Dave Asprey features NanoVi® Technology on Bulletproof Radio
Hans Eng and Rowena Gates recently visited Dave Asprey at his Bulletproof Lab on Vancouver Island. He has been using the NanoVi™ since last year and dedicated a podcast to a conversation about the science behind it and its use. Much of the discussion focused on protein folding so if you haven’t seen the 3D video post, taking a few minutes to watch it first is a good set up for Dave Asprey’s interview with Hans.
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Automated: Bulletproof Radio, a state of high performance.Dave Asprey: You’re listening to Bulletproof Radio, with Dave Asprey. Today’s cool fact of the day is that your body makes on an average day 640 quadrillion free radicals, unless, of course, you do endurance exercise, in which case you can multiply that number times 100. Now 640 quadrillion is a big number because you have only one quadrillion mitochondria in your body, which is interesting because that number is much larger than the number of cells in your body, which is also larger than the number of bacterias in your gut. Free radicals are a cool thing and we’re going to be talking about those more today.
If you’re interested in this kinds of thing … If you saw the podcast with Naveen Jain, recently, we talked about a new service called Viome, that’s V-I-O-M-E, that gets measurements four times a year of your mitochondrial function as well as the entire gut biome, your fungal load, your bacterial load, not just the load, but the actual species involved, including viruses and even bacteriophages. This is probably the most exciting new set of data in the human body that I’ve come across.
So, you can actually see whether your mitochondria are doing what they’re supposed to do and whether all these external things that are in your body are affecting you. If you go to viome.com and use code Bulletproof … In fact right now, I’m pretty sure that they still have some free copies of Headstrong left, which is a good deal and that’s while supplies last. So you might get one of those and they’ll put you to the front of the line. There’s a big wait list for it. I’m on the advisory board of the company, but they’re not paying me to tell you to do that. I just think it’s incredibly cool. It’s one of the most exciting technologies. That’s viome.com with code Bulletproof.
All right, next up … I was supposed to ask you guys, if you haven’t gone to Amazon with Headstrong, and just left a review I’d be really grateful if you did that. Headstrong recently hit … This actually blew me away. Headstrong hit the science monthly bestseller list right between two really well-known books. One’s called Homo Deus and the other one’s called Sapiens. It was on the same list as The Hidden Life of Trees and The Undoing Project, and some other just epic books. So, as an author, this is an unexpected and just a huge honor to be on the monthly science list, not the advice list.
If you’re not an author, maybe you don’t know the difference between the list. But, technically that one’s called the big league. So if you take a second to just review the book on Amazon and say that it did something useful for you, I would be really grateful for your support on that.
All right. Today’s interview is going to be really fun. This is one that’s recorded live in studio at Bulletproof Labs here on Vancouver Island. So, if you have a chance to watch it on video, you’ll actually see a live video and at the end of this, I’m actually going to show you some new tech that’s cool. You can go to bulletproof.com/YouTube to find the channel with all this kind of stuff on it, or if in your car, you’re at work, and you’re not going to do video, that’s okay. We won’t do anything that you can’t process with just your ears alone.
Today’s guest is Hans Eng, and we’re going to have another guest towards the end of the show as well. Hans has a degree in materials science and applied technology and he’s a co-founder of a company called NanoVi, and NanoVi … Actually the company’s called Eng Three.
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Hans Eng: Eng three, yeah.
Dave Asprey: Eng Three. They make NanoVi, there you go. You can tell I’ve got my show notes right here, but I read them backwards. So, NanoVi is the stuff that I’ve been using lately. It’s actually a form of tech and something that’s blown me away. But, I wanted to have Hans on because Hans is one of these guys who can go really, really deep on the structure of water. In fact, he works with Gerald Pollack sometimes who was also on the show, who wrote The Fourth Phase of Water and spoke at the Bulletproof Conference.
