I would not have predicted that out of any possible piece of advice in the world, something as simple as going outside and getting dirty would be one of the top twenty responses from the people I’ve interviewed. Then again, I decided to leave the Silicon Valley tech world behind but to stay connected and move into the forest of Vancouver Island almost a decade ago in order to spend more time outdoors. My experience showed that the greatest gift I could give my kids was growing up in nature. It boosted my mood and cognitive performance immeasurably, and it turns out that I’m not alone. Spending time in nature nourishes your brain and your gut, helps your cells create more energy, and is at least as effective at treating depression as pharmaceuticals. No matter where you live, it is possible and essential to find the time and place to do something so basic that many people make the mistake of overlooking it: going outside. It helps you perform better when you’re inside, too.
Law 41: Make Your Environment Less like a Farm and More like a Zoo
Most people live in a domesticated environment that is economically useful and efficient but devoid of the type of energy that can power you to new levels. Spend more time outdoors. See trees. Smell plants. Taste real food. Sweat in the sun. Shiver when it’s cold. Give your nervous system a taste of the environment it evolved in so you can reap the returns as your biology changes to increase your performance.
Daniel Vitalis is in love with the idea of human wildness—as in free, sovereign, and undomesticated human life. His passion resides at the intersection of human zoology and personal development. In other words, he is keenly focused on understanding how we can use the wisdom of our ancestors and the benefits of their natural environments to reinvigorate our wild nature while simultaneously thriving in today’s world. For two decades, he’s been developing and applying practices modeled on the lives of early humans to help people get in touch with their wild sides. Some of the things he does are a little nuts, but he is inspiring a lot of people to maximize their performance in ways that are in line with mine.
Daniel uses the term “rewilding” to refer to the idea of restoring something to its natural, uncultivated state. It is the antonym of domesticating, which is derived from the same word as domicile—another word for house. In other words, domesticated means “of the house,” and for thousands of years humans not only have been domesticating plants and animals but also domesticating ourselves. Along the way, we’ve created a domestic version of many naturally wild entities. The romaine lettuce we eat is a domesticated version of the wild lettuce Lactuca serriola. The dogs we have as pets are domesticated versions of wolves. And Daniel claims that humans today are not actually Homo sapiens but rather a domesticated subspecies he calls Homo sapiens domestico fragilis. Maybe a little over the top, but he’s got your attention.
How has domestication changed us? Daniel says we are less robust and more graceful physically than our wild ancestors. We’re leaner and thinner and smaller. We mate and breed in captivity. We eat a diet of domesticated food. We are therefore a domestic subspecies. That’s radical thinking.
This means that there is a “wild” form of humans—indigenous people who still live in isolated pockets around the world. Daniel says that these wild humans are healthier, stronger, and fitter than the rest of us. But there aren’t many of them left. Daniel believes that we are on the brink of a monumental change for human history, which is the extinction of wild humans. When this happens, he says, we’ll lose the strength of our gene pool. This is why we must reawaken the wildness that’s still alive in our DNA with daily practices that will kindle the fire in our wild roots.
This rewilding process entails taking a look at your lifestyle and asking yourself how you can reinstate some of the things that are natural to our species. Daniel says to imagine pulling a chimpanzee out of the jungle and bringing him home to live in North America. Is your interest in keeping that animal healthy so it can live a long and productive life? If so, you would set up a habitat for the chimp that resembled its natural setting as much as possible instead of sticking it in an apartment, handing it a remote, and feeding it processed foods. But the latter is exactly what we are doing to ourselves, so much so that Daniel believes we are halting our own evolution and harming our DNA for future generations. He suggests that there is a direct link between this degeneration of our genetic code and the increase in modern illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, tooth decay, and bone decay. We’re coming unglued.
