Jan. 26, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:09:28
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unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| All right, people, we're taking a break from politics this week, | ||
| and we're gonna focus on the F word. | ||
| That's right, food. | ||
| They say you are what you eat, and if that's true, a lot of us are half hot dog, half pizza, and half ice cream. | ||
| I know that's three halves, but we're a pretty fat group of people these days. | ||
| Every week there's a new diet to follow, a new oil to avoid, or a new superfood that'll change your life. | ||
| Then, the week after that, we usually find out that the new revolutionary diet will actually make you gain weight, you actually need that oil to live, and the superfood does absolutely nothing. | ||
| Add an endless slew of magazines to the countless websites and blogs devoted to keeping you clicking on the newest fad, and it becomes almost impossible to figure out what you should eat. | ||
| As those of you who follow me on social media know, I'm in the midst of a little diet myself right now. | ||
| I'm doing a slow carb paleo diet, which is a slightly modified version of what former Rubin Report guest Tim Ferriss helped popularize. | ||
| Basically I'm eating only meat, fish and veggies, with no sugar and very limited carbs. | ||
| I'm even putting grass fed butter in my coffee to get an extra boost of fat and energy in the morning. | ||
| As of taping this direct message, I've lost about 5 pounds in 10 days, although I've also punched 4 random strangers on the street for looking at me the wrong way, but as they say, everything in moderation. | ||
| Of course, what you should or shouldn't put in your body isn't just about weight, it's also about your mind. | ||
| And this is a place where the science is actually pretty solid. | ||
| The foods that we eat, or don't eat, can have a tremendous effect on our brain itself, right down to our ability to think. | ||
| As we've seen a spike in degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, which are just two of the many forms of dementia, it's becoming clearer and clearer that fueling our brains with the right foods and avoiding the wrong ones are a key to brain health. | ||
| So much of what we talk about on this show is related to clear and critical thinking. | ||
| While we may not think about how the food we eat is affecting our brains on a daily basis, feeding our brains the right foods is as important, actually possibly more important, than feeding our brains the right information. | ||
| So this week we're going to learn some information on what we should feed our brains so that we're optimized to engage in intellectual battles in the best way possible. | ||
| Joining me to discuss this is an old friend of the show and author of the new book Genius Foods, Max Lugavere. | ||
| Now excuse me while I put grass fed butter on an avocado sprinkled with goji berries. | ||
| Joining me today is a truth seeker, a self experimenter, a brain food expert, | ||
| and author of the upcoming book Genius Foods, Max Lugavere. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| Thanks so much for having me. | ||
| To the Rubin Report. | ||
| This is a back, although most of my audience now will not know you from the Rubin Report, but you used to do the old Rubin Report. | ||
| Seems like a real lifetime ago, doesn't it? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, back in the day when it was a panel show. | ||
| It was a panel show years ago on TYT. | ||
| I don't even know what we were doing. | ||
| I have almost no recollection of my life at that time. | ||
| It's, you know, every time that I was on it, though, I would always have such a good time and I always would think to myself, Like, how good you are at what you do, and so I'm just so honored to, like, be here in this new set and to see your success. | ||
| Like, you know, the fact that you've just blown up, it's awesome. | ||
| Cool, well thank you, and I feel the same, and I'm glad that our paths have sort of, you know, been on parallel tracks, kind of growing together. | ||
| You have a new book coming out, which we're going to talk about shortly. | ||
| The last time I saw you, though... | ||
| It was about two or two and a half years ago. | ||
| You had me eat some really nasty stuff on camera that you felt, I don't even know why you had me eat it, but you wanted me to. | ||
| What did we eat? | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, we ate. | |
| Because you're doing a lot about food. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you're testing this stuff out all the time. | ||
| What is it that we ate? | ||
| We ate natto, which is a fermented soybean dish that is very commonly consumed in Japan. | ||
| And that was my first time ever trying it because I think, yeah, back where your old set was, we were like a few blocks away from like a Japanese market. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And I was like, wow, what a great place to go and try to find this food that I've heard so much about because of its purported health benefits, but I'd never tasted it. | ||
| And it's known for being particularly gnarly, like it smells like dirty socks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I knew that you were back at the studio and I was like, what? | ||
| You know, there's no better time to try this gnarly food than with my friend Dave Rubin. | ||
| So I brought it back and we tried it and yeah, I don't think you were that into it. | ||
| It was pretty nasty. | ||
| I mean, I'm a pretty open eater and we're going to get a lot into the different types of things that you should be eating and fermented food, obviously good, but it was kind of like beans in this gooey, sticky sauce and it Stunk to high hell. | ||
| But you're saying it was good for my brain. | ||
| It's very good. | ||
| It's the top known source of vitamin K2, which is a really important vitamin for maintaining calcium homeostasis in the body. | ||
| Basically keeping calcium in the parts of your body where calcium should be, like your bones and your teeth, and out of your soft tissues, like your kidneys and your arteries and stuff like that. | ||
| There's really good research on vitamin K2, and yeah, I just, you know, natto is one of these foods, they eat it in, you know, one of the world's blue zones, so I just figured why not give it a try. | ||
| Give it a try. | ||
| I would say it has the consistency of, like, baked beans with a little bit of, like, personal lubricant twirled together, which is obviously not appealing. | ||
| That sounds quite horrific. | ||
| I should have had something here for you to taste on camera. | ||
| That would have been awesome. | ||
| Like kicking the ball back. | ||
| Yeah, something like that. | ||
| All right, maybe next time. | ||
| All right, so first I thought what we'd start off with before we get to the book is I think sort of what you're doing is interesting because it kind of parallels what I'm doing here where we're watching mainstream media crumble and people are coming to people like me perhaps and Shapiro and Joe Rogan and all these Alternate voices to hear about news. | ||
| And I also think that's happening in the food world and the diet world as well, where you used to maybe watch the nightly news to find out what you're supposed to eat, what the latest fad is, what oils you're not supposed to have, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| And now people are going to people like Joe Rogan, who I just mentioned, Tim Ferriss, people like you. | ||
| Did you sort of see that thing coming and that's why you started getting into this world? | ||
| And we'll talk a little bit about the personal reasons why you got in in just a sec. | ||
| Yeah, no, I mean, it's an amazing point. | ||
| I feel that, you know, look, we live in a time, you know, and in a world where we have all of the world's information at our fingertips at any given time with our smartphones, you know, and research is out there. | ||
| Information wants to be free. | ||
| So, you know, whereas prior generations, I feel like, you know, could have only received health information from the doctor or nutrition information from the nutritionist. | ||
| Today, you know, I think things are different where people that are passionate and that do their homework in a way, I'm not just talking about going to, you know, media for their health information, but, you know, PubMed is something that anybody can search. | ||
| It's, you know, the research is out there. | ||
| Not everybody is going to be qualified to the degree that they can, you know, understand, for example, medical literature or even cut through the jargon, but there's a lot that people can glean from what is readily available. | ||
| One of the ways that I try to tell people to become educated about health and science and research is to look at websites that put out university press releases that often accompany studies, like Science Daily, for example, or Medical Express. | ||
| You know, oftentimes, when a study is released, the university will write a press release that basically has the gist of what the study basically found in layman's terms. | ||
| And that's often what journalists will use to write pieces for, like, the Huffington Post or Fast Company. | ||
| So, what I tell people to do is cut out the middleman, go to the press releases, read them, then go to the research article, compare what you read in layman's terms in the press release to the research article, and that can actually help you interpret research. | ||
| So, the average person, though, obviously, is not going to do all that legwork, and I think that's where someone like you comes in going, I will sit down and read all this stuff, and now distill it to you in a way that makes some sense. | ||
| Yeah, well, my background, I mean, you know, before really diving into health and nutrition and fitness, I was a journalist, you know, at Current TV, which was my first job out of college. | ||
| And so getting to work with the journalists there, you know, Peabody Award winning journalists, award winning storytellers. | ||
