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For maximum benefit, we should eat vegetables and fruits that are in season, free of pesticides, and locally grown. The fruits and vegetables that most grocery stores sell as fresh are picked days or weeks before they’re ripe, with the idea that they’ll ripen in transit.
To keep it simple, you can eat the whole plant as much as you like. However, the plant extract, the active ingredient, has a dose-dependent effect. This means that a little bit will help you, but a large amount will shut down the beneficial effects.
Coconut oil and MCT oil are jet fuel for the brain. These medium-chain triglycerides pass through the intestinal wall without causing an insulin spike and go into the mitochondria inside cells. Take two tablespoons daily—one tablespoon in the morning and one tablespoon midafternoon, together with MCT oil in the same proportion. You can also add coconut oil to soup and tea. I like to eat it straight from the jar, like ice cream! The dosage is 4 tablespoons (¼ cup) daily, preferably in the morning. Ubiquinol is a more efficient version of coenzyme Q10, which is essential for energy production by our mitochondria. When mice who were fed ubiquinol during their lives reached the equivalent of 90 years of human age, they were still “going skiing” compared with a control group of mice that were riddled with cancers and heart disease. The dosage is 200 mg daily.
It takes two to three days to burn through the residual sugars in your bloodstream and switch to using fat for fuel. These ketones were turning on higher brain functions I had been trying to reach by sitting cross-legged on a meditation pillow.
That day I realized that what we call spiritual experiences are not only the result of our meditation practice, but of our brain chemistry. We need both. Today I bring a jar of coconut oil whenever I go on a retreat and give it to all of our participants in our Grow a New Body programs to help them get over the hump of the first couple of days it takes to switch into ketosis.
Consuming healthy fats like avocados, coconut oil, and olive oil fuels the brain and the heart (and all our mitochondria) with ketone bodies, which are many times more efficient a fuel than sugars.
The hippocampus cannot tell time, so it often confuses something happening today with something similar that happened 20 years ago. That new person we just met may trigger memories of a former lover from years back, and that’s where the conversation ends. And the hippocampus is linked not just to past events but also to old behaviors, worn-out thoughts, and used-up feelings. When it’s damaged, we keep recalling the same painful situations, the same painful emotions, over and over again. We aren’t as open to new experiences and learning.
You heal the hippocampus by increasing your level of serotonin (made by the flora in your gut) and switching on the production of stem cells in the brain.
am convinced that much of what we call intuition is really a gut instinct that is available to us all once we repair our gut and upgrade the colony of good bacteria that make up more than 90 percent of who we are.
All these roles—victim, persecutor, rescuer—keep us feeling scared, defensive, envious, and competitive.
AI Summary
Grow a New Body by Alberto Villoldo presents key insights from the contemplative tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
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Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
This entry was generated from Readwise highlights. Expand with additional context as appropriate.