by Dave Asprey
The first time I did this, I could feel my brain turn on almost immediately. It was amazing. The burst of energy was so precious to me because I hadn’t felt it in years, despite my best efforts. But it lasted for only five minutes. I knew I was onto something, so for the next eighteen months whenever I wasn’t traveling, I did a little at-home rectal ozone treatment every night. This helped reverse the damage from years of toxic mold exposure and got me back to the healthiest state I’d been in for many years. It was so transformative that as soon as I could afford it, I invested in medical-grade ozone equipment.
You might be wondering why ozone therapy is in a book about living longer than you’re supposed to. Here’s why: It is one of the most effective ways to restore your mitochondrial function to that of a young person and to stop any infection that could kill you on your way to immortality. It’s also very affordable and shockingly safe compared to almost any pharmaceutical.
Since learning how to use it, I’ve turned to ozone therapy whenever I have a local infection that I want to nip in the bud before it spreads and I have to take antibiotics. I even use it on my kids. A few years ago, my then eight-year-old daughter, Anna, scratched her ear on a rosebush, and it got seriously infected. Her ear was hugely swollen and an angry red color. Dr. Lana (a former ER doctor) decided that we would take Anna to an urgent care clinic for antibiotics if it didn’t clear up by the next morning. Knowing how bad antibiotics are for your gut (more on this later), we did what any good biohacker parents would do. We sat her down next to the medical ozone generator, put on a TV show about dragons (a special treat, since she doesn’t watch a lot of TV), blew a fan on her so she wouldn’t breathe in the ozone, and funneled the ozone gas directly onto the skin on her ear. After the first treatment, her ear returned to its normal size. After the second, it returned to its normal color and was completely healed.
Why don’t more doctors know about this treatment? It takes some time to administer ozone therapy, and it requires training, but it doesn’t sell drugs. And because it’s not the dreaded “standard of care” forced on healers by insurance companies, any doctor that uses it is taking on some amount of risk.
Thankfully, there are some doctors who are willing to take that risk. For example, Dr. Robert Rowen. I first met Dr. Rowen when he presented at the Silicon Valley Health Institute and later interviewed him for Bulletproof Radio about the work he did training doctors in Sierra Leone to treat patients suffering from Ebola with ozone therapy. In most cases, patients with Ebola have only a 10 percent chance of survival, but Dr. Rowen knew he could improve those odds if he trained the local doctors to administer ozone therapy. Not only is ozone safer than other treatment options for Ebola, but it’s also less expensive and far more effective.
In October 2014, Dr. Rowen traveled to Sierra Leone with his colleague Howard Robins after being invited by the president to train local health professionals to treat Ebola with ozone therapy. The training went great, but then they hit a snag. While they were at the Sierra Leone Ebola treatment center outside of the capital, a call came in from the Ministry of Health halting the ozone project with no further explanation. Patients and staff were forbidden from receiving ozone therapy, even if they knew they’d been exposed to Ebola. The staff did continue with the training, fearing for their lives. But patients were denied the treatment and left to die.
Four health care workers and three doctors who were on the front lines subsequently contracted the disease. Of the three doctors, two outright refused ozone therapy and died. This made international news. The third doctor had already been trained by Dr. Rowen and requested ozone therapy but was refused. Sadly, he also died. The four health care workers, however, managed to get the ozone therapy, and all four responded nearly instantly. They completely recovered within a few days with no complications. Dr. Rowen published the results of those four cases in the African Journal of Infectious Diseases.4
The wife of one of the senior doctors had encouraged her husband to get ozone treatments, and after his death, she was placed under armed guard quarantine at her home. She knew she had been exposed to the disease and was afraid for her life, but the guards wouldn’t let her leave to get ozone treatment. She became so desperate that she scaled a razor wire fence in the middle of the night, shredding her skin, in order to escape. Luckily, she was able to receive the ozone therapy and developed no symptoms.
