Max Lugavere, journalist and Alzheimer’s prevention researcher, reveals how Western diets—60% ultra-processed foods, seed oils (up 1,000% since the 20th century), and glyphosate exposure (found in 80% of U.S. urine)—drive dementia risk despite flawed amyloid hypotheses and industry-funded misinformation like the 1967 Sugar Research Foundation study. He champions nutrient-dense animal foods (eggs, grass-fed beef) over veganism, citing protein’s role in resilience and sauna’s 22–65% dementia risk reduction with 2–3 weekly sessions. Critiquing ultra-processed plant-based meats for glyphosate residues and misleading health claims, Lugavere warns against corporate-driven dietary guidelines, urging personal research over unproven trends to combat modifiable risks like insulin resistance and hearing loss. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, so I've been deeply immersed in the Alzheimer's dementia prevention world for the past almost decade at this point.
I'm not a, just to lay it out up front, I'm not a medical doctor.
I didn't take the academic route.
I started college sort of on a pre-med track, but what ended up happening was I ended up going into journalism straight out of college and I ended up working for a TV network in the US that was backed by Al Gore back in the day.
And so I got to hone my storytelling chops there, but I'd always been really passionate about health.
Nutrition, medicine, things like that.
But in 2011, my mother started to display the earliest symptoms of what would ultimately be diagnosed as a form of dementia called Lewy body dementia, which is a rare form of dementia.
It's described as feeling like you have both Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease at the same time, and certainly that's what I observed in my mom.
And so when she started to display those symptoms, It had taken me and my family completely off guard.
I had no prior family history of any kind of neurodegenerative condition.
My mom certainly wasn't old at the time.
She was 58. She was still a spirited, youthful woman in middle age.
She had all the pigments in her hair.
For me, I was in between jobs and I really had the opportunity, I was grateful to have had the opportunity to go with her to different doctor's appointments.
And I grew up in New York City, so we had access to cathedrals, to medical advice and examination.
And in every instance, we were met with what I've come to call diagnose and adios.
Basically, a physician would run a battery of esoteric tests on my mom, scribble down a few notes on a prescription pad, and send us on our way.
But we had to ultimately take a trip to the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, which is known for taking on really complex medical cases.
They built a team around the patient.
And it was there that for the first time, my mom was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative condition.
She was prescribed drugs for both Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.
It wasn't until a few years later that she actually received the Lewy body dementia diagnosis.
But at that point, I started to dive into the research because I had been trained as a journalist.
Which, you know, you're not trained as rigorously as a PhD scientist, but you're kind of taught similarly to investigate things, to maintain skepticism, to, you know, ask questions.
And I started to look into the literature and just generally get a sense of what it was that my mom had been diagnosed with, what this entailed.
And I realized that in most cases, dementia begins in the brain decades before the first symptom, 10, 20, 30 years even, by some estimates.
And so for me, this became something really important to explore as a potentially preventable condition, because I realized for the first time that I had a risk factor, that my mom, you know, was my risk factor, essentially.
I hadn't even yet looked into my genes at that point.
But so I... I started looking into it and I came across all of these fascinating insights, which we can talk about.
about.
But I decided at that point, um, that I, to, to sort of do what I could to help push the, you know, move the needle with this condition, um, that I would use my skills, which at the time were, uh, filmmaking.
Cause I had just come off, you know, I was like producing content for TV and I was on camera.
I was a communicator as well.
And so I decided to do a documentary, um, on the topic of dementia prevention, the first ever, uh, documentary on dementia as a potentially preventable condition.
We've all seen dementia documentaries on HBO and networks like that, and they always push this very doom and gloom mentality about the condition, which I understand.
It is a very difficult condition.
It's America's most feared condition, after all.
And this is a condition that, you know, 90% of what we know about Alzheimer's disease in particular, which is just one form of dementia, has been discovered only in the past 15 years.
So it's a very rapidly evolving field of science.
But I felt like if we know that this is a condition that begins in the brain decades before the presentation of symptoms, then to me what that is, that's a very empowering insight.
That means that we have agency to change our cognitive destiny.
So, I started shooting with my mom, which was very hard to do because, you know, I mean, the person who I love most in the world, I was watching decline right in front of the camera.
But also, I decided to exploit my media credentials at the time to then talk to researchers and scientists around the world.
And I was doing my own research in the primary literature as well, but I decided to Yeah, to go to these labs and clinics where they're really ushering in dementia as a potentially preventable condition.
And I actually signed myself up to become a study subject in one, actually, at Weill Cornell in New York.
And ultimately, I became a collaborator with the principal investigator there, who's become my mentor over the years, Richard Isaacson.
And I got to co-author a paper in a clinician's textbook on the clinical practice of dementia prevention.
Because after all this time, I've learned so much about the condition, the etiology, and so forth.
But this documentary, I'm super excited for it.
It's called Little Empty Boxes, and we have a trailer up at littleemptyboxes.com.
Well, it's a nod to something that my mom says in the film, which is actually something, you know, my mom's condition, it seemed like her cognition had just severely downshifted, almost overnight.
My mom never forgot who I was or anything like that.
The presentation of Lewy body dementia is different from Alzheimer's disease.
And once you've seen one case of dementia, just generally speaking, you've seen one case of dementia.
Every dementia is different.
But in my mom's case, it led to her often losing her train of thought soon after beginning to express an idea.
And she would often say things that just didn't make logical sense.
So it's sort of a nod to something that she says in the film.
But I'm super excited because we inked a partnership with a wonderful foundation called the Alzheimer's Foundation of America.
Though Alzheimer's disease was coined in 1906 by a physician named Alois Alzheimer, the brain has long been thought of to sit in sort of the ivory tower of the brain guarded from what happens down below by what's called the blood-brain barrier.
But we now know that the brain is influenced by everything that happens down below.
The dogma, especially with regard to Alzheimer's disease fundraising over the past couple of decades, has really been that this is a condition that you can't treat, prevent, or slow.
But we now have really solid data to say that it is a potentially preventable condition.
So when it comes to our risk for developing Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia, there are basically two categories of risk.
You have your non-modifiable risk factors, of which there are three.
So you've got your age, your genes, and your gender.
So your age.
Age is still the number one risk factor for developing Alzheimer's disease, right?
You can't change your age yet.
You have your gender.
If you're a woman, your risk is double that as compared to a male's.
And you have your genes.
Now, genes is something that we can actually talk about because you can't change your genes, making them, therefore, a non-modifiable risk factor.
You can change the expression of your genes, how your genes express themselves moment to moment.
So, for example, if you live in the United States and you carry a copy or two of what's called the APOE4 allele, so it's basically a polymorphism, meaning it's not a mutation.
It's actually a very common gene variant.
About one in four people carry the APOE4 allele.
In the United States, that increases your risk anywhere between 2 and 14 fold, depending on whether you carry one or two copies.
It makes everything more, it makes your brain more vulnerable in general to insult, whether that is from TBI, exposure to pollutants, exposure to unhealthy ways of eating.
So the ApoE4 allele is thought to be the ancestral version.
So it's the first version.
All non-human primates are ApoE4-4.
So they carry the ApoE4 allele.
Not just one copy, but two copies.
And yet they don't develop Alzheimer's disease.
When you look to people...
We've evolved these different isoforms of the ApoE gene.
So we have ApoE2, 3, and 4. And just to reiterate, ApoE4 is the ancestral allele.
So cultures that have longer exposure to modern agriculture Actually, there's lower frequency of the ApoE4 allele.
The thinking is that agriculture, right?
Like when we became domesticated, when we started basing our diets around grains, when we became more sedentary, less generalized in terms of our cognitive, the daily cognitive tasks that our ancestors would have undertaken, that it's selected against the ApoE4 allele.
So it's possible that that allele Which, again, is very common, one in four people carry it, is sort of the canary in the coal mine for the Western way of life.
That if you adopt a Western way of life and you eat, you know, today, 60% of calories that adults consume come from ultra-processed junk foods, right?
We're more sedentary than ever before in human history.
We've got more stress, we're exposed to more environmental pollutants, that that is what dramatically is what pulls the trigger, right?
Because genes load the gun.
It's our diets and our lifestyles that pull the trigger.
But if you were to take somebody with that same genotype, right, and move them to a less industrialized part of the world, like, say, Ibadan, Nigeria, where the frequency of the ApoE4 allele is just as common, it has little to no association with Alzheimer's disease.
So just to put that another way, what that suggests is if you're genetically at risk for developing Alzheimer's disease in the United States, you might simply move to Ibadan, Nigeria or another less industrialized part of the world and see that risk abolished.
So with this consumption of processed foods that is responsible for a large percentage of the calories that people consume today, is the human body adapting to that?
Is that why this ApoE4 is less prevalent than it is in other cultures?
You know, it's possible, although with age being the primary risk factor, it's unlikely that that has put significant selection pressure.
So I'm not sure, but we do know, you know, there are, I think, gene studies where they've looked at expression of genes that produce enzymes that break down amylase, right, like starch and things like that, and those are increasing, I think, over time.
It's a little out of my wheelhouse, but generally, I mean, yeah, the standard American diet is completely aberrant from the diet that our ancestors consumed, the diet that really we attribute to the development of the human brain.
60% of the calories that we consume today come from ultra-processed, packaged convenience foods.
It's a massive problem.
I mean, it's driving obesity.
It's driving type 2 diabetes.
If you have type 2 diabetes, so going back to Alzheimer's disease and this gene expression, So the ApoE4 allele is, you know, you have it, but it's not necessarily destiny.
And 90% of Alzheimer's cases, I'm sorry, more, like 99% of Alzheimer's cases are attributable to some interplay between our genes and our environment.
There's a very small proportion of patients with Alzheimer's disease that have a gene mutation that is a deterministic gene.
And this is called the early onset familial Alzheimer's gene.
And that gene basically guarantees that you're going to have Alzheimer's disease.
But that makes up only 1-2% of cases.
The vast majority of people who develop Alzheimer's disease, it's the interplay between their genes and their environments.
So excluding environmental factors like pollutants and plastics and all sorts of other things that affect people's bodies, what are the other things that a person can do to make sure that they at least are preventing The possibility this happened.
So if you're saying that, like, if the symptoms take, if it takes decades to exhibit symptoms, what are they seeing when they say that the people exhibit signs or exhibit some sort of a future of dementia?
There are studies that look at what's called brain glucose metabolism.