| It gave me a sense of how to ask questions, how to pick my sources, and then when I became interested in nutrition and health, I kind of knew not only where to look, but how to look. | ||
| My unique job gave me the time and the ability and my personal circumstances. | ||
| Yeah, I don't expect everybody to do their own research, but I do think that people should do their own research. | ||
| I do think that healthcare is something that we like to pretend that we're able to sort of offload to our healthcare providers, right? | ||
| But you don't go to a doctor to be healthy. | ||
| You go to a doctor to become free of disease or to have a disease treated. | ||
| I think healthcare really is something that starts in the kitchen and in the gym, and it's something that we have to imbue our lives with day to day. | ||
| Yeah, and I wanted to start with that because I think it sets the table properly, because I know on YouTube there's a million people talking about health and diets and all that stuff, and I want people to understand that you're somebody that I know has been in this for a long time, actually doing the research. | ||
| So let's go to that personal circumstance part that you mentioned. | ||
| You sort of got into this It's probably only about five years ago with the circumstances with your mom, and I'll let you take it from there. | ||
| Yeah, so when I left Current TV to sort of figure out where I was going to go with my career, it was sort of in that downtime in between jobs that my mom started displaying very strange symptoms that I couldn't explain. | ||
| Memory, you know problems with her memory. | ||
| She complained of brain fog and she also had changes to her gait that were very apparent I mean my mom is a spirited New Yorker and New Yorkers walk very fast. | ||
| They walk everywhere and my mom ran a business so cognitively she was always very sharp and Essentially what we what we saw is that my mom's cognition took like a it just seemed to have like You know, like a web browser with too many open tabs, is how I describe it. | ||
| You know, just, you know, like a stuttering frame rate on a YouTube video with a poor internet connection. | ||
| And my mom's gait changed where, you know, before she was a very fast walker, she almost developed sort of like a shuffle. | ||
| And both of these strange symptoms seemed to come on at once. | ||
| And I had no prior family history of any neurodegenerative disease. | ||
| You know, dementia to me was not a term that I was familiar with. | ||
| I didn't know what Alzheimer's disease was. | ||
| Actually, when I thought about the word dementia, I thought about that character from the Addams Family movie. | ||
| It was like Cousin Itts or Festers, like Crush or something. | ||
| Her name was Dementia, which was actually pretty funny. | ||
| So coinciding with my ignorance, I had the time to go with my mom to some of the top neurology departments in the country. | ||
| We were very fortunate to be able to do that. | ||
| We went to NYU, Columbia in New York, Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, the Cleveland Clinic. | ||
| All in hopes of trying to find some kind of diagnosis for my mom to see what was going on. | ||
| And it was in 2011 at the Cleveland Clinic where my mom was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease for the first time. | ||
| And she was prescribed drugs for both Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease. | ||
| And at that moment, I mean, my world pretty much stopped. | ||
| I'm a pretty chill guy. | ||
| That weekend or that week in Cleveland, it was the first time in my life that I'd ever had a panic attack. | ||
| I was just so freaked out by the possibility that my mom had this fatal disease for which there is no cure or particularly meaningful treatment. | ||
| And I basically became unable to think about anything else, let alone my career. | ||
| I ended up My mom started taking the drugs. | ||
| I ended up coming back to L.A. | ||
| to try to look for jobs and do what it is that you do when you live in L.A. | ||
| and you're a journalist on TV. | ||
| I basically became unable to think about anything other than nutrition. | ||
| Every waking minute that I wasn't doing something career-related, I was in PubMed digging through the research. | ||
| What I think really motivated this journey for me was the fact that what I uncovered in the research was a stark contrast to the, you know, what neuroscientist Norman Doidge calls neurological nihilism, to the despair and bleakness that I experienced in those doctor's offices with my mom. | ||
| Can you describe what that is? | ||
| What are they actually telling you? | ||
| What is the despair? | ||
| Yeah, so I call it diagnose and adios. | ||
| You know, basically there's a There's a quote that I learned that is circulated amongst medical school students that neurologists don't treat disease, they admire it. | ||
| That's because the brain is a mystery for the most part. | ||
| I mean, we know quite a bit about the brain, which is surprising, but there's a lot more unknowns than knowns at this point. | ||
| And treatments for neurological diseases are very limited, you know. | ||
| There's no approved drug for Alzheimer's disease. | ||
| That has a disease-modifying treatment. | ||
| They only act as band-aids, like chemical band-aids, essentially, that work to sort of artificially boost neurotransmitters in the brain, but they do nothing to solve the underlying pathology. | ||
| And, you know, drug trials are notoriously bad. | ||
| Pfizer just announced, for example, that they're going to stop pursuing pharmaceutical treatments for Alzheimer's disease, because treating The quest to find a drug to treat the disease has like a 99.6% fail rate. | ||
| That's worse than any other, you know, disease. | ||
| So meaning that they're getting out of the game altogether? | ||
| They view this as something that can't be solved via drugs? | ||
| I mean, that sounds incredible. | ||
| I don't know how often that happens with other diseases, but that sounds pretty staggering. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, another huge pharmaceutical company basically recently announced the same thing, Axavant. | ||
| Yeah, it's a massive fail rate. | ||
| So think about it from the perspective of an investor. | ||
| Are you going to invest in Alzheimer's or in any drug trial that has a 99.6% fail rate? | ||
| It's just not a smart investment. | ||
| And that's why Alzheimer's disease research is criminally Underfunded, or I shouldn't say criminally. | ||
| It makes sense, although it's tragic, because if there was a pill tomorrow that I could give my mom that would help in a meaningful way, of course I would want it. | ||
| I would want it for all the five million people in America that are suffering from Alzheimer's disease. | ||
| Interesting, because I can bring almost anything back to politics, it's like this is a good argument for publicly funded scientific research, because it doesn't have to deal with the bottom line. | ||
| where you're saying, yeah, these companies, they have to deal with the bottom line and shareholders, | ||
| and they have to then stop at some point if they can't get far enough, | ||
| where something publicly funded, they can keep going to the science, hopefully, | ||
| although you found that there are some other ways to deal with this, | ||
| and that's really what changed your life. | ||
| Yeah, so on the one hand, I became really interested in learning about | ||
| potential diet and lifestyle interventions that I could throw my mom's way to sort of help her, | ||
| but then at the same time, I became really conscious of my own brain health, | ||
| because I learned that changes begin in the brain decades before the first symptom of Alzheimer's disease, | ||
| which is just one form of dementia. | ||
| But even Parkinson's disease, by the time you show your first symptom of Parkinson's disease, half of the neurons involved in movement in the part of the brain associated with Parkinson's | ||
| disease are already dead. | ||
| So these are not, like any chronic disease, these are not diseases that develop overnight. | ||
| They take years, if not decades, to develop. | ||
| And I became really interested in doing what I could do in my own life to maximize my brain health so that I might not have to deal with what it is that my mom's dealing with. | ||
| We'll go from there, and we'll slightly shift to your book. | ||
| Obviously, this is all intertwined. | ||
| This is the advance copy. | ||
| The book comes out in a couple weeks. | ||
| And I was reading a little bit, and I just thought that the opening alone was really perfect. | ||
| So I'm just gonna read the opening paragraph. | ||
| Unless, do you wanna read it in your own voice? | ||
| Maybe you should. | ||
| You know what? - Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm gonna let you read the opening paragraph of your book. - Oh, man. | |
| I thought it was pretty beautiful. | ||
| Thank you so much, yeah. | ||
| Nestled within your skull, mere inches from your eyes are 86 billion of the most efficient transistors | ||
| in the known universe. | ||
| This neural network is you, running the operating system we know as life, and no computer yet conceived comes close to its awesome capabilities. | ||
| Forged over millions and millions of years of life on Earth, your brain is capable of storing nearly 8,000 iPhones worth of information. | ||
| Everything you are, do, love, feel, care for, long for, and aspire to is enabled by an incredibly complex, invisible symphony of neurological processes. | ||
| Elegant, seamless, and blisteringly fast, when scientists tried to simulate just one second of a human brain's abilities, it took supercomputers 40 minutes to do so. | ||
| So yeah, I mean, we each are heir to this amazing birthright, you know, forged over millions and millions of years of life on Earth. | ||
