Max Lugavere’s Little Empty Boxes documentary exposes fraud in Alzheimer’s research, like the retracted 2006 Nature paper falsely linking amyloid beta to cognitive decline, while his mother’s Lewy body dementia diagnosis at Cleveland Clinic—despite a healthy 90-year-old grandmother—highlighted misdiagnosis and delayed treatment. They discuss modifiable risks: ultra-processed foods (60% of caloric intake) linked to 32 health harms, including a 25% higher Alzheimer’s risk per 10% increase; toxins like PFAS in bandages and paraquat in grains; and nicotine’s potential neuroprotective effects. Prevention via protein-rich diets, exercise (7K–10K steps/day), saunas (Finland studies show 20–50% reduced risk), and cold exposure emerges as key, with midlife metabolic health—avoiding obesity and sarcopenic obesity—critical for long-term cognitive resilience. Lugavere’s incremental habit approach (e.g., 30–50g protein breakfast) contrasts weak nutrition science studies, calling their misuse "borderline unethical," while Rogan’s strength training methods align with Russian principles to maximize performance without burnout. [Automatically generated summary]
I think it's the most important thing I've ever done.
And it's the first ever dementia prevention documentary about the science of dementia prevention.
But it focuses...
It's a very emotional and personal film for me because it follows my mom, who for many years suffered from a rare form of dementia called Lewy body dementia, which is akin to having both Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease at the same time.
It affects about one million people in the United States, but it's a dementia.
And dementia is now a soaring public health problem.
And there's a lot of controversy within the field.
The last time I was here, we talked about fraud in the research space with regard to the prevailing hypothesis as to what causes Alzheimer's disease, which is the most common form of dementia.
And actually, finally, over the past month, that paper was finally retracted.
Yeah, so basically, among the dementias, Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of it, and that affects about 6 million people in the United States.
And since it was first named in 1906 by physician Alois Alzheimer, the prevailing hypothesis as to what causes Alzheimer's disease, dubbed the amyloid hypothesis, has been that this plaque formed by a precursor protein called amyloid beta accumulates in the brain,
And by finding a drug that can potentially remove, extract those plaques from the brain, from the extracellular space around neurons, that we could essentially cure the disease.
That the causal factor in the condition was ultimately this amyloid beta protein, which forms the plaque.
Trial after trial had been a dismal failure, and it wasn't looking good until in 2006, a paper was published in Nature, which for any scientist publishing in Nature, it's like winning an Academy Award.
And that paper, essentially, what that did was it allegedly identified this variant of amyloid beta that connected the plaque to the cognitive dysfunction.
So the most important clinical feature Of Alzheimer's disease.
Because for a long time, it was known that cognitively healthy people accumulate plaque in their brains.
And that plaque doesn't seem to correlate with cognitive impairment or anything like that.
And so that was very deflating for researchers in the field until this 2006 paper came out.
And what it did was it renewed faith in this hypothesis, which was always a hypothesis.
And Continued to send billions and billions of dollars worth of funding down this path and what turned out to be the case just two years ago was that that paper was essentially fraudulent and It represented about 16 years worth of wasted time wasted money Which was hugely deflating for not just the research community,
but also for any patient who's ever suffered from Alzheimer's disease and You know, the way that the field is now slowly starting to turn, but this is a drum that I've been beating for the past 10 years, is that we really need to start talking about these conditions in terms of prevention.
And that's what inspired me to set down this path of creating this documentary, Little Empty Boxes.
In the paper, they identified these proteins that they isolated in rat models of the condition, mouse models of the condition, called A-beta star 56. Again, amyloid is...
Amyloid is there at the scene of the crime, so to speak.
So when you have Alzheimer's disease, somebody who's died of Alzheimer's disease, what they find inevitably in the brains of cadavers who've died from Alzheimer's disease are two features.
They see this aggregation of these plaques, amyloid beta plaques, and tangled proteins called tau.
And so it was a very seductive narrative that this plaque causes the condition, right?
For years.
The problem is they've succeeded at reducing the plaque in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease, but that hasn't led to any improvement in the clinically meaningful features of the disease that we aspire to improve for sufferers of Alzheimer's disease, right?
The cognitive, the cognitive function.
And in tandem with that, we see that amyloid is produced naturally in all brains and people who are cognitively healthy have amyloid in their brains.
There's a degree of amyloid burden that seems to be inevitable as a just general phenomena due to aging.
And so it was becoming very clear that amyloid is not the causative feature here, that there is some other factor or factors at play which lead to cognitive degeneration.
Until 2006. And in 2006 what happened, this paper basically found this subtype that when injected into a mouse caused profound cognitive dysfunction.
And what they did was they illustrated these proteins in what's called a Western blot analysis, which is basically a graphical depiction of proteins.
And the peer review process for papers, I mean, people go in and they crunch the numbers and stuff, but they don't look at imagery, and they don't...
They don't go through the imagery with a fine tooth comb to make sure that it hasn't been photoshopped, essentially.
But one sleuth, who is a scientist himself, this researcher from Vanderbilt named Matthew Schrag, actually identified that a lot of these images had artifacts that made it very clear that they were faked.
And by the way, that paper has been subsequently referenced thousands of times in the medical literature.
Basically, you know, negating a ton of research.
I mean, like countless papers that have been since published that have referenced that paper in 2006, that Nature paper that was finally retracted.
I mean, think about the lost time.
Think about the needless suffering.
And it's my view that dementia, essentially by the time you are diagnosed with dementia, we'll say Alzheimer's disease, you are in late stage Alzheimer's disease.
Whether it's mild, whether you were just diagnosed yesterday, this is a disease of midlife with symptoms that appear in late life.
And so that's why the field is now slowly, hopefully, I hope, pivoting more towards prevention.
And where the money, I think, needs to go is into identifying that golden biomarker that's associated with the onset of the condition.
So that clinicians can intervene earlier.
Because right now when you catch it, it's sort of like pancreatic cancer, which incidentally my mom passed from in 2018. But it's, you know, pancreatic cancer, most of the time it's diagnosed and it's too late.
The tumor is already metastasized.
And so this is kind of similar with Alzheimer's disease.
By the time it's diagnosed, you're already very late in the game.
There's widespread neuronal dysfunction.
Glucose metabolism in the brain is diminished by 50%.
So again, you're catching it in its latest stages, ultimately.
And that's why I think Alzheimer's drug trials have a 99.6% fail rate.
Because by the time you catch it, I think reversing it is impossible.
I think it can be slowed with exercise, with a multimodal dietary and lifestyle intervention.
But yeah, it's really sad.
And so that's why 10 years ago when I saw this developing in my mom and I stumbled upon all this research and I began really diving in, it became very clear to me that this is something that anybody with a brain needs to be aware of and talking about.
So the heritability of Alzheimer's disease is very low.
It's like two to three percent.
And the variant that is hereditary is early onset familial.
But that makes up a very tiny proportion of overall Alzheimer's incidence.
And similarly with Parkinson's disease, the heritability of Parkinson's disease is very low.
And I definitely want to talk about Parkinson's disease because there's a lot of really interesting new research in that field.
But by and large, with regard to Alzheimer's disease, you have what are called your non-modifiable risk factors, which are your age.
You can't change your age, your gender.
You can't change your gender and your genes.
You can't change your genes, although you can affect how your genes express themselves, which is known as epigenetics.
But then you have your modifiable risk factors, which I think is so exciting because these are the risk factors that you have agency over.
You can control obesity, hypertension, type 2 diabetes.
I mean, these are all nutritionally mediated, obviously, which I love talking about nutrition and nutrition insofar as it can prevent or reverse obesity.
I think that's incredibly empowering.
Type 2 diabetes, if you have type 2 diabetes, your risk for developing Alzheimer's disease increases between two and fourfold.
They're actually now...
We interviewed in my documentary the researcher who coined the term type 3 diabetes.
Which is a mind-blowing way to think about this condition.
And in fact, we see that peripheral insulin resistance, so the hallmark of type 2 diabetes is insulin resistance.
And we see that the more insulin resistant a person is, the more difficulty their brains seem to have with regard to creating ATP, which is the primary energy currency of our cells.
And the researcher who coined type 3 diabetes, her name is Suzanne Delamonte.
She's a Brown University researcher.
And she is in no way in the public sphere.
She's a, you know, purely a bench researcher.
She's actually in my documentary.
It was like incredible to get to interview her and speak to her.
But it seems that insulin resistance causes the brain to suffer in many ways.
It damages the blood vessels.
Ultimately, when you have type 2 diabetes, it damages the blood vessels that supply the brain with oxygen, nutrients, energy.
But there also seems to be an aspect of insulin resistance that reduces the brain's ability to generate energy.
So, when you first started becoming aware of this, when your mother develops this condition, you first start being aware of it, what were the first things that you noticed that started to get you to question whether or not the conventional applications of drugs are on the right path?
I was living in LA at the time and so we would touch base every other day via phone and she started to complain to me about brain fog.
And there was some aspect of what she was sharing with me that I thought was just a natural part of getting older.
But ultimately, she revealed to me and the rest of my family that she had sought the help of a neurologist.
And that seemed odd.
You know, why would my mom...
I hadn't had any prior family incidents of dementia, anything like that.
Why was my mom suddenly going to see a neurologist?
And, but you know, like I was still in LA living my, my life.
I was in my late twenties at the time, but it wasn't until a trip to Miami.