So, we’re going to talk about what’s going on in your mitochondria. This is the theme for the year, given Headstrong, and we’re going to talk about free radicals and when I speak with him, I just find that there’s an enormous amount of things, little small details around protein folding and stuff like that that I’m not super clear on that he’s clear on. We won’t make it so geeky that you’re just bored, but you’re going to learn a thing or two about how the body works and how you can have a little bit more control over how much energy you have. So, I’m pretty excited. I’ve dug deep in this technology and played with it for a while, but haven’t talked about it before. This is a first time I’m really coming out with it.
So, Hans welcome to the show.
Hans Eng: Thank you, Dave. Thank you for having me here.
Dave Asprey: Now, you are obviously from Germany.
Hans Eng: I am from Germany, from Berlin, yeah.
Dave Asprey: From Berlin, and your training in material science was in Germany?
Hans Eng: It was in Germany, yeah. At first, I worked in the field at a big company, medical device company. We were focused on the latest materials, material structure that is needed for implants, for hip implants.
Dave Asprey: Oh, neat.
Hans Eng: So, that was the part where cell biology is basically connecting to a product and materials science is not only the metal component, it is also the biological material for proteins.
Dave Asprey: It is a ridiculously complex thing to do implants. Lana and I started a medical lab testing company that was funding biological, basically immune resources to implant materials that weren’t well-known in the industry for a while.
Hans Eng: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dave Asprey: And in fact, I would call it one of the more challenging things and you get … No offense Elan if you’re listening, but Neurolace, implantable stuff in the brain, I think we’re going to have some problems with materials science there that are not on the radar. Do you agree?
Hans Eng: Yep. There’s a lot of challenge. We have to know these different components who are actually in the game there to make the right choice.
Dave Asprey: Okay. By the way, I think we can get that from the surface of the skin, or even from off the body without having to stick stuff in the body, but that’s just me. Now, first question, why do all the weird and interesting medical advances happen in Germany first?
Hans Eng: Competition, I guess. Yeah, high competition simply to survive in a field of a lot of other companies, yeah, and you have to dig in. You have to educate as much as possible yourself that a product comes out that is reliable and is proving to work.
Dave Asprey: So, we have this stereotypical German precision where there’s a lot of respect for German engineering and BMW, things like that. But, I’ve also just as a bio-hacker and an anti-aging guy, for many years, some of the top innovations, these are like they came out of the Russian space program, or they came out of Germany and it’s a very unnatural distribution across all of the different countries out there. Is there some sort of like an educational thing, a perspective of why is the perspective on energetic medicine coming out of Germany far ahead of the rest of the world?
Hans Eng: One thing is education, profession, yeah.
Dave Asprey: Okay.
Hans Eng: We have, as you know, in Germany, good education.
Dave Asprey: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Hans Eng: The system goes in all different directions. And two, we have different approaches, maybe even into society, huh, to prevent a problem of to solve when a problem happens in, a different way. So, there are some neat and different societies. When we see in Germany we have a highly aging society, we have to address the entire health structure in society in a different way than we have to address it in some other societies.
Dave Asprey: I was hoping you were going to say beer. Sorry. I just had to say that. Beer is [inaudible]. You guys know to take your charcoal if you’re going to have your beer, etc., etc., and drink German beer. It’s good, right? So, if you’re going to drink beer, it has gluten and whatever. Don’t drink beer. Drink vodka. Anyway, not to distract from things. Let’s talk about how you migrated from medical devices into something, what you’re doing with Eng Three. It’s a medical device that makes … Tell me if I’m saying this right. Basically a water vapor that is exclusions on water, the stuff that Gerald Pollack talked about that carries a certain signal. How did you get into even, thinking about carrying a signal in structured water that you breathe?
Hans Eng: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. The general background is a combination of materials science. We know what biomolecule are and how they work today, and all our proteins are bio-molecules. By the way, the proteins we have in our body are the workhorses for any kind of function our body’s executed by these proteins and we call them enzymes, hormones, a lot of motor proteins, yeah? So, everything that is being executed that we can live, is done by proteins, yeah?