Something that you see in Alzheimer's disease is a reduced ability of the brain to generate energy from glucose.
It's called glucose hypometabolism.
This is a defining feature, actually, of Alzheimer's disease.
And I say Alzheimer's disease, again, my mom didn't have Alzheimer's disease, but it's the most common form of dementia.
And so all the research on it really looks at mostly Alzheimer's disease.
And then you get sort of like all-cause dementia in there, but like these more niche variants like Lewy body, like frontotemporal, there's very little research on them.
So when I say sometimes I use Alzheimer's disease and dementia interchangeably, but with Alzheimer's disease, one of the primary features is called glucose hypometabolism.
So the brain's inability to create energy from glucose.
So if people see this, if they get a test and they find out that they have this ApoE4, and then they get their glucose checked, how are they checking that, their ability to process glucose?
I just, I can't imagine being so sensitive to people's feelings that you ignore a very clear warning sign that they're doing something that's insanely unhealthy.
And preventable.
And it's something that should be broadcast to everybody.
Everybody should know this is a real factor in a host of different problems that are going to happen with your body.
And, you know, that's one of the things that I've enjoyed is a lot of your posts on diet and food, but we'll get to that.
But before we get into that, when you talk about preventative measures that someone can take, other than decreasing your waistline, losing weight, what are the other factors?
And we can tackle this from a number of different angles, but when you exercise, you're literally pushing fresh blood up to the brain, and blood carries oxygen, nutrients, antioxidants, things like that.
When you exercise, you are increasing the expression of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, which is sort of considered to be like a miracle-grow protein for the brain.
You're increasing the expression of BDNF.
You're changing the neurochemistry of the brain, essentially, with a workout.
I mean, I'm a different person when I leave the gym than I was walking into it.
So you can subjectively, you can feel that, that it's doing something to your brain.
You're reducing inflammation.
You're reducing blood pressure.
you're normalizing healthy blood pressure.
This is something that is, uh, this is, I mean, crucially important, but one of the seminal, uh, trials that I use in my argument, which is now, you know, finally being accepted by, you know, the, the, the medical establishment, but, um, the sprint mind trial found that for people who are aggressively treated for their high the sprint mind trial found that for people who are aggressively treated for their high blood pressure with pharmacologic drugs, but, um, but you know, this ties into exercise because exercise is, uh, just as effective as blood But
But for these people who were put on aggressive blood pressure normalizing therapy, they reduced the risk of developing mild cognitive impairment.
And mild cognitive impairment is sort of a prodrome.
It's considered like pre-dementia.
You'll often develop mild cognitive impairment before you're diagnosed with...
And actually, I... I like to remind myself this because I dislike doing cardio.
I don't like running on a treadmill.
I love lifting weights.
I've been doing that my whole life pretty much.
But cardio is super important because we have a ton of evidence on cardio as it pertains to BDNF, which is this brain-derived neurotrophic factor.
And we know this because it's very easy to get a mouse to run on a treadmill and then to sacrifice it and see what's going on in the brain.
It's a lot harder to get a mouse to do squats and bench presses.
You know, so from like the basic science standpoint, we have a lot of evidence on specifically what cardio does for the brain, right?
But resistance training we know in terms of bolstering whole body Resilience, robustness.
We know that your muscles are a very important glucose disposal sink, right?
So, I mean, we live in a time where your average American consumes 300 grams of carbohydrates every single day, right?
Our bodies don't have a way to store carbohydrates beyond the storage capacity of our muscles and our liver tissue, right?
It's not like fat.
You can store 3,000 calories of fat in a single pound of fat tissue, right?
But your muscles, your liver combine only about 400, 500 grams of glucose in a given day or at a time, rather.
And so, yeah, resistance training, you're building up your musculature, which is going to allow you to continue to exercise and be mobile, which we know is really important for the brain, for glucose disposal.
It's crucially important.
So I think both are key.
You can obviously tweak your resistance training regimen to have a more sort of cardio aspect to it, right?
Like shortening the time between sets.
But I do think that there's value in doing both.
But yeah, exercise, it's just at this point, I think it was two or three years ago that the American Academy of Neurology finally made exercise a...
Something that physicians could prescribe to treat somebody who's presenting with subjective cognitive impairment in the, you know, as a prophylactic so that they won't go on to develop mild cognitive impairment.
And the last thing that I would ever want to do is sort of undermine confidence in science.
But there's science, and then there's the science, you know?
And especially in the field of Alzheimer's disease, there was this huge revelation recently that the past 16 years of Alzheimer's research, in many ways, was built on fraud.
That is one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about because it's so crazy.
Please tell people about this because it's so insane and it's so hard to believe that this could happen in modern medicine, especially with something that affects so many people's Alzheimer's.
So basically, the prevailing hypothesis as to what causes Alzheimer's disease over the past century, right, has been what's called the amyloid hypothesis.
So ever since Alois Alzheimer discovered or named Alzheimer's disease in 1906 and looked into the brain of the cadaver and saw these...
Plaques aggregating around neurons, right?
In the extracellular space around neurons.
The plaques have come to be sort of the force, the focus of Alzheimer's research, really.
And the idea was that these plaques were the causative force in the condition.
Much like the plaque on your teeth, right?
You see these plaques in the brain of a person with Alzheimer's disease.
And so that's really been the target of drug therapy.
And the idea was that until we can find a drug that would reduce the plaque burden, reduce the plaque, get rid of the plaque in the brains of a senior person, right?
Somebody who's at risk for developing Alzheimer's disease, that it's a disease that you can't prevent.
There's nothing to do to treat.
But the problem was that they can never actually tie the plaque to cognitive decline, right?
Like the clinically meaningful symptom, the symptomology of Alzheimer's disease, that it messes up your cognition, that it makes you, you know, that it makes you forget your loved ones, ultimately forget who you are, ultimately forgetting how to eat, right?
And nourish yourself.
They can never tie those symptoms to the plaque, right?
Until a paper published in the journal Nature in 2006.
So what happened was this researcher named Sylvain Lesney at the University of Minnesota basically was looking into these, the brains of mice who are bred to overexpress what's called amyloid precursor protein, which is a protein.
which is the precursor to amyloid beta, which is the protein that makes up sort of the skeleton of these plaques that we see aggregate, right?
So what he did was he isolated a subtype that he called A-beta star 56 and injected it into a young and healthy mouse or rat mouse.
And he saw that that mouse's cognition rapidly declined.
So that was the missing link, right?
That he found a subtype of this amyloid beta protein that serves as the backbone of these plaques, which could never be pinned to the cognitive decline itself, right?
The memory loss itself.
But he claimed that he found it, and when injected into the body of a healthy mouse, He saw rapid decline in terms of their cognition, right?
So that was the missing link.
And so at that point, faith in the so-called amyloid hypothesis was starting to wane because they couldn't find effective drugs.
Alzheimer's drug trials have a 99.6% fail rate, so worse than for cancer, worse than for any other disease state, really.
And the drugs that are currently FDA approved on the market, they're biochemical band-aids.
They're minimally effective.
I mean, they modulate various neurotransmitters, but, you know, I've heard it described like, you know, expecting to remove amyloid from the brain of a person with Alzheimer's disease and to see their cognition come back is sort of like thinking that if you remove all the headstones from a grave, you know, people will come back to life, right?
Like there's widespread neuronal dysfunction and death in the brain of somebody with Alzheimer's disease.
And in tandem with that, scanning technology has allowed us to look into the brains of healthy controls.
And what we see is that there's amyloid plaque in the brains of healthy controls as well.
So there's no correlation between amyloid burden in the brain and one's cognitive abilities.
But nonetheless, when this paper came out in 2006, It renewed fervor in terms of this hypothesis because he found the subtype of amyloid that can be injected into a young and healthy mouse that would then seriously impair their cognition, right?
And so that renewed interest in this hypothesis and it's what ultimately led to the fact that just a couple years ago, two years ago, There was a highly controversial drug that was approved by the FDA called Aducanumab or Aduhelm.
And this is a drug that effectively reduced plaque burden in the brain.
For the first time, they found a drug that could actually reduce plaque burden in the brain.
But it didn't lead to any improvement in cognitive symptoms.
Nonetheless, it was given the green light against tons of opposition that the FDA received.
They put together a panel of 11 people Neuroscientists, neurologists, right?
Eight of them told the FDA not to approve this drug.
So 35% of the people in the trial had significant brain swelling.
And half of them had bleeding associated with that brain swelling because these are antibodies.
So aducanumab is an antibody that basically causes your own immune system to target the amyloid plaques, right?
And so what that's doing is causing an inflammatory response in the brain, right?
So 35% of the patients in the phase two trials, I believe, had horrible side effects and no clinically meaningful effect on their cognition.
But nonetheless, because it effectively did reduce the amyloid plaque burden, there was this intense pressure, right, to get it greenlit.
Because that's like the amyloid hypothesis right there, right?
So, huge problem.
One of the big vocal sort of skeptics about this drug, aducanumab, is a guy, a Vanderbilt researcher named Matthew Schragge.
Matthew Schrag was very vocally against the approval of this drug, which, again, doesn't do anything.
Horrible risk of side effects, no clinically meaningful effect on the symptoms that we want to improve for a patient with Alzheimer's disease.
And so he was vocally critical of that.
And then he also was working on some other drug.
And what was revealed basically in the science paper that came out was that he was dabbling on a website called PubPeer, which is a site where you can go.
It's known for post-publication peer review.
So before paper gets accepted for publication, it undergoes this peer review process, right?
And so he found that there were a lot of sort of red flags that were being brought up on this message board, essentially, about this nature paper, this like seminal nature paper that was published that found it was like the missing link between the amyloid hypothesis and the clinically meaningful symptoms, meaning memory loss.
And he did a bit of like image sleuthing, which is not generally part of the peer review process, right?
And he looked at these, the way data is illustrated in this paper, as it is in research generally, it's called a Western blot, which is like a visual representation of data, the presence of proteins and so forth.
And he found that they were all, for the most part, fabricated.
In fact, this A Beta Star 56 wasn't found by any other team.
Hasn't been found by any other team.
It basically came to light that it was essentially fake.
It's the thing that I'm most passionate about in life, right?
Fitness, nutrition, sleep, disease prevention.
My mom is what galvanized that passion for me, right?
And what my mom went through and my desire to prevent it from happening to others that I care about and ultimately people, you know, from all walks of life.