My family went down to Miami to hang out with my dad and Because my parents had been separated.
And my mom was in the kitchen.
And she confessed to the family that she'd been having memory problems at this point.
So it had been described as brain fog.
But she revealed that she had sought the help of a neurologist.
And, you know, me and my brothers and my dad, we were in total disbelief that my mom was having anything outside of the...
Could possibly be having anything outside of the realm of ordinary.
And so we were kind of mocking her in a way.
And we said, well, if you're really having such profound problems, what month is it?
Or I think it was like, what year is it?
Or something like that.
And she couldn't recall.
She couldn't recall what the month was.
And she started to cry.
And at that point for me, that's when I knew that something was really wrong and that I needed to step in.
Because, you know, when you're sick, that's a really scary place to be.
It could be frustrating.
It could be confusing.
And, you know, when you're in these doctor's offices and they're, you know...
Oftentimes, they don't have the best bedside manner, and they run a battery of esoteric tests.
It can be incredibly overwhelming, and it becomes really hard to advocate for yourself, I've learned, as somebody with a chronic illness, not least of which a chronic illness that's affecting your cognition.
And so I decided at that point, essentially, that I had to pack up my LA life.
I moved back to New York, and I started going with my mom.
From doctor's visit to doctor's visit.
And again, you know, I'm pretty privileged.
Grew up in New York City.
My mom had health insurance resources.
We started going, you know, to all of these different cathedrals to Western medicine, academic, medical insight.
And in every instance, I experienced what I've come to call over time, adios, diagnose and adios.
A physician would run these tests, titrate up the dose of a medication that she was already on.
One physician actually thought that all of her symptoms were due to depression.
There's this idea of the hysterical woman.
Today, one in four women over the age of 40 are on an antidepressant drug.
One in four?
Yeah, over the age of 40. Jesus Christ.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm not saying there's no use for them, those kinds of drugs, but they're very over-prescribed.
I don't think that's controversial.
And so my mom was given one of these drugs without full informed consent, I don't think.
I mean, ultimately, we tried to get her off of them, which we found out was incredibly difficult to do.
Titrating off one of these SSRIs is really, really hard, actually.
And it turned out, obviously, to be the case that my mom, that these symptoms were not due to depression.
They were due to degeneration in her brain.
And we went from doctor's office to doctor's office, ultimately culminating in a trip to the Cleveland Clinic.
So just imagine, like, we're in New York City, right?
We have, like, multiple hospitals at our disposal.
We had to book a trip to the Cleveland Clinic, and it was there that, for the first time, my mom was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative condition.
So she was prescribed drugs for both Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease at that time.
And that, to me, was...
I've always been a pretty chill guy, but that was the first time in my life I've ever had a panic attack.
Just Googling the drugs, you know, like any scared kid would do when their mom receives a life-changing diagnosis.
And that was the moment for me that I realized that my life had to pivot and I had no choice but to dedicate myself to learning all that I could about these conditions.
It's the fact that these conditions begin decades before the emergence of symptoms.
You know, again, it's a disease of midlife, essentially.
Alzheimer's disease begins 20 to 30 years, if not more, before the first symptom.
And so to me, it became very clear that we were approaching these conditions in the wrong way.
You know, trying to...
Acting in a reactionary way to something that had taken decades to manifest to me just seemed wrong.
And I stumbled upon the work of a neurologist at Weill Cornell New York Presbyterian who was talking about Alzheimer's disease as a preventable condition, which is not something that I'd heard prior to coming across his work.
And I realized at that time that this was like considered 10 years ago a fringe idea.
Dementia prevention was like a fringe idea.
Except for through the lens of this neurologist who was working within the confines of, you know, rigorous, randomized research and, you know, and checking all the boxes for scientific credibility.
And, um...
And so to me, it became really clear that this is a topic that I needed to help amplify using my skill set as a non-medical doctor, as a non-academic scientist.
And I also learned really early on that it's not a genetic condition, that we have genetic risk factors, but that That we have a say when it comes to our cognitive destiny, that this is not a natural part of aging.
I mean, you know, everything in the body as you get older tends to falter in its functionality.
You know, like, our joints don't work as well.
And, you know, there is a degree of forgetfulness that I think is...
In a way, a natural aspect of getting older, but cognitive impairment, that's not natural.
Degeneration of our neurons of, for example, the portion of the brain that drives movement, the substantia nigra, which occurs in Parkinson's disease, that's not normal.
And so it began this investigation for me, trying to understand, because I was seeing the person who meant the most to me of anybody in life.
You know, degenerating every day in front of my face, getting worse and worse and worse.
It instilled this burning desire in me to understand all that I could and to share in the hopes that it might prevent it from happening to others.
And yeah, it was also very odd because my maternal grandmother did not have dementia.
So it was really sad and surreal, in fact, that my mom was increasingly requiring around-the-clock care while her mother, who lived in the same home, And was 30 years older was cognitively totally healthy.
It was just the oddest thing.
My grandmother, my mom's mom, was in her 90s and totally cognitively healthy, able to form cogent senses.
And my mom was struggling to express an idea to get out of a bathroom.
And it just, to me, it was so shocking that I... It was traumatic.
I mean, I still have PTSD, I think, from those days, but it's, yeah, it's motivated me to do what I can to help.
And I saw all in every, you know, by the end of my mom's life, she was on 14 different pharmaceuticals.
And I'm not anti-pharma.
Like, if there was a drug that would have actually helped my mom, I would have been first in line at the pharmacy to fill that prescription for her.
But the drugs don't work at all.
And physicians are very quick to, you know, to write a prescription.
It's like add a new drug to the arsenal.
They're very reluctant to deprescribe.
I have never seen a prescription deprescribe to my mom.
And by the end of her life, she was on 14 different pharmaceuticals.
And there's nobody on earth that understands how all of those different drugs are interacting in a system that's growing increasingly frail.
It was just really sad.
And, you know, so I started to investigate these modifiable risk factors, you know, whether it's dietary, diet-related, which it, you know, in my mom's case, it may have had something to do with her diet over the years.
It might have had nothing to do with her diet over the years.
I'll never know.
But also now we're starting to see that air pollution is a major contributor to neurodegeneration.
We're starting to see now that, well, as of 2020, it was acknowledged that exposure to air pollution is actually one of these newly identified modifiable risk factors for Alzheimer's disease.
So exposure to fine particulate matter, PM2.5, actually might cause Alzheimer's disease for some patients.
And then Most interestingly, and this is one of the things that I want to talk about with you, which I came across the work of a neurologist named Dr. Ray Dorsey, who's over at University of Rochester, who's done a lot of work publishing on the link between environmental toxicants and Parkinson's disease.
Parkinson's disease is now the fastest growing brain disease.
And my mom's condition actually had more in common with Parkinson's disease than it did Alzheimer's disease.
She had Lewy body dementia, which has more in common with Parkinson's, even though they're both dementia, Lewy body and Alzheimer's.
But there's...
Data now linking exposure to certain herbicides and pesticides to Parkinson's disease dramatically increased risk.
Anywhere between two and a half to six-fold increased risk.
We use it here, and occupational exposure to this compound is associated with between two and a half to three times the risk for the development of Parkinson's disease.
Related compounds are literally used in mouse models to create Parkinson's disease.
The company that creates it has been under investigation for years, and what has now come to light is that they knew about the fact that these chemicals accumulate in the brain, in brain tissue, and they seem to selectively target the region of the brain associated with Parkinson's disease, the substantia nigra.
Well, the residues and the exposures that you get from eating them is very low, but we don't know what long-term exposure to those low levels is doing to us.
My mother is somebody who never believed in Organic produce, right?
And organic is not perfect.
And natural compounds, some of them are the most dangerous compounds on Earth.
So I know, you know, some people listening might say, oh, you know, here we go with the appeal to nature fallacy.
But it's very clear that occupational exposure is very hazardous.
You have to be licensed.
You have to use this stuff very carefully.
But some people actually use it to off themselves.
I mean, it's a really toxic compound.
And we now have data suggesting that it creates this condition, that it selectively targets and destroys dopamine-producing neurons that mediate movement.
Nicotine by itself raises heart rate and it raises blood pressure acutely.
Not by much, but presumably And it's vasoconstrictive as well.
So there's some evidence suggesting it impedes wound healing.
I will occasionally use nicotine as a cognitive enhancer, but I also have...
I have chronic low back issues, and I think that, you know, for people with disc issues, this is just a speculation, but I think that it's probably not a good idea to chronically use nicotine if you have disc issues, which are already, your discs and your back are already poorly vascularized, and nicotine is a vasoconstrictor.
And smoking, you know, increases your risk for Alzheimer's disease.
I don't think that we've identified a relationship between pure nicotine and, well, pretty much anything.
The research on pure nicotine by itself is pretty sparse.
Most of the research on the health effects of nicotine is confounded by smoking, which is obviously not good for you.
But interestingly, there does seem to be an inverse relationship between nicotine use, even via smoking, and Parkinsonism.
So people who smoke cigarettes seem to be protected to some degree against Parkinson's disease, which is very odd.
And they've shown in mouse models That nicotine actually, when they use some of these mitochondrial toxins, some of these poisons like Paraquat, right?
Or another one called MPTP, which has been used as a street party drug, but it's actually profoundly neurotoxic.
It's been shown to create chronic Parkinsonism with just acute use.
Nicotine actually prevents that in those models.
