Defying Dementia! Max Lugavere on Brain Health, Nutrition & Lifestyle
Is our modern lifestyle killing us? Russell chats to wellness journalist and best-selling author, Max Lugavere joins us to expose the truth about an FDA approved drug for Alzheimer’s and how it raises huge profits for Big Pharma. Plus, why is our food system so reliant on ultra-processed foods if it’s so bad for us? Is fake meat a genuine option for sustainability or just another money-maker? And if 40 million Americans are on anti-depressants, how can our diet help our mental health?Find out more about Max: https://www.maxlugavere.com/ Watch Max’s documentary: https://www.littleemptyboxes.com/ Become an Awakened Wonder: https://russellbrand.locals.com/Come see me LIVE: https://www.russellbrand.com/ LISTEN to the ‘Stay Free’ Podcast: https://podfollow.com/1648125917NEW MERCH! https://stuff.russellbrand.com/
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Is there a profit in it?
Who knows what's going on?
Remember, you can join us on Locals for a new and reasonable price, but it's time now for me to introduce our fantastic guest today, Max Lugavere.
Max Lugavere is a health journalist who specializes in nutrition and the brain.
He's a filmmaker.
He's the author of the best-selling Genius Foods, Genius Life, and Genius Kitchen.
Max, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thanks so much for having me.
Are you happy here?
I'm super happy.
Max, the first thing that I want to talk to you about is our lethal, deadly, contemporary lifestyle.
Is it true that 60% of calories that adults eat are coming from processed food and that processed foods are sort of no food at all and are almost akin to a poison?
Yeah, I mean, they are foreign to our bodies.
And the distinction really is, you know, processing occurs on a continuum.
So when you slice an apple, you are processing it to some degree.
Yeah, that's pretty finicky though.
Like even mastication.
I said mastication.
Grow up.
Like even by taking a bite out of an apple, that's a process.
Yeah, but at least you're allowing yourself to masticate your jaw to do the work, which is what it was evolutionarily designed to do, right?
If you bleach the apple into a soup.
Yes, into a soup, right?
You pulverize it, your jaw muscles don't have to work, your stomach, I mean, there are all these muscles throughout your body that are essentially getting a workout.
When you consume a bolus of whole food, we digest food slower, it sends satiety signals to our brains in a more deliberate manner, and so people, there's actually research that shows that people who consume primarily these ultra-processed foods, foods that have essentially been pre-chewed for you, Partially pre-digested tend to over consume them to the tune of about 500 additional calories.
So right there if you look at the fact that today 73% of the foods in your average American supermarket and probably I would reckon that the UK is close by are ultra processed.
It makes sense why the obesity statistics now are so startling about 50% of Americans are not just overweight but obese.
It's a good example of how our biochemistry has evolved alongside nature, which is kind of obvious because we're on the same planet and there's a sort of a natural and literally organic harmony between us.
And even if you extract mastication and the digestive processes that evolved in order to digest the food that we eat, if you extract the necessity for that process, you induce a kind of new The new potential for mutation and sickness and illness.
I wanted to talk to you just for a moment about, we recently have been talking about Bill Gates' growing meat in labs, funding a new sort of, not plastic coating, it's apparently an organic material that allows food to be preserved for longer.
What do we think about the sort of technologisation of food and centralised food and the patenting of food.
Is this ultimately, as it claims, good for climate change and good for health or do you
think that these endeavours have other motivations behind them?
No, I think it's, as you here in the UK would call it, bollocks.
Yes, that's what we would say, bollocks.
Is that what people would say?
That's what we say, that's our language.
Yeah, I think it's quite inappropriate.
What it does is it illustrates this phenomena known as nutritionism, where we apply science to the fact that we've co-evolved with whole foods, right?
And so we try to break a food.
Since the dawn of nutrition science really began, we've attempted to distill foods down to its constituent nutrients, right?
Like an orange has vitamin C and maybe a few other things, right?
A banana has potassium.
and maybe a few other things.
So we isolate these nutrients and we try to determine what's essential and what's not.
And by the way, that list of essential nutrients is constantly evolving.
And so when you take like a Silicon Valley guy who looks at food through this lens,
food as data essentially, you end up with a product like in the US we have something called Soylent.
I don't know if that's available here, but it basically is, it's purported to be a food
that you could essentially live on that has all of the required essential nutrients in it.
But if you look at the ingredients list, it's like ingredients list,
it's a slurry of garbage essentially, but it ticks all the boxes for what we believe to be
our essential nutrients and not.
There've been no long-term randomized control trials to ascertain whether or not this will actually lead
to a thriving human as opposed to somebody who's merely just surviving.
And so, yeah, it is at the end of the day, I think a huge problem.
