Dave Asprey's Substack

Before You Take MOTS-c, Fix This First

Dave Asprey — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 14:57:10 GMT

I’ve been using peptides since before most longevity clinics had heard of them. Let’s get one thing straight first. Only use them after you’ve addressed sleep, light, and your diet.

Peptides are expensive enough that getting the order wrong costs you lots of money. That’s the part I got wrong for a while, and maybe you are too.

I’m planning to live to at least 180, and I think that number is conservative. Deciding things ahead of the literature comes with the territory.

There are two mitochondrial peptides people are excited about right now. One of them has been through human trials. The other has never been given to a human in a controlled study, which hasn’t stopped anyone from selling protocols for it. There’s a specific order in which you should do these peptides, and it makes all the difference in what you get out of them.

In the full version you’ll get:

The mitochondrial peptides and their data
The order I use them in
My timing and my phases

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Whales Rarely Get Cancer. Scientists Just Found Out Why, and It Might Come in a Pill.

Dave Asprey — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 17:47:08 GMT

Bowhead whales are kind of awesome. They weigh more than 80,000 kilograms, roughly the weight of 14 elephants, live past 200 years, and have about a thousand times more cells dividing inside them than I do. Statistically, they should be drowning in cancer. But they rarely get it.

I went down a rabbit hole trying to figure out why, and here’s what I found.

In the full version you’ll get:

Why whale cells resist cancer
The tiny genetic difference that lets a beaver repair cell damage better than a mouse, and live twice as long
The compound already sold as a supplement that switches on the same repair gene in human cells
What an actual human trial testing this right now is measuring, and when we’ll know if it works

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Your Lungs Have a Microbiome. Are You Taking Care of It?

Dave Asprey — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 15:01:23 GMT

I grew up in a basement full of toxic mold. I had asthma as a kid, plus chronic sinusitis bad enough that I took antibiotics almost every month for 15 years straight. The bad asthma went away eventually, but I still cough sometimes. A spirometer test gave me the real diagnosis, adult asthma. Nothing bad enough for an inhaler, but bad enough to annoy me, because I’m a biohacker. I’m supposed to be hackable.

So I went looking for the mechanism behind it, and found a pulmonologist who’s spent 15 years mapping one pathway that most doctors never mention.

In the full version you’ll get:

The breathing technique I did every morning for five years, and why it targets three separate parts of your lungs
The one enzyme that keeps chronic lung inflammation going
What years of antibiotics do to your lungs, separate from what they do to your gut
What to do to help your lungs recover

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The Vitamin You Can’t Use, and It’s in Almost Everything You Eat

Dave Asprey — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 13:54:08 GMT

I’ve been saying this for years: folic acid and folate are not the same thing. Look at your multivitamin and any bread, rice, or cereal products in your pantry. Do any of them say “folic acid” on the label?

Right now there's a decent chance unmetabolized folic acid is sitting in your bloodstream, whether you take a supplement or not. Most people find out the hard way, if they find out at all.

In the full version you’ll get:

Why folic acid isn’t doing what you think it’s doing
What to take instead
Who’s genetically set up to process it even worse, and how to tell if that’s you

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The Mitochondrial Compound Tied to a Longer Lifespan

Dave Asprey — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 15:01:59 GMT

For years I took 30 to 40 mg a day of a supplement called PQQ, a cousin of CoQ10 that supports your mitochondria (the structures inside your cells that produce your energy), and felt nothing. The form I was taking turned out to be my problem. Once I fixed that, 10 mg did more than 40 mg ever had.

In the full version you’ll get:

The biological pathways behind PQQ’s effect on your brain and your mitochondria
What the human trials on cognition, sleep, and inflammation found
The newest data on PQQ
The absorption problem that cost me years and hundreds of dollars a month, and how to avoid making the same mistake

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If You Had Mono, Your MS Risk Is 32 Times Higher

Dave Asprey — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 13:43:33 GMT

If you ever had mono, you carry EBV (Epstein-Barr virus). Compared with someone who has never been infected, the risk of developing multiple sclerosis is about 32 times higher.

A study published in Science in 2022 tracked over 10 million U.S. military members across two decades. Among people who developed MS, 97% contracted Epstein-Barr virus before their diagnosis. The researchers concluded EBV infection is a leading cause of multiple sclerosis.

The standard MS treatment strategy still focuses on suppressing the immune response, not eliminating EBV.

New research published this year in Science Translational Medicine is explaining the mechanism. The findings raise a question medicine has been slow to ask: if EBV helps drive MS, why isn’t the treatment targeting the virus?

In the full version you’ll get:

Why the most common MS drugs work for a reason most doctors never mention
The first major trial testing whether an EBV-targeted treatment reduces MS disease activity, and who qualifies
What I’d do if I had a family history of MS
Potential ways to keep EBV reactivation at bay

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What If a Boner Pill Slows How Cancer Spreads?

