March 8, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| It was super frustrating. | ||
| I went with my mom to the most storied cathedrals to Western medicine. | ||
| And in every instance, I experienced what I've come to call diagnose and adios. | ||
| And I have a lot of respect for medicine. | ||
| In fact, when I started college, I wanted to be a doctor. | ||
| I was pre-med for the first few years. | ||
| But truly, in none of those doctor's offices was diet or lifestyle ever really brought up. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and this is The Rubin Report. | ||
| As always, guys, click that little subscribe button on YouTube so you might, just might see our videos. | ||
| Now, joining me today is a New York Times bestselling author of Genius Foods and the author of the new book, The Genius Life, Max Lugavere. | ||
| Welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| So good to be here. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| New York Times bestselling author. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Were you a New York Times bestselling author last time? | ||
| I was not, no. | ||
| Yeah, you were about to become. | ||
| About to become. | ||
| I didn't know it at the time. | ||
| I had no idea how well Genius Foods would ultimately do, but I'm super grateful, humbled that it's reached big audiences, now published in eight languages around the world. | ||
| It's super cool. | ||
| I was in Colombia, I was in Bogota, and I had like a line of Spanish-speaking fans lined up to get their books signed, and you know, we could barely communicate, but it was just so, so gratifying to see that, you know? | ||
| How does it change one's life to become a New York Times bestselling author? | ||
| I mean, does it really level up the amount of stuff that you suddenly get? | ||
| Because people are like, oh, this guy actually does know what he's talking about. | ||
| It's not just a book about food. | ||
| Yeah, it's a credential. | ||
| I never misrepresent myself. | ||
| I mean, I write about health and science, but I do it not with having a background in academia or medicine. | ||
| I'm just passionately curious, and it's a topic that I think is the most important topic there is. | ||
| But the fact that the book continues to be, it wasn't just sort of a There's this metaphor in book sales, you know, when you launch a book, you could be throwing up either a feather or a brick. | ||
| And a feather is what you want to happen, because the feather goes up and then it kind of floats. | ||
| The break just ends up coming right down. | ||
| And the fact that Genius Foods has kind of just stayed up, you know, and it continues to sell well, to me is a testament to the quality of the work, really, ultimately. | ||
| And as a writer, that's the best form of flattery that you can get, you know, that your writing is embraced and that it continues to do well. | ||
| So yeah, I'm super thrilled. | ||
| It's given me the opportunity to write this book, The Genius Life. | ||
| I have since launched my own podcast, which is also called The Genius Life. | ||
| So it's allowed me to get to do what I love to do full-time. | ||
| And as you know, it's a great thing to work for yourself and to be driven on your own steam. | ||
| Yeah, it's a pretty sweet thing. | ||
| And you're building a studio in your apartment, which I know a little something about that, so that we could do a separate show on that. | ||
| But for people that didn't see our first interview, we'll link to it in this so they can jump back. | ||
| But one of the things I find most interesting about you, and you and I now go back like six, seven years, so before you wrote Genius Foods, your story on how you came to kind of care about this stuff is, well, it's deeply personal, but it's also pretty fascinating, actually. | ||
| Could you do like a quick recap on that? | ||
| Absolutely, yeah. | ||
| I started as a journalist. | ||
| I was a generalist working for Al Gore's Current TV. | ||
| My role there was not as a flag bearer of his political ideas and environmental ideas. | ||
| I got the job right out of college and I got to cover stories that were important to me. | ||
| And they ranged from health to technology to politics occasionally. | ||
| But when I left that job after six years, I started spending more and more time in New York City, which is where I'm from, around my mother. | ||
| Firstborn child, very close to my mom. | ||
| She started at the age of 58 to display the earliest symptoms of dementia. | ||
| And she had a very strange confluence of symptoms. | ||
| She had symptoms that were more indicative of a memory disorder, and then she had movement symptoms, which would indicate a more Parkinsonian complex, like Parkinson's disease. | ||
| And it was something that was traumatic to witness. | ||
| You know, when we got the initial diagnosis, Were you literally the first person that noticed anything, or was she noticing that something was going on? | ||
| She started to complain of brain fog, memory problems, but we didn't have the vernacular in my family. | ||
| We had no prior family history of any kind of neurodegenerative disease. | ||
| And interestingly, my mom's mom, my maternal grandmother, she lived to 96, and she was cognitively sharp until the end. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So my grandmother was not demented. | ||
| And so the idea that my grandma's daughter My mom could somehow be succumbing to this condition that I think most people assume to be an old person's disease. | ||
| It just didn't compute. | ||
| It didn't make any sense. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And so when my mom was initially prescribed the drugs for Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, that was the first time in my life I'd ever had a panic attack. | ||
| I'm a pretty chill guy. | ||
| But I was alone in the hotel room in Cleveland, Ohio, Googling the drug prescriptions, which I think anybody would do in that position. | ||
| And the severity of the situation really dawned on me at that moment. | ||
| And from that point on, I decided to dedicate all of my free time to investigating why this would have happened to my mom, what could be done to help her, what could be done to prevent it from happening to myself. | ||
| And that began about eight years ago. | ||
| And that was a struggle, obviously, watching my mom descend and become more and more handicapped by the disease. | ||
| And that's what motivated me to write Genius Foods and to do all the work that I've put out. | ||
| What occurred after Genius Foods came out was, I mean, equally surprising and equally heartbreaking. | ||
| I was in the middle of writing this book when my mom turned yellow. | ||
| And you could, I mean, usually if you turn yellow, you know, it's either going to be | ||
| jaundice or you've eaten too much beta carotene, you've eaten too many carrots. | ||
| But what happens with jaundice, the whites of your eyes actually become yellow. | ||
| That's kind of what distinguishes it from just, you know, eating too many sweet potatoes. | ||
| And my family rushed her to the emergency room. | ||
| They did an MRI of her abdomen. | ||
| And what they discovered was not a gallstone, which is typically what, you know, it'll cause a blockage in the bile duct, cause bilirubin, which is a pigment to back up into your blood. | ||
| What they found was much worse. | ||
| It was a tumor on the head of her pancreas. | ||
| And she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. | ||
| And 90% of the time when pancreatic cancer is diagnosed, it's already progressed. | ||
| And it was three months and she was, you know, it was the most, it was barbaric and brutal. | ||
| And that's what she ultimately passed from. | ||
| But the fact that my mom had these two freak health conditions, two of the most feared conditions known to humanity, it motivates me every day to learn more, to teach more, and to just stay open and curious and always be willing to challenge my assumptions and my beliefs about what it means to be healthy in the 21st century. | ||
| Yeah, well that's why I think your story is so cool. | ||
| I mean, just like, you're a good guy, but you've also like, even when I, You know, follow you on Instagram and you do a lot of like, you know, don't eat this, eat this kind of stuff. | ||
| And it's very human. | ||
