Get Your Greens

Drink alcohol? Drink soda? Drink fruit juice? All that fructose is "frucing-up" your liver as Dr. Robert Lustig writes in his book Fat Chance.

The good news? You can regenerate your liver by living clean for three years according to Dr. Berg. Giving up the fruit juice and high fructose sodas was easy, but going without alcohol for three years seems a bit extreme to me. Still, I do go days, weeks up to even an month without consuming alcohol and do my best to clean up my liver with leafy greens.

Some time ago, I got fed up with salads and sought another way to get my greens. That is when I bought my Vitamix Series 750 blender and started experimenting with elaborate smoothies, many of which have a bunch of fruit in them.

This is my spinach smoothie. The ingredients are very simple:

• 3 cups baby spinach
• 1 tbsp Stevia, or Xylitol
• 1 tbsp of Ceylon cinnamon, or cinnamon blend
• 16 oz of spring water (I sometime split 50/50 with coconut milk)

Now, I can pound 3 cups of spinach in under a minute and with no carbohydrates to speak of, I should be able to stay in Ketosis.

Stay well engineered,

Devon

These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These statements or products referenced are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

I, Biohacker

A lot of people ask me what a "biohacker" is. Therefore the clever combination of "biohacker" and "engineer" by which I title my blog is lost on them.

Sugar cravings on low carbohydrate? There is a hack for that.

Unable to lose weight despite eating a reduced calorie diet and exercising more? There is a hack for that.

Having trouble going to sleep after staring a computer screen all day/night? There is a hack for that.

I have only been a Biohacker since 2013, so I am still learning all the neat hacks, but I will share them as they become known to me.

Stay well engineered,

Devon

Micronutrient Competition

The goal is to get most of your vitamins, minerals and co-enzymes from the food you eat. However, there are many reports of how depleted our soil is and at the end of the day, you really do not know what is in the food you are eating. The goal of supplementation is to ensure you get the vitamins, minerals and co-enzymes that are either difficult to get in sufficient quantities, or are too critical to leave to chance in your diet.

I recently became aware of micronutrient competition, the brain child of Jayson and Mira Calton of Carlton Nutrition and their Nutreince multivitamin supplement. Nutreince is a twice daily powdered beverage that is designed to provide you with all the micronutrients you require divided into a morning and afternoon servings that do not compete.

As they explain in their patent, certain micronutrients when combined will render both inert, making most multivitamins less effective. Some micronutrients will compete for receptor sites in your body. While other micronutrients can cause decreased utilization of other micronutrients. Lastly, the presence of some micronutrients might mask the deficiency in others.

I still like the convenience of Vitamins on Demand, and even as complete as the Nutreince supplement is, it does not meet some of my personal micronutrient goals. For now, I will see if Vitamins on Demand can package my vitamins differently so they do not compete, but if you are looking to start a new vitamin program, I suggest you consider Calton Nutrition.

Stay well engineered,

Devon

These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These statements or products referenced are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Do You K2?

According to the Mayo Clinic, the majority of Kidney Stones are caused by a build up of Calcium Oxalate.

A lack of Vitamin K2 in your diet will lead to excess serum calcium as discovered when Warfarin was administered to rats in this Pub Med paper.

Dr. Weston A. Price  was a dentist that visited all corners of the world and discovered that primitive cultures in Africa, the European Mountains, the Arctic, the East Indies and beyond all had perfect teeth, no cavities and no signs of atherosclerosis. A condition that deteriorated when these primitive peoples moved into urban areas. 

Price identified white flour, refined sugar and lack of vegetable minerals as the cause of tooth decay and myocardial issues. What Price described as "Activator X" in his book Nutrition and Physical Degradation, is in fact Vitamin K2, an essential vitamin for keeping calcium in your bones and teeth, and out of your veins and arteries according to Dr. Kate Rhéaume-Bleue who has carried on the message of Vitamin K2 in her book Vitamin K2 and the Calcium Paradox: How a Little-Known Vitamin Could Save Your Life.

