are turmeric and curcumin the same


Culinary blog for asian meal

dave: today’s cool fact of the day is thatmen’s noses are ten percent larger than women’s noses, at least in people of europeandescent. researchers measured these and hypothesized that it's not because men like to smell morethan women, it's because men need more oxygen to support lean mass. men normally have morelean mass because of their testosterone. the funny fact is that women smell better eventhough they have smaller noses. when i say women smell better, i mean, they have theability to smell better, not that i think they smell better, although that's true too.dave: hey everyone, it's dave asprey with bulletproof radio. today’s guest is albertovilloldo. alberto is a phd and a cuban-born psychologist and author who studied the shamanichealing practices of the amazon and inca shamans

for twenty-five years. he’s the founderof the four winds society and he has a two-year-long program in energy medicine and leads ayahuascajourneys to peru. i've actually taken one of alberto’s classes with the four windssociety, which was really intense and quite useful. it's my pleasure to have him on myshow today. alberto, welcome. alberto: thank you dave. good to be with you.just a correction, i don’t lead ayahuasca journeys to peru. we used to do that. we stillgo to peru, to the andes and the amazon to work with the shamans, but we don’t promotethat aspect of our work. it's good to be with you, and i understand we're going to talkabout the brain, spirit, the mind, and everything in between.dave: that sounds exactly what i was hoping

we’d talk about, alberto. you're actuallya medical anthropologist and a psychologist, not just a shaman, right?alberto: i started on with psychology, and the problem with psychology in the west isthat it's really centered on two parts of the body, your mouth and your anus. you haveeither oral fixations or anal fixations and this theme, it’s not got a very good castof characters. it wouldn't play well in hollywood because you got mommy issues and daddy issuesand infancy issues. if you really limit it to the scope of your pathology and the, youknow like woody allen says, the secret to being stable mentally is to turn your pathologyinto shtick. western psychology really collapsed a human being into a very narrow band betweenyour mouth and the other end of your alimentary

canal. whereas in traditional societies, the psychewas expansive as the universe. the realms of the archetypes of the gods of old wererealms that one could traverse. you weren't stuck in mommy/daddy issues your entire life.you learn how to embrace the mother. mother earth is your great mother. and the heavens,father sky is your father. you were able to release your parents. at about the age ofthirteen, you put them in the fire so they could become your friends and instead of turningthem into dysfunctional parents. so i broke out of psychology and actually got a grantto go to the amazon from a pharmaceutical company. a very famous swiss pharmaceuticalcompany wanted to discover the next blockbuster

cancer or heart disease drug, and i had donework in the amazon before and there were a lot of terrorists, a lot of terrorism happeningin that part of the world, in peru thirty years ago. i was one of the few fool-hardyanthropologists to go into the amazon. they funded my research. they wanted a blockbusterdrug for heart disease, cancer, and six months later, i came back from extensive travel intributaries of the amazon and villages that really had not ever seen a white man. in fact,the kids would come running up to me and rub my skin to see if the dirt, the white wouldrub off. i came back empty-handed because what i said to these pharmaceutical companywas, “hey, the people that i visit did not have heart disease. they did not have cancer.these are the illnesses of the west. they

died, but from other conditions.”they thought i was holding out on them. they said, “look, you can become very, very wealthyand help a lot of people.” i said, “look, i didn't find the plant you were looking for,because these diseases do not exist outside of europe and america at that time.”dave: when you take americans or westerners down for a healing journey with the nativeshamans today, are they finding the right medicine plants to treat those conditions?have things changed? alberto: the shamans basically have threekinds of medicine. the first is the medicine for what hurts you. if you have a headache,they have the aspirin tree. you treat that. you got a headache or you're bleeding. you’vegot to stop the bleeding. the second kind

of plants that they work with are plants thatturn on the body’s innate healing systems. they don’t attack a cancer. they don’ttreat the heart. they switch back on the body self-repair mechanisms. that means at thecellular level, they switch back all of the antioxidant systems that are built innatelyinto the cell but got switched off after about the age of forty, which is why we call theseillnesses the illnesses of old age because nature, in effect, programmed us for reproduction,not for longevity. biology programmed us to have babies, notto live long lives because that's not economically practical for the species. now, i'm not interestedin having any more kids but i am interested in living a long healthy life and having myhealth span equal my life span. what these

plants do is they turn off systems that switchoff at around the age of forty like your human growth hormone, like your production of glutathione,of superoxide dismutase. they switch on and they turn on, they switch on the longevitygenes. they reset the death clock inside … dave: the telomerase.alberto: yup, inside the cells, absolutely. this is the second category. turn on yourbody’s innate healing systems. the third category were the plants that repair the brainbecause the brain is the commanding control center. if that screwed up, if your motherboardis screwed up, forget about accessing any data, you’re going to be getting error messages.that's what happens when dna goes unregulated by consciousness is that it starts printingthe error messages which are the abrin proteins

