Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1875: Tainted Science With Max Lugavere

Episode Date: August 8, 2022

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin speak to Max Lugavere about what happens when scientists are motivated by outcomes other than finding the truth. When the science-bound model goes wrong. (2:28) Science advances one funeral at a time. (12:28) Why you shouldn’t take everything the Western blot publishes as fact. (15:11) Why is there resistance to acknowledging that we can potentially prevent Alzheimer’s Disease? (22:50) Why this documentary project engenders why Max does what he does. (29:32) How the brain is very complex. (31:18) Turning the serotonin model for depression on its head. (34:31) How do studies get funded, and how can we eliminate these conflicts of interest? (43:05) Nutrition studies, a house of cards. (48:21) When diets become politicized. (50:43) Be evidence-based, but NOT evidence-bound. (57:01) Understanding the BIG picture and sifting through the noise. (1:02:43) Little Empty Boxes. (1:09:53) Related Links/Products Mentioned Visit Paleo Valley for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Promo code MINDPUMP15 at checkout for 15% discount** August Special: TOP SELLING PROGRAMS COMBINED FOR ONLY $99.99! A specific amyloid-β protein assembly in the brain impairs memory Potential Research Fabrication Bombshell Threatens Amyloid Theory of Alzheimer’s Disease A new Alzheimer's drug has been approved. But should you take it? Blood-based biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease - PubMed Genius Foods: Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain for Life – Book by Max Lugavere and Paul Grewal The Lancet: 40% of dementia cases could be prevented or delayed by targeting 12 risk factors throughout life Getting to the Root of Alzheimer's | Harvard Medical School Depression is not caused by a 'chemical imbalance' in the brain | Metro News The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma Most Dietary Guideline Advisors Have Ties to Food and Pharma Industries, Study Finds Tufts Food Compass 50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists To Point Blame At Fat The heretical Minnesota heart study: When science stops asking questions Eating Too Much Protein Makes Pee a Problem Pollutant in the U.S. Mind Pump #1777: Cooking Oils That Can Make You Sick With Max Lugavere Mind Pump #1230: Surviving & Thriving In A Toxic World With Max Lugavere Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources Featured Guest/People Mentioned Instagram: @maxlugavere Website: Max Lugavere Podcast: Genius Life Layne Norton, Ph.D. (@biolayne)  Instagram

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the world's number one fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Ooh, today's episode is a special one. Our good friend Max Lugavir, we've had him on the show before, is one of our favorite guests. Came on again today,

we talk about when science goes wrong. Huge revelations in the scientific community recently, the serotonin model for depression, totally upended, the Amaloid plaque model for Alzheimer's, totally upended, a study showing that many, many scientists involved in our

dietary guidelines have major conflicts of interest. We talked about all of that and more in today's episode. By the way, you could find Max on his podcast, the Genius Life. I highly suggest this podcast. It's so good if you want to learn about wellness and nutrition from somebody that communicates effectively, meaning you get what he's saying and then you can apply it, go check out his podcast. Now this particular episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, Paleo Valley.

They make Paleo-inspired supplements and food products. One of my favorites is their grass-fed meat sticks. They're not dry, they're delicious. You could take them with you anywhere. And they have great macro profile, great protein, low calorie, and they have other products as well. They have like their organ complex. So if you wanna get the benefits of eating organ meats,

but you don't like the taste of organ meats, you could take them in freeze dried capsules, called organ complex. Go check this company out. Head over to paleovali.com forward slash mind pump, use the code mind pump 15 for 15% off your order. Also, we got a sale going on right now that ends on the 14th.

So this is not all month long, okay? This ends on the 14th. It's a bundle sale and here's how we organized it. We've taken multiple combinations of maps, maps workout programs. So two programs together or three programs together. Popular combinations put together like ten of them Every single one of these bundles that you'll find on maps august calm

Every single one is only $99.99 in other words for the price of one program You can get two or three depending on which bundle you choose So again go to maps august calm find the bundle that works for you, and get yourself signed up. All right, here comes the show. Max, what up? Welcome back to the show, man. Thanks for having me. It's been a weird, I don't know, like a couple months

in science, some crazy revelations. One in particular, and this is why I invited you back on, has to do with Alzheimer's. And I know this is a subject that's near and dear to you and also one that you're super well versed and you're like my go to person when it comes to brain health. So maybe kind of explain what's happened. What are these revelations

from Alzheimer's? Now why are your things getting so shaken up? So essentially what happened was it was revealed that a seminal 2006 paper published in the journal Nature was built on fraudulent data. What this basically, this revelation has done is it's overturned almost a century worth tree, worth of effort at this point in terms of looking for a cure for pharmaceutical cure for Alzheimer's disease. Now, that's not to say that all of the research performed is worthless, that's definitely

not the case. But the prevailing hypothesis that has guided drug discovery with regard to Alzheimer's disease over the past century has been what's called the amyloid hypothesis and this hypothesis basically stipulates that amyloid beta which is a protein that we all produce in our brains and as we age tends to form these insoluble plaques is the cause for Alzheimer's disease and it began basically in 1906 when alloys Alzheimer for whom the disease. It began basically in 1906 when alloys Alzheimer for whom the disease is named,

saw these plaques in the brain of a cadaver. His working theory was that these plaques were the cause of the disease. Also in tandem with the plaques, you see widespread neuronal death, there's market brain shrinkage in late-stage Alzheimer's disease and memory deficits, which are obvious. Everybody, anybody who's ever had a loved one with the disease, will be familiar with that. But he wasn't able to name amolabata at the time. He just saw these plaques, kind of like the plaque on your teeth surrounding neurons in our brain, in the brain of this cadaver. It wasn't until the 80s where they discovered,

or they named rather, amyloid beta. They came up with a name for this protein that they saw, again, that we all produce that is able to, in some form, these aggregate plaques. And so the plaques really became the focus for drug discovery with the idea that if we can remove these plaques from the brain, or prevent the brain from accumulating these plaques,

that we will then have a cure for Alzheimer's disease, which is a condition that affects five million people in the US alone, and that number is expected to triple by the year 2030. So it's a condition that's rapidly exploding. But there are a few sort of plot holes that from day one really were dissonant with this notion of amyloid being causative

in Alzheimer's disease. And the primary one is that many older people have amyloid beta in their brains, but they don't have the cognitive deficits that are associated with Alzheimer's disease. Oh, wow. Were you privy to this before all this came out before? Were you kind of already?

Yes, 100%. Because though the amyloid hypothesis directs the vast majority of drug discovery funds and research, it's not that there are other neurologists and neuroscientists who are going down other paths. For example, there's the metabolic origin theory of Alzheimer's disease. That Alzheimer's disease really is a problem of glucose, hypometabolism, and the brain. So an underutilization, a deficit in the ability of the brain to create ATP from sugar.

And this is where the type three diabetes comes from. Exactly, which was coined by a legend of a researcher named Suzanne D'Alemont, at Brown University, but she's not the only one. And so, one of my mentors who was at Cornell for many years, and he's now at FAU, Dr. Richard Isaacson, I mean, he was another, you know, one of these neurologists, practicing neurologists who just didn't buy that amyloid was the cause for, for Alzheimer's disease. Again, because people have it in their brains that don't show these cognitive deficits, right? Now, Max says, everybody who has Alzheimer's have these plaques?

Yes. Okay. So, if you have Alzheimer's, you have these plaques. Right. But then there are people with these plaques that don't have any symptoms. Right. But the central idea is that the plaques are probably a symptom, not the cause. Similar to the way that cholesterol builds up in our arteries, is cholesterol the cause of ethyroschlerosis or is cholesterol being deposited in our arteries due to some other factor, some other variable,

right, whether it's inflammation or oxidation of, for example, the fatty acids, they're being tugged around our bodies by these various lipoproteins. For example, so it's there certainly at the scene of the crime, but is it suspect number one? That's been the sort of guiding hypothesis, but they were never able to connect these amyloid plaques with memory impairment. They were never able to do that until this seminal paper was published in 2006 in the journal Nature by Sylvain Lesney. So this is the one that said, here's a silver bullet.

