by Kim Pederson…….

As you may remember, when Alice first tumbles down the rabbit hole in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, she lands in a strange hall with many locked doors of different sizes. There’s also a table whereupon lies a tiny key that fits a tiny door much too small for the girl and a bottle labeled “Drink Me.” Alice decides that, since the bottle is not marked “Poison,” she’ll swig it down. She does and immediately downsizes — “shutting up like a telescope” in her words — to tiny door stature.

What brought Alice and her incredible shrinking potion to mind was Jenna Wortham’s article “The Supplemented Self” in The New York Times Magazine. In it she writes of Dave Asprey, founder of Bulletproof Executive and creator of the Bulletproof Diet (avocado, steak, butter, not much exercise, yay!), which he claims helped him lose 100 pounds, increase his IQ by more than 12 points, and lower his biological age. Dave is a member of the “quantified-self movement,” that is, people who obsessively collect data about themselves (thank you iPhone and Android!) to monitor and perhaps improve their behavior and themselves. (That reminds me, it’s time to check my blood O2 and stress level. Drat. Where’s my phone?)

Asprey’s signature product is Bulletproof Coffee, described as “a blended drink made of Upgraded Coffee blended together with grass-fed unsalted butter and Brain Octane Oil.” The website also tells you that after drinking this coffee “You will experience one of the best mornings of your life, with boundless energy and focus. It’s amazing.” You can, of course, conveniently order the ingredients you need to be bulletpoof at home. If you’re not convinced yet, take this testimony. “After a few sips,” Wortham writes, “I started to feel giddy, and almost high — as if I could run a marathon and deliver a keynote lecture and do my taxes, all at once.”

Asprey is a biohacker, which Wikipedia describes as someone into “do-it-yourself biology.” The whole enterprise, my cynical side advises, sounds more than a little wonky. But I keep thinking about the purported weight loss, IQ boost, and reyouthification claims of Bulletproof. Maybe I’ll order the the coffee and make myself a cup. I will check the packaging carefully before I do, however. If it doesn’t say “Poison,” I’m golden.

*”Alice Drink Me” by John Tenniel – Alice in Wonderland book by Lewis Carroll, Illustrations by John Tenniel. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons.

Visit Kim Pederson’s blog RatBlurt: Mostly Random Short-Attention-Span Musings.

[optin-cat id=”26188″]