But, you know, a lot of people go into science, go into medicine because it's a career path, right?
It's a career path for somebody wanting validation.
It comes with prestige.
It comes with money.
It comes with all the things that, like, make sense that a person would want, right?
But then ego gets in the way and it becomes really problematic.
This, right, is it's not just like the lost time and all the money that went to continue looking down this sort of path of the amyloid hypothesis, right?
Looking in the wrong place, really.
Because amyloid is there, but it's sort of like what you see in atherosclerosis, right?
Like cholesterol.
It's like everybody has pointed at cholesterol as being the bad guy, because cholesterol is clearly there in atherosclerotic plaques, right?
But what's causing it to be there?
That's the question that these researchers...
Should have been asking all along.
And some have, right?
Like, there have been other, like, my mentor, as I mentioned, you know, at Cornell, who I've been lucky enough to work with over the years on certain projects, you know, knew that there was another way.
It's this glucose-hypometabolism, right?
It's like, but there's no money in that.
There's no money in saying, like, keep yourself as insulin-sensitive as possible.
You know, reduce your exposure to environmental pollutants.
Don't hit your head too hard.
All these different modifiable risk factors.
It's not druggable the way that this amyloid beta protein is druggable.
And so I think the worst thing about it is that anybody who would advance an alternate viewpoint over the past couple of decades would be ridiculed and silenced by the, quote, amyloid mafia.
And this happened to me.
When I first started doing my documentary, Little Empty Boxes, which, when I first started doing it, it had a different name.
It was called Breadhead.
And I could talk about why I named it that, but that was always sort of a working title for the project.
But somebody at one of these foundations, right, like...
There's all these big Alzheimer's foundations.
I'm lucky to be working on this project with one who really believes in me and the project, the Alzheimer's Foundation of America.
But there are these other non-profits that really what they are is just like a front for perpetuating the status quo and keeping the funding pipeline open for drug discovery.
And so when I first got started working on my film, I did a Kickstarter campaign for it.
And one of these quote-unquote non-profits, right?
Deeply invested in the amyloid hypothesis came out and wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal disparaging me and my project and any other alternate sort of viewpoint and talking glowingly about that aducanumab drug, which at the time had yet to be approved, right?
And it was so painful to me at the time because I was working on this project out of the love and passion that I had for my mom and my desire to get the science out, to catalyze interest in this science.
It takes 17 years on average for what's discovered in science to be put into day-to-day clinical practice.
So I was like, that's time we don't have to lose when the brains of our loved ones are at stake.
And so, yeah, I was directly in the crosshairs at the time for this amyloid mafia.
Yeah, because the medication is profitable and that the whole avenue was thought to, you know, if you could find a drug that would reduce amyloid burden in the brain, I mean, that's going to make shareholders really happy.
And so there's no real way of telling how many people have died from this drug because most of the people that are taking this drug are already experiencing this neurodegenerative disease and you could easily chalk it off to that being the cause of death.
Yeah, I mean, I can't speak to, like, you know, people's experiences on it currently, but I do know that the trials were, you know, I mean, if I had a loved one, based on what I know about this drug and those trials, my loved one currently would not be on that drug.
They would be perhaps experimenting with, you know, and this is a very difficult sort of road to go down.
I guess it's easier to say if I had dementia, right?
Yeah.
If I myself had dementia, I would be experimenting with a ketogenic diet on myself and other ketogenic therapies.
Because ketogenic diets, what they do...
So as I mentioned, in the Alzheimer's brain, the ability to generate energy from glucose is reduced by about 50%, 45-50%.
Its ability to generate energy from ketone bodies is unperturbed.
So the idea is that a ketogenic diet can essentially keep the lights on in the Alzheimer's brain.
It's not a cure.
But there has been research On patients with Alzheimer's disease, mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease, that ketogenic diet intervention can actually improve functional capacity in those patients, which is everything, right?
So even though this study has been shown to be fraudulent, and even though that medication has shown to have some pretty severe side effects, and even though the amyloid plaque hypothesis has kind of been disproven now as being the cause of it, Why are they still prescribing that drug?
I mean, think about the sheer numbers of people that have dementia, Alzheimer's, and these significant, horrific problems, and they're basing the treatment of it on fraud.
And the fact that they still do it without having this immediate cease, what could be, other than generating more revenue, what else could possibly be the reason for continuing to prescribe that drug other than ignorance?
Well, I think that it's not that this paper came out and suddenly the amyloid hypothesis has been debunked or whatever.
You know, like, there is still a ton of money invested in this hypothesis, and there are still a lot of researchers who think whether or not this drug is the, you know, this is like version one.
So there are still many researchers who think that this is, like, still the target, still the appropriate target.
But once they realized that the study was fraudulent, and that when injected into these mice and it causes significant degeneration, that this is not really accurate, that this is all fake, So then they don't have a mechanism.
And you get drugs that, you know, one of them, Namenda, it's like an NMDA receptor modulator.
And then you get another one, Donapezil, which works to boost, you know, acetylcholine.
They're biochemical band-aids.
They do nothing to address the underlying pathology.
And yeah, I mean, it was literally until, I believe 2020 was the year 2017, I think, was the first time that the Lancet Neurology acknowledged that a significant proportion of dementia cases were attributable to modifiable risk factors.
So that's sort of their way of saying that, look, there's a significant proportion of these cases that are potentially preventable, right?
You want to be a more ethical, moral, kinder person.
And I respect their motivation.
The problem is in practice.
Both in monocrop agriculture, which is horrific for the environment, and then also in the effects on the human body.
It's very difficult to do correctly.
And we've had conversations before, and unfortunately, there's a lot of documentaries and a lot of people that are propagandizing this ideology.
They're doing it like it's a religion, and that's how they treat it.
They ignore any evidence to the contrary.
They won't even look at eggs, which are really kind of – I mean, if you have chickens or if you know someone has chickens or if you can get eggs from a place that has free-range chickens, it's like zero ethical dilemma.
They lay eggs every day.
They're not going to be chickens.
It's just free protein.
If you let these chickens roam around and eat grass and bugs and do the stuff they're supposed to do, you have literally one of the most healthy sources of food that's available to the human body.
And it's ethically free.
Like if you're a person that's a vegan and you're doing it for moral purposes, but you recognize the fact that you're not getting the appropriate amount of nutrition, get chickens.
If you have a backyard, get some chickens.
They lay an egg almost every day.
And they're better for you than any egg that you're going to buy in a store from grain-fed chickens.
There's a museum in Montana, in Bozeman, and they show you two options of this raptor.
They show you one option, like the Jurassic Park version, and then they show you on the other side of this raptor, they have it completely covered in beautiful colored feathers, just like a chicken.
I consider eggs to be a cognitive multivitamin, actually, because if you consider the fact that when an embryo is developing, the central nervous system, and the nervous system in general, is the first structure to coalesce, right?
So an egg yolk literally has everything in it that nature has deemed important to grow a brain.
It's, I mean, the yolk, it's like, again, a cognitive multivitamin.
And it's no surprise that egg yolk, people are, you know, like, vegans are, they just see red, right, whenever you say cholesterol, whenever they see that, like, there's cholesterol in a food.
But it should be no surprise that an egg yolk is rich in cholesterol because the brain is rich in cholesterol.
Right?
Like, despite accounting for only 2% of your body's mass, 25% of the cholesterol in your body is located in your brain.
That doesn't mean that you don't need to eat cholesterol to support brain health.
Your brain produces all the cholesterol it needs.
It's called de novo cholesterol synthesis.
But an egg yolk has a little bit of vitamin B12. It's got choline.
Choline is one of these crucially important micronutrients.
Actually, the adequate intake for choline is probably less than what it should be when you account for our brain's needs.
Yeah, it's a super important neurotransmitter involved in learning and memory.
And in fact, one of the drugs that's prescribed for Alzheimer's disease modulates that cholinergic sort of pathway.
But yeah, choline is crucially important.
It's found in egg yolks.
I think egg yolks maybe is second place to like beef liver, which is the top source for dietary choline.
But again, something that we under-consume.
And studies show that people who consume more choline have reduced risk for dementia.
And choline is like one of these foods, one of these nutrients could almost be considered a surrogate marker for animal protein intake because you find it in both plants and animals, but it's much more concentrated in animal protein.
Speaking of which, what do you think about these desiccated supplements of heart and liver and testicles and all these things that you see being sold now?
I have a friend of mine who is in the medical field and he's very concerned about this because he's like, I don't know.
I mean, I think our ancestors probably consumed brain early on as a good source of DHA fat, which is one of the most important structural building blocks of the brain, right?
Docosahexaenoic acid, DHA fat, and the brain is rich in that.
But yeah, I mean, I think it's a valid concern, although I haven't, to be honest, I haven't looked into it too deeply.
I do think that liver is a great food.
It's one of the most nutrient-dense foods there is.
And I do think that there is a little bit of truth, at least in the case of liver, where like supports like.
Like we know that beef liver is a top source of choline, right?
And we know that choline directly supports liver health.
Because it helps to export fat.
So choline is actually a good treatment for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
Because it helps to get fat out of the liver.
So in that way, I think eating liver can support liver health.
And the liver is like a crucially, I mean, it's a vital organ obviously, but it plays hundreds of roles in the body.
Yeah, you know, I get, like, on social media especially, like on Instagram, I get a lot of shit from pretty much everybody.
Like, the vegans don't like me, right, because I promote animal products.
The carnivores don't like me because I'm a big believer in the value of dietary fiber and plant, you know, phytochemicals and the like.
The evidence-based, like, credentialist community doesn't like me because I'm not a, you know, I don't have any credentials after my name.
But yeah, and then the paleo community, because I recently have sort of come out sort of not being a huge fan of like butter and ghee.
You know, I'm a huge fan of dairy and dairy fat in general, which dairy fat, so all natural fat-containing foods contain some proportion of saturated fat, polyunsaturated fat, monounsaturated fat, right?
So like any natural fat-containing food is going to contain some saturated fat.
So demonizing any type of fat, I think, doesn't make any sense.
Now, what are the criticisms against seed oils specifically?
Like, I've seen you speak about grapeseed oil, which is a really fascinating one, because it really wasn't something that was in the human diet until, as you were saying, that winemakers realized, hey, we're leaving money on the table with all this grapeseed.
So again, some industrious entrepreneur saw that as a byproduct of winemaking, you're losing out on all these grape seeds, right?