We proved the hypothesis. We proved that amyloid, when injected into young mice, dramatically impairs their cognition, their memories. So that was the missing link That was the missing link and at that time in 2006 when this paper came out There was waning interest in the amyloid hypothesis. It was still the it was still the dominant Direction that industry was going and a lot of these like Massive Alzheimer's focused organizations. I won't name any of them, but are deeply, I mean, everybody was so deeply invested financially in this hypothesis.

Right. Industries around it, right? Industries, yeah. But nonetheless, by 2006, it was becoming clear that it was, or it was at least starting to become clear that this was the wrong direction because drug trials, Alzheimer's drug trials, as anybody knows, who's working in this field, have a dismal success rate. 99.6% of Alzheimer's drug trials fail, right? So you can only fail so many times before people want to look elsewhere for solutions, right? Let's back up for a second. So are these drugs that because the theory is, oh, it's these plaques.

So let's create a drug that effectively reduces these plaques. Oh, here, this does that. Then they put it on trial. Like, oh, man, no symptom improvement. Is that what was happening? That's exactly what happened. And actually a very controversial drug called aduhalmer, adjacanamab, was recently greenlit by the FDA, and it was highly controversial. What these drugs essentially do is their antibodies that mark amyloid plaques for clearing by the body's immune system.

So it essentially creates like an inflammatory response in the brain, which then helps to reduce because it trains our own immune systems to attack these plaques, and let's clear these plaques, right? But what they found in this adjucanumab trial, which was the last, before this, a drug hasn't been approved for Alzheimer's disease for 13 something years. But adjucanumab recently got the the green light and it was highly controversial.

It did succeed in reducing plaques in the plaque burden in the brain, but it didn't improve cognition. It didn't improve anything with any clinical value other than serve as sort of confirmation bias that we can with a drug reduce the brain's plaque burden, right? It's like a statin, almost, right? Almost like a statin, right? So this drug actually when it was being assessed by the FDA, they put together this panel

of 11 people, eight of the people on this panel, this internal panel at the FDA, they put together this panel of 11 people. Eight of the people on this panel, this internal panel at the FDA, told the FDA that they shouldn't, that ethically in terms of the efficacy, this drug should not be approved. Two people withheld comment, and only one person said, yeah, let's go ahead and approve it.

But the FDA ended up approving it, and three people resigned afterwards. And again, this drug reduces plaque in the brain, sure. But it doesn't actually improve any of the meaningful indices that we want to improve for a patient with Alzheimer's disease, right? And in fact, people who saw this reduction in plaque burden, there was a 35% side effect rate,

so 35% of the patients saw brain swelling. Jesus. And about half of those had bleeding associated with the brain swelling. So, nothing good, right? Yeah, now did they apply this hypothesis to other neurodegenerative diseases, or was this the main focus is Alzheimer's, where they found the plaque? Well, Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia. So all the money goes into Alzheimer's disease.

But there's overlapping features with other neurodegenerative conditions. Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, for example, they're called proteopathies. So they both involve these misfolded proteins in Alzheimer's. It's primarily amyloid beta along with tau. And then in Parkinson's disease, you get another protein called alpha-synucleon. So they're different, but they're similar. They all have neuroinflammation in common. They all have oxidative stress in common.

But the more the diseases that are more common get the most fun. And so the Alzheimer's disease was squarely in the target. So my question is how did it get green? Why would it get approved if I had had? Money train already going or what? I mean, yeah, I mean, the way that's, I mean, you have in science these fiercely territorial obstinate personalities that,

I mean, have you guys ever heard the saying, science advances one funeral at a time? It's because, we expect science to evolve naturally and be driven by curiosity and a desire to augment the human condition, right? And make life better for people. But first of all, science is an industry, and it's a tool that's wielded by people that have, I mean, oftentimes serious personality defects. I mean, if you guys spend any time on nutrition, Twitter, I mean, some of these signs, you know, like it's clear that some of these personalities are are highly toxic,

and those exist in academia. And so when you're published in a paper like Nature, which for scientists is like winning the Academy Awards, it's a huge deal. And also when you come from a lab, for example, this guy, Sylvain Lesney, he was the young university of Minnesota researcher who was basically found to have created this fraudulent data which we haven't even gotten into yet. But he was working in the lab of a woman named Karen Ash who had this incredible pedigree. And so scientists, especially when you have celebrity in the field, they don't want people,

there's group think, just like in every industry, you know? It's always human, they're always humans. I'd also be curious too of what drugs were already in the works before this fraudulent study came to do we has anything been released around that like do we know? Like all it was what you said 1986 when was it the study? Oh 2006 was the one that was fraudulent. Yeah, so we're there like drugs that were ready to go like as soon as that study got Published and pushed through do you do you? They? Or that conveniently came out like right now. One drug that we're already out, that we're already supposed to supposedly be.

Yeah, I believe, I'm not sure the timeline of the two most commonly prescribed drugs that are out now for Alzheimer's disease, but all they are are biochemical band aids. There's Donna Pezzle and Nameda, and one works by increasing the amount of acetylcholine in the brain, which is a neurotransmitter involved in learning a memory. And the other one is it's called namenta. It basically modulates the NMDA receptor, which is a glutamate receptor.

What you see in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease is excitotoxicity, so sort of an imbalance of glutamate and GABA. And so those two drugs are usually prescribed in tandem, but they're just biochemical bandages. It's like L-dopa for Parkinson's. Exactly. It's like L-dopa for Parkinson's. Right. Okay. So, so let's talk about this fraudulent study. How did they how did they figure out that it was fraudulent? What happened? So all studies are subject when they're published in major medical journals, especially a journal

like Science or Nature, which is where this study was published. They all undergo this process of peer review, right? But scientists aren't looking with a fine tooth comb at imagery, right? They're not like image sleuths. And the kind of data that was fudged deliberately in this paper was a way of presenting data called the Western Blot, which is basically like these images that depending on how bold this blot appears,

there's a stronger presence of a certain protein that's being illustrated essentially. Now, the whistleblower who identified this data as being fraudulent, he had already garnered a bit of credibility because he was very critical of the edge account of Mab drug that I mentioned earlier. He was very critical of this drug because again, it didn't improve clinical markers,

like quality of life, memory cognition, anything like that, but it was associated with these awful side effects, like brain swelling, right? So he was already hypercritical of that and he was working on another another case for this other pharmaceutical company and over the course of his research he was spending a lot of time on pub peer or peer pub. It's like this website where it's basically a crowd sources peer review. It's like crowd review essentially for scientific literature. And a lot of people were talking about this paper,

which he saw, but they hadn't really kind of done the deep dive that he was able to do using image software, where he found essentially that some of these blots in this Western blot were literally copy and pasted. Like purposefully fake. Purposely,, identical plots to others that were in the paper, they were like digital artifacts that were clearly, if you zoom in and turn up the contrast,

do a little bit of color manipulation. So when a paper submitted for peer review, they're not doing that to the data. They're looking at the numbers. They're reading the methodology, they're reading the conclusions and things like that. They're not looking at the actual imagery. That's how this data was presented in this paper.