that are the cancerous and create heart disease.dave: you don’t sound like what most listeners to our show would imagine a shaman would soundlike. you just talked about the same bio hacking chemicals like glutathione that i work with,yet you're taking this from the perspective of someone who’s looking at the energy andthe consciousness aspect and how it affects chemicals and genes. have you done science-baseddata thinking about these to measure whether there are differences?alberto: yeah, we have actually, we have. the reason that i'm not talking feathers andrattles is because that's just part of what the shamans do. they use that to get intocertain states of consciousness that we can't get into anymore in the west. these are theshamanic states of ecstasy. we can't access

those anymore because our brains are broken.they’ve been broken by the toxins in our food, the poisons in the water, the chemicalsthat we're exposed to, the damage to the hippocampus in the brain which is the area responsiblefor learning. when that area in the brain is damaged, we're living in a constant stateof fight or flight, a fear based off scarcity behavior, getting your slice of the pie.when you live in fight or flight, the brain secretes two hormones, two very, very toxicsubstances that are actually steroid hormones, which are cortisol and adrenaline. you'realways pumped up, always hyped up. that prevents us from accessing the ecstatic, blissful stateswhere we can actually be creative, where we can dream the future into being differently,where we can dream our health differently

into being. what it does when you see, whenyou have this cortisol cocktail in your brain with stress hormones, is that this pathwayfor fight or flight is actually called from a standpoint of medicine, the hpa axis, thehypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. when this hpa axis is turned on, it's dedicatedto the fear hormones. the pituitary is only manufacturing and triggering the stress hormones.it keeps the pituitary from running the alchemical laboratory because that's the alchemical lab.the pituitary is able to take things like serotonin or melatonin even, what we use togo to sleep, into dmt, which is dimethyltryptamine, which is the most powerful psychoactive substancein the planet, which is what triggers the chemical component of this visionary ecstaticstates. that's one of the things the pituitary

is excellent at doing when it's not stressedout, when it doesn't have a gun to its head. dave: alberto, you're saying the pituitarygland can take melatonin and turn it into dmt at will?alberto: not at will. it does so between four or five o’clock in the morning when thebrain is in these very, very calm states of consciousness and when you’re distressedbecause the reason these psychedelics that, i'm really into the brain science becausethe shamans were the very first brain scientists. dave: yes, the first biohackers.alberto: absolutely. they knew how to create. they knew the blend for ayahuascas. how doyou blend these two plants to go through the gut wall? they knew how to prepare curare,which is this incredible neurotoxin that is,

it’s the basis of modern anaesthetic. thereason these psychoactive plants work is because we have receptor sites for them in the brain.why would nature give us receptor sites for these plants out there in the wild? the reasonwe have them is because we produce them naturally. we produce morphine, the endorphins naturally.we produce dmt. we produce psilocybin. psilocybin is magic mushrooms. psilocybin is a methylateddopamine. dopamine is the common neurotransmitter, a feel-good neurotransmitter.and methylation is what the pituitary does. it methylates. this is the alchemical laband the way to do your biohacking is when you're in these states of lucid consciousness,where consciousness itself can modify your genetic expression.dave: it's amazing what methylating common

neurotransmitters will do. there's some othernew things coming out around that that are amazingly effective for enhancing consciousness.alberto: absolutely, yeah. this is the juicy thing for me about being in the jungle isbecause i have little bit of background in brain science so i could get what these guyswere doing. they weren't treating stomach upset. they were switching on the brain sothat the nervous system could upgrade the quality of the information in the entire operatingsystem so you can start running software that nobody’s ever run before.dave: now, one of the things that surprised me about you, alberto, is that you've gota very strong spiritual side of what you do, but when i went to your healing academy atthe four winds, i was surprised that you spent

so much time talking about neurotransmittersand brain chemistry and things like that. it seems like at least half of your perspectiveon how to upgrade human experience or just increase people’s consciousness is biochemicallybased and maybe half is energetically based. am i reading that right? how do you draw theline between those two? how do you integrate them?alberto: you know we're spirit embodied. we're spirits in a body. the reason that we camehere to this world and to this earth from the spirit world is so we could experiencechocolate. chocolate is, among other things, good coffee, the senses. when spirit becomesembodied, suddenly spirit is being modulated by and regulated by electrical activity, hormonalactivity and the problem is that you have

to get these systems, the electrical and hormonalsystems into balance so spirit can adequately sit in this protein wrap that we are. so thatin the shamanic traditions, we work with the chakras, with the energy centers in the body.people ask me, “aren’t chakras hindu? do shamans have chakras?” i say to them,“aren’t kidneys european? do africans have kidneys? it is part of your luminousanatomy. it's universal.” the way that the chakras are actually disturbances in the field,in the energy field of the body that are caused, created when the endocrine system meets thenervous system. nerve bundles coincide with endocrine glands. you know what endocrineglands produce, it's hormones. if you’ve had a teenager, if you remember being a teenager,you know what hormones are like. this is where

these two communication systems in the bodymeet, this disturbance in the field is the chakra.so the shaman will work through the chakras to download or upload information into thesystem, into the nervous system which runs electrically at the speed of light. the hormonesystem which is an analog system. the nervous system is digital, speed of light. hormonesystem is chemical primarily transmits feelings. what you have happening today is that theamount of information and our thoughts operate at the speed of light, nervous system, butour feelings operate on snail mail. they're going on the hormone system which is reallyslow chemical carriers. there's this great disparity, this junction between what we feeland what we think today to the point that

