The first thing that I do upon waking up each morning, is head into my kitchen and brew up a large pot of coffee. I know my morning ritual is similar to millions of other people around the world. Coffee is good, it makes us feel good, and most importantly: it wakes us up. Within moderation, coffee is a perfectly safe substance to enjoy. But we have to be honest with ourselves, coffee and caffeine are drugs. You can tell yourself otherwise, but it is. A cup of coffee (or three) each day won’t end your life, however you can actually experience withdrawal symptoms from it if you use it long enough. While coffee is certainly very vanilla, some people take it up to a whole new level. One of those people would be Dave Asprey and his special coffee cold be worth a lot of money.
Dave Asprey is a person that considers himself what is called a “biohacker”, and one of the most famous ones at that. He has a massive online following and wrote a best selling book, among other things. Now, a biohacker is an individual that alters and manages their own biology through the use of medical and nutritional ways, hopefully for the better. These types of people are very fond of taking supplements and drugs that are known as “nootropics”. Nootropics are a variety of supplements, drugs, vitamins, and foods that are meant to improve your mood, help you think with more clarity, enhance your cognitive abilities, increase your attention, and improve a variety of other functions related to the brain. They’re basically “smart drugs”, or so they claim to be. Dave takes about twenty various forms of nootropics each day, along with his unique coffee that is made with butter, lots of butter.
While this may sound like snake oil, there are intact a variety of supplements out there that do these things and have been backed up with science. A perfect example of a nootropic that works and one that plenty of people take would be any form of A.D.D. medication. Other examples of nootropics would be those found in the racetam family (oxiracetam, aniracetam), and even caffeine would be considered a nootropic as well. These various nootropics have a large following, and may companies are making money off of this selling various blends of these supplements. Dave combines these with a very special diet and it all starts with his butter coffee.
Dave wants you to forget everything that you know about nutrition, and to use a new diet: one that is very high in fats. Now somewhere in the past, I’m not exactly sure when, fats became synonymous with bad. This is simply not the case at all, and most doctors recommend that you ingest a fair amount of fats each day. The important thing is where you get them from. Foods like fish, nuts, certain fruits, and things that contain olive oil would be considered healthy forms of fat. Cheeseburgers, potato chips, and friend chicken would contain bad kinds of fat. This isn’t anything groundbreaking. What is, is that Dave is telling us that our daily diet should consist of about 70% fat, and one of the ways you can get there is with his buttered coffee. Every morning dave adds a heaping scoop of butter to his coffee and coconut oil. My normal morning coffee that has two scoops of sugar and cream is about 40 calories. Dave’s coffee is around 450 calories. This special coffee originally started as a hobby for Dave, however it’s now becoming a business.
15 years ago Dave worked in the technology field and helped found Exodus Communications, one of the first cloud-based computing companies in the world. As you can imagine, he became pretty wealthy, however he felt that his brain was sluggish and worn out. So he became very passionate about fitness, nutrition, and nootropics and eventually that evolvecd from a hobby into a lifestyle. He began experimenting with dieting, and came to the conclusion that a diet high in certain fat is actually good for you. Dave began blogging about it, and people started listening. Since then, Dave has made this a business and founded his company dedicated to this stuff called Bulletproof Executive. His book became a New York Times bestseller, and the podcast, Bulletproof Radio, is the number 1 health podcast out there. Now they are looking to launch this buttered coffee and take it global.
He calls it Bulletproof Coffee, and it has become extremely popular over the years. Essentially it is high-quality coffee that is made with butter from grass-fed cows and various other types of oils. It may sound silly, but its catching on. When they first launched the product, Hollywood celebrities spread it via word of mouth. It was definitely somewhat of a fad, but it seems like its here to stay. His company has raised $2 million from investors, and Dave quit his desk job to work for Bulletproof full-time. Now they are opening their first coffee shop in California. Online sales have also been very high, and the coffee is about four times more expansive than the coffee at Starbucks. And that’s not deterring people from it. Dave is committed to this coffee, and truly believes that it can help you brain.
The doctors and nutritional experts, think a little differently on the other hand. Most medical professionals that are aware of the Bulletproof Diet and Bulletproof coffee, not only feel that it is snake oil, but also bad for you. Consuming butter in the levels found in this coffee is not healthy for you in the long run. Dave’s diet adds up to about 4,500 calories each day, which is certainly atypical. Still Dave is in shape and has lost weight with this diet.
I am not qualified at all to give my opinion of whether Bulletproof Coffee is good or bad for you. I hear it tastes good, and the beans he uses are extremely high-quality. However any food with a lot of butter tastes good. I’m not sure if you’ll get super brain powers from this coffee, but the point is, Dave is making a lot of money doing this. His coffee is very popular, and people certainly seem to want more. So is it a fad diet based around coffee with butter in it? Or is this a massive company that has the potential to be worth billions? Only time will tell. In the meantime, I’m going to stick with my normal coffee. To find out more information about Dave and his coffee, head on over to Bulletproof’s website: upgradedself.com
Photo from bulletproffexec.com