And grape seeds are rich in oil, like all seeds are, right?
So if you can extract the oil...
And get rid of the noxious, like, aromas and flavors, then you've got something that you can sell, right?
For, I think it's like a $500 or $600 million a year business, if not more, these days.
So grapeseed oil, like any of these grain and seed oils, like corn oil, canola oil, which comes from the rapeseed plant, soybean oil, they're referred to sometimes within the food industry as RBD oils, refined, bleached, and deodorized.
Okay, so what's the negative effect of things like...
I would imagine that in the human diet, consuming an exorbitant amount of this kind of grapeseed oil...
It's really not even possible.
Like, how many grapes would you have to eat to get with the seeds to get the kind of the amount that you would get from a tablespoon of, like, grapeseed oil?
Yeah, I mean, humans, we don't even, like, generally, we're averse to seeds for a reason.
I mean, if you've ever tried to chew into a grapeseed, it's bitter, right?
You spit it out.
So that's why these oils didn't exist in the human food supply before 100 years ago.
We hadn't had the chemistry labs, the erector sets required to extract these oils and then run them through all these myriad processes to make them to some degree palatable and able to be utilized by the food industry.
They used to be used as engine lubricants and things like that.
So, I mean, for one, they all undergo that step called the deodorization step, which is the step that removes the noxious odors and aromas from these oils, makes them palatable.
It's basically the food industry's equivalent of the Witness Protection Program, right?
Because it takes an oil and it makes it so bland and free of any kind of character, right, that it can be used to roast nuts in.
It can be used to make granola bars.
It can be used to saute food in a restaurant.
It could be used to fry food in, for example.
And the problem is, one of the problems with these seed oils is that that deodorization step creates a small but significant amount of trans fats.
And we know that there's no safe level of trans fat, artificially man-made trans fat consumption.
Their most recognizable form was in partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, which were outlawed, right?
Five, six years ago, something like that.
But you can still find man-made trans fats on the market in the form of these grain and seed oils.
Now, the dose likely makes the poison, as it does with most things.
But your average American today is over-consuming these oils.
Well, I mean, they didn't exist, again, in the human food supply prior to a century ago.
And their use has increased anywhere between 250 and 1,000%.
1,000% for soybean oil in particular, which is the most commonly used grain and seed oil.
And so we're over-consuming these fats.
They harbor these trans fats.
When we cook with them in particular, when we expose them to high heat, especially for prolonged periods of time, they generate poisons called aldehydes.
And some of these aldehydes are really toxic.
I mean, they're neurotoxic, they're mutagenic, meaning they're cancer-causing.
You know, one such aldehyde is acrolein.
Acrylene is found in cigarette smoke.
It's found in all kinds of industrial pollutants.
And we can see it in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease.
Well, I'm not 100% sure as to how it's produced in cigarette smoke, but it is a byproduct of the burning of garbage, and it's created in myriad industrial processes.
Well, I think one of the big fears, another big fear with regard to these oils is that they might not be acutely inflammatory.
So I think a lot of people, and this is what tends to get pushback among the evidence-based crowd on social media, you'll hear claims that these oils are inflammatory.
And I think this is more an issue of semantics.
They're not acutely inflammatory, but they may be chronically inflammatory because they provide the precursors to our body's inflammation pathways, particularly the omega-6 fats.
Omega-3 fats are, generally speaking, anti-inflammatory, right?
They're able to convert to compounds called resolvins, which quite literally resolve the inflammatory cascade.
But omega-6 fats provide the backbone to these pro-inflammatory signaling molecules in the body, which are responsible for heat, pain, redness, swelling, things like that.
And inflammation underlie, you know, it's a process that is not bad, but when it's chronic and low grade, it's associated with, you know, all of these chronic conditions that we're talking about.
Certainly Alzheimer's disease, other forms of dementia, but also cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and the like.
Now, are they going to actually stimulate an inflammatory response?
You know, I don't think so, unless maybe the oil is highly damaged, but if it's, we'll just say, like, it's a fresh oil, which none of these oils are fresh, because they've all undergone...
Which is like, I mean, if you look at extra virgin olive oil, you'll seldom find a good extra virgin olive oil in plastic, because producers know what they've got.
But these grain and seed oils, you know, they're sitting on the shelf in plastic.
They're sitting, you know, with extra virgin olive oil, for example, one of the tips that I offer people when buying extra virgin olive oil, which I think is medicine in many ways to the brain, is you want to buy it in small bottles, right?
Small glass, opaque bottles, because extra virgin olive oil, unlike wine, only degrades over time.
So there's no, like, appreciation that occurs with time.
The same thing is true for these grain and seed oils, but they sell them in these big tubs, right?
We leave them in our warm kitchen environments.
And these oils are very prone to a process called oxidation, which is like essentially a damaged oil, right?
Like you wouldn't see a piece of rotting food on the counter and intuitively think to yourself, that looks good, right?
You can't necessarily see it happening in these oils.
But nonetheless, we're told over and over again to integrate them into our diets and our lifestyle.
So they're easily oxidized.
They provide the raw materials in abundance to our body's inflammation pathways, right?
And we likely consume them in a ratio that was maybe around 4 to 1, omega-6 to omega-3s for most of our evolution.
And today we're consuming them in a way higher ratio, 25 to 40 to 1, omega-6s to omega-3s.
So I just don't think that this is like – I like to take the precautionary principle approach, right?
These oils, again, they didn't exist in the human food supply, right?
I don't have all the data to convince the most ardent evidence-based practitioner.
I like to say that my approach is evidence-based, but not evidence-bound.
I think that we need to be highly skeptical of foods, especially foods and supplements and products that haven't been around all that long.
This is a mass sort of experiment being laid out on a vast stage.
And I don't think that we have the we don't have good data to say what they are or aren't doing right to us necessarily.
But I do think that because these oils are so easily oxidized and they're of particular relevance to the brain, right?
I think that matters.
We don't yet know what they're doing to our brains.
Lipid peroxidation is a major feature in the Alzheimer's riddled brain, right?
We know that as we consume more of these polyunsaturated fats, which again are what predominate these grain and seed oils, these highly easily oxidizable types of fatty acids, right?
We know that in nature where you see a higher proportion of polyunsaturated fats, you see a higher proportion of vitamin E. Vitamin E literally exists in nature to protect PUFAs, to protect polyunsaturated fats.
We know that your average American is under-consuming vitamin E. Like 10% of Americans consume adequate vitamin E. So as our intake of these polyunsaturated grain and seed oils increases, our need for vitamin C increases, we're not consuming adequate vitamin E. You mean vitamin E? Vitamin E, yeah.
Yeah, you said C. Sorry, vitamin E. And so we're under-consuming vitamin E. That's going to have consequences, right?
Because vitamin E, literally, its role in the body is to protect lipids, right, from oxidizing.
And you can look to parts of the world, like in Israel.
Israelis do everything right in accordance with what the nutritional and the medical orthodoxy would say to do about nutrition, right?
They consume more of these omega-6 dominant grain and seed oils than anyone on the planet.
You think that we consume a lot of grain and seed oils here in the United States?
They consume 10% more.
Why is that?
You know, I don't know.
It could just be that they're more health conscious.
So, like, healthy user bias infuses all of these, which we could talk about.
But, like, this is a big confounding aspect of nutritional epidemiology.
But in Israel, they consume about 10% more of these types of oils than we do here in the U.S. And their health is horrible.
They have the same amount of heart disease.
They have skyrocketing rates of cancer, right?
Type 2 diabetes and the like.
But nonetheless, you look at their diets and they're the picture of, like, they would be, like, the prize client of any, you know, of these, like, more orthodox dietitians.
Extra virgin olive oil is like the primary oil that I use.
I generally, you know, I use avocado oil when I'm cooking at very high temperatures, but for the most part, extra virgin olive oil is an oil where you can look at the entirety of the hierarchy of evidence, and we see that it's beneficial.
It's also the oil used in the Mediterranean dietary pattern, which is to suggest that we use any other oil is not an evidence-based recommendation when the Mediterranean dietary pattern is the dietary pattern that the medical and nutritional orthodoxy is seemingly in love with for every other reason, right?
So they exclusively will use extra virgin olive oil.
And we know that extra virgin olive oil, it's very heat stable.
So it's about 15% saturated fat.
The rest is monounsaturated fat.
You get a tiny proportion of polyunsaturated fat.
But the fats in extra virgin olive oil, they're already chemically stable.
And the small amount of PUFAs in extra virgin olive oil Are protected by the vast array of antioxidants that extra virgin olive oil contains.
Extra virgin olive oil actually has a compound in it called oleocanthal, which is as anti-inflammatory as low-dose ibuprofen.
I think avocado oil is good, but you're missing out on the opportunity to get some of those phytochemicals in olive oil, extra virgin olive oil, particularly.
So extra virgin olive oil is just like, you crush olives.
That's how you get extra virgin olive oil, and then you protect that oil.
The other types are, well, there's filtered and unfiltered extra virgin olive oil, but you generally want to buy filtered.
I know some people might see unfiltered and think that that's the one to buy because it's more pure, but actually what you end up getting with unfiltered oil Is little olive microparticles and water, which can accelerate the degradation process of the oil.
If you're a single person like me, you want to just buy as small of a bottle as you can find, and then use that, and then just keep buying those small bottles.
If you're a big family and you're using it all the time, a bigger liter bottle, I think, will suffice.
But we can look to randomized control trials like the PREDIMED study, which is one of these seminal nutrition studies, because it's a huge population, multi-center trial.
People used a liter of extra virgin olive oil a week in their families.
They had profoundly improved cardiovascular health, metabolic health, brain health, and even like I believe anthropometric features like their waste.
First of all, balsamic vinegar, vinegar in general, acetic acid is the primary ingredient that you'll see across all vinegar variants.
And it can help to reduce...
It can induce satiety.
So actually vinegar is a good...
One of these foods that's oddly satiating.
It can reduce postprandial glycemia.
So like the blood sugar spike after a meal.
So vinegar is a great, great food.
The balsamic vinegar does have a little bit of sugar in it, but I don't mind.
I'm not...
I think that the benefits outweigh the risks.
And also, balsamic vinegar has a compound in it.
I forget what the acronym stands for, but the acronym is DMB, so people can easily find it.
It's one of these long, complex chemical designations.
