104. The Dopamine Diet
Over the last 20 years the biggest changes in the human diet have been an increase in processed foods and an increase in dopamine consumption. The latter is more important but poorly understood.
[This is a very long article, even by my standards. It likely won’t show entirely in your email, you will have to go to the source to see the full thing.]
When I arrived at UCLA to finish by B.S. in Kinesiology I already had more units than I needed to graduate, before I even started. This is because I spent 5 years at Santa Monica College (a junior or 2 year college) prior to my transfer. I did this because I was poor and homeless and I could attend SMC with free tuition. I essentially took every science (including social sciences) and math class available.
Thus instead of the normal 4 years of undergraduate work, I took 7. Undergraduate work is where you learn the most, after that you become very specialized and your total learning rate decreases. Since I could complete my major in 3 quarters, I was told I could take whatever classes I wanted with the other year since I had to be at UCLA for 2 years to get my degree. Even though I was blocked from all graduate degree programs over a 20 year period (for “non academic reasons”), I already had a graduate education by the time I left UCLA.
I put that extra year (the equivalent of a master’s degree) into public health, studying clinical nutrition, molecular nutrition, global nutrition, and any course I could take related to epidemics and pandemics. This would position me to be better prepared for the pandemic (which I knew was coming, and which I alluded to in my 2009 Third Tier of Game Development paper) than most public health PhDs. More importantly, the combination of exercise science and nutrition expertise, combined with my research into stress/drug endocrinology (neuroscience) put me in a position to vastly extend my life span.
Note that with my rough childhood and being a hardcore unfiltered Camel smoker at age 5, my predicted lifespan was under 30 years. Even without the smoking, my 10/10 ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) rating put my lifespan at 30 years. So far I’ve doubled that statistic and I’ve been looking so much younger as I age that when I got my new passport I got stopped regularly because I did not look my age.
How I’ve done this, and my advice to those that want to live longer, might surprise you since it’s so different than the prevailing noise cloud that is trying to hook you on processed food and dopamine.
A Bit About Processed Food
Before I get into the core of this paper (which is about dopamine consumption), let me just point out a few trends about processed food. Hopefully this isn’t news to you.
Processed and especially ultra processed foods aren’t there to benefit you. They are there to benefit factories that transform natural food sources (the ones with the nutrients you need) into foods that you can’t resist eating (with no nutrients). The result is food addiction (which benefits the makers of these “foods”) and obesity. These same companies advertise a lot. So when one complains about the normalization of obesity in media, cancellation is swift.
You will note that social media content promoting obesity is totally fine. I can search for it and it will be provided. Because that’s “body positivity”. Some marketing person got rich coming up with that Double Speak phrase. The reason I know that is 100% bullshit is because when I try to search YouTube for content that promotes eating disorders that cause you to lose weight, I get this:
So that’s not “body positivity”, that’s “obesity positivity”.
Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
The problem is so bad that life expectancy has stopped trending upwards in the USA, and is now trending down. When I travel to Thailand I’ve noticed that the previously very thin population is rapidly approaching American obesity statistics. If you go to the mall and see the proliferation of fast food chains, or to 7-11, you can see why.
Obesity runs in my family. Since I was told by multiple top orthopaedic surgeons at the age of 29 that I would never run again because I had scrubbed off all the cartilage in my ankles from running 200km a week for 10 years, it’s been a constant battle for me to avoid obesity. Even walking is painful. Going vegan in 2012 had a miraculous effect on my health. I have a 70L backpack and I hike (~4km each way) to the local produce market 3 times a week. Most of my diet is fresh fruits and vegetables. I supplement with a protein powder, which requires 10kg of powder every 9 months. It’s very economical. I take about 20g every 6 hours to optimize uptake and not waste protein, since your body can’t store protein. If you consume too much, your body just converts it to urea which is hard on your kidneys and can also cause kidney stones (which are just balls of urea precipitate).
I do exercise daily, how I do that when I’m medically not supposed to be able to is quite complicated. I cheat. I cheat A LOT. I do all sorts of complex biomechanical things that might be fun in another paper but not here. At the age of 29 I needed help crossing the street without a walker because my ankles are bone-on-bone with no cartilage. Cartilage doesn’t grow back.
Dopamine and Epigenetics
In any serious discussion of dopamine consumption, I think it is important to start by talking about children. When I say “consumption” here, it is with the understanding that external stimuli are causing your own body to release dopamine into your blood that was created in your body (endogenous), not from an external physical source (exogenous). But the effect is the same and unless you are a biological scientist, you are going to be wired to think of this as consumption. So imagine that when you watch social media, or a dating app, there is an IV tube going straight from your electronic device right into your vein.
Advertisers and these media companies all understand this quite well, and they know that the vast majority of drug addictions are linked to this dopamine reward loop in your body. They need you addicted to their content, and they know how to ensure that happens. Since this was happening in sneaky fashion and I felt consumers should be alerted, I published a paper explaining how this works back in 2012, call Game Dosing.
