My action plan to boost my longevity: Becoming Super Human, by Dave Asprey – A Book Review

We are taking a break from sharing the ins and outs of our nomadic journey with another book review which is life-changing (pun intended). I am talking about the New York Times Bestseller book from the father of biohacking: Dave Asprey. If you know Dave you should have heard about his book that came out in 2019: Super Human.

In this article I will be going over the book Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever that I read in February 2021. I will explain why I decided to read this book, what the book is about, give you a high-level summary, share my takeaways from it as well as the specific action items I plan to implement this year from it. (Reading is one thing, taking notes and building an action plan from it is one of the best ways to apply the key concepts you learned from it so the book can actually have a significant impact on your life).

“The first rule of biohacking: remove the things that make you weak.”

Dave Asprey

So, without further ado, let’s dig in!

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Why Super Human?

I was looking for Dave Asprey’s latest book (Fast This Way: Burn Fat, Heal Inflammation, and Eat Like the High-Performing Human You Were Meant to Be) on my public library catalog. As this book wasn’t yet available, I stumbled upon this book and decided to give it a read!

Book summary

What is the book about?

In a nutshell, Super Human is a three-part book that gives you actionable tips to live a longer and healthier life. The book teaches you what to do to avoid dying, how to age backwards, and how to heal faster with the goal of living up to 180 years according to the provocative goal for the author.

Let’s go through the content of the book

Part I – What is going to kill us?

Dave Asprey explains what actually powers our body (our mitochondria) and how chronic inflammation (triggered by our mitochondria slowing down) will prepare us to slowly die.

In this first part of the book, he identifies the Four Killers as Heart Diseases, Diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and Cancer (which you probably already know about) and shares that you have a 23% chance of dying from heart disease, 25% from Diabetes, 10% from Alzheimer’s, and 20% from cancer (with 40% chance of getting it)

He then goes one step further by sharing his Seven Pillars of Aging which are:

1. Shrinking Tissues – As you age, your body can’t efficiently replace the cell of your tissue which lead to atrophy or break down. This also applies to your brain when it can’t replace neurons affecting your emotion, memory, and overall nervous system.
2. Mitochondrial Mutations – Your mitochondria are the power plant of your cells. It has its own DNA (different from your human DNA) that has a limited ability to repair itself. So when it is being damaged, the consequence is directly affecting your body to produce energy. And once you can’t make enough energy to power your body you will die.

“It’s a lot easier to avoid damage to your mitochondria than it is to reverse it later.”

Dave Asprey

1. Zombie Cells – When your cells can no longer divide they are usually getting killed. As you age, this mechanism doesn’t always work resulting in malfunctioning cells creating chronic inflammation in your body.
2. Cellular Straitjackets – When our tissues lose their elasticity, they become stiff and your body has to work harder to push blood throughout your circulatory system.
3. Extracellular Junk – With age, junk products build up both inside and outside your cell which leads to the formation of plaque-causing aging and diseases by getting in the way of healthy cellular interactions.
4. Junk Building Inside Cells – Each cell in your body has the ability to destroy unwanted material keeping your cell-free from junk. As you age, these systems stop functioning properly, keeping junk inside your cell, affecting your cells’ performance.
5. Telomere Shortening – Telomeres are end caps for your DNA to protect your chromosomes from fraying with wear and tear. As they deteriorate over time, your cells are no longer protected.

There are basically 3 elements Dave Asprey recommends focusing on if you don’t want to die: Food, Sleep, and Light. 

We won’t spoil too much about the specific action he recommends. That being said, we will leave you with the following test.

When it comes to leaving a healthy life, you might already do (or know the benefits of doing) the following:

• Consuming antioxidants to fight off free radicals
• Managing stress through yoga, meditation
• Avoiding any fried food
• Eating organic food (over conventional)

Correct? But have you heard (and considered addressing) any of the following?

• Skipping nightshade (tomatoes, potatoes)
• Fasting to stimulate autophagy?
• Supplementing with vitamin D
• Knowing which food is not compatible with your biology
• Practicing a cyclical ketogenic diet to let your metabolism be flexible burning fat as an energy source
• Tracking your sleep & improve your sleep hygiene
• Reducing your blue light exposure at night

We are definitely doing some of the above and plan on introducing some more in 2021. Keep reading as we will reveal what we plan to do in 2021 to improve our longevity.

Part II – How to age backward

In the second part of the book, Dave Asprey goes further than preventing us from dying and allows us to age backward. 

Some of my highlights from this part of the books are:

• A deep dive into how the brain works 
  • Why the biggest risk of developing Alzheimer’s is not gene-related but lifestyle-related with chronic inflammation, insulin resistance, and exposure to toxin making to top offenders. 
  • How light therapy can reverse the effect of Alzheimer and why medication is probably the last thing you want to try
  • Why always being on ketosis can lead to developing insulin resistance
  • Lion’s Mane Mushroom (a staple of Chinese cuisine) 
• The poisonous effects of heavy metals. Did you know that plants like kale and cabbage are exceptionally good at soaking up metals from the soil? An excellent solution to detox from them includes using activated charcoal as well as sweating for a long period of time (through high-intensity exercise or the use of a sauna).
• Understanding your hormones. How they impact your longevity, what causes hormonal imbalance, how to boost your hormones, and why you don’t want to trust your doctor when it comes to reviewing your hormonal results based on your age
• How our teeth are a window into our nervous system and how a misaligned jaw can negatively affect sleep quality (& produce sleep apnea)! 
• How the bacteria in our gut control us and make us who we are! And how the food we eat has a direct impact on our stress, inflammation, mental state, and our overall well-being. Plus how wrong our common conceptions of food are (such as fat is bad, sugar is not the enemy, how toxic are lectins and the list goes on…).
  