I am tremendously grateful for brave and disruptive doctors like Dr. Rowen, who take on these risks to bring effective treatments to the people who need them. It’s shameful that greed has kept more people from benefiting.
OZONE THERAPIES
As you read earlier, there are a variety of ways to get ozone into our bodies. The fastest and most effective option is to expose your blood to ozone. This way, the ozone goes straight into your bloodstream and instantaneously reacts with your blood atoms. To do this, the doctor takes blood out of the body, places it into a container, and then injects the ozone in its gas form directly into that container. The ozone gas quickly disappears when it comes into contact with other atoms, creating peroxides. The container that once held blood now holds peroxides and white blood cells. When infusing these cells back into your body, you expose your entire system to the benefits of ozone.
Today you can spend even more to go to a doctor’s office and get the best systemic ozone treatment around, which is called a ten pass. For this treatment, a doctor pulls out your blood, mixes it with ozone, and puts it back into your bloodstream. Then he or she pulls out your blood again, mixes it with ozone, and puts it back in, ten times over and over. This powerful treatment is a substantial procedure, but it does wonders to rejuvenate the body and remove microbial pathogens. I plan to do ten-pass ozone once a year for at least the next hundred years. It might be a good fit for you if you’re suffering from a long-standing illness or just want to reset your mitochondria to become more youthful.
You can also use ozone locally either transdermally or via injection, which causes the peroxides to quickly interact with your cells in an infected area. For example, if you have chronic cystitis (inflammation) of the bladder, you can inject ozone directly into the bladder. When you use ozone rectally, the peroxides drain straight to the liver. This can be used as a direct liver treatment. It’s also possible to “ozonate” water and then apply the water to specific areas to treat local infections. Some dentists recommend swishing with this water to fight off gum disease, and you can use the water as eye drops to treat eye infections. Please don’t try any of these therapies before consulting a doctor! This bears repeating: Accidentally inhaling ozone gas can cause permanent lung damage or even kill you. Don’t go it alone without basic training.
More recently, ozone has become a popular option for treating chronic joint pain, an all-too-common symptom of aging. A promising therapy called prolozone involves injecting ozone directly into the joint, where it triggers healing and regeneration. I learned about this from a member of SVHI who was in her fifties, weighed about four hundred pounds, and was diabetic. One month, she relied on a walker to get around. The next month, after receiving prolozone therapy, she needed only a cane. Medical images of her knees showed no visible cartilage before the treatment and a clear layer of cartilage just six weeks after receiving prolozone therapy. At the time, scientists believed you could not grow cartilage! If chronic joint problems, especially in your knees and back, are a part of your life, this might be a game changer for you. I have since worked with doctors to inject ozone into two of my joints with considerable improvements.
Today I opt to rotate my oxidative therapies because I find that each one has its own unique benefits. Sometimes I do IV UVB, as I mentioned earlier, and on occasion I use a high-dose vitamin C drip to change things up. Ozone is my go-to when I want to keep my energy levels and immunity high after a long flight, and via IV as an occasional anti-aging treatment.
Think of it this way: Excessive oxidation causes your body to basically rust from the inside out. This i
s why excess free radicals are bad for you. It’s counterintuitive to imagine that adding an extra oxidant like ozone to your body will help, but it forces your body to become better at making its own defenses. It’s like lifting weights for your cellular antioxidant systems!
OZONE, ENERGY, AND NAD
I now know that my first at-home ozone treatment turned my brain on, even temporarily, because ozone is also one of the world’s most powerful mitochondrial stimulants. It increases the rate at which red blood cells break down glucose to create energy while boosting the amount of oxygen being sent to tissues. But perhaps most important, it charges a powerful anti-aging molecule called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) with its extra electron, transforming it into NAD+.