Right now, Daniel says, we are living in a human factory farm. The purpose of a farm is not to promote the animals’ health, happiness, well-being, and longevity. It’s about achieving maximum productivity at any expense with the goal of ending that animal’s life shortly. We’re born in captivity. We’re snipped and cut right after birth. We’re traumatized. We’re indoctrinated. We’re brainwashed. Then we produce products, services, and taxation money nonstop until we die prematurely. That’s a factory farm for humans. It’s a dark interpretation of our lives, for sure, and it ignores the benefits of civilization. But this perspective does offer us some useful insights when it comes to maximizing human performance.
Daniel believes we can instead create a human zoo—a place that promotes an animal’s maximum health, the expression of its wild behavior, and the preservation of its genetics so that the animal can live a long life. To live in a zoo, you must re-create a habitat and diet that’s as similar to the wild version as possible, even though it can be only an approximation. That exactly meets the definition of biohacking: changing the environment around you so you have full control of your own biology. Daniel isn’t suggesting that you need to go off the grid completely and start living in the woods. Instead, ask yourself: If you were going to bring a wild human being into your house, how would you prepare? What would you have available for him or her to eat? What kinds of activities would you plan? Then consider how you could take advantage of the same changes to set up your life so that it’s more of a zoo and less of a farm.
Of course, Daniel has faced a lot of criticism. He suggests that this is because the idea of wildness is taboo in a “civilized” society. In order to maintain our civilization, we have programmed ourselves to believe that there is something scary, unorganized, and inherently “other” about wildness and that if we get in touch with that part of us, it will erode all of the progress we’ve made and we’ll become barbaric again.
Not only is wildness normal, it is healthy. We’ve seen how every step we’ve taken away from nature has led to a breakdown in our health, whether it’s a result of sitting too much, not getting enough nutrients from plants and healthy animals, or the backbreaking labor of farming at the beginning of the Neolithic revolution. We were healthier in our wild environment. Before humans lived indoors, they had constant access to fresh air and didn’t have to deal with things such as dust, which is dead skin that we now breathe in all day long in addition to the chlorofluorocarbons that air-conditioning and refrigeration have been releasing into the air since the 1930s and all of the toxins in our factory-produced carpeting and furniture.
We’re never going to be able to go back to being completely wild, but Daniel and others recommend a few simple actions that can help awaken the wildness in your genes—all of which mirror the advice throughout this book: reduce your toxic load, improve the quality of your diet, increase your exposure to fresh air, sunlight, soil, and clean water. Basically, begin the rewilding process by immersing yourself in a natural environment when you can get outside and changing your environment inside to be more natural.
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Law 42: Allow Your Body to Make Its Own Sunscreen
Sunlight is a nutrient. Just as eating too much food can give you diabetes, getting too much sunlight can give you cancer. But replacing sunlight with junk light is like replacing real food with junk food. You will perform better and live longer when real, unfiltered sunlight bathes your naked skin and enters your eyes for at least twenty minutes a day. It will improve your sleep, act as an antidepressant, and give you more energy. Sunlight is not optional.
You read earlier about Dr. Gerald Pollack’s incredible work discovering a fourth phase of water that is not a liquid, gas, or solid but a gel called exclusion zone, or EZ, water. This is the type of water that is in our cells and that your mitochondria (the millions of power plants in your cells) need to create energy. Recently, scientists have discovered mysterious cell structures called microtubules that are required for you to build new mitochondria and move them around in neurons,1 and it turns out that EZ water is essential to movement within microtubules.
There are a few ways to create more EZ water. You get EZ water naturally when you drink raw vegetable juices, fresh spring water, or glacial melt water, and it forms spontaneously when regular water is vibrated or blended. Recent research by Dr. Pollack shows that even more EZ water forms when you blend butterfat into water. Better yet, EZ water forms in your cells when you expose your skin (and your eyes, the gateways to the brain) to unfiltered sunlight for a few minutes every day without sunglasses, clothing, or sunscreen.
Specifically, it’s 1,200-namometer light that creates EZ water, although sunlight also has other spectra with beneficial effects. For instance, the red light found in sunlight is absorbed by the hemoglobin in your blood and by mitochondria, which adds electrons to your cells. They are the same type of electron your body normally makes from combining food and air.