It's a reductionist approach that hasn't served us in any area, you know, in the sphere of biology
and certainly not nutrition.
You can see how technocracy, the control by a cadre of experts, is facilitated by the reduction of all things to data and the idea that if you have a kind of a spiritual or open-minded perspective, also open-minded your brain will fall out, towards food that isn't based on patentable qualities.
It is in fact a kind of an understanding that's somewhat more holistic That is regarded as inferior, that all things are turned into data, all things are made material, all things are objectified, no room for mystery, and it doesn't always work.
So let's just for a moment touch on one of the points you made earlier before moving into the rather more controversial subject, which we won't be able to talk about on YouTube, about this Alzheimer's drug that I understand you have sort of personal motivations in your investigation and
desire to convey the truth around this drug.
Before we get into that though, which we'll do exclusively in the other place,
why would you tell us a little bit about the sort of obesity epidemic and its impact on health and
the relationship between obesity, big food and big pharma?
Yeah, totally.
So, as I alluded to, about half of the U.S.
population, and this is, by the way, this is a condition that we're exporting now, so I'm not sure what the exact statistics are.
I know that in the U.K., about 50% of the calories consumed by your average adult are from ultra-processed foods, and the U.S.
is higher.
It's about 60% for adults, about 70% for children.
It's worse for children.
My hope was that children would eat less processed food.
Yeah, more candy, confectionary products and things like that.
Yeah, it's a huge problem.
Particularly at a time when you're still developing, right?
And the brain is undergoing rapid development.
So this is reflected in the statistics that show us that 50% of adults are either flat-out obese, And 9 in 10 adults have some component now of metabolic illness.
So metabolic syndrome, it's a constellation of symptoms.
About 9 in 10 adults now have that.
So it leaves a dramatic minority in a state of good health, right?
And so I think the food environment definitely plays a huge role in that.
As I mentioned, 73% according to a machine learning algorithm of the foods available in your average supermarket are ultra processed.
These foods are being pushed on us.
They're sold to us in primary colors at eye level in your average supermarket.
They make health claims.
The healthiest foods in the supermarket don't make health claims.
They're found around the perimeter of the supermarket.
You don't see health claims on eggs, on avocados, on dark leafy greens, things like that.
But instead, it's the food products that are extremely high margin, right?
Can you tell me about the criteria used to demonstrate, as this beautiful chart does, that Lucky Charms might be healthier for you than, I don't know, oxygen.
Yeah.
Lucky Charms are a greater requirement than water and your own blood and bones.
Yeah.
I'm made of Lucky Charms.
I'm made of Lucky Charms.
Yeah.
And you really are what you eat.
So this is this is a food, a nutrient profiling system that was devised out of the Friedman School for Nutrition at Tufts University.
Which has this, it's like this very curious hierarchy, right, that places watermelon and kale at the top of the list, but just underneath that you see frosted mini-wheats, you'll see... Oh my god, frosted mini-wheats!
Yeah.
So if this was actually like in the NFL or NBA or APL... Like a perfect food.
Like watermelon is Manchester City, kale, Arsenal, or, you know, I'm guessing it's Green Bay Packers, I don't know what happens in your country, but frosted mini-wheats... Yeah.
I mean, frosted mini-wheats can't come in at number three.
Right, no, I mean, watermelon and kale are perfectly healthy foods, but you would die if you chose to base your diet solely on those two foods.
On watermelon or kale, you're right.
But frosted mini-wheats... Frosted mini-wheats, yeah, it's an ultra processed, super high margin... You want a combination of a little bit of watermelon, a bit of kale, and then I mean, in my view, you could flip the whole thing upside down, actually, because you'll notice that the ground beef, you've got dairy, whole milk is sort of at the bottom, at the bottom end.
But on top of that, you'll find Lucky Charms, you'll find egg substitute fried in vegetable oil.
Right?
So these are the, these are the, essentially the darlings of the food industry that have given, been given unduly high ranking on this list.
And there've been critics of this chart, critics of this chart who've said that foods, these foods were not meant to be compared across categories, right?
But actually, if you were to go to the Tufts University website, they did the exact same thing, but obviously presented it in a much more favorable light.
So this is the problem with these kinds of systems that are heavily influenced by the food industry.
How are these kind of, this kind of data, how is it funded?
How is it put together?
Who's behind the compilation of this?
Yeah, I mean the food industry.
Like the food industry definitely has a hand in not just funding the school, but the researchers that are involved.
I see that Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Gates Medical Research Institute were somewhat involved in creating what I can now call the Lucky Charms graph.
How Lucky Charms are better at that for you than eggs and other whole foods.
But also look at the pharmaceutical companies.