Dave Asprey — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 15:01:28 GMT

I have been microdosing Cialis for years for blood flow, vascular function, and performance.

A study published this month in Cancer Research by researchers at the Weizmann Institute found something else this drug class does, something nobody was studying it for.

The connection is cholesterol. Specifically, what cancer cells do with it when they try to spread, and what this drug class does to disrupt them.

The researchers validated the finding across cancer cell cultures, mouse models, and 20 years of health records from approximately five million people.

In the full version you’ll get:

Exactly how sildenafil disrupts cancer cells
What the sildenafil findings mean for tadalafil, the active ingredient in Cialis
What my current protocol looks like

[Subscribe to unlock the full protocol]

Your Brain’s Waste Clearance System Declines With Age. Here Is What the Research Says You Can Do About It.

Dave Asprey — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:47:05 GMT

Last week I covered the glymphatic system, the network your brain uses to help clear waste during sleep. That piece was about sleep. This one is about what works on the same system during the other 16 hours of your day.

A review published last month in Trends in Neurosciences by researchers at Victoria University looked at how physical activity regulates glymphatic function as your brain ages. The evidence comes primarily from animal studies, with early human research now adding support. In some animal studies, glymphatic clearance dropped by up to 90% in aged animals compared with young animals. Early human trials show you can improve markers of glymphatic function. Timing appears to be important.

I have been saying for years that exercise is one of the most important things you can do for your brain. What this review does is connect that recommendation to a specific, measurable biological pathway. Here is what the research shows.

In the full version you’ll get:

The specific protein exercise affects in the brain’s waste-clearance system, what it does, and how aging disrupts it
Why starting early is important
The specific exercise protocol you can do to get the benefits

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Most Blood Pressure Drugs Are Targeting the Wrong Biology.

Dave Asprey — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:30:22 GMT

Your blood pressure can look controlled on paper while your cardiovascular risk keeps climbing.

A review series published this month in Circulation Research addresses exactly that. Scientists at Vanderbilt University open with a fact most patients never hear: many people whose blood pressure and lipid levels appear well controlled still go on to experience heart attacks, strokes, and heart failure.

I have been writing about this biology for over two decades. In Superhuman, I laid out why cardiovascular disease kills people who look fine on paper and what to measure instead. What is in this review series is evidence now moving in the direction of the framework I learned in my 30s, when I spent time with researchers in their 70s and 80s who had spent careers watching what happened to patients when you looked past the numbers. They were treating the biological mechanisms raising blood pressure, not just the reading. Their ideas were well ahead of the published literature.

The field is now moving in their direction.

The series frames where cardiology stands right now as the third era of hypertension treatment. The first era, beginning in the 1950s, focused on lowering blood pressure with diuretics and beta-blockers. The second era, from the 1980s, introduced mechanism-based targeting of the RAAS (renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system: the hormonal network governing blood pressure and fluid balance) with drugs like captopril and losartan. Both produced major advances. The new framework goes deeper, into vascular aging, chronic inflammation, and the body’s failure to repair its own blood vessels, and the interactions between them.

If you have been following my work, you have been working on that deeper biology for years, through anti-inflammatory nutrition, fasting, full biomarker testing, and hormone optimization.

In the full version you’ll get:

The specific biological pathways this series identifies, and how to find out which one may be driving your risk
Why a class of drugs originally approved for diabetes is now reducing heart attacks through mechanisms that go beyond blood sugar control
What autonomous aldosterone production may be doing in up to 30% of older patients with hypertension, even when standard labs look fine
The tests to request and what each result points to

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What Your Brain Does Between Midnight and 4am Could Determine Whether You Get Alzheimer’s.

Dave Asprey — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 13:42:06 GMT

Most sleep advice has been wrong about the most important thing.

For decades the fixation was on hours. Eight hours. Get your eight hours. Sleep doctors, fitness trackers, your mother, everyone landed on the same number.

Hours are not the point.

In 2013, a neuroscientist named Maiken Nedergaard published a paper in Science that changed everything we thought we knew about why your brain sleeps. Her lab discovered that your brain has its own waste clearance system. She called it the glymphatic system.

During sleep, particularly deep non-REM sleep, glymphatic activity increases substantially and helps clear waste through channels surrounding your blood vessels, draining it out through the lymph vessels in your neck.

When the system runs well, your brain wakes up cleared. When clearance declines, waste proteins like amyloid beta and tau (the two proteins found in the brains of Alzheimer's patients) are more likely to accumulate over time, slowly, for years, long before a single symptom appears.

This has become one of the leading areas of Alzheimer’s prevention research. And the behaviors that support it cost nothing.

I want you to understand that sleep is maintenance. Your brain runs a biological cleaning cycle every night. Hours in bed tell you how long you were there. That number tells you nothing about how much of the work got done.

