Biohacking for your Optimal Well-being
There is a lot of science and unique knowledge behind the different systems for Health and Performance Optimizations. As our understanding of wellness is further developed through data, charts and on-screen improvements, the next evolution of bio-integrated wellness has already been written. BiohackingCongress brought together Top Experts in the Wellness industry to exchange their opinions and share their philosophy with us.
Dallas McClain, the Chief Information Officer and Editor of Biohackers Update became a Moderator of the Panel Discussion on "Biohacking for your Optimal Well-being" at BiohackingCongress in Miami.
"We're very excited to learn more from our exciting panelists. I'll start with you Catherine, how do EnergyBits contribute to one's health and optimal well-being?" - asked Dallas to Catharine Arnston, Founder, CEO, and Chief Scientific Officer ENERGYbits Inc.
“There are tens of thousands of strains of algae in the Universe. But only two are harvested in freshwater as crops and those two are spirulina and chlorella. They are the most nutrient-dense food in the Universe. And it's not only my opinion, NASA has been feeding algae to the astronauts for 50 years because one gram of algae has the same nutrition as a thousand grams of vegetables. One to a thousand. That's extraordinary. And our food is so damaged, we're eating garbage, and even if you're eating vegetables and grass-fed animal protein you are not getting the nutrition that the paleo community had. With algae, you can swallow and can get all the nutrient density that you need for your day and your life. I love algae because of the nutrient density it offers, and the simplicity that makes it easy to gain the benefits. Algae has three times the amount of protein in steak. It has more collagen than collagen. It has 500 times more chlorophyll than arugula and more chlorophyll than chlorophyll. It has 40 vitamins and minerals and it is safe for every age group: newborns, adults, even pets. It's a multi-billion dollar industry in Asia and it is a crime that Americans don't know about. So my goal is to make sure you know about algae, and that you know that you need to use it. It is the safest way to ensure your longevity, your health, your beauty, your digestion, your sleep.” - Catharine Arnston started.”
"Moving now to you Bob, what methods do you use with quantifiedbob.com to lead to optimal health tracking and analysis?" - asked Dallas McClain
"I've been in this space for close to a decade now in terms of wanting to take a data-driven approach to understand myself, optimizing my biology and environment, everything around me. The blog I started quantifybob.com about nine years ago just started out focusing on optimizing diet, seeing the effects in terms of not just lab work and bigger picture sort of aspects of my well-being, but even just getting into the day-to-day. And as I've peeled back the layers of the onions, and I probably at some point some sort of self-experiment around those subjects with full-on whether it's lab work biometric data, genetic data. A lot of what I tell other people just getting into the idea of putting more data to their self-optimization journey is don't try to do everything at once. You can structure experiments, but focus on one variable. And see if there's change. Two things are giving you the bang for the buck: take it easy, not trying to do a million things at once. It's not about quantifying everything all the time, it's about being smart about what aspects we're tracking." - answers Bob Troia, Founder, QuantifiedBob.com and Co-Founder, Awesome Labs
"How does Therasaus's mission align with the biohacking initiative of continual self-improvement through healthy experimentation and hacks? Biohacking's mission is focused a lot on just becoming better every day in every way: mentally, physically, spiritually, through experimenting and trying new things, isolating variables. How is there Therasaus's mission aligned with that?" - asked Dallas McClain to Robby Besner, Psc.D, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer, Therasage
"I'm the Device Developer and Co-Founder of the company, so basically from my perspective, we're very research-oriented. Every year we dedicate our body of research to a different topic. 2021 is about optimal health. We're a company that's more than 25 years old. We focus on infectious diseases and people that have real health challenges. It's easy for me as a practitioner to move the dial on someone that has a health challenge, it's a lot more difficult when you're optimally healthy. Our company was founded on the back of my daughter, who contracted Lyme disease about 30 years ago. And as a practitioner, I unpacked her cognitive health challenges. She had body pain, she had neurological challenges. So the company's mission was to develop devices to help our daughter manage her health care. As any of you have a deal with optimal health you know when you're sick it's really hard to make good decisions. When you're healthy it's much easier. You have more time. For us, who had the family dynamic and challenge, who had family members that have chronic ailments it's not so easy. It's very confusing. What I love about our missions is that you're all looking for the best of the best. We make medical devices that are affordable and that you can use at home. We're a solution-developed company, everything we do is vetted, we're FDA qualified which means that we've gone through all the scrutiny of a scientific device. So we allow you to kind of dial in and take more control over your life and your future and your health and well-being” - Robby Besner, Psc.D, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer, Therasage, shared his experience.