| And yet the modern world is fighting it at every turn, you know, from the toxic industrial products that have saturated the food supply to the dietary advice that we've been given for decades, to now the fact that the pendulum is sort of swinging the other direction and people are, it's sort of like a dietary free-for-all, you know. | ||
| Yeah, so all right, let's shift to my dietary for a second. | ||
| So you know that at the moment I'm in the middle of this sort of slow-carb diet, this high-fat, no-sugar, no-carb diet. | ||
| I've actually in about, as of this taping, in about nine days I've lost about three pounds. | ||
| I actually feel pretty good. | ||
| I have these like brief moments where I want to punch random people. | ||
| I think I'm being a little meaner on Twitter than I normally would be, for real. | ||
| I mean, there's just a little bit of mood stuff, but my energy feels pretty good. | ||
| I'm not getting that sort of crash from coffee that you might get at two o'clock that then has people drinking all kinds of chemicals after their 2.30 feeling or whatever that is. | ||
| So I basically feel pretty good. | ||
| It's pretty much just meat and fish and veggies and a lot of butter. | ||
| And you said to me right before we started, maybe the butter isn't the greatest, grass-fed butter. | ||
| Yeah, well, grass-fed butter is definitely good. | ||
| There's definitely trace nutrients in it, vitamin K2, which we talked about earlier, CLA, which is being studied as a potential cancer fighter and fat burner. | ||
| One of the hallmarks of a healthy food is nutrient density. | ||
| When you take any concentrated fat, butter, oil, they're not very nutrient dense. | ||
| They've got a lot of calories, 9 calories per gram. | ||
| A tablespoon of oil has 140 calories. | ||
| Yeah, and it's a lot of calories with very little nutrients. | ||
| And there's, you know, on butter alone, there's not a lot of evidence to say that butter improves fat burning or brain health or anything like that. | ||
| So, you know, I like to tell people that, you know, consuming fat, the high fat, low carb diet, if you already have fat, all you need is a low carb. | ||
| You know, your body has the fat to burn. | ||
| So your body's gonna go to your fat, probably in your stomach area, as opposed to what a lot of people are doing with these diets, is you're loading up on fat to sort of get the body going on fat, and then the hope is that then it goes to your fat. | ||
| Yeah, your body's gonna want to burn the fat that you're consuming before it burns the fat that you have around your waist, and the point of a diet like this, I would assume, is to lose some of the fat around your waist. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's why I think this conversation is so interesting, because, you know, Ferris, Tim Ferris is the one that sort of did the slow carb thing first, or the four-hour body, whatever it is, And it's like, well, all right, he's focusing on that part, the weight loss part, so I am seeing some results on that front. | ||
| You're focusing on the brain part, which is also very important to me. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I'm someone that likes to know what I'm talking about and be able to have clean thoughts and all that. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I mean, I like to focus on the weight part, too. | ||
| I mean, that's a concern for, I think, everybody, and it's a good way also to just have this conversation about nutrition and healthy eating. | ||
| You know, when you start a low carb diet, you're going to lose a lot of water weight at first because what you're doing is you're depleting the amount of glycogen stored in your muscles. | ||
| Glycogen is basically how your muscles and liver store sugar. | ||
| But for every gram of glycogen that your muscles store, you also store about 3 to 4 grams of water. | ||
| So that's why once you start depleting the glycogen from your muscles with vigorous exercise or just by not eating a lot of carbs, you lose a lot of water weight very quickly. | ||
| And that's also why when people stop eating low carb and go back to eating a higher carb diet, | ||
| their weight just shoots up because their muscles end up storing all that glycogen | ||
| along with all that, with four parts water for every one part of sugar stored. | ||
| I think what we're gonna have to do is, like in a month from now, | ||
| if I can keep running with this thing, I'll have to have you and Ferris on together. | ||
| You guys can, like, poke me, you can poke my brain area, he can poke my stomach, and we'll figure out what happened here. | ||
| Sounds great. | ||
| All right, so enough about my diet. | ||
| People, I guess, will see the results right here on YouTube. | ||
| Okay, so you start realizing that the... | ||
| The medicine for dementia, Alzheimer's, these cognitive degenerative diseases is not quite there. | ||
| You start changing your own diet, but then also realize, well, this is how I can also sort of help my mom and help other people like this. | ||
| So what are some of the first things that you realized that we as people generally are doing wrong? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, definitely, you know, my diet used to be dictated by, you know, what sort of conventional wisdom was surrounding a healthy diet. | ||
| So I used to build my, you know, base my diet around grains. | ||
| I used to basically shun white carbs, you know, white rice, white bread, as if it were some kind of toxin. | ||
| But if you put a huge bowl of brown rice in front of me, I would go to town on it, often asking for seconds. | ||
| You know, every meal had to include a grain, and I would notice That my energy levels throughout the day always felt like a roller coaster. | ||
| You know, I couldn't really go many hours after waking without eating something right away. | ||
| And in between lunch and dinner, I would often find myself starving. | ||
| And, you know, when I started looking into the research, I realized that there's really no good evidence to say that grains improve health. | ||
| I mean, certainly if you're metabolically healthy, you can tolerate grains, which is not the case for 50% of the people living in America that are either pre-diabetic or diabetic and have essentially become glucose or carbohydrate intolerant. | ||
| If you're healthy, though, you can eat, you know, rice and you can certainly incorporate it as a means of, you know, improving athletic performance. | ||
| But that was like really the first thing that I did, you know, because my diet was never very high in added sugars. | ||
| I started cutting out the breads and the rices and all that stuff, and the pastas, and I noticed that my energy levels just, you know, not only did they go through the roof, but they were more stable throughout the day. | ||
| And, you know, without even really trying, my body composition changed. | ||
| I started, you know, losing fat, which is something that was just like a side bonus. | ||
| Again, you know, the recommendations to eat grains, because many people do consider them healthy, you know, how could quinoa or brown rice be anything but healthy, come from misguided, you know, nutrition policy over the past 50 years that have really been attributed to the Mediterranean dietary pattern that's this nebulous idea of how people in the Mediterranean eat, because epidemiological research, observational population-based research, shows that they have reduced rates of cardiovascular disease and Neurological disease, but when you look at randomized control trials, which are the kinds of trials required to prove cause and effect, there's no good evidence to say that grains improve health. | ||
| In fact, when you look at research control trials with people with prediabetes or type 2 diabetes or obesity, low-carb diets seem to win most of the time when compared to standard low-fat conventional dietary wisdom. | ||
| Yeah, so let's back up for a second because you said something really interesting that just sort of rolled off your tongue, but it seems pretty freaking staggering and scary. | ||
| 50% of Americans are either pre-diabetic or diabetic? | ||
| Yeah, that's what the latest statistics. | ||
| So what does pre-diabetic actually mean? | ||
| So when you're pre-diabetic, your blood sugar is higher than it should be. | ||
| That's what a doctor will measure and they'll say you should probably change up your diet because you are at risk for becoming a type 2 diabetic. | ||
| It's sort of like this middle ground where, yeah, your blood sugar is higher than it should be. | ||
| Do they know how much that number has changed over the years? | ||
| I suspect since probably the 50s when we started all this processed food and sugars and all that stuff, and soft drinks and everything else, that must have tremendously increased that number. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's skyrocketed in tandem with, you know, the obesity rates in this country. | ||
| Two-thirds of people are either overweight or obese. | ||
| And they've kind of, you know, risen in tandem with one another. | ||
| And the only thing that can really explain it is the environment, you know, because our genes certainly haven't changed over the last hundred years as a population. | ||
| So, what has? | ||
| Well, the food supply. | ||
| There's a lot of zealotry in the world of nutrition. | ||
| People tend to feel very religious about their nutritious beliefs. | ||
| In general, what I think most people would agree on is that there's become a ubiquity of hyper-processed foods that are rich in both readily, easily digestible carbohydrates, pulverized grains stripped of their nutrients, and added fats. | ||
| You know, both of these foods put together basically create a stereotypical junk food, and that's really what most people are consuming these days. | ||
| I mean, 60% of calories that Americans consume come from these exact kinds of foods, ultra-processed foods. | ||
| I always think of that commercial, I don't know if they're still running it, but it's with Larry the Cable Guy for Prilosec OTC. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you know, he's out there eating the hot dogs and all this stuff, and he's basically like, eat whatever you want as long as you have your Prilosec OTC. | ||
