WE COULD ALL do with being a bit smarter, right?
So if someone comes along with an easy way to improve your IQ it’s worth paying attention.
Bulletproof coffee has been around for a while – basically it’s best known for being the drink that involves adding a chunk of butter to your coffee.
It’s now being launched into the Irish market and the company hopes there will be an appetite for its range of purported benefits.
Bulletproof’s PR literature describes its tech-entrepreneur founder Dave Asprey as a “pioneer in the field of biohacking”, which – according to this Forbes article from 2014 – involves a “fusion of tech optimism and biological experimentation in a non-traditional research setting”.
Through the use of Bulletproof coffee and its associated diet Asprey claims to have lost 100 pounds and improved his IQ by 20 points.
This sort of low-effort, high-reward deal sounds pretty good.
So I decided to give the coffee a go and see if I could boost my IQ after drinking one cup.
So what is it exactly?
Basically, Bulletproof coffee has its own specialised blend of coffee beans to which you add grass-fed unsalted butter plus the company’s ‘Octane Oil’.
It’s not a drink for the fainthearted.
A single cup is made with two-and-a-half tablespoons of coffee, two tablespoons of butter and between one teaspoons and two tablespoons of the Octane Oil depending on your tolerance.
To make up my batch I went for the upper ends of these limits to make sure I got the full effect.
Unable to locate any of the grassfed, unsalted butter that Asprey recommends, I had to make do with regular Kerrygold.
There was no telling how this deviation would impact on the final result.
The coffee’s purported benefits are based around Asprey’s theory that trying to eliminate fat from your diet is not an effective dietary technique.
“Big food can no longer hide behind the calorie myth and use it to sell low-fat sugar snacks that make people fat and tired,” he says.
Having made up a batch of the coffee, it was surprisingly palatable and, for something with two tablespoons of butter in it, wasn’t too overpowering. Sort of like a warm coffee-flavoured milkshake.
How smart am I…
Firstly, a couple of health warnings.
Anyone who wants to actually know their IQ should be aware that doing free tests on the internet might not be the way to go.
Also, no where does Bulletproof coffee make any claim that it can boost IQ after a single cup of coffee; or indeed that the IQ-boosting results experienced by founder Asprey can be easily replicated.
Regardless, here is how I got on:
The first test I did was this one. It takes 40 minutes, has 39 questions and – according to some people on Reddit – is one of the more accurate free online tests.
I took a crack at it first thing after waking up. It started off pretty easy, and by question 12 I was feeling pretty smug about things. Being a Mensa-level genius didn’t seem that difficult after all.
However – things took a pretty sharp left-turn after around question 17.
As things got tougher I muddled through the last few questions with guesswork and managed to score 118, which is in the upper-average range.
And with the coffee…
Shortly after arriving at the office I made up some of the coffee and geared up for my second IQ test of the day.
This time around I was using a different online test, the justification for the change being that the questions on the earlier test would be the same.
This one came with a 30-minute time limit to do 40 questions.
This second test quickly began to present challenges.
The questions were harder, and the shorter time limit made things feel more rushed.
The test ended and my score appeared on screen.
I had scored 75, something that the clearly un-PC website claimed to put me in the category of ‘mild mental retardation’.
Charming.
What?
Bulletproof coffee had nothing to do with my IQ falling by almost 50 points in less than eight hours.
The product has been making big inroads in the United States since 2014 and has gained legions of devotees, even opening its own cafe in Santa Monica.
Having drunk the Bulletproof coffee I did feel more alert, although probably not more so than if I had drank ordinary coffee.
After I finished the IQ test the raised energy level seemed to last throughout the afternoon, with the usual 5pm slump seeming to take a day off.
On the downside, I wasn’t mad about the lingering taste of butter.
According to its marketing, the products main focus is on weight loss and improved energy levels.
Launching in Ireland, it already has some connections to here – with founder Asprey pushing Kerrygold as his butter of choice.
This highly-unscientific experiment probably says more about online IQ tests than anything else.
Boosting your intelligence quotient with a single cup of butter-infused coffee isn’t realistic.
Perhaps peanut butter next time.
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