For this reason, I take (2) K2 Complex Softgels along with my 1,000IU per 25lbs body mass of Vitamin D3 everyday.

Keeping your calcium in your bones is just the first part of keeping calcium out of your soft tissues.

Next time, I will write about how the leafy greens that are essential to life may be hurting you when consumed raw.

Stay well engineered,

Devon

These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These statements or products referenced are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Water Quality, Part 2

My post on Water Quality generated a lot of offline discussions and a couple suggestions.

First: What is pH?

The pH is the measure of the of H+ ions in solution. Acids have high H+ concentrations.

The water sample on the left is the bottled water I drink most often which, to my surprise was more acidic than usual. This might require a larger study. 

The next water sample is my tap water, which comes from a community well. I have always enjoyed the taste and it appears it it is very neutral pH.

The next water sample is the tap water from work. The city of Milwaukee has not always had the best water, but has been widely praised in recent years. While the pH was also very neutral this is the result of an extensive treatment process and certainly some chemicals.

The last water sample is a popular electrolyte beverage for infants...and apparently middle-aged men after a weekend in Vegas...You will note it is quite acidic.

Stay well engineered,

Devon

These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These statements or products referenced are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Burn Fat with Science

When you lose weight, where does it go?

When you lose weight are you burning Calories or are you burning fat? 

In this TEDx talk ruben Meereman agrees that Calories (a unit of heat) and weight loss (a unit of mass) do not compute and tries to explain that weight loss is about a relatively simple chemistry equation. Meereman purports that "burning" fat through exercise is like any combustion reaction which requires fuel, heat and oxygen. But, does this math add up? 

The molar weight of the atoms above are as follows:

• Carbon = 12.010g/mol
• Hydrogen = 1.008g/mol
• Oxygen = 16.000g/mol

Therefore, one could calculate that the weight of one mole of fat would be:

Similarly, one could calculate that weight of the oxygen would be:

Such that one could estimate that it would take 5.503lb of oxygen to burn 1.899lb of fat.

If one considers that Lance Armstrong has been said to have an active VO2max of 85 ml / kg / min, one can calculate the volumetric rate of oxygen consumption of a 200lb male with a VO2max of 85 mL / kg / min would be:

Next, the density of oxygen at standard temperature and pressure needs to be calculated:

With the volumetric rate of oxygen consumption and the density of oxygen at standard temperature and pressure known, mass rate of oxygen consumption can then be calculated:

Lastly, the time to burn 5.503lb (2496g) of oxygen can be calculated:

Therefore, it would take an elite athlete 8.1 hours at a VO2max of 85 mL / kg / min to burn 1.9lb of fat and 15.3 hours for the average adult male with a VO2max of 45 mL / kg / min.

Am I saying that the key to weight loss is simply “eat less and move more” as Ruben is suggesting? No, hormonal imbalances and metabolic issues prevent you from burning fat no matter how little you eat or more you move. However, I believe Ruben does a great job explaining where the fat goes when you do lose weight. 

Furthermore, if one could measure their VO2max, a service offered by many hospitals and universities, then they would be able to calculate the minimum amount of high intensity exercise required to achieve the maximum result. Which is exactly what an efficient Biohacker would do.

Stay well engineered,

Devon

These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These statements or products referenced are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Email Efficiency

A couple months ago, I gave a presentation to a group of my peers on email organization. I covered topics such as:

Batch Email Viewing

Disabling the new email tones and notifications and forcing yourself to check email at regular, spaced intervals between which you focus on the tasks at hand. Email is intrusive and distracting. Limiting your exposure to it will help you be more efficient.

Having as Few Folders as Possible

Using Microsoft Outlook Categories to tag and segregate emails by category and color within a few high-level folders instead of spending countless hours sorting email into dozens of folders.

Making Rules Work for You

Tagging emails with categories is great, but now that I found a script that will enable me to run Inbox Rules that normally activate when email arrives, at the click of the button. Now most of my email will be filled automatically once I have tagged it.