That showed that this specific subtype of amyloid beta, called A-beta star 56, was directly responsible for cognitive deficits in the young rats that it was injected into. What turned out to be the case is that other scientists, since 2006, weren't really able to find this, this amoleum beta subtype, but it was just accepted as truth, A, because it was published in Nature, because it had this like pedigree with the scientist and his mentor and that nobody

everybody just accepted what was presented by the Western Blot as face value. But it turns out it was completely fraudulent and nonetheless this paper went on to really renew interest in this in this amyloid hypothesis. Do we do we know why the what the motive was was it just like this prestige? That's why I asked the drug thing there it just, like, it's, you know, that's why I asked the drug thing there. I feel like there had to been like, so many motivation. Yeah, and they didn't speculate

just why they made a fraudulent study that way. Well, I think, I mean, I think it very clearly has to do with, um, with money. I mean, there's three billion dollars that go into, into Alzheimer's research every year from the NIH and a huge portion of that goes into like Amaloid Amaloid Associated Research. Yeah, and again some of the biggest

Like Alzheimer's advocacy In air quotes advocacy organizations Put money through that sort of pipeline and I have my own experience with that too. Oh, the other thing, the other problem with this, it's not just that it derailed looking elsewhere for a viable cure or treatment for Alzheimer's disease for the past 16 years.

But any other voice, scientist, physician, what have you, that would bring up an alternate sort of viewpoint, would be ridiculed by the quote unquote, amoled mafia, because all of these science were so, they were so deeply invested, their hands were deep in the pockets of this hypothesis. Yeah, so okay, so this is really interesting. I know you have a personal experience,

I wanna go there, I wanna go there in just a second, but just for the listeners, you know, the way research works is you have a hypothesis or an idea. If it gets accepted, it's almost like a branch on a tree and that directs the next coming research. And the longer that's allowed to go on, if it's a wrong, if the first initial breakthrough study, whatever's wrong, the further away from the truth we end up going. So it's like, you have something that can follow a path, it could go this way or could go this way.

And if this is the direction that it's going to go, it keeps going that way. And why it keeps going that way is because that's where you get the funding. Like, if I tried to get funding from the NIH for Alzheimer's research, which they do a lot of funding for Alzheimer's. This is a big problem. But I said, hey, I have this hypothesis that it has nothing to do with amyloid plaques. It has everything to do with, I don't know, I'll say, it'll make up something, right? They're not going to give me any money. They're going to be like, why are we not going to fund that because this is the direction it looks like it's going.

So we're going to give these people money. So everybody who's following along with that particular hypothesis, they're the ones that get the money, and that's where all the studies go, and that's where the drugs go. That's where the drug companies go, because when you're a pharmaceutical company,

if you're trying to raise money from investors, investors are gonna look at what you're trying to do, and they're gonna say, well, I wanna develop a drug that prevents the buildup of AMOLED plaques. Ah, I'm putting money there, or I'm gonna develop a drug that prevents the build up of AMOLED plaques. I'm putting money there, or I'm going to develop a drug that is totally novel and different. That's really risky. I don't think I'm going to give you any money.

So it continued for that long, and for that long we've been totally misguided. I want to talk about your experience. But also, Alzheimer's disease is a condition that begins to bring 30 to 40 years before the presentation of 70. So the idea that you're going to be able to have a drug, right, that comes along and undoes decades worth of damage. And we don't know all of the, and I could talk about some of the potential reasons for the damage, but the idea that we're going to be able to develop some monotherapy that's going to come

along an undue decades worth of damage, it's a pipe dream. It's arrogant, right? But nonetheless, this idea that amyloid because in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease, it's just plausible enough to get doctors and scientists to buy in, right? And if they can come up with a drug that can potentially reduce the amyloid burden. I mean, you know, drugs have a run where before they're able to be generic, you know, they make tons and tons and tons of money and all the investors, I mean, if you see any,

whenever there's any good news of an amyloid drug or an Alzheimer's drug, whatever the pharmaceutical industry if they're a public company, that's the stock spike. Right? So there's a ton of money in it. And there's no money, as you mentioned,

so in telling people to just, perhaps eat a healthier diet or be more mindful of the air pollution that you're exposed to or exercise more. It just doesn't sell. You can't have a billion dollar exit or make shareholders happy with that kind of advice. Yeah, knowing that it's like 20 to 30 years, if you go all the way back there,

is there any early detection signs or tests or anything available to at least start to understand that this is something that is developing. Yeah, great question. I mean, there are, every once in a while you'll see a new biomarker pop up. There was one called IRS-1 that was a blood biomarker that correlated really tightly with brain energy metabolism. I wrote about it in my first book, Genius Foods,

but I haven't really heard much on that since then. Essentially, there's been this resistance to acknowledge that we could potentially prevent Alzheimer's disease because it runs counter to the doom and gloom funding pipeline. Right. And so when I first got started and I started working on this documentary project, which I'm now very close to finishing, thankfully. I got a taste of that. There was actually a, there was this guy, Evil Dude, associated with one of these Alzheimer's,

one of these totally benevolent seeming Alzheimer's advocacy associations that came out against me and attacked my project because it went against this sort of amyloid hypothesis dogma of the time. And he went so far as to, he even wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and the headline is misplaced hopes for Curing Alzheimer's disease. Wow. Okay, so let's talk about this documentary because that's what peaked him to come after

you. Yeah. So I've seen the trailer for this. It's amazing. We've power. Now you have a personal connection. We had you on the show before talking about this, but your mom suffered from Alzheimer's at a young age and you were with her the whole time and this is what motivated you to really go in this direction and why you do what you do.

This documentary was about that process. He got wind of this and in the documentary, you talk about what, like there's dietary stuff you could do, exercise, here's some other. Absolutely. Okay. So I mean, the idea that you can prevent dementia through diet and lifestyle,

and by the way, I'm not saying that we know everything that can prevent dementia in each person, because once you've seen one case of dementia, you've seen one case of dementia. It's possible that there are different causes for each person who ultimately develops Develops that condition, but essentially any any I Guess they felt threatened that any focus that you would take off of the necessity for a sort of cure, quote-unquote cure pharmaceutical cure is less, you know, is again, like less,

it's going to be less good for the bottom line of that organization. So my documentary was all about prevention. My efforts have always been about the prevention of dementia and cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease through diet and lifestyle. Because again, this is a condition that begins in the brain decades before the presentation of symptoms. That's always been since day one of me setting foot out into the How the Wellness World,

the prevention of dementia. Yeah, and now you mentioned the amyloid mafia. So this guy's part of it. Yes. Who else is part of it? And did you get, it was anybody else, or has anybody else come after you, or try to come after you for saying,

you could prevent this through lifestyle changes? Um, this was probably like the closest I flew to the sun or try to come after you for saying, you could prevent this through lifestyle changes. This was probably like the closest I flew to the sun with this one article, that was one guy. But no, I mean, I could name certain scientists who I know that generally do good work, but yeah, their whole careers have been, I mean, the thing is like in science, reputation is everything, right?

So if you're, again, science advances one funeral at a time, right? If your reputation is everything and data comes out overturning what was previously a prevailing dominant hypothesis about the ideology of a certain condition and you've spent your whole career working on that, you're gonna, you're gonna fiercely defend it against all odds, right? And a lot of these guys have incredible pedigrees, like from Ivy League universities and the like. So you see some kid coming, right, trying to do a documentary on dementia

as a condition that's potentially modulated by our diets and our lifestyles, right? And that's a threat, that's a threat because I can speak to the masses, right? These are my shock to their ego, man. You built your whole career off of something like that, and then that goes away. Like, it's a shot to the ego.