Oh my god.
There's essentially no industry that isn't complicit.
And then when you look to the 2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans Committee that was just assembled a couple months ago, 95% of those members had ties to either the food industry or the pharmaceutical industry.
So it's just across the board.
And this nutrient profiling system was essentially designed to influence consumer purchases by making front of package health claims.
And so to me, I mean, that's what a scoring system is essentially. It's so that a consumer would be able to
compare food items from across different categories. And so I think it's a massive problem.
But the idea that this is objective information, the idea that you could trust the science
and regard it as empirical data rather than a set of facts that are organized particularly
to direct you to consume particular foods, to live in a particular way.
We see this across all of public life.
When you unpack information, it's often that information has a sort of a trail behind it of financial interest.
And to see, as you say, Big Pharma, the kind of NGOs and foundations that frequently come up in our reporting is hardly a surprise in that crazy league of Watermelon and Lucky Charms and Little Frosty Yeah, I mean, look, I'm pro-science in the sense that I wish I could snap my fingers and have the kind of study replicated that would show us, for example, the kinds of big looming questions in the field of nutrition, which is a field that I genuinely love.
But the problem with following the science often is that the science follows the money.
And so you get something like this, which is just a four-year-old would look at that graph and be like, something's wrong here.
You know, it's plain that the reliance on a particular type of science has become a new orthodoxy.
I think in the last couple of years we became used to being castigated with the idea that science was not a subset of corporate and globalist interests.
And that happened while simultaneously some scientific voices were closed down, other scientific voices were amplified, but we can't go into too much detail on that while we are still on YouTube, which are to a degree regulated by the World Health Organization's guidelines, which similarly accept incredible funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation of Lucky Charms.
We're going to leave now, if you're watching us on YouTube, to make sure... How do I say that drug again?
Educanumab.
Aducanumab.
And what is the problem with aducanumab, one of the great drugs that's given Alzheimer's sufferers a real opportunity to live a better life, other than possibly it doesn't work.
Can I still say that on YouTube?
Yeah.
If you're watching us on YouTube, click the link in the description right now and join us over on Rumble.
If you're watching us on Rumble, click the red button and join us in Locals Become.
So, tell us a little bit more.
Also, do you drink kombucha?
Because we're developing Vile Slops, a fantastic new kombucha brand.
We're working on the name.
It's being brewed up in the cellar even now by Jim there.
He's got a great sort of wad of, I think, what do you call it?
Mother?
Some sort of... A scoby.
A scoby.
some sort of fertile, ghastly little beast. Alien mass. I've looked at it, it's the most
nasty little thing in a jar. But vile slops will be coming soon and we're making all sorts
of pledges about it, that if we can get the FDA to sign it off, which I think we can,
it's going to be, I think it's going to be a winner. Can you tell us a little bit though
about this, what's it called? Adjacentum.
Kajagoogoo.
Catch me if you can.
Catch me if you can.
Yeah, so aducanumab is a monoclonal antibody drug that basically trains your immune system to identify markers on the plaques that are commonly seen in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease.
So Alzheimer's disease is characterized in part by the presence of this immense plaque burden, plaques made of a protein called amyloid beta.
Along with some other, you know, proteinopathies like misfolded tau protein.
And so Alzheimer's disease drug trials have a 99.6% fail rate.
So it's just dismal when it comes to finding a drug to treat this condition, which by the way, begins in the brain decades before the first symptom.
...like that.
Alzheimer's, the presence of Alzheimer's can be detected decades before the first symptom.
Does that mean that new preventative measures could be applied?
That there are early indicators that mean you could change lifestyle habits?
Absolutely, yes.
Oh my god, I've never heard that before.
Yeah, so I mean you, you, ten years ago... Do you not know about that?
Let me know in the chat.
Did you know that?
Ten years ago, you couldn't mention Alzheimer's disease and prevention within the same sentence without getting ridiculed by the medical establishment, by the medical orthodoxy.
And this actually happened to me.
So my first project, I'm a health and science journalist, so I didn't take an academic path, but my mom had a rare form of dementia called Lewy body dementia.
And even prior to that diagnosis, you know, it was unclear the variant of dementia.
And so I went down the Alzheimer's disease rabbit hole.
And my first project was a feature-length documentary, which I'm still working on.
It's called Little Empty Boxes, and it explores all of the different lifestyle and dietary factors that might predispose a person to developing this condition, which now affects millions and millions of people worldwide.
In fact, it's now the number one cause of death in the UK as of last year, dementia and Alzheimer's disease.
Dementia and Alzheimer's is the number one cause of death?
Yes.
I didn't know that either.
How come these sort of facts are so opaque and difficult to discern?