Since then it’s use in media has been less sneaky, and these companies openly brag about their attempts to optimize dopamine delivery. The push to get children addicted at earlier and earlier ages has also been a huge trend. I would put Cocomelon and Roblox into this category as examples, but it’s happening all across social media.
The problem with this is that early high dopamine exposure is interpreted as stress by the developing brain. Genetically, this activates an emergency response called “epigenetic activation”. Normally hidden genes that can go hundreds or even thousands of years without activating can be called upon in times of great need, like when the children of a tribe are under constant threat. This usually means an extinction event is in progress, at least for that Tribe.
By bombarding our children with dopamine, we are basically running an Extinction Simulation on a biological level with our children. This results in perhaps an epigenetic activation rates that the species only experiences during extinction events.
There is a ton of research on this, but most of it has only been done in the last 10 years. I talked a bit about stress and the threat to children back in 2018 in my Physiology of Gaming paper.
I’m generally considered a smart person. But I don’t think I was born that way. I started speaking human languages (English) kind of late, for instance. But seeing my father attempt to beat my mother to death (he pled insanity and was institutionalized) when I was 2 years old, and then smoking unfiltered Camels (tobacco is a dopamine delivery chemical) at the age of 5 put me under an extreme amount of stress. The ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) test is designed to measure this easily. Of course this was only the beginning of stress for me.
With a 10 out of 10 rating, I’m in a very exclusive club that I hope no one you ever know gets invited to. I can only imagine how fantastic life would be if I only had a score of 4, but apparently only some 17% of Americans score 4 or higher. That’s like a totally alien reality to me.
Hence the very low expected lifespan. The research shows that the more stress (dopamine is a stress chemical) a child is exposed to, the more epigenetic activation. This would make sense from an evolutionary and species survival view. With epigenetic activation new talents and abilities can be added to a Tribe that normally would not exist, but also these children die much earlier. This is sort of an evolutionary “hail Mary” pass as a last ditch effort to avert extinction. After all, if the tribe goes extinct you don’t really have to worry about lifespan. At least some must survive, even if it’s not these children.
I imagine that as the stress level goes up, if the child doesn’t die outright then there is sort of an Epigenetic Slot Machine (ESM) that spins and then gives you some semi random assortment of new genes. They aren’t technically new, they’ve always been there, but they’ve never activated before or likely have not in thousands of years. I believe this is also strongly linked to Autism traits, and are often one in the same. This would also explain why Autism seems to be trending strongly up in appearance.
I have not gone into this much detail before because I have fears that some authoritarian governments might round up a million kids and torture them to see if they can get one or two with really good rolls on the ESM. These are the same countries that do pretty much the exact same thing in order to produce a few top Olympians in sports that aren’t even practiced in their countries, so the idea that they would do this isn’t far fetched.
But as media companies perfect this Extinction Simulator they are running on our children, it wouldn’t be hard to get nearly all of the children in a country up to ACE 4 levels of stress. You can see from the statistics how catastrophic this would be.
I think part of the “non academic reasons” that keep blocking me from academia (besides my ethnicity) are that people feel that my cognitive abilities make me privileged in a way that otherwise privileged people get bent about. Realize I get blocked by people who never met me so it’s not my personality they are reacting to. I think if they realized the price I and others have paid to have access to these unusual epigenetic talents, they would realize this is not a privilege.
As the overall goal of this paper is to explain why and how to lower your dopamine levels, I am also not advocating that you abuse your children on the off chance they might get a positive cognitive trait. As you can see from the statistics, that’s like a 1 in a million chance (like a real Las Vegas slot machine) and that it’s far more likely you will have children that will commit suicide or die of a drug overdose.
Managing Your Dopamine Diet
While I think that diet is super important for longevity (which is why I mention it here), I think that managing your dopamine exposure is actually more important for longevity. In my case, just because I got past age 30 doesn’t mean I’ve cracked the code and I’m out of the woods.
My body is actively trying to melt, as my endocrine system was pooched hard from an early age. As my rare traits emerged, which seemed to mostly be dopamine linked, I really started to push myself to inhuman extremes. This did even more damage as I didn’t really understand what was going on with me.
As a child I was sick most of the time. But now in retrospect it seems a lot of that was allergies. My body overreacts to almost everything. I can’t eat most foods, I can’t wear most clothes, I can’t wear jewellery, and drugs are a really bad idea. But the allergy effects are like a slow motion anaphylaxis that takes about a week or more to build up. So unlike typical anaphylactic shock, which just takes minutes, it’s much harder to identify as an allergy.
Figuring this out took me decades. But my body wasn’t done messing with me. About every 6 years I develop a new autoimmune disorder where my body tries to kill itself. I have several at this point. I look fantastic for my age because I do everything right, but like with my ankles, it’s a very complicated scenario to keep it all going.
