Well, what if you made better choices throughout your life so you took fewer hits over the course of decades? Then when you got to the age of seventy you might look and feel more like fifty because you simply suffered less damage. You’re never going to be able to avoid all the cuts—again, simply breathing creates some amount of wear and tear over time. It’s a matter of preventing as much damage as possible, which happens to dovetail nicely with the first rule of biohacking: Remove the things that make you weak. This is in and of itself a powerful anti-aging strategy.
When your mitochondria start to slow down and create an excess of free radicals, the result is widespread chronic inflammation throughout your body. Inflammation is such a hot topic in the field of longevity that you probably already know how closely it’s linked to aging. When I was sick and old as a young man, I knew I was inflamed, but I had no clue this stemmed from mitochondrial dysfunction, nor did I know that inflammation was more than a painful annoyance. I had no idea that inflammation creates the ideal circumstances for each of the Four Killers to thrive.
HEART DISEASE
A condition known as atherosclerosis, hardening of the arteries, is the first obvious clinical sign that heart disease has started. But what causes this? A thin layer of cells called the endothelium lines your arteries. When the endothelium is damaged, fats can cross into the arterial wall and form plaques. This is bad enough, but when your immune system picks up on the fact that this is happening, it creates chemical messengers called inflammatory cytokines to attract white blood cells to those plaques. This is an inflammatory immune response. When those plaques rupture because they are so inflamed, blood clots form, and these clots are the real cause of most heart attacks and strokes.
While some doctors are hesitant to definitively state that inflammation causes heart disease, it’s hard to refute the evidence that inflammation is a big step in the disease’s process, and most functional medicine practitioners now identify inflammation as a bigger health risk than cholesterol levels. In a landmark study conducted by researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital that followed ten thousand participants for twenty-five years, the data revealed that participants who reduced their inflammation levels also significantly lowered their risk of cardiovascular disease and the need for heart surgery without any other medical interventions.5
A new study out of the University of Colorado at Boulder shows that your gut bacteria actually play a role in the inflammation behind atherosclerosis.6 As animals (and likely humans) age, changes to gut bacteria harm the vascular system and make arteries stiffer. That stiffening came from inflammation. The gut bacteria of older mice actually produced three times the normal amount of an inflammatory compound called trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO). When researchers used antibiotics to knock out the old mice’s gut bacteria, their vascular systems magically returned to those of young mice. The researchers concluded, “The fountain of youth may actually lie in the gut.” After following the lifestyle recommendations in this book, I am happy to report that my last test showed that I had zero species of gut bacteria that produce this harmful compound!
Even more mind-blowing, a 2017 study out of the University of Connecticut in Storrs revealed that the fat molecules that form plaques in your arteries come not from the fat in the food you eat, but directly from bad gut bacteria.7 This turns everything that conventional doctors tell us about dietary cholesterol on its head and means you have permission to laugh when people repeat the myth that a “plant-based” diet is better because it doesn’t contain saturated fats like butter that will somehow “stick to” your arteries. It also shows the importance of healthy gut bacteria and mitochondria for a long and energetic life. (More on this in chapter 11.)
We know that the mitochondria in our cells, which themselves evolved from bacteria, communicate with the bacteria in our gut. Bacteria communicate with one another via chemicals (like hormones), light, or physical movement. They even gather around and trade bits of their genetic code in a microscopic swap meet for bacteria superpowers. This is called a plasmid level exchange. Imagine a group of Marvel superheroes hanging out at headquarters. Wolverine says to Spider-Man, “Do you want my ability to grow claws? I’ll trade you for your super speed.” This happens constantly in our guts and in the world around us, which is why drug-resistant bacteria spread so rapidly. It’s also why we must end industrial livestock practices that require antibiotics. The bad bacteria that evolve in that environment find their way into your gut and make it hard for you to live well for a long time.
So there is clearly an inflammatory and gut bacterial connection to heart disease. Plus, we know that when you have the right kind of bacteria in your gut they can actually transform the foods you eat into short-chain fatty acids, which are highly anti-inflammatory. Nurturing healthy gut bacteria is one of the most important things you can do to become Super Human, and you’ll learn how later.
Look, I remember what it felt like when my doctor, complete with white lab coat, looked right at me and said in a matter-of-fact voice, “You are at a high risk for heart attack and stroke.” I recall the bewilderment and fear in my gut as I stared my own mortality in the face. That happened when I was still in my twenties, and thanks to the information in this book, it is not an issue for me anymore. But even when I was just a kid, I had symptoms of cardiovascular issues, specifically blood pressure instability, a condition normally reserved for much older people. When I stood up quickly, my blood pressure was too low to keep oxygen in my brain. This caused me to start seeing stars and feel extremely fatigued. As a youngster, I would lean my head forward after getting out of a car in order to avoid seeing stars. I was so used to this that I thought it was how everybody lived.
Now I know these were symptoms of postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS, which is often triggered by toxic mold exposure but can also happen with age. In either case, inflammation disrupts the line of communication between the nervous system and the endocrine (hormonal) system. The disruption of these signals leads to fatigue and blood pressure instability, and can lead to symptoms of attention deficit disorder (ADD)8 and Asperger’s syndrome,9 which I certainly exhibited as well.
This manifested in my not knowing the names of most of the kids in my class, even at the end of the school year. I had zero facial recognition and no understanding of basic social skills. My body was filtering out those signals to conserve energy because my biology was so trashed. Our bodies will always prioritize survival over socialization, and I didn’t have enough energy to go around.
It may be hard to comprehend how cognitive symptoms could be connected to vascular issues, but as you will learn in this book, everything in the body is connected. And that includes the diseases that age us and too often lead to premature death.
DIABETES
While the idea of inflammation “causing” heart disease remains controversial, we have definitive proof that type 2 diabetes is an inflammatory disease,10 and having diabetes dramatically increases your risk of cardiovascular issues. More than ten years ago, researchers discovered that when macrophages—immature white blood cells that play a key role in the immune response—find their way into otherwise healthy tissues, they release inflammatory substances called cytokines that cause nearby cells to become insulin resistant.11
In insulin resistance, the body has an impaired response to insulin, which is normally responsible for moving sugar out of the blood and into your cells. The result is that your blood sugar levels are not well regulated and become chronically high. Because chronic high blood sugar will eventually lead to diabetes—a disease in which the pancreas is unable to produce enough insulin to keep up with the body’s demands—a diagnosis of insulin resistance is most often accompanied by the label prediabetic.