| You're not like beating people over the head with all this. | ||
| And I want to get to some of those techniques and little tricks that you use to make things a little bit healthier. | ||
| But when your mom got diagnosed and then subsequently when you did all of the things that you tried to do over the course of that time, was anyone else talking about food? | ||
| Or was it all just like, this is what you take, this is what you take, we'll up it here. | ||
| If this happens, you do this. | ||
| Like, was there any, like, eat more avocado? | ||
| No. | ||
| It was super frustrating. | ||
| I went with my mom to the most storied cathedrals to Western medicine, and in every instance, I experienced what I've come to call diagnose and adios. | ||
| And I have a lot of respect for medicine. | ||
| In fact, when I started college, I wanted to be a doctor. | ||
| I was pre-med for the first few years. | ||
| Truly, in none of those doctors' offices was diet or lifestyle ever really brought up. | ||
| And the contrast between what I was experiencing in the clinicians' offices with my mom and what I started to discover in the medical literature, there was just this big value in between the dearth of information and the despair that I was seeing there with my mom and the optimism that I was reading about in the medical literature. | ||
| And ultimately what I did was I realized that I had media credentials. | ||
| And I started to reach out to scientists and researchers who were the authors of the papers that I was reading. | ||
| And they echoed that sentiment of optimism. | ||
| And yet, at the point of care with my mom, what I experienced was anything but optimistic. | ||
| So I really had to take it upon myself. | ||
| And I think when you're a patient, my mom was scared. | ||
| She was confused. | ||
| She didn't have a framework for understanding health or science or anything like that. | ||
| I did because I had a lifelong passion for the topic. | ||
| But really, I think there are a lot of people in her shoes that are met with the same kind of, I don't know, like hopelessness. | ||
| And yeah, you're right. | ||
| I mean, what every doctor would ultimately do would titrate up the dose of a medication that she was already on, throw something new into the mix. | ||
| And by the time my mom passed, she was on 10 different pharmaceuticals. | ||
| I'm not even being hyperbolic. | ||
| And there's just no way that a physician can have any idea of how each of those pills are interacting with one another in a body that's growing increasingly frail and sick. | ||
| And in fact, one of the medications that my mom was prescribed was actually a drug that's contraindicated for people with cognitive decline, with dementia. | ||
| It was a drug in a category of drugs called anticholinergics. | ||
| which affect the way the neurotransmitter acetylcholine operates, | ||
| which is involved in learning and memory. | ||
| And in fact, when you have dementia, usually they'll prescribe a drug to boost levels of acetylcholine, | ||
| and she was on this drug that basically was negatively affecting the way that that drug works. | ||
| And so, yeah, it was a big problem. | ||
| There was infighting in my family. | ||
| None of the doctors ever, I think, deprescribed, you know, so she was on all these drugs. | ||
| Did you try to bring up to the doctors, oh, maybe, you know, I've seen this study, she should eat this, this, or we should move this out of her diet, or insert this, et cetera? | ||
| I tried. | ||
| Doctors tend to be down on what they're not up on. | ||
| I think that's part of the training, but they are always hyper-skeptical of anything on the more holistic side of things. | ||
| And to be clear, I didn't change my mom's diet and see a dramatic improvement in her cognition. | ||
| I think that the science is really pointing towards prevention as the key There is hope coming out in the medical literature. | ||
| Really vigorous lifestyle interventions can, I think, perhaps slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, but dietary change for anybody is difficult to do, let alone somebody with dementia. | ||
| So for most of us, then, that know that Alzheimer's and dementia, that these numbers seem to be increasing and increasing, and your mom, you said 59? | ||
| She was 58 when she first started, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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58 years old. | |
| I mean, that's incredibly young. | ||
| So let's talk about some of those things that you can do before you're sitting at the doctor's office and they're giving you the 10 medications. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, the first thing that you need to realize is that dementia often begins in the brain decades before the first symptom. | ||
| And I saw that nobody was talking about this. | ||
| And that's why I decided to step up. | ||
| The fact that I wasn't a medical doctor, to me, didn't seem like a barrier to entry. | ||
| Because I genuinely believe that people should know how to care for their bodies and their brains. | ||
| And we're just not taught this. | ||
| We're fed misinformation from every conceivable angle, whether it's the food industry and the way that they market | ||
| their foods, making health claims on their products, | ||
| to the way that the media reports on health studies and research and things like that. | ||
| So, I think, I mean, what I've learned is that you really, that the standard American diet is toxic, essentially. | ||
| And anything that you can do to run in the opposite direction of that. | ||
| So what is the standard American diet? | ||
| If you're painting that picture, what does that really look like? | ||
| There are, I mean, there are images that you can, like you can go to Google Images and you can search for the average, you know, shopping haul for your typical American family over the course of the week. | ||
| And essentially, it's all processed foods. | ||
| Ultra-processed foods, to be more clear. | ||
| Today, 60% of the calories that we're consuming come from what are called ultra-processed foods, which are made in factories. | ||
| They usually are the processed permutations of wheat, corn, and rice, maybe some soy. | ||
| And they generally are what food scientists refer to as being hyper-palatable. | ||
| So, they're extremely calorie-dense. | ||
| They're not satiating. | ||
| In fact, they actually can make you hungry later on. | ||
| They often put additives in there, right, that actually make you want more, right? | ||
| Isn't that the Dorito effect or something? | ||
| Well, I think it's the fact that, I mean, these foods are just, they're, they become impossibly delicious when you combine sugar, fat, salt. | ||
| You know, these are, I mean, each of these flavors were relatively scarce in antiquity, and today they're just abundantly available. | ||
| Like, sugar would be available to a hunter-gatherer, you know, once per year when it was summer and the fruit, you know, became ripe. | ||
| And even then, the fruits that would be available to one of our ancestors would be a fraction as sweet as they are today. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| The amount of apples that you would have to eat to get the sugar levels that you can get in a bag of Sour Patch Kids or something is insane. | ||
| Yeah, like the ancestral apple is like a crab apple, essentially. | ||
| And today we have these cosmic crisp apples that are amazing. | ||
| Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of apples, but they're bred to contain more starch and sugar than ever before. | ||
| in history and they're also bred, a lot of our produce now is being bred to remove these | ||
| bitter compounds which are actually compounds that probably produce the greatest health | ||
| benefit when we consume them like polyphenols and flavonoids and things like that. | ||
| So sugar, fat we know is highly delectable. | ||
| It sends off our brain's reward centers. | ||
| It's one of the reasons why we put half and half in our coffee. | ||
| It just allows flavors to linger on the tongue. | ||
| And then salt. | ||
| The word salary derives from salt. | ||
| It's super important. | ||
| We need it for good health. | ||
| Sodium is a macro mineral. | ||
| It's also one of these nutrients that's been demonized over the past couple of decades, | ||
