Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 732: Max Lugavere- Genius Foods

Starting point is 00:00:00 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mite, op, mite, op with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You want to see me go off if you haven't talked to Ruben. That's my fucking... I hope so. I'm always trying to get you to go off, man. Always. That's a promise. No, you're not trying to do that. You always say get off. You always want to see me get off. No That's totally different. I always want to see you go off all behind the scenes And then I'll see you get on the mic and the all PC South comes out. Yeah

Starting point is 00:00:32 No, I like mayonnaise You know what's funny, but I do I know you do you're a man a seat instead of a bitch mayonnaise is Delicious, I actually couldn't do my friends' horrible. I know I see you dip in your tongue with you. You're not even English. What? English. They love like vinegar and manays.

Starting point is 00:00:54 The vinegar is what they do. The manays is good. The manays too. Okay. Well, whatever. It's part of Europe. It's part of Europe. Technically, I'm still right.

Starting point is 00:01:02 Have you always been a big mayo eater? Is that something you recently have found? Cause, No, that's what do you mean? Have I always? First big male eaters? That's something you recently have found because No, that's what do you mean? Have I always first off? I don't it's like I eat mayonnaise all time Oh, everybody dips their fries and mayo I'm so common. Yeah, and we're in Europe partly Huh, it's it and we're in Europe. Well, I'm just saying that Europeans do it. So I'm not the only one that does it I'm not saying it's better either. I'm just saying it's a different way of So back to my question. have you always done this?

Starting point is 00:01:25 Or is this something that you started? What point did you start dipping your fries in mayo? I was mayo been a big part of it. Since I was a child, you prefer that to catch it. Since I was a child. Yeah, catch up is just sugar. It's sugar, sugar tomato. Yeah, I mean, it is the sugar pasty.

Starting point is 00:01:39 It's just sugar tomato. Yeah, listen, here's the thing, like, what's mayo all made of? Man, he's not any better. I mean it's not It's soybean oil and egg white actually actually if you get real manais you get real mayonnaise made with real egg yolks It's fucking though. It's really well. That's not that bad best food sales sells real mayonnaise. That's actually their label Finally, that's actually the label. Yeah, finally, that's actually the label. Yeah, it was a real mayonnaise.

Starting point is 00:02:06 So as mayonnaise considered a brain enhancing food group. Absolutely. Oh, you like that transition? Not. It's absolutely not a brain enhancing. No. You can buy paleo mayonnaise. I think, you know what?

Starting point is 00:02:19 They think avocado mayo. No, what is that? You know where you can get really good mayonnaise? Thrive markets got really good mayonnaise. Yeah, you could get there. No, they have the avocado man We've got we've ordered it from there, and that's really good Mm-hmm, and that's what I like to put that on my pizza What's mom just kidding? You just said strange things. I just kidding. I can't keep up I thought I'd throw some crazy shit out now when I was a kid, you know, we grew up, you know on below you grew up

Starting point is 00:02:41 me below on below me and me That was a staple that was a staple lunch my mom tried me below. On below me on below me and Mayo. I'm still on that was a staple. That was a staple lunch. My mom tried to make it so below me mayonnaise. Part of why I'm white bread. I didn't eat any of that shit. Yeah, I stayed away from all that. So you had below me mayonnaise and white bread. Yeah, and that was your sandwich.

Starting point is 00:02:54 Iron kids. What about that's a balanced meal. What about you Justin? What? Did you have below me mayonnaise and white bread? No, no, I didn't have nasty meat like that. I was just like eight like peanut butter and jelly. That was like my staple to do. And juice boxes all the time. You see you sucking a Capri Sunday with your,

Starting point is 00:03:10 I mean, you're visually. I can see your, your peanut butter and jelly sandwich with peanut butter on your cheeks. I mean, it's getting all over my face. Can you not see just in my hands? Yeah. It's dripping in my lap. I would pay money to see that. I would totally pay my, I used to have a lot of balloony and cheese sandwiches. Here's a question. Okay, this is fucking, we gotta talk about this.

Starting point is 00:03:29 This is very important. I realize this as a child, you are either a cut your sandwich in half this way, lengthwise, or a cut your sandwich in a diagonal. Dagnals. Dagnals. You're one of the Friday chop it. You're not both.

Starting point is 00:03:42 You're either one or the other. Or you're a crust kid that like cuts the crust off. Oh, remember that kid, that's weird. That kid's a daughter becoming a pussy. That's like a killer. See, it's okay for a woman. You're a psycho killer if you do that. So did you cut your sandwich diagonally or straight down?

Starting point is 00:03:57 Diagonally, cutcha! Did you made that noise too when you did it? Yeah, I like would chop it down. What about you at a diagonal? You did diagonally too? Yeah, I went straight down. Oh, this explains a, Alan? You did diagonally too? Yeah, why? I went straight down. Oh, this explains a lot. It does explain a lot.

Starting point is 00:04:07 Very, very, very. Yeah, I'm interested. I feel like diagonally is, popular. Diagnol is the right way. No, it's, it creates two triangles. The fuck is that, huh? If you cut it in half all the way down,

Starting point is 00:04:19 it's geometry. What you've done is you've created two sandwiches. What you guys have done is create two triangles with pointy edges. It's just not way easier to eat. It's way easier to eat. From an evolutionary standpoint. Ooh, square, square in hole.

Starting point is 00:04:33 It's gonna hit you. I've tried to throw some nice pointy edges that go right in. Anyway, listen, here's a deal. You're wrong on this one, sir. This is actually what you're about to listen to is a very smart episode. I know

Starting point is 00:04:45 contrary to the intro that you just heard. No, we had Max Lugavir on the show whose author of genius foods and he's making the rounds right now because this book is it should be out, right? Is this out? No, well, it's out now because this will go live when the book is out. Yeah, this goes live on Wednesday and the book just came out yesterday. I wish my parents had read this book. No, this is, so he had, he has an interesting story. So he had a mother's stricken with a type of dementia. He's a journalist with a biology background and he went deep in study to figure out

Starting point is 00:05:18 like how do we prevent, you know, these degenerative disorders from happening and this book is all about how to maximize the health of your brain through diet. And there's some crazy stuff that's coming out. There's a recent study that he talks about in this episode where they actually showed how diet can be efficacious for depression.

Starting point is 00:05:39 This is a 2017 study. He talks about how inflammation plays a role in all of that. How Alzheimer's is type three diabetes, which we've referenced before in the past. We get into why babies are fat. Everyone know why your kid's fat? No, not your kid. Yeah, you're a baby.

Starting point is 00:05:57 Yeah, dude, I think that was probably one of the most mind blowing things that he dropped. He dropped all kinds of little, Justin was, that was the nugget bombs. Yeah, nugget bombs. He took a bunch of nugget bombs in there today. Yeah, yeah. I make stuff up in his sense.

Starting point is 00:06:07 He's been on Dr. Oz what, four or five times already. So he's been on the Rubin Report, so he's making the rounds. Yeah, yeah. And he's, me and him became best friends very quickly. Very, very similar background. Very similar story and background. Yes, it's very familiar.

Starting point is 00:06:20 But anyway, you will enjoy this episode. It's a great conversation about nutrition. His book is fascinating. You can find his book at GeniusFoodsBook.com. You can find them on Instagram at maxLugaVier. That's L-U-G-A-V-E-R-E. So I highly recommend his Instagram. His Instagram is a cleaner version of like what Sal, Sal likes to do his helpies where he puts long posts and he has a terrible image. This guy actually puts really good images that are bits of information and drops a lot of knowledge. His Instagram is full. We appreciate the nipple hair. Yeah, absolutely. What? Oh, yeah. If you want to know,

Starting point is 00:06:59 not max, go to my Instagram page. I haven't seen his page yet. Absolutely. Also, listen, this month, we're giving you access to our forum for free for enrolling in any of our fitness or maps bundles. By the way, you don't know what the maps programs are. Here's a quick rundown. If you want to build a maximum muscle, maps and a bulk, that's the program you want to do.

Starting point is 00:07:21 If you want to build a functional physique, like an athlete, that's maps performance. If you want to build a functional physique, like an athlete, that's maps performance. If you want to train like a bodybuilder or sculptor physique, like a bikini competitor, that's maps aesthetic. If you want to work at home or on the road without equipment, so just using your body weight, well, that's maps anywhere. And then for correctional exercise purposes, especially if you're a personal trainer. Look, if you're a personal trainer, you need to get the prime bundle so that you can help train your client. And finally, he actually mentions how high intensity interval training has been shown to increase the density of mitochondria in the cells of the body.

Starting point is 00:07:57 That's the powerhouse of the cells of the body. And a lot of scientists now are saying that that is the key to longevity, health, and performance. We also have a hit program, our Maps Hit program, which you can get. You can get all of this, by the way, at mindpumpmedia.com. If you get a bundle, you get access to our forum for free. With that being said, without any further ado, here we are talking to Max Lugavir, author of Genius Foods. Enjoy the show. Tell us a little bit about your story. further ado, here we are talking to Max Lugavir, author of Genius Foods. Enjoy the show.

Starting point is 00:08:26 Tell us a little bit about your story. Let's start off with that first before we dive into some of the details, I should say. Yeah, absolutely. So, my background, I started as a journalist. My first job out of college was working for Al Gore. He co-founded a TV network that was available in 100 million homes in the US called Current TV. What was that like? million homes in the US called Current TV.

Starting point is 00:08:45 What was that like? That was pretty crazy. That was, are you an Al Gore fan going into this? I mean, not necessarily. Be honest, don't bullshit right now. No, no, no, no. Basically, when I started college, I was pre-med, I was a biology major,

Starting point is 00:09:00 and then I realized that I had a love of storytelling and creativity, and I also struggled all throughout my schooling with executive function. I was always in the gifted program, but I always really, it was really difficult for me to get good grades. And so even though I had a passion always for science and health actually dating back to like my sophomore year of high school, I didn't think that I had the ability to keep up with the academic rigor that medical school would ultimately require. And so I, and then I also ended up really falling in love with film and cinema and documentary filmmaking and music. And so halfway through college, I switched my major to double major in film and psychology.

Starting point is 00:09:37 And I didn't know what I was going to do when I graduated college. I knew that I liked storytelling. I knew that I had a passion for things that could, stories that could ultimately make the world a better place. I've always been a very empathetic and compassionate person. But I didn't know how that would pan out in terms of a career. I was lucky enough to have parents

Starting point is 00:09:54 that kind of just encouraged me to do what I loved, which I think is rare. But one day when I was walking around the communications center of my college, University of Miami, there was a poster advertising this network, this TV network that Al Gore was launching with partners that was gonna seize the reins of traditional media and give it back to the youth.

Starting point is 00:10:16 Okay, this sounds exciting. Super exciting, yeah. Super exciting. How old are you at this point? How old are you? So I was like 22. It's called the internet. Yeah, yeah. Well, but this was so back then you? So I was like 22. That's called the internet. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:10:25 Well, but this was so back then, okay. It was not that long ago, but my space was still like the social network to be on, right? And YouTube had yet to really become a phenomena. So for me, it was like this amazing, credible platform to tell stories. The idea was they were gonna give like 50 kids, cameras and laptops to go around the world

Starting point is 00:10:43 and shoot stories that were, you know, entertainment first, but also could make the world a better place. That's right. And yeah, I thought it was amazing. I thought it was a dream job. So I threw myself at the network, along with thousands of other kids around the US.

