Dave Asprey joined Lisa Garr (email) in the first half to discuss how he spent two decades and over $1 million to hack his own biology - his latest techniques deal with "biohacking" your own body for alertness, health, and energy. Asprey recalled his early days in Silicon Valley, setting up servers for the first version of Google, and making $6 million dollars by the age of 26, then losing it by age 28. At the time, he was sickly and weighed close to 300 pounds. He decided to figure out how to get himself back to optimum mental and physical health. Asprey’s theory is based on ways to control the cells that he says control all of our physical systems: mitochondrial bacteria. If we can fool these control cells into doing what we want, Asprey says, we can "hack the human body in the same way we hack computers."
He suggested a simple way to control your sleep cycles-- blocking out all light in your bedroom at night, including even alarm clocks, which he believes can rob the body of quality sleep. Another front of action involves the diet, especially the first meal of the day. Asprey says that his "Bulletproof coffee" product tells the body’s mitochondrial bacteria that your brain (which uses most of the energy you consume) has gotten the energy it needs to function, and as he claims, will "turn off hunger in the morning." Asprey also extolled the virtues of stem cell treatments, which involve extracting the body’s own healthy cells and injecting them back in to problem areas, which he says has cured him of a variety of long-term ailments.
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In the second half, Steven Druker, executive director of the Alliance for Bio-Integrity, revealed how the public has been deceived about genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. He stated that virtually all genetically engineered (GE) foods currently on the market have been created through the use of recombinant DNA technology, which alters them in ways that could not have occurred through conventional breeding. He said the FDA has an explicitly acknowledged policy to foster biotechnology, and contended that the agency permitted GE foods to be marketed without undergoing the safety testing that’s mandated by US law. He also explained how the lawsuit he initiated against the FDA uncovered evidence that the agency ignored the advice of many of its own scientists who cautioned that GE foods pose abnormal health risks, such as the accidental production of novel toxins or allergens that could be difficult to detect. Druker noted that the FDA not only covered up the scientists’ memos, but claimed it was “not aware” of any information showing that these foods differ from others in any meaningful way, which he calls "a major fraud."
Druker says that while the advocates of GMOs claimed it would create food crops with increased nutritional benefits and would increase yields, the vast majority have been engineered to withstand more pesticides, which only increases profit margins for the growers. In 1994, the first GMO crop introduced on the market was the "Flavr Savr" tomato, which was designed to stay fresh longer. Druker reported that when FDA scientists reviewed the studies that had been conducted with the product, they concluded that further testing was necessary. Administrators claimed that all safety issues had been resolved, and approved it for sale without requiring any additional testing, which he referred to as "an astounding miscarriage of the scientific process." He says that unlike the EU, where the media has openly reported on GMOs, the US media has largely failed to inform the public of problems and has instead transmitted the unfounded assurances of the biotech industry and a compromised FDA.