Change Your Brain Every Day - A Better Lifestyle for a Longer Lifespan, with Max Lugavere

Episode Date: March 4, 2020

In his new book, “The Genius Life,” author Max Lugavere gives his tips for a lifestyle that will give you not only a healthier life, but a longer life, too. In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Max discusses his top lifestyle tips with Dr. Daniel and Tana Amen, from how to portion protein correctly to strategies for supplements that provide the greatest benefit.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back. We are here with Max Lugavere and having a great time and we're grateful for his time to share his knowledge on the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Max is a filmmaker, a TV personality, a journalist, a brain food expert. His New York

Times bestselling book, Genius Foods, has just done phenomenal and helped so many people. And, you know, Max, I have to tell you, our nutritionists at Amen Clinics have the best testimonials. So it's generally not the medications we put you on. It's get your food right and your brain will follow. But you have a new book coming out March 17th called The Genius Life. And talk to us about how that's different from genius foods and how do people have a genius life? Because who the heck wouldn't want that? Yeah, it's such a good question. So I wrote The Genius Life to really be an all-in-one diet and lifestyle guide

that's going to give you the best shot at averting not just Alzheimer's disease and dementia in accordance with the best available evidence, but other conditions like heart disease and even certain types of cancer. It's really a book about longevity and health span. A lot of people today, they spend many, many years sick. They don't live a long time whatever years, precious years we do have to our lives, much of it is dedicated to the management of chronic disease. I certainly saw that in my own life. And so this is a book about extending your lifespan and making sure that those years are spent healthy and virile and with vigor. And so I do make nutritional recommendations in the book

that are a little bit different than the genius life. They're really calibrated more towards, uh, helping readers achieve the best possible body composition. Um, so being, uh, you know, relatively lean and strong, um, in body and mind. And so in the genius life, what I do is I placed an emphasis on certain macronutrients like protein, which, you know, I think a lot of people are confused about the value of protein. On the one hand, people were told that we're eating too much protein as it is. But on the other hand, you know, how many people are struggling with sarcopenia as they get older and frailty? I mean, my mother was definitely one of those people. And so, um, and also, I mean, not to mention you look at the obesity statistics and I think that at protein, I think that protein

is a very, very powerful tool for people. And this is something that is kind of known in the fitness industry where it's a little bit sort of siloed off. Um, but I like to expose the value of protein in the genius life. It's the most satiating macronutrient. So protein is going to kill your hunger better than anything else, carbs or fat. And while I don't advocate for a very high protein diet, it's actually very difficult to consume what one might consider a very high protein diet because protein is so satiating. So I talk about in my book, I advise readers to prioritize protein, whether that is grass-fed beef or fatty fish or poultry. Um, or if you're on a plant-based

diet, you know, plant-based foods that are high in protein, because it's gonna, it's gonna fill you up essentially. And then, you know, there's this idea that people who under consume protein actually consume more carbs and fat. And carbs and fat are essentially energy today. And people are inundated with energy. People are packing energy around their waistlines, on their thighs. And so protein, I think, is important for building, maintaining muscle, for losing weight. And also there is an association.

People who consume higher amounts of protein, and this is an observational study that I cite in the book, but people who consume higher levels of protein in their diet actually have less amyloid beta in their brains and in their cerebrospinal fluid. Now, whether that's a function of the fact that they're consuming more protein or they're just consuming less potentially pro-inflammatory foods, because if you look at all of the ultra-processed foods in the supermarket, they're all low-protein foods. They're all saturated in carbs and fat. I think it's a really powerful recommendation. Although there is a movement on, you know, putting the number of grams of protein on the packages, but I really want people to read the label, read the label, you know, like over and over again, I say, you know, about this study from the Mayo Clinic where they showed people who had basically a fat based diet had 42 percent less risk of Alzheimer's disease.

And they went on to say people had primarily a protein based diet, had 21 percent less risk of Alzheimer's disease. And those who consumed basically a carbohydrate-based diet, bread, pasta, potatoes, rice, fruit juice, sugar, had a 400% increased risk of Alzheimer's disease. It's the food. And so having enough protein is, you know, we have to actually think of that as the body's reserve. We have a friend who was buff and really sort of took the brain warrior's way lifestyle seriously. And then he went to Hawaii and he was a little crazy and he jumped into a pool and ended up with leptospirosis, which is a bacterial

infection that attacked his body and his brain. And he ended up in a coma. And I thought, you know, when I left him at the hospital that night, I was getting a call in the middle of the night that he died. But it was really only because of the muscle on his body, which was his protein reserve, that he ended up surviving and becoming himself again. So true. And as a nurse, I was a trauma nurse. And what I noticed is, and there are studies actually supporting this, what would kill the elderly people that would come into our unit versus the younger people? It was frailty. So frailty killed. It wasn't necessarily the broken hip or anything like that. It was, they didn't have enough muscle reserve to survive through it, to actually be able to

breathe and get up and do the things they needed to do. They didn't have enough muscle on their body. They had sarcopenia like you talked about. And the same in reverse was the reason there were people that survived accidents. you would not imagine. We never thought they would survive or should survive, but they did because of the reserve they had going in. And so if you were young and you were healthy and you had muscle on your body, you could sustain three months in an ICU, you know, where you couldn't do that if you were frail going in. So, yeah, that's the biggest killer. What else in the genius life? Yeah. So it's a lifestyle guide. So, you know, I go deep into the value of getting good light

