Episode 130: Biohacking for Moms & Reversing Aging with Bulletproof’s Dave Asprey Copyright © 2018 Wellness Mama · All Rights Reserved 1 Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast. This episode is brought to you by My Green Mattress. If you’ve been reading Wellness Mama, you know that I have used and recommended natural and organic mattresses for years. And I’ve tried a lot of them. We spend a third to a half of our time in our beds, especially children. So this is one great place to optimize and reduce exposure to harmful chemicals. We’ve tried, like I said, several different mattresses over the years and I love all the ones that we’ve tried. They’re all natural options. But I’ve been getting a lot of requests for a more budget friendly option that is good for kids. Which is why when our littlest needed a bigger mattress, we ordered one from My Green Mattress. They are GOT and GOLS certified, they are GREENGUARD certified and they’re completely natural. They’re also much less expensive than a lot of mattresses. So you can check them out and find out more at wellnessmama.com/go/green-mattress. This podcast is brought to you by myobuddy. This thing is one of my daily go-to’s for relaxation because it combines the benefits of infrared heat, percussive massage and vibrational therapy for what I can only describe as a mixture of deep tissue massage and myofascial release all in one device. It has really reduced my muscle tension and my need for massage and many people with conditions like MS, chronic fatigue, etc are using this for muscle relief. Also, many athletes use it for faster recovery. I personally find the biggest benefit for relaxation and for fascia work, but you can try it out at wellnessmama.com/go/myobuddy and make sure to check the show notes for a special discount. Katie: Hello, and welcome to The Healthy Moms Podcast. I'm Katie from wellnessmama.com, and I am here today with someone I cannot wait to chat with, Dave Asprey is the founder and CEO of Bulletproof. He's the creator of Bulletproof coffee which you've probably tried. He's host of the award-winning podcast Bulletproof Radio, and he's the New York Times bestselling author of "Headstrong". He's also a dad of two, and he's taken his background in computer technology and applied it to the body, to help thousands of people perform at a higher level. And he's here today, we're gonna talk about bio hacks you can do at home, how to improve your mitochondria, and how we can give our kids the best foundation for lifelong health. So welcome, Dave. Thanks so much for being here. Dave: Katie, it's a pleasure. Katie: Awesome I would love to hear a little bit of your story because I've heard it personally. But I'd love for everyone else to hear it as well because I've known you for a few years and in those few years, I literally...I think you're aging backwards you seem to get younger. But I know that hasn't always been the case, so can you kinda take us through your journey and what life was like before you became the Bulletproof guy? Dave: Oh, sure. I used to weigh 300 pounds, and I've lost 100 pounds of fat and since then put on a little bit of muscle, but losing that much weight was a huge thing for me. Problem is this all started because I was old when I was young. I was diagnosed with arthritis when I was 14. I was obese as a teenager and by the time I got into my mid-20s, I had tried working out six days a week, an hour and a half a day eating a low fat, low- calorie diet and I couldn't lose the weight. And I just had this voice in my head that, Oh, maybe it's because I'm not trying hard enough. Maybe I need to Copyright © 2018 Wellness Mama · All Rights Reserved 2 eat even less or work out seven days a week or whatever it was." And one day, I just got to this conclusion that maybe what I'm doing just doesn't work, and I sort of felt betrayed by the medical profession. And I went to the doctor and said, I'm getting brain fog. I can't pay attention at work, my career is taking off, but I'm really worried. And he basically looked at me and said, "Maybe you should try and lose some weight." I'm like, "How?" He said, "Eat healthy." What does that mean? And he had nothing to offer me. And I said, "Well, vitamin C makes me feel better." And he said, "Stop, it could kill you." And I said what about Linus Pauling? Linus Pauling is something I would expect a doctor to know about. This is a guy who won two Nobel Prizes who took 90 grams of vitamin C a day. And the doctor looked me and said, "Linus who?" And I said, "You're fired." And I walked out the door, and I spent $300,000, in the next five years hacking my own biology. And just deciding I'm going to spend four hours a night until I literally fall asleep in my computer learning how the body works. Because if I can hack the Internet, I can hack this. And eventually, I got to the point where I was getting younger and my brain works better now in my mid-40s than it did in my mid-20s. And I started writing saying, well five people knew what I know now. If five people could pick that up in their 20s, it would so radically change their life and my blog will be worth it. And it turns out I reach 10 million people a month, and well now my blog became "Bulletproof," and a line of products that things I couldn't buy, things I wanted to use. But it all came from this idea of having a really old person's brain with what would be considered early onset Alzheimer's or cognitive dementia or just brain dysfunction, and biological dysfunction, and being unwilling to put up with it anymore. Katie: That's incredible and I'm curious, so you said you spent $300,000 and many years on this process. I'd love to