So it's been shown to somehow protect the brain from, in some regards, against Parkinson's disease.
So I wouldn't recommend using nicotine unless somebody, and this is again a speculation, but my hypothesis is that if you were exposed occupationally to some of these compounds like Paraquat or Rodinone, or there are other compounds that are being directly connected to Parkinson's disease, too, like trichloroethylene.
I would say maybe nicotine is a potentially disease-modifying intervention in those contexts.
So when they've studied patients, was there a noticeably smaller instance of people who developed Parkinson's who were smokers, or was it non-existent?
I'm not sure the relative risk decrease, but it's one of these odd things that seems pretty consistent in the literature, that smokers are less likely to develop Parkinson's disease.
A lot of the research on nicotine is in animal models, unfortunately.
But it does seem to do...
If you set the vascular effects aside, which might play a role in neurodegeneration because the brain relies on its vascular network.
The brain is a very hungry organ, and vascular dementia is the second most common form of dementia, actually.
But nicotine does seem to have some really protective effects on the brain.
It seems to reduce neuroinflammation.
It...
Might act in a way as an antioxidant in the brain.
I'm not recommending it because there are risks, of course, but they've shown that it seems to be protective in these animal models against these poisons that would otherwise cause Parkinsonism.
And...
Some other cool facts about nicotine, actually, because I did do a little bit of a deep dive recently into it, because I do notice a cognitive benefit when I use it.
See, I mean, it does seem to be this, it's like this really interesting compound where it does all these, you know, it has all these effects in the body that many of which I'm sure are negative, but it does seem to do some good stuff for the brain, which is fascinating, you know?
So I think, again, I'm not promoting it, but...
If you're able to forge, as an adult, a responsible relationship with it, then maybe it's worth experimenting with.
Particularly because of its potential to...
I don't want this to come off as an endorsement for nicotine, but its ability potentially to protect against Parkinsonism is very interesting.
And so when a person, you're saying, so this is something that starts to happen in midlife and then it really expresses itself in dramatic ways years later.
Other than the environmental factors, what dietary factors contribute?
Except, obviously, pesticides and herbicides that are, unfortunately, a part of our food system now.
And today on social media, if you in so much as mention organic and that debate organic versus conventional, I mean, there's so much controversy.
But, you know, I think the as we've seen, right, with Paraquat and this Chinese company that has shrouded the data, and in fact, Shrouded the data and in fact they they've assembled internally a SWAT team to basically to essentially suppress Data suggesting harm due to exposure to this to this herbicide even though it's banned even though Even though it's banned in China, yeah.
But there was another article that came out recently in the publication ProPublica written by, I believe her name was Sharon Lerner, another journalist who I connected with at this DC event that I was at recently, who, it was this crazy, 3M has been hiding the health harms, shrouding the health harms, suppressing the health harms due to exposure to these PFAS compounds.
That are forever chemicals, known endocrine disruptors.
So there's like all this corporate collusion and shrouding of the truth.
And I'm just like, I think insofar as you can reduce your exposures to these kinds of things and selectively, you know, if money is scarce, you know, selectively buy certain things organic.
Partnering with Environmental Health News, a consumer watchdog sent 40 bandages of different brands to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency certified lab.
The lab found that 65% of the bandages contained detectable levels of synthetic forever chemicals, or PFAS. Yeah.
I mean, that's something that I guarantee you corporations use.
If nations use it, and we know they do, and we know we do, we know that there's troll farms in Russia, we know this is a real thing.
Why wouldn't corporations use that too, especially if they could farm that off and be removed from it as far as being able to trace back the paperwork?
I mean, even within our own government, the USDA, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 95% of people on that committee have or have had conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical industry and the food industry.
At least 50% that I'm aware of today, you know, working on the 2020, 2020, 2025 issue.
We see all the time there's been a number of great journalism done by done in the Washington Post exposing how the food industry pays dietitians to promote, you know, certain a certain ideology around food that all foods are cool. certain a certain ideology around food that all foods are You know, you just have to eat less and move more.
I mean, these companies, they pay these people that are body positive influencers as well.
So they're basically paying people that are ill because of eating these things to tell other people it's okay to eat these things and that it's somehow or another phobic, whether it's fat phobic or whatever it is, to not encourage body positivity.
And it's stupid.
It's just stupid.
It's stupid for the people that are getting it.
It's stupid for the people that are promoting it.
It's stupid for our culture to be inundated with this nonsense and misinformation where we have to sort through it and try to do deeper research and consult people who actually understand what's going on.
It's so disheartening that we live in this world that's so compromised by money.
That information about key things like your own health is so distorted that it's hard.
Like, you know, you talk to people and so many people have like a basic misunderstanding of what is good and not good for you.
And all of it is because of this kind of thing.
That it's just so prevalent and it's so confusing.
And you're getting expert advice from people, which is one of the wildest ones for me.
I mean, most of the social media, you know, personas that I've observed that purport to be experts or that, you know, that seem to have, I don't know whether it's through credentialism, a degree of authority.
I mean, I wouldn't send a loved one to.
Yeah.
It's just gaslighting on a mass scale, because your average person today comes across this ideology that all foods are fine, it's all good, and they try to reduce their consumption of the crap that they're already eating, and they end up failing at that,
because it's really hard to moderate your consumption of these foods, which have been engineered to be consumed Quickly and regularly, and then they feel as though they're, you know, they feel moral failure, and then it just creates this vicious cycle of yo-yo dieting.
We're not being honest about the way that these foods impact behavior.
And today, 60% of the calories that your average person consumes comes from ultra-processed foods, which are foods that are highly calorie-dense.
They are nutrient-poor.
They are minimally satiating.
They're uber-delicious.
I mean, they push your brain to a bliss point beyond which self-control is...
Seemingly impossible.
And by the way, it's these ultra-processed foods that are a major route of ingestion for these kinds of chemicals that we're talking about, these industrial chemicals, forever chemicals.
You know, ultra processed foods are, you know, if you want more phthalates in your body, consume more ultra processed foods.
There was a study that recently was published that found that for every 10% increment in ultra processed food consumption, pregnant women were ingesting about 14% higher levels of these phthalates, right?
I mean, you had, you did such an amazing episode with Shauna Swan a couple years ago, talking about the fact that our exposure to these chemicals are reducing the anogenital distance in boys, right?
Which is a, which is a very easy, I don't know about if easy is the right term, but it's a very, it's, it's a very simple proxy to use to identify how these compounds might be affecting us, right?
But that's only what you can observe.
Like, how are these chemicals affecting us in other ways, you know?
I get asked this a lot, like, who do you know who to trust on social media?
I think a really good heuristic is, you know, somebody actually, I was giving a talk recently, and somebody highlighted that one good indicator of somebody who is likely trustworthy is somebody who is willing to present the opposing viewpoint, and not strawman the opposing viewpoint, but actually steelman the opposing viewpoint, like to actually make clear what the opposing viewpoint is, and then to refute that viewpoint.
I try to share where I've changed my mind in the past or where I've evolved my viewpoint.
I try to be clear about the things that I don't know.
I don't know.
I'm also not trying to be one of these people on social media that purports to know everything, to have the magic routine or protocol.
You know, for everything, you know, as like some kind of, you know, all-knowing arbiter of health information because I feel like there are still so many unknowns and I could easily one day develop what it is.
Is that my mom developed?
I hope I don't.
I had a health scare in 2022 that, um, you know, just proved to me that, you know, there is a lot of like luck that goes into this, you know, into this equation as well.
Oh man, I have mild, or it's probably progressed, but it's like disc desiccation between L5 and S1. So it's basically a dehydrated disc, which I got from just squatting improperly 10 years ago, and my back's never been the same since.
It was a piece of machinery that was designed by Westside Barbell, Louis Roberts.
What's his name?
Simmons.
Louis Simmons, sorry.
Louis Simmons from Westside Barbell developed this machine that strengthens the back and actively decompresses the back.
And what it is is your body weight with your chest down sits on this bench and underneath it you hook your legs to this thing that's like a leg curl and you lift up which strengthens your back and on the D cell when it brings it down it's actively pulling your back and it's phenomenal.
It's really good at strengthening all the muscles around your back to keep your back stable.
This is the machine right here.
We have one.
Yeah, we have the rogue version of it out there in the studio.
I could show it to you after we're done here, but I love it.
It's phenomenal.
And it's great for developing leg strength and hamstring strength and glute strength, but really I use it for lower back, for decompression.
Show a video, Jamie, if you would, so we could see how it worked.
This is Louie.
He was on the podcast back in the day.
He was an amazing guy.
And very innovative.
So he was a power lifter and developed some back problems himself.
But you see how on the downswing, it's actually pulling your back and you can feel it pull your back.
So you can feel it like separate everything.
You feel like little things pop in there and it provides relief.
And for him, they were telling them he had to get his disc fused because he had too much compression.
He said, well, what about decompression?
And they were reluctant to consider that and so he's a genius, a fitness genius, and so he designed a machine that would actively decompress the spine while strengthening the muscles around it.
And what that does is, instead of hanging from your ankles so your legs tense up and your legs resist the weight of your body, instead of that, everything hinges down from your hips, and you will, like, immediately feel when you get down there your back popping and decompressing.
Everyone, like Daniel Cormier, UFC champion, he's like, I was never the same.
Once they cut my back open, it was never the same.
There's ways to also deal with it with stem cells.