is so hard to bridge that gap.when you have this incredible schism between what you feel and when you think, you cannotbe spirit-embodied. you're living in a war zone. that's why we focus our attention morenow into how do you turn your brain on. how do you create health so that disease goesaway? we're not just teaching people how to heal disease, we're teaching them how to createhealth. how do you do that by upgrading the quality of the wisdom in the system of theinformation? not treating cancer or treating heart disease or treating symptoms, upgradethe information level. make the system smarter and the body attains states of health thatare extraordinary. dave: one of the more interesting studiesi've come across in the last year talked about

how people cannot get smarter unless theybelieve that they can get smarter. once they're taught you're capable of it, they are capableof it. without that, the intelligence is limited. how does that fit in with your experienceof working with people? alberto: you know the story about the upsguy? remember that story? dave: no.alberto: well there was this ashram. i don’t know if this really happened or not but ilove this story. there was this ashram. people practice meditation and they got ups packageseveryday or every other day. right in their front office, there was a photograph of theguru in meditation. one day, they put the face, the image of the face of the ups guyon the painting of the guru. when the ups

guy comes, they start bowing to him, “you'rehere. you're back, thank you so much. come be with us some time.” the guy’s bewildered,leaves, comes back two days later. they're bowing to him again. he sees his photographup in the face of the maharishi. “we've been waiting for you.” they welcome himin. he comes into their meditation and begins to speak and this wisdom starts flowing throughhim, this exquisite wisdom. he said, “before meeting you guys, i was just the ups guy.i didn't know that that spirit that i was the one you were waiting for.”and a few days later, he discovered everyone is the one that they’ve been waiting forbecause there's a new ups guy with a new face up on the wall. yes, the minute you believeyou can do it, then it becomes possible to

do it. but it's not a given. i worked witholympic teams. you have to get the athlete first to believe that they could do it. then,they had to train as if they had already done it.dave: why is it that way? why do you have to train as if you’ve already done it? howshould people who listen to this, a lot of them are driving in cars right now, how canthey take that perspective into whatever they're doing?alberto: that’s a shamanic perspective, which is that you envision that it's alreadydone, it's already happened. what you're trying to create in your life has already been createdand it's just simply a matter of it manifesting, of it waiting for you around the corner.dave: now if that sounds weird to people listening,

it's not that particularly unusual. look atnapoleon hill’s work, same exact thing. you write it down as if it's been done. youhave the people, the secret, things like that. if you're going to set an intention, the ruleis not, “i'm going to do it some point in the future, maybe whenever.” it’s that,“i already did it.” that seems to make it happen.alberto: totally, what the shamans are the shamans are the medicine men and women. wenever defined who the shamans were. they are the wisdom keepers of the americas, the ancientwisdom keepers of the americas. they were the first scientists. they were the firstastronomers. they were also the healers. that's what they did for a living. what they didfor themselves was to commune with the wisdom

of the universe and to help to dream the worldinto being. they discovered you couldn't only dream anicer car or a better looking spouse that you thought you deserved; you couldn't justdream the individual thing into being. you could but it would backfire. you had to dreamthe whole thing into being, the whole universe, the whole world. peace on earth, water clean,air breathable. then, the nicer car and the spouse would appear and everything else wouldcome. if you tried to do it reductionistic, one thing at a time, it wouldn't work becauseyou were then feeding your personal dream and not the great dream of humanity.dave: i very much agree with what you're saying. at the same time, i think a lot of listenershave a hard time drawing the line. we have

a western perspective that medicine man orshaman is someone who’s irrational or illogical. some of what you said there, dream the worldinto being. those words, when i run them through my rational, cognitive filter in my head,i don’t get it. for people who are skeptical, what do you say? i'm not a skeptic, by theway, but what do you say to the skeptics? alberto: the reason you don’t get it isbecause your brain is broken. no, not yours, dave, i know. i know that everybody who’sdriving out there and listening to this says, “hey, i'm together. it’s the other guythat's all screwed up.” the truth is that ninety-nine percent of us have brains thatare broken. that's why we cannot hold or entertain the idea that we dream truly our reality andit manifests. it comes true, that the higher

you dream it into being, the higher the orderof magnitude, the more effective that this cascades down to the day-to-day and the immediate.but the reason our brains have been broken is because of our diet. can i take you throughthat tour quickly? dave: yes, please do.alberto: okay, so around ten thousand years ago, there's a revolution, the agriculturalrevolution. we stopped being hunter-gatherers, paleolithic. we have the agricultural revolution,where we discover a new kind of food, which are grains. now the human genome dna takesabout forty to fifty thousand years to adapt to a new food, we discovered this new foodand began producing it in quantity and we settled. we're no longer following the game,going to the waterholes, hunter-gatherers.