So, we know the structures and more than 100 years, it has been well researched all these things. We know the quantity of how many we have. We assume that our body has one million different proteins, yeah, and to address the problems that come with loss of protein function for our approach is not to replace missing protein or damaged protein, it is to improve the body’s ability to reinstall the protein function. So, that is our background. The second one is biophysics. We are not in chemistry. We are … Our background is physics and is a process of the protein function installment is the protein folding that is a pure biophysical process and that is related to the environment where the proteins are embedded and that is the water in the cell.
Dave Asprey: In the past 20 or so years of looking at computational biology, we’ve had this problem, which was how do we predict how a protein is going to fold. So, we get a set of instructions from DNA, and then we unwrap it with RNA-
Hans Eng: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dave Asprey: … and read it basically and then we say, “All right we’re going to make a protein,” and trying to predict how that protein is going to look, like how it’s going to fold, has been just from a computer science perspective, really difficult, and we’ve gotten there to the point we’re relatively predictive some of the time would you say?
Hans Eng: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dave Asprey: What you’re talking about though is less about how a new protein is formed and more about how an existing protein gets either damaged or unfolded, or misshapen and then gets repaired, right?
Hans Eng: Yeah. Yeah. The protein folding sequence is … R&D that we and research that we see today is very often related to the intent to produce an artificial protein.
Dave Asprey: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Hans Eng: … that will replace a missing component of our body. Our approach is, assuming that we have the right amino acids in our body, we need 20 to build all the proteins in there.
Dave Asprey: And that comes from food.
Hans Eng: That comes from food. 10 of them we have to eat, the other 10 our body produces. Then, assuming that the DNA is correct for the blueprint that creates amino acid chain to build the first level for the protein that that all works. The next and the last most important step in the body is the protein folding. And the protein folding mechanism is a thermodynamic process that is the same for all proteins.
Dave Asprey: So, if someone’s listening to the show right now, they’re probably … If they’re not into really deep biology stuff, why would you care about protein folding?
Hans Eng: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Only the folded protein’s able to execute the task that it is designed for.
Dave Asprey: Okay.
Hans Eng: So the unfolded protein is not possible to do anything in our body. The usual and natural process is folding of protein and it’s also natural, you mentioned at the beginning, the oxidative stress that always occurs [inaudible 00:12:20] our body, will also always damage the proteins. So, that is a natural process. By more having a higher task in our lifestyle, we are doing sport, we have a far higher performance level in our daily life. When we think about it, it’s thinking for several hours intensively thinking, generate, need the same amount of ATP, like running a marathon. So, if we do this and we are doing it now, far later in our life, because [crosstalk].
Dave Asprey: If we do exercise you’re saying, or … Okay.
Hans Eng: Yeah. If we are working hard, if we are sitting in office, but working hard, we are running marathons with our brain. We are producing the oxidative stress. We are producing the damaging events. So, the question is how can we assist the body to repair this damage? We are not interested to avoid the damage. That’s your lifestyle, your environment is this to repair so that you can keep your performance level high.
Dave Asprey: Is it safe to look at least some of the proteins in the body as little molecular machines?
Hans Eng: Absolutely.
Dave Asprey: Okay.
Hans Eng: Absolutely, and they are working very fast as one of the problems why we don’t know so much about them.
Dave Asprey: Yeah.
Hans Eng: They are folding in picoseconds. They have very short lifetime. They are only there when they are needed in the right amount, at the right place when they are needed. Also proteins are turning unnecessary proteins off. So, there is some constantly little … We call it selectivity, kind of the thunderstorm in ourselves, turning on, turning off, so and having the best [crosstalk].
Dave Asprey: So, we have these little proteins and if you ever get a chance to see one on on-line and probably in the blog post. I’ll get some pictures on, but these are incredibly complex. They look like a ball of yarn, basically.