Why is it that we're only just learning about it?
This was ridiculed, so it's not, there's nothing conspiratorial about us not knowing that it's preventable, it's just that wasn't scientifically verified so it's understandable.
But the idea that it's such a significant cause of death, it seems extraordinary to me that it's not something that we commonly appreciate.
Did you lot know that?
Let me know in the chat.
Yeah, well, I mean, there's this saying that science advances one funeral at a time, and this is because scientific personalities are very obstinate, they're fiercely territorial.
We see this in Alzheimer's disease.
We see this at the highest echelons of academic medicine and nutrition science and the like.
And this is why it takes, on average, 17 years for what's discovered in science to be put into day-to-day clinical practice.
And so, I've been working in this field trying to advocate for prevention for about a decade at this point, but it's really only the past couple of years, the past three years, really, that the tide has begun to turn.
So, in 2020, the Lancet Commission on Dementia published a statement saying that About 40% of Alzheimer's cases and dementia cases are attributable to what they call potentially modifiable risk factors, which basically means risk factors for dementia, the development of dementia, that fall under your control, i.e.
modifiable.
And so things like obesity, things like diabetes, hypertension, depression, low education status, these are all variables that we have.
Diet and poverty.
There you go.
There you go.
But diet plays a massive role here.
There are some non-modifiable risk factors.
There are about three of them.
So you've got your age, your gender, and your genetics.
You obviously can't change those.
But this is a condition that largely develops.
We're now starting to see, due to an interaction between those risk factors that are hardwired in us and the environment in which we live.
And so that's where I think the data is becoming abundantly clear that we do have a say.
So it was your own mother's rare form of dementia that caused you to begin investigating the subject, is that correct?
Yes.
So I began as a generalist journalist, and when my mom became sick, it was like an atom bomb going off in my world.
She was the most important person in my life.
And in every doctor's office, what I experienced with her, I've come to call diagnose and adios.
And basically a physician would run a battery of esoteric tests, write a prescription down, you know, or titrate up or down some medication that she was on and send us on our way.
And by the, by the, by the end of her life, she was on 12 different pharmaceuticals that were, I think, you know, in tandem or individually making her worse.
None of them helped.
Um, and I can say that with, with certainty.
And so, I was very disillusioned by the tools that medicine had, you know, during that time when a person presents with the most feared condition for your average American, which is, of course, dementia at this point.
And I took it upon myself to use my journalistic skills and my media credentials to reach out to people and start doing my own research, diving into PubMed.
I mean, we live in a time now where, you know, all of the world's knowledge is available at our fingertips 24-7.
And I found it to be incredibly empowering, despite the fact that I had this real tragic thing occurring in my personal life.
I exploited, I decided to exploit all those tools to the betterment of my, to the benefit of my family.
And what I learned was startling.
So I mean, dementia is a condition that begins years prior to the onset of symptoms.
And so that's a real window of opportunity to change the course of our cognitive destiny.
So if you're obese, become not obese.
If you're a type 2 diabetic, become not a type 2 diabetic.
You know, I mean, just being type 2 diabetic right now, which affects two thirds of, or I'm sorry, 50% of people in the United States now.
Increases your risk for developing Alzheimer's disease between two and fourfold.
So this is a massive, modifiable problem.
Yeah, that's extraordinary.
That's extraordinary.
I've never looked at it in those terms.
We sort of sold the idea that there's an inevitability that we're on some preconceived, predetermined route towards illness and pharmacological solutions that our behaviors and our diets are not Considerable factors in you know, particularly in this kind of condition.
Yeah, and I'll give you another example where the pharmaceutical industry may be complicit, right?
So that 40% figure that I listed off to you, that was what was indicated in the Lancet report, which said the potential for prevention is high.
But I think that's a gross underestimate.
And one of another massively modifiable risk factor for people is the chronic use of what are called anticholinergic drugs, which is a category of drugs.
I couldn't possibly list off all of the drugs.
But these are drugs that are like essentially sleep aids, and they help with, you know, to relieve symptoms of allergies for people.
Chronic use of these drugs is associated with a dramatically higher risk of the development of Alzheimer's disease.
Is this real?
And they're drugs.
They're over-the-counter drugs.
Massive big money.
Can you tell me about aducanumab and what in particular is important about this and the potential falsification of papers and how it got its FDA approval?
Totally.
So, ever since Alzheimer's disease was first coined in 1906 by physician Alois Alzheimer, He looked in the brain of a cadaver, a woman who had died from the condition, and saw plaque, essentially, in the brain, clumped around brain cells, neurons, like the plaque on your teeth, essentially.
