Change Your Brain Every Day - How to Become Smarter & Happier – PT. 1 with Max Lugavere

Episode Date: April 23, 2018

There’s a critical link between the foods you eat and the way your brain functions. In this episode of the Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen are joined by Max Lugavere, author of the new book Genius Foods. Max tells the story of how his mom’s heartbreaking diagnosis set him on the path to learn and spread the message of eating right.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the 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 nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. And stay tuned for a special code for a discount to Amen Clinics for a full evaluation, as well as any of our supplements at brainmdhealth.com. Well, welcome everybody. We are so excited about the next three podcasts we're going to do together with our friend Max Lugavere, who's the author of the brand new bestselling book, Genius Foods Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain for Life.

And I know how important this book is to Max. Max and I first met on the Dr. Oz show. We were studying the effects of technology and the brain, on the brain, and Max was one of our subjects. But when I heard his story about why health was important to him, I just bonded to him immediately and I'm just so grateful that he's gonna take time for us. He's been interviewed and contributed to Medscape, Vice, Fast Company, The Daily Beast. He's been featured on NBC Nightly News, The Dr. Oz Show multiple times, The Wall Street Journal.

He is a journalist and has a personal interest. So welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Thank you so much for having me. I definitely consider myself a brain warrior, so this is a real honor. So brain warriors are armed, prepared, and aware. Yes, it's a war. So why did you become a brain warrior? I became a brain warrior because about seven years ago, my mother was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative condition. I had no prior family history of any kind of dementia. And at the youthful age of 58, my mom, spirited, blonde-haired, began showing her very first symptoms, ending up with me going around the country with my mom to some of the top neurology departments in the United States

to try to come to some sort of consensus as to what it was that she had. She had symptoms that were indicative of a movement disorder, but then it seemed, you know, her cognition also had downshifted pretty profoundly. I mean, I think when we're talking to an elderly person, we all, you know, speak a little bit more slowly because we understand that there's a decline in processing speed that occurs with age. But my mom was not old. So it had seemed suddenly as if my mom had had a brain transplant with an elderly person and you know I now know that dementia is not a natural aspect of aging but you know back then I was just completely ignorant and when my mom was first diagnosed at the Cleveland Clinic I became obsessed with learning

everything I possibly could about how diet and lifestyle might provide a more meaningful intervention for my mom, while also becoming really interested, in fact, laser focused on the steps that we can take today to prevent cognitive decline from ever happening to us when we're young. One of the most shocking things that I learned, which Dr. Amen, you preach all the time, is that dementia is not something that bubbles up overnight. It's often a decades long disease process. And it became very much my passion and mission to spread the message of prevention and awareness to younger people. And so that's really what led to the creation of Genius Foods. Max, you said your mom was showing symptoms of a movement disorder as well. So that's very interesting. So she was really suffering significantly for someone so young. There was a change to her gait. Her stride was affected. She, you know, what would have been previously a normal, you know, way in which she walked became suddenly a shuffle.

So there were symptoms that were indicative of something Parkinsonian going on. Right. That's what I was thinking. Yeah. But there was no tremor. Okay. And the ultimate diagnosis for her was what? So it seems that she has something like Lewy body dementia is what it has, you know, basically unfolded as, you know, and her course has been somewhat stable for better or worse. Lewy body dementia is a very niche form of dementia.

There's not a lot known about it. It affects about one million people in the United States. So Lewy body is dementia, is the dementia that Robin Williams died from. It is where you get this deposition of these things called syn-nuclein, alpha-syn-nuclein plaques that attack the basal ganglia, also attack the occipital lobes.

So on SPECT, the study we do, you can differentiate this from Alzheimer's disease, which is usually the parietal and temporal lobes. Lewy body dementia is usually the basal ganglia and the occipital lobes in the back. And all the steps to keep your brain healthy or reverse Alzheimer's are the same steps for Lewy body as well, which may in some ways, at least in my experience, be associated with toxic exposure. And toxins are just everywhere, including our food. So tell us about Genius Foods.

You know, we have young people listen to the podcast, old people, but all of us want to be a genius no matter what our age. Talk to us about what you wrote about in Genius Foods. Yeah. I think we're at an interesting time where most people that are clued into health-related content are aware that sugar is not good right and I can go on and on and as can you about the dangers of added sugar and how our food supply has just become saturated in

it but ingenious foods rather than continue to be people over the head with what they shouldn't be eating I decided to go another route through that body of evidence that foods actually improve your brain functions and support your brain health in a way that's going to help minimize your risk decades from now for the kinds of diseases that we are talking about. You know, a really interesting study came out from the University of Texas that found that dietary diversity in the modern supermarket is actually not a good thing. So when people abide by the eat everything in moderation