hear a couple of the things that you tried that worked really well, and a few that maybe were complete fails. Dave: Sure. At this point, the number is substantially north of a million. This was going back to the beginning of the blog. What I did is I just realized because I'd had so much cognitive dysfunction, just so much pain and waking up feeling like I hadn't slept, and my back always hurt. My skin was always puffy, and I just I didn't feel right. And I realized the most important thing I could do was invest in that. So I would always take probably 20% of whatever I made and put it into my own biology, assuming that's the best investment I could make. And what I did at the beginning is...okay, I'm 26, so this is going back 20 years or so, I went to an anti-aging doctor. And you don't see a lot of people in mid-20s going to an aging doctor. But this was the first guy to get a full hormone workup. And we figured out oh look, you have less testosterone than your mom. And a lot more estrogen and your thyroid isn't working, and you're actually at high risk for stroke and heart attack. They actually diagnosed that before I was 30. And you're pre-diabetic even though you work out a lot and you eat what you think is a healthy diet, and all these things were sort of like, "What's going on?" So getting the data helped, and back then this was quite expensive. And I also would go out and I tried a lot of different supplements, some of which were really effective and some of which weren't. I learned about a light therapy 15 years ago and bought my own devices and now light therapy is finally coming of age. And I started looking at okay, what's going on inside my head? I went to Tibet to learn meditation from the Copyright © 2018 Wellness Mama · All Rights Reserved 3 masters, that was where I first tried yak butter tea. Which was the genesis for the idea of Bulletproof coffee, which I came back and did a lot of tweaking on that original idea. And through the course of exploring what was going on in my head, what's going on in my biology and trying things like ozone therapy which was profoundly effective, and learning about mitochondrial function and how to turn that back on. It was literally thousands of little things, and what I found that was most important was stop doing the things that make you weak, and then do the things that make you strong. There are so many of us right now who walk around telling ourselves that we're doing something that makes us stronger and maybe it does. But quite often at the same time, we're doing something that also makes us weak at the same time. So we get random results or it's uncomfortable or we don't do it. So it's just less work to quit harming yourself than it is to make yourself better. Katie: Yeah. That makes so much sense, and you talk about mitochondria a lot. I just read "Headstrong" recently and you talk a lot in "Headstrong" about mitochondria. But to kinda start at the beginning, for anyone who's not familiar with them any more than freshman biology, can you kinda go give us a rundown of what they do in the body why they're so important? Dave: Sure in seventh grade maybe you might hear this thing, that mitochondria are the power plants of your cells, and there's a few of these things floating around inside each cell. And they used to be ancient bacteria. Well, the story we tell ourselves is that 2 billion years ago, we harnessed these organisms so that we could have energy from food and air. But the real story is that 2 billion years ago there was a cell floating around in the ocean some kind of a creature, probably a parasite they're not really sure, and that's our cells today. And then these ancient little bacteria found the cell and they're like, "Hey, that looks like a great Petri dish, let's move in and take over." And they did. And they've been running things ever since. So the mitochondria are inside almost all the cells in your body except for your red blood cells. You have up to 15,000 of them in your neurons, in your brain, in your eyes, and in your heart. And women interestingly have 100,000 mitochondria per cell in parts of their ovaries. And what mitochondria do is not just make energy for you, they sense the environment around you and change what your cells are allowed to do. And what they will do even when genes get expressed based on real-time changes in your environment. What they're doing is they're working to keep their Petri dish alive, which is you, and they run very basic bacterial processes. And the three things that mitochondria care about are the same three things that a single cell bacteria floating around in a lake would care about. Number one, run away from, kill or hide from scary things. Number two eat everything, number three have sex with everything else. And this is a great recipe for keeping a species of bacteria or a species of mammals alive forever. Make sure you don't starve, make sure nothing kills you, and make sure you reproduce the species. And I'll just tell you, Katie, everything I've ever done that I'm ashamed of was a mitochondrial behavior, not something I necessarily chose to do. Because they are still in there. There's a quadrillion of them more of them than there are cells in your body, more of them than there are bacteria in your gut. And they are making micro-decisions every second. And they decide things like, will you get Alzheimer's, will you get cancer, are you going to have a food craving right now, are you going to make hormones tonight, will you get deep sleep tonight, will you form new neurons, what will your skin look like. And they do this based on their interpretation of the environment around you Copyright © 2018 