And one of the things they're doing now, because the FDA has such restrictive rules on stem cells, people are going overseas and other countries to do it.
And I have some friends that run a clinic down in Tijuana, the Cellular Performance Institute.
And I know many people, including a good friend of mine, my friend Shane Dorian, who is a world champion surfer who's had pretty severe back problems.
He went there and they're injecting directly into the discs.
And there's a very strict protocol of recovery.
You're not doing anything physical for like a couple of months after that.
You can walk.
Essentially, they don't want any stress on the back, anything that's going to impede the healing process.
He said within six months after that, all of the issues that he had went away.
So you're lying flat on your back, you press this up, you sit up, you get to one knee, you post the other knee, you get up, you stand up straight, and then you lower yourself back the same way.
And I think one of the problems that people have when it comes to weightlifting and developing problems, and I've certainly had plenty, Is that you're overloading certain muscle groups and then all the stuff that connects things together, the lower back, the neck, all these different issues.
They happen because your whole system is not strong uniformly.
You're developing strong muscle groups like quads, but how are the hamstrings?
How are the things behind your calves?
How are your tib muscles?
How's your lower back?
What exercises have you done to make sure that your spine is protected?
And so what a slant board is, is a board that you do squats on where the back of it is raised, so your toes are pointing down, your heels are pointing up, and what this allows you to do is get a very deep bend of the knees, and you get your knees That push out over your toes and you really lower, you know, ass to heels.
And what I do with those, that's it right there.
I have that one at home.
He made me one of those.
So you can do this.
They're doing it with different exercises here.
These are just calf strengthening exercises.
I do them with bodyweight squats and one of the things I do them with is goblet squats.
I have very strong legs, but I never do deadlifts, and I never do like regular squats.
The heaviest thing I squat with is a 100-pound kettlebell.
So I hold a 100-pound kettlebell in front of me, and then I do goblet squats on that.
And what that does is it strengthens...
When you have a heavy weight, like a 100-pound kettlebell, and you're holding it in this position...
Just to hold it there, your whole body wants to go forward, right?
Because it's like, it's all this weight out in front of you.
So you're stabilizing it with your lower back, you're stabilizing it with your abs, and then you're dropping down very deep into this bodyweight squat and then up for this goblet squat.
And I do it on that, on the slant board.
Phenomenal, and it doesn't put a lot of strain on your back.
Yeah, I mean, you know, there's a lot that I, you know, obviously don't know, but I know what I know, and I know that from a nutritional standpoint, from an environmental exposure standpoint, your average American today is inflicting self-harm unwittingly on a daily basis via the foods, via the exposures.
And, you know, our circadian rhythms are all dysregulated.
We're more sedentary than we've ever been.
We're exposed to...
I mean, I believe it was the Environmental Working Group identified 217 industrial chemicals in cord blood, you know, of pregnant women.
We're being exposed, you know, from every which way.
And it's not necessarily that it's like one compound that's causing all of our problems, you know?
But it's cumulative injury.
It's like our bodies are resilient, but they can only contend with so much.
So you throw all these exposures against the backdrop of widespread nutrient deficiencies, you know, unprecedented sedentary behavior, chronic stress, poor sleep.
And it's a recipe for chronic disease.
I mean, to me, it's very clear as to why so many of us seem to be suffering.
Yeah, and to quote-unquote detoxify, which has become one of these contentious words now on social media, granted maybe possibly for good reason because it's used to sell detox supplements and things like that, but I mean our bodies can detox.
We just have to make sure that we're giving our bodies the right raw materials to do that.
And that's actually one reason why I think I'm not a carnivore dieter.
I'm a big advocate of consuming grass-fed, grass-finished meat.
I'm a huge protein guy, but I do think dietary fiber plays an important role in terms of helping us detoxify, release some of these compounds when we go to the bathroom.
So, the three primary means in which a body detoxifies is via peeing, pooping, and sweating.
And when you release bile acids into the lumen of the gut, with those bile acids compounds of the liver has essentially deemed, has marked for removal from the body.
And fiber, dietary fiber, soluble fiber specifically, sequesters these bile acids.
And because they're absorbed by the soluble fiber, they disallow reabsorption.
And so you poop them out.
That's one of the reasons...
That's actually the mechanism by which soluble fiber can reduce LDL cholesterol, ApoB, because it sequesters bile acids, which your liver creates using cholesterol.
And...
So you essentially poop out lipids, toxins.
I mean, if you're not pooping on a regular basis, you're harboring toxins.
That's why I think that's probably one of the mechanisms by which fiber seems to be so consistently associated with healthspan, lifespan.
And those observations are not necessarily causal.
There's healthy user bias there.
I think obviously people who eat more fruits and vegetables today They likely have other healthy dietary and lifestyle habits.
That's clear, right?
But I do think there's a mechanism for fiber to help remove some of these toxins and the like.
Basically, bile acids get released into the lumen of the gut, which help break down fats, right?
You need these compounds to break down and assimilate fats from your diet, right?
But there's a very small, I believe it's at the end of the small intestine where these acids essentially would otherwise get reabsorbed, but because they're trapped by the soluble gel-forming fiber, They get passed.
You know, the bulk of stool is made up of fiber and dead bacteria and cells that have been sloughed off the, you know, epithelial layer of the large intestine, small intestine.
But yeah, fiber is generally what makes up, you know, the majority of a stool.
Well, I've never personally done a carnivore diet and I'm not a gastroenterologist, but carnivore dieters say that they poop fine, but I think it's a missed opportunity to not be getting fiber in your diet.
I don't think that the carnivore diet long-term is optimal.
Short-term, and also I will say that people that see reprieve from awful conditions like So the primary function of fiber that you think is beneficial versus having a carnivore diet is the fact that it can absorb these compounds inside the gut, whereas if you're just eating meat, that's not going to happen.
Correct.
I think that's one of the benefits of fiber.
I think fiber has a few benefits.
So for one, fiber is satiating.
It's not as satiating as protein, but it does mechanically stretch out the stomach, which turns off the hunger hormone ghrelin.
So fiber containing foods are beneficial because they're satiating.
Two, for this lipid regulation, hormone regulation, toxin removal function that fiber plays.
But then three, fiber seems to promote...
Gut bacterial diversity.
There are some studies that suggest otherwise, that it's not necessarily the fiber, it's fermented foods that play a larger role in promoting gut bacterial diversity.
But we know that fiber feeds gut bacteria, and as a result, we get beneficial postbiotic compounds like sodium butyrate, which is anti-inflammatory, feeds cells in the gut.
I think there are a few benefits to fiber consumption.
I don't think that fiber is the primary thing that we should be looking for in the diet necessarily.
I prioritize protein.
I think eating a protein-rich diet, there seems to be many benefits of that.
And fiber is not an essential nutrient, but it does seem to do good things in the body.
Yeah, it's one of the weird arguments from the carnivore diet side is that fiber is not necessary.
And, you know, when you see these people that have been eating nothing but meat for 5, 10 years and show an alleviation of all sorts of symptoms of different autoimmune conditions and different issues that they've had, it's interesting.
So, you know, like, red meat, generally very, very well tolerated.
Chicken, very well tolerated.
But it's these plant products, these plant items that seem to, you know, people have different sensitivities to them.
So I wouldn't say, like, you have to eat broccoli or you have to eat spinach.
Like, people have different...
You know, and we're also, today there's widespread gut dysbiosis.
So people have problems with their guts.
They have immune systems that are not fully competent, as evidenced by the soaring prevalence of autoimmune conditions and allergies and the like today.
Which I think is attributed to there are many factors that play a role.
You know, it could be overuse of antibiotics.
It could be the hygiene hypothesis.
We've just become so sterile as a culture.
Fewer people today are being, or kids are being breastfed or being born via C-section.
Travel can play a role.
You know, you travel to some foreign country, you get an infection.
That changes the microbiome.
And so I think like we have these sensitivities that are not surprising.
But I think by and large for most people, these plant foods have a lot of good to offer.
You know that the benefits, generally speaking, outweigh risks.
I'm glad you brought up the overuse of antibiotics because there's a very interesting case.
That belt on the wall up there, the Abu Dhabi Combat Club, that's the most prestigious grappling competition in the world.
And the guy who won that is the greatest grappler of all time.
His name is Gordon Ryan.
And he's a guy who's only 28 years old, which is really wild.
And he hasn't been beaten in, like, forever.
And it's not whether or not he beats people, it's how he beats them.
He's that good.
He's one of the most dominant athletes of any sport of all time.
But he had staph infection, which is very common amongst grapplers.
It's very common.
People get a lot of staph infections.
Well, he was getting it so often that he was essentially on antibiotics for a whole year.
And his gut is fucked up real bad to the point where he's like constantly nauseous.
He's seen a bunch of different doctors, they've tried to fix it in a bunch of different ways, and no one can really figure it out.
Like, when someone has developed a really destroyed gut biome because of antibiotics and long-term, like, really irresponsible long-term use of antibiotics, what can someone do to try to come back from that?
Yeah, I mean, most people would reach for a probiotic, but there was actually a study that came out a couple years ago that found that probiotics, after a course of antibiotics, I believe the antibiotic was Cipro, actually delayed recolonization of the gut by healthy bacteria.
The microbiome is a big buzz term, and there are still so many more unanswered questions than there are answers.
I think based on my assessment of the literature, and I've written about it in my books, I think that the best thing to do would probably be just to slowly get back to a diet.