| Right, just take a pill. | ||
| It's like the pill is the answer. | ||
| You know, he's a pretty heavy guy in the first place. | ||
| I have no problem with him. | ||
| But it's like that we go to do whatever the hell you want and then here's our magic pill for it. | ||
| Probably not the best way to be dealing with our health. | ||
| No, not the best way at all. | ||
| I mean, and the thing is, you know, once you've, one of the main drivers of type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance, which is one of the sort of, which is the hallmark of type 2 diabetes, is chronically elevated levels of insulin, which could precede a diagnosis of even pre-diabetes by a decade. | ||
| So, I mean, people are walking around eating, on average, 300 grams of carbohydrates per day, exactly from the kinds of foods that we're talking about, hyper-processed foods. | ||
| And it's just doing a number on our metabolisms, our waistlines, and, you know, in Genius Foods we explore, you know, what it's doing to our brains and our mental function and our moods. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so that's really where I wanna focus on this, because I think that's your expertise, and I just find that fascinating, because I think there's a lot of things happening right now that might be changing some of our brain chemistry, and how we think, and all that sort of stuff. | ||
| So, at any point when this was happening with your mom, did any doctor say, maybe she should change her diet, this or that? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| Really? | ||
| Not once, yeah. | ||
| And again, I've been to all of the most storied U.S. | ||
| news and whatever the annual ranking of hospitals in America is. | ||
| We went to the top hospitals to try to find a diagnosis and not once was diet mentioned at all. | ||
| There's not conclusive evidence on how diet can affect somebody who has the disease, although it's starting to bubble up in the literature. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, you know, exercise wasn't really mentioned even though exercise is one | ||
| of the best ways to treat. | ||
| Actually, the guidelines for treating mild cognitive impairment were literally just updated | ||
| two weeks ago to include exercise as a means of treatment for people with mild cognitive | ||
| impairment, which is sort of like pre-dementia, which often converts to diseases like Alzheimer's | ||
| disease. | ||
| But yeah, so I became fixated on these sort of alternate approaches to treatment and even possibly prevention. | ||
| When I had that experience with my mom, because I've always been a big believer in the power of diet and lifestyle, I've just seen it play out in my own life. | ||
| I mean, I go to the gym, and I'm a different person walking out of the gym than I am walking into the gym. | ||
| I mean, whatever cobwebs I have in my head are gone, excised, like the demons are excised with a good workout. | ||
| And yet, that's not something that I feel like is common wisdom. | ||
| When this all happened to my mom, I started researching and I realized that there's a lot of insight out there, both in terms of risk factors for developing dementia. | ||
| For example, take the Mediterranean dietary pattern, which we talked about before, which is associated with reduced risks of many chronic diseases. | ||
| Can you explain to people what that is? | ||
| It's basically a lot of oils. | ||
| Yeah, so it's characterized by being really high in extra virgin olive oil, a glass of wine per day for women, one to two for men. | ||
| And then the way that it's typically defined in the medical literature is it's defined as being a grain-based diet. | ||
| And it all stems back from this one epidemiologist named Ancel Keys, who basically, in the 1950s, stationed himself on the island of Crete to look at how that population basically ate and went about their lives. | ||
| in the midst of a major epidemic of heart disease in the United States, he wanted to | ||
| see what they were doing differently in the Mediterranean region of the world, that we | ||
| might be able to glean some nutritional insight. | ||
| But the problem is he—and this is a story that's been told by other people. | ||
| There's a great book called The Big Fat Surprise, where the journalist who wrote it really goes | ||
| into depth on the story, but I talk about it as well in Genius Foods. | ||
| He was stationed on the island during Lent, so it was a particularly lean time just after | ||
| World War II. | ||
| And his observation of their dietary pattern was one where, you know, it was predominantly grain-based. | ||
| But people in the Mediterranean region, they love fatty cuts of meat. | ||
| You know, I have friends who were born there and who visit, you know, very frequently and they eat very fatty cuts of, you know, meat, lamb, for example. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah, that's all but ignored in the medical textbook definition of the Mediterranean diet. | ||
| And also, when you're observing a population as well as what it is that they're eating, it's impossible to ascribe causality to any dietary element because what you're observing is basically, you're doing just that, you're observing variables. | ||
| But without doing a randomized control trial, it's impossible to prove which aspects of that diet are causally related to the phenotypes, the outcomes that you're seeing in terms of the population health. | ||
| So that could partly also just because of geography and lifestyle, weather, the amount they move around. | ||
| If it's cold, you might need a little more fat on your bones. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You don't know. | ||
| So you need a randomized control trial to do that. | ||
| So what I argue in the book is that what you see in terms of the health of people living in that region of the world, Is not because of the grains that they're eating, but in spite of the grains that they're eating. | ||
| Because when you actually look at what grains are, it's a whole lot of starch wrapped in a little bit of insoluble fiber and a tiny amount of vitamins. | ||
| When building a healthy diet, we want to really look for things that are nutrient-dense, that the brain needs. | ||
| So, one of the recommendations that I make To people generally is to consume a huge salad, a fatty salad every single day. | ||
| Rather than eating a bowl of brown rice, which is pretty nutritionally sparse, dark leafy greens contain a bevy of micronutrients that the brain actually needs to create energy. | ||
| And there's really good research actually, a study was just published from Rush University that found that people that consume a large bowl of dark leafy greens per day have brains that look on scans 11 years younger. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| So, yeah. | ||
| And you also realize with some of this stuff that you're not missing much, actually. | ||
| I mean, even just in this week and whatever that I'm doing this diet, I got a poke bowl yesterday, and I usually get brown rice on the bottom, but I got the leafy greens instead, and I actually, in a way, I enjoyed it more, and I felt kinda slimmer after, because yeah, you're just taking in all that rice. | ||
| Well, you're going to feel much better. | ||
| I mean, your body, you know, makes a lot of effort to keep certain things within a very narrow margin. | ||
| So, for example, your body temperature is one of those things that your body works really hard to keep with, you know, hovering at around 98.6 degrees, right? | ||
| The same thing with your blood sugar. | ||
| At any given time, you've got, you know, one teaspoon of circulating sugar in your body. | ||
| And your pancreas works very hard to keep your circulating blood sugar at that level. | ||
| The minute you eat a massive bowl of brown rice or drink a glass of orange juice, which so many Americans begin their day with, which contains about six to seven teaspoons of pure sugar, that's like a deluge of glucose being shuttled straight into your blood that the vast majority of people don't need. | ||
| Where's that sugar going to go? | ||
| Most likely it's going to end up on your hips and on your waist. | ||
| Yeah, so basically, soft drinks, I mean, I think everyone sort of knows this at this point and drinks it despite the knowledge, or at least the knowledge is readily accessible. | ||
| Soft drinks are pretty much the worst thing you can drink, right? | ||
| I mean, the amount of sugar in there is just insane. | ||
| Horrible, yeah. | ||
| I mean, there's no requirement for consuming added sugar. | ||
| A lot of people actually feel that they need sugar to fuel their brain. | ||
| Because of the boost in executive function that they feel after consuming a food that's sugary, or a granola bar, or any carb-rich food. | ||
| But really, so many people are hooked on glucose as a fuel for the brain that, in reality, what they're doing is they're treating their withdrawal from sugar, from the previous meal. | ||
| And that's why they feel a boost. | ||
| So basically, you have a soda at lunch, and then you're having that crash two hours later, and you're like, I need that bar that has... Exactly. | ||
| And it tricks you. | ||
| There's a good reason that you feel tricked and that you feel like these foods are your friends, because when you're on that sort of glucose rollercoaster throughout the day, you need those constant pick-me-ups, and that's the problem. | ||
| So what I think is a more sustainable way of having Energy, cognitive resilience, is to step off of that train, the glucose train, and really reacquaint yourself with healthy fats and foods that are much lower in carbohydrates and much richer in the nutrients that your brain actually needs. | ||
| All right, I wanna get down to all the things we should be eating. | ||
| We talked about green, leafy things. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But there's a lot more to it than that. | ||
| That's what a lot of this is about. | ||