we started settling.then, around six thousand years ago, agriculture really spread. cities began to develop. youfind that the grains are widespread. population increases and religion appears. before that,our primary diet was fats and proteins. now, our diet becomes carbs which are sugars. youhave the religions that say, “and give us this day our daily fats and proteins,” right?“give us this day our daily bread.” you have two classes of people that appear. youhave the class of masters and slaves. the slaves were the pyramid builders who religionpromised a reward in the next life. the slaves were fed the high sugar rich carbs. the slaveswere the pyramid builders and the warriors, the soldiers, fed the sugars, feeds that regionin the brain that lives in fear and that in

fight or flight and in scarcity.now, the masters continued eating the ancient diet. if you look at what the egyptian priestate, if you look at what the inca kings, they had fish run up to machu picchu to the mountainsfrom the sea four hundred miles away by runners. they continued to feed on the good qualityprotein and good quality fats, primarily non-animal fats. they have full access to their brain.they understood that whatever you set your intention to, you could bring about.today, we don’t believe that because we're living in a very disempowered world and theirgreat corporate interest that want to keep us so in that slave mentality. what you andi are here to do and all of you who are listening to this show is to say, “hey, we're mastersof our own destiny. we can dream it into being.”

you're not your genetics. you're not yourgenes. you are your dreams. your genes only account for five to ten percent of your health.the rest is your lifestyle and your communion with nature and the beauty that you bringto life. the first step for the shaman was to repairthe brain. i think for us as well, that's an important step. we can a little bit latergo into what the plant substances are that repair the brain.dave: i think that you've definitely got our listeners interested in what those are. beforewe get there, though, you mentioned in this high-fat, high-protein diet. when i look atwhat the average ceo eats, it’s the guys that i talk to before i start working withthem as clients. they eat garbage. they're

not eating these kinds of foods. if in theold days, the egyptian pharaohs or incan kings ate a diet for a fully functioning mind andeveryone else didn't, when you fast-forward to today, the vast majority of leaders ofindustry, don’t have brains that are functioning, at least they don’t eat like they do.then who are the people eating that way, pulling the strings? or did we just forget this knowledgeand now we're walking around like a bunch of robots?alberto: yeah. i’ll tell you the, one of the foods that repairs this is dha. we'regoing to get to dha, the omega-3’s in a little while. i know you're very familiarwith them. dave: do share. keep talking, yeah.alberto: the reason that these guys, the ceos,

they're still slaves to the system. they'remaking a little more money than we are. they don’t have any more free time. their livesare screwed up. their health is screwed up. their relationships are screwed up. you walkin to consult with them and you see that their children hate them and that they can't standtheir image and that they're overweight. they don’t sleep well. they're losing their hair.they got rashes on their skin. they're depressed. the fact that they appear to be more successfuldoesn't mean that they're having more successful lives but it begins with your diet. then,it goes on to your spiritual practice. dave: yeah. if you don’t have adequate brainfuel, how are you going to use all of your brain? that was a big learning for me personally.alberto: totally, yeah. if your brain fuels

only carbs. you know what the minimum dailyrequirement of carbs are? dave: i would argue it's about 15 grams forlong periods of time. alberto: it's actually zero, unless you'rea marathon runner. we have minimum daily requirements of proteins and fats. the carbs or the grainsand we can work with the carbs. in fact, i include grains in my diet, which the strictpaleolithic people don’t. we have to remember that diet is only half of it. we have to alsorecover the paleolithic mindset, which is the shamanic mindset, which is the communionwith all life and all of creation. the relationship to the earth is one of stewardship and nota predatory one where it’s ours for the taking so it starts with the diet and thebrain runs on sugars but it prefers, the higher

brain functions run on fats, particularlya fat called beta-hydroxybutyrate which is… dave: brain octane makes that, right?alberto: jet fuel for the brain and when you get that, if you want a little bit of that,you can get it in a drive-thru service station but you can get some coconut oil or coconutbutter which is … and eat a spoonful of it, imagine it's vanilla ice cream, pure foodfor mitochondria. it's a fat. it's a medium-chain triglyceride and it turns on the brain. ifyou got a difficult problem in your hands, you got to feed the brain with the right fuel.dave: alberto, when we met, i hadn't quite started shipping brain octane, which is fourpercent of coconut oil that converts to bhb the fastest. this is what i put a tablespoonof in my coffee in the morning, which is equal

to eighteen tablespoons of coconut oil interms of bhb. alberto: really?dave: yeah. alberto: i want to order some.dave: i’ll just send you some. consider it done.alberto: thank you. thank you. let me take us to another area which is not only thatour brains have been damaged. we have two brains in the body. one of them is in ourheads. guess where the other one is? dave: that would be the gut.alberto: the gut, right, the gut brain. it's really fascinating because humans are colonyorganism so we are … if you look at a grain of rice or at a tape worm, a grain of ricehas ninety thousand genes in its dna. a tape

worm has seventy thousand genes. a human hastwenty-four thousand genes. we have far fewer genes than rice or tape worms. why is that?that's because we have over six hundred microorganisms that live in our gut. we have hijacked theirgenetic machinery to have them produce vitamins and extract minerals. they're the workers.in fact, they outnumber us, ten to one, so that ninety percent of our dna belongs tothem. only ten percent of who we are is we. if you ever wake up in the morning and sayto yourself, “i'm not feeling quite myself today,” you're absolutely right, becauseyou're not. because nine-tenths of you, of your dna belongs to these symbiotic creaturesthat are part of our colony. what the western diet and fluorinated and chlorinated waterdoes in antibiotics is that they destroy the