That contains fermented foods.
I think fermented foods have been shown to be really supportive of gut bacterial diversity.
I mean, I would probably adopt a low FODMAP diet and at a certain point, you know, again, I'm just speculating.
So, I mean, this could be the worst advice.
So don't take with a grain of salt.
But I would probably adopt one of those diets and then, you know, first, maybe even like an elimination diet, like a really aggressive one.
Because people with serious gut issues, I mean, again, I'm not like a carnivore advocate, but seem to do really well, at least in the short term on these carnivore diets.
So I would say maybe try something like that.
If that is too restrictive, then I would try maybe a low FODMAP diet.
The vast majority, 85-90% of my meals are meat and eggs.
And the regulation of my energy level is incredible.
It's just changed everything.
I used to get tired in the afternoon.
You know, it used to be like the afternoon, I'd be like, oh, then I'd have to power through, get a cup of coffee, wake up, figure out what to do, and then go to a show.
That's not the case anymore.
Like, I'm wide awake all day long.
It's very different.
It's very different in when you eliminate...
Essentially, most carbohydrates from your diet and then your body starts to produce glucose via gluconeogenesis through absorption of protein and meat.
The whole thing changes.
You have a steady, manageable level of energy throughout the entire day.
And cognitively, it's been one of the best things I've ever done.
When I first started doing it again, I'd gotten off of it for a while and I first started doing it again.
All of a sudden I was like, Jesus Christ, I have like an extra gear in my brain.
It's like conversationally, it's like for podcasting for me.
I... I would consider myself carnivore-adjacent in the sense that I am a huge fan of, I think, red meat's a health food, which I know.
I mean, saying that in and of itself is a controversial statement today.
I take a very protein-forward approach with my diet.
Like, I think that protein, there are many benefits to prioritizing protein.
It's the most satiating macronutrient.
You've got a six-fold higher thermic effect of eating protein as compared to carbs and fat.
Obviously, your body is made of protein.
It supports muscle protein synthesis.
It halts muscle protein.
There's so many benefits to prioritizing protein, which I do.
But I do think that, you know, like dark leafy greens, for example, is known to be one of the most nutrient-dense forms of produce because of its low calorie density, and it's a great source of vitamin C, folate, But also I think dark leafy greens, I mean, take kale.
Kale's the top source of these carotenoids called lutein and zeaxanthin, which we know directly support eye health and brain health.
And so I don't see a reason to deprive myself of these greens that I know have these compounds that Literally migrate up to the brain where they help to reduce oxidative stress.
They might even improve the way, you know, cognitive function and the like.
And they try to figure out what's wrong and then many of them try to supplement and then one day they'll have a piece of salmon and feel like their body just returned on and then they go, okay, I gotta stop doing this.
I think one thing that's really interesting is that, you know, even within the nutritional orthodoxy, saturated fat still continues to be demonized, right?
But only 3% of the saturated fat that your average American intakes, ingests, comes from steak, comes from meat.
The vast majority of saturated...
Like, if you were just to accept that saturated fat is the worst dietary nutrient one might ingest...
But 3% comes from red meat, excluding mixed dishes.
The vast majority of saturated fat that your average American ingests comes from desserts, comes from mixed dishes like pizza, lasagna, egg rolls, things like that.
Yeah, we're in a very strange position, this country at least, with regards to our understanding of what is actually good and not good for you.
You know, when I tell people that I eat mostly meat, they're like, what about your cholesterol?
I'm like...
To try to walk them down the rabbit hole of good cholesterol, bad cholesterol, the balance of cholesterol, cholesterol as it relates to plaque in your arteries.
What's really wrong?
And is it actual food that most people eat?
Is that really what the problem is?
Because I doubt that it is.
I doubt that it's meat.
I doubt that it's eggs.
I doubt that that's the problem.
And when people are willing to readily consume this processed bullshit on a daily basis, but then demonize steak, I'm like, that is one of the dumbest things that we have become accustomed to.
This idea that a steak is delicious, but it's ultimately bad for you.
I mean, I, you know, especially contextually today with the, you look at health statistics, right?
Like one in two people are almost obese today.
40% of people are obese today.
And by the year 2030, half are going to be not just overweight, but clinically obese.
Okay.
Half of adults today are, have some degree of insulin resistance, right?
We know that 90% of adults have some degree of metabolic dysregulation if you factor in things like waist circumference, low HDL, triglycerides, and things like that.
And so for a health expert today to demonize any whole food, any whole food to me is just absurd and actually really unethical.
And red meat is, you know, again and again, it comes up on these lists on, you know, in the data as one of the most nutrient dense foods.
I mean, it's the most, it provides the most bioavailable source of iron, heme iron, right?
I mean, iron deficiency anemia is still a major global health problem last I checked.
And red meat is the ultimate iron supplement.
It's highly bioavailable.
It provides zinc.
It provides creatine.
It provides carnosine, carnitine, all these really incredible and valuable micronutrients.
And again, when talking about steak, that's where 3% of the saturated fat is.
So what's wrong with steak?
What's the big problem with it from a health standpoint?
I mean, you know, there was this, like, thing where for a while it was like all animal source foods are bad, right?
The antidote to disease is to...
Shun all animal-sourced foods, right?
But then we started to see, oh, wait a minute, fish is actually associated with better health outcomes.
So let's eat more fish.
And then the data came out showing us that, oh, wait a minute, cholesterol, this nutrient that we've demonized for decades, actually has no negative downside, no downside with regard to cardiovascular risk.
For the vast majority of people consuming dietary cholesterol, very little impact on serum cholesterol, right?
And then dairy.
Turns out that, oh my god, wait a minute.
It's not low-fat and reduced-fat dairy that seems to be associated with better health.
It's full-fat dairy that seems to be associated with better health.
It's, I mean, the perfect antidote to boxed mac and cheese.
I mean, how many people for dinner in this country are eating boxed mac and cheese for dinner?
Noodles with butter, you know?
Or margarine, worse.
And I just think it's a huge shame.
And I grew up in a household that was largely...
You know, my mother had a bias towards vegetarianism.
She wasn't a vegetarian.
She ate chicken.
She ate occasionally fish.
But she was very concerned about heart disease.
And so she, you know, growing up, we were, like, she never ate, I never saw her eat red meat.
And she never ate any eggs.
And when she served me my first egg when I was a child, she served me it with a warning to not eat these with any significant frequency because they have the potential to clog your arteries.
She bought into, you know, the advice at the time.
She didn't have the internet.
She wasn't, you know, online.
But she, whatever the magazines or the TV, you know, the nightly news would share about healthy eating, and certainly whatever the marketing, you know, in the supermarket, as she was pushing her shopping cart around the supermarket aisle, anything with a red Heart Healthy logo on it would end up in my shopping cart at some point, make its way through my kitchen.
And so I grew up on a diet that was largely ultra-processed and mainly, you know, I was encouraged to eat a low cholesterol, low saturated fat diet.
I mean, I grew up consuming margarine.
And I remember the big plastic tub of corn oil that we always had out by the stove.
So, like, even when I wrote my first book, Genius Foods, This data hadn't even yet come out yet, but we now see for every 10% increment in ultra-processed food consumption, there's a 25% higher risk of developing Alzheimer's disease.
It's the craziest scam to ever get pulled off that the commonly known foods that people have eaten for eternity, forever...
Are the ones that are the problem.
And that these ultra-processed foods that have recently been introduced into the American diet, those are the things that you should gravitate towards.
They are committing a crime against humans, an information crime against humans, and it will result in those people taking choices that are negatively going to affect their life.
Ultra-processed food consumption linked to 32 negative health outcomes.
In this review, they looked at all of the available research linking ultra-processed foods to negative health outcomes.
They couldn't find one single benefit of ultra-processed food consumption.
It was all bad.
And again, I think it goes back to the fact that these foods are, you know, we tend to over consume them and they're a route of ingestion for these, you know, for these forever chemicals and the like.
They, yeah, it's just not, it's not good.
They drive obesity.
They drive insulin resistance when consumed en masse.
I'm not saying that you can't consume any.
I think it's important to be a pragmatist.
And it's not like my diet is 100% free of ultra-processed foods.
We consume too many today.
And I think part of that has to do with the fact that we're not adequately taught.
It's never informed consent.
We're not adequately taught how these foods influence behavior.
Well, I think people are more aware of it now, fortunately, because of people like you that are spreading this information and people hear podcasts and they get like an adjusted sense of why they've been misinformed.
And that's a new thing, you know, and the ability to access information from unofficial sources now.
It turns out to be real information and very beneficial.
There's so many competing voices and misinformation out there on social media and fear-mongering today.
I mean, fear-mongering with regard to animal source foods, which I think is a problem.
I mean, as I've said, I'm not a carnivore dieter.
I think it's just, yeah, it's really insane that today anybody would fear-monger, you know, Any sort of whole food.
And I think that really, you know, like I used to be more interested in what's the appropriate, for example, ratio of carbs and fats to one's diet for optimal health.
And I really do think it's, you know, for most people, the big lever, dietarily speaking, is to reduce your consumption of these kinds of foods.
You know, I think intermittent fasting is something that a lot of people are talking about today.
I think that's like, you know, there's nothing magic about it, but that can be used as a tool.
There are lots of tools at people's disposal, and it frustrates me sometimes on social media where you see, you know, people, especially those in the so-called evidence-based community, that get so down on what they're simply not up on.