There is so much confusion and fear about sun exposure that many people take great pains to cover every inch of their skin before going outside. We slather on sunscreen, wear sunglasses, and cover up with clothing. But our bodies thrive in natural sunlight. Of course, it is not healthy to get so much sun exposure that you get sunburned, but a small amount of sun exposure every day stimulates collagen production in your skin and is good for your brain, your mood, and the water in your cells.
To get some information on sun exposure and sunscreen, I sought out Dr. Stephanie Seneff, a senior research scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, whose research concentrates mainly on the relationship between nutrition and health. She has written ten papers on modern-day diseases and the impact of nutritional deficiencies and environmental toxins on human health. She’s my favorite type of game changer—an expert in one field who moved to another field and disrupted it because she saw things a different way.
Dr. Seneff says that melanoma rates have increased in step with the increased use of sunscreen. Though causality has not been proven, there is a strong correlation between sunscreen use and melanoma, which doesn’t make sense since sunscreen is supposed to protect you from the harmful sun’s rays. But Dr. Seneff explains that the connection actually goes back to glyphosate, the herbicide in Roundup, which, she says, disrupts the skin’s natural ability to protect itself from the sun.
Gut microbes normally produce tryptophan and tyrosine, amino acids that serve as precursors of melanin, the dark compound in tan or dark-skinned types. They are meant to soak up UV light and protect you from any damage it might cause. But when your food is exposed to glyphosate, it affects your gut microbes and they cannot produce enough of these amino acids. Your natural mechanisms for sun protection stop functioning. This contributes to dangerous sunburns and/or melanoma—not because of exposure to the sun itself but because of exposure to chemicals that kill off the bacteria you need to protect yourself from the sun. You also need plenty of polyphenols (compounds from brightly colored plants) in your diet for your skin to manufacture melanin because melanin is made out of cross-linked polyphenols.
With the right diet and a healthy gut, you can safely expose yourself to the sun in moderation, enabling your cells to make more EZ water. When regular water is exposed to infrared (and maybe UV) light, it is transformed into EZ water. If you expose yourself to infrared light via an infrared sauna or simply by going outside on a sunny day without sunglasses or sunscreen, your body will soak up that light energy and build EZ water. Light enters your body through your eyes and makes its way directly into your brain, where you’ll first feel its impact. Light matters greatly to your brain because of its ability to help make EZ water and because you build melanin deep inside your brain, where it can create extra oxygen and electrons to fuel cognitive function. Other research shows that exposure to UV light can prevent or lessen nearsightedness.2
Dr. Pollack told me about an experiment in his lab in which he flowed water through a narrow tube. When he exposed the water to UV light, it flowed through the tube five times faster. If your blood and lymphatic fluid can flow through your narrow capillaries more quickly, you will experience less chronic inflammation. The tiny microtubules in your mitochondria also benefit from this “turbocharge” effect when you are exposed to sunlight.
As you read in chapter 7, adequate exposure to sunlight is also necessary to support your circadian rhythm so you can get good-quality sleep. When you’re exposed to daylight, your body produces serotonin, the “feel-good” neurotransmitter. Your body breaks down serotonin into melatonin, the hormone that helps you sleep. If you’re not exposed to enough natural sunlight during the day, you won’t have enough melatonin to sleep well at night. And you already know that not sleeping well is the key to sucking at basically everything.
One of the first people to really sound the alarm about junk light (artificial light that can hinder performance) was T. S. Wiley, an author who was fifteen years ahead of her time in identifying the importance of sunlight and darkness for human health. Since that time, the Nobel Prize has been awarded for work in circadian biology, and a few thought leaders in the wellness space have joined me in taking up the cause of using light and darkness to improve our biology. Perhaps the best known is Dr. Joseph Mercola, an osteopathic physician who has run the most trafficked health site on the internet for twenty years. He’s consistently been ahead of the curve with many of his recommendations. As you’d expect from a disruptive game changer, he has his share of critics, even though he’s been vindicated many times. In addition to interviewing him on the show, I’ve gotten to know him as someone who really practices what he preaches. To support his own biology, Dr. Mercola spends about ninety minutes every day walking on the beach, most of the time barefoot and without a shirt on to get electrons, photons, negative ions from the ocean, microbes from the seabirds, and, most important, UVB exposure. This has allowed him to maintain high vitamin D levels without taking supplements for the past several years. Ninety minutes a day is not possible for most people, but you can still benefit from spending a few minutes walking in nature as often as possible.