in through your eyes every single day, basically at a 30,000 foot level. It's the book is about all the little things that you could do every single day in your lifestyle that are going to have big wins in terms of how you feel in the moment. But then also as far as your health down the road as well. And so this is the practical story. So this is the practical tips. And how do I do this now? Now that you said that, I just have to say this is brand new for us. We have a bright minds therapy lamp half an hour in the morning, and we have both white and blue light that has been shown to improve your circadian rhythm. So for our shift workers, but also seasonal affective disorder head to head against Prozac was found to be more effective, helps with energy and so on. So and you talk about you're talking about light therapy as well, right, Max?

I'm talking about light therapy as well. Yeah. But this is a crucial point to bring up that, you know, so what the latest research is suggesting is that it takes about a half an hour every morning of fairly bright light, about a thousand lux of light, which is if you just go outside, even on an overcast day, you're easily being, you're easily achieving that. The problem is 93% of our time today is spent indoors, uh, where our house lights never are able to reach that level of intensity, but it takes about a half an hour to anchor your body circadian clock, which is going to help you be more alert, more focused, and even happier throughout the day.

And it's going to help your sleep at the other end of the day. But the caveat that I would add is that for these light-sensing proteins in our eyes to be activated so that we can have a healthy circadian rhythm, we need to spend that time in the sun. And the amount of time that we need might actually increase as we get older. So as we age, there's a yellowing of the lens that tends to occur. And that can actually make us less sensitive to bright light. Oh, how interesting. Yeah, that's interesting.

So my mall walking days should be limited. Well, so you only do that when it's raining. And I'm not supporting the mall walking thing unless it's raining. The mall walking thing? Yeah, he's a mall walker. I never thought I was going to be married to a mall walker i never thought i was whenever it rains like i have to walk if i if i don't walk i'm not nearly as happy or energetic and you know it's one of the things i do for exercise besides playing table tennis but uh i love going to the

beach in the morning we live in southern california like you do and uh it's see that's my life being outside yeah this winter has been really cold and the people in new york are going yeah are you kidding me 48 is not gold yeah 48 below is gold i know yeah it's uh it's crucially important but light in the daytime is important for getting good sleep. It's important for feeling focused and energetic. But a lot of older adults, they claim that they don't, you know, that complaint that I'm just not sleeping the way that I used to. Well, it might be a function of the fact that anchoring light sensitivity as their 10 year old self. So that's half. So whereas their 10 year old self might only require 10 or 20 or 30 minutes in the sun to get that same potent circadian anchoring effect that the sun offers us, you might need double that time as an older adult. And if you look at hunter gatherer communities or any of the world's blue zones where people are living for a long time and they're robust, they're outside all the time.

So that's not an issue. But for us, you know, the fact that we're spending so much of our time indoors might be particularly deleterious for older adults. And so that's why I really look at all of the many things that you can do over the course of the day across the age spectrum to boost your health. Light getting good. And is it light through your eyes or is it light through your skin? Because, you know, especially in the winter, which is when this is going to air is, you know, people aren't taking off their shirt and many people actually shouldn't take off their shirt. Um, so, so what would you recommend? Yeah, well, light on your skin is crucially important too. And I, I do a deep dive into the value of getting sun on your skin in the book, primarily because it helps us create vitamin D, which is important for good brain health,

reducing levels of inflammation, having healthy levels of blood pressure. So getting sun on your skin is important. In the winter months, obviously that becomes more difficult to do. And that's where eating foods that are rich in vitamin D come in. So egg yolks, fatty fish, and things like that. I mean, food is a non-trivial source of vitamin D to hold you over until those summer months when you can get back out into the sun. The problem is many people are not consuming foods that have vitamin D in it. So they're vitamin D deficient in the summer because they're told by their dermatologist to avoid the sun at all costs. And then in the winter, they're not eating vitamin D rich foods because they're told to avoid animal products.

So they're not eating the egg yolks and they're not eating the fatty fish. And that's one of the reasons why I think so many of us are struggling with problems related to cardiovascular health, to brain health and the like. It's just a systemic problem. But getting the sun on your skin

when you're able to, super important. I mean, the UVB rays from the sun help us create vitamin D, which there was a very interesting, it was a small study, it needs to be replicated, but they found that for patients with Alzheimer's disease, actually that supplementation with just 800 international units of vitamin D every day was able to seemingly halt the progression of the condition. And that was an amazing finding that needs to be, I think, replicated with, you know, maybe a larger population. Multi-center trial would be amazing. That's a really small amount. I take seven. So when we come back, we're going to talk about

more of these really helpful suggestions and Max's new book, The Genius Life. Stay with us. If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast, please don't forget to subscribe so you'll always know when there's a new episode. And while you're at it, feel free to give us a review or five-star rating as that helps others find the podcast. If you're considering coming to Amen Clinics or trying some of the brain healthy supplements from BrainMD, you can use the code podcast10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or a 10% discount on all supplements at brainmdhealth.com. For more information, give us a call at 855-978-1363.