They tend to write these tools off as being trivial or they'll even talk disparagingly about them.
I think whatever tool is at your disposal that you have the ability to use today, I think that's a great thing.
So for your documentary, when you're discussing the causes and what you can do to sort of mitigate the effects of these things, what's the primary concern and when does some...
So you say this is a disease that starts to show itself in middle age or begins, and then by the time you see the symptoms, you're in late stage.
So it's by the time you present and you're diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, I think that it's irreversible at that point.
So I think the sooner you can get a handle on your risk factors, you know, some of which include nutrition, but also social isolation is a risk factor.
Well, I mean, there's that 80-year-long ongoing study at Harvard, the study of human development that found that loneliness is a toxin on par with smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol.
And, you know, I think humans are, first and foremost, we're social beings.
That's one of the reasons why, you know, a human neonate is born half-baked.
I mean, we continue our development in the presence of others.
You know, they call it the fourth trimester.
Relative to other animals in the animal kingdom, a human is born with zero capacity to survive.
You know, we need those around us.
And so I think it's just hardwired into who we are as a species, that we are social beings.
And today, whether it's attributed to, you know, living in cities and remote work or social media, It's taking a huge toll on us from the standpoint of mental health, and that creates downstream biochemical consequences.
I mean, this is not just an emotional phenomenon.
This is something that actually has a real-life health impact.
I mean, exercise is medicine when it comes to the brain.
With regard to the epidemiology of exercise and dementia risk, I don't think that's clear because also as people get older, they tend to become more sedentary.
But we do know that exercise does have a profound impact, even just light activity.
But is there an instance or like a measurable decrease in instances of people that have dementia and Alzheimer's with people that are enthusiasts that have never stopped exercising, like people that are like 70-year-old marathon runners?
I mean, people with greater cardio-respiratory fitness, particularly in midlife, seem to have reduced risk in late life for an Alzheimer's diagnosis.
Because again, it's about being healthy in midlife that really seems to move the needle.
So midlife obesity is associated with increased risk for Alzheimer's disease down the line.
Being actually heavier in late life is associated with lower risk because people tend to become less well-nourished as they get older.
So the obesity and Alzheimer's disease connection is actually quite interesting.
So midlife obesity is associated with With increased risk for Alzheimer's disease, but people who are of heavier weight as opposed to more frail in late life seem to be protected.
So just by virtue of one of the things I've always said about heavy people is if boy if you can get that person to lose weight They're gonna be so strong because they've been carrying around all this weight all the time.
Yeah, you know like my friend Ralphie Mae Ralphie was How big do you think Ralphie was his heyday?
There's lots of evidence now, meta-analyses even, Showing us whether it's resistance training, I mean, cardiovascular, it's such an important tool for brain health.
And that's part of the reason why I love fitness.
And most of it is due to what fitness does for my brain, my brain health, my mental health.
There was no, I mean, nobody was resistance training for fun, certainly not women, right?
And they were the targets of like, they were the bullseye of precisely that messaging, avoid cholesterol, avoid saturated fat, you know, low-fat this, low-fat that.
And they weren't working out.
And it's really sad when you look around and you see that generation, you know, and their health.
Yeah, and the differences between, I mean, there's been a bunch of internet memes about this, the difference between like an 80-year-old woman who regularly strength trains and has been doing it her whole life and another 80-year-old woman who's in a chair, you know, and she's rolling around on a scooter because she can't walk right anymore.
So, I mean, I think we're definitely making progress.
I think that's one of the upsides of the wellness industry and this, I think, this fervor surrounding wellness and whether it's group workouts or gym culture.
I think it's amazing that people across the age spectrum now have embraced fitness as a lifestyle.
And women are lifting weights, and I think that's just incredible.
I mean, it's probably, you know, in some way if that's all you're drinking and who knows what else that water has been able to leach through the pipes or what have you.
That we establish what's called the no observed adverse effect level for a given compound, and then we assume that below that, exposure is safe, right?
And so that's why you always hear that exposure to these compounds is fine because the dose makes the poison, and they're very small in terms of the doses that we're being exposed to.
But the problem with endocrine disruptors, and this is not fully appreciated, I think, by the vast majority of people, Is that unlike most compounds which follow a linear dose response where, you know, you consume too much water at a certain point fast enough and it'll kill you, but below that, you're fine.
A lot of these endocrine disrupting compounds have what's called a non-monotonic dose response.
So a non-monotonic dose response means that at a low level, you might have effects, and you might not have effects for a period above that dose, and then you might have toxic effects at a much higher dose.
You might have completely different effects at a low dose.
So low dose toxicity, that's the issue.
And hormesis is a perfect example of this working in our favor, and it's a perfect example of a non-monotonic dose response that we actually want.
So at a very low dose, broccoli sprouts, this compound sulforaphane, produced by broccoli sprouts, creates a beneficial effect in the body, a response, where it causes our livers to increase production of glutathione, and we seem to have this protective, adaptive response to it, right?
But if you were to consume too much sulforaphane, it would kill you, right?
And so one of the issues with these compounds like phthalates and other endocrine disruptors, but phthalates in particular, Is that they have what's called a non-monotonic dose response, which makes them really difficult to study.
And it makes guidelines surrounding them really tricky.
And so the idea is that you might experience effects due to a low dose exposure that aren't necessarily killing you, right?
But that are still deemed safe, you know?
So it's not quite a linear dose response.
It can be, you know, a U-shaped curve, for example.
And so that's a big issue.
It makes these chemicals hard to study.
And that's one of the major concerns within the field of toxicology surrounding these kinds of compounds.
So you have an effect at various dosing, with various dosing, you know, exposures.
And, you know, in the case of sauna with hormesis, it's actually a beneficial thing.
But some of these endocrine disrupting compounds, the way that they impact hormones, the way that they impact receptors on cell surfaces, I don't necessarily, you know, it's not so clear that a low dose is necessarily safer than a high dose.
And that's one of the problems.
That's why I think you're better off, you know, when people say that, oh, well, the level of phthalates in these ultra-processed foods, they're in the parts per billion.
You know, we don't actually know how those, you know, how those, even as minute as they are, doses to that degree are affecting us.
You know, in the short term, certainly not the long term, but also, you know, when combined with all of the other exposures that your average person, you know, incurs over a day-to-day basis, it's just, yeah, it's a looming question mark.
And so that's why I think it's better to be safe than sorry and practice the precautionary principle and to reduce your exposure when you can.
So for pretty much anyone listening to this that's concerned about Alzheimer's and any form of degeneration, whether it's Lewy body or any kind of dementia, so first of all, be healthy, be fit, stop eating processed foods, start exercising, limit your exposure to whatever these chemicals are, whether they're You know, all the endocrine disruptors.
Because it's a heavier vehicle and there's more of that.
And I wondered like if they included Teslas in those because I have a Tesla and it has regenerative braking, right?
So what that means is like it doesn't coast.
As I'm driving, so if I'm driving 60 miles an hour and I see up ahead there is a stoplight that just turned yellow, and I know it's going to turn red, and I have a few hundred yards, I just let off the gas and my car slows down.
It slows down considerably to the point where I barely have to use the brakes.
So a lot of people, when they talk about driving Teslas, they talk about one-foot driving.
Because you have to use the brakes.
You have to stop short or something's going on.
But for the most part, if you know how the vehicle works, you rarely touch the brakes.
It slows down a lot when it comes near a red light.
As you come close to red light, let off the gas, it slows down a lot.
Generally produce less brake dust than gas-powered cars, but that's just Teslas.
My wife has a Porsche that doesn't have regenerative braking, and it's an electric car.
Regenerative braking converts a vehicle's kinetic engine.
You're right, but what about the ones that show that electric cars...
Produce more brake dust.
EVs can produce more tire dust because they're heavier and have more torque, which can cause them to wear out tires faster.
I think that what they were saying in the one study that I read, though, was that with many of them, because I don't think most electric cars use the regenerative braking aspect.
It's just wild to me that, I mean, it's like hubris.
You know, we think, one day we think we're doing good for the environment, and then the next day, you know, we find out that there are all of these downstream...
It's kind of like, you know, people don't, I think, can't wrap their head around the fact that plant production actually leads to crop death.
You know, critters and moles and moles on, but it's just like works.
If you're partaking in modern life today, there is blood on your hands and I don't think there's any way to get around it.
You know, you're leaving a footprint.
And I actually think that the focus on greenhouse gas emissions is super important, but I think it's unfortunately taken the focus away from corporations who Seem to get a hall pass when it comes to releasing these kinds of volatile organic compounds and these forever chemicals into the environment.
I think that's a real major environmental concern that not enough people are talking about.
I mean, the data that I've seen, proportionally, I'm not sure, but I know that it's significant, and it depends, obviously, on parts of the world.
And more research needs to be done because obviously a very polluted – somebody who lives amid serious air pollution, probably there are other factors at play.
They might live in a very industrialized part of a city that might not – they might be lower on the socioeconomic spectrum.
So they might have other risks like confounding risk.
Um...
I think we're good to go.
I think it depends on where you are, and I don't think there's one cause of dementia for every person with dementia.
I think there are different causes, but certainly when you look at these studies and you see that they had PM2.5 in their brains, and around the PM2.5, these particles...
There's the aggregation of these plaques that we associate with late-onset Alzheimer's disease.
I mean, that's startling.
So I don't know the proportion, but I do know that it's a significant concern.