Our bodies are designed to make all the vitamin D we need when we are exposed to adequate UVB light via the sun’s rays. Yet Dr. Mercola estimates that today 85 percent of people are deficient in vitamin D, which is linked to a huge multitude of problems: cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis, cardiovascular disease, high cholesterol levels, neurological system disorders, kidney failure, reproductive system disorders, muscle weakness, obesity, disorders of the skin, and even tooth decay.
There is another reason that vitamin D is so important: vitamin D deficiency can lead to sleep disorders. In fact, studies show that the epidemic of sleep disorders is caused in part by widespread vitamin D deficiency.3 If you can’t move to Florida and spend more than an hour at the beach every day as Dr. Mercola does, I suggest eating foods that are rich in vitamin D, such as salmon, egg yolks, and tuna, and supplementing in addition to getting some UVB exposure from sunlight or a tanning lamp if you live in a northern climate as I do. Before supplementing, have a blood test done to make sure you’re getting the right amount of vitamin D. Just as too little vitamin D is bad, so is too much. Vitamin D temporarily pauses melatonin production, so take it in the morning instead of at night, when you want to go to sleep. And please, please do not take vitamin D3 unless you also take vitamin K2. New research shows that taking vitamin D3 without having enough K2 in your diet may calcify tissues over decades, and some preformed vitamin A (not just beta-carotene) can help balance these ratios.
Exposure to sunlight is essential to your mental health and overall happiness. You’re likely already familiar with one of the most pervasive types of depression, which hits during the darker months. Clinically, this is called seasonal affective disorder (SAD), and its symptoms can range from lack of motivation and trouble focusing to full-blown depressive symptoms. People who suffer from SAD usually find that it starts in the autumn, as the days grow shorter, and gets better in spring, when the days get longer. Location also clearly plays a role—those living farther from the equator have a higher incidence of SAD than those closer to the equator. Only around 1 percent of Florida residents experience SAD, whereas it affects 9 percent of Alaska residents.4 I believe there are many people who don’t have full-blown SAD but whose performance and overall wellness are negatively impacted in the winter, especially in the northern latitudes. This is a huge problem if you’re looking to be more successful at what you do but have less energy for several months of the year!
For decades, the most effective and popular treatment for seasonal depression has been light therapy. Research has shown it to be as effective as pharmaceutical antidepressants, and some studies have even indicated that it can work faster.5 The most effective version of light therapy is simply to go outside and expose your eyes and skin to natural sunlight for twenty minutes a day. To max out your vitamin D, expose as much of your skin as the temperature and local laws allow.
To set your brain’s sleep and wake timer, don’t wear sunglasses, and don’t look directly at the sun. The right spectrum of light will bounce off of your surroundings. Even if you don’t suffer from seasonal depression, doing this will improve your mood, help you sleep, and help you build more beneficial EZ water in your cells. And it’s free.
If exposure to natural light is not an option, try to find an indoor full-spectrum light that emits at least 2,500 lux (lux is a unit of light) without using LED lights. Set your lights at eye level and angle them away from your direct field of vision. As with the sun, don’t look directly at it. You want to expose your eyes without frying your retinas. Start at just five or ten minutes of exposure a day, depending on your light’s power, and work your way up to no more than sixty minutes. Make sure to follow the manufacturer’s directions. Protect your eyes from excessive UV light.