| but you combine them all together, and it's basically like the 4th of July's fireworks | ||
| in the brain, and it makes it impossible to moderate our consumption of these foods. | ||
| And so one of the ideas that I put forth in The Genius Life, I try to really make | ||
| dietary recommendations without further harming people's relationship with food. | ||
| I think people today have this fractured relationship with food. | ||
| Yeah, I always see when I'm at Trader Joe's, they have guilt-free pita chips, | ||
| and I'm always like, the fact that the word guilt is on there, like the idea that you'd be buying | ||
| a regular pita chip and feel guilty about it is kind of crazy, putting aside whether you want | ||
| carbs or breads or whatever, but like, the way it's all marketed, these are guilt-free. | ||
| Like, so you can walk out of here and you're not gonna feel guilty. | ||
| That's not the stuff you should feel guilty over. | ||
| No, it's ridiculous. | ||
| I mean, the truth is these foods are designed to be over-consumed and without telling consumers how these foods are going to affect their behavior, when they try to moderate their consumption of these pita chips or the pint of ice cream and they end up feeling like moral failures because they just simply can't, that I think is where the problem lies. | ||
| On the other hand, if you actually are aware that these foods, they're so easily over-consumed, | ||
| then it becomes informed consent. | ||
| Then you actually know what you're opting into, and then there shouldn't be any guilt | ||
| about that. | ||
| You're an adult making a decision, which you should be able to do. | ||
| You should be able to eat whatever you want. | ||
| But the problem is, I think, that most people don't know that these foods actually drive | ||
| over-consumption. | ||
| There was a great study that was published, and I wrote about what these hyperpalatable | ||
| ultra processed foods due to our behavior and genius foods. | ||
| But since genius foods came out, there was a great study that was published. | ||
| It actually was funded by the National Institutes of Health. | ||
| And they found that when people were given all you can eat access to an ultra-processed diet, it's called ad libitum feeding. | ||
| that people tend to over consume about 500 additional calories | ||
| to reach the point of satiety. So to just eat until to a point of fullness, people tend to over consume about | ||
| 500 calories a day. | ||
| And you're more inclined to do that by eating processed? | ||
| With these ultra processed foods. Because of the way they're making you feel. | ||
| Bagels, muffins, pizzas, burritos, chicken dishes, potato chips, sandwiches, things like that. | ||
| Foods that are primarily packaged, shelf-stable, devoid of moisture, which actually can be satiating when food has water in it, but water It makes food spoil. | ||
| You have to remove the water to make a product shelf stable. | ||
| So they're not satiating. | ||
| They can often induce what's called biphasic hunger, so they can make you hungry later on. | ||
| And, yeah, 500 additional calories a day, that might not seem like a lot, but stretched | ||
| out over the course of a week, that's a pound of fat gain. | ||
| And then they – so it was a crossover study. | ||
| And when they put these same people, when they gave them access to foods that were minimally | ||
| processed – again, ad libitum feeding, they were able to eat until they were full – to | ||
| the same degree of satiety, they actually under-consumed about 300 calories a day. | ||
| So what that's going to do is lead to effortless weight loss. | ||
| So that's really kind of like the switch that I think people need to be aware of that. | ||
| We tend to think that we have full agency when it comes to our meal choices, but we | ||
| don't. | ||
| I mean, we're – our actions are the end result of an eating disorder. | ||
| an interplay between hormones, neurotransmitters, which are ultimately influenced | ||
| by the types of foods that we're eating. | ||
| Do you think more than anything else, you're always, as someone that cares about this | ||
| and you're trying to get people to change their habits, it's really always about fighting a marketing machine | ||
| that is oddly ahead of you. | ||
| So like if you just turn on television and every commercial you see for like a breakfast food, | ||
| suddenly they try to make everything healthy, but you know, it's like an egg | ||
| that you crack in this thing and then it's got all this other stuff already in there | ||
| and it's sorta seems healthy. | ||
| You're kind of like, oh, I'm eating an egg in the morning, and it kind of seems right. | ||
| And then I'm sure that when you look at the instructions or the ingredients on the back, it's like, yeah, the sodium and everything else. | ||
| But you have to fight that constantly because they're marketing it all as healthy. | ||
| Yeah, I mean food marketing, they put products at eye level, they market to children, they forge those habits early in life, they become exponentially more difficult to break. | ||
| I'm human, so I eat processed foods too, right? | ||
| Like, I'm just as guilty as anybody else, but I think to be aware... I mean, knowledge is power at the end of the day, and to be able to act on that knowledge, I mean, that's the most empowering aspect of all of this, because, you know, like, health is something that... | ||
| Health care is something that we do when we're pushing the shopping cart through the aisles of the supermarket or actually avoiding the aisles because that's where all the ultra-processed foods tend to be. | ||
| When we're debating with ourselves whether or not to get to the gym, that's really where health care happens. | ||
| What I experienced with my mom was sick care and the relative lack of options once you actually have one of these chronic diseases that has set in. | ||
| At the end of the day, the food industry doesn't have your back. | ||
| I mean, the food industry is great in many... It's an industry like anything else. | ||
| It's an industry. | ||
| It's not all bad. | ||
| I mean, food is safer. | ||
| We're exposed to fewer pathogens than ever before. | ||
| Hunger is less of an issue today than it is in the past if you're in the developed world. | ||
| the developed world, but a lot of these conditions that we're seeing society now struggle with are | ||
| lifestyle mediated. They're mediated by being overly sedentary, by basing our diet around | ||
| these ultra-processed foods. It's funny, I'm noticing now at Whole Foods, just because we're | ||
| in the midst of this odd thing with coronavirus, that nobody, at least at my Whole Foods, nobody's | ||
| touching the grains that you can do yourself. | ||
| They've got that wall of grains. | ||
| It's like nobody's even going over there anymore, which is probably, I guess, good at the moment, but who knows? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A lot of people are now using these hand sanitizers. | ||
| If you go on Amazon, the markup has just shot up exponentially. | ||
| But something that I think few people appreciate is that when you use a hand sanitizer before you go shopping and then you touch the store register receipt, these store register receipts are actually coated with Bisphenol A, which is a pretty potent endocrine disruptor. | ||
| That hand sanitizer, when you use it just before or even just after you touch these receipts, it actually dramatically, by at least an order of magnitude, increases the permeability of your skin to these compounds. | ||
| So you want to be... I don't know... Well, that's incredible. | ||
| They're literally selling hand sanitizer at the register. | ||
| You probably... people are buying it right then and there. | ||
| You put it on, you grab the receipt, and now... Yeah, it's not good. | ||
| That's actually a big topic that I cover in the new book is endocrine disruption and environmental toxins without trying to fear monger, but just to kind of alert people and to get people to think a little bit more critically about the industrial chemicals to which they are routinely exposed. | ||
| All right, so before we go fully there, I wanna tell you what my basic diet is on a day like today, where I told you right before we started. | ||
| I feel like we did this last time. | ||
| We did do this last time, and I think I was doing pretty good. | ||