flora in the gut so that the colony has beendecimated. if the colony is decimated, we can't extract foods. not only that, we startgetting a problem known as leaky gut … because the lining in the gut, if you were to spreadit out, it would be the size of a tennis court. it's only one cell thick. these cells havevery tight junctions. they don’t want to allow anything through that hasn’t beenprocessed by the flora. what happens when you have grain that containgluten is that the gluten will wedge itself between these tight junctions through a proteinthat allows the gluten to get into the blood stream. the immune system recognizes thatgluten as a pathogenic bacteria and attacks it. you have this huge immune reaction happening.all of your life force is going into this

immune response to fight off that piece ofbread that you had this morning. dave: yeah, it sucks you.alberto: totally. we have to repair the brain but we start with repairing the gut with theright probiotics. we can do that. dave: when you say the right probiotics, i'vespent at least fifty or sixty thousand dollars on probiotics over the past while. i tookantibiotics for fifteen years, about once a month for chronic sinusitis and all. whatare the right probiotics in your experience? alberto: if you go to your local pharmacy,you buy strains of probiotic, twelve billion per … you're buying soldiers that are goingto recolonize this territory that you lost. but these are not necessarily smart soldiers.better to have ten special forces guys than

ten million chaotic crazy guys with spears.you got to get the smart probiotics and the high quality probiotics. now, there's a companythat manufactures what i think are the best probiotics. what they did is they collectedprobiotics from the soil of these blue zones around the world which were the high longevityregions around the world. then, they train them. they make them smart bugs. regardlessof whether you use it … i can give you the name of this company.dave: we’ll put it in the show notes. alberto: great. get a probiotic that you refrigerate,needs to be refrigerated. make sure it comes from a good source. most of the time we'regetting dumb bugs, which is why this really … this company also makes a toothpaste,for example. you need the probiotics in your

mouth because that's what keeps your teethhealthy and you need them in your sinuses and in your lungs. the other place where theflora lives is in our skin. we take a shower with chlorinated water, we kill all the goodbugs in our skin. we end up only with the bad ones. they keep us from getting skin diseasesand rashes. we need to repopulate the … we've worked in the west. we're focused on chemicals,which are dead. the shamans focus on the living. what arethe living ingredients? the probiotics in your skin, in your mouth, in your gi tract,they're enlisting the help of nature to maintain your health optimally.dave: i laughed when you said probiotics from soil, because i've done a lot of researchon what different strains that you buy in

most common pharmacies and whatnot, what theydo, and a lot of them form histamine or they form nitrosamines in the gut. they actuallymake you weaker. alberto: totally.dave: soil-based organisms i recommend. alberto: yeah, so you got to be careful whatbugs you buy. you're buying life forms. some people spend more money buying fertilizerfor their yards than they do buying fertilizing bugs for their gut.dave: it's astounding to me what people spend on taking care of their dog that they won'tspend on taking care of themselves. alberto: yeah.dave: why is that? alberto: i don’t know but i took my dogto the vet the other day. i had to go to the

doctor myself. the first thing the doctorasked me is what medications are you on. i took my dog to the vet and the first thingthe vet asked, what do you feed this dog. i'm going to start going to the vet from nowon because it's all with the food. it starts with the food.dave: my dog doesn't really go to the vet but my dog also eats a diet high in mct oil,raw meat and a few vegetables and funny what that does.alberto: it's incredible. it's healthy. you know how many cancers pets get that if youwould slip in a tablet of resveratrol into the dog food, it's extraordinary. it’s themissing ingredient, resveratrol switches on all of the longevity genes in humans and inanimals. that's one of these great hacking

tools.dave: there's been a lot of controversy about resveratrol. some of the early studies werefake. there's concerns about estrogen activity. despite all of that, in your experience, yourecommend resveratrol. alberto: i do. yeah, pterostilbene and resveratrol.dave: by the way, for people listening, pterostilbene is a strange spelling. we’ll put that inthe show notes. that's what i take. it's two trans-resveratrol stuck together.alberto: tell us about it. dave: i want to make sure that we give youthe most time to share your knowledge but for people concerned about the resveratrolproblem, there was some scientific fraud but resveratrol itself as an antioxidant and assomething that replicates the effects of a

low-calorie diet without the negative brainimpact of a low calorie diet, it's pretty magic. i take the pterostilbene and i takeupgraded aging, which also mimics caloric restriction. that combination can increasemitochondrial function and hopefully slow the aging process. how does that map withwhat you know? alberto: reverse the aging process. we consideraging is not natural. the brain fog and … that was harder to get out of bed every morning.no, i think that you can keep your clarity, your sexuality, your sense of humor, yourvitality until the day you drop dead. unfortunately, in the west we all have to fit within thebell curve. the bell curve, it’s already picked a death sentence for you. it says thatthirty-two percent of us will die of heart

disease, twenty-nine percent of cancer. onlyone out of a hundred will die in the arms of his or her beloved at the age of a hundredand twenty after great sex. this will be … dave: that will be the best way to die thati can think of. alberto: that will be the outliers. that'swhat we … when you look at the shamanic traditions, this is how people live. theydie of old age. they died of accidents and some parasites but we know how to treat thosetoday. we have the opportunity to really live smartly. that means we have to have smartbugs in our belly, smart brains and the brain foods that do that.dave: so far you've mentioned dha, you mentioned soil-based organisms and you're going to giveme a link, we’ll put it all on there. i'm