I have been using light therapy since 2007 to upgrade my performance, and it works. One of the people who helped me figure it out was Steven Fowkes, a biochemist who was one of the first people to pull together the research on smart drugs and share it. His influential newsletter, Smart Drug News, which is no longer being published, was the very beginning of the revolution in nootropics we are living through today. Without Steve’s work, I wouldn’t have had the Silicon Valley career I’ve enjoyed. Steve was onto something twenty years before everyone else.
Steve helped me fine-tune my light therapy, which has boosted my cognitive function and helped me enjoy noticeably better sleep. He says that if you’re in harmony with your day and your biorhythms are in phase with the light-dark cycle, you want to expose yourself to red light in the morning to mirror the sunrise. Then the light needs to shift toward blue in the middle of the day and for most of the day before phasing back down into red again as you prepare for sleep. This replicates the sun’s natural cycle, although blue LEDs are a poor way to get daytime blue light because of their intensity.
If you’re out of sync with the natural phases of day, meaning that you stay up late or wake up early (before sunrise), you can use light therapy to nudge yourself back into alignment with the day. For example, if you have to wake up earlier than is ideal for your biology, you really want red light exposure first thing when you wake up. Set up some red lights above your bed, kick off the covers, turn on the red lights, and bake your body in red and infrared photons. This will turn on your mitochondria, improve your circulation, and give you a noticeable boost in energy. At night, the blue light that is a part of the spectrum of LED bulbs suppresses melatonin production, so set dimmer switches in your house for evenings and avoid the lights of electronic screens.
Exposure to the sun helps your body create vitamin D and EZ water and sets your circadian rhythm to boost your performance. Getting outside is critical, which leads us to the next law . . .
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Law 43: Bathe in the Forest Instead of the Tub
Our society’s obsession with cleanliness has led to a dramatic reduction in our gut biodiversity, which has a negative impact on our overall health and happiness. It is not necessary or beneficial to be 100 percent sanitary all the time. For optimum health and happiness, get dirty, bathe in nature, and keep yourself no more than moderately clean.
Dr. Maya Shetreat-Klein is a neurologist and herbalist and the author of The Dirt Cure: Healthy Food, Healthy Gut, Happy Child, which describes an integrative and spiritual approach to treating health issues in both kids and adults. I find her work particularly interesting because not only is Dr. Shetreat-Klein a neurologist, she’s also an herbalist and urban farmer, and she has done a lot of important work with indigenous communities.
Dr. Shetreat-Klein wants to change the way you think about dirt and bacteria. She says that exposing yourself to bacteria is transformative for the whole body, from the development of the gut to the development of the immune system to healthy brain function. Our culture is obsessed with being hygienic. We have come to believe that the cleaner you are, the better, and that being dirty is a bad thing. As a result, we’ve sanitized our lives and our bodies to a fault using antibiotics, factory-farmed food, and antibacterial cleansers.
This has all conspired to make us less healthy and less happy instead of more. Dr. Shetreat-Klein says that the first step in reclaiming our well-being is to shift the way we think about dirt. Most bacteria are neither good nor bad. There are definitely a few nasty ones, but the strength of your body’s immune system—which includes your gut microbes—determines how much of a threat is present. So what determines the health of your gut? Microbial biodiversity is the Holy Grail. When you have a diverse community of bacteria living inside you, they keep the gut balanced and prevent any one type of bacterium from growing out of control. You’ll never be completely free of bad organisms. They’re in us all the time, including parasites and viruses. But they can live synergistically and keep one another in check as long as you have a wide variety of other organisms, as well.
The best way to promote gut microbe diversity is through exposure to good, old-fashioned dirt—in particular, soil, which contains organisms that can literally make you happier. Scientists discovered this, like many other good things, by accident. Back in 2004, Dr. Mary O’Brien, an oncologist at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London, injected lung cancer patients with a soil bacterium called Mycobacterium vaccae to see if it could prolong their lives. It did not. However, it did significantly improve the patients’ quality of life. They were happier, expressed more vitality, and had better cognitive functioning after being injected with the bacterium.