Wellness Mama · All Rights Reserved 4 and inside of you. Katie: Yeah, that makes perfect sense too and I love that because in the book you talk about that a lot, how like your mitochondria controls so much. And you mentioned like for instance, for someone trying to lose weight or just eat healthier that giving into cravings is not a moral failing. But a lot of people I think, feel like it is. So can you explain that a little deeper, of like how this affects our lives like that on a daily basis and what we can do about it? Dave: It's funny that you asked that because it's why I call the book "Headstrong" because part of the word headstrong is that it's about being a little bit stubborn, but it's also about making your head strong. So will power itself is your ability to make decisions about what to do. The problem is that making decisions takes energy and energy comes from mitochondria. So if something lowers their ability to make energy, or if you have low blood sugar, let's say, you will have less willpower by definition. Because willpower takes the electricity that's made by these cells and you have less electricity. So right when you're gonna call in your willpower to deny a craving, you don't have enough charge in your battery to use the willpower. So then, someone sets a cookie in front of you, and I remember this so well when I weighed 300 pounds in the afternoon meetings. And I'd say, "I'm not gonna eat cookies because they're gonna make me fat even though I'm already fat." And the little voice in my head would say, "Eat the cookie." And then my willpower would kick in and say, "No." And then the voice would come back stronger and say, "Eat the cookie." And I'd say, "No." And then we'd go back and forth like you do with a two-year-old. And then a little while later I'm like, "Okay, I'll just eat half the cookie." And then I would feel like such a failure because I wasn't strong enough. But what was going on is that the MSG and sugar that I had in my lunch caused a blood sugar crash. So the part of me that was screaming for the cookie was trying to keep my body from starving to death, and it was giving me these signals that got progressively stronger. And at the same time, it was taking away my energy to say no. So no wonder I gave in to the cravings. It's a normal thing to do, but the cravings were not coming from me, they were coming from ancient bacteria that are running things. And when you realize that there's a separate consciousness inside of you that wants to do these three things and that you can control the environment, so it won't get in your way that's how you get on top of these cravings. When you eat enough of the right kinds of fat suddenly your cells don't feel like they're starving even if your blood sugar moves a little bit up or down, and then you don't get the craving. So you don't have to use the energy to say no to the craving, and then you can congratulate yourself for being a good person and having more willpower, or you could just say, "Well, I hacked that problem so the voice in my head didn't tell me to eat the cookie." When I do what I do with the Bulletproof diet and especially with a Bulletproof coffee that contains an oil called Brain octane, that raises energy in the blood that doesn't come from sugar. There is no voice in my head. You put the cookie in front of me and it's like actually, I'm full. I don't really want the cookie. And for me, that was very liberating as an obese person that was pre-diabetic. It used to be such a huge part of my life, when I'm I gonna have lunch, what's gonna be next? And there was always a little process running in my brain saying, "You know, what's the next meal? What are you gonna eat? How are you gonna keep your energy up?" And it's completely different when you can just look at food and say, "If I don't eat this meal, I'm Copyright © 2018 Wellness Mama · All Rights Reserved 5 gonna be fine. Nothing's going to happen. And if I eat this meal, I'm gonna choose to eat the stuff that makes me feel good and taste good." But it isn't born out of a sense of desperation or like I'm going to die or I'm going to crash if I don't get it. I never had that when I was young, and it's pretty liberating to just get control of your biology that way. Katie: Yeah, and I've heard it explained as well like for someone who's having those kinds of cravings, and has those kinds of biochemical issues, it's literally like if you try to tell yourself, "Just don't breathe for a while." Like eventually your body's response is going to make you do it because like you said, there's a biochemical thing happening in your body, and it's not just your willpower at that point. I think just that alone can be very liberating to people, just to understand that so they don't feel like a moral failure. Dave: It is not a moral failing if you are fat, and I will tell you fat people, having been one for much of my life, are the best willpower athletes in existence. And it's because when your body is taking the energy you're supposed to use for thinking and feeling and moving and breathing, and instead of doing that it's putting it into excess fat storage, that means that you're chronically deprived of energy that should be going into activity. And you have less free willpower. At the same time, you are using that willpower to tell yourself not to eat and to do everything else that you're supposed to do in your life. Like have normal emotional responses, and not yell at people you care about all that kind of stuff. And it was just really liberating for me to understand oh, this is a separate consciousness trying to keep my body alive, and the fact that this happens isn't a bad thing. And