| But on a day like today, I have a crazy day. | ||
| I told you, I have two shoots, then I have three other shows, and we're doing a live stream. | ||
| I'm gonna be just crazed all day long. | ||
| So this morning, all I've had so far today, it's about 10 a.m. | ||
| right now, I had a cup of coffee, I grind the beans myself, do that, I put a scoop of collagen protein in there, and a half teaspoon of lion's mane mushroom, which is good for the brain, as they say. | ||
| I've had that, one cup, and I've had about three quarters of a cup of oatmeal. | ||
| With a little almond milk and a tiny bit of sugar-free syrup, and that's gonna get me to lunch. | ||
| How am I doing in the morning? | ||
| It sounds pretty good. | ||
| Wait, what was the protein? | ||
| Was there any, you had just... It's collagen protein, so it's like maybe 18 grams of protein in a scoop, something like that. | ||
| Collagen is not... Yeah, talk to me about collagen. | ||
| This is LA, everybody's obsessed with collagen. | ||
| You can't go anywhere with that. | ||
| Well, I'm actually a fan of collagen. | ||
| Collagen's one of the few, especially today, where we tend to eat, for the omnivores in the audience, we tend to eat mostly muscle meat, which is concentrated in an amino acid, called methionine. It's an essential amino acid, but there | ||
| is thinking that by consuming too much methionine without | ||
| adequate glycine, which is an amino acid that is found predominantly in collagenous tissue and also in | ||
| collagen protein. It's about one-third of | ||
| collagen protein is glycine. That might be to our detriment. | ||
| Especially for an omnivore, I think supplementing with collagen protein is actually a pretty good idea. | ||
| So coffee with a little collagen protein and some of the mushroom powder. | ||
| I'm doing okay in the morning. | ||
| Yeah, I'm a fan of lion's mane as well. | ||
| I use the lion's mane powder. | ||
| Dave, the studies on lion's mane, it can potentially boost nerve growth factor. | ||
| And I've seen, there was a clinical trial performed in Japan where it's been used to, what they observed was a boost in cognitive function in patients with mild cognitive impairment. | ||
| So, you know, I'm a fan of these like, quote unquote, medicinal mushrooms. | ||
| There's not a ton of research on them. | ||
| And then oatmeal, a little sugar-free syrup, I'm doing okay? | ||
| Yeah, oatmeal's okay. | ||
| Almond milk. | ||
| I mean, it's a little, for me, it's a little high in glycemic to have first thing in the morning, but oatmeal, you know, it's a great source of soluble fiber, it's satiating. | ||
| You've got these beta-glucans in it, which are immunomodulatory. | ||
| So yeah, I think oatmeal is, steel cut is generally the best, it's gonna have the lowest They're still cut. | ||
| You can confirm when you walk out of here. | ||
| Okay, so then I'll have two shows and then I'm gonna have lunch. | ||
| I think they placed the order already. | ||
| We're doing like sweet greens or tender greens. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| Get like a chipotle chicken salad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Got a romaine. | ||
| There's probably a little cheese in there. | ||
| I'm a big fan of the... I eat what's called a big fatty salad every day. | ||
| I feel like I might have talked about this the last time I was here. | ||
| But yeah, researchers at Rush University actually One of the lead authors in a lot of the studies that I cite in my books and in my talks, Martha Clare Morris, she just passed away. | ||
| of esophageal cancer. | ||
| She is the originator of the MIND diet, and she also has done a lot of the epidemiology | ||
| surrounding risk factors for cognitive decline. | ||
| And what she found, what her team found, is that the consumption of a big salad every day, | ||
| about a cup and a third of dark leafy greens, is associated with brains that perform up to 11 years | ||
| younger. | ||
| Wow. - So, yeah. | ||
| I mean, there's probably a strong healthy user bias there, too. | ||
| People who eat more greens, more whole grains, things like that, tend to be more health conscious. | ||
| But, you know, we know that dark leafy greens are good for us. | ||
| They contain carotenoids, which are really beneficial for eye health, for brain health. | ||
| Also, you can eat a lot of spinach really quick. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| You can put a whole handful of it, and once it cooks down, it's like three bites and you're good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Spinach? | ||
| Yeah, I'm a fan of dark leafy greens. | ||
| I mean, we live in this weird, contentious time in nutrition where we've got these different factions, like breaking off. | ||
| We've got the vegans, we've got the carnivores. | ||
| And so I actually have a pretty balanced message, I think. | ||
| I'm a strong advocate of the consumption of animal foods, grass-fed beef, fatty fish, things like that. | ||
| But then also, yeah, dark leafy greens, kale, spinach, arugula. | ||
| So speaking of the carnivores, you know I was on tour with Jordan Peterson and he became famous or infamous for partaking in the carnivore diet, which I think his daughter Michaela has now called the lion diet. | ||
| The lion diet. | ||
| The lion diet, which is quite literally only beef. | ||
| And I was on tour with this guy. | ||
| He ate ribeyes for breakfast. | ||
| He'd often have two ribeyes for lunch and sometimes a whole tomahawk at night. | ||
| Or maybe two more ribeyes, a little salt, he had some club soda, water, that's it. | ||
| People kept asking me, this can't be true. | ||
| And I was like, if he is secretly eating cookies in his hotel room, I don't know about it. | ||
| But from what I know, he was keeping to it. | ||
| And I did see throughout the year that we were together on the road that he actually, his skin started looking better. | ||
| He said it fixed some stuff related to like oral hygiene. | ||
| and that I thought his hair looked even like a little thicker or something. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Have you studied this at all? | ||
| Do you sense an imbalance there? | ||
| Not about him specifically, but just generally like when people do these, what are seemingly | ||
| sort of extreme versions of what you're talking about. | ||
| Well, I think meat is very nutrient dense. | ||
| I think people in the carnivore community, there's some debate about whether or not they're getting adequate amounts of vitamin C or even optimal amounts of vitamin C, which is found predominantly in... You can get small amounts of vitamin C in fresh liver, raw fresh liver, but you've got to eat raw fresh liver to get it if you're a carnivore. | ||
| By the way, I should mention that in the midst of all this, he had a physical for some insurance stuff and all his numbers, he told me, came back fine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I think that meat is very healthy. | ||
| I think that there's a lot of confusion about the value of meat in a healthful diet, in | ||
| an environmentally friendly diet or way of eating, I should say. | ||
| But yeah, no, I'm a big advocate. | ||
| I think a lot of people, the people that I see tend to do best on the carnivore diet | ||
| because it's a very extreme elimination diet is essentially what it is. | ||
| And it's also very hard to overconsume meat because protein is the most satiating macronutrient. | ||
| It's going to be more satiating than fat. | ||
| It's going to be more satiating than carbs. | ||
| So it's very difficult to overeat meat. | ||
| So a lot of people, what you'll see is they're going to end up losing weight. | ||
| And when you lose weight, a lot of biomarkers that we associate with ill health tend to | ||
| get fixed. | ||
| You know, if you have high blood pressure, it's going to go down when you lose weight, | ||
| inflammatory markers and things like that. | ||
| So just losing weight is going to help you if you are overweight. | ||
| But also, people with inflammatory conditions, with autoimmune conditions, what I've observed in my conversations with people who are advocates of the carnivore diet and also medical doctors who are advocates of the carnivore diet, that you're removing problematic compounds, plant-based compounds that can be allergenic for some people, that can It's a very difficult diet to adhere to, and if I were suffering from some kind of autoimmune condition, I would probably give it a shot, but then I would try to reintegrate. | ||