not sure there's so many different spos now.then, you just mentioned trans-resveratrol or pterostilbene. what are the other thingsthat fix the brain that you referenced earlier? alberto: i’ll tell you a couple. when iwas in the jungle in the amazon as a medical anthropologist and eventually as a studentof the shamans, i was going through my training which included fasting and fasting is extraordinary.i fast one day a week. the shamans would say to me, “well, you've got to eat the barkof that root, of that tree and those roots over there.” i go, “why?” they say,“because it's always been done that way.” that wasn’t good enough for me. i wantedthe science behind it but science belongs to us in the west, not to … i went aheadand ate. it tasted like crap, awful. i boil

it, i chew it. then, we took it to the laboratorytwenty years later and we found that what they were doing is that they were repairingthe brain. they were turning on the longevity genes, the sir2 genes and there are few substancesthat do that. first, omega-3s, which we used to get fromfish. they're essential fatty acids because the body does not produce them. that's whythey're called essential. today, we can't get it from fish anymore because all of ourfish is farm-raised and they're fed corn, cannot make dha from corn. dha, breast milkis forty percent dha because the brain needs it. if you don’t know somebody who’s lactating,you got to supplement because you need the dha to repair the regions in the brain wherelearning happens. if you're not learning,

you're repeating what you already learn. you'rerepeating the same job, the same relationship, the same arguments with your spouse, the sameattitudes, been there, done that. you stagnate. what happens when you do that is you becomea grouchy, crabby old person. my wife and i were having dinner the other night at arestaurant. there was this couple sitting about six tables away, not too many peoplethere. you could tell they’ve been together for a hundred years and they hated each other.they weren't talking to each other. we're kind of watching them. finally, after abouttwenty minutes, he says to her, “pass salt.” you can read between the lines and what he’ssaying is pass the salt bitch, you’re ruin-, so this is what happens when you don’t repairyour brain. you become a grouchy old guy whose

world has collapsed or a gold woman that'sbitter and angry. if you repair it, you keep learning all your life.dave: alberto, i have to tell you that one of the highlights of the entire podcast historyis that you just said, “pass the salt bitch,” on the show. i would not ever have predictedyou’d say that. what a great story. alberto: i should’ve watched my language,i'm sorry. you can … dave: no, no, no. i wouldn't have predictedthat would ever come from you but what a perfect story. it made me laugh.alberto: dha, we're on the brain foods, dha is essential. curcumin, which is from turmeric,curcumin, a gram a day … let’s go back to dha and epa which are the omega-3s. youshould be doing about three grams of omega-3

a day.dave: what's your favorite source? i recommend krill on the bulletproof diet. do you likekrill? or do you like salmon? or do you like sardines or some other kind of fish oil?alberto: i love salmons and sardines but i like my dha from algae.dave: okay, got it, the purified stuff. alberto: yeah. as long as you have a goodsupplier, they're all equally good. dave: i try to get the phosphorylated dhabecause then your body doesn't have to put it in the brain. is it worth the extra moneyfor that in your experience? alberto: sure, you're saving energy to thesystem. turmeric, in america, if you live to be eighty-five years old, the odds of beingdiagnosed with alzheimer’s are one out of

two. fifty percent of americans who live tobe eighty-five will have diagnose with alzheimer’s, which means that it began twenty years before.if you look at the statistics in india, where they eat a lot of curcumin and turmeric, it'sonly fifteen percent. if you go to some native american populations, it's only five percentor is non-existent if you go to the amazon. the curcumin is essential because it switcheson both mitochondrial biogenesis and production of new mitochondria as well as the sirtuingenes and it's an amazing anti-inflammatory, nature’s best anti-inflammatory.dave: that is exactly in line with my understanding. people should always be eating food cookedwith it or they should be taking that as a supplement.alberto: absolutely, and then eat colourful.

eat for the rainbow. go for the colors infruit. avoid anything white. in fact, if you want to really stay healthy, avoid anythingthat has a label, anything that’s like … don’t eat it. if you can't pronounce what’s init, don’t buy it. dave: i eat at least ten servings of vegetablesa day. i recommend that on the bulletproof diet. i found when i went down to a zero carbdiet for three months, i'm talking one serving of green vegetables a day, i developed leakygut and got new food allergies, which is why i try to keep about fifteen grams or moreoccasionally of carbs to allow mucus formation. alberto: yeah, but don’t get your carbsfrom grains. dave: okay. i also say if you're going toeat carbs, to refuel glycogen once a week,

sweet potatoes are first but white rice isthe lowest toxin, non-sweet potato thing that i could find that would provide starch. what'syour take on white rice? alberto: yeah, i like rice. if you look atthe great religions in the world and the traditions in the world, you could see them in europe.the europeans are people of the wheat and their religions there are around the wheat.in christianity, you have the wheat, the wafer that becomes the body of christ and demeterwas the goddess of the greeks that was the goddess of the wheat. in asia, it's the rice,they're people of the rice. in the americas, it's the corn. the traditions around corn;corn is seen as the mother. i like rice. i think that the real critter here is gluten.dave: yeah. you can't have a fully-functioning