even to this day, I do not experience cravings, unless I'm in a really toxic environment. And there are certain things in my case, one of the reasons I was fat and my mitochondria broke, is that I lived in a house that had toxic mold when I was a child, and again as a young man. Toxic mold breaks your mitochondria and causes you to gain weight no matter what you eat. So I was dealing with less energy and more fat and blaming myself for it. But to this very day if I walk into a moldy building and I stay in there for a little while, I will get a sugar craving and what that is, is my body going we just lost our ability, my mitochondria saying, "We lost our ability to make energy the way we did before. Something got in the way. Could you please eat some sugar." And you know what I do is kind of amazing, I eat some sugar. And I do that once and I have the right kinds of fat at the same time, and I take toxins bidding substances and mitochondria enhancers, and I'm back up and running again in a couple hours. If I didn't quote "give into that craving," I didn't listen to my body, I would actually crash harder than I normally do. It used to take me a month after I would be exposed to really toxic environment before I'd feel like my brain was back online. Now, it's a couple hours because I understand the biochemistry. There are hundreds of millions of people who walk around with brain fog much of the time or some of the time. And oftentimes it's an environmental toxins, sometimes it's toxins formed in the gut, sometimes it's because they're eating a bunch of fried food, and MSG, or food chemicals that are poisoning their brain, or it's just aging mitochondria dysfunction. All of that is hackable and it's not even that hard when you understand the system and you have the tools at your disposal. I wrote my last couple books specifically to just show people this is what no one told me when I was 25 and struggling to focus in a meeting, no matter what I did. I could bite my lip. Copyright © 2018 Wellness Mama · All Rights Reserved 6 I could squeeze my fingernails into my palm to try and stay awake, and stay focused and just apply every bit of willpower I had, and still not remember anything in the meeting. Because my biology wasn't working. When you realize your body doesn't listen to you very well, it listens to the world around you, and after it does that it listens to you to see if you have chronic anxiety which it can detect through the way your heartbeat changes. Well, okay change the environment around you and inside of you including the food that you eat, including the air that you're breathing, including the light that you're exposed to. Making simple changes that way can radically improve the amount of willpower you have and the amount of energy you have. And the side effect of that is you might grow abs and you might need new pants, and that's not a bad thing. Katie: Yeah, I love that you're bringing that voice to the conversation and taking that away from what for so long was just like calories or macronutrients or these things that people would get hung up on. And I'm curious, so you've done a lot of research on this and also trial on yourself, but what do you think are some of the biggest factors that are affecting mitochondrial function kind of across the board for all of us? Dave: Right now 48% of people under age 40 have early onset mitochondrial dysfunction, and everyone over 40 has mitochondrial dysfunction called aging. And I would argue that's also early onset because we don't have to age the way we do. So some of this happens just because over time your mitochondria wear out and they don't replace themselves. So one of the things you can do to force them to replace themselves is you need to teach these quadrillion bacteria floating around, they work as a system but they're also a bunch of individual bacteria that are now linked into our cells. You teach them you know what, if you can't make energy quickly you'll have to die. So you send them this rule that says only the strong survive. One of the ways you do that is high-intensity interval training. And here's the deal, I have two young kids, I have basically three full-time jobs. I'm New York Times bestselling author, I run an award-winning podcast, and a venture-backed food company, Bulletproof, right? So these are all things that take up more time than they should. So I don't wanna spend two hours a day exercising. High-intensity interval training means that once a week, you sprint for 60 to 90 seconds rest for a minute, and then do it again. And I describe that in "Headstrong" there's a benefit to actually laying down between the sprints to cause your body to recover even faster, but it's that intense exhaustion. Same thing if I'm gonna lift something for weightlifting, I do that once a week and I do it usually with a computer. We have a whole lab in Santa Monica now, we just opened last week actually to the public, where you can exhaust your muscles as fast as possible. The point here is you're talking about 15 minutes a week of exercise, but you send this really strong signal to the mitochondria that says, "If you can't produce all the energy I want right away, you're too weak. You can die, and form a new, fresh, young, healthy mitochondria capable of producing energy that will be demanded by the world we live in." The other thing that's in the book that's really helpful, is something that people listening will not like me for, for the first four days. And every morning at the end of your shower when the water is hitting your face and your chest turn it on full blast cold water. You'll last about eight seconds and swear the first time, and that's