Biohacking & HealthSpan

A placebo is a fake treatment, a medical intervention that does not contain any physically or pharmacologically active substances with a direct ability to induce therapeutic effects. Yet, its effect is real. When you’re told that something is going to produce a specific effect on you, even though it does not really have the ability to do so, it is highly likely that you will feel it. And that is the reason why clinical trials use placebos as a control to accurately determine the efficacy of a drug.

Our modern lifestyles are slowly killing us: by overeating and being excessively sedentary, we might have brought upon ourselves an epidemic in metabolic diseases. Our body is not optimized for these modern ways of life and we can’t change that overnight, nor even in the course of a few generations. Evolution is slow.

Throughout evolution, the survival of humans may have greatly depended on the constraints of needing to acquire food. Food deprivation was most likely one of the biggest energetic and evolutionary challenges to our bodies - it is likely that many of our ancestors could only acquire food during daytime, having to fast for long hours; it is also likely that long periods of food scarcity were common. So, those who were able to endure in these conditions ended up being favoured by evolution.

The fact that our bodies store fat as a backup long-term, high-energy source, and that we can survive relying solely on it for a fair amount of time, is an indication of how human evolution prepared us (and maybe even optimized us) to go through periods of fasting.

Think of all the microbes in our gut - it’s pretty impressive the way our gut is thriving with life. There are trillions of microbes from at least a thousand different bacterial species living together to make up an incredible ecosystem - the gut microbiota. And those microbes aren’t just hanging out in the gut, waiting to be fed; they are actually very important for our physical and mental health! We live in symbiosis and we need each other equally.

The gut’s potential impact on physical health becomes obvious if you recognise that most of our immune cells originate in the digestive system, placing it as a key player in our immune defence arsenal. But the gut also has a (surprisingly) huge impact on our mental health. That’s because the gut and the brain are intimately connected. Anyone who’s ever been in a stressful situation has felt it: our mind takes hold of our body - we feel it in our heartbeat and we feel it in our gut.