| So let's get to it. | ||
| If you wanna, someone's watching this right now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe they're eating poorly. | ||
| Maybe they're eating okay. | ||
| Maybe they think they're doing a pretty good job, but they want to just kind of reset. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Take them from beat one. | ||
| Yeah, so I mean, I think the first thing that people should do is really cut out the processed foods, which is harder than it seems, you know, and I definitely, my heart goes out to people that feel like they can't give up the junk food, because again, you know, these foods are not designed to be consumed in moderation. | ||
| The advice to eat everything in moderation is horrible in the modern world, in the modern supermarket. | ||
| Literally, our supermarket aisles are lined with foods that are designed by scientists that are paid a lot more than you and I to create insatiable overconsumption and addiction. | ||
| Yeah, wait, let's focus on that for a second, because it sounds like it's not true, but it's actually true. | ||
| They actually have people working on, isn't this what they did with Doritos originally, I think? | ||
| I think, I think. | ||
| I mean, that Cool Ranch flavor, I used to just lick. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| I literally used to just lick those chips. | ||
| You don't wanna hit your fingers. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So there are literally scientists working for these companies making you want more and more and more. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| These foods, you know, which now make up, again, 60% of the calories consumed in the U.S., are designed to screw up your brain. | ||
| And usually what happens is a scientist will combine some parts, sugar, wheat, usually, with fat and salt. | ||
| And it creates this unique mixture of delectable, you know, mouthfeel as well as just, you know, The exact sensation that we've evolved, basically, to seek out more of, it just sets off dopamine fireworks in our brains. | ||
| Is that actually the same thing that happens to your brain when you do drugs and then you need more drugs? | ||
| I mean, is it really the same chemical reactions that are happening? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| If not worse. | ||
| I mean, they've done studies on animals, rats for example, which are all id, basically. | ||
| And rats provide a really great look into the behavior that certain foods drive because, you know, they've got no super ego to steer them from what it is that they really want to do. | ||
| They're all id. | ||
| So they've shown that rats actually prefer sugar to cocaine, which is funny because rats really like cocaine. | ||
| Rats really like cocaine. | ||
| They really like cocaine. | ||
| We tend to think of ourselves as having had a moral failure, right? | ||
| Like when we go through a whole bag of chips or eat the whole pint of ice cream. | ||
| But again, these foods are not designed to be consumed in moderation. | ||
| They're designed literally to have you finish that whole pint or that whole bag and then go back as a repeat customer. | ||
| Yeah, I always think the branding of it is so funny, too. | ||
| Like, you see all these things like guilt-free chips, or don't feel bad about how fat you are, this, or any of this stuff. | ||
| And it's like, it's all this weird psychological play to get you to keep eating all this stuff. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| Once you pop, you can't stop. | ||
| It's like a truism with scientific backing now at this point. | ||
| All right, so the reset person that's watching this right now that's gonna start doing some stuff. | ||
| Okay, get the processed stuff out. | ||
| And that includes like, that's pretty much all the stuff that you see in the frozen section, right? | ||
| Like all of that frozen breakfast stuff and all those sandwiches and all that. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| And actually, you know, a really good recommendation for people that are really trying to make this change is to first actually, which is kind of counterintuitive, but to work on your sleep. | ||
| Sleep, I like to say, allows a person, getting good quality adequate sleep gives a person the hormonal fortitude to make those dietary changes. | ||
| So when you, you know, when you're underslept, actually a study was just put out showing that people tend to overconsume and eat excess calories. | ||
| Predominantly from these exact kinds of foods. | ||
| So, yeah, optimizing sleep, and then... What do they say on sleep? | ||
| Is it eight hours, really? | ||
| Is that what they want for the average? | ||
| Yeah, eight hours is a good amount, and that's also roughly the amount of sleep that you need to maximize growth hormone, which is an important hormone in the body for preserving lean mass. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, and quality sleep as well. | ||
| So I mean, not just getting those eight hours, but making sure that those eight hours are really super high quality. | ||
| And we can get into ways of optimizing sleep. | ||
| I guess one of the best ways that I like to optimize my sleep, and I find it to be very effective, | ||
| is to limit my exposure to screens at night. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, what time do you shut down? | |
| Yeah, I mean, I shut down, I try to shut down two to three hours before bed, or if I'm not shutting down and I have to work up until the point at which, you know, I go to bed, I mean, let's face it, I'm living in the real world, you know, sometimes we have to respond to an urgent email. | ||
| I use blue light blocking glasses, which I'm a big fan of, actually, and there's good research on amber colored glasses and their ability to sort of mitigate some of the loss of melatonin. | ||
| Do you know, is that the same effect that the iPhone has now with their night thing? | ||
| Is that that same thing? | ||
| I'm not sure that that's been... They're putting this nighttime filter on. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I'm not sure if it's comparable, actually. | ||
| I mean, it certainly feels way better to my eyes when night shift is on. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, I notice that when I... | ||
| So, in my house in New York, I've got, it's my brother's, I live with my brother. | ||
| He has a massive TV, it's like 85 inches, or just one of the biggest monsters of television I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| And, you know, he likes to watch movies up until the point at which he goes to bed, and that's not my preference, but I do that with him sometimes, and I'll watch like a movie up until like midnight or something. | ||
| And I notice that when I have that amount of light pouring into my face, when I go to bed right after that, | ||
| I'll oftentimes actually wake up feeling hungover. | ||
| Even though I've had the eight hours of sleep and I hadn't had any alcohol, | ||
| I just feel underslept and not rejuvenated. | ||
| Whereas when I wear the blue led lugging glasses, and I have no, I'm not formally affiliated | ||
| with any of these companies, I don't manufacture them in any sense, | ||
| but I do find that they work. | ||
| I wake up feeling a lot more refreshed when I wear them. | ||
| Well, I think that the digital piece of this is so interesting, because I talk about it | ||
| with almost every guest, like just the frustration with social media | ||
| and not putting this stuff down and digital addiction and all of this. | ||
| And it's like, one of the things that I've tried to do is I never bring my phone into my room anymore, bedroom. | ||
| I just stop doing it, because I realize, wow, right before I go to bed, I'm looking at my phone, and then literally the first thing I do when I wake up, before I brush my teeth, before I go to the bathroom, is I'm suddenly looking at my phone again. | ||
| Like, even if it's all wonderful news, it's probably not, and it's usually not. | ||
| But even if it was, it's probably not a great way to start your day. | ||
| So that, and I've really, really been trying to do no technology on the weekends. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| And I think that that's really helped. | ||
| So is there some sort of connection between all of that and just the digital monster that's affecting our brain, too? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there's no... Beyond just light, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like something else happening. | ||
| Well, yeah, I mean, I think from a mood standpoint, for sure. | ||
| I mean, our stress response evolved at a time when things that were stressful to us required our immediate attention, right? | ||
| Like a bear. | ||
| Yeah, like a bear. | ||
| In your face, yeah. | ||
| This protracted long-term psychological stress that so many of us have so commonly today is a fairly new invention on the evolutionary time scale. | ||
| And the media, for example, knows this, and app developers know this. | ||
| That's why you turn on any news station, local news especially, They abide by the "if it bleeds, it leads" mentality. | ||
| Put the most anxiety-inducing segment up front, or tease at it at least, | ||
| so that it causes an expression of, or an upregulation of norepinephrine in the brain, | ||
| which is basically the brain's focus and attention neurotransmitter associated with stress. | ||
| And that's something that, you know, it makes you more alert, makes you feel more awake. | ||
| And so when you read, you know, doom and gloom news on your smartphone, you're basically having the same exact stress response. | ||
| Yeah, it's funny how when you step away from it a little bit too, how silly it almost seems. | ||
| So like when I get away on the weekend, And then I'm back on Monday. | ||
| If I look back at anything that might've happened and I see all these people fighting, I'm like, wow, you all spent your weekend fighting about this stuff. | ||