your mitochondria telling you that you're going to die from the cold water. You know that's a lie but you're gonna get out of the water. The second day you'll probably go 20 seconds, the third day 40 seconds. And after the fourth or fifth day suddenly, you know Copyright © 2018 Wellness Mama · All Rights Reserved 7 what this doesn't hurt at all. In fact, it feels really good. And what happened there is that thing that says, "You're going to die," was not you going to die. It was your mitochondria saying the weak ones of us are going to die. But as long as you consistently do this you feel supercharged when you get out of the shower. Your skin looks better and you burn hundreds more calories throughout the day because of a brief cold exposure. You just told those mitochondria, "If you can't make enough heat to stay warm, get out of the way. There are other things you can do." And there's something called intermittent fasting which is a powerful technique but one that's a bit risky for women. And in this technique, you don't eat for 18 hours a day effectively with...you sleep. You don't eat when you're asleep usually. And then, don't have breakfast. You can have coffee or tea, either black or there's a technique called Bulletproof intermittent fasting. We have only certain kinds of fat but no carbohydrates and no protein whatsoever, and then have a late lunch, which is around 2 or 3 p.m. And you eat a nice lunch and a nice dinner. And if you do that even a couple times a week, it just tells your mitochondria, "You better be willing and able to live for 18 hours without food." But if you do this every day, especially as a woman it tends to cause renal distress, it lowers sleep quality, and it can cause problems with the monthly cycle. So this is something to do a couple times a week. These are things that you just say, "Hey, it's time to be strong." And when you do that at the cellular level it rolls up and all of a sudden you have more willpower. You have more energy. You have less cravings. Your brain works better, your hormones work better, your skin looks better. And on top of that, one of the most important tools out there is something called ketosis. I think you've talked about it with your listeners before. But basically, your body has the ability to burn sugar as a primary fuel source, and it has the ability to burn fat as a primary fuel source. To go into this ketosis fat burning mode it takes about four days of eating low protein and very low carbohydrates and relatively high amounts of fat. And this is a good thing to go into sometimes. However, most of us with jobs and kids and busy lives don't necessarily do this very often. And I know because I've gone to the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine. I'm presenting to a room full of 3000 anti-aging doctors, and I say, "Raise your hand, how many of you have been in ketosis?" Every one of those doctors in the room raises their hand. They've at least tried to doing this low carb thing, and they know that it's good for them. And then I said, "All right, how many of you are in ketosis right now?" And you see like 20 hands go up. So we all know it's good but no one does it. The hack for that is an ingredient in Bulletproof Coffee, it's something you can get at Whole Foods, it's called Brain Octane Oil. This is an oil that comes from coconut oil, but it's about 5% of what's found in coconut oil. So you can't get enough of it from just eating coconut oil. And it causes your body to make ketones directly that will go into your blood as if you've been fasting for four days even though you didn't. So what I do...I do this for my kids, my wife who's a physician, and I do this every day. We pour a little bit of Brain Octane into whatever we're eating. And when I have Bulletproof coffee for breakfast which is my normal breakfast, it's in the coffee. But I'll pour it on my sushi. I'll pour it in my vegetables. I'll use in my salad dressings. So my body always has some fat burning molecules called ketones, and there's some blood glucose present. When you do this, any time your blood sugar goes down a little bit, you don't have the emergency response in Copyright © 2018 Wellness Mama · All Rights Reserved 8 the body anymore, because the cells are like, "I've got this backup energy source from fat." And that radically changes your appetite levels and they're even studies that show mild ketosis. Which is what I'm describing will change two different hormones that can radically change your relationship with food. One of those hormones is called ghrelin. and levels just very mild levels of ketosis the kind you can achieve with brain octane or by fasting, or by a high-fat, low carb diet. It changes ghrelin levels which makes you less hungry. And there's another hormone called CCK, and CCK is not brought to you by Calvin Klein even though it kind of sounds like it. It's the fullness hormone. And CCK levels go up when there are mild levels of ketosis in the blood. So you pour this stuff on your food or you go into the ketosis mode of the Bulletproof diet, some paleo diets. I know that your work, Katie, you talk about ketosis as well. Any of those ways to get into it will automatically mean you look at this food, and before you've heard the voice in your head saying, "Eat it or you'll die." And all of a sudden, the voice in your head says, "Actually, I've got enough energy right now. Like you could eat it or not. It doesn't really matter." To look at food and have the ability to make a rational choice about whether you wanna introduce that into your body, that is one of the most liberating things you can do. Because the guilt and the shame and the sort of beating