| immune response in some people. | ||
| That being said, do I think that people need to ... It's a very difficult diet to adhere | ||
| to and if I were suffering from some kind of autoimmune condition, I would probably | ||
| give it a shot, but then I would try to reintegrate. | ||
| Elimination diets are not meant to be adhered to long term. | ||
| You're supposed to cut everything out and then reintegrate one by one these different | ||
| so that you can see what the actual source of your problems is. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I've never tried it personally. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Can we talk about the anti-inflammatory thing for a little bit? | ||
| So I don't remember, last time I had you on, which I think maybe is like a year and a half ago or so, | ||
| I don't even know if I had talked about it publicly yet, but a couple years back, about five years ago, | ||
| I was getting my hair cut and my girl, she told me that I was missing some chunks of hair. | ||
| And then it started spreading basically all over my head. | ||
| And at one point I had lost literally like 40% of my hair. | ||
| And I was doing like crazy, have I told you about this? | ||
| I think you mentioned it. - Even privately maybe? | ||
| I don't even remember if it was private or on the show. | ||
| But in any event, I was doing like crazy spray-on stuff to be on camera and all this other stuff. | ||
| And I was doing steroids, and then I went on some experimental stuff, | ||
| and I had a really horrible reaction to that. | ||
| The one thing that started turning it around for me was when I started doing more of a paleo diet, which I'm still doing, not fully, I'm doing more of a slow-carb thing, but really just to do the anti-inflammatory thing, and I've seen a change. | ||
| I mean, I've lost weight, I feel better. | ||
| Little things, old basketball injuries that don't hurt as much. | ||
| Can you just talk about the inflammatory situation? | ||
| Why you don't want to be inflamed all the time? | ||
| Yeah, so I like chronic, low-grade inflammation to a forest fire occurring in the body. | ||
| My focus, the brain, sits directly downwind of that fire, unfortunately. | ||
| Inflammation is not a bad thing. | ||
| It's a life-saving function of our immune systems, and it's really designed by nature to spot clean cuts, wounds, scrapes, bruises. | ||
| You can feel it if you've ever sprained an ankle. | ||
| The area gets hot. | ||
| It starts swelling. | ||
| It will engorge with blood. | ||
| The same thing happens if you have an infection in your body. | ||
| You become inflamed. | ||
| The problem today, I think, is that our immune systems are responding not to what they would have, you know, for our ancestors, but they're responding more to our diets and our lifestyles. | ||
| Meaning in the old days, it would respond because you were wounded, or you stepped on something, or you got bit by an animal, or something like that. | ||
| And now it's just the constant intake of crap, basically. | ||
| Yeah, it's essentially there as a defense mechanism, but unfortunately today, it's overactive as a response to pro-inflammatory diets, being overly sedentary, chronic stress. | ||
| Chronic stress is inflammatory. | ||
| So, I mean, there's this whole milieu that our immune systems now have to sort of contend with. | ||
| And it's a problem because inflammation, it's not like a free ride. | ||
| There's collateral damage that occurs when When the body essentially is there, is like, is putting out a fire, essentially. | ||
| And when that's occurring all over the body, it creates this collateral damage. | ||
| It can damage, you know, brain tissue. | ||
| It could negatively affect your immune system, leave you prone to infection. | ||
| So, I think for a lot of people, I mean, we're seeing epidemic rates of obesity and metabolic syndrome. | ||
| Today, about 12% of people are in what researchers would call good metabolic health. | ||
|
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Man, that is a depressingly low number. | |
| Super depressing. | ||
| Today, a lot of people are struggling with chronic low-grade inflammation and that really is the cornerstone, it seems, to a lot of these kinds of lifestyle-mediated conditions that we're seeing skyrocket. | ||
| Inflammation, the role that it plays in the onset of these conditions is still being explored, but it can exacerbate problems. | ||
| I mean, the role that inflammation plays in mental health and behavior and risk for neurodegenerative disease is really kind of like my focus. | ||
| But inflammation can also damage your DNA, which is at the root cause of Cancer, maybe an aging itself. | ||
| But when an animal is inflamed, animals display what are called sickness behaviors. | ||
| They retract from the herd, they lose interest in grooming and food and sex. | ||
| So I mean inflammation, which is a biochemical process in the body, can actually have an effect on the way that we think and the way that we feel. | ||
| Yeah, it's so interesting because, you know, we just lost our 16-year-old dog Emma, and in the last year she had bladder cancer, and they told us two weeks to five months, and really all we did was change her diet. | ||
| We changed her diet from, you know, the usual processed dog food, you know, she was eating something pretty decent but it was dog food, and we changed it into human food. | ||
| She was eating organic chicken and sweet potato mostly, and then At the end she was eating ribeyes. | ||
| She had a great last week. | ||
| I saw that. | ||
| Yeah, the girl was doing all right. | ||
| But that was further evidence, I know it's a dog not a human, of just what a diet change will do. | ||
| Because I had the doctor who literally wanted us to do chemo on her and go in for surgeries and all that for a 15 year old dog at the time. | ||
| And I was just like, I'm not, we're not doing that. | ||
| And what we did was just a diet change. | ||
| And not only, I mean, our vet then started telling us, well, not only because you've changed her diet and gotten her off some of those foods, is that just in and of itself good, but now she's lost some weight so her arthritis is better and a series of other things. | ||
| So it's like, there are these just obvious things that I guess we just don't think about that often. | ||
| I mean, the role that food plays in helping us to prevent these kinds of conditions, I think, is profound. | ||
| I don't think that food can cure everything. | ||
| It certainly didn't cure my mom. | ||
| But that being said, neither did Western medicine. | ||
| My mom was not really offered anything that actually helped her, either for her dementia or for her cancer. | ||
| But I think that's why I'm so passionate about this idea of prevention. | ||
| And doing what you can while you're healthy. | ||
| One of my favorite quotes, John F. Kennedy, you know, the time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining. | ||
| And dementia, Alzheimer's disease, even Parkinson's disease, by the time you show your first symptom of Parkinson's disease, half of the dopaminergic neurons involved in movement in the region of the brain associated with the condition are already dead. | ||
| So, cancer, heart disease, none of these conditions develop overnight. | ||
| So I wanna come back to that. | ||
| So let's pin that for just a sec, but let's get through my daily diet so we can get that out of the way. | ||
| So then I have a bunch of shows this afternoon. | ||
| Then tonight, we have the whole crew's here working late. | ||
| So I think we're bringing in from this Israeli Mediterranean place. | ||
| I'm gonna do some shawarma, some salads, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| I know you're good with that. | ||
| Now talk to me about the pita and the fries. | ||
| I'm gonna try to avoid it. | ||
| I usually try to avoid it. | ||
| Yeah, I think-- | ||
| So I know you're happy if I just do the chicken and the salads and all that stuff, we're good. | ||
| It's the, French fries are the, it's the number one vegetable. | ||
| Like, potatoes are the number one vegetable consumed in this nation, and usually they're in the form of french fries and potato chips. | ||