But here's what I've seen. I've seen the tides turn. I mean, they're turning slowly, but shortly. Like, when I first got started, you couldn't say dementia and prevention within the same sentence. That was like, you'd get like tomatoes thrown at you. It was just that it just flew against, you know, everything that the neurological medical orthodoxy knew about Alzheimer's disease, that it was not a condition that you could

prevent, treat, or slow. But as of, I mean, it was 2020 published in the Lancet that the Lancet is one of the most prestigious medical journals finally acknowledged that up to 40% or at least 40% of Alzheimer's cases, dementia cases are potentially preventable. They said literally in the Lancet, and I quote, the potential for prevention is high. And they listed all of the different risk factors. So I mean, when it comes to Alzheimer's disease, you have what's called, you have two types of risk factors. You have your non-modifiable risk factors, right? I'm sure you guys can guess what those are. You have your age, you have your gender, and you

have your genes. You can't modify any of those things, right? But then you have this array 12 non-modifiable risk factors. So the 12 modifiable risk factors. Diet, sleep, exercise. Yeah, all those things, are you obese? Do you have hypertension? Are you, what's your education like, right? Do you, are you socially connected? What is, are you a type two diabetic?

And as of 2020, they actually included three new modifiable risk factors, one of which being air pollution, exposure to excessive air pollution, excessive drinking, and then there was one other one I forgot it. But essentially, the bottom line is that we all have risk factors that are modifiable,

and that's the empowering story here, right? And about five of them, if I recall correctly, whether it was like BMI or hypertension are mediated by diet. So diet plays a huge role in terms of our brain health. Yeah, it's the diabetes connection is pretty big, right? Or just your inability to process carbohydrate sugar or just being insensitive insulin, that's a pretty big connection. Huge.

Yeah. If you have type 2 diabetes, you're risk for developing Alzheimer's disease increases between 2 and 4-fold. So it's massive. Now, I'm going to ask you a personal question because this is really close for you. You went through the process of what it's like to watch someone get treated for Alzheimer's through the medical community and it failed. When that, when this news came out, which is recent, that, hey, this was fraudulent, I mean,

what was your reaction? How did you feel when you saw that? I mean, I went straight back to that Wall Street Journal article where my project was attacked. And this is a project that I've been working on for eight years. Like, I've put so much of my blood, sweat, and tears into this, into this documentary. And the documentary precedes my books. So I got started working on this documentary back in 2014. And since then, because I had to make a living, and I wasn't just gonna sit idly on my hands as I waited for all the pieces to come into place to finish my documentary, I've written, you know,

I've written three books, I've launched my podcast, etc. But this, this film is really like the, it, it, it, um, engenders like why I do what I do. It's about my mom. My mom had a rare form of dementia called Louis-Body-Dementia. It's a one in five dementia cases are attributable to Louis-Body-Dementia. So, you know, I'm not holding my breath for the kind of research that we have on Alzheimer's disease to come out with regard to Lewy-Bottaya dementia anytime soon, but what I've learned, you know, after years and years of years and years of immersing myself in this in this research is that what's good for the brain is good for the brain.

We don't have all the answers about Lewy-Bottaya dementia. We don't have all the answers about Lou about dementia. We don't have all the answers about Alzheimer's disease, but we know essentially a few salient tenants about how to live in a way that nurtures the health of our brains. And so that's really what my work has been about. Because I find this very interesting that if we talk about the heart, we consider the heart a part of the body.

So it's like healthy body, healthy heart. But when it comes to the brain, although it's still a part of the body, just like the heart is, we, because it houses the mind, we sometimes separate the two. Like we don't necessarily say, well, if you have a healthy body,

you're more likely to have a healthy brain, therefore have a healthy mind. Why do you think that is? Well, I think part of it has to do with the fact that when you present to a physician with, you know, perhaps risk factors for cardiovascular disease, there are things that a cardiologist can do that will at least on paper make him happy, right?

Like if you present to a cardiologist and say your LDL is too high or whatever, they can put you on a reduced saturated fat specifically diet and you can watch your LDL come down. If you have joint issues and you're eating an inflammatory diet, a prone inflammatory diet, you can potentially clean up your diet and see your joint issues improve. You can eat in a certain way that obviously affects your body composition. You guys are experts at that. You talk about that all the time, right? With the brain, it's not as simple.

With the brain, we don't have as many biomarkers. You can't flex your brain in the mirror. When you present to a neurologist with any kind of brain condition, the tools in the toolbox are very limited. So it's like, it's basically IQ tests and cognitive tests, and that's our metric, essentially. But we have really good correlates. We know that the metabolic health of the body

is crucially important when it comes to the metabolic health of the brain. They're tightly correlated. We know that cardiovascular health is really important with regards to the brain. The brain is fed blood and nutrients and oxygen by this network of micro-vessels that if you were to take out of your brain, out of your head and stack end-to-end, these micro-vessels would stretch 400 miles long.

So we need to nurture that network of micro-vessels essentially and procuring good heart health is one way to do that. We have cognitive tests, cognitive tests are okay. We have various brain scans, but as I mentioned, I mean, it's futile to look for amyloid in your brain because, I mean, as people age, they tend to accumulate amyloid. And amyloid is actually, it's probably the same way that we produce cholesterol as a vital nutrient for life, right? Amyloid is probably, probably serves some kind of protective function, at least early in

life, right? They've done studies at Harvard where they've actually devised the technology where they can grow essentially brain cells in a lab dish. And they find that when exposed to the herpes virus, you see this upregulation of amyloid production in the brain. So amyloid is like, it potentially serves an anti-inflammatory purpose, at least until the point where the buildup

becomes overwhelming. And then the inflammation kind of like feeds back on itself. Just like the plaques on arteries, some people will say they're put there to, because there's inflammation and it's kind of both string strengthening the artery, but then of course you get too much,

and then it blocks things off. It's been a really weird time in science because while this happened with Alzheimer's, which literally upended just the preventing thought, we have this paper that comes out that totally flips the serotonin model for depression on its head as well. Like that just came out and there's decades of medications and treatments completely based on this serotonin deficiency model for depression. And now they're like, no, that's okay.

Are you familiar with what's been happening with that? Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, this paper that came out, it was an umbrella meta-analysis and review. And basically what it found was that there's no good evidence that there is a chemical imbalance in the brains of people with depression, which I think is really empowering news, right? Because I think it could be tempting.

It could be seductive to think that your brain just is, not working properly when you're depressed, right? Or that you were born with a brain that just isn't meant to be happy, for example. Now what this reviewed, and I think it's really important to mention this, what the review didn't look at was the efficacy of medication. So these medications do work for some, right?

I'm glad you said that. So that's super important. Because if you're on an SSRI and it's helped, don't go off of it. Absolutely. This mechanism doesn't matter. Yes. The mechanism doesn't matter.

The outcome is really what matters. And what research shows is that the efficacy of these medications really depends on or is mediated rather by the severity of the depression. And what the medication seems to be most efficacious in people with more, with increasing severity of their depression. Unfortunately, the medications are very widely prescribed and overprescribed, in fact. And for people with mild to moderate, which is the most common forms of depression, it's a vast majority of people with depression.

Right. So for people with mild to moderate depression, not much more effective than placebo. And certainly, you know, likely not much, not more effective if at all than exercise, which we know is a powerful antidepressant. But they are certainly effective for some people, for many people even. But what this paper basically showed us was that there really is no difference in terms of the serotonin level in the depressed person versus the Quote-quote-not-depressed person. They look in they've compared cerebrospinal fluid serotonin levels Which admittedly is pretty hard to do so that there isn't a ton of research on this but In post-menopausal women what they found was that among depressed women and non-depressed women, clinically depressed women and non-clinically depressed women, cerebrosp… levels of serotonin

in CSF, not significantly different. They've also done a number of studies over the years that are called serotonin depletion studies. They use… there are different mechanisms to do this, but one way to do it is you basically feed somebody branched chanemino acids, which out-compete triptophane for entry into the brain. You can triptophane as the precursor to serotonin. Essentially what you're able to do, at least temporarily, is to quote unquote, deplete the brain of serotonin. That tends not to cause depressive symptoms.