In the full version you’ll get:

- How your glymphatic pump turns on

-Specific factors that reduce clearance

-The protocol to start tonight. (None of it requires a device or a subscription)

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Brown Fat Makes You Burn More Fat. Here’s How to Get More.

Dave Asprey — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 15:01:09 GMT

Your body has two kinds of fat and they do opposite things. White fat holds onto energy. Brown fat burns energy to generate heat. The reason brown fat looks brown is that it contains tons of mitochondria, the tiny energy-producing structures inside your cells. A protein called UCP1 sits inside those mitochondria. Instead of converting fuel into usable energy, UCP1 releases stored energy as heat. This is called thermogenesis, when you generate warmth without moving a muscle.

You had a lot of brown fat when you were born. Adults still carry brown fat, mostly around the collarbone, neck, and upper chest. Those three regions account for about 67% of all the active brown fat in your body, according to a 2017 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

People with more active brown fat tend to be leaner, handle blood sugar better, and carry less body fat overall. Lean adults have roughly 334 milliliters of active brown fat on average. Adults with obesity average about 130 milliliters. Scans detect active brown fat in 58% of lean people and only 33% of people with obesity.

Brown fat activity is not fixed. Cold, specific supplements, and exercise all increase brown fat activity. Some studies suggest repeated cold exposure grows more brown fat volume over time.

In the full version you’ll get:

-The clinical data on interventions

-Exact protocols

-How to test your own brown fat response without a hospital scanner

-How brown fat stacks with other metabolic interventions

[Subscribe to unlock the full protocol]

Join The Human Upgrade Studio Audience Tomorrow!

Dave Asprey — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 21:48:14 GMT

Hey guys! Tomorrow I’ll be interviewing two great guests on The Human Upgrade and I’d love for you to join the live audience!

Here are the details:

Both take place on Thursday, July 9th 2026

11:15am CST…

The Problem With Antioxidants Is They Work Too Well.

Dave Asprey — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 20:06:39 GMT

Free radicals have a reputation problem. Your body creates them on purpose. Reactive oxygen species (ROS, chemically reactive molecules containing oxygen) drive muscle adaptation, regulate immune responses, and induce cellular signaling pathways your health depends on. Without them, you don’t build strength, fight infections, or adapt to training.

High-dose antioxidant supplements treat all free radicals the same. Research shows high-dose vitamin C or NAC taken around workouts blunts some of the muscle and endurance adaptations to training, because these supplements neutralize beneficial ROS alongside the damaging ones.

There’s an antioxidant that you may have heard of before that isn’t like the other ones: hydrogen. Your gut bacteria have been making molecular hydrogen (H2) for as long as you’ve eaten fiber. H2 works more like a signaling molecule than a traditional antioxidant. H2 selectively targets the most damaging reactive molecules while leaving the signaling molecules your body relies on intact.

A paper published in Redox Biology in December 2025 identified the first well-supported molecular target of H2 in human cells. H2 acts on a specific protein inside your mitochondria, triggering a controlled stress response and prompting the mitochondria to repair and adapt.

In the full version you’ll get:

-The clinical data on inflammation, performance, and metabolic markers

-How to choose between hydrogen water, inhalation, and tablets

-The protocol

-How H2 stacks with other longevity interventions

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The Longevity Compound Your Body Makes Less of Every Decade

Dave Asprey — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 15:02:22 GMT

Your cells run a continuous cycle of chemical reactions to make energy. Alpha-ketoglutarate (AKG) is one of the key players in the citric acid cycle (the sequence of reactions your mitochondria use to convert food into usable energy). In your 20s, your body produces and circulates AKG in abundance. By later adulthood, circulating levels are much lower.

Lower AKG levels affect more than energy production. AKG is a required cofactor (a helper molecule an enzyme needs to function) for TET enzymes, proteins responsible for clearing methylation marks (chemical tags placed on DNA over time that influence which genes your body reads) from the genome. When AKG levels drop, those tags accumulate in patterns associated with biological aging. Studies also show AKG reduces mTOR signaling. mTOR is a nutrient-sensing pathway (a system your cells use to detect food availability and adjust growth and repair accordingly) contributing to accelerated aging when it’s chronically overactivated.

In the full version you’ll get:

-The research behind AKG supplementation

-The specific form scientists used in studies and why form selection changes outcomes

-Exact dosing, timing, and what to track

-How to stack AKG with other longevity interventions

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Calcium Is Quietly Building Plaque in Your Arteries. Here Is What Stops It.

Dave Asprey — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 22:01:56 GMT

By age 40, many people already have detectable coronary plaque.

Your coronary artery calcium (CAC) score measures the calcified plaque in your arteries. A CT scan assigns a number to the buildup. A score above zero means you have plaque. Scores between 100 and 400 mean you have moderate plaque burden and higher cardiovascular risk. In many people, CAC scores rise over time, especially when you have metabolic dysfunction.