A few years later, neuroscientists at the University of Bristol injected the same bacterium into mice and found that it activated groups of neurons in the mouse brains responsible for producing serotonin. That boosted serotonin levels in the brain to similar levels as antidepressant medications. So instead of taking medications with well-known and well-documented side effects, it’s possible to get similar results from tending to your organic garden. Sign me up for that.
Scientists are currently studying whether they can replicate these results in humans and use soil bacteria to treat depression and even PTSD. Until they find funding and jump through the necessary hoops to complete a double-blind study, I’m going to risk wasting my time playing in the mud.
There is a reason we enjoy playing in the mud as kids: we instinctively gravitate toward it because it makes us feel good. We naturally want to get dirty. Even as babies, we crawl on the ground and constantly put out hands and feet into our mouths. As we do this, we’re actually seeding our microbes again and again during this critical period of development.
Dr. Shetreat-Klein says that this is only one way that humans naturally engage in plant medicine. We all know that taking a walk in nature makes us feel good. So does receiving flowers, which, she suggests, is another form of plant medicine. Our culture tells us to give flowers to people when we’re happy, when we love them, when we want to congratulate them, or when they’re sad or have experienced a loss. We do it because it transforms the way we feel physically and emotionally. Having living plants from the outdoors in our homes shifts our mood. Perhaps the cloud of soil bacteria that accompanies the flowers is one reason for this.
Another cultural behavior based in plant medicine is the Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing. In this tradition, people immerse themselves in the beauty of the forest. The concept was developed in the 1980s as many Japanese moved from the countryside to more urban areas and felt compelled to get back to the land and bathe in it to soak up some of what they were missing in the city. The therapy has become a mainstay of Japanese medicine.
Forest bathing doesn’t just improve your gut biome; walking in nature is a nonstrenuous physical activity, which in and of itself can improve mood, decrease stress hormone production, and increase longevity.6 But it’s not just the movement that reduces stress in forest bathers. Studies have shown that the average salivary cortisol concentrations of forest bathers are 12 to 13 percent lower than those of urban hikers, meaning that nature itself reduces stress hormones. Forest bathing can also decrease sympathetic nerve activity, blood pressure, and heart rate.7
Forest bathing also boosts immunity. This may be due in part to increased biodiversity from spending time in nature. In addition, many evergreen trees give off aromatic compounds called phytoncides that increase natural killer (NK) cells, your immune system’s lead defense against viruses and disease. NK cells are suppressed by chronic exposure to stress hormones, which can lead to a weakened immune system and even cancer. But NK cell activity is always higher after forest bathing and rises as your body is exposed to more phytoncides. Cognitively, forest bathing improves mood and increases mental performance and creative problem solving.8 It’s possible that some essential oils from evergreen trees contain these compounds, too.
Another Bulletproof Radio guest, Dr. Zach Bush, began his career in oncology research. When he discovered molecules from microbes in soil that looked like the chemotherapy chemicals he was studying, a lightbulb went off in his head. He realized that soil microbes communicate directly with our mitochondria and our cellular DNA and changed his career to study this phenomenon. In his interview, Dr. Bush recommended that we all spend time in a larger variety of natural environments, just breathing deeply. Our sinuses pick up microbes from natural environments, and microbial diversity in our bodies makes us far more resilient. He makes a practice of visiting deserts, rain forests, and any other unusual natural environments he can find as a way of diversifying his gut bacteria. He has also created a supplement made from ancient soil bacteria containing the compounds he discovered, called Restore. I now make it a point to breathe deeply in unusual environments full of undisturbed soil microbes. It’s called hiking, and it beats using a treadmill on so many levels.
Even if you live in an urban environment, there are ways to benefit from being in nature. Spend time in public parks, try composting, get a dog to run around outside with, or spend more time with other people to boost your gut biodiversity. Being clean and washing your hands is fine, but cut back on antimicrobials and hand sanitizers and use regular soap instead.
Basically, be moderately clean and encourage your kids to get dirty. Let them roll down hills and play outside as much as they can. Play outside with them, and then wash off at the end of the day with a bar of soap. It’s actually pretty simple, like all the best game changers are.
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