But that's been shown to actually support gut health, like support the microbiome, particularly for people who consume a lot of red meat, which is awesome, which I do.
I'm a big advocate for the consumption of grass-fed beef and things like that.
I think only if you're really counting calories, which I don't endorse.
I think balsamic vinegar is great.
You also get a little bit of resveratrol in balsamic vinegar.
I think balsamic vinegar is great.
I happen to love it.
And also, people that eat a salad every day, so this is a really cool research from Rush University, found that people who eat a big bowl of dark leafy greens every day have brains that perform up to 11 years younger.
Wow.
Yeah.
So this could be like healthy user bias.
Like, again, nutrition, even the recommendations that I make, like, you know, a lot of healthy user bias confounds many of these kinds of studies in the world of nutrition because we just don't have many long-term randomized, you know, large population, multicenter randomized control trials, right?
But the research shows that regular consumers of dark leafy greens, so I like to say like a salad a day, that's what this research found, that they have more youthful brains by up to 11 years.
And when you actually look at what dark leafy greens have in them, first of all, they're one of the most nutrient-dense foods that we have.
I mean, the most nutrient-dense foods that we have access to are going to be animal products, right?
But dark leafy greens are up there because they're so calorie sparse, and they are a good source of folate and vitamin C. And we also know that they're one of the best ways to get those carotenoids like lutein and zeaxanthin, which is not just associated with better cognitive aging and lower risk for cognitive decline.
But in young and healthy college students, they've actually shown that when you give...
People who are already thought to be at their peak of cognitive prowess, supplemental lutein and zeaxanthin, that you see an improvement by about 25% in visual processing speed.
I think if you have like, you know, kidney stones like in your family, things like that, like if you are, generally you would know, you know, I think there are genes that play a role in this or if, you know, somebody in your family or if you yourself have had them before, you know, calcium oxalate is what you want to be careful with.
But I don't think that like eating a salad a day is going to put you at risk.
I think if all you're doing is eating kale day in and day out, like there's a famous case report published in the medical literature of a woman who heard that bok choy could help prevent type 2 diabetes.
And so she was eating like two kilograms a day of raw bok choy.
She grew a goiter on her neck.
But I think most people are not going to, you know, I think the benefits outweigh the risk.
There are benefits and risks associated with eating anything.
So I think each person has to look at each food.
And also, I don't believe that there's a one-size-fits-all diet.
Like, I think that some people, like, it makes sense to me why some people would do well on carnivore diets, right?
To me, it's about kind of identifying what foods work best for you, right?
Right.
And even things like, you know, dietary fiber.
A lot of people say that they have difficulty digesting dietary fiber, but it's not necessarily a problem with the fiber.
You likely haven't cultivated a microbiome to contend with whatever, you know, quality or quantity of fibers that you're consuming.
So people that from one day to the next will go and just dramatically increase their fiber intake, which I think sometimes you go on some of these vegan-run social media accounts, they make it seem like fiber is the only nutrient that you need, right?
And so a lot of people will then dramatically increase their fiber intake, and that sets them up right off the bat for bloating, gas, all kinds of digestive problems.
You know, a lot of these plant defense compounds have a beneficial hormetic effect in us.
The issue is if you don't react to them well, is it a problem with the compounds themselves or is it a problem maybe you've got some degree of gut dysbiosis, right?
You've lost some degree of gut resilience to be able to reap the full benefit from those types of compounds, right?
I think that this, I mean, it makes a lot of sense today, right?
We live in a time where there's widespread gut dysbiosis, gut problems, problems with the microbiome, right?
Where, you know, many people are born via C-section, for example, which medically certainly indicated in some instances, right?
They're not being breastfed, overuse of antibiotics.
And we live in a society, especially over the past two years, that's become overly obsessed with, you know, what I call hygiene theater.
And so, you know, I think that we've lost a bit of resilience in our gut.
And so that can sometimes affect how we, you know, whether or not we're able to re-benefit from these compounds that are, to some degree, toxic, right?
If your system is already robust, then putting a little bit of stress into the system, that's going to foster anti-fragility, which is a concept that I love, right?
Making yourself harder to kill, which I think is a great sort of way to frame, you know, your wellness, like, nutritional approach, right?
But if you have, you know, an impaired microbiome, for example, or if your gut mucosa Has become degraded, which is sort of this like demilitarized zone between your gut lumen and your gut epithelium, right?
Well, generally it's caused by not consuming enough fiber because we see that when you don't consume enough dietary fiber over time, the bacteria, certain species of bacteria in your gut will actually eat the mucin that comprises this gut mucosa that sort of acts, you know, it's like this sort of bacteria-free zone in your large intestine that separates the interior contents of your gut and your gut microbiome from your epithelium.
Does that balance out if someone does try to incorporate a carnivore diet or maybe even a version of the ketogenic diet that eschews plant protein or plant matter?
Does that eventually bounce back?
I mean, is that like a temporary effect where this bacteria searches for fiber, doesn't find it anymore, and then attacks the mucus membrane?
My understanding is that sometimes the root cause of these problems can be bacterial overgrowth.
And so when you do an elimination diet like a carnivore diet, for example, you starve out the bad bacteria, right?
And so you can kind of create like a milieu that ultimately then becomes more friendly to the reintroduction of these kinds of fibers, at which point you can start to build up that resilience and that mucosa again.
I think that the carnivore diet is a really great – can be a great short-term therapeutic diet.
um But again, I think running around being afraid of these plant quote-unquote toxins.
The evidence on the consumption of fruits...
If fruits and vegetables were really trying to kill us, they're doing a terrible job.
But the research on them suggests that people who consume more tend to live longer.
Now, I'm not, like, I definitely advocate for, like, both, you know, and I'm a big animal protein, you know, and I think that, like, people have different tolerances to different vegetables, right?
I know somebody who, if he's in the same room as an allium, which is like garlic, leeks, shallots, onions, and things like that, You know, he's just like, he has to quarantine himself for a different reason, you know?
Or like a cold plunge, things along those lines, where your body's reacting to this intruder or this invasion of excess heat or cold and producing this beneficial effect to the overall body.
What I do is I'll put my fingers on the radial artery in my wrist and sometimes you can get a sense that your body is having a mild aerobic exercise session.
There's only so much of that that you can take between the sweating and your heart rate is increased.
You get this feeling of dysphoria that washes over you.
There's a sauna that I go to sometimes in LA that gets up to 225 degrees.
Yeah, I mean, that's the argument against this thing about a hermetic effect of leafy greens.
So, the most favorable sauna duration and temperature associated with lower dementia risk were 5 to 14 minutes per session at a temperature of 80 to 99 degrees Celsius.
Higher temperatures over 100 degrees Celsius were in fact associated with an elevated risk for dementia.
Okay, so if you go too hard...
Yeah, I took my sauna temperature down a little bit.
I was at 189 degrees for 25 minutes and I took it down to 189 for 25 minutes and I took it down to 185 for 20. Because I was just, I was so exhausted when I get out of there at 189. I was like, I think I'm fucking myself up.
And when hanging out with Laird Hamilton, unfortunately, that's psycho.
He gets it up to 220 degrees and he puts oven mitts on and he gets on an airdyne bike in the sauna.
So Laird, his protocols, I'm not sure if he goes in the cold plunge first.
If he goes in the cold plunge first, then it kind of makes sense that he can get in that sauna and ride that Airdyne machine at such a high temperature.
Yeah, I mean, there's probably an effect where just being in it longer and, like, you're able to be in it longer when it's at a lower temperature is beneficial.
I think what it does for your blood pressure is amazing because we already talked about the fact that having normal blood pressure is key to keeping your brain healthy.
And there was actually also a risk reduction from the same lab at University of Eastern Finland showing you that stroke risk is reduced.
I'm 55 now, so it's like the one thing that's shown to me to really have a benefit on the way I feel, other than exercise, my overall sense of well-being in my body is sauna and the cold plunge combination.
So, obviously, blood pressure, you know, we've hit on it a few times.
But when we eat foods that are rich in compounds called nitrates, like beets, arugula.
Arugula is the top source, calorie for calorie.
Dark leafy greens in general are a great source of these compounds called nitrates.
Sometimes you'll see supplements on the market that are like nitrate, beetroot powder to boost nitric oxide in the body.
We rely on oral bacteria, our oral microbiome, to reduce nitrate from our produce to nitrite.
Reducing means that these bacteria remove an oxygen molecule.
And it's that nitrite that enters the nitric oxide pathway to boost nitric oxide, which has the overall effect of reducing blood pressure and increasing blood flow, right?
But if you frequently swish with antiseptic mouthwash, so not all mouthwashes, but alcohol-based bactericidal mouthwash, you're nuking indiscriminately the bacteria in your mouth that are pivotal, critical in that pathway.
We know that alcohol is something that does have some degree of benefit, right?
If it's like a stress-relieving tool for you, if you use it as a social lubricant.
But in general, we know that ethanol is a neurotoxin and that alcohol inflames the gut.
It drives the translocation of endotoxin from the gut into circulation.
People who even moderately consume alcohol have accelerated shrinkage in the hippocampus, the memory center of the brain.
So, you know, I think alcohol is one of these things where, like, you know, if you have a healthy relationship with it and you drink infrequently, I think it's fine.
But, yeah, I don't know exactly, you know, if it's, like, I don't think that research has been done yet.
Like, what a transient bit of alcohol.
But we do know that this bacteria is on the tongue.
So, presumably, if the alcohol is sliding down your tongue, right?
And when you're talking about these mouthwashes post-workout, so is it specifically post-workout or is there a time ever where those mouthwashes are not dangerous?
So if you rather work out and then brush your teeth with fluoride-based toothpaste afterwards, would that have a similar effect as this mouthwash does?
I mean, the toothpaste that I use, I look for nanohydroxyapatite.
I don't know if you ever talked about that here on the podcast, but that's sort of a fluoride alternative that they've been using in Japan for some time that has shown to have a remineralizing effect on par with fluoride.
But hydroxyapatite is a fully natural...
Our bones are made of hydroxyapatite.
Our teeth are made of hydroxyapatite.
So it's totally natural.
It doesn't have any endocrine disrupting potential the way that fluoride does.
Fluoride is also a suspected endocrine disruptor, which I think is not good.
I mean, we ingest fluoride in the drinking water sometimes.
There's this debate.
I mean, typically with toxins, you get what's called a dose effect, right?