A 2026 randomized controlled trial in JAMA Cardiology tested whether 360 mcg per day of menaquinone-7 (MK-7, a form of vitamin K2) slows progression. After two years, the K2 group accumulated significantly less new calcification than the placebo group.

In the full version:

Why calcium ends up in arteries instead of bones
About the trial
What to pair with K2
How to get a CAC scan and what your number means
What I take and why

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You’re Spending Too Long in the Gym. Here’s Why.

Dave Asprey — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 15:02:03 GMT

Large pooled cohort studies and meta-analyses spanning decades and roughly 100,000+ participants found the amount of strength training associated with longer life. The number is 90 to 120 minutes per week.

I do about 20.

Before you tell me I’m wrong, read the data more carefully. Because buried inside this research is something the headlines are missing: above 120 minutes per week, all-cause mortality risk stops declining meaningfully, with little additional reduction at higher volumes.

That plateau suggests there may be a threshold beyond which additional training delivers diminishing returns for longevity.

In observational data, 90 to 120 minutes per week associates with roughly 10 to 25% lower all-cause mortality risk, with cardiovascular outcomes and some neurological outcomes showing similar benefits. Those are significant numbers. What the research also found is that people doing two or three times that amount saw little additional longevity benefit.

So the real question is not how much you should train. It is how efficiently you can reach the range that actually gives you results.

In the full version:

Why the studies are measuring the wrong variable
What stimulus quality actually means and why it determines your results more than time does
My actual 20-minute protocol and the science behind why it works
What to track instead of minutes

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Is Eloralintide the Next Ozempic?

Dave Asprey — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 14:49:54 GMT

Millions of people are on GLP-1 drugs. A lot of them don’t know that roughly 25 to 40 percent of the weight they’re losing comes from lean tissue, including muscle. Some of what you lose is the muscle you spent years working your ass off in the gym for.

That’s not a reason to stop using these drugs if you need them. But it’s a good idea to understand what’s happening in your body, and to know that a different class of compounds is emerging that appears to address the problem.

The compound is eloralintide. It’s a selective amylin receptor agonist developed by Eli Lilly. Eloralintide doesn’t work on the GLP-1 receptor at all. It works through amylin receptors, a pathway that traditional GLP-1 drugs do not directly target. Phase 2 data published in The Lancet in 2025 showed up to 20% body weight loss, comparable to tirzepatide. Preclinical findings suggest eloralintide may preserve lean mass more favorably during weight loss.

In the full version you’ll get:

The breakdown of every GLP-1 generation and the muscle preservation issue
The amylin signaling pathway, how it differs from GLP-1, and why those differences change the longevity calculation
The combination potential with existing GLP-1 protocols and what Lilly’s trial data suggests
Why eloralintide might be the next best thing

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Join The Human Upgrade Studio Audience Tomorrow!

Dave Asprey — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 20:45:55 GMT

Hey guys! Tomorrow I’ll be interviewing three great guests on The Human Upgrade and I’d love for you to join the live audience!

Here are the details:

All take place on Tuesday, June 23rd 2026

Ditte Youn…

Russia Built This Compound for Their Military. Their Athletes Used It at the Olympics.

Dave Asprey — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 14:01:55 GMT

Russia has produced some of the most interesting biohacking compounds in existence. Bioregulator peptides, actoprotectors, adaptogens with clinical trials behind them. The West largely ignores all of it because none of it comes with an FDA filing.

Bromantane is one of those compounds. Five athletes tested positive for it at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and got banned. Russia approved it as a prescription drug the following year. Here’s what it does and why the mechanism is unlike anything else in the dopamine space.

In the full version you’ll get:

Why and how Bromantane works
The stacking protocol and dosing
Where to source it and what to look for in quality

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The $30 Supplement That Touches Nearly Every Longevity Pathway at Once

Dave Asprey — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 18:07:04 GMT

I’ve had EGCG in my stack for years. Most people know it as the active compound in green tea. What most people don’t know is that green tea itself is actually not a great way to get it.

Commercial green tea is high in oxalates, which bind to minerals and contribute to kidney stones and systemic issues. It’s also a significant source of fluoride, which accumulates in the pineal gland and disrupts sleep and hormonal signaling. A standardized extract gives you what you want without the baggage.

EGCG is one of the few compounds with research spanning mitochondrial function, cellular stress responses, inflammation, glycation, and brain health. A new study on its protective effects against severe cellular stress gave me another reason to keep it in my daily stack.

In the full version you’ll get:

The longevity pathways EGCG influences and the science behind them
What to stack it with and the synergies the research supports
How to find a quality product
The full dosing and timing protocol

[Subscribe to unlock the full protocol]