| I'm not a, I mean, here, I'll eat them occasionally as well, but it's very hard for me to moderate my consumption of french fries. | ||
| It's just, it's very difficult. | ||
| You think it's particularly hard for you now? | ||
| Because it's also like you're doing something so counter to everything else you believe in, it's like, ah, I'm doing it. | ||
| And so I just end up bingeing. | ||
| So you just go crazy, yeah. | ||
| No, I've always struggled and I realized from a very young age that the way for me to control my health and to moderate my consumption of those foods is to not try them. | ||
| Because I think once I open up those floodgates, they're like trigger foods. | ||
| They're triggers. | ||
| We live in a world where everybody's being triggered. | ||
| I think a lot of people are triggered by foods and then they end up over-consuming them. | ||
| And so once, you know, if I'm able to kind of not break the seal on those foods, it becomes very, you know, it's just so much more effortless for me to manage my health. | ||
| If I were to give in to every craving, I feel like I would, you know, I mean, I don't know, but I would probably... Well, you'd definitely be in a different line of work. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know that much. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| But yeah, French fries, you know, I mean, potatoes can be, you know, by themselves can be a nutrient-dense food, but the minute you throw them in the oil and you throw salt on them, I mean, another major problem is that fried foods, usually when you get fried foods in a restaurant, they're being fried in oil that's just been sitting out all day. | ||
| And these oils are toxic. | ||
| I mean, the production process alone creates a small but meaningful amount of trans fats, which there's no safe level of man-made trans fat consumption. | ||
| They inflame your arteries. | ||
| They're associated with increased risk for Alzheimer's disease, for worse brain function, even if you're young and healthy, heart disease, cancer, things like that. | ||
| They're aggressively pro-inflammatory. | ||
| And then the heating and just the constant heating and reheating of these oils creates other dangerous compounds like aldehydes. | ||
| which we know are damaging to our brain cells. | ||
| So, I mean, if you can just cut out like fried foods or at least dramatically minimize your consumption | ||
| of these foods, super, super important stuff. | ||
| So speaking of oils, I know I asked you this last time, but it's a year and a half, things change. | ||
| You're cooking with oil. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| What oil are you going to? | ||
| What is the go-to oil? | ||
| Everyone talks about Smoke Point and when it becomes acidic and all this other stuff. | ||
| I think, I mean, it's a myth that you can't cook with extra virgin olive oil. | ||
| You know, generally you want to use it for low to medium temperatures. | ||
| For higher heat cooking, I'll use avocado oil or even like a more saturated fat like butter or ghee. | ||
| Because the more saturated a fat is, the more stability it's going to have at higher temperatures. | ||
| And what you really don't want to do is damage the oil because damaged oil damages you. | ||
| And that's one of the problems with eating fried foods and with eating processed foods that are made with these oils and even buying the oils and having them sit in a plastic tub in your warm kitchen for months on end. | ||
| It damages the oils and these cooking oils that we've been told for decades are good for us like canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil. | ||
| They're the most damage prone of these oils. | ||
| So you're cooking a steak, you're searing a steak, you're doing it in butter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Butter or ghee. | ||
| Butter or ghee, yeah, generally. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Alright, so my diet sounds pretty decent. | ||
| It sounds pretty good. | ||
| And not to say I don't deviate from that. | ||
| You know, maybe once every two weeks I'll have some pizza and I'll do in and out every now and again, although I'm trying to do the lettuce wraps. | ||
| That's cool, yeah. | ||
| Here's the thing, I mean I think, I don't actually like to use the term cheat meal. | ||
| I think, you know, the way that I've seen it described that I think is a way more empowering and it's a way healthier way to look at these, you know, when you choose to have the pizza, which we all know pizza is delicious, right? | ||
| If we consider them planned indulgences, where you know that you're gonna loosen the belt | ||
| and you're just gonna like go all in. | ||
| I think that offers tremendous value for our psyches, you know, and it's part of the human experience, | ||
| being able to indulge when we choose to. | ||
| And that can also help us adhere to whatever diet plan we choose to be on. | ||
| 'Cause I mean, the number one predictor of success is adherence to a diet. | ||
| I mean, you can go to a, as I mean, As the author of health books, I'll tell you, you can go to a bookstore and you can pick up any health book off the shelf and as long as you adhere to it, it's probably going to do good things for your health. | ||
| You just have to find the one that's going to be the most sustainable for you. | ||
| Yeah, have you ever done any research, or I'm sure there's research on this, on just geographically, like looking at the United States alone, how people eat so differently depending on where they are. | ||
| So like when I go back to New York, where you're from New York City, and I, most of my life was spent in New York City, it's so focused on pizza and bagels there, that when I go, it's like, I'm always like, yeah, I'll have one bagel, I'll have one slice of pizza. | ||
| But then like you do it once, and then it, sort of what you're talking about, it's like you start losing control, because it's everywhere all the time. | ||
| Food deserts definitely exist. | ||
| in California where it's like, you often can't even find a piece of bread | ||
| or they'll shoot you. | ||
| I think they just passed a law. | ||
| They're allowed to shoot you if they see you eating bread on the street. | ||
| But just geographically and how the middle America obviously is so different from that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there are food deserts definitely exist. | ||
| Access, I think is still an issue for many people. | ||
| And I mean, the mere, like food proximity is a predictor to our consumption of that food. | ||
| I mean, just being close to food and having food always available is a major reason why I think so many people are overweight these days. | ||
| I mean, I was reading coverage of a study that came out in the New York Times that estimated that by the year 2030, One in two adults in the U.S. | ||
| are going to be obese. | ||
| Not just overweight, but obese. | ||
| And one in four are going to be severely obese. | ||
| Man, we're going to WALL-E. | ||
| Remember the Pixar movie WALL-E? | ||
| We're going there. | ||
| Yeah, we are. | ||
| We totally are. | ||
| It's going to be half WALL-E, half idiocracy. | ||
| That's pretty much where we're going. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| It's so unfortunate. | ||
| But yeah, I think the proximity, just the ever-present proximity that we have to these ultra-processed foods begging us at every moment of the day to not just eat, but overeat. | ||
| I think it's a big problem. | ||
| All right, so if we want to live the genius life, we've obviously spent most of this time talking about food, but one of the other things you talk about in this book is something that I care a lot about and I'm writing about and I talk about constantly, Sort of the digital version of why you might need a detox every now and again or how to control the amount of information we're slammed with or the rest of it, which I always find for people in our positions is a particularly odd thing to talk about because we're on YouTube. | ||
| We're doing podcasts. | ||
| You have to be on Instagram to promote your stuff. | ||
| You're on Twitter, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And yet that actually can affect your health and wellbeing and everything else. | ||
| Yeah, in a big way. | ||
| And I really value what you do. | ||
| Every August, you take off? | ||
| Yeah, every August. | ||
