← The Human Upgrade: Biohacking for Longevity & Performance
The Human Upgrade: Biohacking for Longevity & Performance
World Cup, Sunscreen, Hair Regrowth, Caffeine Chewing Gum, and more... : 1483
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I'm Dave Asprey. That's Dave spelled D A I V E. And this is your 10 minute weekly upgrade on the biggest stories in biohacking, longevity and the world of health. Let's go. Want to know which foods and supplements work best for your body? Viome takes the guesswork out of it. Their full body intelligence test reads your rna, not your DNA. So you see what's happening in your body right now. Now, while standard labs measure around 100 markers, Viome's AI analyzes over 10,000 active pathways across your gut, oral and cellular health. Then it translates that into personalized food and supplement recommendations built for your unique biology. They'll tell you what foods to eat and which ones to avoid. They even create custom supplements and oral care products based on your results. So what you're getting is what will work for your body, not someone else's. Your results update as your lifestyle changes, so your plan evolves with you. Check it out@viome.com and use code 10. Dave for 10% off. It's time to stop guessing and start knowing your body. I'm Jake Stauch, co founder and CEO of Cervel. We built Cerval to automate the IT work that slows companies down. Onboarding password resets, access to applications. My laptop stopped working. While employees wait for help, their real work is put on hold. IT desperately wants to automate this work. And that's why they need Serval. You just tell Servil what you want to automate in plain English and it's built. No drag and drop workflows, no expensive consultants. Employees get unblocked and IT teams go from drowning in tickets to building what actually matters. With Cerval, it becomes the AI engine powering the entire company. This is a new way to run it. We guarantee you'll automate 50% of all tickets. And we'll prove it to you in a free four week pilot. Go to serval.com tickets that's S E R-V-A L.com tickets. Here's something I've been thinking about. The most dangerous health isn't the obvious misinformation. It's the stuff that's half right. This week, every story has a version that's technically true and a version that could hurt you. And I want to walk you through the difference. Let's start with the one that actually got my attention this week. A new study in Nature Communications looked at semaglutide. That's the GLP1 drug people know as ozempica and found it slowed biological aging markers by 9% on the Dunedin Pace epigenetic clock. They also saw improvements on PC grim age which is tied to all cause mortality risk. And these effects showed up simultaneously across inflammation, heart, kidney, liver and brain markers. Now here's what I want you to understand about why this study is actually bigger than the headlines are making it. The population studied had HIV related metabolic disease. People under severe chronic inflammatory stress. Some people are reading that as a limitation. I read it as a proof of mechanism. What the researchers essentially showed is that when you hit the GLP1 pathway and reduce deep metabolic inflammation, aging clocks move not weight, not just blood sugar, aging clocks across multiple organ systems at once. The inflammation aging connection has been the central thesis of everything I've worked on for 20 years and and here it is showing up in a randomized controlled trial with epigenetic data behind it. The FDA approved Bimotrizenol as a permitted Sunscreen Active ingredient. First new approval in roughly 20 years. It covers both UVA and UVB. It's cleared for adults and kids down to six months. And it's been used safely in Europe and much of the world for years. The FDA cited low skin absorption in its approval 20 years. I want to sit with that for a second. Europe has had access to better sunscreen chemistry for two decades. Americans have been using the same formulas in the meantime, some of which have real questions around systemic absorption and hormone disruption that the FDA never fully resolved. So I'm not going to stand here and applaud a regulatory agency for finally catching up to the rest of the world on bimotrizenol. Specifically, I want to see independent absorption data, not just the manufacturer's submission. Low skin absorption is what every new chemical filter gets marketed as. And then sometimes years later we find out the picture is more complicated. I've been in the mineral sunscreen camp for a long time. Zinc oxide, titanium dioxide, physical blockers. Partly because the absorption question on chemical filters has never fully satisfied me. But motrizenol may genuinely be cleaner. The European safety record is meaningful, but I'm not switching my stack. Based on an FDA press release, researchers tested a topical gel made from deoxyribose, the sugar backbone of DNA, on mice with male pattern baldness. Both the deoxyribose gel and minoxidil produced roughly 80 to 90% hair regrowth. They observed new follicle formation and increased blood vessel and skin cell activity. Proposed mechanism is improved local circulation, though it's not fully established. I'll be honest, I'm reflexively skeptical of mouse hair regrowth stories because they almost never translate cleanly to humans. Hair follicle biology in mice is different enough from ours. That matched minoxidil in mice is a very long way from works in men. We've been down this road many times. That said, deoxyribose is an interesting molecule to try because it's endogenous, it's simple, and the circulation mechanism is at least plausible. If the story is this sugar improves local blood flow and that supports follicle activity, that's a testable, coherent hypothesis. What I'd want to see before getting a human trial, ideally with biopsy data, not just hair counts. And I'd want to know whether the effect holds at the vertex versus the hairline, because those respond differently to almost everything. All in all, though, a really interesting story. A Systematic Review covering 21 studies found that caffeinated chewing gum has a small but real ergogenic effect for muscular strength, both dynamic and isometric, and a modest benefit for counter movement jump height. No significant effect on muscular endurance. The practical detail is timing. Buccal absorption means caffeine from gum hits faster than capsules or drinks, with the effective window cited at 5 to 25 minutes pre training. The effect size here is small standardized mean difference of 0.21. I want to name that because the coverage around this makes it sound more dramatic than it is. This is a marginal edge, not a transformation. But marginal edges are actually what biohacking is mostly about, and the absorption mechanism is genuinely interesting. Look, I drink a lot of coffee and I've been saying for years it's one of the best things you can put in your body, so I'm obviously not going to tell you. Caffeine needs a disclaimer. What this study adds is something more specific and actually useful. The delivery mechanism matters. Buccal absorption through the