| It's one thing that we're doing it on the weekdays and maybe we can all manage that, myself included, maybe we can all manage that a little differently. | ||
| But that endless sort of... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No way out thing. | ||
| It's a lot. | ||
| It also, yeah, I mean, I'm not as familiar with the, there was a study that came out showing that just having your smartphone around you is exhausting from a cognitive standpoint. | ||
| You know, just having it around and sort of feeling that pull. | ||
| We get addicted to it. | ||
| I mean, it sort of, you know, hijacks our dopamine systems as well. | ||
| You know, being addicted to social media, that's a real thing. | ||
| It's interesting to me though, because people watch this show and we know what our watch times are and they're off the charts for YouTube, which usually has like a seven second watch time or something. | ||
| And that shows to me that people want long form. | ||
| They actually want something that isn't so insulting to their senses and to their brain. | ||
| Now, ironically, many people are watching this right now or listening on their phones. | ||
| But a lot of people listen on their phones while they're doing exercise or while they're commuting or something. | ||
| But I do sense that people want something else. | ||
| So it's like the news is giving us, the local news, as you're saying, they're giving us something we don't want because they know it'll keep us there. | ||
| The food companies are giving us something that's not good for us because they know it'll keep us there. | ||
| We now know, Tristan Harris, who I've had on, Talked about how the tech companies, and you just alluded to this, are giving us things that they know are bad for us. | ||
| So it really is your job. | ||
| It's like a full-time job now as a human to be like, I'm gonna do the things that actually are good for me, not the things you keep feeding me. | ||
| Well, exactly. | ||
| That's why I think it's such a shame because We each are heir to this amazing gift, right, the human | ||
| brain, yet the modern world is like The Hunger Games, right, like attacking it from every which | ||
| way, and we are not equipped with the tools to understand what to do to sort of fix that | ||
| situation. | ||
| And so, yeah, I mean, I definitely recommend people taking a break from social media, from | ||
| The 24-hour news cycle, I think, is just not healthy. | ||
| And then also certainly food. | ||
| You know, I think food is a major part of it. | ||
| Lifestyle. | ||
| You know, one of the things that I talk about in the book We go into depth is the fact that, you know, not only are we more sedentary than we've ever been, not getting enough exercise, but, you know, there was another form of exercise that we all had for the majority of our evolution, and that is thermal exercise. | ||
| You know, today we live in a time where, you know, there's chronic climate control, you know, and that's something that seems to be to the detriment of our metabolisms. | ||
| So I talk about how you can use You know, cold showers to enhance vigilance, which is one of the few things that you can do that you actually feel a shift in your consciousness. | ||
| Are you big on that? | ||
| There are these people that, like, jump from, like, the hot tub to a freezing cold pool? | ||
| I do that, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Oh, wait, maybe it was you that I first saw do it. | ||
| You took a picture, like, in a pool or something? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So it must have been you, I think, the first time I saw it. | ||
| So what is that? | ||
| So you're jumping from hot water to cold water and your system is just, like, constantly rebooting. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's called contrast therapy. | ||
| A lot of the mechanisms are conserved between the two activities. | ||
| When you go into a sauna, for example, you're activating something called heat shock proteins, which are there to guard the proteins in your body against disfigurement, which is really important because a lot of the diseases that we're talking about, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, are associated with misfolded proteins. | ||
| So anytime we can activate these heat shock proteins, it seems to be helpful. | ||
| They're also activated when you expose yourself to cold air. | ||
| Yeah, there's really good research. | ||
| A lot of people now are practicing cryotherapy as a means of enhancing vigilance, reducing inflammation, boosting metabolism, increasing the proliferation of brown fat. | ||
| We all have a kind of fat in us that it wasn't thought that adults carried it with them past you know, childhood or infancy. | ||
| But now we know that we actually have this sort of fat, it's actually a good fat, a fat that we want more of | ||
| because it's metabolically active and it burns calories. | ||
| So by going into cold and keeping ourselves exposed to, you know, intermittent cooler temperatures, | ||
| we actually encourage the proliferation of this fat, which is really cool. | ||
| So I thought by moving to LA. | ||
| and being an 80 degree sunny weather every day was good for me. | ||
| That was a good thing. | ||
| I guess it's good for my vitamin D, but perhaps not good for some of this other stuff. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So I think getting back to that, you know, having a little bit more thermal stress in our lives is important. | ||
| They've done really good research on people with type 2 diabetes and have found that, you know, even mild cold below, you know, or higher I should say, than what would be like a freezing temperature, Does improve insulin sensitivity, which is sort of the hallmark of metabolic health, which is really interesting. | ||
| It's a way to improve your health without even doing anything. | ||
| I mean, you can basically just turn the dial on your air conditioner down a little bit more. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| All right. | ||
| So now let's circle back. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This person starts, this imaginary person that we're talking about that's watching right now and going, all right, I'm going to incorporate some of this stuff. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They're going to get the Eggos, Lego My Eggos, they're going to get that out of the way. | ||
| Processed food in the morning. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What are they replacing that with for breakfast? | ||
| Yeah, so I mean... Let's start this day. | ||
| Okay, let's start the day. | ||
| Well, first of all, there's no biological need for breakfast. | ||
| So let's just, you know, get that out of the picture. | ||
| But I thought breakfast was the most important meal of the day! | ||
| The meal that you break your fast with is important, but there's no biological need to eat as soon as you wake up. | ||
| So whether you push that first meal an hour after you wake up or two hours after you wake up, you should be able to do that. | ||
| I mean, breakfast is a fairly new construct. | ||
| you know, in the evolutionary sense. | ||
| And also when you wake up, first thing in the morning, your body has a really unique | ||
| hormonal milieu where it wants to burn fat. | ||
| You know, cortisol is at its highest. | ||
| It peaks immediately after you wake up. | ||
| And cortisol is sort of like the body's fat-burning hormone. | ||
| It's the body's chief catabolic hormone, liberates stored fatty acids, sugars, proteins. | ||
| And so to throw breakfast into that equation, especially in the most commonly consumed form | ||
| of it, which is, you know, as you said, like an Eggo waffle. | ||
| No offense to Eggo and Doritos before the warriors are, you know, attacking. | ||
| We're just naming some things here, yeah. | ||
| So what, for the person though, that wants to have something in the morning? | ||
| Fat and fiber and protein. | ||
| So, you know, eggs are a perfect food to eat first thing in the morning. | ||
| A scramble, for example, with some spinach, kale, and some extra virgin olive oil, or you could use a little bit of coconut oil. | ||
| That's a, you know, great. | ||
| Eat an avocado. | ||
| Are those the two good oils? | ||
| Because every, I feel like every year someone says, grapeseed oil is good, now I know, I saw on your website, get rid of the grapeseed oil. | ||
| Yes, get rid of the grapeseed. | ||
| Nothing to do with grapeseed oil, okay, no problem. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But when you're cooking, so basically you're saying coconut oil or extra virgin olive oil. | ||
| Coconut oil is good, yeah. | ||
| You can actually cook with extra virgin olive oil. | ||
| It maintains, you know, it doesn't oxidize the way some of these awful grain and seed oils will. | ||
| Corn oil, soybean oil, canola oil, grapeseed oil, these are the worst. | ||
| Yeah, that's basically like the smoke point part, right, where it becomes... Actually, interestingly, and this is a question I get asked a lot, smoke point and the temperature at which an oil oxidizes, there's no relationship. | ||
| So smoke point is something that's like a culinary concern more than anything else. | ||
| These oils like canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil are so heavily processed in order for them to have a high smoke point. | ||
| But actually they become rancid at much lower temperatures. | ||
| Whereas you take a, you know, like a fat like butter, butter will start to smoke pretty early on, but it's not because of the fat oxidizing, it's because of the proteins and the casein, you know, the trace lactose and casein found in butter. | ||
| But that actually has no bearing on whether or not it's good or bad for you. | ||
| So basically, though, if you were making, you know, an egg omelette, use some kale and spinach, you're talking about olive oil, you're talking about coconut oil, and butter. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Yeah, because, you know, the more saturated an oil is, the more chemically stable it's going to be at higher temperatures. | ||
