Dhru Purohit Show - Eat These Foods to Optimize Your Body and Brain with Max Lugavere

Episode Date: September 5, 2022

This episode is brought to you by InsideTracker and AirDoctor. Processed foods, sedentary lifestyles, and mixed messages about nutrition have completely disrupted our health, leading us to feel awful and long for better health. While it might seem complicated, identifying and turning around the unique offenders in your own life is simpler than you might think.  On today’s mini-episode, Dhru sits down with Max Lugavere to talk about streamlining your health so you can get back to feeling great.  Max Lugavere is a health and science journalist and the author of three books: Genius Foods: Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain for Life, The Genius Life: Heal Your Mind, Strengthen Your Body, and Become Extraordinary, and Genius Kitchen. Max is also the host of a #1 iTunes health and wellness podcast called The Genius Life. Max is an internationally sought-after speaker and appears regularly on the Dr. Oz Show, the Rachael Ray Show, and The Doctors. He has contributed to Medscape, Vice, Fast Company, CNN, and the Daily Beast, and he has been featured on NBC Nightly News and the Today Show, as well as in the New York Times and People magazine. In this episode we dive into:   -Max's approach to dairy consumption -The relationship between full-fat dairy consumption and metabolic health -How to make coffee healthier -The benefits of saturated fat and how much value we should place on LDL levels -How salt can positively impact our health -The power of movement and exercise for brain health    Listen to the full episode here. For more on Max, follow him on Instagram @maxlugavere, Facebook @maxlugavere, YouTube @maxlugavere, and through his website maxlugavere.com. Get his book, Genius Kitchen, at geniuskitchenbook.com. Listen to his podcast, The Genius Life, here. This episode is brought to you by InsideTracker and AirDoctor. InsideTracker provides detailed nutrition and lifestyle guidance based on your individual needs. Right now, they’re offering my podcast community 20% off. Just go to insidetracker.com/DHRU to get your discount and try it out for yourself. AirDoctor is an affordable and efficient way to create clean air in your home. Right now, they are offering my community $300 off. That's up to 50% off their normal price! Visit drhyman.com/filter to redeem this offer today. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi everyone, Drew Prote here on today's mini episode. We have a conversation with Max Louvier, one of my dear friends, and we're talking all things nutrition. Specifically, we're talking about Max's approach to dairy consumption and the relationship between full fat dairy consumption and metabolic health. We're also chatting about how to actually make your coffee healthier, topic that a lot of people are interested in. The benefits of saturated fat and how much value we should place on LDL levels, especially if they're elevated. We're also chatting about how salt can positively impact our health. Salt is one of those things that so many people demonize, but could it have beneficial properties for us? And lastly, we're talking about the power of movement and exercise for brain

help. On these mini episodes, we take our popular podcast in the past, we condense them down, and we pull top clips to make sure that if you miss the episode, you can still get tons of actionable takeaways. That's what we did today with our interview with Max O'Gavir. I hope you enjoy. So let's talk about dairy for a second. You wrote about it in your new book and I've done a couple podcasts with my business partner about his views of dairy have changed. I've started incorporating like goat kefir in my diet regularly. I still, when I eat a lot of dairy or I eat in certain types of dairy, I still don't feel the best. I break out other things for some reason goat kefer I tend to do really well and give me your perspectives and what has caused you to

like have a little bit of a shift in how you see dairy. Yeah. So I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, still tend to be very deliberate about my dairy consumption. I think it's dairy is not something that I want at every meal. And I think that one of the issues with modern ultra processed foods and, and meals tend to be that there's just cheese added on everything, right? Like you can go to, you can go into one of these big chain restaurants and order a salad, the healthiest dish that most people are going to eat over the course of the day. And it comes loaded with cheese on it, right? So typically I go dairy free. But I do think that dairy has unfairly been demonized in the, especially in, I think, parts of the wellness world.

And, you know, I guess we can start with protein. Dairy is a pristine source of protein. It consistently ranks as one of being one of the highest biological value, biological value sources of protein that exists. Whether it's way protein or casein, way is an amazing, highly biological. available source of protein, concentrated with essential amino acids, and in particular, leucine, which is really important for muscle protein synthesis and halting muscle protein breakdown, which is a really important way to maintain your lean mass as you age, which should be important to aging populations. So I routinely will do weigh protein. Now, I'm not lactose intolerant,

and I do acknowledge that 75% of a global adult population is lactose intolerant. So if dairy doesn't agree with you, don't consume it. Way protein isolate, though, is almost 99.9% free of lactose and casein. So even among that I've seen people that are otherwise dairy sensitive, they tend to do really well with weight protein. For me, way protein is great. It's a very satiating snack. It feels indulgent because you can find them in all kinds of really delicious flavors now,