And so from that day forward, amyloid plaque was thought to be the causal factor with regard to Alzheimer's disease.
And from a pharmaceutical drug discovery standpoint, the mission has been, well, if we can get rid of this plaque, then we'll have a cure for Alzheimer's disease.
But of course, as time goes on, we develop new imaging technologies.
What we see is that people without Alzheimer's disease also have amyloid in the brain.
Amyloid is produced naturally in all brains, essentially.
They would try all these different drugs, trying to get amyloid out of the brain, and that's called the amyloid hypothesis.
That became the domineering kind of route of drug discovery, with the idea that if we can get rid of this villainous plaque, that we'll find a cure for the condition, right?
And so spending $3 billion a year on drug discovery.
But by the year 2006, with Alzheimer's drug trials having a 99.6% fail rate, worse than for cancer, heart disease, any other condition, faith in that hypothesis was starting to wane until a paper was published in the journal Nature by a University of Minnesota researcher named Sylvain Lesny, which essentially claimed to have isolated a subtype of amyloid beta that, when injected into a healthy rat, caused severe cognitive deficits.
And so this was thought to be the missing link because, as I mentioned, cognitively healthy people have amyloid in their brain.
Researchers up until this point weren't really able to connect amyloid beta with the most important symptomology, the most important symptom with regard to Alzheimer's disease, which is the severe and profound cognitive decline, until this paper was published where they claimed to have found the subtype, injected into a mouse, boom, we have like cognitive impairment, right?
And so since then, since 2006, that paper came out in Nature, which is like winning an Academy Award if you're a research scientist, right?
It's been cited thousands of times, because science is cumulative, it builds on papers that have come prior.
citing this paper, and it really renewed faith.
It funneled a lot more money down this path and renewed faith in this so-called amyloid
hypothesis.
The problem was, and this was published last year, late last year, in Science Magazine,
a Vanderbilt researcher named Matthew Schrag was known for scouring these post-publication
peer review websites where people look at papers that have already gone through the
peer review process but have flaws that they might flag and indicate and send off to the
publishers.
And the peer review process doesn't look at... They'll crunch numbers occasionally, but they don't look at, for example, Western blots, which are imagery, which is basically data presented in a more illustrative format.
And what Matthew Schrag found was that this 2006 paper, um, the images, the data was essentially fabricated.
It was, there were artifacts indicative of Photoshop, like a cheap Photoshop cut and paste job.
So the paper was deemed completely fraudulent, like that data didn't exist.
And so again, since then, since 2006, All of this other research has come out building on top of it.
It funneled billions and billions and billions of more money looking into this path, this amyloid hypothesis.
Of course, it's wasted time, right?
Which is heartbreaking for anybody with a loved one with the condition.
And again and again and again, we see that amyloid is not the cause of the condition.
Certainly when it builds up to the pathologic degree that we see in Alzheimer's disease, it becomes problematic, of course.
But it's like claiming that cholesterol is the cause of heart disease.
It's like what's causing the cholesterol to aggregate there?
What's causing the amyloid to aggregate in the brain, right?
It's there at the scene of the crime, but it's not necessarily the victim.
It's like claiming that firefighters cause fires because firefighters are always there
at the scene of the fire, right?
It's correlation, not causation.
And so, there are other theories as to why Alzheimer's disease develops, and there's the metabolic theory of Alzheimer's and the like, but this new drug, aducanumab, that was approved by the FDA, despite a panel of, it was about 11 or 12, I think it was 11 experts, the vast majority of them either disagreed with its approval or remained silent, like lips were sealed on its approval.
And nonetheless, the FDA approved it.
And it is minimally effective, right?
It might be better than nothing for certain patients, like a small subset of patients, but in the majority of patients that took it, were a significant proportion of the patients that took it.
I don't, I can't say for sure if it was the majority, because I don't recall.
It led to severe side effects like brain swelling, bleeding, accelerated brain atrophy, which is already, you know, par for the course if you have Alzheimer's disease, like, like dramatic atrophy of the cortex of the brain.
And so it's not a cure.
It's just like this, like this bandaid that probably does more harm than good.
So it possibly did nothing.
It possibly made things worse.
Experts at the point when it was up for approval had doubts about it, questioned it, or didn't speak about it, and it was approved anyway.
Do you suggest that this is the type of thing that frequently happens, and do you imagine that there are other motivations for its approval other than its efficacy?
Yeah, I mean, it's money.
I mean, first of all, it's wildly expensive.
And the benefit is it leads to a .45 cognitive benefit on an 18 point scale.
So .45 out of 18 points, that's the benefit.
And then you have all these horrible side effects to contend with, right?
Brain swelling.
Is it that drug?
Catch me if you can, Giselle.
