App shop. Sign up for free and check it out!

Blinkist has over 2,000 books–in–blinks with 40 new titles added each month. Read or listen and get the key ideas from the best non-fiction books in 15 minutes. I love it!

Ketosis

Ketosis is a metabolic state where the body burns fat for energy instead of sugar.

Some people try to reach ketosis by avoiding carbohydrates in their diet, but another trick is, adding butter or MCT oil or even both to your coffee. It makes your coffee bulletproof and will help your body burn more fat as an energy source.

A ketone level of 0.6 mM* indicates ketosis. Typically, circulating levels of ketones are at ~0.1 mM in the average person after an overnight fast.
Dave Asprey who is the author of the book “Bulletproof Diet”, describes that after drinking a cup of bulletproof coffee, the blood ketone level can reach 0.7mM within 30 minutes.
People on low-carb diets have to restrict their intake of carbohydrates for three days before they can reach the same level.

*mM stands for millimolar. It’s the measuring unit of concentrations expressing the number of moles of the substance (here ketones) present in a defined volume of solution: A 1 millimolar (1 mM) solution contains 1 millimole per litre (1 mmol/l).

Optimum blood ketone levels for nutritional ketosis range from 0.5 to 3.0 mM,
according to Volek and Phinney in their best-selling book “The Art and Science of Low-Carbohydrate Living”.

C8 MCT Oil

It is made from coconut or palm oil and has 18 times more medium-chain triglycerides than regular coconut oil.

Medium–chain triglycerides are a form of saturated fatty acid that has numerous health benefits, ranging from improved cognitive function to better weight management.

Antioxidants

Antioxidants help neutralize harmful free radicals in your body by donating an electron to the free radical’s unpaired electron.

If there are no antioxidants present, free radicals take electrons from healthy cells in the body, causing oxidative stress.

The apples above demonstrate how oxidative stress breaks down your cells, causing premature aging and disease.

 

Best antioxidant rich foods
1) Goji berries 25000 ORAC* score
2) Dark chocolate 21000 ORAC score
3) Pecan nuts 17000 ORAC score
4) Wild blueberries 14000 ORAC score
5) Elderberries 14000 ORAC score
6) Artichokes 9400 ORAC score
7) Cranberries 9500 ORAC score
8) Kidney beans 8400 ORAC score
9) Blackberries 5300 ORAC score
10) Coriander 5100 ORAC score

*ORAC stands for Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity. It’s a lab test that attempts to quantify the “total antioxidant capacity” (TAC) of a food.