Hans Eng: Yeah.
Dave Asprey: Like very complex and what it does, it’s a little machine and in order to power the machine, we’re getting electrons that come from mitochondria, right? Mitochondria’s generating these things. I maybe simplifying. Tell me where I’m over simplifying.
Hans Eng: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The proteins, they are executing then, biochemically a lot of work.
Dave Asprey: Right.
Hans Eng: And the fuel for biochemicals reaction to the ATP-
Dave Asprey: Right.
Hans Eng: … that is why the mitochondria produces ATP out of oxygen and glucose-
Dave Asprey: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Hans Eng: … to fuel our biochemical reactions.
Dave Asprey: So, the ATP essentially, when one of the P’s is stripped off, it frees up an electron. It goes through an electron transport chain, which is then used by the proteins?
Hans Eng: Yeah.
Dave Asprey: So, the protein doesn’t use ATP directly. It uses an electron that’s basically made through the ATP resynthesis.
Hans Eng: Yeah. Yeah. They are different mechanisms. So, two proteins, several proteins come together, they create a new molecule that is executing something out of something-
Dave Asprey: Okay.
Hans Eng: … very complex.
Dave Asprey: So, we’ll see if we can zoom out on that for listeners who aren’t as geeky as maybe you and I are. If you were to look at this little machine, a very tiny, very fast acting protein, and it’s got to get raw materials, which may be other proteins, they may be amino acids, it may be fats, whatever the inputs are, and it needs energy to do this, and what we know and certainly what you’ve been working with for a while is that when you make that energy, and you use that energy in proteins you cause damage to some of the proteins some of the time. They become folded the wrong way. They become damaged.
Hans Eng: Yes.
Dave Asprey: Accurate?
Hans Eng: Basically, unfolded, that is the most common thing.
Dave Asprey: Okay.
Hans Eng: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dave Asprey: They unfold and then they must be refolded so that they can be functional proteins. What happens if you have proteins that are damaged or unfolded or that are shaped the wrong way because of biological activity? What do they do in the body if they’re hanging around?
Hans Eng: Yeah. Unfolded proteins simply do nothing.
Dave Asprey: Well, they take up space at a minimum, right?
Hans Eng: They take up space, yeah. So, the [inaudible 00:16:07], the DNA, the blueprint creates these proteins. They are in there. They don’t do anything.
Dave Asprey: They don’t create free radicals, they don’t make you get wrinkles.
Hans Eng: No. They don’t do anything. They could not execute any biochemical reaction. No.
Dave Asprey: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Hans Eng: So, therefore they are pretty useless.
Dave Asprey: They’re useless, but I mean if 50% of your body weight was misfolded proteins, we’d be fat, right?
Hans Eng: You don’t even need 50%. You need far less. You simply stop living.
Dave Asprey: Right. Okay. So, it’s not a good thing to have non-functioning proteins in the body.
Hans Eng: Right.
Dave Asprey: You’ll be more useful and have more energy if the proteins you have are all able to do what they were printed from DNA to do.
Hans Eng: Yes. Yes.
Dave Asprey: Okay.
Hans Eng: So, everyone knows hemoglobin, that’s a protein.
Dave Asprey: Probably not. So, hemoglobin is a protein in your blood that carries oxygen. Okay.
Hans Eng: Yeah. And if they are not working anymore, for example, we cannot transport oxygen anymore-
Dave Asprey: Right.
Hans Eng: … if not low oxygen generation. If you have certain enzymes in your digestion system that are not working, they have to be there, but they’re unfolded, not working, you don’t metabolize food. So, you see that if the function is lost, if the protein folding isn’t there, the function is lost. And most of the functions that we lose or can lose are not recognizable by us because more than one million proteins run all the functions. Most of the functions in our body are not recognizable.
Dave Asprey: And that we just don’t know what they are.
Hans Eng: And we don’t know what they are.
Dave Asprey: Okay.