Since all the evidence goes back to extreme early dopamine exposure, and then a lot of extreme activities in my first 25 years, I look at myself as sort of a Replicant from Blade Runner (1982). “The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long”. So I see myself as living on borrowed time. I don’t know how much time I have left but I’d like to help the world as much as I can with however much time I have left. It’s a running joke about how fast rock stars die, as they start to juice up with drugs to speed up and slow down their life. It takes a lot of discipline to avoid that cycle, and even more to get off of it.
Reduce the Drip
Living in the modern world, unless you are a monk, means you are being constantly exposed to a Dopamine Drip. This can put you at ACE 4+ stress levels all day without you being conscious of it. Stress levels like this don’t create the same sort of extreme adaptations in adults that they do with children.
That’s good and bad.
It means that you can endure these stress levels and think “oh it’s not that bad”. But if you have children, they are in a whole different world. As they develop, their body is adapting to that stress with results you can see statistically above. Thus the huge spike in depression, addiction, suicide rates and other assorted flavors of mental illness across the board with the youngest generations.
But lets focus here on you, the adult.
These sorts of studies are difficult to perform because it is unethical to harm subjects, especially over long periods of time. Also, it’s impossible to set up a double blind control group as the people under stress know it. This is even more clear with subjects who are children. This is why I get mad when I see a PhD advocating for not protecting children until a causal link has been established between an activity and harm to children. That’s not the proper standard. You should assume it’s harmful until it’s been proven NOT harmful. When I see that, I know that professor has been bought by the industry they are trusted to regulate. You would be surprised how common this is, and this contributes to the historically low reputation that academics have in society today.
Thus I would consider the above consequences to be very conservative numbers, and that the real effects, especially later in life, are going to be a lot more severe.
Your Telomeres govern the ability of your cells to undergo mitosis and make new cells. This is what allows your body to heal itself and regenerate from illness and injury. Just making new skin cells, intestinal cells, hair, and nails all require this process. As your Telomeres shorten, you lose this ability. This is why everyone dies: they run out of Telomere length as it shortens every time it is used to copy the cell.
The Telomere is a built in lifespan regulator that limits how much life you get. We don’t have a way to reverse this. The more cells you make, the shorter you live. Thus the Replicant reference from Blade Runner that I like so much is spot on. I know a lot of Olympians from my time in the Olympic family. They don’t have long lifespans. You would expect that they would from how fit they are. But the brighter they shine, the shorter they shine. I imagine my Telomeres are smouldering ruins these days and I can feel how much harder it is to heal from everything. I used to heal so fast that I made jokes about it being “demonic regeneration”. Since my metabolism is super hyped up, I still do to some extent. But some cells can’t reproduce anymore and are dying off. The ones left have to work extra hard to compensate.
So my physical goal for the last 13 years, since I went vegan, has been to slow my life and my body down as much as possible. I exercise daily, but I limit the amount to just what I need to avoid obesity. I try very hard to reduce my caloric intake, which is hard because my partner is a master cook and that is her love language.
I’ve had 14 motorcycles, and outlived all of them. I haven’t rode in the last 5.5 years. That’s a big deal because I get a lot more dopamine from a fast bike than I do from sex. Remember that the closer you get to dying (without dying), the more dopamine you get. I’ve had some very dangerous romantic partners (like witches and police) but usually they don’t kill you (I don’t date police anymore. Bikes are safer). Ditching police cruisers, bikes, helicopters, and airplanes was always good for extra juice.
If you want to live life happier and longer, I would recommend you evaluate your entire life to see what the sources of dopamine are. If it is “exciting” or “scary” or even “attention grabbing”, that’s a sign it’s a dopamine drip. Also, any drug that increases your alertness is in this category. Yes that means coffee. I wonder as I write this if 90% of companies are going to blacklist me for this recommendation. But this is how ubiquitous these drip sources are. Food, drink, media, TV, dating apps, sex, driving, criminal activity, it’s all around us. This is why women seem to love drama series about crime and murder investigations, even if they are about women being killed. It’s thrilling, and the closer you get to death without dying, the more dopamine you get. I also see this as why “prisoners are hot” in media these days.
Exercise daily, but not to the extreme. I’m a bad example, don’t be training 4 to 6 hours a day. Daily, but in moderation. You can have a really amazing body on just one hour a day, especially if you dump the processed foods. Speaking of which, I recently recommended in my dating app matchmaker paper that if you are an “8”, don’t chase 9s and 10s. Chase 7s. That’s too much dopamine. You want to get by every day with the least amount of dopamine you can handle. So that “7” is perfect. And later on as they get older they will drop even lower, which is going to keep you alive longer!
This might not be my most popular advice, but I would urge you to ignore all the programming trying to get you to spend more on ever bigger dopamine drips. Do the opposite of what these companies are trying to force you to do. You will also save a lot of money in the process because that ever bigger high is also ever more expensive, and probably ever more dangerous.