The dose makes the poison.
That's sort of like one of the hallmark platitudes in the field of toxicology.
But the reason why endocrine disruptors are so treacherous and so difficult to study is they possess what's called a non-monotonic dose response.
So you might have increasing risk of a certain effect with a higher dose with these endocrine disrupting compounds, but you might have a completely different effect at a low dose.
So that's what makes them tricky to study and also just treacherous in general in terms of their effects on our health.
I mean, the Environmental Working Group found that, you know, umbilical cord has between 200 and 300 different industrial chemicals, like waste products, in a population representative sampling of fetuses.
That there's like BPA, right?
Like bisphenol A, which is a known xenoestrogen, right?
We've known for 100 years at this point that it acts like estrogen in the body.
And it's everywhere.
These are like the everywhere chemicals.
I mean, you had an expert on the show talking about how it's, you know, reducing the anogenital distance in males.
Anytime you're drinking out of plastic, if it doesn't have bisphenol A, it's going to have bisphenol S, generally, unless it says no bisphenols, which is rare.
But going back to the mouthwash, I mean, they've done studies that show that frequent users, so just to be clear, this is two or more times per day, of antiseptic mouthwash have a 50% increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes and a doubling of risk for the development of hypertension, which is high blood pressure.
I think they have xylitol-based mouthwashes that I believe are selectively antiseptic.
But I believe that good oral health shouldn't require much more than flossing regularly, brushing with something that doesn't have fluoride in it, and also eating a diet, a biologically appropriate diet.
I mean, grains and grain products are the worst thing for your dental health.
And if you think about it, an animal in the wild without its teeth is quickly a dead animal.
So I think that whatever is going to be good for the oral microbiome is going to be good for systemic health and vice versa.
And so grain products, refined grains, added sugars, I mean these are the worst foods, right?
Like anything that's gonna cause any kind of like starch-dominant food product that is easily retained in the gum line, major driver of cavities.
Yeah, I think there's some truth to that, but I don't think that...
Our widespread tooth decay is due to a lack of fluoride.
I think it's more due to the fact that our diets have become aberrant.
I mean, I'll tell you, I haven't used fluoride toothpaste in some time, and when I was a kid, I was the kind of kid that every time I would go to a dentist, there would be a new cavity.
I just would always dread going to the dentist because there would always be something for them to fill.
And ever since I demoted grains and grain products to the occasional indulgence in my diet, I haven't had a single cavity.
That's an anecdote, certainly, but I think it's not a mystery why these kinds of things develop, why we have tooth decay.
You know, I think what it is is that these kinds of foods tend to have that quality known as hyperpalatability.
They tend to bring together, you know, sugar, whether it's like the sugar in the tomato sauce, wheat flour, fat, copious fat, amounts of fat, salt, right?
I mean, these foods typify the standard American diet.
And these are the kinds of foods that now we consume by the majority.
60% of our calories now come from these kinds of foods, ultra-processed foods or these hyperpalatable mixed foods, mixed dishes, like the lasagnas, the pizzas, the burgers and things like that.
Tufts University, and I recently had a conversation with a principal investigator, and I believe that our conversation was had out of good faith, and he was interested in hearing my perspective.
I mean, basically, this was an attempt by researchers at Tufts University to create a nutrient profiling system.
This isn't the first, right?
There's actually a profiling system that was devised in Latin America called the NOVA profiling system, which I actually am a fan of.
It ranks foods in accordance with how processed they are, which I think is actually quite important, can be quite useful in the context of the standard American diet with an obese population.
But this is the Tufts attempt.
And we can clearly see that it underweights protein, and it doesn't properly penalize foods for being ultra-processed.
Yeah, I mean, they basically score it in accordance with this formula that they've developed where, you know, they'll give a certain amount of points for protein, a certain amount of points for fiber, micronutrients, but they clearly don't properly penalize foods for being ultra-processed, right?
Right.
Honeynut Cheerios.
I mean, ultra-processed foods, Joe...
Are every 10% increase in ultra-processed food consumption associated with a 14% increased risk of early mortality.
Every 10% increase in ultra-processed food consumption associated with a 25% increased risk for dementia, recently published research, right?
So this chart clearly is, in my view, right?
And until I'm convinced otherwise, an instrument designed to sell ultra-processed food, right?
Half of the population is either diabetic or pre-diabetic.
So it has some degree of glucose intolerance.
And you're going to say that that orange juice is a healthy choice for somebody who has essentially glucose intolerance because they're insulin resistant.
And it's like, you know, whether we're talking about the Alzheimer's paper that was fraudulent or this, which, you know, I don't think that there's any malice behind this.
That found that among the people called on by the 2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans Committee, like those committee members, 95% of them had conflicts of interest with pharma, with the food industry, right?
Like General Mills, Kraft, AstraZeneca, right?
Those are the people coming up with our dietary guidelines, right?
So they're not going to say minimize your consumption of ultra-processed foods because the food industry would never let them.
My little brother, we have the first baby in the family, a little girl.
And I'm learning about breastfeeding and all the things, right?
But what's interesting is that their pediatrician told us that he'll often see vegan moms come in and they're suffering from crazy osteoporosis and low bone mineral density because the mammary tissue doesn't care The mammary tissue just wants to make the best milk possible.
It doesn't care if the mother's getting it from her diet.
Another thing I wanted to talk to you about is glyphosate.
There was a recent study that showed that glyphosate appeared, and see if you can find what the actual numbers were.
But it was a shocking number of people's bodies containing glyphosate in them, which is Roundup, which is an herbicide.
That when you talk about people consuming large amounts of vegetables and large amounts of grains, one thing to take into consideration when you're dealing with monocrop agriculture is the use of pesticides.
Disturbing weed killer ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of U.S. urine samples.
Now, immediately upon publishing this, I went on to Twitter and I saw this shill for these herbicide companies that was talking about, oh, it's just a minimal amount.
A tiny amount.
Parts per million.
You can't even find it if you're looking for it.
Nothing to see here.
Like...
What the fuck are you talking about?
It's poison.
There's zero amount of that that should be in your body.
When it's in 80% of the US population, like, how bad is that?
I mean, I think soaking and rinsing like produce...
Well, with regard to grain, I'm not sure.
With regard to produce, I do think that there's both an effect with like rinsing and like soaking in particular, in vinegar and salt, and or salt, vinegar and or salt, and cooking.
I don't think it's a very heat-stable compound, but I'm not, you know, like I think people should avoid it.
Like I generally, if I'm eating the skin, this is, I mean personally, There's online, I mean, I'm sure you've seen, but the debate between whether or not organic is better for you than non-organic.
Nutritionally, in terms of micronutrients, there's no real difference.
You'll see higher levels of certain micronutrients in organic, and you'll see higher levels of certain, for example, nitrates in non-organic produce.
So you can't really say that one is more nutritious than the other.
Studies do show, obviously aside from reducing your exposure to glyphosate and other petroleum-based herbicides and pesticides, you're reducing your exposure potentially to heavy metals.
There was a meta-analysis that found cadmium levels were reduced by 50% in organic produce as compared to conventional.
And then you see higher levels of these like plant quote-unquote defense compounds in organic produce.
Which, depending on, you know, where you stand on these plant defense compounds, I mean, likely, you know, I think provide benefit to human health.
You know, I wish I could give a really buttoned-up, informed answer.
I'm not 100% sure.
What I will say is that there's only a small handful of crops that are GMO. There's only 10 crops that are GMO. Sometimes you'll see non-GMO asparagus, but asparagus was never GMO. But generally, I believe, it's soy, it's corn.
Yeah, I mean like I'm yeah, I'm I would rather reduce my exposure to that and you know and yeah, it's just like It's fair that not everything that's natural is good for you not everything that's unnatural is bad for you but like I'm not gonna put like my health in the hands of Monsanto which which is now Bayer I think after yes, they purchased it right but But like, those companies don't give a fuck about your health, right?
And when you do finally get sick, there's no recourse.
And there's this complex situation that we have here where we have these enormous cities that have millions and millions of people and you have to feed these people.
And monocrop agriculture is the most efficient way to provide these people with produce.
And monocrop agriculture with herbicides is the most efficient way to grow agriculture.
It's so complex and so difficult to get out of.
Because all these people that are proponents of regenerative farming, whenever I ask them if it's scalable, they always do this, like, Yeah.
Fucking it's never been done.
When you're talking about being able to provide grass-fed beef for 330 million people, show me.
That's where I think it's another area where the argument for veganism falls short, is that if you're partaking in modern society, if you're shopping in a modern supermarket, there's blood on your hands, right?
There's like, nobody is...
Inculcated from the fact that today, whether it's modern plant agriculture or modern animal agriculture, animals and people are being exploited.
It's doing a number on the environment.
If you really want to live the most sustainable and quote-unquote regenerative lifestyle, you're going to be growing your own Yes, and that really is probably the only option.
Yeah, but also like sickness is massively environmentally taxing, right?
It's a massive resource sink.
And the nutrition and the calories and, you know, what you get from beef is...
You know, you get a lot more in a much smaller package, right?
Like one cow can feed a family, and I'm not like an environmental expert or an expert in agriculture, but I know that one cow can feed a family for months, right?
And so if you're looking to reduce the area under the curve for suffering, for environmental damage, it makes a lot more sense to me that you would lean into animal agriculture.
Also, animal agriculture in regards to grass-fed, grass-finished beef, you're talking about an animal that has free range because that's the only way they can consume that much grass.
They have to be in these open pastures.
They get to roam around.
They're not contained in pens because that wouldn't be efficient.
They move around.
And the ones that use regenerative agriculture, the benefit to that is they use the manure.
And the manure helps grow more plants.
And it helps they use it as fertilizer.
It also helps the richness of the soil and keeps the soil maintaining.
Which is so important because topsoil in this country is like really fucked, especially in these monocrop agriculture environments.
They're pouring nitrogen on the soil and all sorts of other industrial fertilizers they're trying to use just in order to allow these plants to have the nutrients to grow.
I wrote about this in my second book, The Genius Life, but generally, yeah.
So it's the confluence of factors, right?
It's like what we're doing to the soil, it's the fact that there's more carbon in the atmosphere.
So our plants are actually becoming less nutritious in terms of their micronutrients, but also the macronutrients are being depleted as well, right?
We're diluting protein in the plants.