rule, they tend to use that as an excuse or justification to eat more junk food, whereas the healthiest people buy healthy foods on loop. And so with Cheap Meas Foods, that was sort of like my strategy where I said, okay, these are the 10 foods and food categories that if you were just to put on, you know, your smartphone and just remind yourself every time you go to the supermarket to buy these foods on loop, you're probably going to lose a lot of weight and your brain is going to thank you for it. We go into depth in foods to avoid, certainly processed foods and especially ream the industrial processed oils that now saturate our food supply, canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil,

and these are toxic foods to the brain. But I really try to do Ingen Genius Foods, make all of my recommendations highly actionable and talk in terms of food. I think a lot of nutrition scientists suffer from what Michael Pollan calls nutritionism. We basically break down foods into their nutrients, but we didn't co-evolve with single nutrients. We co-evolved with food. And food is what we buy when we go to the supermarket. So it's a very food focused approach. And I like that because people get lost in the minutia and then they finish your book and they're like, that was really good. And then all

of a sudden they're like, why do I still don't know what to eat? So they get really confused. I mean, I see it all the time. People will reach out all the time. They're like, I don't know what to eat. So that's why when you make it simple like that, they need to know what foods to eat. Then if you want to tell them what's in the foods, that's fine. But they need to know what food to eat first. So in the last 24 hours, I'm just looking at the foods on the cover of Genius Foods. I've actually had all of them. I had eggs this morning. We had a salad and salmon last night. I have a cup of frozen blueberries. Almost every day. Every day. I had nuts for lunch. I have, we actually, BrainMD, which is our supplement food company, makes a sugar-free, dairy-free dark chocolate. So I love this. This is exactly how we eat. I was thinking,

as Max was talking, that the people who are the healthiest are the ones who eat the same foods, but they're the healthy food. I'm like, well, no wonder you're so healthy, because you can eat the same stuff. Well, and people are already in a rhythm or in a rut. It's just, are you in a rut or are you in a supercharged tunnel to get what you want. Or you want to pull the saccharine on the highway. People are like, oh, this is hard. It's like, well, your routine is going to make you sick and you're going to die early. Why don't you just get another different routine with foods that serve your health

rather than foods that steal your health? Right. I agree. Both of you said something, and maybe this is a whole podcast in and of itself, but, uh, we talk a lot about toxins and, um, we mentioned this here about, you know, how toxins can be one of those things that make people sick, but there's a lot of power in food, antioxidant foods that help with detoxifying the body. So do you talk about that at all, Max, about how, I mean, especially in light of what's going on with body. So do you talk about that at all, Max,

about how, I mean, especially in light of what's going on with your mom, can you talk a little bit about your recommendations for what you put in the book for detoxifying foods? Absolutely. I mean, I definitely talk about the value of antioxidants in food, particularly the fat-soluble variety, vitamin E.

So we wanna seek out these fat-soluble antioxidants in our foods. But some of the most valuable foods are valuable in part because they stimulate their body's own antioxidant. Right. Right. So I talk a lot about these in the book, the value of cruciferous vegetables, things like that. I mean, we live in a time where detox programs are very trendy, but

people forget that we have the ultimate detox machine right in our own bodies, and that's our livers. We just need to feed the right ingredients, eat the right ingredients so that our livers have the materials to produce these detox compounds and get the stimulus required to sort of. Yeah. I had a patient one time get really upset with me because she wouldn't, I was talking about detox, like detoxifying foods,

like eating healthy to support the liver. And she was like, well, I shouldn't have to do all of that. Like an, an environmental toxins. So what? That's what my liver is for. And like all these foods,

that's so what if I eat bad and drink alcohol, that's what my liver is for and like all these foods that's so what if I eat bad and drink alcohol that's what my liver is for and I'm like yes but I mean there is a thing you know there's cirrhosis there's all sorts of problems if you don't support your liver with healthy foods if you don't take care of it it can't take care of you so there's a way to eat foods to support it and there's a way to not do that so clearly. Dr. Absolutely. I mean containing foods with sulfur containing amino acids, eggs, grass-fed beef, broccoli, things like that, very important stuff. Even whey protein could potentially be used. But then also you really want to eat the foods that stimulate those gene pathways involved in creating those liver detox compounds. So I thought about actually

our favorite for broccoli. So broccoli is a very potent activator of these detox pathways in the body. A hundred times as powerful as adult broccoli. So that's why whenever I go to the supermarket, I'm always looking out for broccoli sprouts. And I even grow my own actually. On my website, there's a great guide. You can super cheaply grow out for broccoli sprouts. I even grow my own actually. On my website, there's a great guide. You can super cheaply grow your own broccoli sprouts after three days. They're one of those powerful foods that you can eat. That's fantastic. Stay with us.

When we come back, we're going to talk about foods and tactics that can supercharge and rejuvenate your brain, no matter what your age. Use the code PODCAST10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or on our supplements at brainmdhealth.com. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Go to iTunes and leave a review and you'll automatically be entered into a drawing to get a free signed copy of the Brain Warriors Way and the Brain Warriors Way cookbook we give away every month. Thank you.