| So, higher heat cooking, you want to use coconut oil, butter. | ||
| Ghee, lard, tallow, things like that. | ||
| My coffee right now, it's got ghee and MCT oil and collagen in it. | ||
| It doesn't really taste like coffee anymore, but it's not bad. | ||
| Collagen's awesome. | ||
| I did a great article, Deep Dive into the Health Benefits of Collagen, on my website. | ||
| And MCT oil is great. | ||
| I don't really see... For people that have no idea, MCT oil, it's like an extract of coconut oil, is that fair to say? | ||
| Yeah, so MCT oil is digested differently than other fats. | ||
| It basically goes straight to the liver and it becomes converted to ketones, which are a sort of alternate fuel that the brain will readily use when they're available. | ||
| And there's some really interesting research on MCT as a potential intervention for patients with Alzheimer's disease. | ||
| It might theoretically help people sort of wean themselves off of carbs by sort of supplementing brain energy. | ||
| And yeah, it could also, you know, I think just in terms of making you feel like you've had something first thing in the morning, slowing the release of caffeine into your bloodstream, you know, that's great. | ||
| But again, you want to be careful with the added fats because they're not nutrient-dense, and if you're trying to lose weight, there's no need to add a ton of oils to your diet. | ||
| I know, that's the irony of where I'm at with this thing, not to make this about me, but like I somehow actually have lost a couple pounds while doing this very high fat thing, but I hear what you're saying. | ||
| I actually probably could cut down on that and then my body will go to my actual fat instead of the fat I'm putting in there. | ||
| And I don't want to break it to you, but the weight that you lost could be water at the same time, so yeah, adding oils to the diet. | ||
| You wanted to break that to me, come on. | ||
| I mean, this is what you do. | ||
| I mean, you look good, you look good. | ||
| Okay, so you have basically an omelet, something to that effect, in the morning. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| With some greens in there. | ||
| Or yogurt, full-fat yogurt, grass-fed yogurt. | ||
| You know, that's something that I think is great. | ||
| Can you explain why grass-fed is so important? | ||
| Because I feel like there's a certain set of people that are always kind of like, you know, you go to get grass-fed. | ||
| Oh, you grass-fed. | ||
| Like, that doesn't do anything. | ||
| It's no, well it dictates the healthiness of the fat, you know, so if you're talking about like grass-fed whey protein, for example, makes much less of a difference because whey protein is just pure protein. | ||
| But if you're talking about, you know, a piece of red meat or something, grass-fed red meat compared to grain-fed red meat, it's a different animal, even though it's the same animal. | ||
| It's basically, I mean, one In grass-fed red meat, you have a ratio of omega-6 fats to omega-3 fats that basically mirrors that of the human brain. | ||
| You've got a lot more carotenoids, which are basically these fat-soluble antioxidant compounds that have been shown to boost processing speed in the brain, which is really important. | ||
| Cows that eat grass, grass contains these carotenoids, which are fat-soluble. | ||
| They become embedded in the fat of the cow. | ||
| And so when you eat a piece of steak from a cow that's been grass-fed, you're eating those carotenoids. | ||
| Along with fat that helps you absorb it, because they need fat to be absorbed. | ||
| So, I mean, it's a really healthy food when we're talking about grass-fed meat. | ||
| And then, in terms of yogurt, grass-fed yogurt, full fat, can have a few omega-3s. | ||
| It's not a major source, but it's got CLA, vitamin K2, much higher in the fat of grass-fed, full-fat yogurt than conventional yogurt. | ||
| I feel like lunch is the hard one for a lot of people, because people are at work. | ||
| A lot of people are barely leaving their desks at work. | ||
| Even for me, working from home even, but I'm so busy during the day, it's like, ah, we just gotta grab something or get chipotle or whatever it is. | ||
| What can you do in the midday? | ||
| You can have a relatively healthy meal at Chipotle. | ||
| I mean, Chipotle still, I think in all of their options, uses one of those oils, probably canola oil. | ||
| I'm not sure which, but yeah, I mean, you can get guacamole there, which is certainly very healthy. | ||
| Avocado is incredible for you. | ||
| It's, again, packed with carotenoids. | ||
| An avocado has twice the potassium of a banana, which is amazing. | ||
| People think about potassium, they only think about bananas. | ||
| Very low carb food. | ||
| You can get some protein. | ||
| And then the salsa, I think, is fine. | ||
| And the bell peppers are great. | ||
| But generally what I tell people for lunch is it's a great opportunity during the day to eat a salad. | ||
| I think people should be eating a large salad every single day. | ||
| Again, the research. | ||
| It's pretty compelling and mechanistically it makes sense that dark leafy greens would be really good for a person. | ||
| They're the most nutrient-dense foods there are, meaning there's tons of nutrients for very few calories. | ||
| They're packed with dietary fiber, which will not only help fill you up, but it feeds the microorganisms that live in your large intestines. | ||
| It's called the microbiome, which is a really exciting focus now in research. | ||
| And you want to make that salad fatty. | ||
| And I don't mean by putting, you know, tortilla strips and ranch dressing and cheese on it, or even commercial salad dressings. | ||
| You really want to avoid those. | ||
| But there's no better vehicle for extra virgin olive oil than a salad. | ||
| And extra virgin olive oil, going back to the Mediterranean dietary pattern, it's a hallmark. | ||
| And they've done research, you know, randomized controlled trials where they look specifically at extra virgin olive oil, one of the, you know, the One of the sort of best studies to look at was done out of Barcelona, Spain, called the PREDIMED study, where they gave subjects a liter of extra virgin olive oil to consume per week. | ||
| And they found that, you know, at the end of, I think the trial went on for six years, they had improved cognitive function, they had improved risk factors for cardiovascular disease, and they even lost weight. | ||
| So by adding more fat to their diet, they ended up losing weight. | ||
| Although it was extra virgin olive oil, it wasn't butter. | ||
| Right, okay, so now we've had the omelet, started the day, we've had a big green leafy salad for lunch, maybe some protein in there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's happening for dinner? | ||
| Yeah, so for dinner, I'm a big fan of grass-fed, you know, red meat. | ||
| I think that's one of the more controversial tips that I give people, because meat, you know, has sort of been in the doghouse for so long. | ||
| I thought one day a week, a red meat. | ||
| No, I mean, the thing is, I don't, there's no, you know, there was a really great study performed by Charlotte Newman at UCLA, where they gave, it was, again, a randomized control trial. | ||
| They gave children in Kenya. | ||
| This traditional porridge dish made of beans and green beans and things like that, you know, a control group had just the sort of vegetarian version, then they gave a group a version with dairy, and they gave a group a version with meat, and they found that the kids that were given the version with supplemented meat, added meat, actually at the end of the trial had improved cognitive function and signs of mental health. | ||
| There's other research actually that I cite in Genius Foods from Australia, Deakin University, where they found that women who didn't consume The nationally recommended three to four servings of red meat per week actually had twice the risk for depression or anxiety or mood disorder. | ||
| And so, you know, I think there's what's called like a U-shaped curve. | ||
| I think definitely some red meat is better than none, but eating too much isn't great either. | ||
| You definitely want to have a diet that's rich in vegetables. | ||
| Dark leafy greens, kale, spinach, things like that. | ||
| But in that context, I think that eating properly raised meat is definitely healthy. | ||
| Fatty fish for dinner would be another option. | ||
| Fish is packed with micronutrients that the brain needs to create new cells, which we now know the adult brain can do up until death. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you know, there's a lot of options. | ||
| I think, you know, when you look at a plate, you want to have half of it vegetables and half of it meat. | ||
| I don't think eating one of the, I think, incorrect interpretations of the paleo diet is that it's meant to be a really high meat diet. | ||
| I think that ignores a lot of the research now, again, surrounding the microbiome, which is this area that's very new. | ||
| We want to get a good amount of dietary fiber, micronutrients, which the brain needs, and there's no better way to do that than with veggies. | ||
| How often do you cheat on this stuff? | ||
| Because I'm guessing a certain amount of people are watching this going, all right, this is what this guy does for a living. | ||
| He's writing books about it, you know what I mean? | ||
| He has the time to prepare meals the way he wants, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| How often do you go off the deep end and, you know, really dig out on something? | ||
|
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I mean, a couple times a year, but, you know, I think, Do you not have the cravings for that stuff? | |
| No, I don't. | ||
| Or ice cream? | ||
| I don't, to be totally honest. | ||
| And I've always had a huge sweet tooth. | ||
| But I don't really... Once I made the transition to a lower carb diet, I don't have those cravings. | ||
| In fact, I can comfortably go hours without eating. | ||