| Yeah, it's awesome. | ||
| No nothing. | ||
| No news. | ||
| You know how hard it is to just avoid news? | ||
| I mean, forget phone. | ||
| I literally lock my phone in a safe. | ||
| But just to avoid, because everywhere you go, CNN is on everywhere. | ||
| Airports, you go to a burger joint, you go to the gym. | ||
| I actually, most of the month, I didn't even go to the gym because TVs are on everywhere. | ||
| Or I did, and I'd wear a really low hat and have to kind of just stare down the entire time. | ||
| But we're slammed with information constantly, that's the point. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| And it's overwhelming. | ||
| And it's junk food information. | ||
| Most of it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's not information information. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, the same way that junk food is what's responsible for our ever-growing waistlines and, you know, the fact that only, you know, 88% of us are in good metabolic health because it's, you know, this chronic, omnipresent exposure to junk food, we are getting, you know, information that is essentially just junk food. | ||
| And obviously, there are exceptions to the rule. | ||
| People like you, what I try to do, put out good quality information for people. | ||
| But yeah, I think social media is a source of malaise for many people. | ||
| And we're seeing record rates of anxiety, depression. | ||
| I mean, in 2018 alone, sales of books related to how to improve symptoms of anxiety shot up by 25% at one major retailer alone. | ||
| So it's a big topic for people. | ||
| And I think social media. | ||
| One researcher in a study that I cite in the book put it so eloquently. | ||
| The problem with our devices is that they reorient the gravitational pull. | ||
| They have a really strong gravitational pull of our attention. | ||
| So when they're around, it's like it's hard to focus on anything but the phone or the social media feed or what have you. | ||
| And it stresses us out when we're not checking our phones. | ||
| But then, unlike a drug of abuse, so like when you are In withdrawal for a given compound, there is a reduction in stress once you actually get the compound, whatever that drug happens to be. | ||
| But the difference with our smartphones is that actually it increases the stress. | ||
| So we're stressed out when we're not checking our phones, and then when we do check our phones, it adds even more stress into the equation. | ||
| And so it's a bit of a leap to connect, you know, social media and smartphone use with the chronic disease epidemic. | ||
| But I mean, we know that chronic stress is not good for us. | ||
| It's an indiscriminate killer. | ||
| It affects digestion in many ways, in negative ways. | ||
| It affects our immune system negatively. | ||
| Have they done many studies, I know there have been some, just about attention spans and ability to think, which sort of relates everything back to dementia and Alzheimer's and everything else, because I notice now, like, one of the real things that I notice is people never have just a time to sit and kind of do nothing. | ||
| You never, you know, it's like, remember the old days when we were in high school and it's like, if you're meeting your friend on the corner, You were like, all right, I'll be there at 3.30, and at 3.30, rolled around, he wasn't there. | ||
| It's like, you just had to stand there. | ||
| You would stand and wait, where now, we have no kind of just stand and wait time, or sit in a waiting room. | ||
| A waiting room, you're supposed to wait in the waiting room. | ||
| But instead, you're working. | ||
| We're all guilty of this, right? | ||
| So I'm doing better than anyone. | ||
| But we don't give our brains just a rest, really. | ||
| Maybe when we're sleeping, but often, the last thing we're doing at night is this, and the first thing we're doing in the morning is this. | ||
| I don't bring my phone in the bedroom anymore, at least most of the time. | ||
| And that I found to be really positive, actually. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, just as you were saying that, it made me realize that contemplation and introspection have become like vestigial organs. | ||
| They've become like these obsolete artifacts of time past. | ||
| What? | ||
| Because it's almost like if you saw someone just standing on a corner, you'd be like, he's up to no good. | ||
| You'd be like, why would you just be standing on a corner? | ||
| What, are you just standing there? | ||
| They can't be just doing nothing. | ||
| Yeah, it's a problem. | ||
| I use social media a lot, but I can see there are times, even in my own mental health, when I need to put the phone away and take a break. | ||
| I get commenters, and often the comments that I get on my social media feeds are positive, but then you'll get some commenters that are really negative. | ||
| Somebody the other day called me a literal cancer. | ||
| Like, a literal cancer. | ||
| Not just a metaphorical cancer. | ||
| Wow, that's even a step up from Nazis. | ||
| So, yeah, I mean it could be hard to take, but I think, you know, you have to develop a thick skin and building in to our schedule reprieves from technology. | ||
| For me, when I go to the gym, I'll lock my phone occasionally in the in the locker or I'll do cardio and it's just, | ||
| cardio is one of those things where you can kind of, you can listen to your music, | ||
| but it becomes a lot more difficult to use your phone. | ||
| You wanna join me for Off the Grid August? | ||
| I'm down. - Yeah, you're down? | ||
| Yeah. - I think maybe what I'll do this year is I'm gonna select, | ||
| like hand select like 10 or 20 public people and be like, I challenge you to join me. | ||
| That's cool. - And like, let's see what happens if a whole bunch of us check out. | ||
| 'Cause I suspect everyone will have a very similar situation to me, which is pretty damn good. | ||
| Now does David do it as well or? | ||
| He doesn't go off the grid because we still have businesses to run. | ||
| There's all sorts of things, but he does try to limit the checking, like quick in the morning, make sure there's no major fires, and once at night. | ||
| But that's the limit of it, and also we don't really talk about news or any of that kind of stuff, because it's like when you're in something at the level that I'm in it, I feel like you do have to have that. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's it, I'm challenging you. | |
| Right now, okay, I'm definitely down for the challenge. | ||
| We'll see how I feel come August. | ||
| Yeah, we'll talk on July 31st. | ||
| But I think this is going to be one of the major, like I don't have all the answers, I think this is going to be one of the major challenges of our generation, trying to figure out where that balance lies between this embracing of technology, which I think has done so much good for the world, obviously. | ||
| I mean, I get to do what I do. | ||
| Thanks to technology, so do you. | ||
| Right, that's the thing. | ||
| But it definitely has led to challenges in the way of mental health. | ||
| Do you think it's on us, meaning us old timer, are you a Gen X or two? | ||
| Gen Y. You're a Gen Y, oh excuse me. | ||
| But even for an old timer Gen Y guy like you. | ||
| I'm not letting go of that millennial right now. | ||
| or an old ass Gen X guy like me, do you kind of think it's on us to fix this? | ||
| Because it's like the baby boomers are slightly aging out now. | ||
| And it's like, we all focused on the millennials forever and the millennials, they're still super young. | ||
| They're not ready, they have no real power yet. | ||
| Although they scream a lot, but like they have no real power. | ||
| And that we, the Gen Y, Gen X people, we're the last ones to remember the world before the phone. | ||
| Like, there was a time I didn't have a cell phone in college. | ||
| You probably had one in college, right? | ||
| Uh, I had a cell phone in college. | ||
| Alright, but that shows you. | ||
| It's like, we're the last ones to remember that and there's something valuable in that knowledge. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| I mean the cell phone that I had in college was a flip phone and it emitted two colors that were, you know, it was as bright as the dimmest bulb. | ||
| Today our smartphones emit millions of colors and they can light up an entire room. | ||