Is it that what it done was broke down plaque, but it didn't affect the causes of Alzheimer's?
Is that what they were able to demonstrate its effect was?
Exactly.
Yeah.
So it reduced the plaque, right?
So it's like it serves as confirmation bias.
So as a toothpaste, fantastic.
But as a remedy for Alzheimer's and dementia, not so good.
There you go.
I mean, what it did was it served to confirm the biases of all of the many scientists who
are fiercely territorial over their reputations working in that field.
And again, if I had a blockbuster drug to give my mom.
You know, at the depths of her despair and her difficulty with her dementia, I would, in a second, I would have gone out to get it for her, right?
But these drugs don't work, and they're potentially, you know, they're likely more harm than good, so it's a big issue.
Yeah, Max, it seems like what you're tracking is a food industry that promotes foods that likely contribute to senility, dementia, Alzheimer's and related conditions, then a drug industry that offers medications that are not effective And I begin to get the idea that we're on again a conveyor belt where one end of it we're sort of blobbed up with sloppy food as bad for us and basically poisonous and then treated with medications many of which have to be
used in conjunction with others, this sort of symphony of shoddy medications that often
have not been effectively trialled. And increasingly what we're finding is that the motivation
for the pharmaceutical companies, for the food industry, for the FDA is not scientific
excellence or nutritional heights but profit.
And it's pretty plain that it's become gargantuan and out of control.
As we often discuss on this show, I don't think anybody begrudges industriousness or even a profit motive.
But when it reaches the point that it has done in the examples that you conveyed, it's a problem.
Also what's a problem is that when you try to have a conversation about these kind of subjects, is that you're subject to incredible censorship.
Now, am I right in thinking that the mainstream media opposed the documentary that you've already mentioned in which you try to present some novel ideas on Alzheimer's, its relationship to diet and the lack of effectiveness of many of the medications?
Oh yeah, so when I first got started, an ambassador for one of these drug discovery funds Which is a non-profit, right?
It's like, you go to its website and you would think it was the most benevolent organization with the care of the patients as their sole priority.
But when I first got started on this project, I did a Kickstarter campaign for it.
And so it went kind of viral and we're raising money and all that.
And thankfully it was successful and we're now nearing the finish line, finally.
But this ambassador wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
Basically comparing my efforts to, I think the headline was, uh, Alzheimer's disease, the cure for Alzheimer's disease isn't going to come in the form of coconut oil and other quack, you know, speculative things.
And this was like, this is years ago.
So this is even before that Lancet paper that said the potential for prevention is high.
Right.
But they, these, this, whether it's the, you know, the drug discovery funds or the researchers,
people tend to be down on what they're not up on in the field of academia, right?
So this kid comes along trying to- Are you that kid?
I'm that kid.
You're like a plucky kid.
Yeah.
You're an outsider.
You, Max- Lugavere, yeah.
Lugavere, with a name that sounds like a radical and an outlaw, you turn up with your new documentary
Lugavere, with a name that sounds like a radical and an outlaw, you turn up with your new documentary
where you wanna talk about diet, the efficacy of certain medicines,
where you want to talk about diet, the efficacy of certain medicines,
presumably your personal experiences with your mother, and immediately there's opposition
presumably your personal experiences with your mother.
And immediately there's opposition Lugavere, yeah.
when it's at the Kickstarter phase.
Yeah, immediately.
It's astonishing.
And it was heartbreaking at the time, because I thought that this film had the potential
and it will do massive good for the world, but because it took the spotlight for a second
during that time off of, we gotta find a cure.
Alzheimer's disease is the only condition that can't be prevented, cured, or treated.
Let people get it, then cure it with toothpaste.
There you go.
And so it's like a house of cards built on fear, right?
If we stop the fear-mongering, then people are going to stop the funding of this, right?
They're going to stop writing the checks.
And so yeah, I saw that up like up close and personal and it was really heartbreaking you still still find the article It's something like Alzheimer's disease coconut oil in the Wall Street Journal.
It was an op-ed.
Do you look at it sometimes?
I mean bastards.
I mean I've thought about I've thought about hitting that person up, but he was a really rude rude human unfortunately We've got some comments from our community, like Thomas Beard.
He wants to ask you about plant-based diets.
Are they a good thing or a bad thing?
I noticed that you liked our beef down at the bottom of the Lucky Charm link.
I'm a big advocate for omnivory.
I think it's our biologically appropriate diet, but I think you can work a few levers to make a plant-based diet work if you're dedicated to it, and as I know you are, and many people are.
Because you just think there are valuable nutrients, proteins, and things like that.
Turin and stuff in me that we just can't like that.
