Bulletproof Coffee on Wall Street?
If you haven't already heard of Bulletproof Coffee (click here for more info), I can pretty much guarantee that someone in your office will soon be drinking a cup and raving about how great they look/feel/perform.
Coffee + Grass-Fed Butter + MCT Oil might be the most popular recipe for increased performance in 2015.
Surprisingly, I haven't seen one mention of Bulletproof Coffee on the WSO forums. Given that it's claimed benefits include improved cognitive function, improved physical performance, increased energy, reduced food cravings, and increased fat loss it seems perfect for over-worked WSO readers seeking optimum performance.
Normally, I'm skeptical of benefits like this and assume it's just good-marketing backed by pseudo-science, but Bulletproof Coffee has such a strong following that there might be some truth to the claims.
Read on for a short background on the rise of Bulletproof Coffee and a discussion of it's use on Wall Street.
The Rise of Bulletproof Coffee
This supercharged coffee—from Dave Asprey of bulletproofexec.com—was 'created' in 2009 and was still a fringe trend when I tried drinking it two years ago in 2013.
In the latter half of 2014 it's popularity reached a tipping point as pretty much every mainstream media outlet released an article on the drink (e.g. The New York Times, The Guardian, Fox News, Fast Company, The Huffington Post).
As with anything new in the health and fitness world, this increased attention has brought increased scrutiny and a number of 'experts' are weighing in on the benefits and risks of a coffee loaded with saturated fat and ~500 calories. I'm not prepared to give a verdict on whether it's good or bad for you and I doubt there will be a medical consensus anytime soon, but in my view it has reached a level of popularity that means it will be around for the foreseeable future.
The next phase of growth seems to be retail locations: there's an official Bulletproof Coffee location opening in Santa Monica and there are stores across the U.S. currently dishing out some variation of the butter coffee recipe.
Bulletproof Coffee on Wall Street
Here's my take on Bulletproof Coffee: if your goal is to create a competitive advantage at work by maximizing your mental performance, then your best bet is to first address foundational elements like exercise, sleep, nutrition, and meditation. If you've got these locked in and are looking for more then I see no problem with experimenting with tools like Bulletproof Coffee as long as you diligently monitor the effects on your health and performance.
So, how prevalent is Bulletproof Coffee in the WSO community?
Have you tried it? Have your colleagues tried it? What do you think?
Alistair Clark is a former management consultant and current exercise and nutrition coach that runs worklifeiftness.co, a website that helps busy professionals create a competitive advantage at work by building systems that maximize mental energy and increase cognitive performance.
Sick Ad bro
how did that get on the homepage?
Yeah cmon this is basically spam.
Hey @"mrb87" and others. Sorry this post comes off as spam or an ad, but that's not the intent.
BulletProof Coffee is not my product, I don't make money off of it through affiliates, and I don't sell any of my own products online. Basically: nothing I do online makes me any money. Maybe someday I will monetize my own website, but right now I just write and give away free content that I think is interesting and useful. For example, here's some other stuff I've written for WSO:
http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/blog/hacks-for-minimizing-the-hangover-f… http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/blog/how-to-eat-healthy-while-living-in-…
I'll admit this post isn't as useful as those, but that's only because I don't have a fully-formed opinion on the topic. Instead, I am just genuinely interested in finding out if people are really drinking this butter coffee since I've heard a bunch of buzz from friends in the last few months.
Screw ur ad, thanks 4 the recipe tho.
Nice ad (...not! Douche!) or rather nice try. In my experience nothing gives me the boost in energy, clarity of thinking and sheer bad ass-ness like a good old wild dirty fuck session. Pussy is THE fountain of youth my friends. Nuff said.
Appeals to popularity like 'millions of people can't be wrong' is generally considered a red flag for bullshit though..
bio-hacking is an interesting concept and I listen to far too many podcasts about it. Most of them end up simply cross promoting each others' products (Ferris, Asprey, etc.) which ends up annoying me. They also start to go off the rails when they begin selling me these products such as bulletproof coffee. Look, 90% of people who end up buying these special coffees do 10 other things that probably end up defeating the minimal gains from bulletproof coffee. Sure, if you are already doing everything else geared towards perfectly maximizing yourself and this provides that extra 5% that you need then maybe it is worth it. But when they get on there and start talking about eating only grass fed sticks of butter in an airport and packing sardines and shit... haha. It gets a bit absurd.
Again, this is going to end up with a lot of people wondering why they are suddenly gaining weight when they add an extra 500 calories of fat to their already bad diet. That's the issue with something like this. No different than a lot of smoothie places but for most people that amount of calories will obliterate their waistline. Decreased appetite? Check, that's what eating a cheeseburger-ish amount of calories will do to you. I just keep coming back to the point that most using this who report benefits are also eating super clean, working out like crazy and trying to constantly maximize themselves. I think it is fascinating, but probably not a very mainstream product.
whoa don't put Ferriss and Asprey in the same category, the latter is a snake oil salesman, Tim has quite a bit of credibility (yes he promotes products and makes money from this, but has legit research to back it up, for the most part.
what podcast and/or blog do you think is best?
any biohacking products you've tried?
HAHAHAHA I wanna see what Mark Cuban has to say but I think wikipedia sums it up pretty well:
"Asprey has claimed that when used in combination with other "health hacks", the coffee helped to boost his IQ score by more than 20 points. His company claims that bulletproof coffee can aid cognition and trigger weight loss through ketosis. Commenting on the product, a nutrition expert said that there was some research on the use of medium-chain triglycerides in weight loss and cholesterol regulation, but that any effect was "very, very small"." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletproof_Coffee
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