NAD is a coenzyme (a compound that certain enzymes need in order to work) that every one of your cells needs to perform its basic functions and keep you alive. Unfortunately, your levels of NAD decline by 50 percent between birth and age fifty,5 and they continue declining even further after that unless you do something about it. To understand what NAD does, it’s helpful to think of NAD as a waiter that picks up an electron from one table and drops it off at another. It exists in two forms: NAD+ and NADH. The oxidized form, NAD+, grabs an electron from one molecule. While it has a hold on that electron, it becomes NADH. NADH then donates that electron to another molecule, and it becomes NAD+ again. This simple act of shuffling electrons around allows your enzymes to activate microscopic chemical reactions in your cells that keep them healthy and your whole body humming. And ozone therapy adds extra electrons to the party.
Without NAD+, everything grinds to a halt. Your mitochondria require NAD+ to create energy. Your body also needs NAD+ for the maintenance of blood glucose levels at night, for the generation of ketones, for proper muscle function, and for your nerves to send messages to one another. In a nutshell, you cannot function without it. In one study, when scientists created conditions in the lab that inhibited NAD+, cells died because their mitochondria couldn’t make enough energy to sustain life.6
NAD+ also helps ensure that proteins retain their shape so you can avoid the buildup of amyloid proteins, one of the Seven Pillars of Aging. And your cells use NAD+ to help a particular family of proteins called sirtuins function. Sirtuins regulate biological pathways and protect your cells from oxidative stress and its resulting age-related decline.7 These proteins also play a crucial role in maintaining the length of your telomeres.8 Because you want long telomeres and the longevity that goes along with them, you need plenty of NAD+.
There’s plenty of research to show that NAD+ itself also protects cells from oxidative stress. In one study, when researchers measured a cell’s NAD+ levels, they were able to predict whether or not it would survive in the face of a stressor. The more NAD+ a cell has, the better its chance of survival.9 In another study out of Singapore, researchers stressed rat brain cells by depriving them of oxygen and then added NAD+ directly to the cell culture. They found that the cells treated with NAD+ were far more resilient to stress. A much higher percentage of the cells that received the NAD+ survived than those that did not get the extra shot of NAD+.10 Translation: Healthy levels of NAD+ keep you and your cells strong and resilient, especially in the face of stress.
NAD+ also helps your body repair DNA that has been damaged from normal day-to-day exposures and functions.11 It does this by bringing a negative charge to places where DNA is damaged, which facilitates repair.12 This has been shown to extend the life-span of animals. In one study on rats, a control group that did not receive NAD+ supplements all died within five months. Half of them died even sooner, within three and a half months. Meanwhile, the group that received supplemental NAD+ all lived beyond ten months, indicating that NAD+ supplementation led to a dramatic improvement in life-span.13 If this molecule can help a rat live 50 percent longer than expected, what can it do for you?
Your ratio between NAD+ to NADH plays a big role in how you’ll age. Ideally, you want a NAD+ to NADH ratio of 700:1. Most healthy people have this proper ratio in their cells until around the age of forty, when NAD+ levels begin to decline.14 It’s no big surprise that this coincides with increased oxidative stress and rapid cellular aging.15 Athletes are usually the first ones to notice an NAD+ decline when they suddenly can’t bring it the way they used to despite keeping up with their usual training regimen. Other “normal” people usually don’t notice that something has changed until another decade or so has passed. Then they chalk it up to simply getting older, and sadly have no clue that they can enhance their NAD+ to NADH ratio and begin aging backward instead of quickly sliding downhill.
There are actually lots of things you can do to keep your NAD levels from declining and even raise them to youthful levels. This is a good idea regardless of your age. Raising NAD+ levels increases insulin sensitivity,16 reverses mitochondrial dysfunction,17 reduces stem cell senescence, and even increases life-span in animals.18 How’s that for taking on all Four Killers and shoring up two pillars?