Yeah, I think like when we try to distill an entire food category such as animal source foods to one essential Nutrient like vitamin b12.
We're practicing that reductionism that we talked about earlier We're practicing nutritionism, and I think we've co-evolved with our food We've co-evolved with all of the many what are called karna nutrients that are found in animal source products that are you know plug-and-play but But ultimately, I think the big wins today for anybody navigating the standard American or the standard British food environment, to be not overweight, to be not type 2 diabetic, I mean, those are the big rocks.
So yeah, I think you can make any diet work, essentially.
But my view is that Omnivore is probably the most optimal.
Is it true that you disagree with some of the views of our other sexy diet guest, Paul Saladino?
He's got some theories on vegetables.
I think he says vegetables are a waste of time.
He hates them.
They should be shot.
Each parsnip should be interviewed now and asked to leave the country.
And if the parsnip for some reason resists, it should be pushed over the White Cliffs of Dover.
That's Paul Saladino's theories.
What are your views on vegetables?
No, I disagree.
Uh, I disagree.
I think vegetables are great.
Um, I think, uh, if you're going to point a finger at kale or even oatmeal, which I think he's been doing quite a bit lately and say, that is the smoking gun for all of our health ills.
I think that that's, uh, baseless, but I think he does present some, some really good ideas as well.
So we've got to come to a kind of consensus of truth together.
Uh, Tesla said, and this, I can't believe I missed this question, Max, you mentioned earlier that Alzheimer's can be detected decades before symptoms.
How?
Well, so it's not that it can necessarily be detected, we can look for what are called risk factors at this point.
They can do imaging, they can look at brain volume, they can look at amyloid burden, but they're not doing those kinds of tests clinically, and that really is the holy grail of prevention, is to find the biomarker that dictates whether or not a person... Are you saying that biomarker hasn't yet to be found?
It hasn't yet been found, yeah.
But there's not enough trialing and research because that's not profitable, it's in fact expensive.
There was a blood test, and I wrote about it in my first book called Genius Foods, called IRS-1, where it predicted with 90% accuracy something, or even higher than that, whether or not somebody was going to develop it.
But I think at this point, it's good to know your genetic risk factor, to know whether or not you're a carrier of the ApoE4 allele, and then to look at all the other biomarkers that we know are associated Most closely, you want to look at your metabolic health, so you want to make sure that you have a nice, healthy blood sugar, you're not a type 2 diabetic, you're not overweight or obese, and I would also do my best to minimize at this point exposure to environmental pollutants, toxicants, air pollution, things like that.
Know Daganoku, who's a great member of our community, and if you're not a member of our community yet, press the red button.
There are all sorts of incredible benefits, including regular scans to prevent outside- we don't do that, that's just simply false advertising.
No, Dugganoku is a member of our community and he asks, hey Max, I want to ask you, through Russell of course, don't be cheeky, a question pertaining to diversity.
How do you feel that there is evidence to support the notion that diet may be more unique than what we're led to believe by our societies?
I've personally tried for years to figure out the diet which matches me best, sometimes living exclusively on grass.
Once for a week, only wine gums.
Another time, squirrel tail.
I've tried everything.
Some of those details I added.
What, how do I find a diet which matches me best while staying away from food that are filled with chemicals, plastics, or genetic modifications?
That's from Nodaganoku.
Yeah, I mean, I think, like, again, shop around the perimeter of your supermarket and stick to mainly minimally processed whole foods.
Everybody is different, so there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all diet.
I like where he was going with that question.
And there's also, you know, everybody's different and then everybody has different microbiomes.
So, you know, we can say things like vegetables and things, you know, of that nature are good for you.
But if you don't have the microbiome cultivated to contend with a sudden onslaught increase in fiber, then you're going to be paying a digestive penalty for that.
So, you know, you got to, I think a little bit of experimentation is really important.
But again, I think as long as you're, you're sticking mainly to minimally processed foods, omnivory, I think for most people is going to do the most good.
Things like that.
I think you're, you're probably in the clear.
Max, Dootie1947 says, Alright mate, I love my fried egg.
Organic, on toast, whole grain, with olive oil on it every morning.
Is this healthy?
Am I living in a gangster's paradise?
I would say that's pretty good.
I love olive oil.
Even if you're cooking with it?
Yeah, you can.
It's a myth that you can't cook with it.
It's very chemically stable, owed to its predominance of monounsaturated fat, which is very chemically stable, and it's about 15% saturated fat.
And on top of that, extra virgin olive oil is loaded with polyphenol antioxidants, which protect the oil against oxidation.
It's chemically very stable.
They cook with it in the Mediterranean.
I mean, people who, for generations, use extra virgin olive oil, they're using it to cook with, right?