| So this is another topic that I cover in The Genius Life is circadian disruption and circadian biology and how disruptive that, you know, our smartphones have been. | ||
| We're all living in a constant state of jet lag due to artificial lighting. | ||
| Yeah, let's do that a little bit, 'cause just the light that you talk, | ||
| well, you talk about it on the phone, but also just lights that were around all the time. | ||
| And it throws your sleep out of whack, and you're watching TV right before bed, | ||
|
unidentified
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and all this stuff. | |
| Yeah, we're all living in a constant state of jet lag due to artificial lighting. | ||
| We're not getting enough light early in the day, which we need to anchor our body's circadian rhythm, | ||
| which is the timer, basically, that dictates when we're gonna be at our most energetic, | ||
| at our most coordinated, at our most focused, when we're gonna have the best digestion, | ||
| the best metabolisms to partition and to utilize energy, and also when we're gonna get the most, | ||
| when we're gonna begin to wind down for the evening and get those rejuvenating and restorative aspects of sleep. | ||
| What's the phrase when they found this with older people that like as dusk comes around, they usually, that's where you start seeing some memory stuff? | ||
| Do you know about this? | ||
| Well, there's this concept of afternoon diabetes where your metabolism, you become less insulin sensitive later in the day. | ||
| One of the mechanisms by which that occurs is the hormone melatonin starts to be released by the pineal gland. | ||
| And melatonin, it's an amazing hormone. | ||
| It's involved in this process called autophagy, which is sort of like the KonMari method that biology uses to clean up our cells, to tidy up, get rid of old, worn out proteins and organelles. | ||
| And it's involved in DNA repair, which is amazing. | ||
| It's one of the reasons that's been proposed, why you'll see an increased risk of certain cancers in night shift workers, which make up something like 20% of the global workforce. | ||
| So, yeah, I mean, you tend to become less insulin sensitive because insulin sensitivity and energy metabolism, it's really our hormones are oriented in a way to support daylight associated activity when the light is out, when it's light out. | ||
| Evolution has anticipated that we're gonna be less active at night as diurnal creatures, and so we become less insulin-sensitive at night. | ||
| I'm not sure the cognitive link, but there is certain, you know, we tend to be more alert earlier in the day than we are later in the day. | ||
| I mean, that makes total sense. | ||
| Yeah, I know there's no scientific anything to this, but one of the things that I noticed with our dog, Emma, was that around five o'clock or so, when it was, you know, because we're just getting out of the winter now, That was so the sun would go down earlier and it seemed like that was when she would be the most restless or the most sort of exhibiting more signs of being in pain or something. | ||
| I have no idea if it has anything to do with circadian rhythm or just maybe it had something to do with later dinner. | ||
| I don't know, something. | ||
| But it just seemed like you just start seeing odd things, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, our circadian clocks dictate the way that our neurotransmitters work, the way that our hormones work. | ||
| I mean, cortisol, which is an energizing hormone, is highest in the day, and then it begins a long, gradual decline to the end of the day. | ||
| I mean, so there is, like, aspects of our cognitive function, of how energetic we feel, are related to our circadian rhythms. | ||
| There's no doubt about that. | ||
| And so I talk about ways of anchoring that function. | ||
| One of the I think most important things that a person can do is make sure that you get bright light in through your eyes first thing in the morning or sometime before noon. | ||
| There are these proteins In the eyes, called melanopsin proteins, discovered by one of the guys on the team, Sachin Pand, a brilliant researcher at the Salk Institute, who I had the pleasure of interviewing for my podcast. | ||
| And these proteins are fairly insensitive, but they respond to about a thousand lux of light or higher. | ||
| You can actually download an app, I believe it's actually called Lux on your iPhone, to get a sense of your ambient light intensity. | ||
| And a thousand lux, basically, which you can easily get from standing by an open window, even on an overcast day. | ||
| flips a switch on those proteins, which then activates a small region in the brain called | ||
| the suprachiasmatic nucleus, sort of the brain's master clock, which then sets off this 24-hour | ||
| cascade of hormone fluctuations and the like throughout your body. | ||
| And so that's, I think, the most important thing that you could do. | ||
| Food also acts like a time setter, so I think it's important to be mindful of when we're eating. | ||
| I think our bodies are best at utilizing and partitioning energy during the day, so this whole intermittent fasting thing. | ||
| concept that's been popularized lately by the media. | ||
| I think intermittent fasting can be useful, but I think that the greatest health benefit | ||
| that I've seen kind of orients the food consumption to earlier in the day. | ||
| Eating like an hour or two after you wake up and then stopping eating two to three to | ||
| four maybe hours before you go to sleep. | ||
| It's been called early time restricted feeding in the literature I think can be super helpful. | ||
| Independent of weight loss seems to improve people's blood pressure, blood sugar and things like that. | ||
| Alright, so for everybody that wants to live the genius life and become extraordinary and that is what it says on the title of the book. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What else should we be thinking about in these last couple of minutes? | ||
|
unidentified
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Like, what else should people be trying to do? | |
| Well, the book is like a 360-degree lifestyle approach, and every topic that I cover in the book could easily warrant its own volume. | ||
| But I try to make things actionable, approachable, and achievable for people using only the most relevant science and making it really you know, digestible. But essentially moving the body I | ||
| think is crucially important. | ||
| I talk all about exercise and the value of resistance training. | ||
| We know that resistance training, you know, building stronger muscles, | ||
| it becomes increasingly difficult to do as we get older, but all the more valuable. | ||
| It's one of the best ways to actually improve your metabolic health, which we know that most people are not in ideal metabolic health. | ||
| Being mindful of your circadian rhythm. | ||
| As easy as it is to anchor your body's circadian rhythm first thing in the morning, it's another one of the central challenges of modern life has become to maintain that circadian rhythm. | ||
| Kind of guarding your eyes from bright light in the evening. | ||
| I'm a big fan of blue light blocking glasses. | ||
| Do you do that iPhone setting, like the night setting? | ||
| Yeah, the night shift. | ||
| Shuts down some of the light, right? | ||
| Yeah, super important. | ||
| There's a lot of gimmicks in the health and wellness world, the biohacking space, but amber colored glasses I think are actually pretty useful. | ||
| And yeah, I talk all about environmental toxins, just being more sort of aware of what's in the environment. | ||
| And yeah, knowledge is power. | ||
| But if you're just going to let that knowledge sit on the bookshelf in the back of your psyche and gather dust, then it's not going to serve you. | ||
| I think you've got to act on that knowledge. | ||
| And yeah, there's no time like the present to start. | ||
| Good finish, my man. | ||
| Yeah, thanks. | ||
| All right, people, if you want to become extraordinary, go to GeniusLifeBook.com. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about lifestyles instead of nonstop yelling, check out our lifestyle playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're both right over here. |
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