"What does The DNA Company vision say about one's ability to control their well-being while growing and discovering themselves?" - continued Dallas
"When it comes to DNA testing, there's so much misinformation out there, so much mistrust of how genetic data will be used, and so much confusion conflicting ideas. And then there's the issue of conventional versus, alternative or functional approaches to healthcare. So with The DNA Company, we would like to provide a guiding light that's backed by clinical research that makes people understand their genes is an essential part of achieving personalized health and wellness. If you don't start by looking at what your genes are telling you about yourself then you're already starting at a disadvantage. It has to be multiple studies you as an individual and once you understand who you as an individual are. Then you make the decisions that are right for you. Not for your children, not for your wife, not for your parents. For you. Everyone has to take that approach and that's what we believe we can do with The DNA Company help them build that individualized approach "- shared Kashif Khan, Director of Product Development and Co-Founder of The DNA Company
"Why are EnergyBits one of the best modern-day nutrition hacks and how can the average person incorporate them into their daily routine?" - asked Dallas McClain
"I started the company almost 13 years ago. As a result of my younger sister being diagnosed with breast cancer. She's fine now. But at the time in Canada, her oncologist told her she needed to change her diet to an alkaline diet because it would help with her healing. I've had nothing to do with nutrition. I was an MBA doing international business, but I'm a good researcher. And I found out it was mostly plant-based diets that led me to learn about algae, which led me to learn to change my career and study nutrition. In these tiny little tablets, each one has the same nutrition as an entire plate of vegetables. And that's not just smoke, that's based on a calculation we got from NASA. If you're traveling or you're anywhere you will always have to call it your health insurance, health nutrition insurance. So the reason why algae is so great for you and why it's the best biohack in the world is that it's the bottom of the food chain algae was the first life on earth 3.5 billion years ago. It's where the fish get their omega-3 from. It's nutrient-dense and most importantly it is effortless so if you want a biohack - it's a gift from mother nature, she knows her stuff and algae is the most eco-friendly sustainable crop in the world, so when you are giving yourself some self-love you are also showing the Earth some love.” - noticed Catharine Arnston
"What is the best example from quantifiedbob.com that you can show to demonstrate how hacking, analyzing and everything that comes along with biohacking can help one's life?" - asked Dallas McClain to Bob Troia
"I'd say, for example, fasting. You can get data, collect data during a fast, before a fast, after a fast that can show the benefits of what happens. What's going on with the body? Doing my experiment, I did a baseline of blood work and other metabolic data to see where my body was at before the fast and then during it. I was seeing benefits to everything from sleep to hearing about the body's parasympathetic, sympathetic systems, heart rate variability. So you can get a lot of cool benefits out of that.
I've even done some extended experiments around its pretty hardcore sauna experiments. I had found a lot of heavy metals in my body, particularly lead and mercury, and I did a pretty intense 30-day sauna protocol, and after I see how those levels change. So when you hear someone talking about these technologies or tools just think about yourself, how would you apply to yourself. I'm one of these people where biohacking is about being efficient and so if we can whittle things down to the minimal amount of things we need to do, that's my goal. I mentioned sleep earlier and we're got wearables and things that can track a lot of that data and be able to see which tactics give you the best bang. For me, two things helped me the most: sleep in a very cold room and a very dark room and go to the bed around the same time every night.” -shared Bob with the audience.
“How Infrared Saunas in particular, which is what you specialize in with your company Therasage, how does that differ from mainstream saunas and other traditional healing practices and how do you use your products to help extend someone's lifespan not only lifespan but their wellness span?” - asked Dallas
“Traditional Saunas as hot rock or steam rooms are one kind that uses convection heat. That means you have a heating element. It heats the ambient air that heats the skin on your body and eventually that heat will permeate and then you start to sweat. Sweating is one of the best detox vehicles we have. How does that differ from radiant heat which is the infrared format? So radiant heat and sun energy infrared frequencies are responsible for warming 82 percent of the planet. They don't heat the ambient air. They looked and sought the densest parts of our bodies which is our muscle mass or our organ tissue. And the frequencies vibrate at the same frequency as the water inside of us. When sunlight infrared frequencies come into the body they go through the insulating layer of fat under your skin and go right into those organs and muscle mass and so it's the most efficient way to heat you. The difference between convection saunas and infrared saunas is that the convections heat saunas will just pull the available toxins that are in your bloodstream, which still could be a lot. Infrared frequencies decouple the covalent bonds between all the toxins, including heavy metals, and mobilize all of them into your bloodstream. So you're getting more bang for your buck for much less money. “ - answered Robby
“How does our DNA determine our level and of optimal performance and what can we do to change it in terms of looking at chromosomal age versus biological age?” - asked Dallas McClain to Harris Khan
"You can't control the genes you're blessed with. When it comes to chronological versus biological age what The DNA Company does is provide you the foundation who you are innately like this is your genes. Many people probably know it's called upon and everyone's heard of apoe4 and its association with Alzheimer's disease. High levels of cholesterol and all that's important it's a very strong association. But if you take a person who has the apoe44 genotype but that person lives out in Minnesota, he's got an infrared sauna, he's taking algae, he's quantifying himself, he has a low-stress job, he eats from the earth or he's taking some sort of he's not going to have any high cholesterol issues ever in his life. But you take that apoe44 and you make him the CEO of Facebook and you put him in San Francisco and he's working 12 hours a day and then that guy is going to have high cholesterol problems within six months. That's the predisposition. So it's about understanding that here is my foundation and then what are the burdens I'm putting on myself and environmental burdens are probably the most important burdens and yet the least addressed burdens in our life. We want to teach people that your genetics are one thing, but if you know exactly what you need to address and what things are causing that body burden to occur you can stretch out your longevity and it's not as hard.” - shared Harris Khan
BiohackingCongress's Team is very grateful to all participants of the genuinely and educative Panel Discussion for joining our biohacking conference and giving an incredible speech.
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Based on the Panel Discussion with Dallas McClain, Catharine Arnston, Bob Troia, Robby Besner, Kashif Khan.
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