Having as Few Emails in Your Inbox as Possible

I have (7) emails in my personal inbox and only (2) back at the office. These are the emails that require my follow up tomorrow. Reducing inbox clutter also helps curb the the Zeigarnik Effect, a compulsive need to think about incomplete tasks.

If these sort of things interest you, I would highly recommend checking out The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss and Less Doing, More Living by Ari Meisel.

Stay well engineered,

Stay well engineered,

Devon

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These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These statements or products referenced are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

All Purified Water is Not Created Equal

Manufacturers of bottled water love to tell you how pure their water is. Purity being the measures taken to filter out particles and large micro organisms and further disinfect of viruses and other pathogens through heat or chemical processes. Meanwhile, other Premium water manufacturers will tell you how natural their product is coming from some under ground aquifer or some glacial mountain stream. While lastly, there are the water "purists" who tout alkaline water as the only water we should be consuming. I can see how it can be a little confusing.

I noticed that my coworkers have spent the last month or so battling some sort of Upper Respiratory Infection, right about the time that I noticed that my coworkers started drinking a particular bottle of water provided to us by the vendor that runs the VMI Program.

Last week, the April showers did not yet bring May flowers, but the tree pollen levels were certainly rising up and I found myself feeling particularly lousy and my normal allergy medication not being particularly effective. What I did not realize right away was that I had also recently changed the bottled water I was drinking.

So, I decided to test this for myself using 5 drops of this PH Testing drops I bought from Amazon and the results were not necessarily surprising.

The glass on the left is the bottled water I have been drinking for years (PH=7.0). In the middle is the water that my coworkers have been drinking recently (PH=6.0). Lastly, the glass on the right is the water I have recently started drinking (PH=6.5). Is it a coincidence that my coworkers got sick, and more importantly stayed sick, when they were drinking water that was slightly acidic? 

What about the mountain spring water? What about the alkaline water?

The glass on the left is the bottled water I have been drinking for years (PH=7.0). The glass in the middle a popular European mountain spring water (PH=7.0). Lastly, the glass on the right is a brand of alkaline water I have seen at Whole Foods and elsewhere that touts a PH of 9.5+ on the bottle; it does not disappoint.

Now, I am a man of science and I know that, like everything in life, there must be a balance. Our bodies strive to maintain gradients of salt, potassium, calcium, glucose and, yes, PH.

That said, I think that people put all filtered and disinfected water in the same category and if you are feeling particularly tired or sick perhaps you should reevaluate your water.

Stay well engineered,

Devon

These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These statements or products referenced are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Back in Ketosis!

My fasting glucose dropped by over 40 mg/dL over the course of the day and I was focused, clear-minded and, least of all, not hungry thanks to my Bulletproof Coffee. There was a that point just before I went home that I felt a little sick, but once my body got with the program, I could feel the blood returning to my head with all those glorious Ketones.

You will note that in the chart above that the concentration of the Ketone, Beta Hydroxybutyrate, is so much smaller than glucose that I had to scale up the values 1000x to show a comparatively similar swing a I had in glucose.

In the past months I have recorded some of my worst blood sugar readings that I can recall. I will not say what it was or when it was, but it did get me thinking. If I believed in the Energy Balance theory, what would it take to burn off the excess blood sugar?

For example, if I had a fasting blood sugar of 110 mg/dL and my target blood sugar was 85 mg/dL, I would be in a surplus of 25 mg/dL. Assuming that I have 50 dL of blood, I would have an excess of 1250mg (1.25g) of sugar in my blood. At 4 calories per gram, I would be in an energy surplus of  only 5 Calories.

If this was true, then I could chew off my calories surplus with a stick of gum. If this was true, anyone who overate carbohydrates by 5 calories, would have high fasting blood sugar. Clearly, neither are true. So, something about this paradigm is incorrect. It is the glucose, not the calories. It has always been about the glucose.