If you take a BCAA supplement on an empty stomach, do you walk away depressed? No. No, you don't. So they looked at, you know, basically the breadth of available evidence, measuring serotonin levels in clinically depressed people and control. They also found in that that the serotonin receptors,

because they said, okay, maybe the receptors are down-regulated. They actually found that depressed people have slightly up-regulated serotonous receptors. Yeah. Which is like the opposite. The complete opposite, what do you would explain? Right. Yeah, so based on this review, they found that there is no, but you know, most, like any

psychiatrist, like, worth their salt, knew that this was not this theory wasn't the sole guiding theory for depression. No, we had a debated in junior college, in psychology class, because we knew way back then that the placebo effect was almost as effective as those drugs. I feel like we've kind of known them. The argument that we had a debate was, should we still prescribe it, even though we know that the placebo effect is almost as equal and the

Prevailing answer by the class was like yeah, we still should because it's still helping a ton of people the side effects Well, the side effects. Yeah, the side effects are are non-trivial, you know like they they mess with your sex drive obesity They can increase suicidality in some. Like, they're, yeah. They're, uh, they're no walk in the park. And so, and they're also difficult to come off of. And I have experienced personal anecdotal experience with this too.

My mom, at the beginning of her disease, a psychiatrist thought that all of her symptoms were attributable to depression. There is a, there is a kind of, uh, like, there is a complex of dementia that you can kind of observe in people who are severely depressed. It's called pseudo-demensia, but that's not what my mom had, but nonetheless, the psychiatrist put her on surgery, which is like one of these SSRIs, and she was on the drug until the end

of her life, and it was impossible to come off of, like impossible. You need to, you know, jump through all kinds of hoops to... Oh, because it was drawl? Yeah, because it was drawl. Holy cow. Yeah, I mean, well, so I'm actually, I was listening to a book called The Body Keeps of Score right now. It's a really, really good book.

It's a great thing. Excellent book. And in the book, he talks about how like, Prozac hits the market, and it created a completely new industry in mental health, where it was all talk therapy. And then all of a sudden, it was like prescription therapy was the big thing. And I mean, just, I can't stress this enough,

how much it changed the trajectory of investments and of research, because so much was built on that theory, that lots of money didn't go in other places because it all went to that. Again, getting funding to develop a new SSRI after Prozac hit the market, way easy to get that money compared to, hey, I have this idea for this other novel treatment. You're not going to get any money for that. Yeah. I mean, these drugs, they've been shown to increase levels of BDNF, brain drive, neurootrophic factors, so they can help potentially, in air quotes, rewire the brain.

If you have like old traumas and stuff, like there is the potential for that. But no, I mean, in general, yeah, they do tend to be over prescribed. That is a big problem. And there are other causes for depression. I mean, you could have something bad happen in your life and feel it's normal to be depressed. There's the inflammatory cytokine model of depression. That inflammation can instigate depression in some. Their depression can potentially be caused by a crappy diet. And we can see this in studies where they actually improve subjects with clinical depression

their diets. They get them off of junk food diets and they start, you know, getting them more on whole of Whole Foods dominant diet. And they see like remission, like, like stark rates of remission in people just eating like Whole Foods, right? Yeah. Max, this is so, here's, here's why I think it's so part of the reason why it's so complex. And by the way, what you're saying, I mean, we here's here's why I think it's so part of the reason why it's so complex and by the way what you're saying I mean we were trainers for decades. I didn't I never saw a single client not have a mood improvement from

Exercising with me and changing the diet every single person I worked with that was consistent Sawed such an improvement that they would comment on it. Okay. That was everybody I was just exercise and diet wasn't performing miracles, it was just traditional exercise in diet. But part of the reason why this is so challenging is, it's almost like pain, it's almost like dealing with pain, like physical pain, like describe your pain,

where does it come from? And then it's your experience of the pain. That can make it for some people, it can make it a rousing, for other people could be terrifying, right? When you're talking about depression, like both two people could be, you know, terrifying, right? When you're talking about depression, like, both two people could have the same, I guess,

objective feeling, but then subjectively, one person could perceive it differently. Maybe they feel more empowered, or maybe there's meaning behind something, and they don't perceive it as something terrible. They just happen to be, oh, that's John, he's just a little flap, but man, that guy's driven. And then you got this person over here

who maybe feels physically the same, but the John, he's just a little flap. But man, that guy's driven. And then you got this person over here who maybe feels physically the same, but the perception and their experience of how they feel is so different that for them, it's depressing and crippling. And so how do you separate the two? That's the challenge. Because we're not just dealing with the brain, we're dealing with the mind and consciousness. Good luck.

That's why I find that, you know, so damn challenging. How do studies get funded? And why is so hard to get some things funded and other things, not so hard? How does that work? Yeah, I mean, I think you just have to follow the money trail. I mean, it's easier to find money for a drug candidate

if it's potentially patentable. And, you know, we've certainly seen that with, I mean, when I prosack, I'm pretty sure is generic at this point. Most of these SSRIs are generic, right? But there is, and I don't know the exact laws and rules, but at the beginning, a drug is able to be patented. And they're crazy expensive. Like, I mean, the Alzheimer's drug that we were talking about before,

adjacanemab is insanely expensive. Thousands of dollars a pill. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. And yeah, I mean, it's, you know, with regard to nutrition studies, I mean, like a lot of the nutrition research that we have actually comes from the industry. I talk about this a lot because, you know, we know, for example, that blueberries are very good for the brain, but blueberries are, I know, we know, for example, that blueberries are very good for the brain. But blueberries are, I mean, we know this because the studies on blueberries are funded by one of these like blueberry producers. We know that we know that dark chocolate is really good for the brain because most of the studies on dark chocolate, cocoa flavonols that we know support cardiovascular

health and brain health are funded by Mars. I swear. So, you know, we can't necessarily throw out all industry funded studies, right? Because if we're gonna throw out studies funded by one industry, we should throw out all of them. Yeah. Yeah, cause let's talk about this, cause this is a very challenging problem, right? Cause I'm gonna navigate.

I talk to my, okay, so I talk to a friend of ours, Lane Norton, somebody that we love and sometimes disagree with, but he's got his opinions and he tries to stay. He's got good integrity in my experience. And I sent him this paper, I sent you the same one, it was in PubMed and somebody did analysis of the, what was it? I think it was a dietary, dietary, yeah, dietary, dietary, dietary guidelines for Americans. Yes.

And this is an association that essentially dictates our dietary policy influences regulation, okay? So smart scientists, it's association that, that they're the ones that put forth our policy, okay? So they went through and they looked for conflicts of interest, like strong conflicts of interest, like, okay, could this person, are they connected to this industry here and how connected are they and could that sway their decision?

So it'd be like, if I'm a Congress person passing legislation on a new bill that's gonna raise taxes on a product and then I go buy a competing product on the stock market, like that's conflict of interest. Yeah. Okay. 95% of the people in this association had strong conflicts of interest or potential conflict.

So almost all of them with the food and pharmaceutical industry. Now here's a challenge with that, but that doesn't sound like a good thing. I don't think it is a good thing, but the challenge is how do we fix that? Because like when I talked to my friend Lane, I said, hey dude, this is crazy. And he goes, it is. He goes, but I don't know what the solution is. And he goes, like when I talked to my friend Lane, I said, hey, dude, this is crazy. And he goes, it is.

He goes, but I don't know what the solution is. And he goes, look, when I got funded because he did studies on losing, his theory was that losing, you know, if you measure losing, that'll tell you the quality of protein, essentially. I'm paraphrasing. And he's like, where was I going to go get funding for that? I wasn't going to get it from, you know, plant food companies or because I had to go to the beef industry and the dairy industry because if my theory was correct,

it would benefit them. So it's like, do you have any ideas of how we could potentially eliminate these conflicts of interest and make it more? Because I've been- I hope that there's enough competing that if you can't get it from one industry, you can get it from another industry, right?

