Читать книгу Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever онлайн

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The next day, the bus I was in stopped about halfway between Kathmandu and Lhasa in a town with only one restaurant. It had mud walls and a dirt floor and was filled with locals. I asked a Chinese friend from the bus to read the menu for me and quickly ascertained that the best source of collagen in the place was … pig’s ears. Without hesitation, I ordered it, and a few minutes later I came face-to-face with a giant bowl of cold boiled pig’s ears. I looked around to see if Joe Rogan, the host of Fear Factor, was hiding to challenge me to eat them for an absurd cash prize, but he was nowhere to be seen.

I had the idea that the pig’s ears would somehow be more palatable if I could find a way to warm them up, so I ordered some watery soup and dipped the ears in one at a time before biting into their rubbery blandness. It was the second worst meal of my life. (The winner, during that same trip, was Chinese military ration sardines heated over a yak dung fire.) The pig’s ears didn’t have much taste, but the texture was wholly unappealing. However, I was shocked when I woke up the next morning and could walk without using trekking poles. Two days later, I could jog up a short hill. That is the magic of collagen. But I didn’t want to have to eat pig’s ears every time my knees hurt, so I worked hard to bring collagen to the market years later. I just couldn’t see blending pig’s ears into yak butter tea!