| I think that's a really good subjective sign of metabolic resilience. | ||
| What about alcohol? | ||
| Where does that fit into this? | ||
| I know you mentioned the one glass of wine for a woman. | ||
| Is it one and a half to two? | ||
| One to two for men per day. | ||
| Yeah, does that basically align with what you're... Yeah, I mean there's, you know, some researchers recommend, you know, consuming red wine. | ||
| It's part of the sort of mind diet, which is a dietary sort of pattern that was created at Rush University. | ||
| But I don't, you know, I think... | ||
| I think it's hard to study alcohol because on the one hand, it's such a powerful social lubricant and feeling connected to one another. | ||
| And of course, as a solvent for stress, I think it's really powerful. | ||
| And that's not to be discounted. | ||
| We live stressful lives and there's sort of no way around that for many people. | ||
| But ethanol is a neurotoxin and I think if you have a way of dealing with stress and feeling connected with one another without it, I think you're probably better off doing that. | ||
| I do give some tips in the book about how to make consuming alcohol as healthy an experience as possible. | ||
| You want to avoid sugary mixers. | ||
| I think beer is one of the least healthiest alcohols that you can consume. | ||
| You always want to follow the one-for-one rule, you know, chase every drink with a glass of water. | ||
| And also, you know, alcohol is a diuretic, and when you pee a lot, you excrete sodium. | ||
| And so by replenishing those electrolytes, you know, while you're drinking, I think that's really important. | ||
| So sprinkling a little bit of salt in your water, for example, could be one way to do that. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| People don't realize that. | ||
| You don't need down a Gatorade just because you lost a couple electrolytes. | ||
| Literally just a little salt in your water. | ||
| A little bit of salt, yeah. | ||
| I actually became, I've become really interested in salt. | ||
| I carry a little vial of salt in my gym bag now and after a good sauna session or workout I sprinkle a little bit in my mouth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, because you lose... Gatorade people are not going to be happy about that. | ||
| They're not going to be happy about that. | ||
| You lose, especially when you're on a low-carb diet, when you drop the carbs, your insulin comes down, and insulin basically tells the kidneys to hold on to sodium, you know, unnaturally. | ||
| So for people that are on a really high-carb diet, which most Americans are, consuming 300 grams of carbs a day with insulin levels constantly elevated, they're holding on to excess sodium. | ||
| So the recommendation to watch your sodium intake in that sort of context makes a lot of sense. | ||
| But if you're eating a low-carb diet, as you should, focused on whole foods that are not packed with starch, You really need to be mindful of not only your sodium intake, because again, sodium is a nutrient. | ||
| It's not this poison that you would think it was looking at the labels of processed foods that are low in sodium and that's somehow supposed to make it okay that you're eating tons of sugar and processed wheat. | ||
| Yeah, so you need to really be mindful of that. | ||
| And then you do other things in your lifestyle that accelerate the spilling of sodium. | ||
| So like exercise, drinking coffee, which causes you to pee out a lot of sodium. | ||
| I did a great interview with a researcher who focuses on this topic. | ||
| Yeah, it's an area of interest for me. | ||
| Definitely when I wake up in the morning, if I'm doing one of my really particularly low carb phases, | ||
| I'll sprinkle a little bit of salt in my water and it makes me feel, it gives me a boost of energy, | ||
| I feel like, yeah. | ||
| All right, so let's go full circle here. | ||
| So basically about six years ago, that's when this all started and your mom was diagnosed. | ||
| It obviously changed her life afterwards, changed your life. | ||
| Where's your mom at now and how have the things, everything we've talked about for this last hour, how have you been able to incorporate them into her life and see some changes? | ||
| I mean, you know, I've tried, especially when I moved from L.A. | ||
| back to New York, I really tried to take a... | ||
| You know, super hands-on approach for as long as I could with my mom to change her diet and certainly some aspects of her diet has changed. | ||
| But, you know, dementia is a horrible disease and it makes it really hard on both the patient and the caregiver to adhere to strict dietary interventions. | ||
| There was a study that I dove into recently where they put people with Alzheimer's disease, | ||
| both mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease, on a ketogenic diet. | ||
| And they found that one of the major limitations of the study is that adherence is so high to these diets, | ||
| and it's a major stress on the caregiver. | ||
| I'm not my mom's caregiver, but at a certain point, I had to kind of teach and step back | ||
| so that if I am around my mom, and she's craving something that isn't max approved, | ||
| it doesn't affect my relationship with her because first and foremost, I love my mom, | ||
| and I don't wanna do anything to compromise the relationship | ||
| or her quality of life. | ||
| I wonder, is there any work done that people with dementia, I can sort of remember this from my grandmother who had dementia and I spent a lot of time with her her last few years, that she was an incredible cook, used to cook all sorts of exotic things, but in her later years as the dementia kicked in, she really only wanted the same few things. | ||
| Is that, do you think, somehow connected to, like there's just certain things maybe that are still in the memory? | ||
| Like she really suddenly wanted chicken soup all the time. | ||
| But I don't remember really her having chicken soup for many years before that. | ||
| She would cook these crazy meals. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, the only shift in food preference that I'm familiar with is a shift towards sweeter foods, which occurs. | ||
| And it's thought that that happens because a brain with Alzheimer's disease is essentially being starved of one of its primary energy substrates, which is glucose. | ||
| So there's this notion that Alzheimer's disease is a form of diabetes of the brain. | ||
| It's essentially become unable to properly process glucose. | ||
| That's where ketogenic interventions have shown a lot of promise and it's thought that that might be really helpful for a patient with Alzheimer's disease. | ||
| And one of the things that sort of strengthens that notion is that people that perhaps never expressed a preference for sweet foods or had a sweet tooth begin to crave sugar. | ||
| And it's thought that that's sort of the brain crying out for sugar as a means of creating energy. | ||
| But the irony is that those are the exact kinds of foods that drive inflammation and insulin resistance in the body and that are so detrimental to the brain to begin with. | ||
| There's really interesting, you know, and ketogenic diets are, I think they've become a little buzzworthy these days and popular, but there's a lot of good research on them. | ||
| They're hard to study. | ||
| There's not a lot of money to go around to really study them. | ||
| But there's good evidence that actually one of my friends published a study on patients with mild cognitive impairment where putting patients with With mild cognitive impairment on a ketogenic diet seemed to improve cognitive function. | ||
| And then just recently that was extended to patients with Alzheimer's disease, which we were all waiting for. | ||
| We were all waiting for a ketogenic trial to be performed on patients with diagnosed Alzheimer's disease. | ||
| And it seemed that for the patients that were able to adhere to it, there was a significant improvement in their cognitive function when they were on that diet. | ||
| And they went back to, you know, their baseline level of cognitive function after the trial ended, which really, you know, It strengthens the notion that ketones were helping the brain, sort of as an energetic life raft. | ||
| It seems that the main takeaway here is do some of the preventional work. | ||
| Completely. | ||
| Again, Alzheimer's disease begins in the brain 30 to 40 years before the first symptoms, before the first symptom, and there's even some data suggesting that this could be a lifelong thing for people with certain genes that put them at higher risk for Alzheimer's disease, like the ApoE4 allele, which one in four people carry. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's a pleasure to see you. | ||
| You've become a master of your craft, and I think it maybe has a little something to do with what you're eating, because, I mean, you're pulling information pretty quickly, so. | ||
| Thanks, man. | ||
| I think you've, the proof is in the gluten-free pudding, or something like that. | ||
| All right, Genius Foods comes out March 20th, am I right? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| See, I memorized that. | ||
| That was pretty impressive. | ||
| And Breadhead, your documentary, that's in the works right now? | ||
| That's in the works, that'll come out at some point this year. | ||
| People can check out a Kickstarter teaser at breadheadmovie.com. | ||
| Yeah, we'll link to that right down below. | ||
| And Genius Foods is up for pre-order now. | ||
| I mean, it's gonna be everywhere books are sold, so thank you. | ||
| All right, well, it's been a pleasure, I think, doing this with you while I'm in the midst of this diet, and you've given me some ways that maybe I can change it, a little less fat, and we'll revisit this privately in a couple weeks, and then we'll do this again for sure. | ||
| Awesome, thanks. | ||
| Alright, well for more on Max, follow him on the Twitter. | ||
| It's Max Lugavere. |
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