vanilla creamsicle, what have you. And newer brands are you can get it from grass-fed cows, which you don't really need to spend the extra money to get weight protein from a grass-fed cow because what a cow eats dictates primarily the healthiness of its fat. And weight protein is, you know, a protein shake is pretty fat-free. But you can get it, you can find protein shakes sweetened with stevia. And you can make a ton of different recipes with just way protein. I mean, one of my favorite faux ice creams involves just way protein and fruit. frozen berries. Just blend it all up and you get this really delicious kind of faux ice cream. And you get the benefits of weight protein. You get the benefits of berry consumption, which is,

we know, great for brain health, among other things. So I think way is great. When zooming out, I also think that Greek yogurt is a great product. I'm continually impressed that in a in a cup of Greek yogurt, and let's just say fat-free, right, that you get, you can get about 19 grams of protein in an 80 to 90 calorie serving, that to me is amazing. That's like a really fantastic and economical way to get very highly high biological value protein into your diet, again, provided you're not sensitive to dairy. And then when you go to full fat dairy products like full fat Greek yogurt, cream, you're also getting a slew of really unique and probably important fat soluble antioxidants, which you lose, by the way, when you go fat-free or

reduced fat. So I reviewed this actually, this one paper that quantified the amount of vitamin K2 in various dairy products. And you lose it when you go for low fat or fat free. But in dairy products like cream, you get a significant amount of vitamin K2. You get about 88 micrograms of vitamin K2 in a single tablespoon serving. And vitamin K2 is a, it's sort of an underappreciated nutrient. Most people when they think of vitamin K, they think of vitamin K1, which is involved in blood clotting. And very few people, if any people in Western society are deficient in vitamin K1, and you typically know because you're prone to bleeding. So it's a vitamin K deficiency.

Vitamin K1 deficiency is pretty rare. But vitamin K2, people tend to underconsume. And it has different physiologic effects in the body. It helps maintain calcium homeostasis. So it helps deposit calcium into places you want calcium to be like in your bones and your teeth. And it helps keep it out of soft tissue, which is where calcium actually shouldn't be allowed to congregate. So it keeps it out of arteries, kidneys, things like that. And vitamin K2 is relatively underconsumed because it is found, again, in full fat dairy.

And there's been this push over the past couple of decades to steer consumers to reduced fat. fat dairy. It tends to be higher in dairy products that come from grass-fed cows. And most of our dairy comes from cows that are not fed grass, right? It's found in organ meats and things like that. And so, yeah, I think that full-fat dairy is a great source of like pretty important, potentially important micronutrients like vitamin K, too. And then finally, this has been an area of interest for me for some time, but full fat dairy contains a compound in it that is unique called milk fat globule membrane. And milk fat globule membrane is sort of like, you can think of it like a capsule that compote that that that encapsulates the triglycerides, the fats that are

typically found in dairy. Now dairy is a very, among all foods, dairy has the highest proportion of saturated fat. And yet consumption of full fat dairy, is associated consistently with better cardiometabolic health. It's not associated with higher levels of LDL, higher incidence of cardiovascular disease. But saturated fat typically does raise your levels of LDL, which we know when that gets too high, that's a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. And so it seems to be that this milk fat globule membrane, it basically changes the way our bodies respond to the fat contained by dairy.

And it's super interesting, actually. Heavy cream and butter are essentially the same. They start out from the same origin product. Like butter is heavy cream that's simply been churned. But when you churn heavy cream to create butter, you're disrupting the milk fat globule membrane. And so that's why there have been feeding studies where they've shown that when you feed a person,

heavy cream, there is no impact on their lipids. They don't see an increase in their LDL, right? But when you feed a person butter, you do see an increase in their LDL. So that effect, that response is thought to be attributable to, that protective effect seems to be attributable to the presence of milk fat globule membrane, which again is this encapsulation of the fats that dairy contains that's made up of proteins, different lipids, different phospholipids. And so that got me thinking, like, what is the purpose of dairy, right? The purpose of dairy, yeah, it's to grow a, it's to grow a neonate, right? And in the case of bovine dairy, it's to grow a calf into a cow.

But what part of the animal is the most rapidly growing part of the animal, especially early on? It's the brain, right? And so when you look at what milk fat globule membrane contains in it, it's rich in phosphatidylcholine, which we know is a really important component of brain cell membranes. It's rich in a compound called sphingomylen, which is actually a core component of myelin, the myelin sheath that acts like insulation for your neurons.