brain and eat gluten on a regular basis. idon’t believe it's possible. alberto: i don’t either. in fact, if youwant to have a fully-functioning shamanic brain, where you develop all kinds of whatwe would call extraordinary abilities, where you're able to see things that other peoplecan't. there was a wonderful book that was published about forty years ago called executiveesp among top fortune 500 companies. they found that the executives that had the highestesp scores, which is the ability to see things that other people can't see, actually morethan doubled their personal net worth and their company’s net worth in the same periodof time, where the executives with the lowest esp scores actually lost money for their companies.dave: this book explains how they determine

what an esp score is?alberto: oh yeah, absolutely. they use standardized esp test. i’ll show you the book.dave: awesome. i'm going to have to read this. we may find that there's a shortage of thisbook used on amazon after the show goes public. alberto: you've got to get it. friends ofmine actually wrote it. you've got to get it online. can you see it?dave: yeah. alberto: it's a brilliant book. actually,it was co-authored by sheila ostrander and lynn schroeder, which wrote the book psychicdiscoveries behind the iron curtain. what we were calling psychic phenomena, which wethink the voodoo priest and shamans and psychics are mediums of, they're actually natural abilitiesof every human but we find them in such a

small number of the population that we considerthem super normal or super ordinary. they are ordinary. they're natural. they're normal.when you repair the brain, repair the gut, feed the brain with a high mitochondrial foodsand trigger the mitochondrial repair, these abilities begin to appear on their own.you don’t need to be a yogi or chant ohm, though it helps, you just have to do the basicsand then the human potential begins to reveal itself to you.dave: that is so well said and it's been my own experience. you just end up gaining intuitionand creativity in a way that you didn't before when you remove the self-limiting foods andyou add in the things that increase brain power.alberto: precisely.

alberto: we're only two or three days awayfrom feeling well. take for granted the fact that well, i'm just getting older or i haven’texercised or … no, we take for granted the fact that we're waking up every morning notfeeling good. it only takes two or three days of first of all getting the dairy out of yourdiet, getting the gluten out of your diet, getting the inflammatories, the sugars outof your diet and getting the junk out of your diet. within three to four days, you feelbetter. in fact, we have a program we call growing new body, where in seven days, wetrigger the growth of a new body that's healed, that's healthy.dave: i will include links to that. that sounds pretty interesting. my own experience is youreally do feel massive reductions in inflammation

when you start eating “a clean diet”.you get rid of all the various sources of things that slow you down. all of a sudden,you wake up and you have a level of mental abilities you didn't …alberto: you're sleeping well and your brain fog clears. you laugh again. it's important.you laugh for no reason sometimes. dave: let me ask you another question. we'recoming close to the end of the show. do you drink coffee?alberto: i love coffee. dave: does coffee in your experience, increaseyour ability to do some of the more high functioning mental states that you work with as a shaman?or is it more just like an energizer thing? alberto: let’s go back to the brain. inwestern science, we look at pathways, neuro

pathways, chemical pathways because when youfind a pathway that a chemical works on, you can patent that and you've got a pharmaceuticalremedy, you can make a lot of money with. we look at single active chemicals, whereasa shaman works with the entire plant, you can't patent comfrey or oregano. if you takean extract from it, you find the active ingredient, you can. we look at pathways. the shaman insteadlooks at the whole plant, looks at networks which are bunches of pathways. then, you wantto look at systems which in a bunches of networks. if you go back to the pathways, there's a… coffee is the best stimulant of a detox pathway called the nrf2 detox pathway.what it does is that it switches on. there are a number of products that do that, turmeric,broccoli, all the cruciferous vegetables do

that. they turn on the detox pathways insidethe cell that shut down after about the age of forty. they turn on the production of glutathione,of sod. within thirty days of taking these regulators, you find that you return to youryour antioxidant production you have when you were eighteen years old. what does thatis turmeric, cruciferous vegetables, coffee is one of the best ones to turn on this pathway.you begin to detoxify, switches on to longevity genes but you can only have coffee and enjoyit really if your fight or flight is turned off because living in a world that is dangerousand you need to be hyper alert and stimulated, then the coffee is going to be affecting negativelythe adrenaline pathways. when you're able to relax and de-stress byrepairing the brain, repairing the gut, coffee

is manna from heaven. some people react toit and should not have it but even if you have the decaffeinated coffee and it's a qualitydecaf because it's non-toxic and you can talk about that i'm sure, it still activates thatsame pathway. dave: that's exactly the reason that i madea decaf of grated coffee bean even though i believe it's better for people to have thefully caffeinated coffee with all of its oils intact, there are benefits to the decaf stuffthat i've seen in multiple studies. i consider it a core part of what i do on a regular basis.i just wanted to get the kind of shaman meditation perspective from you on it. we didn't linethis up ahead of time or anything. i just ask a lot of the guests about this. some saythey like coffee. some say they don’t.