Starting point is 00:10:56 And I was one of the only ones to get a full time job. Essentially, it was like a dream job, where they ended up moving me out to LA, putting me on TV and giving me the reins to essentially work with Peabody award winning journalists and storytellers. Dude, what was that process? What was that process like? I mean, it was nuts. I was on national TV from the minute I graduated college until about 2011.

Starting point is 00:11:20 Fuck, I'd be scared to death at that age. It was insane. I mean, imagine leaving college literally and then winding up in the makeup chair every single day to get like TV friendly, you know, and like it was just insane. It was insane. But it was, how did you deal with that?

Starting point is 00:11:36 Was it, did you ever feel like you were, did you get scared? I mean, did you have moments too where your ego blew up? I mean, what did you, what did you go through with that? I mean, at a young age to, to drop into that, that's different. Yeah. That's not like most people that... It's scary, it's scary as hell.

Starting point is 00:11:50 Even it would scare the hell out of me now. Did you feel like, okay, this is my purpose, and that's what drove you? Or was it conflicting with being afraid of doing it? I didn't know. I mean, I definitely didn't have an aspiration of being on camera in college. I didn't want to be an actor or anything

Starting point is 00:12:05 like that. I just knew that I throughout my life I've been able to go really deep in certain topics and when I found topics like that over the course of my life, I knew that I really liked to talk about them. So for one of the most salient passions of mine has always been health. And so I've always enjoyed really talking to people about health. And I recognize that throughout college and whatever people would always come to me with their health questions. And that's just sort of a pattern that emerged. I never had any professional aspiration.

Starting point is 00:12:41 But when I landed this opportunity to talk about my passions on TV and have a show where I could really curate topics and really be a generalist in that sense, it was, I guess, a little intimidating. I definitely learned a lot over the course of the process, but I also tried to use it as a funnel for things that I felt could leave my audience better off. I really, and like you guys, I feel like when you have a platform, you've got to kind of think about yourself as being in the service of the audience, you know?

Starting point is 00:13:10 Completely. Yeah. And so, and of course, I learned that over, you know, there were certain things that were not intuitive to me that I ended up learning. So for example, when I first went on camera, I thought that your audience would like you, the cooler you made yourself sound

Starting point is 00:13:27 Which obviously the exact opposite is true, right? Yeah, because you're not vulnerable otherwise Right, you got to see you got to look real. Yeah, I mean these are not the kinds of how did you put that together? What would you would happen? What did it sound like? I want to hear that voice Well, it's just like you know, hey guys Well, it's just like, hey guys. Yeah, hello. You America. Yeah, yeah. You just kind of want to make yourself seem like kind of a badass,

Starting point is 00:13:48 but like really the way we now know as adults, like the way to actually be a badass is to be vulnerable and to be real and authentic. Which I guess is kind of difficult to do when you're on a TV set. But yeah, I mean, there was a learning curve. I remember the first shot that went on air on current, I was wearing shorts in this set on set, basically, and because I was growing up a lot of shorts, and so I would kind of

Starting point is 00:14:16 try to wear them whenever I could on TV, which is just rule number one, not a good idea. You don't want to wear shorts on TV. But in this opening shot, I remember the camera was like, it was on a jib, which is essentially like a crane. So the blue camera had a jib, and it was like, it coming from a really low angle. Oh, perfect. I could literally see like all up my shorts.

Starting point is 00:14:35 Like, yeah, male, there's the nuts. Yeah, there's, yeah. Yeah. So most downloaded video of all time. Yeah. Yeah. Those are popular. Those are the kinds of things you learn.

Starting point is 00:14:46 Did you ever have a paradigm shattering moment during that process that altered the way you acted on the show where you have to where you're like fuck that was embarrassing? I mean obviously the shorts thing, but did you ever say something or become really super nerve-wracking going into it? Did you have moments like that? I think one of the big things for me was to know that when the camera's on, you've got to be a higher energy version of yourself. Sometimes I remember I would roll into set just after waking up and I would be kind of

Starting point is 00:15:17 like, my voice, it's deep. Sometimes it can be a bit, it can sound a bit monotone. Even though internally I'm feeling like excited. I realize that that doesn't, you know, sometimes I need to kind of, you know, articulate, what's the word? Like just using more tonality, I guess, or something like that.

Starting point is 00:15:35 Inflictions and things like that helps. I mean, these are things that kind of, after a while came intuitively to me, but. No, that's such a great point that I think you're kind of grazing over. When we started interviewing all these people that either been on TV or like YouTube stars, something that I made a connection really quick

Starting point is 00:15:53 and early on was holy shit, these guys and girls are totally different in person than as soon as like the camera comes off. Oh yeah, they turn it on. Yeah, some of them were like complete opposite personalities off camera and they just have this ability that once they turn their phone facing them, where the cameras come on, all of a sudden this is widely personality comes out and it was like, whoa, but it makes

Starting point is 00:16:14 so much sense because the person on the other side that's receiving that, they feel that energy, that excitement, that animation in the person, like so that makes a big difference. Yeah, I think that's part of it. I think really what it what it ultimately comes down to is just having having a level of respect for your audience And not talking down to them not dumbing down your content really valuing the attention that they're paying to you I mean attention is sort of like the new limited resource, right? And so I just You know working with the president of programming at current who is sort of a mentor to me, I really just learned to make everything that I do to be in the service of the audience. And actually, and I've taken all of those learnings and I've used, I continue to use them

Starting point is 00:16:54 today. So for example, I made a switch recently, not to get off topic, but I made a switch recently in how I approach Instagram. And I, you know, I basically realized that for a while I was using Instagram to basically post pictures of myself where I was using Instagram to basically post pictures of myself where I was looking cool, which I think is how a lot of people use Instagram. And I was like posting, you know, I might be able to nail a caption here and there, but posting pictures of myself is not, I'm not doing this in the service of the audience. I'm doing this because I want the

Starting point is 00:17:19 dopamine hit of getting likes on this photo. And so a couple months ago I decided, look, I'm just going to like start creating infographics where I can really give people bite-sized, adjustable information because my goal is to help people with health literacy, help them make switches in their lives, that are gonna help them be healthier. And so that, I would say, is a direction that really stems from those early days

Starting point is 00:17:40 at current TV. How was, how was, how gore, dude? I mean, Sal is a huge fan, so I wanna know what you, what you think about him. Not at all. He's, um, you know, he was, he was definitely a great boss. Like I got to see him every year at the company parties

Starting point is 00:17:53 and big, big staff meetings. The network wasn't the Al Gore network. It was, it was a network. He was actually very hands off when it came to programming. It wasn't, did you have any say into what you would be covering and stuff? Was there a lot of flexibility there? Yeah, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:18:07 Yeah, they gave me free reign. So I was basically... Yeah, I was hired by the president of programming of current because I embodied who the network was ultimately seeking to empower. So when I was an undergraduate at University of Miami, I made a short documentary that was the first ever film that I'd made,

Starting point is 00:18:30 where I was ranting about hedonism and spirituality. That was my student film. That's what I was really into when I went to University of Miami. I was trying to reconcile the fact that I've always had a seekers mentality about spirituality, yet I always found this cognitive, I found it to be a source of cognitive dissonance for me that religious traditions have always said that to find enlightenment, you've got to deny the pleasures of the flesh. You've got to either walk across coals, lie down on nails, not have sex until marriage. To me, as an undergraduate, really entering adulthood for the first time in South Beach,

Starting point is 00:18:56 I was like, wait a minute, there's got to be a better way to find, quote unquote. How can I get around this? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So as an undergraduate, I made this short film where I was like ranting to the camera about, basically about that. I was obsessed with a philosopher named

Starting point is 00:19:11 Jidu Krishnamurti who talked a lot about this stuff about how truth is really a pathless land. And you really have to find it through your own self-experimentation, spiritually. We talk about self-experimentation today in terms of health and fitness, but he's really the ultimate guru

Starting point is 00:19:24 when it comes to self-experimentation today in terms of health and fitness But he's really the ultimate guru when it comes to self-experimentation in terms of spiritual truth He's sort of like the anti guru guru. So I was like kind of obsessed with this guy And his and his work and so I made this documentary. I was in front of the camera and the film Portrayed me basically as being the the ultimate one-man band storyteller with something to say and basically as being the ultimate one man band storyteller with something to say. And current TV, the network saw it and they were like, look, this is like a young passionate storyteller.

Starting point is 00:19:50 This is who we're ultimately trying to empower. And they gave me this job. And that really is a pattern that, as I mentioned, you know, I've always had throughout my life. When I get passionate about something, all I wanna do is talk about it and bring people with me along for the journey. And that, yeah.

Starting point is 00:20:11 So I mean. Do you find yourself getting obsessive about topics? I do. My brain is like a light switch. So I'm either not interested in it or I'm completely obsessed with it and I can't sleep until I feel like I've got some sort of grasp over it.

Starting point is 00:20:23 How do you think everybody here can identify with that? Oh man, there you go. You're saying that, I'm like I've got some sort of grasp over it. How does everybody here can identify with that? Oh man, there you go. You're saying that, I'm like, yep. How did the obsession with health start? So yeah, I've been really interested in health from high school. So my, I was a shy computer programmer introvert in college.

Starting point is 00:20:42 I had bad hair, I wore braces. I really gravitated to computers and programming. And I also had a mutual passion for comic books and superheroes. And one day, I was like, you were hit with the ladies. I was like, I had panties dropping all over the place. I wasn't into sports, I was always terrible at any kind of athleticism. And here I thought him and I were gonna connect the most, but I think it might be you.

Starting point is 00:21:08 He's like me right now. Well, you're describing Sal right now. Well, but here's the really, yeah. So I was, but so I went to, and I went to high school in Manhattan in New York City and close to my high school, one day I discovered a supplement store. It was a mom and pop supplement store near my high school.

Starting point is 00:21:25 And I walked in one day and there was a guy behind the counter who was always there and he was very knowledgeable. And I saw the supplements on the wall as sort of being in a way like these sort of potions that could help me transcend my nerdiness as a school kid, you know, almost in a way that could like make me a superhero. And that sort of connected with my interest in like in programming, I found many of the same feedback loops that were

Starting point is 00:21:52 there in programming were evident in or were present rather in working out. And I became really interested in bodybuilding, actually, in high school. And so much so that my senior thesis in high school actually wrote a 12 page dissertation on creatine and the benefits of creatine. And I was like really nerdy for this. For sure, Sal, bro. So for sure, I was so wildy building creatine. I think we just became back then.

Starting point is 00:22:18 That's awesome. I mean, no, these are not the kinds of things that I could talk about with girls, especially in a first date or most girls that I know, but, well, not at least new in high school. So now I know a lot of really cool girls that I can talk about those too, but, but yeah, needless to say, I was, I became obsessed.