And so, you know, this, I just, I tend to go down like rabbit holes, right? But there was, I look to see if there was an association between dairy, consumption and reduced risk for Alzheimer's disease. Now, an association isn't like a causal connection. It's a correlation. But there was a study that the first author was this guy, Oriel Willett, who his work I've been following for some time now because he publishes a lot on nutrients as it relates to brain health, which you know is my primary passion. And it was a study that involved food frequency questionnaires. So we know that these are not the most reliable, because people tend to overrepresent on these questionnaires how healthy their diet was.

They tend to underrepresent components, dietary components that are less healthy, healthy user bias, you know. But what they found was that above and beyond every single dietary component, the consumption of dairy was associated with a protective effect against cognitive decline. So all that being said, I've sort of become more of a fan. of different types of dairy. I still eat it in moderation. Like I'll consume like zero to two servings of dairy a day. And I'm not, again, I'm not lactose intolerant. But I think it is interesting these connections.

And I also used to really, I used to, I probably used to consume a lot more butter. But butter to me now, I put it in the category of, I consider it an indulgence because it lacks, it's been chemically altered. And that chemical alteration creates the texture that we know and love and call butter, right? And I still use it occasionally like here and there. I'm a, I'm overall a fan of butter. But as a health food, I think it's, I think it's probably better to put, like, it's probably better to stick with dairy components, dairy products that that still have intact milk fat globule membrane because of all the benefits that that provides. This episode is brought to you by Inside Tracker.

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Make your home, your sanctuary, clean up your air and feel better. It's an easy step towards optimizing your health with Air Doctor. Yeah, super interesting as we just continue to learn more how people's own individual experimentation, you know, changes. Like, I want to like Way so badly. It tastes good. There's so many great qualities that are out there, like Goat Way, Sheeps, We, you know, all these different types of way. And I've tried weigh in different sorts of ways. And for me, again, my journey and health history started when I had a really bad acne all throughout high school. And then I found out that it was primarily dairy. And again, being South Asian, Indian background, other stuff.

There is a lot of dairy consumption there modernly, but does it also, do my genetics and background also make me more lactose intolerant? Not in the traditional way, but having challenges with lactose. Who knows? Got microbiome alteration, whatever. So getting off a dairy, my skin cleared up in like two months. Wow. Like I went from being on like acutane, different gel, all that different stuff.

My skin was super bad. Cut out all dairy. And month and a half, two months, my skin. looked as if it was minus scar tissue looked completely clean. So then I thought, man, I had the answer, like dairy is poison, right? And I would tell people, I was vegan at the time. I'd say, you know, this isn't a good situation. Naturally, then I found the world of functional medicine, started running all my labs and found out that actually, you know, I've been vegan now for like seven years. Like a lot of this stuff isn't working, even though I felt great when I first started doing it.

So I started including back in targeted food. So I would have a little bit of cheese. So I thought, okay, a little bit of cheese, especially like European-style cheese. I'm fine. I can enjoy it. And I can have it with a little bit of, you know, like dinner or whatever here and there. But in general, I would include dairy. And then recently I saw a couple papers on just on Kiefer and how like some people that had challenges.

I was really curious because way I would get pimples again. I'd get a little bit of acne and things like that. And it was pretty much within 24 hours. Then I started having a little bit of goat kefir in the morning, like a serving. Not every day, every so often. My digestion felt good that morning. Like in general, my digestion feels good, but I didn't have any sort of rumbling. I didn't have any challenges.

I felt good. It was satiating. It doesn't have any sugar inside of it. So I'd put in a couple berries or some seeds or other stuff. And it's just amazing to see when you've written off of food, but you're open. You approach it in an open-minded way, as you did with the inclusion of dairy back in your diet. You continue to follow the literature. And you say, okay, let me try this and see if there's evidence that these studies are saying that this thing could be beneficial.

Let me see how I could personalize it for myself. For your case, it sounds like it was way. I don't think you ever stopped having weight, right? You always had weight. Yeah, I've always kind of integrated weight to something. But more like straight up, like dairy or heavy cream is what you've been trying. Yeah. Yeah, that's sort of what I, what I started to like reintegrate.

Yeah, I mean, I, so I used, I was for a little while doing the butter in my coffee thing. Right. Which I think is delicious. So just I'll put that out there. I think it's, I actually, I quite enjoy it. However, I carry a genotype that probably puts me at increased risk of hypercholestrolemia. So, you know, high cholesterol. I'm not a, I'm not anti-collestral or anything like that.

Sure. You know, I'm an advocate of well-sourced animal consumption. But I do think it's important to like hedge your bets, you know, and to always do labs and to get tested and to be willing to iterate. To always, you know, I don't, I don't wear my personal diet, my dietary pattern as an identity, right? I think that's where people tend to go astray, especially today, when they make their diet, their identity. because then they become unwilling to iterate when new data presents itself or when they get labs and those labs don't necessarily agree with the picture of... Sure, they planted a flag in the ground.