And when that happens, when you dilute protein, I mean, you're going to have an effect on I mean, we haven't yet been able to quantify it, but when you dilute protein in an organism, you're reducing the amount of amino acids, you're increasing the amount of energy that you're giving that animal.
That potentially could be a recipe for obesity or a contributing factor.
The argument that always drives me nuts when people talk about what is and what is not sustainable is You know, this is what people always want to discuss.
Like, when you discuss, like, you should eat grass-fed beef, you should eat...
Well, that's not sustainable.
But I think your argument is best in that most people are not going to listen anyway.
But if you're listening and you're a person who's really taking the...
You really are taking this information in and you're really trying to make steps to have an overall better metabolic health and overall just you want your body to function better.
You can't think about sustaining the entire world.
But we're saying for the people that do want to take these steps and are motivated to change their life for the better, there are options available that are better for your overall metabolic health, they're better for your mind, they're literally better for the environment, for everything.
And I think that it would be immoral for a physician sitting across from a sick person to have their guidance be informed by anything other than what's going to be best for that person.
If you're a physician and you're considering what's going to be best for the planet, right?
Well, Max, he's an asshole.
He doesn't care about the planet.
I absolutely do care about the planet.
I absolutely do care about animal welfare.
But if you're sitting across the table from somebody who's sick or you're broadcasting a message to a sick population, you have a responsibility to that population, to that person.
And so, for me, my number one priority is to personally eat and to recommend to people what, in my estimation, is going to be the best to avert these kinds of conditions.
And I'll tell you that my mom, my mom...
I'll never know what was causal with regard to what she had developed, but she was basically vegetarian.
She never ate red meat.
My mom was actually very much attuned to messaging surrounding heart disease.
She was always afraid of developing heart disease.
So she ate a very low-saturated-fat diet.
She also cared about animals, so she never ate red meat.
She never ate eggs.
She ate whatever grain product she saw in the supermarket that had the red Heart Healthy logo on it.
That would end up in the shopping cart.
We always had the corn oil by the stove, again, with the red Heart Healthy logo on it.
Always had that.
Never any butter in my fridge.
Always margarine in those tubs.
That's the kind of food that I grew up consuming.
Because my mom was very much attuned to what the orthodoxy said about heart disease at the time.
And she didn't have the internet, of course, for exposure to dissenting opinions on that.
Right.
But yeah, I mean, I do think that my hypothesis is not to like, you know, blame her in any sense, but I do think that like, you know, had she had integrated some of these more nutrient-dense foods, more minimally processed foods into her diet, that it would have protected her to some degree.
Well, if your assertion is correct in terms of preventing Alzheimer's, it seems like all those things were negative, like all the things she's doing, the margarine, the grains, other than junky fast food.
And, you know, this is, like, all I have is, like, retrospective, like, looking back and kind of trying to ascertain, you know, how she lived, you know, while I was exposed to it.
It's not that my, you know, she had it like she was following any particular diet or anything like that, but...
But yeah, she was a big animal rights advocate.
Lots of grain products.
Not a ton of protein.
Occasionally she would eat lean, skinless chicken breast or a piece of fish, but was always very, very concerned about cholesterol and things like that.
So I do think that that's a dietary...
That is the standard American diet.
That is, to me...
What, you know, how not to eat if you want to protect your brain over time based on like all the research that I've done since then.
And it's such an uphill battle to try to convince those people or to try to have a conversation with them.
When someone says, what about cholesterol?
You're not worried about your cholesterol?
I just always like...
Where do I go with this?
This is such a long conversation to have with a person that has this orthodox opinion that's been kind of drilled in their head by the food pyramid and by all the scare tactics that people have heard about.
Well, we've talked about this before in the podcast but it bears repeating.
How saturated fat was the whole more fraud by the sugar companies and that the sugar companies literally bribed scientists to lie about what was causing heart disease and they started blaming it on saturated fat and tried to try to take the blame off of sugar.
That was seemingly the nail in the coffin on the issue as to whether or not it was sugar or saturated fat that drove the epidemic of heart disease that we were seeing in the mid-century.
And the Sugar Research Foundation paid each of those scientists $48,000.
Equivalent of today's money to basically say that it wasn't sugar.
And Ansel Keys, who really is like thought to be the father of the diet heart hypothesis, was like this very, you see this all the time, like this very overbearing personality, right?
That's like, that's the way that they, the same way that they described in the science article, Sylvain Lesney, the guy who, you know, who renewed vigor for the amyloid hypothesis.
It's like, you know, they have this celebrity and charisma.
First of all, having any charisma as a scientist, you're going to go places, right?
Like, because so many of them- Have zero.
Have zero, you know?
So, yeah, so it's a big problem.
And saturated fat, I think, is like- The plant-based community and still much of the medical orthodoxy are myopically focused on LDL cholesterol.
Specifically now, I think it's pivoting a little bit to ApoB, so all ApoB-containing lipoproteins.
But when you take out...
Red meat from your diet, for example.
Yeah, your ApoB or your LDL cholesterol might be a little bit lower, right?
But that's not a risk-free swap, right?
You're removing from your diet a rich source of highly bioavailable micronutrients like vitamin B12, like zinc, like creatine, which supports brain energy metabolism, like carnosine, which helps to support healthy blood sugar regulation in the body.
And, of course, protein.
An amazing, pristine source of highly bioavailable, highly digestible protein.
So, like, to be myopically focused on these single marker indicators of, you know, related to cardiovascular risk, I think, doesn't make any sense.
It's not necessarily causal because they've actually engineered drugs to raise HDL and it does nothing in terms of reducing cardiovascular disease risk.
I think the current thinking is that HDL is more reflective of good health.
So if it's high, it shows that you're doing something right.
So you want it to be high.
LDL is a little more complicated.
There are many different things that it's responsive to, but primarily certain types of saturated fatty acids.
So when you hear on social media, for example, that saturated fat is bad, that's pseudoscience because a fat isn't a fat.
It's the same way that protein isn't protein.
Carbs aren't necessarily carbs.
They're all underneath those umbrella terms.
There are different types that determine how we respond biologically to them.
So when it comes to saturated fat, I mean, you've got different kinds of saturated fatty acids.
One type of saturated fatty acid that's actually elevated in grass-fed, grass-finished beef is stearic acid.
Stear, named for cows, actually has a neutral effect, doesn't increase levels of LDL cholesterol, and actually might improve functioning of the mitochondria.
So we can't just say that saturated fat is bad.
Dairy is one of these things where when you look observationally, people who consume full fat dairy, not even low fat or reduced fat dairy, have better cardiovascular health, better metabolic health.
And dairy proportionally has more saturated fat than any other fat source, right?
Because as I mentioned, all natural fat containing foods have some proportion of saturated fat, polyunsaturated fat, monounsaturated fat.
If you look at beef fat, Tallow.
It's about 50% monounsaturated fat, some small proportion of polyunsaturated fat, and then some, again, minority proportion of saturated fat.
But dairy is actually mostly saturated fat.
So you'd think that if saturated fat was this dietary boogeyman, that regular consumers of dairy, people who consume a lot of dairy fat, would have the worst cardiovascular health.
Because the opposite of that is like it's exposed to heat and dairy has fat in it.
It's got some component of or some proportion of polyunsaturated fats which are heat sensitive.
So, you know, you want to protect those fats generally.
And a baby consuming breast milk, I mean, that breast milk is raw milk, right?
But the one thing about dairy that I think is worth talking about is that it's thought that the reason why we don't necessarily exhibit the predicted effect that you would expect based on the high proportion of saturated fat in dairy is attributed to the fact that dairy contains something called milk fat globule membrane.
So, I know it's kind of a mouthful, but milk fat globule membrane is basically the lipoprotein in dairy that keeps the dairy fats perfectly suspended.
It's like an emulsifier.
So that dairy, which is mostly water, milk is mostly water, right?
The fats don't actually float to the top.
The fats are perfectly dispersed throughout.
So the triglycerides in dairy fat are wrapped up in a bubble.
And this bubble is called milk fat globule membrane.
And it's made up of actually some really healthy compounds, like phosphatidylcholine, which choline we talked about, you know, and its benefit to the brain.
There's also a little bit of sphingomyelin in dairy, in full-fat dairy, which is a core component to myelin, the myelin sheath in our brains that help insulate neurons.
And if you think about, like, the purpose that dairy serves for a neonate, it's to help grow a brain.
I mean, it's like the whole body's growing, but primarily the brain is the organ that's under, like, the most rapid growth in organization.
And so it makes perfect sense that dairy would have components in it that are, like, really beneficial when it comes to brain health.
And so, yeah, so I think that full-fat dairy is really quite beneficial.
But when you look at a dairy product like butter, interestingly, when you feed a person, if you were to feed a person both heavy cream and Followed by butter.
You'd see that butter actually leads to an adverse effect on blood lipids.
Whereas heavy cream doesn't.
And butter is just made from heavy cream, right?
It's like churned cream.
But the churning disrupts this membrane, this lipoprotein called milk fat globule membrane.
And I think that's why butter can have this negative effect on blood lipids.
So actually when I discovered this, when I realized this, It caused me to actually demote butter to be more of like a YOLO food, more of like an indulgence food.
So butter and heavy cream are both the same foundational ingredient, right?
And actually, if you were to put heavy cream in coffee, the cream would easily just disperse throughout the coffee, right?
Butter sits at the top.
So you can clearly see that chemically something has changed after it gets churned and becomes the food product that we know and love and call butter.
So the milk fat globule membrane, which is present in full fat heavy cream and other dairy products...
It's thought that that actually is quite beneficial from the standpoint of brain health, but also affects how we metabolize the fats in dairy.
So in clinical trials, what they've shown is that you can feed somebody this controlled for fat calories, right?
You can feed somebody...
Dairy cream, and it won't have any effect on their LDL cholesterol, right?
If you feed somebody butter, it will.
You'll see an elevation of LDL cholesterol.
And I'm not, you know, I don't believe that we should do everything we can to get our LDL as low as possible.
Because again, like foods that are generally very beneficial and healthful, like, you know, grass-fed red meat and things like that, eggs, the benefits outweigh the risk.
But with butter, I think potentially you're causing an elevation of your So, yeah, so butter can have this negative effect that you don't see in other dairy products.
So, for me, dairy is great.
It's just that butter is one of these dairy products that I think, you know, especially if you're prone to hypercholesterolemia, if you're prone to elevated levels of like LDL, ApoB, It might serve you to reduce your consumption of butter.