Starting point is 00:22:36 I was working out all the time. I was trying all kinds of crazy diets. I became obsessed with a book that I discovered in, it was probably 11th grade written by Lawn McDonald on the ketogenic diet, so I became obsessed with this book that I discovered in, it was probably 11th grade written by Laugh McDonald on the ketogenic diet, so I became obsessed with this topic like very early on. So I've always been,

Starting point is 00:22:49 well, you read a book on keto in what year is that? That was in 1998. Oh wow. Yeah, wow. Way ahead of a lot of people for sure. Yeah. And I mean, I read the book. Dave Palumbo was a bodybuilder.

Starting point is 00:23:01 I used to advocate for ketogenic diets back in the late 92. But not a lot of people talking about it back then. No, no, no. No, no. All of the Trio diets been around for such a long time. You know, it's, I mean, that was before it became cool. Exactly. So I've been into this for a very long time.

Starting point is 00:23:15 And no, you know, I mean, other than, then, then starting college as a pre-med, I had no professional, you know, I wasn't sure what I was, how I was gonna to use this. It was really just a personal passion. It made me feel good. I knew I recognized the mental health benefits of it. But yeah, I sort of carried this passion for health and science with me all throughout

Starting point is 00:23:37 life. You know, I was from an early age familiar with PubMed and had to find research whenever I had health questions. And at Current TV, which was my first real job at of college, whenever I had the opportunity to shine a light on health-related topics, whether it was, you know, new science findings or how technology was beginning to augment health in really interesting ways, I would seize that opportunity. When I left Current TV to try to figure out where I was gonna go with my career, I was in my, I guess, late 20s.

Starting point is 00:24:10 Yeah, this was, I guess, 2008 around or 2000, maybe 2000, no, sorry, 2011. It was then in my personal life that, I was starting to spend more and more time back home where I'm from in New York, where my mom and my brothers live. And I was starting to spend more and more time back home, where I'm from in New York, where my mom and my brothers live, and I was starting to spend more and more time around my mom. And my mom started to show very early signs of memory loss. And what would ultimately be revealed were the earliest symptoms

Starting point is 00:24:41 of a very niche form of dementia. And what did this look like? Because I think most people experience the, I forgot where I put my keys, type of deal, but this might have been, this was different. Yeah, assuming. Yeah, if you forget where your keys are, that's normal, if you forget what your keys are for,

Starting point is 00:25:01 that's a lot of you need to go see a doctor. What's a good point. Yeah, so basically it had seemed like, I mean, my mom's processing speed had downshifted severely. She began complaining of brain fog, which is not something I'd ever heard her complain about in the past. My mom was what I would consider today a high performer. If I knew her when she was my age, I mean, she ran a successful business in the 80s and 90s that she launched

Starting point is 00:25:30 with her with her, with my dad, who was her husband at the time. She raised three kids. She was always very passionate about learning and self-education. And at a certain point, my mom, still blonde, still youthful, still vibrant, it had just seemed as if talking to her was different. When I would be in the kitchen with her cooking a meal, for example, and I'd ask her to pass the salt if she were standing next to the cabinet where a spice happened to be.

Starting point is 00:26:02 I'd ask her to pass it. It would take her five seconds to even process that command before she would begin to respond to be. I ask her to pass it, it would take her five seconds to even process that command before she would begin to respond to it. Where if I tell you to pass me something, you hear it, you respond instantly. It would be quicker for me to actually traverse the kitchen and reach into the cabinet and grab it myself.

Starting point is 00:26:20 Like you're talking to it, I mean, we kind of intuitively know when we're talking to much older people that their processing speed is not what, you know, is not that of a younger person or even a person in middle age. But it almost seemed as if talking to my mom, I was talking to an elderly person. And this was, was this sudden? It was, yeah, it was pretty sudden. And it coincided with a change to her gate, which is the way that she walks. So my mom, you know, like any New Yorker walks pretty fast. She, my mom's never had a driver's license. She walks everywhere. And it had seemed as if her stride had sort of shortened.

Starting point is 00:26:57 Now being somebody who's in health and understands, or at least because you had a passion for the human body, when you notice these things, was it like, oh, shit, were you terrified right away? Or were you, were you, like, when you down the rabbit hole of learning? No, not yet. So I thought actually initially that, first of all, I thought my mom's moving problems were just because of the fact that she hadn't really ever worked out throughout her life. She really didn't have the same kind of value of exercise.

Starting point is 00:27:22 Anything people have today. Um. So I was like, no, I'm get to the gym, you know, maybe do some stretching. I had no concept that how a person moves could be related to their brain function. Of course, now I know, you know, I know otherwise. But, but yeah, it wasn't for me

Starting point is 00:27:39 until a family trip to Miami to visit my dad, my parents were divorced at this time and this was one of the few cases where my mom and my brothers, we all sort of descended on Miami, and my mom and my dad remained friends, so we would stay with my dad occasionally. And this was one of those times. We're all in Miami, and we're all in the living room,

Starting point is 00:28:02 and the living room's connected to the dining room. There's a big breakfast bar that separates the two. And we're all in the living room, and the living room is connected to the dining room. There's a big breakfast bar that separates the two. And we're all sort of sitting there, and my mom, to the whole family, announced that she had been having memory problems. I mean, previous to that, it was sort of just sort of something that she might have mentioned under her breath to me or in passing. And that she had also started seeing a neurologist. And this, to me, sounded, I guess, a little bit more serious.

Starting point is 00:28:31 But then, my dad, who can be a little bit sardonic at times, chimed in and asked my mom, well, if you're having memory problems, how could you be having memory problems? What year is it? And my mom had to think about it. She couldn't immediately tell us what year it was. And me and my brothers were so ignorant at the time, we kind of chimed in and we started to poke fun. I imagine how horrible that is. We were just so in the dark. We're like, come on, mom, how could you not know what year it is? And she started to cry in that moment. And that, to me, is like when everything changed, I realized that something was seriously wrong with my mom and I had to, essentially, it was my call to action.

Starting point is 00:29:18 I had to really dedicate time to figuring out what this was. And because I was the only person in my family that really had an interest in health, I realized. And I also have, thankfully, a non-traditional job where I had the ability to kind of take time away from my career to go with my mom. I knew that I had to start going with my mom to doctor's appointments. And still, even at this point, I had no idea what I was in for, but I went with my mom to a neurologist at NYU. Really hard to come to any sort of conclusion.

Starting point is 00:29:55 I mean, they did MRI tests, but my mom wasn't diagnosed with anything. We ended up going to Columbia University, which is also in New York City, one of the top neurologist departments in the US. We went to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Ultimately, the journey culminated, at least for me, in a trip to the Cleveland Clinic. The Cleveland Clinic, I remember reading about, was known for taking a sort of all hands-on deck approach to people's health. People with very complicated medical problems end up going to the Cleveland Clinic because

Starting point is 00:30:23 even before I had the definition of functional medicine This to me was sort of what the promise of functional medicine today seems to be is that they really take a root cause approach to try to figure out what the What the root cause is? It's not amazing that we're kind of just now getting around to this. Yeah, exactly. That's crazy Because the way Western medicine operates, it's one pill for every ill. They basically treat the symptoms with pharmaceutical band-aids

Starting point is 00:30:49 and they send you on your way. It's also extremely reductionist. It's, you know, you break everything down into such small pieces that it becomes impossible to find a root cause of anything. Because many times the root cause is linked to so many different things. To another system of the body

Starting point is 00:31:03 that they're not specialized. Or to all of them. 100%. Yeah, 100%. And that is absolutely the case for the brain, according to the latest and best available evidence. And, you know, I went to the Cleveland Clinic expecting it to be this cathedral to medical insight, right?

Starting point is 00:31:17 Like, I mean, it's one of the top. So you were hopeful. We're very hopeful. Very hopeful, very hopeful. And also, you know, I have a lot of respect for medicine. So, I mean, I was not, I wasn't going in as a skeptic, but it was there that my mom for the first time was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease. And we were in a renowned neurologist's office, and he ran a battery of physical and cognitive tests on my mom, and without addressing diet or lifestyle once,

Starting point is 00:31:47 he sent us on our way essentially with two prescriptions. Was this your first experience of your diagnosis and audio? Yes, yes, yeah, I've refer to that a lot because that's what I experience in every single time. I mean, in no case, and even today, I continue to experience it with my mom who's become essentially a walking pharmacy. But yeah, you know, doctors, the way the current medical paradigm is set up, and you guys,

Starting point is 00:32:13 I'm sure, are familiar with this, you know, your average physician has less than 15 minutes to give to any one patient. So they don't take the time to talk about, well, not only do they not take the time to talk about diet and lifestyle, but they're not, they're not, they're not, they don't know much about it. So, we go to these doctors when we're scared and confused expecting them to be experts in all things health and wellness, but they're not experts when it comes to nutrition. They're not, you know, they get an afternoon of medical treatment.

Starting point is 00:32:38 Yeah, or exercise, right? And they'll do, to arguably the most important things that you can probably apply. Exactly, exactly. In fact, many times you would, if you bring up nutrition and exercise, they'll get scoffed at. Many times, if you go with a skin condition or a mental issue or a degenerative disease and you say, hey, what about diet?

Starting point is 00:32:55 And they'll say, oh, it's not has no effect. Yeah, sure you can do that, but 100%. Yeah, I like to say that people, as a, first of all, I think science literacy is so important. And I like to say that people, you know, as a, first of all, I think science literacy is so important, and I like to remind people that, you know, it's good to be esceptic, okay? What's not good is to be a cynic. And what I find is that so many of these doctors have just been put through the medical school ringer. It's not even their fault, really. It's not that there's some kind of, you know, malevolent thing going on, where doctors are just trained to shit on alternative

Starting point is 00:33:25 approaches, but medical school is really hard. Most doctors end up coming out at the other end of the tunnel with depression and mental health problems themselves. There's way more doctors today spend at least 50% of their time doing administrative work to meet their financial needs. So it's just like, it's just a systemic problem. And I found, you know, in most cases, when bringing up diet in these doctors offices,

Starting point is 00:33:54 that they end up being way more cynical than they should be. They just, you know, they're down on what they're not up on. When you went that time and they gave your mom those two medications and you left were you okay hopeful were you thinking like okay here we go this is gonna help or were you like no I need to look deeper yeah well I mean the first thing that I that I did which I think anybody would do is I took out my smartphone and I googled the prescriptions because these are drugs that I'd never heard of

Starting point is 00:34:18 before and what I realized actually it wasn't, you know, the word Alzheimer's disease and dementia wasn't even brought up in that neurologist's office. And yet my mom was prescribed, one of the two drugs was for Alzheimer's disease. And that to me is when, I mean, that was the first time in my life I'd ever had a panic attack because I started really looking into what these drugs do.

Starting point is 00:34:39 And I realized that they have no disease modifying effect there of limited efficacy. And they're basically what dopamine or neurotransmitter boosters are? Exactly, exactly. So what they do is the gold standard drug for Parkinson's disease is basically like, is it dope, is it dope, level dope?