They planted the flag in the ground, exactly. So for me, I don't want to cause an undue elevation of my LDL levels when there's no really benefit in doing so. We know that certain saturated fats, and I talk about this in the book, do LLL. elevate LDL, right? Sure. The way that they do is they reduce the availability of the LDL receptor on the surface of the liver, which is really important for recycling those LDL particles, right?

Certain genotypes are not as efficient at that, and I'm probably one of those, one of those people. I'm definitely one of those people. Okay. Yeah. So, and this is interesting because I recently brought coffee back into my dive, and I want to bring up why coffee could be particularly beneficial to people like that. Yeah, let's talk about it. But with something like grass-fed beef, with every food, there are risks and there are benefits.

It's my perspective, based on data, that the benefits of eating grass-fed beef outweigh any risks. Because you're getting a highly nutrient-dense food with a pristine source of protein. You're getting compounds like creatine, which we know is reduced in the brain as we get older. Vitamin E, tiny amount of omega-3 fats, but, you know, significant nonetheless. But mixing butter in my coffee, especially with regard to the milk fat globule membrane aspect that I mentioned earlier, it's probably going to cause your LDL to go up. And there's really no benefit that you're getting other than the fact that it's like delicious, right? Also, MCT oil. MCT oil.

Right. Any kind of that sort of heavy dose saturated fat. Yeah. MCT oil, I'm not sure does that. I can tell you for me it does. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

So that's good to know. So I'm not, so I don't, so I didn't necessarily want that to happen to me. But then I found these studies that found that heavy cream basically gives you the same. I mean, it's a dairy fat. You don't have to blend it. So that's like a great benefit of doing that. And it and because it has intact milk fat globule membrane, according to the data, it's not going to cause this like this elevation of LDL. So I'm getting this essentially getting the same product, the same end product was like a creamy, indulgent, unctuous cup of coffee, right?

but uh but uh but yeah without but with like a chemical difference that's that might be physiologically significant for me yeah it's interesting it's always about that experimentation talking about labs like how often do you personally will you look at your labs especially with this uh you know history of high cholesterol or other stuff or just looking at any sort of you know markers that are there how often will you get your labs done yeah i mean i try to do it i try to do it once a year and um and and And my family, I mean, people know my family history. My mother had very poor health. She had this rare form of dementia that developed when she was very young.

And we know that vascular changes occur before almost every other change with regard to Alzheimer's disease, which is the most common form of dementia and certainly vascular dementia. So cardiovascular health is crucially important. And it's something that I'm always mindful of. And again, every food has a benefit and a risk. Coffee, I think, is really interesting from this standpoint. Yeah, let's talk about it. Yeah.

So coffee is something that it's the world's most commonly consumed drug, right? It's a psychoactive drug. I love it. But I found at a certain point that coffee was starting to give me that tired and wired feeling. And so I took it out for a while and I felt great. This is another reason that I think many people feel shitty all the time, right? because they are dependent on this drug, that they need to consume in order to treat their withdrawal from it, that they're experiencing due to a 24-hour deficit of caffeine, right?

And so for most people, when they consume coffee, they're not actually experiencing a performance boost above their baseline levels of performance. They're dependent on it, so they need to consume coffee to get back to their baseline level of performance. So for people who are not regular coffee drinkers, caffeine does. provide a performance boosting effect. But for people who are chronic coffee drinkers, dependent on coffee, that caffeine is just, you need that morning cup because you're, because you're going to feel the unpleasant symptoms of withdrawal without it.

And the other aspect of coffee that I think most people are not aware of is that coffee doesn't, coffee does give you an energy boost, but it doesn't create energy from thin air. It borrows it from later. And that's a debt that's going to be repaid. later in the day. So that's what I was feeling personally when I was drinking coffee first thing in the morning. I would end up feeling like a train hit me by two, three in the afternoon. Oftentimes leading me to the coffee pot to get some more coffee. And that was starting to just disrupt my sleep. And so I took coffee out to resensitize my brain to it. And then I brought it back in so that now I can consume it at the minimal effective dose for me. And I love it. I drink it.

I drink it now every day. But what we have, having before and how does that compare now? Was it just that you were having the quantity or just was that you didn't take a break enough for your body to reset? I was having probably too much. So the dose was probably too high for me. Which would be what? Um, well, I know that I was in my coffee, uh, French press that I was using. I was putting probably like four or five tablespoons of grounds into that French press, which is probably like three, four hundred, if not more, milligrams of caffeine. And I was also drinking it first thing in the morning, which you don't typically want to do because coffee caffeine can cause an elevation of cortisol levels.