I don't know. Or maybe fund, maybe fund a scientific, because here's another thing that there's not much funding. Scientists who come out to duplicate or prove wrong studies, there's not much funding in that, right? Which is that's what science is supposed to be doing. Yeah. Yeah.

How does that happen? How does that happen? It takes monumentally more effort to debunk something, or to debunk a lie than to create that lie from the get go. Yeah, I don't have a simple solution, but it really is a house of cards and it's very disheartening. I'm not like, I think it's, you got to be tricky.

You don't want to sow skepticism when it comes to science because science is really at its heart a method, but the industry of science I think is really, has really, you know, it's really bad. Well, I just, I think the, I mean, I don't know the answer to getting the studies funded, but for the consumer, for the average listener, I think this is the message that we've been trying to communicate so long on this show, I know you do the same thing too, is just that you have to kind of take everything with a grain of salt. You can't. You're just because of some, just because some study says this, it doesn't make it the truth. It can end all be all. And I think as consumers,

we need to, okay, this now may point us in this direction, or this is interesting, but the, what I found with, and I, and you, I think you alluded to it earlier with the nutritionist on, on social media. I mean, it's like you get this dogma around it. Like, one study comes through and says something or proves a point which probably was biased because somebody who funded it wanted that point to be proved.

Now, everybody latches onto it as it's the end all be all and it's just not. Well, it wasn't part of the scientific method being able to replicate it. How often do these studies get replicated? Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, there's what's called the primary literature, the secondary literature, but a lot of this stuff that people argue about is secondary just dreamed up in a boardroom

somewhere and then somehow published. A good example of this that I talked about recently on social media was the Tufts University Food Compass. Did you guys see that? I've been tweeted it. Did you? Yeah, I posted it. Oh, explain it. It's a nutrient profiling system that was devised at Tufts University by a researcher who's done, he's a legit nutrition researcher.

You know, I've cited some of his previous work, but he was on this team that assembled this nutrient profiling system that was then critiqued by a researcher and others named Tybeel at all, put together this critique, because when using this algorithm that they devise to score foods, to make it easier for consumers to identify what's healthy and what's not, and also for manufacturers to use, to steer consumers towards healthier choices. When running a myriad of different food items through this algorithm, what they found was that

really healthful nutrient dense foods like beef and eggs and whole milk work on the bottom of the list. And then at the top were like frosted miniweeds and lucky charms. And egg substitute because they're like fortify wishes. Yeah, it's just because they use that in vegetable oil. Yeah, that freaking thing. The food compass score. So yeah, so basically this legit nutrition researcher whose work I really quite like published this critique and submitted it and sent it over to Tofs and it went ignored. It went ignored and this happens all the time in nutrition. Bro, that's why it's all a freaking house of cards

and I think we're we have like real problems, you know, like it's no wonder people are so sick and are so confused and don't know who to trust. It makes sense. And this, and the, and it comes from within science. I mean, I could, I could throw out history. There have been other like this like amyloid thing that we were talking about, which is, which is so awful, so terrible. It's not, I mean, it's like just one of many examples.

Like there was that case of, I don't know if you guys remember, but this was like an expose that was revealed years ago where the sugar research foundation. Yeah. Basically paid scientists, the equivalent in today's money, of $50,000 to place to take all the blame off of cardiovascular disease, take it off of sugar and put it on fat and put it onto fat, right?

And that was not disclosed in the pivotal New England Journal of Medicine paper that for decades led to people being afraid of dietary fat, of saturated fat, right? So, right, I mean, that was, it was so corrupt. And then there was this other instance of, and I actually think it's quite funny. I'm probably the only person that gets the nuance of this, but Ansel Keys and this Sylvain Lesney guy, both were both conducted research at the University of Minnesota. And so Ansel Keys is this guy who for decades,

is he's... This is a seven country study. Seven country study, which was really the 22 country study, but he conveniently left off all the countries that happened to eat high fat and had low incidence of heart disease. But he was, this is what you see over and over again, with this Lesney guy, with this, with Ansel Keys,

you see the same kind of descriptors used over and over again, like obstinate, outsized personality, highly charismatic, and in a sea of scientists, if you've got even like an Iota of charisma. He's dead now. You're going places, right? So that was the case for this Anselkees guy, who many people trace back to being the reason

why we've become, we've been so scared of dietary fat and saturated fat in particular. It became national policy for decades because of his fake study. Because of his fake study. And so one of his, the pivotal studies that he set out to prove the diet heart hypothesis, right, that dietary saturated fat increases risk for cardiovascular disease, was called the Minnesota coronary experiment,

where they took these prisoners, right? And they randomized them to either being on the, what was the equivalent of the standard American diet at the time, I think it was like 18% saturated fat in their diets, and then the control that the standard American diet at the time? I think it was like 18% saturated fat in their diets. And then the control that they slashed the saturated fat in half and they gave them all this corn, oil, fortified crap food, right? There was like, I think what the findings at the time was there was no difference

or something. So it was like essentially a null result. But 30 years later, they found the data, they found the data. They re, they found the data in a basement somewhere. They re-analyzed it and they found that the Corn Oil, the people in the intervention diet, the Corn Oil diet, were having dramatically more incidents of heart disease, heart attacks, cancer, and things like that. You know, it's interesting about that is they even said, if I'm not mistaken, it was that study where they said,

oh, the Corn Oil, vegetable oil people, we saw reduction in cholesterol. Yeah, that's how that, that's how they advertise it. Like, oh, the Corn Oil, vegetable oil, we saw reduction in cholesterol. Yeah, that's how they advertise it. Like, oh, it works. Reduction in cholesterol. But again, like the reduction in amyloid, right? If you're reducing cholesterol, but you're not actually reducing rates of heart attacks, then what the fuck are you doing?

You have the point. The shitty part is how long it takes to steer the ship too. Because once you set it in motion on that direction, I mean, you guys still come across people that think that, you know, butters, saturate, in fact, things like that is like the, the devil, the devil. The devil. The devil.

The devil. The devil. The devil. The devil. The devil. The devil. The devil. The devil.

The devil. The devil. The devil. The devil. The devil. The devil. The devil. The devil. The devil. The devil. method of science is objective, but the people that advertise it talk about it, use it. Human beings are corruptible.

That use it, those are the ones that can be corrupt. And science, I never thought I'd see the day, Max, where diets would become politicized. I never thought I'd see the day. Like how can you politicize a diet, how can a political party use a diet in a way to advance their cause. And now we're seeing that. We'll see somebody smart quickly realized how closely related is the religion.

Diet and religion are so closely related. And it's a part of who you are. Yes. And now I'm seeing, there was an article in Scientific American how eating too much protein can make your urine bad for the climate. Yeah. My natural pee is bad for the body.

Yeah. Get the fuck outta here. Yeah. I'm gonna be scared of my pee now. Yeah, I mean, and you've been on the other end of this, like how politicized the diet has, diets have become. I know you've even even been attacked because you've said things like,

yeah, meat's actually quite nutritious. Yeah. It's super nutritious. I mean, this guy, one of the papers that I love to cite from Ty Beale, and you know, there are other papers, I love to cite from Ty Beall. And, you know, there are other papers, he's not the only researcher, nutrition researcher, but animal products are the most nutrient dense foods that we have access to.

There was a paper that came out where it was basically listed all of the foods that are the highest in terms of their concentration of not just any nutrient, but like nutrients of concern, nutrients that tend to be under-consuming. It was, with the exception of dark leafy greens at the top, it was all animal products. It was like liver, eggs, milk, products, and things like that.