Starting point is 00:34:56 Yes, is that okay? Yeah, level dope and carbidopa, it's called cinemat, and it basically is a dopamine replacement for the brain, because in Parkinson's disease, dopamine orgic neurons in the region of the brain associated with a disease involved in movement begin to die. And by the first time you show your first Parkinson's symptom,

Starting point is 00:35:12 50% of those neurons are already dead. So by the time when you see symptoms, you're already down, I mean, you've already gone down the path now. Well, they say like like 20, 30 years, right? That's when it normally starts for like Alzheimer's and things like that. Yes, exactly.

Starting point is 00:35:24 Wow. Exactly. And that was, She diagnosed That's when it normally starts for like Alzheimer's and things like that. Yes, exactly. Wow. Exactly. And that was... She diagnosed Alzheimer's and dementia at this point. She was diagnosed with dementia and the Parkinsonian syndrome. She wasn't diagnosed with Alzheimer's, but she had the symptoms of both. She had the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease,

Starting point is 00:35:38 which is a memory disorder. And she had symptoms that were more Parkinsonian in nature. So she was prescribed both drugs. No matter what variant of dementia you come in on generally, if it's not a- They'll give you the same thing, they'll give you the same thing. Yeah, because they're saying, okay, these, basically, these receptors for dopamine are dead.

Starting point is 00:35:54 So let's just boost the dopamine to get more out of the leftover receptors, which may actually accelerate the process sometimes, right? Doesn't the receptors sometimes get hammered and maybe even get worse later on? Why don't they lose their efficacy at some point when they do nothing for you at all? Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:36:11 So this is one of the problems with, or one of the, I guess, potential dangers of messing with your neurotransmitters is that, neurotransmitter, the receptors for neurotransmitters become downregulated when they're flooded with neurotransmitter. And not only thatransmitters become down-regulated when they're flooded with neurotransmitter. And not only that, but if the drug isn't necessarily working, neurotransmitters are oxidative.

Starting point is 00:36:31 So I mean, one of the, take, take, yeah, like this, this drug, cinamet, is actually a pro-oxidant. So if it's not actually working, then you shouldn't be on the drug. This might be, it's like one of the cases where the medicine starts to become worse than the disease among them. Yeah, I mean, it's one of the cases where the medicine starts to become worse than the disease. Yeah, I mean, it's one of the reasons why MDMA is so damaging, because it basically floods your synaptic cleft with your own serotonin, essentially burning away neurons because serotonin actually produces oxidative stress. But it's really fun. I've heard.

Starting point is 00:37:04 And potentially useful. So when did you start going down the path of, I hate to use the word alternative, but other ways of helping your mom? Well, so there was this weird moment where I realized that my mom's mom, my grandma, was 94 and healthy at the time. She was, my grandmother's cognition was fine, and yet this disease that I had previously considered to be an old person's disease was sort of bubbling up in my mom.

Starting point is 00:37:38 And so I had this hunch that there had to have been something that changed between my grandmother's generation and my mom's that led to my mom developing this condition. And my hunch, because I have a bias towards diet and lifestyle as being profoundly important when it comes to your health and how you feel, my theory was that there had to be something related to diet and lifestyle. And I started, I mean, immediately I went into PubMed, and I started looking at potential dietary and lifestyle interventions, and also when I learned,

Starting point is 00:38:14 so I learned that one of the reasons why these pharmaceutical drugs are so ineffective, and one of the reasons why 99.6% of Alzheimer's drug treatment trials fail is because, as you mentioned, Alzheimer's disease begins to bring decades before the first symptom. So almost in tandem with my quest to see if there was anything out there that could help my mom, I became really interested in the notion of prevention. And this was because if you subtract 30 from a mom's age at the time, you get me. And I became really interested in doing whatever it is

Starting point is 00:38:45 that I could do to prevent this from ever happening to myself. Does that scare you when you kind of computed that in your head? I mean, yeah, it was terrifying. Right. It was terrifying. I mean, I recognize that I've always been very health conscious and that I've always valued exercise and working out.

Starting point is 00:39:00 And so, you know, I wasn't, I guess, immediately afraid. And also, I figured, you figured, what, what, 30 years has exactly caused for concern? That's a big window of opportunity for me to change my diet and do whatever I might be able to do to protect my brain. But alongside my research, I also remembered, a couple of years prior, I had seen a TED talk by Terry Walls, TEDx Talk.

Starting point is 00:39:25 We had a video on the show, Oh, did you? Awesome, she's about. Awesome. Yeah, I mean, it was sort of this, I mean, it's funny how, you know, foreshadowing it was that I actually really loved that TED Talk when I had watched it, but it's something that I remembered

Starting point is 00:39:40 seeing when I started to think about like, where I might go for clues as to how diet and lifestyle might affect brain function. I mean obviously she talks about the role of diet and lifestyle in multiple sclerosis, but there was a lot less information out there at the time when I began researching this for diet and Alzheimer's disease, let alone other variants of dementia. So I just began looking and I stumbled upon this really interesting insight that relates Alzheimer's disease, which is the most common form of dementia, not

Starting point is 00:40:09 necessarily what my mom had, but I figured that anything that pertains to Alzheimer's, I might be able to, you know, maybe glean and use on my mom, so to speak, particularly if it's a safe recommendation. And I stumbled upon this insight that Alzheimer's related to type 2 diabetes. Some scientists call it type 3 diabetes, in fact. I'll tell Alzheimer's type 3 diabetes. Yeah, yeah. So the scientist, these scientists who coined that term,

Starting point is 00:40:35 Suzanne de la Montaille, at Brown University, I've been to her lab and I've interviewed her. And that was a really interesting and paradigm shifting insight for me because you know, type 2 diabetes according to most experts that you'll ask is a lifestyle disease brought on by sedentary lifestyle, a diet that's become saturated with hyper processed foods. And so even though my mom had never been diabetic, I was like, okay, what insights can I get from studies on metabolism? And use that to say, well, you know, if the brains, if the metabolic health of the brain is related so closely to the metabolic health of the body,

Starting point is 00:41:17 what insights might I glean, what actionable steps and foods and practices might I be able to take from the studies on metabolism that might potentially be able to take from the studies on metabolism that might potentially be able to help my mom. So this was, there was a level of dot connecting there that I was making that I think most clinicians and even PhDs, for example, are not able to do because clinicians, you know, they think only in terms of evidence-based, you know, things that they can prescribe, less they have a malpractice suit waged against them. And PhDs tend to lose sight of the forest for the trees

Starting point is 00:41:50 because they're so focused on these really tiny, niche topics, and we need both, right? So I'm not saying that there's anything. This is where your journalism background probably really came in handy. Yeah. And I think a level of creative thinking as well, because I had to learn all of these things

Starting point is 00:42:09 from the ground up. And for me to be able to integrate them into a way that makes sense for me, that I can communicate effectively to people, I've got to be able to tell it like a story, like sort of a story of how we might protect our health so that we may enhance brain function and the like. So I started looking into all these different areas. I was looking into metabolism.

Starting point is 00:42:30 What are the latest diet studies and randomized control trials, which are the only kinds of trials that can actually prove cause and effect, say on diets that we might eat to improve metabolic health? I started looking at low fat versus low carb and became really interested there. I also started looking into the latest research in understanding of vascular health and how to prevent cardiovascular disease. Because even though you'll go see a cardiologist and you'll go see a neurologist and neither the twain shall meet, because as you mentioned, medicine typically takes such a reductionist approach.

Starting point is 00:43:05 I was like, well, the brain has fed nutrients and fuel by a network of microvessels that if you were to take out of your brain and line end-to-end would stretch 400 miles long. So there's gotta be something to say about nurturing vascular health. I mean, the second most common form of dementia is called vascular dementia, which is basically due

Starting point is 00:43:22 to a series of strokes, micro strokes in the brain, but there are vascular issues at play too when it comes to Alzheimer's disease, and likely the niche form of mental monstrosity that my mom had developed. So I was just like putting all of these together and obviously, you know, like I said, my brain works like a switch. So I just became obsessed. I was losing sleep to hours and hours of research. I was digging into the primary literature. I was just, you know, doing everything I could to understand. And, you know, granted, I didn't have training as a scientist, but I did find that, you know, it's very empowering that we live in a time where all of the world's knowledge is available to us at our fingertips. So not once did it seem to me to be sort of a barrier

Starting point is 00:44:08 to finding the answers that I wanted that I wasn't a medical doctor. I was like, we have PubMed, you know, many studies are available to us for free. I started reading the introductions to these studies which provide context. I started reading the discussions which provide sort of in, you know,

Starting point is 00:44:23 English language analysis of what the results are of these studies Ultimately ended up finding somebody who gave me their login to an academic Portal so that I could download all research papers. Yeah, so I had access to all papers. It was like being a kin to candy store. I swear to God Sounds like something to sound get a bone or over. Oh, right No, it's you know, if you have the right... Let's move it over a little bit. Yeah, if you have the right motivation today, you can learn anything.

Starting point is 00:44:53 And we are seeing the emergence of citizen scientists and citizen doctors and discoveries are being made right now through forums. I have family members who have chronic health issues who made discoveries through belonging to groups forums. I have family members who have chronic health issues who may discover this through belonging to groups of people with these issues through their compiled anecdote or driving research now, which this wasn't the case before. So many barriers to be able to be able to even read some of these things

Starting point is 00:45:18 before which no longer exist. So if you have the right motivation, which you definitely did in your smart person, I mean, you can make some pretty incredible. How receptive was she? Cause one of the challenges I've always had is when I deal with someone who's close to me, and I don't know how familiar you might be with this one. So I have a best friend, man. We go all the way back to elementary school.

Starting point is 00:45:36 And he has this disorder, or they can't even pin what it is, but he wakes up in the middle of the night, and he acts out his dreams, and they extremely,, he wakes up in the middle of the night, and he acts out as dreams. And they extremely, and dangerous. Like, he'll jump off the bed, and there's been stories of people that have the same condition that will walk out of their window,

Starting point is 00:45:54 and show that, because they think they have a dream that the place is burning on fire, and they jump out, and it's really scary for them. And they've, no one can quite put their finger on exactly what it is. And they say that like 98 or 95% of the people that go through this, like he's going through, end up with Parkinson's.

Starting point is 00:46:13 And so I've been trying to send him all this research around Parkinson's and then how to be preventative with a lot of it. And I just think that, I feel his frustration because I know he's going to all these medical doctors and these doctors aren't able to tell him certainly what it is. And so how was your mom?