But first thing in the morning, your cortisol levels are already the highest that they're going to be all day because of the diurnal cortisol pattern. Cortisol is your body's waking hormone. It's what gets you out of bed. So once I started to, I took coffee out first to kind of press the recent. set button. And then I brought it back at a much lower dose and I try to the to the best of my ability to drink it 45 minutes after I wake up to an hour after I wake up. So that that cortisol spike starts to come down. The other thing that I did was the other great thing about that is it

forces you to drink water first thing in the morning. Oh yeah. Which is also I think on one of your post here there, you know, people go to caffeine first. Right. And then it's like, well, coffee's made out of water. So it's all good. That's the first liquid that they have in the day. So they're already dehydrated waking up. Their cortisol is already high. And they're drinking something that's making them more dehydrated first thing in the morning.

So sorry to interrupt, but that's another thing that you get for delaying coffee a little bit is you get to sneak in that water and make sure that that's the first thing that you have in the morning. That's a great. I mean, that's a great point. People with when trying to set healthy new habits, you want a habit stack. And so giving yourself that extra time in the morning and throwing in some new habits in it. Because you know you've got your coffee habit coming up. But that's a great opportunity to, yeah, to like to drink some water, hydrate, maybe put some like some electrolytes into the mix.

But so yeah, so I brought it back. And also I learned a few things about how to make coffee healthier. So for one, I was French pressing my coffee, as I mentioned. When you, coffee has a compound in it called Cafestal, which is sort of a double-edged sword. It's a compound that has been shown to improve insulin sensitivity, but powerfully also raise levels of LDL cholesterol. And when you use a paper filter, the paper filter absorbs all of that compound. all of that cafe stall, whereas a French press doesn't absorb any of it. So if you French press your coffee and you're prone to hyper-cholestrolemia,

maybe you have high cholesterol, you want to get rid of the French press and use a pour over or a coffee machine or whatever, just something that utilizes a paper filter, which absorbs almost all of that cafe stall compound, which again is one of the most powerful, it's one of the most powerfully known elevators of LDL cholesterol and humans. Yeah. And it does this. I forget how it does it actually. I think it might have something to do with reducing, again, availability of the LDL receptor, this one compound. But you absorb nearly all of it with just a paper filter. So I got rid of my French press and now I'm using a pour over where I have an unbleached paper filter that I use. And I know that that is actually

helpful. That is going to have a meaningful impact, right? Wow. I make an espresso in the morning. I wonder if I can make that espresso. My friend gifted me a little wedding present. And it's like, I'm going on one of those nice Italian machines condensed. I wonder if I could pour that through a paper filter afterwards. Maybe. Yeah. It would potentially help.

And you think it makes that much of a difference. I do. I do. Yeah. With a French press, you're getting about, I believe it's like six milligrams of this, of this cafe stall compound. People can look it up. You can easily Google Cafe Stall. I'm not making it up.

It's a compounding coffee that's fully absorbed by the paper. filter. I think after using a paper filter, you get about 0.2 milligrams or something. It's like a dramatic reduction of caffeine still yield in the cup. And yeah, that's enough to have a significant effect. But the other thing that coffee was recently, and caffeine specifically, has been found to do, which is actually a really positive thing, is it was found that caffeine is a natural PCSK-9 inhibitor. There's a new class of cholesterol-lowering

drugs on the market that are called PCSK-9 inhibitors. So most people are familiar with statins, statins reduce the ability of your liver to synthesize cholesterol. But PCSK-9 inhibitors, the way they work is they increase, by inhibiting this protein, PCSK-9,

they cause an increase in the availability of this LDL receptor, which is really great, for helping to pick up these remnant LDL particles that have been sent out in circulation after they do their job of dropping off cholesterol and triglycerides all around the body. The liver, its job is to pick those remnant lipoprotein particles

up, right, before they have the chance to get small and dense. Because I'm sure you've talked about the difference between large and fluffy LDL particles and small and dense part. The longer an LDL particle spends in circulation, the smaller and denser it's going to get. Yep.

So we want to do everything we can to optimize the efficiency of our livers for recycling LDL. And this is true, this is true for everybody, but it's certainly true for people with specific genotypes, mine included. So caffeine was shown in this study that just came out to inhibit PCSK9 by about 25%. I believe the dose was something like, I believe it was 400. 100 milligrams of caffeine, which is quite a bit of caffeine. So I'm not recommending such high a dose. But it is cool to know that via this mechanism, coffee can actually increase the efficiency of your liver to recycle these LDL lipoproteins, which is really, which is great, right? It's great. Yeah. Because coffee has been consistently, coffee consumption observational has been