I don't know if it's, you know, here in the United States, where we have better regulations now.
I mean, LA used to be very polluted.
It's a lot less so these days, for example.
I live in LA. And yet people are still developing Alzheimer's disease, unfortunately, in Southern California.
I don't know if that's as big of a contributor in LA, but...
I think it's really important to reduce your exposure.
I think an air purifier makes sense.
I think making sure that your HVAC system has changed that filter regularly, make sure that it's a good filter.
I mean, there are ways to mitigate exposure.
You can damp, you can wet dust, as opposed to using a dry duster that just redistributes dust.
I mean, dust oftentimes harbors a lot of these chemicals that we're talking about, whether it's trichloroethylene or plastic-related compounds.
You want to sequester the dust in a damp cloth, throw that cloth away or wash it.
Vacuuming, I think, is really important.
Make sure that your home is well-ventilated because homes are now becoming increasingly insulated as a cost-saving measure.
Which has led to an increase in exposure to certain volatile organic compounds in the home.
So, yeah, I mean, you might not be at risk in your house for exposure to fine particulate matter, per se, but, you know, you're breathing in all this other stuff, which isn't great for you.
And so when you set out to do this documentary, were you...
Trying to just highlight all the issues we're trying to present cures or potential Mitigating techniques that people can use like what were you trying to do?
Yeah, so I wanted to on the one hand Capture what it was that my mom was going through and as an artist.
I mean it was an incredibly painful for me and my family and so I felt in many ways that by documenting it It was giving meaning to the whole experience for me, which would otherwise just be purely traumatic.
And so I wanted to document what my mom was going through and pay tribute to her and also to pay tribute to the science of dementia prevention, which again, 10 years ago, nobody was talking about.
I wouldn't consider it a diet film.
There's no magical diet that's proposed.
The hope with the film was to unravel a lot of this sort of misinformation that I think we've been doled out over the past few decades with regard to what we should and shouldn't be eating.
But there are other factors that are covered.
in the documentary, of course.
But yeah, it does paint with broad strokes how one might live or eat to reduce risk for dementia.
And as I mentioned, one of the interviewees that is in the film is Dr. Delamonte at Brown, who coined the term type 3 diabetes.
And she talks a little bit about why we see rates increasing so starkly today.
And she talks about how it's unlikely to be genetic due to genetics.
It's likely to be due to exposure to whether the standard American food environment or something else.
And we also have one of my mentors, Richard Isaacson, who's the Alzheimer's prevention specialist who I was at New York Presbyterian, Weill Cornell, whose work I stumbled upon really early.
So it's really to drive home the notion that this condition doesn't begin overnight.
You have decades to set yourself down a different path if you simply become aware of the fact that your choices do impact your brain health.
And so it's in part informational, but it's also a tribute to...
My mom, and it's a tribute to anybody really who's ever experienced dementia, both as a patient or as a caregiver.
It's a film that people will find solace in.
And yeah, it's really cinematic.
It's hard for me to watch, but it's a film that is, I think, really emotional.
It's a really intimate look into what dementia is like.
And my mom is such a charismatic light, you know?
And she's so relatable.
And she's young, you know?
She's like in her early 60s in the film.
And so for anybody who thinks that this is something that, you know, only affects old people, you know, people, grandma, grandpa, I think it's going to shatter a lot of unhelpful misconceptions that people have about these conditions.
I think it slowed the progression of the condition, but it also, in a significant way, lifted her spirits.
Because, I mean, we know that exercise is really important for mental health, and it certainly helped with hers.
But it also, I mean, there is evidence that exercise, whether Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's disease, I mean, it's profoundly effective as a, you know, I mean, potentially in terms of slowing the condition, improving symptomology, improving quality of life.
And so, yeah, I mean, we got her on an exercise regimen.
We hired a trainer.
And that was really the first time in her life that my mom ever really took exercise seriously, which is crazy to think about.
And it's just so good for you from a metabolic health standpoint, mental health, brain health, cardiovascular health.
It's just like...
And we've become so sedentary, generally.
We have to schedule our activity today.
So, yeah, it's not, you know, there is no magic bullet, unfortunately.
It's a multifaceted problem, and we don't yet have all the answers, unfortunately, but my intent was to show people, to convince people that, you know, even though...
We don't have all the answers.
We don't need to sit idly on our hands as we, you know, particularly with the degree of self-harm that your average person is self-imposing on a day-to-day basis with the foods that they're eating, with their lifestyles.
Like, we can do things a little bit differently, and the research tends to support that by changing the way that we're doing things, it'll buy us additional years or maybe even decades of cognitive health.
Because in the brain of somebody with Alzheimer's disease, glucose metabolism is dramatically constrained.
And so you're basically like you're shooting insulin straight up into the brain because whatever goes up your nose is like you bypass the blood-brain barrier.
Because you've got these olfactory neurons that extend into the nasal cavity.
This is one of the reasons why air pollution is so harmful when we breathe it in through our noses.
So they're blowing insulin up the nose, and they're seeing that that improves cognitive function.
And I think they've already...
I could be wrong, but I think they've already shown in a phase one and phase two trial that it leads to an improvement in cognitive function in patients with Alzheimer's disease, semaglutide.
But the thing is, in the brain of somebody with Alzheimer's disease, so one of the reasons why they're calling it type 3 diabetes is because there's insulin deficiency and insulin resistance.
So it kind of has the hallmarks of both type 1 and type 2 diabetes.
So it seems to, you know, you're basically shooting up the brain with a peptide.
Insulin is a peptide that causes it to dramatically, you know, maybe uptake glucose.
Insulin's role in the brain is different than its role elsewhere in the body.
For example, skeletal muscle, it plays multiple functions in the brain.
But yeah, intranasal insulin has been shown in some studies.
Who knows?
Maybe spraying insulin up into the brain on a chronic basis increases insulin resistance, and then you become dependent on that.
So as a last line, maybe it's helpful in some capacity, but I think that's one of the reasons why semaglutide might help for somebody who's already experiencing cognitive decline.
But then also, I mean, yeah, I wouldn't...
Drugs that are helpful in the setting of somebody who's already been diagnosed, there really isn't much.
There isn't much.
I mean, there were these drugs that were...
We're approved and have recently been essentially abandoned.
One of the drugs being aducanumab by Biogen, because they found it to be effective at reducing the plaque in the brain, but it led to, first of all, there were awful side effects.
It actually increased, these drugs increased brain atrophy and didn't lead to any significant improvement in cognitive function.
So, I mean, those were a big fail.
And the drugs prior to these monoclonal antibodies, like aducanumab and the Minimally effective.
My mom was on pretty much all of them.
They didn't do anything for her.
So it's unfortunate.
I don't think that drugs really have a fighting chance when it comes to a condition that has taken decades to develop.
So up to 60% of the brain's energy needs can be furnished by ketones.
Normally, under fed conditions, your brain is using glucose 100% as a fuel source.
But your brain also can use ketones.
And it seems to be the case that the brain of somebody with Alzheimer's disease, their ability to generate ATP from glucose is diminished by 50%, but their ability to generate energy from ketones is unperturbed.
So you can basically supplement The brain's energy needs with ketone bodies.
But when a person develops Alzheimer's disease, their preference for sweet foods increases.
They actually develop a sweet tooth, which is thought to be the brain essentially crying out for sugar because it's starving essentially for energy.
And so getting somebody with Alzheimer's disease to adhere to a ketogenic diet, incredibly difficult to do I would imagine.
There's not good data on exogenous ketones, but there is an FDA-approved medical food.
I believe it's called Axona, which is a medium-chain triglyceride-based product.
Medium chain triglycerides are converted by the liver directly to ketones, whether you're in a fasted or fed state.
And that's actually an FDA approved medical food.
We now have various ketone products on the market that I would suspect might have an impact, but I don't know for sure.
There is one pediatrician.
She's a neonatal pediatrician named Dr. Mary Newport, who's been an advocate for this research for decades at this point, whose husband, Steve, developed Alzheimer's disease.
And knowing what she knew about neonatal nutrition, she started giving him coconut oil before the availability, the widespread availability of MCT oil and these ketone products.
And this is an anecdote, but she has written about and reported that when she initially started giving her husband these ketones, he had Alzheimer's disease.
She saw a dramatic improvement in his cognitive function.
Now that's an observational study, but I think it's potentially more telling that it was a study done in Finland because in Finland, Finland is the sauna capital of the world.
There's one sauna on average per household in Finland.
And so it kind of removes a bit of the healthy user bias that you might see doing that same study here.
You know, people here in the United States, people who regularly use saunas, maybe they're more well-off, they have spa access, you know, they've got fancy gym memberships, or they can afford to have a sauna in their homes.
But in Finland, it's like one sauna.
It's like a shower.
It's like one sauna per house.
And in that observational study, they saw consistent health benefits due to regular sauna use.
Two to three times a week, I think it was like...
I want to say close to 20% reduced risk.
Four to seven times a week, 35 to 50% reduced risk.
Again, observational, but mechanistically...
And saunas, they do get your heart rate going.
They do seem to ultimately reduce blood pressure, even though they raise it acutely when you're sitting in a sauna.
It's like a workout that you can self-impose while sitting absolutely still.
When you look at all of the different things that are available today to improve your health, when you look at lifestyle choices, dietary choices, exercise choices, is there a way, like if a person's listening to this, what's the best step forward?
Well, I think you don't want to break off more than you can chew.