Starting point is 00:46:30 And like I said, I know it's like to try and give this information to somebody, how's her attitude? Is she receiving it well? Is she willing to try everything? Or are you struggling with that at all? Yeah, so I mean, initially there was some pushback because obviously I'm a mom's son,

Starting point is 00:46:43 you know, I could possibly know more than her about nutrition, right? My mom grew up in a time when the nation was in a frenzy over what seemed like an epidemic of heart disease. So my mom's always been very attuned to the messaging from the government over the past 50 years about how a person might eat to prevent heart disease. So growing up, even though my mom was health conscious,

Starting point is 00:47:03 even though my mom had access to healthy food, we always used corn oil. We always had margarine instead of butter. And, you know, my mom always, I never saw my mom eating eggs, and but going through an entire bag of, you know, saturated fat free potato chips, or an entire bag of pretzels, low fat pretzels,

Starting point is 00:47:20 would be completely fine. And, you know, if not, maybe even improve her health. It's what she thought. Right. So, me coming in and saying, Mom, you've got to reduce the carbohydrates. You've got to eat more fat, healthier fats. You've got to ditch the corn oil. Eggs are not going to kill you.

Starting point is 00:47:38 In fact, eggs are really important when it comes to brain health. And there's no relationship for most people when it comes to dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol. You know, she just, it was kind of a hard sell from my mom to say the least. But eventually, she started buying into these, to these notions. She got rid of the corn oil, thankfully. I started, you know, I got rid of the bread and all that stuff in her house, which I think doesn't really serve anybody. You know, if you're metabolically healthy, I think bread is maybe benign. If you're working out a lot, obviously, and you've got bigger, more skeletal muscle,

Starting point is 00:48:11 you can dispose of greater amounts of glucose. And if you're not gluten sensitive, I think fine. But to me, bread is the ultimate processed food mask rating as a health staple. Right. Oh, yeah, people don't realize, like, we need to be extremely processed for us to even be able to eat it. Exactly. And not only that, you touched on a part that I think is most important People don't realize, like, we need to be extremely processed for us to even be able to eat it. Exactly. And not only that, you touched on a part

Starting point is 00:48:26 that I think is most important that I've seen just in my 15 plus career of being in health and fitness is the decline of movement. I mean, the average client, I share this on the R-R show all the time that the average American is moving like 4,000 steps a day. That's not even a fucking one hour walk. For the entire day, like that, we're fucking lazy.

Starting point is 00:48:45 We're not moving at all. And even people that exercise are still considered sedentary. So I think a lot of that has to do with that. I think 50 plus years ago, we were way more physical and way more active. So our body's utilizing a lot of that. We're now, it's just full. It's so different too.

Starting point is 00:48:58 Did you, so when you just touched on a few things with lower carbohydrate, more fat out, healthier fats, cholesterol is probably good for you when you consume it. When you're discovering this information, You just touched on a few things with lower carbohydrate, more fat, healthier fats, cholesterol, it's probably good for you when you consume it. When you're discovering this information, when you're reading about it, are you blown away? Yeah, blown away.

Starting point is 00:49:13 I mean, I used to, I mean, you remember the first article you read where you're like, what the hell? That's totally opposite what it's called. It's totally the contradiction. Yeah, I mean, well, the first thing that I started to do is I started to, I started to think with skepticism over foods and products that have been in the human food supply for

Starting point is 00:49:32 a shorter period of time. So rather than look at fairly new food products and dietary constructs as being innocent until proven guilty, I was like, we should start thinking more about these things as being guilty until proven innocent. No, I like that mentality. Yeah. And I realized that, you know, for the entire,

Starting point is 00:49:52 for the pretty much the entirety of my life, I thought of grains and whole grains, particularly as being additive to health. I used to really, you know, I would avoid white rice at the plague, but if you were to put a brown rice bowl in front of me, I'd eat it in its entirety and probably go back for seconds. And I realized that there's actually no biological necessity for grains. So this is something that we're only fed, spoon fed, literally, no pun intended, as a sort of this modern construct that

Starting point is 00:50:21 has no basis in scientific evidence. I mean, most of our dietary recommendations are they stem from epidemiology. So nutrition science in humans is very difficult. It's very difficult to do this kind of research. Let aside from population level evidence, we can look at populations, we can see how they eat, we can see how long they live, we can see their health spans,

Starting point is 00:50:43 essentially, which is how long they're able to live free of chronic disease. And we can say, look, people that live a long time, they eat X, they eat Y, they live Z. But I think what our nutritional guidelines have done, they've made the grave mistake of attributing causality to correlations. And those correlations have really formed the basis of our nutritional guidelines, which is really unfortunate. Right. Let's feed this rat, this chemical for six months.

Starting point is 00:51:13 Oh, it's fine. Yeah. It did die. Well, even besides that, exactly. Exactly. The fat hypothesis was, they actually took out a lot of important information to fit their theory of saturated fat causing heart disease, and that became national policy. This is one of the reasons why I'm so opposed

Starting point is 00:51:32 to government guidelines for pretty much anything, but especially when it comes to nutrition, because when it becomes this guideline, and you put it out nationally, like if you're off by a little bit and you make a mistake, that's gonna cause a lot of problems with everybody in a drive. A hundred and two thousand a week.

Starting point is 00:51:48 Yeah, versus letting the market kind of decide and there's always gonna be mistakes made there too, but you find that there's more opportunities to figure out what works versus what doesn't work versus going to school. I was having dinner last night with my parents and I was having this conversation with my mom, and she's like, yeah, when you eat meat,

Starting point is 00:52:07 it needs to fit in the palm of your hand, and the majority of your food needs to be carbohydrates, because that's what we teach in school. And I'm like, no, that's so wrong for a lot of people. But it's just been fed to us for so long, and it's caused so many problems. When you started making these changes with your mom and her diet,

Starting point is 00:52:24 did she start to notice improvements in her health? Well, so, you know, when I came down from the mountain with all these insights and toe, and I became really interested in the ketogenic diet, because again, I've been familiar with the ketogenic diet since 1988. So when I started to look at brain metabolism and I came across the work of Mary Newport, who's a neonatologist who has been a really, I think, impactful pioneer in terms of spreading the word about the value of ketones for the Alzheimer's brain.

Starting point is 00:52:55 I became familiar with her work, and I essentially tried to put my mom on a ketogenic diet. And I think the most I was able to keep around it for were two weeks. When people develop Alzheimer's disease, there's a shift in food preference that occurs, where people that maybe never have had a sweet tooth begin to crave sweet, starchy foods. Oh, wow. Yeah. And so this goes back to the type 3 diabetes hypothesis in the Alzheimer's brain. So the brain can use two fuels, primarily,

Starting point is 00:53:28 to generate ATP. That is fat and glucose. Generally speaking, for somebody on the standard American diet, consuming 300 grams of carbohydrates per day, the brain is primarily using glucose to generate ATP. Glucose is the brain's gasoline. And as a byproduct of glucose metabolism, it creates free radicals. What happens in a lot of these neurological conditions, especially Alzheimer's

Starting point is 00:53:51 disease, Parkinson's disease, there's a tilting of the scale where there's more oxidative stress happening in the brain than we can effectively mop up, so to speak. Glucose metabolism creates oxidative stress because it creates a lot of these free radicals. Keytones are considered to be sort of like the brain's electricity in that sort of glucose gasoline analogy in that it's a much cleaner burning fuel source. And also, there's an inability of brains with Alzheimer's disease to properly metabolize or create ATP out of glucose. In fact, the Alzheimer's brain's ability to create ATP out of glucose is diminished by about 50%. So they're starved of their main energy. They're starved of their main energy source.

Starting point is 00:54:31 And yet interestingly, their ability to generate ATP through with ketones is actually not deterred by Alzheimer's disease aging or even certain genes that are well known to be Alzheimer's risk genes. And so, yeah, so I was like, okay, so we got to put my mom on a ketogenic diet to sort of supplement this sort of brain energy that is likely being lost in my mom. My mom, again, didn't have Alzheimer's disease, but there seems to be what's called glucose hypometabolism

Starting point is 00:55:01 evident in a number of neurological conditions. And even without having a neurological condition, carriers of the most well-defined Alzheimer's risk gene have reduced glucose metabolism in their brains, evident from the 20s, from a very young age, way prior to symptoms. So I tried to put my mom on this ketogenic diet, and by the way, that's why Alzheimer's, that's why it's speculated that Alzheimer's disease patients

Starting point is 00:55:27 have this craving for sugar, because they need more of it, they need more of it. Yeah, they need more of it, which is ironic, because those are the, these foods, especially in the modern food supplier, these exact kinds of foods that drive inflammation, which seem to promote this reduced inability of the brain to create energy.

Starting point is 00:55:44 So it's like this, it becomes this vicious cycle. But at the end of the day, putting a patient with dementia on such a rigorous dietary protocol, I mean, being on a ketogenic diet is not easy. It's really hard. It's a huge strain on the caregiver, and it's hard for the patient. And so at a certain point, I realized that I had to, you know, take a step back, teach gently, but then take a step back because I didn't, I was starting to get really emotionally invested

Starting point is 00:56:17 in my mom's diet, and I would become upset when I would go to her house, and I would see a bag of potato chips open on the counter or that bag of kind bars or whatever, you know, granola bars that have, you know, way too much sugar. That's what I was seeking for. I knew that I had it because it's so hard, man, when you're not somebody who's doing that because she's got a lot that's going on inside for her, man. She's probably depressed and sad and angry and frustrated and dealing with craving. I mean, there's got to be a million things going through her head. It's so

Starting point is 00:56:42 hard to break through somebody like that. So what was that process like? Dude, well, that's got to be a million things going through your head. It's so hard to break through somebody like that. What was that process like? Dude, well, that's why I'm so sensitive to the struggle of the caregiver. I'm not my mom's caregiver, but sometimes you hear people today because, you know, I mean, information on the fake news is real. You know, information on the internet can spread like wildfire. And there's a lot of people now in the health and wellness space throwing around the R-word reversed when it comes to diseases like Alzheimer's disease.

Starting point is 00:57:08 And I think it's very responsible because when a person, when a patient has dementia particularly when it's advanced, damage is done, right? I mean, these are diseases again that begin oftentimes decades before the first symptom. So yeah, so I want to, you know, I try to teach at first a little bit wanna, you know, I tried to teach, at first, a little bit more, you know, with a little bit more force, but at a certain point, I didn't want it to affect my mom's quality of life. Or your relationship with her, right? You don't want her to hate you.

Starting point is 00:57:34 Exactly, exactly. Or the relationship that I have with my mom. I mean, at this point, anything that I could do to make my mom happy and to make her smile, I wanna do, and I know that she's happiest when she's around me and my little brothers, and I don't want that to I don't want her to feel like oh my god I've got to hide this food from Max, you know like because I'm I'm neurotic as hell when it comes to nutrition and the things that I eat and

Starting point is 00:57:54 The supplements that I take and all that stuff but But you know, I don't expect other other people to be similar experiences with me again with my parents Like I can't even talk about nutrition with them anymore because they get so angry because I'll go in their house and I'll start throwing things away. And it's like, okay, if I want to have a good relationship with my parents, I got a chill. I can't always be like this, you know? Otherwise, I won't be able to connect with them anymore.