Either that or, you know, animal-based fats.
But I think the healthiest fat to use, like the healthiest added fat to use is by far extra virgin olive oil.
And then eggs are one of nature's multivitamins.
I mean, it literally is a cognitive multivitamin, the egg yolk.
We've answered your questions.
That's what we've done.
That's why it's worth becoming an Awakened Wonder and a member of our community.
Another thing that you'll avoid by being part of a community is potentially depression.
40 million Americans are apparently depressed, or at least that many Americans are on antidepressants.
For all I know, it's many, many more.
Is depression exacerbated or even caused by diet in your view, Max, seeing as how you claim to know everything?
I don't claim to know everything.
I don't.
I really don't.
I like to be really clear, actually, about what I know and what I don't know.
But with regard to depression, my first book was a deep dive into the topic of nutritional psychiatry, which is a growing field right now, and it's very exciting.
And it's showing us that for a subset of depressed patients, diet may play a role.
The mechanism here, it's being referred to by some as the inflammatory cytokine model of depression.
That depression is the result of chronic low-grade inflammation that's occurring in the body.
And we basically can control, to some degree, with our diets and our lifestyles, our overall inflammatory status.
And so we know that eating a diet that is rich in ultra-processed foods, you know, packaged shelf-stable vending machine foods, if you will.
And an overly sedentary lifestyle, a lifestyle that relegates sleep to an afterthought, a lifestyle that is chronically stressed out.
We know that those are all pro-inflammatory and that that can have a downstream effect on the brain and our cognitive processes certainly as well as our mental health.
And so there are studies now coming out of Many highly regarded academic centers like the Food and Mood Center at Deakin University.
One study that I cite fairly regularly is the SMILES trial, which found that for clinically depressed patients who had really crappy diets, half of them were given the standard of care in Australia.
The other half were given a Mediterranean dietary pattern to adhere to.
They saw three times the rate of remission from depression in that group that was given the Mediterranean dietary pattern to consume.
Olive oil, animal products, dark leafy greens, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, things like that.
And the other group, obviously, they didn't have the improvement in symptoms to the same degree, and they didn't see the same rate of remission.
So, we're seeing now that, you know, in the form of clinical randomized control trials, that diet does have a pretty powerful influence, right?
And we know that micronutrients like magnesium, which half of Americans don't consume adequate amounts of, we know that that's related to many, many processes, hundreds of processes in the body.
We know that it can play a role in the reduction of anxiety and depression and things like that.
We also know that Yeah, there are nutrients.
There are nutrients in animal products, in shellfish, that play a really important role in mental health.
And I like what you said about inflammation, that we're like inflamed as individuals and as a culture.
What do you think about fake meat, the sort of the vegans treat, the way out?
Bill Gates' hobby course, fake meats, what are they?
Any good or vile blobs of nothingness?
I mean, I think that they don't hold a candle to actual meat in terms of a nutritional value.
But I'll concede that many vegans enjoy it because it just tastes good.
Yeah.
And so I wouldn't withhold that from them, right?
Here's the thing about me.
I actually don't care what people choose to eat.
I'm not emotionally invested in what other people choose to consume.
I just like to lay out the facts free of...
As free from bias as I can possibly muster.
And so, yeah, from that standpoint, eat it if you enjoy it, but from a nutrition standpoint, it doesn't hold a candle to real red meat.
Mate, I want to thank you for coming on our show, for sharing that information so fluently, carefully and beautifully.
Thank you for mobilising your own personal story and suffering into something valuable for the community.
And thanks for responding so brilliantly to our community questions.
I wish you all the best with the documentary.
You've found the funding for that now, have you?
Yeah.
We, well, we still have like, you know, a bit of a ways to go.
We need to find distribution for it, but we have a trailer at littleemptyboxes.com.
And, um, and I host my own podcast too, so people can come and check me out.
Uh, it's called The Genius Life.
There you go.
We'll post the links to both of those in both of our chats and also Max's latest book, The Genius Kitchen is out now.
And as Max mentioned, his podcast, The Genius Life is also available.
Now, if you want to be a member of our community, one of the ways that I reckon you can reduce inflammation and also get some Awakened Wonder Pants, it starts today.
If you are an Awakened Wonder, simply by pressing the red button, you can join our team meetings, post-show shows, meditations, podcast recordings.
It's really worth becoming a member.
I guarantee that.
Now, last week, the world was lit up to a degree by Tucker's controversial interview with that dude that made them Obama revelations.
So, in Here's the News today, we used that to begin an analysis of Barack Obama's time in office and his status as an elder and hero of the Democratic Party.
How can this status be maintained when you scrutinize Obama's time in office, particularly around war?