And yet these foods continue to be demonized. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but it's hard not to believe that somebody somewhere is in like, it's keeping them weak, you know what I'm saying? It's like, you're in my real house now. I wouldn't believe you had I not seen articles, which people share with me now over the last couple of years. So I never saw articles like this before,

but I've had people share me articles, literally why lifting weights is contributing to toxic masculinity or why trying to be too to all right. Is body shaming and you know, white, yeah, all right, you know, flourishes and fitness communities. And I remember I've, I've seen these articles, I'm like, oh my God, are they gonna try to politicize? Weaponizing this.

Fitness, well good luck, first of all. The reason why I say good luck is because it's, you can politicize anything, but people who are really into fitness, and I don't care where you, where you start from. I'm fat, I'm skinny, I don't look good, I don't want to look sexy for the beach, whatever. If you pursue it long enough, it's such a personal growth vehicle that once you experience it, you do it for five years, 10 years, you try attacking it.

And it's like, no, man, it doesn't work that way. Like I've been in Gen for 10 years, and they're the most accepting places on Earth for obese people, where at some of these articles say, don't go to gyms, they're going to body shame you. The last place you'll get body shamed if you're obese is when you go to the gym and work out. That's when people are working out and they see you and they go, oh my god, it's so awesome you're here. Let me help you out.

Or do you have any questions or high five you? This is really, really crazy. Really crazy. So okay, so people listening to this, so here's my fear. My fear is with all this stuff that's coming, that now people are like, I don't believe anything. Synthesis is in through the roof. Yeah, I don't believe anything.

I don't know who to believe. I'll just, you know, whatever. Which I don't think that's good either. Are there good, kind of, directing principles that people can look for when they read a study? Like what do they look at? You know, things like controls and what about meta-analysis? Like what are the things that you look for in studies that make you go, okay, this, I think this is good,

this is a good direction or, ooh, I don't really know if I like this study. You know, it's really hard to say because I mean, I would say go to the meta-analysis but even meta-analysis can be poorly done based on what their inclusion, exclusion criteria is. So you can do a study to prove any point that you're trying to make.

That's why I think, I mean, my mantra has always been evidence-based, but not evidence-bound. I think it's super important to still use common sense and to be able to think through the lens of evolution. Like, what, ooh, I like that. Yeah. Like, what would have made sense for my ancestors? You know, I think that the less time, for example,

a food product or a medicine or a supplement has spent in circulation, the greater scrutiny and skepticism we should have when assessing whether or not it's gonna be right for us. I mean, a great example of that are the grain and seed oils. You know, I get a lot of flack sometimes online for steering people away from grain and seed oils because the nutritional and the medical orthodoxy

still loves them. And it is hard to find human outcome data that they are acutely harmful, right? But these are novel foods, like they didn't exist in the human foods supply part to 100 years ago. And so suddenly we think that this is somehow going to be a better alternative for us than something that our ancestors have consumed. I mean, I know that there's the appeal to nature fallacy and I know that what's natural

isn't always better for us. Like that should be a given at this point, that's not what I'm saying, but a novel food like this, especially when we have ample animal research, we have mechanistic data that would suggest that these are not ideal for us. All of the human outcome data is short-term and equivocal. It's not like overwhelmingly positive in favor of seed oils. And then you could look at parts of the world like in Israel. Israel is actually, they have what's called

the Israeli paradox. They are the top seed oil consumers in the world. They consume about almost 10% more of the bicarories of these seed oils than we do here in the US. And they're not a picture of cardiovascular health. They have higher rates of cancer. They have all the obesity, all the type 2 diabetes. And so it's a big problem.

It's an experiment that, you know, we don't really know the true outcome of it. Well, it's co-evolution. This is the part, this is why what you're saying is so true because, for example, let's just say we didn't know what the sun was, we never were on the sun. And scientists went and studied the radiation from the sun. The message would be, don't go outside, this will kill you, right? But now, the reason why that sun doesn't kill us and why we need it is because we evolved with it.

The sun was here before we were, so we evolved with the sun. So the foods that we've eaten for thousands and thousands of years, we evolved alongside those foods, meaning we've become either dependent on them or those of us that didn't process them well. Those of us that had intolerances to meet probably didn't survive and those that did well with it, you know, thrived and had offspring. This is over the course of thousands and thousands of years. So I like the lens of evolution. I also like to use ancient practices or ancient health practices, not because I think they're

the answer to everything, but because they've been around longer. And so I'll sometimes look at Chinese medicine or aeroretic medicine and see what they use. And it's like, how long have they been using that? Oh, they've been using that for a thousand years. And they say it's good for anxiety. There might be something there. That's a long time for them to say something is effective, right? A thousand years. I say, how many millions and millions of people have used it over that pretty time. Do you ever do that where you look at these different arenas and try and find clues or answers? I think there is a lot of wisdom to be gleaned from these ancient traditions, whether it's

Ayurvedic medicine or Chinese medicine. Sometimes you'll see you'll get data about various compounds and other times you won't. I think it's good to have a foot and be rooted in science and the available data. I think the way to encourage science being performed better is not to opt out of science entirely. We need science. I'm not anti-science in any way, but I just think that it's a shame that we don't get better data on these kinds of compounds. Like, for example, what is that supplement that I tell Oshwaganda? You know, it's like an anti-stress, I mean, it'd be great to have the level of evidence that we have for something like that,

that we do for something like Prozac, but unfortunately it's like you can't patent, you know. No, unless they figure out the active ingredient and then synthesize it and change it a little bit. Yeah, right, like proprietary formula. But yeah, I think the evolutionary lens, I think it's important, you know. It's like, you know, I wanna eat whole foods primarily and avoid the foods of modernity in hopes of potentially avoiding the diseases of modernity,

you know, the diseases of civilization. I mean, rates of Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, like all these kinds of conditions, they're increasing, they're accelerating. Autoimmune issues. Yeah, autoimmune issues. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, it's hard not to point the finger at the modern. When you first got into this space and your intentions were, oh man, I just wanna help people. And you wrote your first book. So when we first had you at the show, great book, then you wrote the second one.

And all your books are amazing. And you genuinely wanna help people. You genuinely have these great intentions, good intentions. Were you shocked or blown away that you would actually have people coming after you? Not to say, hey, I have information that's maybe different, but rather trying to attack you, like you were running for public office or something,

like they need to throw mud at you. I remember when, I'm not gonna get into details, but I remember text messages from you, where you'd send them to me like, this is the weirdest thing. Why are these people coming after me? Where's all this hate coming from? Did you have any idea that would happen?

I get a lot from the vegans just because I take an unapologetic approach to promoting animal products, but I also promote whole plants. So it's like, the carnivores come after me too. So. And then I get attacked by sometimes like the quote unquote evidence-based people on social media.