Stay well engineered,

Devon

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These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These statements or products referenced are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Flynn Lives!

"Flynn Lives!"

Blog? Sure.

Biohacking? By the boat load.

Engineering? Not so much since the website's inception, until now.

Like many, I thoroughly enjoyed Tron Legacy and eagerly await TR3N, if a trilogy is in its franchise future. Back in the land of "the users", we are not befriended by self-manifesting Olivia Wilde's, or enrobed in suits of light. The latter, now possible thanks to the folks at Adafruit, I was able to upgrade a simple jacket into a Kevin Flynn flashback inspired piece.

The jacket had a waist band adjuster, which made a perfect chase for wires from one side to the other, allowing me to have an EL strip on each side of the jacket and a 2xAA inverter in one of the pockets.

It was my first time using a stitch puller. I needed to open up the chase to add grommets to both ends of the chase and solder the connectors, which were too large to fit through the grommets.

I had to perforate the clear periphery of the EL tape every eighth inch or so to affix it to the jacket with transparent thread. The result...worthy of the users.

I still need to repair the places the stitch puller did its work, but it will be several months before it is warm enough to wear this light of a jacket in these parts of the grid.

Stay well engineered,

Devon

End of Line.

No Sugar

I have listened to countless hours of podcasts, watched many hours of lectures, read a dozen books but all the while the proof has been staring me in the face. Notice that the nutritional information for one medium orange shows there appears to be no dietary requirement for Trans Fat, Sugar or Protein. Is it that there is no requirement, or is it that they do not want you to know what the requirements are? (Hint: zero trans fat, zero sugar, and moderate protein).

Stay well engineered,

Devon

These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These statements or products referenced are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

The Proof is the Yolk

One of my tool makers would always say "the proof is in the pudding". That adage can be applied to many things, and none so simple as the humble egg yolk. Perhaps this is why Dave Asprey discussed it in his Biohacking 101 Podcast.

There is nothing wrong with your monitor, one of these eggs has a different colored yolk. The lightly colored yolk in the upper left is a popular brand of USDA Certified Organic Omega-3 enhanced egg, while the other two are from a Pasture Raised eggs like those sold by Vital Farms.

If you refer to the Whole Foods Market guide to eggs, Organic eggs come from hens that only have access to the outside and are still fed an organic (grain) diet, while Pastured Raised eggs come from hens that have access to pasture where they eat grass, insects and small vertebrates.

Omega-3 enhanced eggs are not what they are all cracked up to be either. The most common way to increase the Omega-3 content of eggs is to feed hens flax seeds, but it turns out that Omega-3 enhanced eggs are higher in ALA and not higher in the EPA and DHA that we want.

Yes, the Pasture Raised eggs cost up to twice as much as the Organic eggs, which are even higher than the commercial eggs I ate few years ago. So, perhaps I do not eat eggs all that often. But when I do, I go for the good stuff.

Stay well engineered,

Devon

These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These statements or products referenced are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

I Wear My Sunglasses at Night

It is 11:59 PM. My alarm clock goes off in fours and thirty-one minutes and I do not feel tired. Maybe it was the second cup of Bulletproof Coffee today. Or, maybe it is because my circadian rhythm is off from my Christmas vacation. In times like these I don my red-tinted aviators.

Why red? The object is to block blue light and red does this quite handily. Why block blue light? Blue light blocks serotonin production in your pineal gland explains Mark Hyman in this Huffington Post article.

" As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work." John 9:4

There was a time when sunset was the end of the work day and the blue sky would turn an orange-red color before total darkness. This was the way that nature used to trigger our sleep. However, many of us work in spaces lit by florescent lights, stare at a computer screens all day and have bright "blue" HID headlights shined in our faces on the way home from work; while few of us have actually seen a sunset recently.

Eliminating blue light and sleeping in total darkness are perhaps two of the simplest things you can do hack your sleep.

Stay well engineered,

Devon

These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These statements or products referenced are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.