Silicon Valley startup proudly starves its employees
Silicon Valley startup proudly starves its employees
By Rebecca Sullivan, News.com.au July 13, 2016 | 2:44pm
Millions of people around the world have tried fasting as
a way to lose weight. Intermittent fasting and the 5:2 diet are both
science-approved ways of keeping your waistline in check.
Now a Silicon Valley startup has implemented a weekly
36-hour starvation period for all employees — not to help them lose weight, but
to improve their workplace focus and concentration.
Employees at Nootrobox, a smart drug company which
produces cognitive enhancers called nootropics, don’t eat from Monday night
until Wednesday morning.
“We’re actually super-productive on Tuesdays,” co-founder
and CEO Geoffrey Woo told The Mercury News. “It’s hard at first, but we
literally adopted it as part of the company culture.”
Some of Woo’s colleagues are way more hardcore. “Some
people don’t eat for even longer. They fast on Sunday night, then breakfast on
Wednesday morning,” he told Inverse.
Many Silicon Valley workers are trying to “hack” their
brains as they strive to gain an edge in the city’s ever-competitive market.
When a great idea can earn you millions of dollars — apps
like Uber, Snapchat and Tinder once started as tiny ideas — there’s an extra
incentive to have your brain always working at full capacity.
“It kind of sucks, in the beginning, to not eat for 36
hours,” Woo said. “But it’s fun to get breakfast together on Wednesday. We
realized that a lot of people in our community want to do that as well, so we
started a biohacker breakfast.
“We have 300 people in a Slack channel, nerding about
fasting and different fasting protocols. Every Wednesday at 8 a.m. in San
Francisco, we have a biohacker breakfast.”
As well as fasting and taking nootropics, some employees
are consuming prescription drugs and small doses of LSD, The Mercury News
reports.
“Entrepreneurs and executives and investors are not
normal people,” said Dr. Molly Maloof, who works with lots of biohacking
clients from top-tier Silicon Valley tech companies.
“They are like high-performance race cars that are
non-stop moving, and they need pit stops more often than normal people.”
Nootrobox sells four different nootropics in tablet form,
as well as chewable caffeine candies.
Rise is designed to “enhance memory, stamina, and
resilience,” Kado-3 is an Omega-3 tablet, Sprint is for “immediate clarity, energy
and flow” over four to six hours and Yawn is to be taken before bed to help
with a good night’s sleep.
All are designed to increase brain performance and boost
energy and can be purchased online without a prescription from a doctor.
Professor Anthony Hannan from the Florey Institute of
Neuroscience and Mental Health says there is little scientific evidence to
support fasting or taking nootropics to boost brain functionality.
“There are some companies who are conducting clinical
trials on these drugs to improve cognitive function, but they’re mainly to
treat neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s, dementia and schizophrenia,”
Hannan told news.com.au.
“They’re not for healthy people who think they are just
going to perform better.”
Every drug has side effects and risks that need to be
taken into account, Hannan said.
“If you can buy them online, it would be extremely
unlikely that there is any proper scientific evidence of cognitive enhancement,
because it’s very hard for these companies to pay for those studies. You could
argue they wouldn’t want to know the results of that research,” he said.
“While there is certainly scientific evidence that
fasting is beneficial for weight maintenance and overall health, the idea that
you’re going to perform better cognitively isn’t really there.”
Hannan says the best way to improve brain functionality
is to maintain a healthy diet, exercise regularly, keep your brain stimulated,
get eight hours of sleep a night and reduce your stress levels.
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