alberto: are you selling the intravenous,the long drip that you can take to the vein directly?dave: intravenous espresso, totally. alberto: a shot to go. everything in naturehas its beauty but there are certain plants that when you take them, the body interpretsthem as poisons and mounts this huge antioxidant response to them. they're not really poison.in fact, all of our spices are plants that we haven’t fully adapted to. the exampleis when you have iceberg lettuce. iceberg lettuce doesn't taste like anything. you gotthe whole bunch of olive oil and blue cheese on it for it to taste like something. if youtake arugula, arugula is delicious, got a little spice to it. that's because we havecompletely adapted to iceberg lettuce, to

the chemical defenses, but arugula, we'restill adapting to as a species. it's got a little bite.all the spices are plants that we're still adapting to but that are not toxic, but someof them, the body reads them as toxins and when they're not and mounts this huge antioxidantresponse to them and it turns on the machinery that has creeped slowly to semi-death insidethe cells, switches it back on again full force, starts producing new mitochondria andstarts regenerating. this is what fasting does. curcumin, coffee triggers that samemechanism. shamans learned a long time ago that if you wanted to heal an illness, youdon’t treat the illness. in fact, you look at the illness as the best effort that thebody is making to heal itself, not as the

enemy but the best that the body knows howto do to bring about healing. you work with the illness and not againstit. you work not by treating the illness but by turning on the self-healing systems insidethe body. dave: yeah, that is a wonderful way of lookingat it. it's so much more holistic than i'm going to fix this one thing, not knowing whatelse will change around it. alberto: yeah, i mean especially today whenyou look at western medicine and you have doctors by geography. the doctors specializein the head and some of them in the gut and some of them in the feet and the heart. thehead docs and the neurologist don’t talk to the gut docs. most of the head problemscome from the gut. doctors specialize in organs

and in diseases. nobody specializes in thewhole body. if people want to learn more about this, they can visit our website at the fourwinds, where we have in the additional reading section thefourwinds.com, t-h-e-f-o-u-r-w-i-n-d-s.com. dave: you actually read my mind, which i guessis a skill that you've trained. i was going to ask you what's the url that people shouldbe going to? is that the only url you want to share?alberto: that's probably the best one. if you friend me in facebook or like me in facebook,we feed a lot of interesting material. that's under the four winds as well. the four winds,f-o-u-r-w-i-n-d-s. lot of good shamanic insight with brain, sprinkling of brain material.what amazed me when i went to the amazon is

i saw them prepare curare one time. can itell the story? do we have time? dave: please, yeah.alberto: they're brewing the stuff and i get a whiff of it at a distance. it smells delicious,smell like bread baking. i start getting closer to it. they stop me. they said, “don’tgo any closer.” i go, “why?” “because you’ll die.” curare is prepared by mixingseven plants. it's a neurotoxin that you … dave: it's like the smell from subway withthat …? alberto: yeah, not quite that bad. they’llput it in blowdarts and blowguns and you need to cook it seventy-two hours exactly, no longer,no shorter, seven plants. if you smell the aroma, it kills you within twenty seconds.when it's prepared, it's a very thick paste

and the shaman says, “open your hand.”he puts a glob of it in my hand. i asked him, “what is it?” he said, “curare.” idropped it. he says, “no, no, no. it can't hurt you.” you could swallow it and it’llgo through your full digestive tract and to put it in your hand but if it comes into contactwith blood, that's when you're in trouble. i asked him, “how did you learn which sevenplants to cook?” they couldn't have smelled it because they would've died. they wouldn'thave been able to tell their children what to do or not to do. the shaman said, “well,the plants told us. the jungle told us how to do it.” these are people that still havean active dialog with nature and with spirit. they can learn directly from nature. theycan learn directly from the wisdom of the

universe.dave: that's pretty profound. alberto, every guest on the show gets asked the same questionat the end of the show. what are the top three recommendations that you would make for someonewho wants to perform better across the all the mains of their life? your entire life’swisdom and work distilled into the three most important things for the average person. whatare they? alberto: i don’t give advice. the firstone would be don’t give advice to anybody that you're not doing yourself. the secondone would be laugh a lot. at the end, it's all funny. it's all very funny. it's all agood, good joke. the third is prepare to die so that you're living your life complete inevery moment and you know that you have lived

it to the best that you possibly could andthat life continues beyond death. dave: thank you alberto. awesome, awesomepoints and what a great interview. i really appreciate you taking the time to be on bulletproofradio today. we have links to your facebook page, to the four winds website and all theother things we talked about today in the show notes so people can find them. for peoplelistening, i would encourage you to look at alberto’s work. he’s a true brain hackerwho’s absolutely willing to look at biochemistry and then goes straight up to meditation andsee how the two come together. i've learned a lot from him.alberto: thank you. thank you dave and blessings and blessings to everyone listening to ustoday. don’t forget to send me that product.

i want to try that.dave: you'll get some brain octane. alberto: all right, be well. bye bye. uj: talk to you soon, dave. featured the four winds facebook page the four winds resources trans-resveratrol or pterostilbene “executive esp” by douglas dean and johnmihalasky

bulletproof upgraded brain octane upgraded mct oil upgraded aging upgraded coffee upgraded decaf coffeebulletproof toolbox podcast #79, alberto villoldo 28 â© the bulletproof executive 2013