Nutritional biohacking involves eating food with nutrients that allow the body to work at its highest potential while eliminating harmful food from your diet. It also includes getting direct sunlight and drinking alkaline water.
What is nutritional biohacking?
Dr. Jan Kasprowicz: The term nutritional biohacking or bio-optimization, it implies using foods, also super foods and other nutrients that allow our bodies and minds to work at our highest potential. In today’s society, we are surrounded by an environment that keeps breaking our bodies down. From a nutritional standpoint, we can’t just prevent breakdowns or decline because we can actually surpass or optimize our lives that we are functioning in concurrently.
It is not just about adding these foods, biohack foods and nutrients, but it is also about eliminating the foods and other anti-nutrients, which are actually reducing our body optimization.
What nutritional biohacks can benefit everyone?
Dr. Jan Kasprowicz: The first one is easy. First and foremost, get outside and get some sun on your skin. Everybody needs to get outdoors at a minimum of 20 minutes per day without sunglasses. You need sunlight to get into your retina. Without sunblock. Also, we want to make sure that your skin is being exposed to the sun as well. This way you can actually create vitamin D.
Vitamin D deficiency is probably the number one thing that I see the majority of our population is affected by. Just by taking a vitamin D supplement, that doesn’t do it. You need to actually be outside in order for that vitamin D supplement that many people are taking to be activated.
Actually, we are doing some renovations here in my home. We actually added a little addition to our home where I am actually enlarging our biohacking lab in our basement. What we also did is we removed a lot of the LED lights in our house and we actually put back the incandescent bulbs because it has been proven that LED lights, the lights that come out of there, actually the body does not know how to use that light energy and it actually affects your circadian rhythms.
Your circadian rhythm is basically your biological clock and it tells you how to function throughout the day. Another easy biohack that everybody can do is to go ahead and basically try to change out your LED lights and put those incandescent bulbs back in because that creates biochemical reactions in your body as well.
Another thing too, which a lot of people take, which is a really good thing, is omega-3s. The unfortunate thing is that people haven’t heard too much about krill oil. Krill oil is also an omega-3 from fish oil. It’s not actually a fish. Krill are basically small little shrimp-like animals that the fish actually eat. The great thing about the krill oil, it is a much more effective antioxidant, so omega-3. It basically takes on one free radical at a time.
Krill oil actually takes on multiple, can basically destroy multiple free radicals at the same time. So it is a very powerful anti-inflammatory as well. It lowers your blood pressure. It increases your good cholesterol and decreases your triglycerides. From a cognitive or a brain standpoint, it also helps fight cognitive decline, which has been shown to be one of the main reasons why the majority of our population is exposed to Alzheimer’s disease.
Because it reduces and neutralizes this thing called phospholipid hyperoxidze, which is basically a chemical that is formed in the brain and krill oil could actually help denature that. A cool ingredient that a lot of our supplements have, we have our own supplement line, is called dimethylglycine. It’s an adaptogen. A lot of people that I know also take another adaptogen called ashwagandha, which has been around for a very long time.
An adaptogen is basically something that you take in that allows your body to adapt to stress. The dimethylglycine, the DMG that we utilize, and I use when I work out, and I do a lot of cycling, helps your body to adapt to stress. This way you are not perceiving the same kind of level of stress. The perfect example is if I am riding up a big hill, I have a significant amount of lactic acid building up in the muscles in my legs. I feel that burning sensation, so taking DMG, dimethylglycine or ashwagandha, which is another adaptogen, reduces my perception of discomfort.
This way you could actually train harder, you could ride up bigger hills with the same amount of exertion, but your perception of discomfort is significantly minimized. Those are basically some simple things you could do. And also drink water, but make sure the water that you are drinking is not coming out of a plastic bottle. You want to make sure you are drinking water which has a higher pH level than seven. The higher the pH the water that you are drinking, it’s going to create more of an alkaline environment within your body, which overall is going to be healthier for you because the majority of our disease processes are based in an acidic environment and not an alkaline environment.
How did you educate yourself about nutritional biohacking?
Dr. Jan Kasprowicz: Lots and lots of reading. Lots of reading, lots of podcasts, self-experimentation and unfortunately lots of money too. Every morning when I wake up, I usually get up around 4 AM, take the dog out so she can do her business, come back inside of the house, pour some coffee and pretty much read for a couple hours. Then, driving to and from my clinic, I listen to podcasts.
I am pretty much my own citizen scientist. What that means is basically I experiment on myself prior to telling anybody else about possible things that I have been doing because what may work for me may not exactly work for somebody else because we all are pretty similar, but our biochemistries come a little bit different as well. I personally am not lactose intolerant, but some other people are.
Basically, I will experiment on myself and then I have a couple, I’d say six, seven people that I am pretty close with that I’ll have try the things that I have tried as well and if things seem to be promising, I basically open up the information to people in my clinic.
How quickly do people feel results from nutritional biohacking?
Dr. Jan Kasprowicz: It could be quite immediate sometimes. It’s dependent on what you are trying to accomplish, but most importantly it is also dependent upon the toxic load that your body has been exposed to. If you’ve been exposed to a serious toxic load it might take a little bit longer. If all you’re doing is increasing the amount of nutrients and biohacking nutrients into your system without reducing the negative environments and negative anti-nutrients in your system, it is going to take longer.
But the easiest thing is try this. If it is sunny where you are right now, where you’re listening to this, go outside, let the sun hit your face for a couple minutes and see how you feel after five, 10 minutes being in the sun. I guarantee you are going to feel better than you were when you were inside.
If you are interested in speaking with Dr. Jan Kasprowitz, visit www.chiropracticandsportsrecovery.com, or call 917-748-2902 to schedule an appointment.
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