I think that's a big mistake that people make.
You want to try to adopt one new habit at a time.
And after that habit cements, then you can try adding in another habit.
But for some people, it might be as simple as Drinking a glass of water before your first cup of coffee in the morning.
You know, just like hydrating yourself before that first cup of coffee.
And then once you start doing that, maybe start to look at breakfast.
You know, breakfast, there's all this data now coming out showing us that...
I used to think...
And this is an area where my thinking has evolved.
I used to think that breakfast was...
Non-essential, some like, you know, that the later in the day we can push our first meal, the better.
You know, we would get some kind of like autophagy brownie point or something like that.
But actually the data has come out showing us that when we eat a protein-rich breakfast first thing in the morning, and we consistently eat that every day, it does a really good job at regulating our hunger levels throughout the day.
We subsequently, when we eat a high-protein breakfast, we eat fewer calories over the subsequent 24 hours.
And I think that's really important.
I mean, how many people today start their days with a, you know, coffee drink from, you know...
I mean, you're setting yourself up for hunger dysregulation.
It's just no bueno.
Stress, you know?
And so try starting your day with a protein-rich breakfast.
Try to hit 30, 40, maybe even 50 grams of protein with your first meal of the day.
It's a great way to assuage your hunger to make sure that you're going to be Come lunchtime, you're not going to be up against the wall looking for the quick sugary fix from the vending machine or from the rec room or the cafeteria or whatever.
I think it's a great first healthy habit to adopt.
And that's going to influence your behavior subsequently down the line.
I also think it can be really useful to try to be as present with your food as possible.
I mean, I'm guilty of eating on the run just as much as anybody else today, but studies show that when we're distracted when we're eating, we tend to consume more calories, about 15% more calories, which doesn't seem like a lot, but you consume...
You know, 15% more calories with every meal every day, and that adds up to a spare tire over time, you know?
You really want to major in the majors, as opposed to the minors, which I think many people do today.
So prioritizing whole foods, if there's one dietary tip, I really think that that's it.
Because in so doing, you are optimizing for satiety.
We know, thanks to NIH-funded research, that when people eat largely an ultra-processed diet, they tend to...
Overconsume their calorie budget for the day by about 500 additional calories.
I think it's also very important what you said about not biting off more than you could chew and just try to take on one healthy habit at a time and build up to that.
Because it's been shown that habits, if you can continue them for a predetermined period of time, I think it's 90 days or something like that, once it gets to around 90 days, those habits become sort of cemented in to who you are.
And it's so intimidating to, like, walk into this place where everyone's so familiar, they're already so far on their fitness journey path that, you know, you look at their body like, that is not my body.
And here's the thing about fitness is that it's like, it's not, once you adopt it into your life and you embrace it and you embrace the lifestyle, it's like the rising tide that lifts all the boats in your harbor.
Because the discipline, you know, the discipline that it takes that you, you know, that habit once cemented, I mean, you can apply the things that you learn in fitness to so many other areas of life.
It's so powerful.
And if lifting weights is intimidating to you, if you're not even walking on a daily basis, then start there.
Brief, intense bursts of activity, often called exercise snacks, offer a potent strategy to mitigate the health risks associated with our sedentary lifestyles.
I mean it sort of like lines up with the strength first philosophy of Pavel Totsilin and all the the talk of kettlebell work like do you do any that stuff?
The idea was you should never do anything to failure and that this idea of doing things to failure is you're just trying to rush results by you know forcing yourself to do that and that strength should be thought of as a skill and And the way to practice skills is to not be tired.
And so when you do kettlebells, like, I follow these principles.
So say if I'm doing clean and presses with 70 pounds, I could probably do 25 reps if I wanted to get to failure.
If I really wanted to get to, like, the last one, like, ugh!
So I don't do that.
I do ten and at ten I'm fine.
I could totally keep going but I put it down and then I walk away and then It looks like I'm lazy because I'll just like watch TV I'll watch a fight on TV and I won't do a thing for five minutes So in between my sets, I'm not the guy that like unless I'm doing endurance training I'm not the guy that like goes through these sets like all right, let's go next one push it I don't do any of that And I've gotten significantly stronger.
I just wait a long time in between sets and my workouts, like my kettlebell workouts might take two and a half hours.
So I'm lifting weights for two and a half hours, but in between I'm drinking electrolyte filled water.
I'm taking, I take this alpha brain pre-workout that has beta alanine in it, a lot of different things.
I drink that stuff.
And I get all the reps in if I just burnt myself out by sandwiching them together.
But I'm doing it at a point where when I'm doing my third set of 10 reps, I'm not tired.
I can do that third set, no problem.
And I put it down.
And then I go to my next exercise and I follow the same protocol for my next exercise.
So whatever that is, whether it's Renegade Rose, same thing.
I don't go to failure.
I get like whatever the rep number is with whatever the weight it is over time.
I figured it out.
And then I take a big break.
Big break.
Five minutes.
Ten minutes even maybe sometimes.
For the last set, I really want to be fresh.
And then when I'm hitting these, I'm not fatigued.
And it's decreased my soreness substantially.
It has allowed me to get all the repetitions that I would get in a shorter workout, but I'm never in a point of fatigue where I'm having a difficulty controlling the weight.
And I think the Russians used this strength training method, you know, a long time ago, and they realized that this idea of, like, train smarter, not harder.
I mean, hypertrophy, a lot of times, like bodybuilders, if you ever observe, they'll do really lightweight and extremely high repetitions, like 100 curls with, like, 15 pounds.
Hmm.
Because they're just trying to blow out those muscle fibers.
But I don't necessarily think that contributes to strength the same way lifting things that are heavier does.
Yeah, I've always heard that lower on the rep range as opposed to higher in the rep range tends to promote more strength.
And then hypertrophy you can achieve across the rep range now.
I think we now understand.
I wonder how it reconciles, because for hypertrophy, I've never been all that strong, and so my workouts have been...
I've primarily focused on hypertrophy, but I've always thought that while you don't necessarily need to go to failure on every set, you do want to get close to it, and maybe even hitting failure on the last set seems to promote good gains, at least in terms of muscle growth.
So obviously, working through the entire rep range of a movement is beneficial and should, I think, generally be the default.
But my understanding is that when the muscle is in its most lengthened position, under load, you seem to get a lot of bang for your buck.
And that's where the benefits of Lengthened partials comes into play, but also really kind of emphasizing that stretched position of any move, you know, of any exercise, whether it's like the bicep curl or the chest fly or even the chest press, you know, making sure that you're really stretching out that muscle.
There seems to be a lot of reward to be gained from that.
Whereas opposed, I think, maybe what's most interesting about it is that we tend to think of most of the gains being achieved when fully contracted.
You know, like we squeeze the full contracted position, for example, of the chest fly.
Whereas I think what this research is starting to suggest is that you actually get more benefit from that stretched position.
So really emphasizing that.
And making sure that you're really, as opposed to kind of just doing like this like partial range of motion, like really kind of extending out and carrying that kind of philosophy to, you know, on through, you know, every lift.
I think there are some, there's some thinking that, you know, the...
Certain exercises, there might be some risk incurred with that.
For example, preacher curls, for example.
I've seen some horror story videos on Instagram where people snap their biceps.
But just generally speaking, That's sort of like a big buzz thing now within the fitness community.
The stretch-mediated hypertrophy, which is interesting.
Yeah, you really feel vulnerable in the beginning in the beginning everything feels like I got to get past this where it's enjoyable And it's kind of enjoyable in this rep range like as you're bringing the hands together Yeah, yeah, I mean I'm not I'm not definitely not like an expert on the topic But I'm a student of of it of fitness science and and I've put it into practice and I've seen some pretty significant gains As a result, it is interesting.
But primarily, you generally want to complete the full range of motion, but then just maybe throwing in some length and partials.
Adding more volume always seems to be helpful from the standpoint of hypertrophy.
Provided you're not adding junk volume, you're not just building fatigue, you're actually adding stimulus.
Seems effective.
I think that's one of the biggest mistakes that people make in the gym is that they don't train with adequate intensity.
I see a lot of people in my gym, they're lifting weights...
And I see them putting the weight down when they clearly had five, six additional reps in the tank.
And they're not lifting weight that's all that heavy compared to how you described your new lifting style.
They're kind of just going through the motions of the exercise, but they're not actually sending the adequate stimulus to the muscle that it needs to adapt, grow stronger, or we're going to die.
I'm just super psyched to be here, to get to do what I do, to share...
Evidence-based research with people, but in a way that's practical and that acknowledges the limitations of the research that I share and just the general landscape of nutrition science, which tends to be incredibly weak.
I think that's not...
often acknowledged that a lot of our nutrition studies are incredibly weak, built on epidemiology, which has many flaws or not flaws.
It's good for what it's meant to do, but I think we tend to over-interpret it and we use it to influence others, which I think is not smart, borderline unethical.
And so yeah, insofar as I get to provide a more authentic, high integrity, highly actionable path for people, I'm just grateful that I get to do what I do.
And I do it on my podcast, The Genius Life.
And I'm super excited for people to watch the film, which I've worked on for the past 10 years.
And again, I think it's the most important thing I've ever done.
You are a really important resource, and I think it's a great pleasure to have people like you available to provide free information for people to learn about all these different ways that they can benefit their health.
And it's just so important to have someone like yourself out there that really focuses on it and does a great job of disseminating that information.