But actually some of them, like when you look at them, the first of all, the advice that they often peddle is among the worst out there. And they tend not to look very healthy either. I mean, the last person I want to take nutrition advice from is a nutrition expert on social media, ironically, right? Like some of these, and I'm not talking about anybody in specific here, but like, a lot of the nutrition PhDs and the dieticians, it's some of the worst information

that you'll see, like this all foods fit mantra. The idea that really calories are all that matter, which I know that you guys talk about all the time. So I don't want to be dead, be a dead horse, but it's like this really sort of like reductionist and simplistic approach to nutrition that like, I don't really know who it's serving, you know? Like sometimes you'll see these like food scientists that there, it seems like their

whole brand is to, is to really shoot down what I think is the warranted skepticism that people have around food additives and about chemicals that they're exposed to in their environment. They'll say things like everything is a chemical. To the mom who's afraid of exposing their baby to some kind of industrial freaking chemical that's only been sort of in human circulation for the past like 20 or so years. I think they're, I want to believe their intentions are pure. I don't think they're all malicious, right? I think what they're trying to do is to still it down to what they think is the biggest rock and think that like we're not going to be able to convince all these people to look deeper at their foods and like,

so let's just give them the biggest thing, which is, if you just eat less calories than you burn every day, you'll be exponentially healthier. And so they try and stay focused on that and then everything else they wanna dismiss because it's too overwhelming for the majority. And so I think that's the logic that that you hope that message you don't sell that way. They don't they don't sell that way. I think they deliver it poorly, but I can think of a lot of

these people that present that message and I know some of them and I know that they they don't have malicious intent. I think think quite a few of them get a little bit of God complex because they're educated and they're smart and they know other studies and so and they think they know what's best or the best way to communicate it. But I think the part that they miss big time and that we try we all here trying to communicate is the behavioral aspect and I think that that's the piece that's missing in this conversation. A lot of times is like you know when, when you tell somebody it's just calories and if that person, because you technically, if your body burns 2000 calories, you absolutely could eat a thousand calories of ice cream every day

and potentially still lose weight, but we know what behaviors that leads to later on and the reality that person is going to stay at a thousand calories eating ice cream is not realistic and so there's a bigger part of the conversation that I think that we're all trying to have all the time with people, and I think people are smart enough to be able to understand that. It's myopic, that's why people get real myopic. And like artificial sweeteners is one, right? That's a big one that I tend to hammer on and people are like, oh, but the study shows

it's really safe for what I'm like, okay, do you taste it? Do you perceive it? It influences your behaviors. It is not innocuous. So, and by the way, it does, and now it also comes along with no calories. Do you perceive it? It influences your behaviors. It is not innocuous. So, and by the way, it does, and now it also comes along with no calories. Do you think that's gonna change your behaviors

when you're gonna get this feeling of the sensation of sweet without calories? And sure enough, you know, someone might drink one coke, but now it's a diet coke, so I'll have 15, right? So, it's, they don't have the big picture, or at least they're communicating just one small thing. Another example would be a study on an additive, and they say, well, here's a six months study showing that at

10 times a concentration that anybody will consume it at that they'll be totally fine. Well, there's two problems with that. One is it's six months. So who knows what it looks like, cumulative, cumulative, you know, over decades and decades. And also, there's a lot of these additives that are in combination. Nobody studying all of them together. Like, okay, fine, the chemical in my deodorant has been shown to be safe in some studies. And the chemical in my plastic container

has been shown to be safe in some studies. And then the shampoo and then the food. And then the, but is there a study combining all these things? None. None of those exist. And over years. None of that of those exist. And over years. None of that exist. None of that exist.

Six weeks. Yes. And our worsening chronic health issues and has they continue to worsen, tells me we're doing a lot wrong. More wrong than we are right. Yeah. Inhabiting the modern world is like swimming in a toxic soup. It really is.

There was an organization called the endocrine Disruption Exchange that I was sort of friendly with the one of the main spokespeople for it and they identified 1400 compounds that were exposed to on a daily basis that have endocrine disrupting potential. It's like disrupting the 100. Yeah. So we know one of them may do but 1400 combined? Right. Combined. Yeah. They don't know. They're doing these studies with rats in isolation. And the reason why these compounds are so difficult to study in terms of their toxicological effects is that they don't have the same linear dose response

that other potentially toxic compounds have, right? Yeah, sometimes there's a tipping point. In other words, you don't get an effect until you hit this high amount and then you start to see some real negative effects. So if they don't hit that, you might not see anything. Well, that's like the dose makes the poison.

So that's like typically like you could look at water, you could look at salt, you could look at literally any compound and at a given, there is a toxic dose, right? For any compound, like for any exposure, but the problem and that, and that it's linear, essentially is a toxic dose, right, for any compound, like for any exposure, but the problem and that, and that, it's linear essentially. Like with increasing dose, you get increasing danger for lack of a better term, but the problem with these endocrine-disrupting compounds, we've talked about this in the past, but it's

that they have a non-monotonic dose response. So it's not a straight line, it's like a curve, it's like a U, where you can get one effect at a certain dose, and then in a low dose, you can get a completely different effect. And so that's why it makes these compounds really difficult to study. Wow, wow, this is crazy. Okay, so let's talk about this documentary that you worked on and that you've been working on for years.

You showed me the trailer twice now. Both times it made me want to cry, because it's so powerful. So talk about this for a second. And what are we doing with this? Are we, are you putting it out there? Yeah, well, it's, we don't have a release plan in place yet, but the film is called Little Empty Boxes. It used to have another name.

We did a Kickstarter campaign for it, and the name was Breadhead, actually, for the, that was the name of the documentary. And it was called Breadhead, not because I was pointing a finger at Bread and saying Bread causes Alzheimer's disease, but because Bread, I think, is one of, it's one of these like ultra processed foods that tends to mask curators like a health food. You know, it's one of humanity's oldest processed foods, but it's a processed food nonetheless. And today our diets are dominated by ultra processed foods.

I mean, 60% of the calories that we consume. Actually, one of the first studies, I'm sure you guys would be interested in this, came out looking at the relationship between ultra-processed food consumption and dementia risk. It was published two weeks ago. I thought, yeah, for every 10% increase in ultra-processed food consumption, 25% increased risk of developing dementia over 10 years. Right? What does that have to do with amyloid? Nothing. Right? It's like, you know, it's in the food. But anyway, so the documentary is called Little Empty Boxes, and it's the first ever dementia prevention film, and we are finishing it up right now. We're submitting it to various film festivals. Hopefully we can get a premiere at one of them. But the footage is, there's footage,

it's your mom. It's a big part of it because she went through it. And there's old footage of you as a child recording. Were you always like trying to capture stuff? And yeah, I've always been, that's actually the, I think, probably major reason why I go into medicine, which is, you know, something I've always been incredibly passionate about, but I'm also super creative.

So I've always been sort of towing around with cameras and yeah, so I've been, I've been, I've been essentially filming my mom who passed away three years ago, but I've been filming her since I'm like a little kid, since like a baby. Wow. And it's funny, because like I, you know,

I mean, now I know what it was all for, right? It was so that I can, so that, you know, the tragedy that was her life, I mean, her life wasn't entirely tragic, but that what she endured wasn't in vain, you know, that I can share her story with others and hopefully inspire them to a greater vision of life. Well, God bless you, man.

I hope this thing crumks. I'm excited for the commama. I'm very excited. Again, you're by far one of our favorite people. I don't want to say my favorite on air because then I don't want hurting ones feeling it, but you know how we feel. About two minutes.

Thanks, but no, I appreciate you, man. I really appreciate what you're doing. I mean, interesting time right now, but great timing for you because this has been something you've been preaching for a while now. And now finally news is coming out that you've been going to write direction. So, this is good for humanity,

because Alzheimer's is a modern health crisis. People just don't realize how big of a deal it is. And you said, it's a triple, the number of what people with Alzheimer's is a triple by what, 2030? 2030, yeah. It's less than 10 years for us. Yeah, it's crazy.

I mean, today if you make it to the age of 85, you have a 50% chance of being diagnosed. Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. But there are things that you can do. And, you know, I've dedicated my life really to helping people, you know, separate fact from fiction and help avert these kinds of conditions and cardiovascular disease, because, you know, it's important when it comes to the brain.

So anybody that wants to do a deeper dive, I've written three books, but Genius Foods is my first book, and that's really a, it's like a nutritional care manual for the brain. So anybody wanting to do a really thorough dive into the mechanics of brain health and how to optimize the way that their brains work, both for mental health as well as risk commendation for these kinds of conditions, great place to start, and then I talk a lot about the stuff on my podcast, the Genius Life, and we just said you on. Yeah, yeah. I was just on there a few times.

Good time. Always a good time. Thanks, man. Thanks, Max. Appreciate it. Thanks, Max. Appreciate it. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump.

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