Starting point is 00:58:14 What were some of the things that you, some of the things that really shocked you the most as you went down this path and really, and you wrote this book now, you wrote a book called Genius Foods, which was spurred on by this experience that you had with your mom. What were some of the things that you wrote about in your book that were kind of shocking to you or mind blowing? Well, I would say definitely the notion that Alzheimer's disease begins in the brain decades before the first symptom. Alzheimer's disease is something that affects 5 million

Starting point is 00:58:41 people today in the U.S. and those numbers are expected to explode in the coming years. And this is just one kind of dementia. I mean, there's a number of other neurological conditions. And with the oldest millennial now approaching 40, to me, which is shocking, to me, it became very clear that this is something that young people need to talk about. And I'm not talking about, in the context of younger people being caregivers, I'm talking about younger people carving out their own cognitive destiny decades from now. And over the course of the research and putting into practice all of the things that I was learning about, you know, from an evolutionary lens, the kind of diet that

Starting point is 00:59:13 we might want to consume to help our brains not only survive, but thrive. I started putting them into practice in my own life, and I noticed that my brain started working better as well. I mean, I mentioned to you guys, I struggled with grades growing up. These are aspects of one's cognitive abilities called executive function. An executive function is thought by some researchers to be more important in terms of a person's overall success, life success, than IQ. And this includes abilities like focus, being able to tune out distractions, planning, decision making, aspects of one's personality, and even to some degree altruism and feeling

Starting point is 00:59:52 connected with other people. These are all factors that are heavily mediated by the kinds of foods that we're eating and the ways that we're living our lives. And I noticed that my brain started to work better. It was almost as if my brain had downshifted. As I started putting these practices into play in my own life. And I was like, okay, that's interesting. Were there major foods that did that for you that you noticed?

Starting point is 01:00:18 Oh shit, when I cut that out and I introduced that, that was something that I wasn't doing before and I instantly noticed it. Like for me, when we started to just fast, that was a big difference, and when I made this shift, because I was a very high carbohydrate eater myself, especially when I was in a competing,

Starting point is 01:00:33 I was four, 600 grams of carbs a day. And my attitude was, oh, I've always been able to keep myself in shape, why would I ever even fuck with a ketogenic diet? It just didn't appeal to me. But that attitude alone was what made me do it. I thought, well, that's a stupid reason for me not to see if it actually could improve my life. And we switched to ketogenic for a while.

Starting point is 01:00:52 And man, that was mental clarity. Instantly was one of the first things that I noticed. And it was just by cutting out all the grains and stuff and bread and shit like that that I used to have in my diet all the time. What did you notice first? Yeah, well, some people tend to feel, you know, an improvement in executive function

Starting point is 01:01:07 when they do eat carbs and sugar, but it's not clear whether or not the carbs and sugar are actually improving a person's ability to think, or if when they're eating those carbs and sugar, they're essentially treating their own withdrawal from their last meal. I would argue that. Yeah, I would argue that as well.

Starting point is 01:01:23 So once I started cutting out the grains and sugar for my diet, my energy levels definitely stabilized. And I mean, it was sort of like the tide and the harbor lifting all boats. I mean, I definitely felt like my energy levels were more stable and reliable and consistent throughout the day. I mean, I would have massive energy swings. And I've always been metabolically healthy, I've never been overweight. And I was always in what I call the 1% of grain swings. And I've always been metabolically healthy. I've never been overweight. And I was always in what I call the 1% of grain consumers.

Starting point is 01:01:48 I was religious about consuming grains only in their whole grain form. And yet nonetheless, my energy levels were like a roller coaster throughout the day. I would start every day with a whole wheat bagel. I would be starving by lunch, probably I'd end up having another sandwich or something for lunch or a brown rice bowl,

Starting point is 01:02:06 which was my favorite thing to eat. And then before dinner, dried fruit, fruit snacks, remember I found these whole wheat cookies, and I would just, I would eat six of them at a time because they were whole wheat. So, yeah, so once I started cutting all those foods out of my diet, first of all, I no longer became,

Starting point is 01:02:29 I was no longer a slave to my food. You know, I got to eat when I wanted. I was, I essentially became fat adapted. So, once you have that pipeline of fat up and running, I mean, we store fat for a reason. Our fat is there to be burned, right? Too many of us in the modern world, I think stockpileile fat and never allow themselves

Starting point is 01:02:48 to have the opportunity to burn it. Such a great point. Yeah, and so let your body burn fat. Your brain wants to burn fat. And in fact, there's a really interesting thing that I learned over the course of the book, which the book is full of these really interesting side bars. And I think the one that I'm most proud of, there's a few that I'm proud of, but I really like

Starting point is 01:03:09 the one where I talk about why human babies are born so fat. A lot of people, when a human baby is born fat, or sorry, when a human baby is born, they actually come with a body fat percentage that's higher than any mammal. I think the body fat of a human baby rivals out of newborn baby seals. But why is that? Interesting. It's interesting, right? It isn't adorable too.

Starting point is 01:03:30 They're adorable. We like to pinch that fat. But why is that fat there, right? So the human baby completes its cognitive development in the world. Unlike our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, you know, if you were to look at a chimp, when a newborn chimp is born, a chimp is born ripped, but a chimp is also born packed with

Starting point is 01:03:49 a catalog of cognitive instincts and abilities that human baby is not born with. A human baby's brain continues to develop in the real world. This is what many people call the fourth trimester, right? And it's also one of the reasons why I think humans have been able to accomplish as a species, what humans have been able to accomplish is where species, what humans have been able to accomplish. We're the most social species. We, you know, we team up, we build things together. So I think this is all owed to fat.

Starting point is 01:04:12 It's believed that the fat that a baby comes packaged with is literally like a mofie for the developing brain. A mofie sort of like an iPhone's backup battery. That fat is actually a backup battery for the developing brain. A newborn spends most of its time in ketosis, and this is to supply the brain with energy, because you might know that the adult brain uses about 25% of our base metabolic rate,

Starting point is 01:04:35 so 25% of all the things that you eat, every breath you take, is going to create energy in your brain, right? But the newborn baby's brain, the brain is actually using 90% of that baby's metabolism. Wow, all that fascinating shit that I have. It's like a brain attached to, like chubbiness. You know what I mean?

Starting point is 01:04:53 It's just attached to a brain, basically. Right, exactly. That's exactly what it is. So that brain is literally, that, that, a neonate, that human baby is literally a walking developing brain, and that fat is there to supply the energy in the form of ketones to the brain.

Starting point is 01:05:08 In fact, if you look at mother's milk, which is arguably the best food for a new... High fat. It's high fat. It's rich and saturated fat, and even medium-changer glycerides, which basically push additional ketones into the brain. So that baby is spending a lot of time. Wow. I did not know that.

Starting point is 01:05:25 That's fucking fascinating. I mean, if you look at, I mean, this is, here's a statistic that blew me away years ago, is I learned that if you're, even if you're a lean athlete, you store about 30,000 calories worth of potential ketones that you can run off of. And any given moment, the most you store in terms of glycogen is about 6,000 calories.

Starting point is 01:05:43 So in terms of an energy source, like even if you're lean, you've got way more fat that you can call upon to utilize for energy than you can with glucose. Like we're designed to run off of fat and probably because we were hunters and we killed something we ate it and then we had to wait until we killed the next animal. And so we went for long periods of time without food. Absolutely. And our ability to store sugar is really limited. I mean, you can only store about 125 grams of glycogen in your liver, maybe 400, 500

Starting point is 01:06:12 in your muscle, but your muscle can only use the glycogen that it has stored. So basically, your brain's only backup source of glucose is the liver, which only contains about 100 grams of glucose. Which you could easily tap out in a one hour sporting event you're done with that. Exactly, exactly. But we have a virtually unlimited capacity to store fat. And again, the brain loves to use fat for fuel.

Starting point is 01:06:35 This is something that we were elegantly designed to do. And the minute insulin, which is the hormone that comes stimulated when we consume carbs predominantly, becomes elevated, ketone production comes to a grinding halt. So you can imagine your average American consuming more than 300 grams of carbs per day. First of all, the brain is given no choice but to use glucose, which as we mentioned is a dirty fuel.

Starting point is 01:06:58 Do you think this is the major problem of obesity right now? I mean, I think it's so fascinating that we continue to get smarter and evolve, but yet these diseases continue to, we continue to see a rise. Do you think this is the main reason why? I think, yeah, I mean, I think definitely where we've got, we do less leisure time recreational activity than ever before in history, we're more sedentary than ever before. We're eating more carbs than ever before. And usually these carbs come in the form of ultra processed foods, which are hyper-palatable. So they're basically prone to overconsumption.

Starting point is 01:07:32 And when we eat these carbs because we're so sedentary, because, you know, very few of us relatively speaking are hitting the gym, we've got nowhere to dispose of that glucose. So I mean, the more muscle you have on your body, the greater your ability to dispose of glucose. This is an incredibly important function of muscle. I mean, aside from just making you look better naked, right? And helping you lift heavier things like muscle, muscle basically serves the function of being banks for glucose. So that when you do decide to eat that brown rice bowl or or over and dulled on fruit, which we very likely probably did seasonally as hunter-gatherers, it gives you an ability to store those carbs.

Starting point is 01:08:09 Literally in the context of modern life, we've told people to do the exact, the wrong things. When it comes to exercise, and we've said this so often on the show, probably, and this isn't the context of modern lifestyle, the most important form of exercise you could be partaking in is exercise that builds muscle. Because of that, because you're surrounded by hyper-palatable carbohydrates and processed

Starting point is 01:08:32 foods, muscle directly combats the insulin resistance and the problems that arise from consuming too many carbohydrates, far more than doing cardiovascular activity, which is a very manual way of trying to burn glycogen, and and doesn't really improve your body's ability to store it. Definitely and there's a strong relation to actually between upper body strength and lower body strength and brain health. So I mean having more muscle in your body is really important. Again for making sure that your blood sugar stays within healthy levels to you know obviously promote insulin sensitivity which is really important. Also interestingly the same stimulus that makes your muscles bigger works on your brain cells.

Starting point is 01:09:07 We now know thanks to animal studies that high intensity interval training actually stimulates mitochondrial biogenesis in your muscle tissue. You create more mitochondria, but this also occurs in the brain as well. Really important. Going back to the brain's metabolic health, mitochond mean mitochondria are sort of like the cornerstones of healthy brain metabolism, and we can support them by doing high intensity. We've traded acute disease for chronic diseases, what's happened in modern life, and I don't think people realize that the reason why we eat the way we do is humans a long time ago,

Starting point is 01:09:42 discover, well, in the context of all of human history, it's not that it's actually quite recent, we discovered that we could plant things and grow them and eat them, and so we made this huge shift in how we eat, and when you look at the crops that we grow here in modern Western societies, these are the crops that we've learned to grow the most of, and to just make them the most efficient. So we eat a lot of corn, a lot of soy, a lot of wheat.

Starting point is 01:10:08 And it's not because those were always a part of human history or were cornst, it's because those are the easiest to grow and we were able to stop starvation from it, which is a great problem to solve. But now we've got this other problem where, if that's all you eat or if that's the majority of what you eat, we're encountering chronic health problems like never before. Who are some of the people that you interviewed and talked to that to put your book together?