consistently associated with reduced risk for cardiovascular disease, for certain neurodegenerative conditions, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, MS, all these things. But it's like, is there a mechanism that could, that could explain that, right? Sure. And this is a pretty, pretty significant mechanism, pretty plausible. How much do you think? I mean, we know, we know all the research that's out there on LDL and we've done episodes on and other stuff, but how much do you think is when people talk about elevated levels of LDL? And then of course, you know, people can always get like an NMR test and look at the actual particle sides build up. You know, do they have the right amount of, you know,

do they have a lot of small, dense ones, which you talked about and why they're problematic? Do you have big and fluffy ones and it's not as much of an issue and everything when it comes to the cholesterol and lipids conversation? How much of the conversation around LDLs do you think is the association of LDLs with people who have just tend to have very inflammatory diets, a lot of processed sugar, other stuff? and, you know, what would be a great study that you'd like to see when it came to people like me and you who typically don't eat a lot of processed foods and might have a tendency to lean towards higher LDL?

Would you, yeah, what would be a study that you'd like to see that would give you more information about just how worried should we be about it? But again, we want to try to hedge our bets, but yeah, what would be a study? I'd be curious if you have a take on that. Yeah, I just, I think that, I think that with regard to the foods that we know that can potentially raise LDL, we have to ask ourselves, do the, do the benefits outweigh the risks? And for foods like grass fed beef, any animal product, I mean, you know, even, even wild salmon, fatty fish in general, which is associated with better cardiovascular health, has saturated fat in it. So we can't demonize a single nutrient in isolation. That makes no sense. to do that. And also, even when we say saturated fat, there are different kinds of saturated fatty acids. There is meristic acid. There is palmitic acid. There's stearic acid, right? They all have different effects on the body. So if you're just saying saturated fat is bad, you, to somebody who actually

knows what they're talking about, you don't sound like you know what you're talking about because steic acid, for example, has a neutral effect on lipids like LDL. And in fact, could actually potentially play a positive role for health. It's been shown to be. boost mitochondrial function, for example, right? When you take a cow and you feed a cow grass for the entirety of its life, you're going to see a higher proportion of stearic acid, which again is from a cardiovascular standpoint, totally neutral, if not healthy. You're going to see less overall saturated fat. You're going to see more omega-3s. And so the benefits I think of eating that food outweighs any risk. The benefits of eating fish today still seem to outweigh any risks.

Breast milk, right, is loaded with saturated fat. It's one of the perfect foods that nature has devised to grow a developing brain, right? So I don't think, I think when we take a food-centric approach, I mean, that really to me is, that ultimately answers the question of how much value do I place on LDL. I think if you're eating an overall healthy dietary pattern that is primarily constituted with minimally processed foods, and you're not overdoing it with butter, which is a dairy is a, is nature's creation, right? But butter is a man-made creation. So certain genotypes, I think, don't do as well with with butter. Also, ghee. Ghi is a derivative of butter. Ghee has a derivative of butter. Ghee has, and I think Ghee is great in certain recipes. I certainly use it. It's a very,

it's very stable at high temperatures. But ghee is basically butter, but then you have the added effect of having a high prevalence of oxidized cholesterol in it, which I don't think is necessarily great to over consume. So I tend to, I take a food-centric approach and optimize like the diet and then if everything else was good on my labs and then I saw my LDL was in the you know maybe the high normal range I personally wouldn't be I wouldn't medicate myself based on that I wouldn't I wouldn't be too concerned I'll caveat that by saying I'm not a medical doctor but but I personally would not be you know if my if if if my overall metabolic health was good if I didn't have an oversized waistline, if my A1C was nice and low, if my blood pressure was

nice and healthy, my fasting insulin, my fasting blood sugar were low, my HDL was high, my triglycerides were low, and my LDL was maybe 130 or something like that, which is probably above what the guidelines would call pristine, I would probably be fine with that. Because there are consequences to cutting out foods that I would have to cut out to get that pristine LDL, right? I would have to cut out the grass-fed beef. I would have to maybe eat a lower overall fat diet, right? Which we know can reduce levels of testosterone, which provides many benefits, well-being, libido, body composition.

So treating based on just an isolated number, I don't think makes any sense. Let's pivot for a second. You know, we talked a lot about fat. We talked about dairy. Talked about oils. What is another category of food that you took on in your new cookbook? Link is in the show notes for everybody who's listening. What's a category of foods that you wrote about where maybe you have a little bit of a different take than some of the common thought process or trends that are out there when it comes to that category?

