The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [209]
If you want to replicate the formula that has proven most effective for the most people, follow the rules in “The Slow-Carb Diet.”
Enjoy cheat day. For that matter, eat a chocolate croissant for me. Those bad boys are delicious.
End of Chapter Notes
8. Unless we’re dealing with customer service complaints, in which case there is an incentive: something can be fixed after-the-fact.
SEX MACHINE II
Details and Dangers
Too much of a good thing can hurt you. Toxicity is serious business. If the topics of testosterone and libido are important to you, it’s better to know too much rather than too little. This chapter will help you avoid problems, provide more background, and amplify results by personalizing the prescription.
If overwhelmed after your first pass-through, just remember the synopsis in Sex Machine I, which wraps up the general program in concise terms. That said, do not ignore the warnings here.
Here’s the nitty-gritty on both protocols.
Protocol #1: Long-Term and Sustained
FERMENTED COD LIVER OIL + VITAMIN-RICH BUTTER FAT—
TWO CAPSULES UPON WAKING AND TWO CAPSULES BEFORE BED
I began taking fermented cod liver oil and butter fat after conversations with several MDs trained at Harvard and UCSF who cited the findings of Weston A. Price (1870–1948).
Price, nicknamed “the Charles Darwin of Nutrition,” was a researcher and dental surgeon who traveled the world throughout the 1930s recording the health and whole-food diets of isolated indigenous populations. Using meticulous notes and hundreds of photographs, he then compared each group with members of the same populations who had moved into cities and adopted industrialized diets. Through hundreds of settlements in 14 countries, from the remote villages of Lötschental, Switzerland, to the Jalou tribes of Kenya, from the American Indians to the Aborigines, he documented a diverse range of traditional diets.
Some contained almost no plants, while others contained a plethora; some ate nearly all food cooked, whereas others preferred all foods, even animal meats, raw. Despite these differences, there were a few commonalities among the diets of the groups with the least incidence of disease. Three types of food are of particular interest in our libido discussion:
1. Lacto-fermented foods such as sauerkraut, kimchi, or Japanese natto, which appear a few times in this book, were staples.
2. 10 -fold the U.S. consumption level of vitamin D and vitamin A (animal-based retinol, not plant-based carotene) were consumed from sources such as egg yolks, fish oils, butter, lard, and foods with fat-rich cellular membranes (fish eggs, shellfish, and organ meats).
3. The diets included foods rich in what Price called “Activator X,” now thought to be vitamin K(2) based on analysis performed by Chris Masterjohn. Common sources included fish eggs, cod liver oil, organ meats, and the deep yellow butter from cows eating rapidly growing green grass. If “Activator X” is, in fact, vitamin K(2), then Japanese natto is perhaps the best traditional source at 1,103.4 micrograms per 100 grams. It outguns goose liver pâté (yum) (369 micrograms) in second place and the hard cheeses (76.3 micrograms) in third place by almost 3 times and 14 times, respectively.
Why are these three relevant to our discussion?
Vitamin A has a direct positive effect on testosterone production in adult testes, and supplementation along with zinc has been shown to be as effective as anabolic steroid administration (oxandrolone and testosterone depot) in stimulating growth and puberty, the latter defined as an increase in testicular volume of 12 milliliters or more.
Vitamin K(2) activates vitamin A- and D-dependent proteins by conferring upon them the physical ability to bind calcium. Dr. Price had no shortage of real- world examples of how K(2) amplifies the effects of A and D:
Cod liver oil, which is high in both vitamins A and D, partially corrected growth retardation and weak legs in turkeys fed a deficiency diet, but the combination of cod liver oil and high-Activator X butter