Starting point is 01:10:32 Who are some of the experts that you interviewed and work with? Well, I definitely, so, I mean, one of the first people that I interviewed was Susanne de la Monte, who coined the term type three diabetes, which has since been referenced over and over and over again in medical literature and lay literature alike. I have interviewed Dr. Alessio Fuzano, who is one of the, well he's the founder of the Center for Sealiac Research at Harvard. He's one of the leading experts on gluten and autoimmunity. I interviewed one of the researchers that has basically given us the strongest evidence to date that our cognitive health is something that we have a say in when it comes to diet and lifestyle. I've actually, and over the course of the book, I've actually contributed to research at the Alzheimer's Prevention Clinic in New York at Wal-Cornnell Medicine.

Starting point is 01:11:20 One of my mentors, who is the director there, his name is Richard Isaacson, he's a good friend of mine, and we've collaborated on research and traded notes as well. I mean, I really, I tried to call information from everywhere. If it pertains to having a better brain, I'm interested, I'm obsessed, and I tried to synthesize it all in genius foods. It also, aside from dementia prevention, I'm really interested. So, I noticed that my brain started working better. I started to really look into this topic. There's not quite a name for it.

Starting point is 01:11:51 I call it cognitive optimization, but it really is this burgeoning line of research that looks at how various foods and nutrients affect people that are cognitively healthy, young, cognitively healthy people. They're not typically a population that's studied, but there's really interesting research on how certain nutrients can actually improve the way that your brain functions in the here and now, even if you're young, which is kind of striking because we already consider

Starting point is 01:12:15 young people to be at their peak of cognitive abilities. So what are you finding? Well, you know, most people in this country are deficient in at least one essential nutrient. And these nutrients are readily contained in the whole foods that we're not eating. So, you know, take dark leafy greens, which I think the CDC found that only 10% of Americans are consuming an adequate amount of vegetables.

Starting point is 01:12:41 These foods contain really powerful chemicals called carotenoids, which I sort of highlight in the book, in particular, lutein and zezanthin, which are found in vegetables and egg yolks and fat of grass-fed cows, because these carotenoids are found in plants, which cows eat. When cows are fed corn, they don't embed the carotenoids in their fat. Because corn has very few. So when you get a grass-fed cow, one of the main health benefits of eating grass-fed meat

Starting point is 01:13:08 is that the carotenoids at these cows basically ingest when they consume grass embeds themselves into their fat. So these carotenoids basically, they are really important for eye health. They help shield the macula against, you know, potentially damaging frequencies of light. But it's also been recently shown that these same crotenoids actually make their way up

Starting point is 01:13:29 to the brain where they can boost something called visual processing speed. So, this is really important for athletic performance and just overall, the way that you are able to visually take an stimuli, process it, and respond to it. It's a key aspect, I would say, of your cognitive function. And University of Georgia researchers found that in young healthy college-aged students, they were able to boost their visual processing speed by 20% when supplementing. Well, that's significant.

Starting point is 01:13:58 That's significant. When supplementing with lutein and zizanthin, these two plant-based carotenoids, which are readily found in kale, spinach, avocado, and also in there, what make pastured egg yolks look so orange. And so, yeah, these carotenoids, really important in terms of boosting your health and coincidentally,

Starting point is 01:14:19 although I don't think it's a coincidence, these same foods that are high in these carotenoids also are associated with reduced brain aging. So going back to the dementia space, I mean, it it's coincidence. These same foods that are high in these carotenoids also are associated with reduced brain aging. So going back to the dementia space, I mean, it's all related. So again, going back to like dot connecting, we really connect the dots, I think, in a cool way in the book.

Starting point is 01:14:37 And then also we make the leap to this other burgeoning field called nutritional psychiatry, which to me is really interesting. Growing up in New York City, I would always struggle with seasonal effective disorder. I would get really depressed, come winter time, and so mental health is something that's become really important to me. And also, I think everybody, just as a natural part of living in 2018, occasionally deals with depression, anxiety, things like that. So I document in the book, really interesting research on how food can improve mood. I talk about, and I've interviewed the researcher who published the first ever randomized control

Starting point is 01:15:13 trial to use a diet as an anti-depressant, published in 2017. We just had Michaela Peterson on the show. It's Jordan Peterson's daughter, and she had severe depression since the age of 12 and autoimmune issues and whatnot. Through diet, she was able to go off almost all of her medications, especially her antidepressant drugs, and she had to go on a radical diet. She actually only eats meat at the moment, and I do think there's an autoimmune component there, but you're hearing more, more of it, but there's always so much

Starting point is 01:15:45 pushback, especially when you talk about the psychological effects of food. What's that been like for you? Have you been getting a lot of pushback from people? I mean, to be totally honest, no, not a lot of pushback at all. Yeah, which I'm really happy about. It's the way you deliver it. You don't deliver it in a very dogmatic way. Every time you've said something, which I really appreciate, because sometimes when people come and they, I, we all agree that for the most part, a majority of people are over consuming carbohydrates, but the same time too, we don't demonize the food. If you're a fucking sports athlete and you're moving and you're burning, you know,

Starting point is 01:16:19 7,000 calories a day, by all means, you know, carbohydrates could probably serve you, but for the most part. So I think it's the way you do. For maximum performance, you know, we know studies show you carbohydrates probably will make you perform a little bit better, but there's a difference between optimal health and optimal performance and many times that don't necessarily connect. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I, you know, I really want to, my goal,

Starting point is 01:16:41 one of my goals is to try to get this message out beyond what I call the paleosphere, you goal, one of my goals is to try to get this message out beyond what I call the paleoosphere. I think it's so important to not just speak to the echo chamber of your social media networks and really get this information out to the people that need it. I think about the audience that I talked to on the Dr. Osho, for example, which I've been really lucky to get to talk to. When making a recommendation to people, I have to be cognizant of the fact that 66%

Starting point is 01:17:05 of the US population is either overweight or obese. You know, 50% are either diabetic or prediabetic, which is essentially glucose intolerance. So, do I think that grains are toxic like many people would suggest in the paleo world today? No, not for somebody if you're working out and you're going to the gym and you're not eating a whole lot of processed foods and the like, but for the majority of people in the Western

Starting point is 01:17:29 world, which have become basically intolerant of glucose, yeah, probably. Why are you eating grains, which are basically energy, dense chains of glucose stored in the endospirum of these plants when you could be eating dark leafy greens, which are full of micronutrients, so we know that you're not getting. Right. So, what is it? What is the, if you could, could you just still, like, what a healthy diet would look like for the brain? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:17:56 Well, so, and you touched on this a little bit earlier. You know, I started using, like, the evolutionary lens to try to figure out what diet we might have consumed in the time in which our brains evolved and how we might be able to emulate that diet today. So we know that for 200,000 years, since we've been anatomically modern humans, if not long before that, the land was our buffet, right? There's 50,000 edible plant species around the world. And yet, as of 10,000 years ago, when we became essentially slaves to the handful of crops that we could domesticate,

Starting point is 01:18:32 we essentially turned our backs on that diet, which paved the way for the fact that today our diets are dominated by three plants, okay? Wheat corn and rice. So again, these plants help to prevent starvation and help to grow the species by providing a really cheap source of calories, but they're very nutrient dense.

Starting point is 01:18:52 And so over time, our brains actually lost the volumetric equivalent of a tennis ball. This has been well documented. And... Oh, repeat that, a lot of people don't know that. Yeah, so our brains actually lost volume. So we... Yeah, so we ate a certain way for, you know,

Starting point is 01:19:08 a hundred thousand, 180,000 years that led to the evolution of our brains, this magnificent supercomputer, which we are each heir to today. We turned our backs on that diet, our brains shrank. So I was like, okay, well, we haven't really had, we've had grains for a relative blip on the radar in terms of our evolutionary time scale for about 10,000 years. So clearly they're not essential.

Starting point is 01:19:31 There's no essential grain out there. And grains don't provide nutrients that you can't find more efficiently anywhere else. So my first, the first thing that I did was I cut, cut grains out, at least initially, to see how I would feel because I realized that these are not needed for the brain. And I started to look at the nutrients that the brain needs to thrive. So I mean, we have a handful of nutrients that we know that the body needs to avert, to

Starting point is 01:19:56 avoid what are called deficiency diseases. So these are the 42 vitamins and minerals that we know that we need. But a lot of the recommended daily allowances for these vitamins and minerals are set only to avert, again, deficiency. So vitamin D we know is the, you know, whatever, I think it's like 400 or 800 international units that we're supposed to intake every day is really set only so that a population might avoid rickets, for example. But I started to really look at all of these nutrients

Starting point is 01:20:28 the kinds of foods that they're found in. And I was like, well, darkly if your greens are really the best that you can get when it comes to just a broad array of micronutrients that we know that we need magnesium, for example, folate, which is folate, I've become, especially for people that carry the RCHFR gene mutation. Folates really helpful in terms of your body's methylation cycle and keeping

Starting point is 01:20:50 an amino acid called homocysteine low. When you have elevated homocysteine, it actually accelerates the rate of brain atrophy. And by eating folate, by eating it or supplementing with it, particularly, and also importantly, you've got to, you know, do this in tandem with vitamin B12 and vitamin B6. Really important, and these are found in folate, is named for foliage. That's where the name comes from. So, dark leafy greens, I really started to build my diet more around those.

Starting point is 01:21:18 Kale, spinach, arugula, arugula going back to a heart health first-second. Arugula is the top source of nitrates in the diet. Really important for the healthy functioning of your vascular. So I started eating more arugula, more spinach, things like that. Then I started looking at fats. What are the healthy fats to consume? So really good evidence on extra virgin olive oil. At the population level, extra virgin olive oil is the hallmark of the Mediterranean diet. They consume lots of extra virgin olive oilginalovoil. But as we mentioned, that's part of a dietary pattern.

Starting point is 01:21:49 We can't tease out from that kind of research, whether or not X-roverginalovoil is causally involved in the Mediterranean dietary pattern, or it's just sort of there as just an aside. Right. But actually, there are really good studies being done on extra virgin olive oil, both animal trials and there was a very really good long term, large population randomized control trial done out of Barcelona, Spain called the Predimed trial, where they actually put patients on

Starting point is 01:22:21 three diets. One was a low fat diet, which is still widely recommended in two versions of the Mediterranean diet, which is already high in fat, but one was supplemented with even one version of those of the Mediterranean diet was supplemented with even more extra virgin olive oil about a liter additional per week.

Starting point is 01:22:37 And they found that at the end of, I believe it was successful. That's a lot. It's a lot. It's like 8,000 calories. Yeah, that's a lot. That's what I do. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:22:46 I'm Italian. We basically bathe in it so. We bathe in it, yeah. Garble it, yeah. I mean, yeah, they use it, I mean, in the Mediterranean region of the world, they use it as a sauce. They pour it on things, they cook in it. I mean, it's like, they don't, you put, I mean,

Starting point is 01:23:00 show your mother like a tube of corn oil or a bottle of corn oil, they're probably like, what is this? Yeah, absolutely. It's got no flavor. Yeah. So Max, walk me through, and we're going to make some really cool YouTube videos along these lines, but walk me through a morning to night, normal day of eating, and your choices,

Starting point is 01:23:19 and then why you took those choices, and you're covering some of them right now, but walk me through a day and why you choose those foods. Cool. So I mean, I wake up in the morning, I drink a glass of water. If I'm doing a particularly low carb iteration of my diet, I'll throw some mineral salt in there. When you drop insulin, which you do very, very easily

Starting point is 01:23:37 on a low carb diet, your kidneys spill sodium. So sodium is a very important electrolyte. It's a nutrient. It's been demonized again by the modern dietary guidelines, but very important. And actually, one of the probably most noticeable aspects of my protocol is when I'm doing very low carb to add a little bit of salt.

