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

114 страница из 130

COFFEE + TIME = KETONES

Recently I interviewed Satchin Panda, a leading researcher on circadian rhythms, the natural twenty-four-hour cycles of all living beings, and learned something new about Bulletproof Coffee. According to Satchin, it’s part of our natural rhythm to start producing ketones at the end of our fasting cycle. For most of us, that would be in the morning before we break our fast with the aptly named meal, breakfast.

Those ketones have a huge impact on our cardiovascular and brain health. Satchin observed that when mice produce ketones toward the end of their fasting cycle, those ketones go directly to brain cells called clock neurons, which monitor the environment in the brain and help to regulate circadian rhythm. When ketones reach those clock neurons, they receive a signal to become awake and alert and begin what is called exploratory activity. Of course exploratory activity is more pleasant than desperately wanting to hit the snooze button in the morning.

This makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective. Just a couple hundred years ago, our ancestors fasted all night and then had to hunt for food in the morning. Their brains and muscles had to work really well in that hungry state in order to successfully find food, and ketones were the answer. This is why we are programmed to build up ketones during the last couple of hours of our fasting period. Those ketones give our brains, muscles, and hearts more energy so we can hunt—exactly what Satchin has seen in his lab rats. An hour or two before they were fed in the morning, they got up and started looking around, exploring, and getting ready to hunt.