cheek bypasses digestion entirely, which means the caffeine hits faster and more predictably than a pill or even a drink. Timing has always been an underrated variable with caffeine, and this meta analysis puts real data behind what a lot of high performers have figured out intuitively. Get it in your system 10 to 15 minutes before you need it. Your hair is a sign of how healthy you are. So what actually works if you want to grow new hair? There are tons of products that sound good on paper, but they really don't do much in practice. Irestore is different because it is powerful and it's targeted and it's light therapy. Your hair follicles directly absorb the light energy, which means blood flow increases and that means dormant hair follicles can wake back up. The Elite delivers that through 300 lasers and 200 LEDs directly to your scalp and it takes an easy 12 minutes a day. And you can wear it while you're working, while you're doing chores around the house. And the clinical results from it are amazing. Double blind study 100% of participants grew more hair. In four months their hair count increased an average of 43.2% and this thing really works. Plus you get a 12 month money back guarantee. Try it for a year and see what happens and you'll like it. Spring savings is happening right now, so go to irestore.com, use code Dave and get an exclusive discount on the elite. That's irestore.com code Dave Every breakthrough in human performance comes down to one thing just changing your state. And right now, the science and the technology and the ancient practices are converging faster than you realize. For 50 years, bad policy and stigma blocked scientific researchers from studying some of the most powerful tools for the human brain. And that just changed. This October. The researchers, the clinicians, the guys pioneers in consciousness, tech and psychedelics are all going to be under one roof in Austin. And you can be there too. With me, for the first time ever, I'm hosting and operating beyond Wonderland. Two full days where you'll learn the science and the practice of changing your state and you'll get to talk to the researchers doing it. You'll learn how these tools unlock a version of yourself you didn't know existed. You'll find talks about altered states with or without the psychedelics. A tech hall where you can try the tools yourself. Breakout sessions, breathwork, ceremony integration circles and more. This field is moving really fast and the people who are here in Austin on October 13th and 14th with me are going to be years ahead of everyone who finds out about this later. Learn more get your ticket now@wonderlandconference.com this one is sadly no surprise. Vitamin A overdoses increased nearly 39% in the first quarter of 2025. The driver was online posts claiming high dose vitamin A treats or prevents measles. Medical News Today covered it as a public health warning. The article emphasized that vitamin A doesn't prevent measles and that excess intake is dangerous. This one genuinely frustrated me and I want to be specific about why. First, the toxicity mechanism. Vitamin A is fat soluble and accumulates in the liver. Chronic hypervitaminosis A causes hepatotoxicity increased intracranial pressure, bone demineralization and in pregnant women, teratogenic effects. This is not theoretical. It's well documented at sustained doses above around 10,000iu of preformed retinol daily and significantly lower in some individuals. That's the actual risk and it's worth saying clearly here's where I want to push back on the mainstream framing Though vitamin A genuinely does matter for immune function, the problem isn't that people connected vitamin A to immunity. That connection is real and well supported. The problem is the leap from this nutrient supports immune function to mega dosing it cures a viral illness. That's not how any of this works, and it's a logic error the wellness community makes constantly. Mechanism is not dosing protocol and the distinction between preformed the retinol, which is the form that accumulates and causes toxicity, versus beta carotene, which your body converts much more conservatively, is a distinction that got completely lost in the noise. Here. Here's one for all you soccer fans out there. Healthline published a piece framing the 2026 FIFA World cup as a public health risk event. Dense crowds, mass international travel, shared air, elevated transmission environment for respiratory illness. The argument is that prevention planning matters more than any specific outbreak concern. I'll be honest, this is the softest story of the week in terms of direct application, but I think the framing in the Healthline piece misses something I actually care about. The germ centric model. You're exposed, you get sick is an incomplete picture. Terrain matters. Your immune resilience going into an exposure event is a variable you actually control, and most people don't treat it that way. They just hope they don't catch something. My pre exposure stack when I know I'm going into a high contact environment is consistent. Sleep debt is zero, Alcohol is zero. I'm on nac. Vitamin D is topped up, zinc is in range and I'm keeping inflammatory load low in the days before the World cup isn't my problem specifically, but if you're traveling to a packed stadium this summer, your preparation window matters. The upgrade two to three days before any high exposure event Travel, concert, stadium, conference get sleep debt to zero. Cut alcohol and make sure your vitamin D and zinc are in range. You can't control what's in the air. You can control what your immune system brings to the encounter. Here's something I didn't expect to be thinking about after this week's stories. Four out of six of them come down to the same what does your body actually do with a molecule once it's inside you. Semaglutide works because it hits metabolic receptors systemically and moves aging clocks across multiple organs at once. Vitamin A hospitalizes people because it's fat soluble and your liver holds onto it whether you want it to or not. The entire debate about bimotrizenol is whether it stays on the skin or crosses into circulation. Caffeine gum works faster than a pill for one reason. It bypasses your gut entirely and absorbs through your cheek. The delivery mechanism and the fate of the molecule in your body are not footnotes to the science in most of these stories. They are the science. That's the level I want you thinking at. Not is this good or bad for me, but what is this actually doing inside my biology and where does it go? That question will protect you from more bad decisions than any single supplement recommendation I could ever give you. See you next week. Keep upgrading all right guys, that is your weekly biohacking roundup. Join me again next Friday for another rundown of the biggest health stories in the news. Enjoy your weekend.
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The Human Upgrade, formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully, read all labels and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the product. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.