Starting point is 01:23:58 It gives me, it keeps my blood pressure up, but not up in a negative way. It just keeps it so that I feel like I've got a sense of energy and also adds in some other trace minerals as well. That an hour, two hours after I wake up, I'll have my first meal of the day. I don't like to eat first thing in the morning. First thing in the morning, we have a hormonal milieu

Starting point is 01:24:20 that wants to burn fat. Cortisol is at its peak that it's gonna be throughout the day, first thing in the morning, right? And Cortisol is the body's chief catabolic hormone. It's there to liberate stored sugar from your liver. It's there to liberate stored fats that your brain loves to use. I mean, most people, when they wake up, they're already in sort of a mild ketosis.

Starting point is 01:24:37 How much does drinking coffee kill that? Well, I don't think it kills it. It helps it. Yeah, doesn't help it. Yeah, you don't have to sell a coffee. Yeah, coffee encourages ketosis. So why not drink that? Are you not a coffee drinker?

Starting point is 01:24:50 Well, I do drink coffee. No, I do drink coffee. I try not to drink it for, you know, 45. I try to wait until that cortisol, that peak morning cortisol spike begins to subside before I have my first cup. But yeah, I do drink black coffee. I'm a big fan.

Starting point is 01:25:05 And the research on coffee, I think, is very supportive of it as being a sort of health tonic. Again, within like sort of a range, right? We were talking about this before, we started recording, but some is probably better than none, especially if you're not sensitive to it, but too much doesn't necessarily equate to better health either, right?

Starting point is 01:25:22 That's right, Justin. Yeah. Yeah. So. That's right, Justin. Yeah. Right. Um, so. So, judgmental. So I try not to like mess with that hormonal meal you too much. I wanna, you know, allow my bite of the burnt fat, or, you know, liberate stored fuels.

Starting point is 01:25:35 And then I'll break my fast with my first meal of the day, which usually so if I've, sometimes I'll do like a morning workout and if I've had a really intense workout and I wanna like get that glycogen back in my muscles, I'll have maybe a sweet potato with my food or maybe I'll go for some rice. I don't always do this, but I do think when you're trying to maintain high intensity output,

Starting point is 01:25:59 it's really important to have that glycogen in your muscles. We hit a certain threshold in high intensity work where we need glycolysis really to push through a lift. So, but then again, I'm not a power lifter. I'm not really into bodybuilding so much anymore, so I don't always do this. But, if I hadn't had a big workout, I'll go for what I call a huge fatty salad. So I'll really pack a bowl with dark leafy greens, douse it with extra virgin olive oil, you know, lots of color in there because again, those carotenoids are really important

Starting point is 01:26:35 and they're plant pigments. Maybe they're on egg in. You need fat because carotenoids are fat soluble. So if you're eating a bowl of dark leafy greens with fat-free dressing, which so many people do, you're actually your absorption of these, most of, you know, some of the most important compounds in those greens becomes negligible.

Starting point is 01:26:54 What a great point. Yeah, it becomes negligible. Whereas by adding fat to that salad, you actually it becomes sort of like a slip and slide for these nutrients to enter your system. Then I try not to snack too much, and by the way, I don't, I never count calories. I always eat until I'm full.

Starting point is 01:27:11 Sometimes I'll go back for seconds. I think when you're eating whole foods like this, and especially when you put a focus on protein, getting that feeling of satiety is so important, and protein is the most satiating micronutrient. So this is really key. We can get into why, I think it's really interesting, but moving on to the day, I think, you know, I try not to snack so much, but you know, from around the house, sometimes I

Starting point is 01:27:37 do, I always reach for nuts, very important, and dark chocolate is what I call a genius food, you know, rich in these flavanoles that have been shown to be really beneficial Nuts, very important. And dark chocolate is what I call a genius food. Rich in these flavanoles that have been shown to be really beneficial to the brain. Also a great source of magnesium, very important. 50% of the US population doesn't consume enough magnesium. So I like to tell people if it's as easy as eating more dark chocolate, have at it.

Starting point is 01:28:02 And then for dinner, again, I like to eat a lot. So I'll usually, you know, roast a piece of fish or have a grass-fed beef burger or something without the bun, throw it on either a bed of dark leafy greens or I'll roast up some vegetables. Um, chicken, you know, I love to, you know, go forerie chicken. I love to bake up some chicken legs, really good. I used to go only for white meat, and I was like really into the lean protein thing, but actually chicken legs are a great source of collagen protein. Collagen is really important as well. We used to eat the whole animal. Now we only eat muscle meat, but when you eat a chicken leg, cartilage tends to be found around the joints of animals, and so you get a lot of that

Starting point is 01:28:48 really important. I think a lot of people don't realize when you stick to whole whole natural foods and you avoid grains on top of it, your bodies and natural systems of satiety work pretty well. Yeah, you tend to not overeat as a result of that. I think it's harder to overeat. Of course, there's lots of other reasons why people overeat. There could be emotional reasons

Starting point is 01:29:09 for it. But when you're foods, and this is just through my experience, I've been trained people for over 20 years. And when they would stick to whole natural foods without counting calories or macros, many times, not always, but many times, they would lose lots of body fat, just because their bodies are telling them when it's time to stop eating and when it's time to start eating. Whereas when you introduce all these hyper-palatable processed foods, you're just hijacking the shit out of that.

Starting point is 01:29:32 You just want to keep eating and that's what those foods are designed to do, by the way, they're engineered to do that for you, to make you hungry. Absolutely, I mean, you could do a little thought experiment in your own kitchen. You could take a baked potato or a spoonful of sugar and put it in your mouth and see how prone

Starting point is 01:29:46 those two foods are to overconsumption. They're probably, you're probably not gonna wanna over consume just straight up sugar put into your mouth and a baked potato by itself is not very good, but the minute you mix that sugar with eggs and flour and you create cookie dough. Oh my God, it's like the fourth of July in your brains reward reward center. Right.

Starting point is 01:30:05 When you take a baked potato or try eating a stick of butter, it's not that good. But the minute you combine the two, it becomes what's called hyper palatable. It pushes your brain to a bliss point beyond which you can't control yourself. I mean, we can do this in our own kitchens, but food manufacturers are super aware of that. Yes, master it. Yeah, because they know that when it comes to these hyper-processed foods, once you pop, you can't stop. Right?

Starting point is 01:30:28 So do you get a lot of people asking for recommendations for supplementation and how do you feel particularly about this boom in people trying to get these supplements to increase your cognitive performance. Oh, like Neutrophic. Neutrophic. Neutrophic, yeah. I'm gonna have a shitty diet. Right, exactly. But they're avoiding that topic.

Starting point is 01:30:54 100% well, that's it. I mean, I'm not a big fan. And I, there's, for most people, I would say, there's so many low-hanging fruits in people's diets and lifestyles that to throw a supplement on top of that, I think is bad news. I like to say, I mean, my official answer to that whenever people ask me is that, food is the ultimate nootropic. So I'm not a big, I never take any brain supplements.

Starting point is 01:31:17 I just, I focus on foods. I mean, drinking coffee, coffee has caffeine, caffeine's an nootropic. Most of the nootropics that you'll pay a lot of money for basically are just jacked up caffeine cocktails with some other things that are probably not super effective. Right. Absolutely.

Starting point is 01:31:33 Who do you hope to reach with your book or what do you hope to accomplish with it? I mean, I think it's, you know, I hope, I think it's relevant to every person. I mean, I really do. I think whether or not you have Alzheimer's in your family or any kind of every, the human brain is highly delicate and damaged prone,

Starting point is 01:31:50 particularly in the modern food environment. And so, in so far as our brain really is the battery that makes everything that we love possible and helps us to connect with one another and love the ones, I think it's something that we need to protect as if our life depends on it because it does. I also think that with so many people today struggling with memory problems

Starting point is 01:32:12 and one in six adults is now on a psychiatric drug, one in seven younger people between the ages of 18 and 39 complain of memory problems. I mean, I think our brains are clearly not working the way that they ought to. Too often today, you know, proper brain function is a privilege afforded to too few when I think it should be a right. I mean, if you're alive, you are literally the heir to this incredible flagship product of Darwinian evolution. It should work the

Starting point is 01:32:39 way it's meant to. And so, you know, I really hope, it's a book that I think everybody can read. It's written so that everybody will be able to get something from it. But in particular, if you do have a family history of dementia, if you're scared of cognitive decline, of Alzheimer's disease, I wrote it to be the ultimate tone to dementia prevention. And in a way that I think is probably going to be more impactful, I hope it's going to be more impactful than current books it's going to be more impactful than current books that are out there about dementia prevention because it's not packaged in the language of dementia prevention. So that's my secret like Trojan Horse goal is that people

Starting point is 01:33:13 read it wanting to learn about how to increase energy, how to increase focus, cognitive resilience, all that stuff. And in the end inadvertently end up preventing their own dementia. That's my like secret goal because trust me man, I've like seen the monster that is dementia, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently,

Starting point is 01:33:36 I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, I'm currently, of confusion for most people, there's a lot of misinformation out there and I just think that getting this message out to young people, people that are not typically attuned to dementia-related content. That's why I don't really use the term dementia in terms of its marketing and I'm trying to really steer the conversation in terms of prevention because, because again, it begins in the brain decades

Starting point is 01:34:06 before the first symptom. And people don't realize just how expensive it is to treat Alzheimer's and dementia. Two of the most, dementia is one of the most expensive, it's one of the biggest costs that we incur with our, with our healthcare costs. And you know, if you combine that with like diabetes, it will bankrupt us.

Starting point is 01:34:25 100%, we're on a trajectory to become bankrupt if we don't figure this out soon. And I think I'm glad you're putting out a book like this. I'm glad more of this information's going out because this is not just a problem for, at a shape unhealthy people. This is a problem for everybody, even if you are healthy and fit,

Starting point is 01:34:42 because at some point you may have to pay for all this stuff, or at least you're going to incur the side effects of this economy crashing, because people are just not healthy. Who's going to take care of all these people? Who's going to pay for it all? You're so right. Yeah. I appreciate you writing this book. I appreciate you coming to show, man.

Starting point is 01:34:59 Dude. Great conversation. Thank you so much for having me. It really means a lot. Yeah, no, I'm looking forward to the YouTube. So make sure you guys check out that, because we'll definitely put up some cool videos with Max for sure he's got a ton of good information. Definitely thanks again Max. Thank you guys. Thank you for listening to MindPunk. If your goal is to build and shape your body,

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Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 732: Max Lugavere- Genius Foods

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