Oh, man, there's so, so many. I mean, I talk about salt quite a bit. Let's talk about salt. Yeah, I think salt's really important. I most the vast majority of sodium that your average American consumes comes from restaurant food, fast food and ultra-processed foods and also canned foods. And I think that the reason for that is, well, there are a few reasons, but when you make a shelf-stable food, you're losing some of the taste condoning qualities of volatile organic compounds

that are best when fresh. one of the reasons why fresh food is so much, tends to be so much tastier than preserved food, canned food. And so to compensate, manufacturers will often add sodium to these products. And I mean, I think that that's a big problem. We tend not to under-consume sodium. Most Americans are consuming lots and lots of sodium, but only because they're consuming lots and lots of these ultra-processed products. But when you take those products out, it's important to realize that only 11% of the sodium that people consume every day come from their own salt shakers,

come from the salt that they add to recipes that they're making, for example. And so for people who are working to optimize their diets, which I know is a significant portion of the people who listen to this show, it becomes then a question of like, where are you getting your salt from? Because sodium is a macromineral. We need it for good health. Especially, you know, as you get older, a lot of people,

a lot of older adults suffer from hyponotremia. They're not getting enough sodium. And sodium is really important for nerve signal transduction, really important for maintaining healthy blood volume. If you sweat regularly, which I do because I love using saunas, I exercise fairly regularly, you need to actually increase the amount of sodium that you're consuming. Also, if you are on a low carbohydrate diet, you tend to require more sodium. A lot of people that are transitioning to a low carb diet for the first time will experience what's called the low carb flu, which can be mitigated by including more sodium into one's diet. So I think that salt is a really important,

well, sodium is an important nutrient. And then from a culinary standpoint, I think salt is just, it's, it's the easiest way to take an ingredient and turn it into food. You know what I'm saying? Like, if you have a ribby, for example, it's not a steak until you add salt to it. It's when you have vegetables, some of the incredibly healthful, life-supportive vegetables in the produce section of the supermarket. If you're not adding salt and seasoning those vegetables well, you're not going to be able to convince your kids to eat them. You're not going to enjoy eating them. I actually think, this is my own hypothesis, but this is one of the reasons why so many people are now adopting these carnivore diets, because these are people who as children just

didn't have well-seasoned vegetables. And I was lucky. I grew up. My mother was really good. I mean, she loved, you know, seasoning vegetables. She would throw salt, garlic, pepper. We didn't use a lot of butter in my house growing up because my mom, she was big on the vegetable oil and the margarins and stuff like that because she was actually afraid of heart disease. So I grew up eating those kinds of fake fats. But yeah, I mean, I think salt is an incredibly important, um, calling. staple to elevate the quality of your food. In the book, I talk about the different kinds of salt. You have fine salt, coarse salt, and flake salt. Flake salt to me is something that if you don't have it in your kitchen, it's one of the easiest ways to elevate the quality of your food to

restaurant quality. It's super inexpensive. But just finishing your dishes with a little bit of flake salt to me is like one of the best, one of the best finishing moves to impress guests, friends, family. It's really, really, really important. So yeah, sodium was one of those things that I think people misunderstand. There was, there's, there's been a number of studies that have come out showing that sodium's impact. So with regard to the, to the health aspect of sodium, there is a small portion of the population that is sodium sensitive. Those people tend to be in the minority. I bet it's, I think it's about 25%. Obviously, people, with hypertension, the proportion isn't going to be a bit higher. But most people are not

responsive to sodium from the standpoint of their blood pressure. And I think that's really, really important. That for most people, sodium doesn't really play, doesn't really have an impact in terms of your blood pressure. Other things do. So we were talking about added sugar. Right. Added sugar plays a huge role in, I think, the hypertension epidemic. There was one study that found that one single sugar sweetened beverage raised subjects systolic blood pressure for two hours after ingestion. And it was actually the same amount of sugar

in that beverage as people are consuming all day, every day on average. Even fructose, like just straight up fruit juice, just straight up orange juice. If somebody's starting every morning off with orange juice, we had Dr. Richard Johnson on the podcast, and he's got a new book out, and he was the researcher that really understood

the link between, you know, uric acid and why it got so important and led to David Perlmutter's book and other people's books that are out there. He's done a lot of studies and in the space of hypertension. And originally, of course, you know, talking about concentrated salt being an issue for people. And again, putting in the caveat that most of it's going to come from the food that we get outside, the processed food, the restaurants, the other stuff, people that add salt to it. But he actually found and ended up going because, you know, he's a nephrologist, Kiddy doctor, can't up going from just salt to now looking at when you have concentrated forms of fructose, how that impacts hypertension and patients and was able to, with concentrated

sorts of fructose in mice and later seeing in observational studies with, you know, human beings, that you can induce high blood pressure just by giving people like strong amounts of fructose in their diet. Wow. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's not surprising. When you feed somebody a huge bolus of sugar, it stimulates their sympathetic nervous system, which is like their fight or flight response, which is like, you know, your blood pressure increases. So I think that that's a bigger problem. And obviously, refined grains play a role there as well because refined grains break down almost instantly to sugar, whether or not it appears like sugar. It biologically is no different. And so with regard to sodium, I think it's the hype is, is the, the danger signal is definitely overblown. Now, the consumption of potassium also plays a role in helping balance out the effects that the effect that sodium has on your blood pressure.