  Food diet has been one of my favorite topics for the past decade, especially when bundled with fasting (which I have done consistently for more than 5 years now!). This book is a good reminder (and introduction) to these topics if you are new to them. I have cut processed food, (most) non-natural sugars, and increased the amount of fat many years ago, and cut out most lectins. – (Check out The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in “Healthy” Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain for a deep dive into the dangers of lectins in our food)

Part III – How to heal like a deity

In this last part of the book, Dave Asprey provides various methods to help you heal faster, which is important as you age since this ability slows down. The section is divided into the following chapters:

• Virgin cells and Vampire blood – How stem cell treatment is a thing and can boost your longevity, how to enhance them. How spending time in nature (& forest bathing – something we are a big fan of) can help boost your own natural killer cells and enhancement your immune system.’
• Don’t look like an alien – What you can apply (externally) to your skin and your hair to help them strive with solutions like cold exposure, collagen supplementation, eating food with polyphenols (for your skins) and ashwagandha, curcumin, vitamin E, stress management and getting your hormone in balance (for your hair). 
• Hack your longevity like a Russian – In this last chapter, Dave Asprey goes into various performance-enhancing drugs he tried himself and that has been backed by some level of research that is quite promising about increasing your longevity. (Note: this is by far the most controversial part of the book IMHO as it includes substance-like forms of opioids that have been apparently widely used by some of the city’s elite). 

Bottom line

After reading this book, you will be equipped with a new set of tools to incorporate to your day-to-day life to enhance your life and live as healthy as possible: 

• By rebooting (or upgrading) the food you eat, improving your sleep, and controlling the light you are exposed to, you will reduce your chance of dying. 

“High-performing people know that getting their food right is the number one human upgrade”

Dave Asprey

• By supplementing your diet with specific compounds, checking your teeth & jaw alignment, making sure your hormones are at their peak, and understanding what is good for your gut bacteria, you will likely age backward. 
• By rejuvenating your stem cells, using cold exposure, collagen supplementation, or even trying out some performance-enhancing drugs, you could potentially boost your longevity even further and heal like a deity! 

Book review

What I love about this book is debunking common myths around aging and providing affordable and day-to-day changes that will let you live considerably healthier and longer than most people. Each problem is explained using research and solutions are provided to address each of them which are also backed by the author’s experience.

Having a set of actionable items at the end of each chapter also makes it easier to build an action plan for yourself.

This book is also a great reminder to everyone that our lives should not be the sum of our career + salary and should instead of a good dose of mental health, physical health, free time (to reduce our stress), and liking what we do every single day! 

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My Action Plan

After reading this book here are a few actions I wrote down for 2021. Some of them are already scheduled on my calendar. 

I divided my plan into mesures, experiments and food upgrades.

“Making small changes in your environment can really ramp up what’s possible for you. Perfection not required.”

Dave Asprey

Measure

Since you don’t know what you don’t know I like to regularly perform detailed blood work as a way to see how my body is performing and Dave Asprey then agrees to rely on blood tests to get some baseline about your health. For my next test I plan to add an advanced hormonal panel (including T3 + Reverse T3). Review Vitamin D + zinc levels.

I will get some of my hair analyzed to understand how much metal toxicity I have in my body. 

Lastly, if I can get back to the USA, I will consider taking a Viome at-Home Gut Microbiome Test to understand what is my gut microbiome made and identify which food is compatible with it. 

Experiment

I am going to experiment will the following activities:

• Try oil pulling and brushing with activated charcoal to sop up toxins from my month
• Wear my night guard multiple times a week (rather than a couple of times a month)
• Try a DHT-blocking shampoo
• Get stricter about my nighttime routine to go to bed always at the same time
• Buying another pair of blue light glasses like the TrueDark Daylights Elite since Mrs. NN enjoys wearing the blue light glasses we currently have. 
• Incorporate HITT type of exercise in my exercise routine
• Practice Kegel exercises on a regular basis

Diet upgrades

Food 

• Eat more food containing polyphenols, vitamin C, and antioxidants (green tea, dark chocolate, ashwagandha, curcumin)
• Cut the fried stuff I occasionally eat.
• Up my intake of prebiotic fiber, resistant starch.
• Watch my occasional sugar intake
• Use Chinese Danshen + Hu Shou Wu herbs (for healthy hair)
• Doubling down on Lion’s Mane Mushroom as part of our diet (for brain enhancement) they are widely available here in Taiwan

Supplements

• Supplement with grass-fed or pastured collagen protein via protein powder.
• Supplement with Vitamin E (for hair health)
• L-tyrosine, vitamin D3, vitamin K2, vitamin A, and zinc supplement to achieve healthy hormone level (based on blood test results)
• Carbon60 Plus
•  Chlorella tablets (when eating fish to reduce metal absorption)
• Use Brain Octane Oil when eating carbs to keep a low level of ketones present in my body most of the time
• Boron supplement for stem cell health. 

What about you?

Are you interested in living a healthy and long life? Do your day-to-day activities greatly add or remove years in your life? 

If you answer YES to both questions, you might want to consider picking up a copy of Dave Asprey’s book Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever. (Disclaimer: by clicking and buying a copy from the previous link, we will get a small kickback of your purchase from Amazon, at no additional cost to you).