If you want to pull out all the stops, you can opt for intravenous NAD+ treatments. This was originally used as a treatment option for drug and alcohol addiction, but it’s now a regular part of my quest to live to a hundred and eighty. It’s also part of the human upgrade program at Upgrade Labs in Beverly Hills. To date, I have completed twenty full IV treatments, although the standard anti-aging regimen is five and the drug and alcohol regimen is ten. Each one takes about ninety minutes, and the first few are intense. It may sound strange, but in a way it reminded me of the first time I tried ayahuasca in Peru, but without the hallucinations. I could feel a strange, tingly pressure in my chest, which bordered on uncomfortable, and then I felt warm all over. I slept incredibly well after my first NAD+ treatment and felt great for days afterward. From now until the time I reach a hundred and eighty, I plan to continue getting IV NAD+ treatments once a quarter to supercharge my mitochondria and keep myself from ever peaking.
Here are some other ways to boost NAD+ levels:
Take supplements that will boost your NAD+ levels. I like Tru Niagen, which contains the only known FDA-safety notified form of nicotinamide riboside, a precursor to NAD+.
Follow a cyclical ketogenic diet. Whether they come from fasting, restricting carbs, or using Brain Octane Oil to raise ketones directly, ketones increase the NAD+ to NADH ratio.
Practice intermittent fasting and/or calorie restriction, which both increase NAD+ levels.19
Take oxaloacetate (a part of Bulletproof’s KetoPrime supplement). Your body converts this organic compound to malate, a salt form of malic acid, which raises your NAD+ to NADH ratio.20
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Bottom Line
Want to age backward? Do these things right now:
•If you’re over fifty or have dealt with serious health problems in the past, find a local ozone doctor and get IV treatments when they are affordable for you. At worst, your mitochondria will become better. At best, the ozone will knock out other unpleasant stuff growing in your body that you don’t even know about.
•If you have arthritis or sore joints that don’t get better, consider prolozone injections into the impacted joint to speed healing dramatically.
•If you’re having dental work done, look for a dentist who uses ozone gas to sterilize the teeth before treatments. This can help you avoid chronic inflammation and its corresponding aging.
•Up your NAD+ with supplements or IV treatments to boost mitochondrial function at any age. If you don’t want to try either of these, you can increase your NAD+ levels through cyclical ketosis, intermittent fasting, and/or calorie restriction.
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9
FERTILITY = LONGEVITY
As you read earlier, I was twenty-six when I had my first hormone tests done at an anti-aging physician’s office. When the results came back, I learned I had low testosterone, way more estrogen than was normal (enough to grow man boobs), and exceptionally low thyroid hormone levels. In response, I went on prescriptio
n bioidentical testosterone and thyroid, and this changed my life. I can share firsthand how important these hormones are for how you look, how you feel, how you perform in bed (or even if you care about what goes on in bed), and how much you like your job and your life in general.
No matter how old you are, knowing your hormone levels and making sure they are ideal can only benefit you. If you want “normal” hormone levels for a seventy-five-year-old when you’re seventy-five, go for it. I’ll be rocking my twenty-five-year-old hormones when I’m seventy-five, either because by then I’ll have upgraded my biology enough to produce hormones like a young man or because I’ll still be supplementing with hormones to make me feel Super Human.
SEX, LIES, AND HORMONES
In 2001, as I set out to learn about the complex world of hormone replacement, I met T. S. Wiley at the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine. I was already familiar with her work. Her first book, Lights Out, informed a lot of my early thoughts on the importance of circadian rhythms, and her second one, Sex, Lies, and Menopause, completely changed the way I thought about hormones and fertility.
That convention was filled with the brightest stars of the anti-aging world, but most people outside those walls had never heard of these brilliant and badass doctors, authors, and researchers. At the time, those in mainstream medicine considered the entire field of anti-aging to be crazy. That’s still true to some extent today. But within the field, Wiley is considered a maverick because she helps her older clients use hormones to mirror the natural hormonal cycles of much younger people. If normal hormone replacement is paint by numbers, her protocols are van Goghs.