Yeah, probably because there's a higher proportion of carotenoids in the butter.
But in general, I think that butter can be great.
There's, again, vitamin A, there's these carotenoids, there's CLA, there's butyrate, there's all these interesting vitamin K2 in butter, which are...
You know, which are significant.
And, you know, that's great.
But if you are, you know, for example, if you have familial hypercholesterolemia, which many people do, or if, you know, it's just one of these foods that, like, I would not consume as liberally as, say, I'm consuming, like, the heavy cream or full-fat Greek yogurt or even fat-free Greek yogurt, which is a great, like, high-protein food.
Yeah.
But yeah, always, I mean, you're always going to get higher nutrient density when a cow eats its biologically appropriate diet.
Also, you know, when a cow is grass finished versus grain finished, it's a leaner animal.
Like, I know you love to, like, hunt, right?
Like, wild game is way leaner than a modern cow, particularly a grain finished cow.
That's from animals that are eating grains and they develop like abscesses and real problems and they have to ventilate their stomachs because of all the gases.
I mean, I'm definitely, definitely a huge fan of, like, you know, the grass finish.
But also I think it's important, and this is something that, like, that I, you know, I think one of the reasons why people gravitate to my content is that, like, I try to be as non-dogmatic as possible.
And even for somebody who doesn't have access to the most pristine beef that I have access to living in Los Angeles, you know?
And I hate to promote the factory farm system because it's terrible.
It's like an animal holocaust every day.
It's like worse.
But still, for somebody living in a quote-unquote food desert that doesn't have access to the kind of beef that I have access to, That's still gonna be a better option for dinner than boxed mac and cheese.
And what a cow eats determines mainly the content, the nutritional value of its fat.
So if you don't have access to the most pristine beef, grass-fed, grass-finished beef, you can go slightly leaner because that's generally a way to circumvent that.
It doesn't make any sense to eat grass-fed, grass-finished filet mignon because a filet mignon is a lean piece of meat.
But if we're talking about a ribeye or ground beef, yeah, it does make sense to buy leaner beef because you're just skimming off what is ultimately determined by what a cow eats.
And the protein is still pristine, and it's really just the fat.
Like, for example, the difference between grass-finished and grain-finished, you get about five times the omega-3s in grass-finished.
Beef, in general, is not a great omega-3 source, so just to put that out there, you're getting, in absolute terms, a much smaller amount of omega-3 fatty acids as you would get from a piece of salmon, for example.
Still, five times the omega-3s as compared to grain finished.
You're getting three times the vitamin E, which we know is super important to help protect the fats that are already in your body.
We need vitamin E. Vitamin E is crucially important.
You get much less, fewer fat calories overall.
And of the saturated fat, you're getting a higher proportion of stearic acid, which we know is actually quite beneficial.
So I do think that it's probably healthier to consume, you know.
But none of those features are really going to matter if the meat is super lean, right?
Because we're talking primarily about, like, it's fat.
But no, I've definitely had experts on the show who lean more plant-based.
I just, you know, after doing all the interviews that I've done, what I've seen is that, you know, you bring on somebody who's like a medical doctor and you ask them about nutrition, and they start opining as if they're authorities on nutrition because they're medical doctors.
And most of them are unaware even of their own biases, which I think is a big problem.
You know, I had somebody on the podcast who, she's a lovely woman, purports to be like a nutrition expert from like an Indian background, right?
And like generally I know like if you're from an Indian background, like you're not going to be super pro beef, you know?
It's just like not in the culture.
And that came out in the interview that she was anti-meat and leans more plant-based.
And so I see the podcast not as a platform for me to debate people.
I'm not one of those.
Because at the end of the day, I think something that I'm really passionate about, or I know that I'm really passionate about, is fostering scientific literacy.
Yeah.
I don't really call myself an expert.
Other people have called me that, and I'll take it if that's what you perceive from me.
But really, I hope to be, I think, for people, a role model.
Because at the end of the day, I was just a guy who stood up because his mom was sick, and I think this is something that we all experience, right?
But I, whether it's my upbringing or the...
sort of first job that I had in college, you know, I felt out of college, I felt entitled to answers and to like reaching out to people.
And of course, along the journey, I realized I had an aptitude for aggregating and assimilating and communicating science.
But I want people to, like, do the research for themselves.
And, like, you know, to always be willing to challenge their own assumptions and beliefs about things.
Right?
Because, you know, people these days, they watch a Netflix documentary and they throw their whole diet into upheaval.
There's more that we agree on than what we disagree on.
And I think primarily people, you know...
One of the things that I really hope people take away from this is to reduce their consumption of these ultra-processed foods that, for some reason or another, made it to the top of the Food Compass nutrient profiling system.
But essentially, ultra-processed foods, we know that when you make them the bulk of your diet, they drive their own overconsumption.
We tend to overconsume them because they have this quality of being hyperpalatable and hyposatiating.
And what makes a food satiating, there are three factors that make a food satiating.
One, it's protein content.
Protein is the most satiating macronutrient.
So a lot of people that are struggling with being overweight, they go to their doctors and they get told this cookie-cutter advice to just eat less and move more, right?
So they focus on the quantity of what they're eating, right?
Like how much they're eating.
But what so few people understand, unfortunately today, is that what you eat determines how much you eat.
And so by focusing on protein, right?
Protein is the most satiating macronutrient.
We know we need it.
It fosters resilience and robustness.
Frailty.
There was a study that came out recently that found that among people who are genetically at risk for developing Alzheimer's disease, it was the frailty that determined by threefold Who was going to develop it or not, basically.
So you were protected the stronger, the more robust and resilient you were.
Resistance training, all that stuff obviously plays a role, but protein.
You know, regularly reaching for high quality protein, I think, is crucially important.
And the best, you know, the highest quality protein comes from animal products.
If you're eating enough protein, you know, quality becomes less of an issue.
So, you know, if you're on a plant-based diet, vegan diet, just make sure that you're getting enough protein.
But that's hard to do without protein supplements.
And we know that plant-based protein powders harbor heavy metals.
So there's all these factors that come into play that I think about, you know, day to day.
The second factor that makes a food satiating is fiber.
It's fiber content.
And that's not because we have some innate need for fiber, but because it mechanically stretches out the stomach.
And we do see, thanks to meta-analyses and such, that fiber consumption is associated with longevity, reduced inflammation, and things like that.
But you want to, you know, make sure that you're reaching for foods that contain fiber, fibrous vegetables, right?
And then the third factor that makes a food satiating is its water content.
Water, you know, before we had access to running water, right, like we would either look for water on the savannah or whatever, or we would eat food because food, by and large, provides water, right, like produce.
Even animal products are a good source of hydration.
I have a cat.
My cat gets its hydration primarily from the meat that it eats.
And so when you look at ultra-processed foods, they're depleted of all three of those features.
They're dehydrated because water impedes shelf stability.
They lack fiber.
They lack protein.
They lack protein primarily because protein is expensive, right?
Protein has high margins.
So it actually, from a bottom line perspective, it makes sense why the powers that be would want to deplete our food environment of protein, right?
I mean, some people will say, oh, they're making us weak.
I think it's just like bottom line, right?
Like it's like rapidly digested carbohydrates are just cheap to produce, right?
Now we're seeing this flood on the market of all these like It's fake meat products, which is another thing that I talk about all the time on my podcast.
It's like the food equivalent of...
It's human pet food is how I refer to it.
Basically, it's no different than kibble made for humans, right?
And these are the kinds of foods that yield big exits because they're proprietary formulas.
There's obviously profit to be made in meat and dairy and things like that, but you don't get the kinds of...
You know proprietary formulations that you get with these like plant-based products that then like go public and have these like huge company valuations.
Well the good news is they're sinking because people aren't buying them because they're disgusting and also people have seen the studies you know there was the one study about plant-based meat and with rats so I'm sure you saw that.
That's what these plant-based, that's like, what they're trying to do is they're trying to emulate what a burger looks and tastes like, which is so strange.
It's like, are you opposed to burgers or not?
Because why do you have a fake one?
Yeah.
Never understood fake chicken and now fake beef.
If you want to eat vegetables, eat fucking vegetables.
The levels of glyphosate detected in the Impossible Burger by Health Research Institute laboratories were 11 times higher than the non-GMO project verified Beyond Burger.
In 2015, the Food and Drug Administration denied the product GRAS status, which is generally recognized as safe.
But in 2017, it issued a no-questions letter not assuring safety but protecting the FDA from liability if adverse effects are found.
And that's why I think like, yeah, you can show me all the data you want, but like the longer a food or product has been around, I think the safer we can assume that it is and the less time it's been around, right?
I think the greater scrutiny, I'm not saying that they're all bad, right?
Like if I need medical assistance, I'm going to a hospital, right?
If I'm in like crazy pain for whatever reason- You're not going to go to a witch doctor?
I'm not going to go to a witch doctor, no.
So I'm not anti-medicine or anything like that.
If I had that blockbuster drug or whatever to give my mom, I would have given to her in a heartbeat.
But it's just like these kinds of conditions take years if not decades to manifest, right?
Like you're not dealing with something that's going to show an adverse effect instantaneously.
You're going to deal with an accumulative effect over time that's going to be detrimental to people that take this thing that has been approved because of money, not because it's effective or generally beneficial to your health.
But because a bunch of people have been paid off.
And there's so much of that.
There's so much of that where these people that give their opinions on these things have been bought and paid for.
Yeah, so my podcast is called The Genius Life, available on all podcast platforms.
My Instagram is at MaxLugavere, M-A-X-L-U-G-A-V-E-R-E. And then check out the trailer to Little Empty Boxes, which is the first ever dementia prevention documentary, which I hope to have out soon at littleemptyboxes.com.
Clinicians will use it to recommend to their patients.
You'll get PhD-level knowledge when you read Genius Foods.
If you're at risk for dementia, or if you have a loved one, or if you just want to know how to better fuel the brain, because we also talk about this new field, which is being called nutritional psychiatry, so how to get your brain to work better in the here and now.
It really is everything you need to know about food and the brain.
The second book...
It was called The Genius Life.
And in that, I do a deep dive in terms of endocrine disruptors and, you know, nature immersion, all this sort of more lifestyle stuff.
And then my third book just came out.
It was called Genius Kitchen.
And it's a two-in-one sort of like wellness guide and cookbook.