Hans Eng: And we also cannot influence … We cannot influence the speed of our digestion. We cannot influence in a lot of areas our autonomic system. So, we cannot influence the gross speed of ourself.
Dave Asprey: But wait, we can, right, just take human growth hormone, for instance. It seems like we have some influence there.
Hans Eng: Yeah. When you take these hormones because they are missing, but if they are in your body, you cannot with your mind or anything, you cannot influence to work them better.
Dave Asprey: Are you sure about that?
Hans Eng: Kind of, yeah.
Dave Asprey: So, the reason I’m asking that is if you do say, heart rate variability training exercises or with the neurofeedback stuff that we do at 40 years, then we incorporate heart rate variability. But, you can actually do things with your brain that affect your heart. When your heart beat changes, the magnetic field around the heart changes.
Hans Eng: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dave Asprey: The mitochondria are listening to that.
Hans Eng: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dave Asprey: You can influence energy productions-
Hans Eng: Yeah.
Dave Asprey: … which then influences protein generation. Another thing that isn’t well-known is that when you have ketones present, and this is cool … Whether they come from exogenous ketones, like brain octane, but not necessarily from ketone salts because half of them are not bio-identical, slight issue there, you actually can more easily read the DNA through something called HDAC.
Hans Eng: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dave Asprey: And so, things like that and environmental input allows you to make more energy or to more easily get instructions like that. It seems like we have some degree of control, but we don’t have it at the protein where we can say, “This protein, we don’t even know what it does for most of them.” So, we can say, “This protein helps regulate that.” Just because it’s too complex, but there’s high level things we can do meditation wise or breathing or cold, environmental variables that we know trickle down 50,000 steps to make a protein different.
Hans Eng: Right. Right. If you are able to consciously influence in our ATP production-
Dave Asprey: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Hans Eng: … that is what we do with correct breathing to avoid other uses for ATP. So, as I say, we should not do … We can override our protein function capacity by, for example, not giving enough time to our body to do certain things, yeah? So, if I decide, you mentioned an amount of mitochondria that we have that also tells us that we only have a certain amount of ATP that we could use. So, if we override the use of ATP by simply saying I do sport. I do exercise, or I do thinking-
Dave Asprey: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Hans Eng: … this ATP is not available for us, a very important task for bio-molecules. So, in this moment, we cannot have a good autonomic system balance that uses ATP if it is not available because we do sport, or we do … We force our body to do other physical or mental performance. Then the performance is not being executed.
Dave Asprey: So, you’re saying if you over train in the gym, or you overwork in the office, or wherever else, that you’re using this energy that probably should have gone to making better proteins in the body.
Hans Eng: Yeah. Yeah.
Dave Asprey: Okay.
Hans Eng: And we all know that if you don’t have enough rest and we don’t sleep enough, we are not regenerating enough because the repair process needs ATP, and if that is not available, we are not regenerating.
Dave Asprey: This is one of the reasons that when I work with these CEO types who are type A, not only do I want to grow my company rapidly, I’m also going to run an ultra-marathon. I’m going to do the Kona Iron Man, and I’m going to fly all around the world while I’m doing all of this.
Hans Eng: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dave Asprey: And then you look at their heart rate variability, their autonomic nervous system is trashed and my belief after writing Headstrong is pretty clear that there’s an energy that’s going on here. It starts with mitochondria. There just isn’t enough energy. Even if you eat more, even if you go into ketosis, even if you do these things, there isn’t enough time, and energy and communication in the cells to allow full repair and recovery, so you start declining.
Hans Eng: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dave Asprey: You also have concentrated very much on free radical formation. We mentioned at the beginning … In fact the cool fact of the day was something that you told me about the fact that if you’re doing endurance exercise regularly, you’re getting 100 times more free radicals than normal. And that isn’t necessarily a big thing in that free radicals can be helpful.
Hans Eng: Yeah.