So making sure that you're eating a healthy diet. I think researchers believe that we used to consume about four times as much potassium as hunter-gatherers as we do now. And potassium could be found in fruits and vegetables are loaded with potassium, but also most people aren't aware, but wild salmon and beef are actually very good sources of potassium, much higher in terms of their potassium content than their natural sodium content. So making sure that you're getting potassium on a daily basis, I think is really helpful. and again, cutting out the ultra-processed foods because this advice to stop adding salt to your food

is just completely misguided. It's really bad advice because people are just, they're making their food more bland. Some of the most healthy foods in the supermarket are simply not palatable without the addition of salt. And the number one source of dietary sodium in the American diet, you would think that it would be like processed meat or canned foods.

It's not. It's bread and rolls. But when was the last time you heard a dietitian tell you to avoid bread and rolls, right, to get your blood pressure and check? You'll never hear that, right? They say, limit your salt intake. And so what do most people do? They stop using, they shun the salt shaker.

It's so misguided. It's so backwards. I want to go back to that post that I had reference. You know, we're interweaving, why do I feel shed you all the time on top of the pack of the new book and kind of highlighting out different things in both sides? that contribute to people not feeling great and what we do to optimize. So I want to shift off of food topics for a second.

And I'm going to read you back out the list and give me a couple of those that you might just want to go through a quick rant on. Okay? How's that sound? Yeah, let's do it. Okay, so we talked about ultra-processed foods. That was number one.

Zero exercise, sitting all day, poor posture, too much alcohol. We talked about the caffeine one, too much caffeine. Sun plus nature deprived, crappy sleep, and overuse, I'm guessing, of social media. You just have social media, but I'm guessing you mean overhears of social media.

Give me one of those that you might want to toss out a little rant on. Oh, man. Well, I think sitting all day is a big problem. When you're sedentary for an extended period of time, blood literally drains from your brain. I mean, just think about it that way. Like you're sitting, your brain is at the top of your body, right? Blood literally drains.

And by just integrating a little bit of movement, you help re-perfuse the brain for all intents and purposes. And all it takes is just a few minutes of walking around. If you're stuck at a desk for every half an hour of seated time, go up and walk around for two minutes. That's literally all it takes. I anecdotally, I tend to find myself prone to headaches when I'm sitting for an extended period of time. But we know that the brain thrives when the body is moving and that it suffers when we are, when we're sitting all day. I mean, it's like blood, our bodies literally serve in effect as a pump to get blood up to the brain, right?

I mean, yeah, we have our heart, but the brain is affected by what goes on down below. There was a really interesting study that came out a few years ago. It was fascinating. That found that just being underwater with your head out, that the pressure that being underwater puts on your body increased cerebral profusion by about 14% or something like that. like that. So movement is so key, right? And, and I think that's one of the major reasons why people tend to feel crappy today is that they're, they're just overly sedentary. I mean, we know that when you exercise, and by the way, there's, there are different kinds of movement. There's exercise, which underneath the umbrella of exercise, you've got your anaerobic and your aerobic exercise,

which we could break apart. But then non-exercise physical activity, I think, is probably the most important because it's it's just the daily movements that we do all day that we don't necessarily count as exercise but that plays such a huge role in terms of fostering metabolic health keeping fresh blood oxygen nutrients flowing up to the brain and that can be anything from dancing to taking the stairs to going on a walk to I mean technically even tapping your foot is non-exercise. Fidgeting, for example, is non-exercise physical activity, doing chores around the house, laundry, chasing your cat, which I do, you know, sometimes. All of these play an important role. And then exercise, we know anaerobic exercise, whether it's weight training or high-intensity

interval training, really important for gaining, for correcting metabolic illness, for becoming more resilient for improving cardiorespiratory fitness, which is all so related to living a longer life with greater health span. Aerobic exercise for, again, cardiorespiratory fitness plays an important role in reducing risk of early mortality. So, yeah, being as active as you can, right? And for me, my level of high intensity, quote unquote, exercise can be different. from yours, right? Because I've been working out, for example, my whole life. I don't necessarily

look like it, but I've been working out for 25 years at this point. So what's high intensity for me is going to be different than what it is for you. So we can't compare, you know, from individual to individual and, and, and make those sorts of comparisons. But as long as you're giving it your best and doing the best that you can for you, giving your fitness levels, giving your age, giving your ability, whatever constructs and constraints that you have in your life, you have to do that. Because that's, I think, I mean, when it comes to the brain, exercise is medicine.