yourself up because you ate that, back away. Because you're usually eating it because part of your body thought you're gonna die if you didn't eat it. And it was a reasonable thing to do. There are people with emotional eating disorders where you're eating for love or company or things like that, I'm not going about that. But a lot of times these cravings, these intense cravings, most of us don't even know the difference between hunger and cravings. Because we're constantly craving because we eat so-called healthy whole grains or eating chemicals or even types of vegetables that trigger intense cravings in us and we just don't know it. So my work has been around showing people how to turn up the energy available for your cells to make energy and turning down these things that cause cravings. And the side effect is less inflammation, less hunger and you typically lose weight without effort. But more importantly, you have the energy to bring it every day, the kind of energy that I was desperate for in my 20s that I had lost. I have more energy than I've ever had in my life, and I run circles around people 20 years younger than me. And I just love it because I built that, and it's not that hard when you have the right info. Katie: Yeah, I love it, and I bet there's a lot of women listening who are saying like, "That's all great. I'm not doing the cold thing because that's horrible and I don't do cold." And so I wanna like echo that because I was that way for a long time. I was like, "Nope, I'll do everything else. I don't like the cold, and we started doing ice baths. Like not just cold showers, but like full out sitting in a bathtub full of ice. And the first time, like you said, I could last like 10 seconds, and then the next time it was like a minute. And now like we'll do like 30 minutes ice baths on the weekend. It's like a challenge. But it really does, like the feeling that you get when you get out of that is absolutely incredible. It's second to none. And I'm also glad that you mentioned your kids because I was really hoping we could talk about this topic. I'm guessing you don't get to talk about it as much on "Bulletproof." But I know that you're very passionate about raising healthy, amazing children, and I've met at least your daughter and she's absolutely incredible. So I'd love to hear...like let's talk about parenting and your parenting strategy, what are some of the non-negotiables that you do with your kids to make sure they stay healthy? Copyright © 2018 Wellness Mama · All Rights Reserved 9 Dave: All right, I'm going to answer that. But first I'm going to be terribly rude and I'm gonna talk about boobs, is that okay? Katie: Go for it. Dave: Okay. My wife is a physician from Sweden. She couldn't make the conference this year because she actually had a concussion believe it or not. But our first book was about fertility, and I spent four years doing research to restore her fertility because she was infertile. And I really dug in on this stuff and we had our kids at 39 and 42. But one of the things that she's noticed from doing these cold showers, and things like that is, I mention the water hits you in the forehead and the chest is that you have much more youthful breasts as a result of doing the cold shower. And because she is from Sweden she said, "This is an old Swedish tradition that women would do, where they would use snow on their breasts." But a little bit of cold can go a long way towards maintaining youthfulness in a part of women that well, I think most women would like to keep them in the best shape they can. And that cold shower really helps because cold water causes collagen re-synthesis, which collagen is the connective tissue in your cells. So if you can have a tighter healthier skin on parts of the body that tend to sag especially if you have had kids, there's an extra benefit for women, that men don't usually get from those cold showers. Katie: That's awesome and for the face too, that's great if it improves collagen. Dave: Yeah, it really does Katie: That's an awesome thing to do. Dave: All right, so see that wasn't as bad as you thought it would be, right? Now, let's talk kids. I live on an organic farm. When my kids were young we decided to move up to Vancouver Island. And one of the reasons for that was that I wanted my kids to go to a Waldorf school, and I wanted them to be able to play outdoors for two hours a day. And about two months ago, I took my kids to San Francisco where I used to live, and we were wandering around downtown. And my daughter looked at me, she's 10, and she says, "Daddy, what do all the children do here for fun when they don't have a forest?" And she was looking around like what do you do here? It was almost like a foreign environment to her, and it was such an innocent cute comment. But one of the things that I think matters most for kids, is that they get the right building blocks so that they can learn to manage all the emotions that turn on as they hit different stages of childhood development. But if they have a voice in their head screaming at them, "You are starving right now," they have a hard time focusing. And they get these big emotional swings and they get amplified by their food. And then if kids are always on devices and they don't get time in nature, and time to just play and time to be, they get really, really stressed. And one of the things that stress does is it inhibits mitochondrial function. And I think that stress and toxins and just the lack of nature and bad diets are some of the reasons that we're seeing half of people under age 40, having poorly functioning mitochondria. Copyright © 2018 Wellness Mama · All Rights Reserved 10