Dave Asprey: But, they can also be harmful depending on what they are and where they are and whether you have enough energy to deal with them. Talk a little bit more about what free radicals do in this whole system of protein folding.
Hans Eng: Yeah. Like I said, free radicals are not only harmful, they are very essential.
Dave Asprey: Most people don’t know that. We’ve been programmed through 35 years of antioxidants will save the world sort of thing to believe that free radicals are bad.
Hans Eng: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dave Asprey: What is a good free radical versus a bad free radical?
Hans Eng: Yeah. They are the same molecules. The question is what kind of tasks they are doing. So, any kind of inflammation is involving a huge amount of free radicals. So, the free radicals are kind of a protection shield for our entire body.
Dave Asprey: Free radicals are a protection shield. Okay.
Hans Eng: Yeah, think about if you have a splinter-
Dave Asprey: Uh-huh (affirmative).
Hans Eng: … or you have an open wound and viruses, bacteria are coming in there. They have to be killed by the body. So, the only thing that the body can produce beside antibodies that is if you have another leak, free radicals.
Dave Asprey: We make hydrogen peroxide in our immune cells to kill things, right?
Hans Eng: Right.
Dave Asprey: And hydrogen peroxide is a free radical.
Hans Eng: Absolutely. So, it is a very, very important protection shield for us.
Dave Asprey: Okay. So, that’s certainly a positive use of free radicals. But, that’s not necessarily what you’re doing if you’re running a hundred miles.
Hans Eng: Yeah. The free radicals are also, when they go into chemical reactions with different … Other things are creating or are causing protein damage.
Dave Asprey: Okay.
Hans Eng: So, the protein is unfolding that most common damage. They are falling apart and like I said this very weird not that every protein is unfolding and now they cannot execute this anymore. The good thing is now that these, some of these free radicals are very specific free radicals that is an excited oxygen atom, is able to trigger the repair, to assist with the repair.
Dave Asprey: So, some free radicals tell the cell it’s time to fix yourself, buddy. Other free radicals though, like peroxynitrite, for instance, and dome of these other things are maybe not ever good for us, rarely good for us, help me understand this.
Hans Eng: Yeah. Like we just discussed, if the free radical damages a molecule that is necessary for us, we claim it as bad.
Dave Asprey: Okay.
Hans Eng: If it’s damaged the molecule, like a virus, that is not good for us, we call it good.
Dave Asprey: Okay.
Hans Eng: So, it depends always on which kind of [inaudible 00:24:54] we are looking at. If free radicals are essential in the body, they are part of any inflammation and repair process, if we suppress the free radical activity in this process, we are even running into bigger problems.
Dave Asprey: In fact, if you were to fully suppress free radical production in your body, what would happen?
Hans Eng: We would come to this point when our technology’s doing, or what we apply there, is basically proteins would not be able to fold.
Dave Asprey: You would die.
Hans Eng: You would die.
Dave Asprey: Yeah, and that is a really important thing. Just like we’ve had this ridiculous thing where people say salt is bad for you. Therefore, eat no salts, which is terrible for you, right? And in fact, there’s pretty good evidence that getting much salt is very hard to do because we just noticed that eating a high salt diet lets you eat 25% more calories without gaining weight. That’s interesting.
Hans Eng: Yeah.
Dave Asprey: But, the point is, in almost every single nutritional dogma that’s out there, ketosis is an example. Sugar is evil, and you must never have any carbs for the rest of your life, or you’re a bad person, and if you’re endlessly in ketosis, that’s probably not ideal for most people. You might want to come out of that on occasion. So, it’s about getting the right dose.
Hans Eng: Yeah.
Dave Asprey: With free radicals, there’s types of free radicals. There’s doses of free radicals, right? How does someone listening this know, “All right, so sometimes I want free radicals, sometimes I don’t. ” What do you do with that knowledge that sometimes … What’s actionable there?
Hans Eng: That is exactly the difficult task in all eyes. Yeah. Yeah. Also, to monitor exactly
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