Dhru Purohit Show - Top Food Hacks to Supercharge Your Health with Max Lugavere

Episode Date: March 24, 2022

This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers and InsideTracker. 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.  Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru talks with his good friend Max Lugavere about streamlining your health so you can get back to feeling great.  Max Lugavere is a health and science journalist and the author of the New York Times bestselling book Genius Foods: Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain for Life, now published in 10 languages around the globe. His sophomore book, also a best-seller, is called The Genius Life: Heal Your Mind, Strengthen Your Body, and Become Extraordinary. His upcoming cookbook, Genius Kitchen, hits shelves on March 29. Max is the host of a #1 iTunes health and wellness podcast, called The Genius Life. In this episode, we dive into:  -The best time to eat dessert (5:23) -Understanding sugar alcohols (10:22) -Max’s approach to dairy consumption (16:30) -The benefits of vitamin K2 (20:45) -The relationship between full-fat dairy consumption and metabolic health (22:13) -How to make coffee healthier (34:28)  -The benefits of saturated fat and how much value we should place on LDL levels (43:24)  -How salt can positively impact your health (51:41)  -Max’s approach to fasting (1:00:31)  -The power of movement and exercise for brain health (1:09:01) -Max’s favorite recipes from his book (1:23:02)   For more on Max Lugavere, 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 BiOptimizers and InsideTracker. Magnesium Breakthrough from BiOptimizers really stands out from the other magnesium supplements out there. It contains 7 different forms of magnesium, which all have different functions in the body. There isn't anything else like it on the market. BiOptimizers is offering my community 10% off, just head over to magbreakthrough.com/dhru, with code DHRU10. 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So if you're just saying saturated fat is bad, to somebody who actually knows what they're talking about, you don't sound like you know what you're talking about. Welcome to the Drew Perot podcast. Each week, we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. Today, my guest is my dear friend, Max Lugavir. Max is a filmmaker, TV personality, and health and science journalist. He's most notably known for his authoring of the New York Times Best Best, selling book, Genius Food. Become smarter, happier, and more productive while protecting your brain for life. If there was an ideal guest for this podcast to talk about nutrition, it would be

Max. Max knows so much about the body and the brain. And today we have him back on the podcast to celebrate his new book, Genius Kitchen, where he dives deep into 100 easy and delicious recipes to make your brain sharp and strong and taste buds happy. We're not, talking recipes necessarily on here, but we are talking nutrition, and Max shines when it comes to the topic of nutrition. I think you're going to enjoy today's episode. Stay tuned. So if I had to pick one supplement that's made the biggest difference in my overall health, it would have to be magnesium. This super mineral is needed for over 400 different enzyme reactions in your body, and this is the thing because you know I'm obsessed with sleep, it's so critical for your

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Just head over to magbreakthrough.com backslash Drew with the code Drew 10. that's M-A-G-B-R-E-A-K-T-H-R-O-U-G-H dot com backslash Drew D-H-R-U with the code Drew-T-R-U-10, and get your bio-optimizers magnesium breakthrough today. So over the years, I've experimented with every different type of eating approach in the book. Raw foodist, vegan, vegetarian, meat eater, you name it, I've tried it. And the truth is, at first, I felt pretty darn good on all of them until one day I didn't. The common denominator for all these diets is the fact that they're made up of mostly whole foods and free from processed foods, which will do anybody good.

But after some time had passed, I still felt like I wasn't personally thriving. I was dealing with some lingering gut issues, endotoxemia, and acne breakouts, and nutritional deficiencies in some cases. Through a bunch of trial and error, I found that, following one specific eating style wasn't the answer for me, and maybe it hasn't been the answer for you either. In my opinion, I think technology can be a critical part in the solution in helping us figure out what foods and dietary approach is best suited for our own unique makeup. That's why I was super excited when I heard about Inside Tracker. Inside Tracker helps take the guesswork out of living optimally and creates a nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle plan

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That's D-H-R-U to get your discount code and try it for yourself today. That's inside tracker.com slash dh-R-U for 20% off. The link is in the show notes. Definitely check it out. Today we're talking about food. got a new cookbook out. Let's talk about that. And on the topic of sugar, do you have any dessert, quote unquote, dessert style recipes? And what's your approach for sweet things in your own life? If you're not eating a lot of processed foods that have these things in them, not that you don't

occasionally partake in some of this stuff. What's your approach to things when it comes to that dessert category? I think it's really important to have planned to indulge. And I think to incorporate planned indulgences into your life. But the problem, The problem is today, I think we're indulging at every turn. Like, we're eating cereal for breakfast, which is essentially a form of dessert, right? Most granola is a form of dessert. So we're doing that. We're eating granola bars or other energy bars throughout the day that are essentially, again, just desserts with fancy packaging on it. And then, of course, after dinner, we tend to want our dessert dessert, and that's when we eat that. So we're just, I think we're overdoing it. That's clear. there should be room in the diet for sweets and for indulgences and things like that. And so for me, there are a few, I don't want to say rules, but I guess guidelines that I like to abide by. Let's break them down. Yeah. So the best time, the best time to eat any kind of concentrated source of starch or even something with added sugar, whether it's a piece of cake or whatever,

is going to be after some kind of activity. Ideally, a workout. Because after a workout, after you've engaged your muscles, you benefit from something called insulin-independent glucose uptake. So typically, when you consume a source of carbohydrates that breaks down into glucose, you see a rise in your blood glucose. And as a result, your pancreas then secretes insulin, whose job it is to get that sugar out of your blood, right, to bring you back to homeostasis. So it shuttles then that sugar into your musculature, into your liver cells. and so insulin is it's a hormone.

There's nothing bad about it, but a lot of us today have chronically elevated levels of insulin, which leads over time to chronically elevated levels of blood sugar. When you consume sugar source in the post-workout setting, your muscles basically become a sponge for sugar. So when a cell meets the hormone insulin, receptors make their way up to the surface of the cell. These are called glute four receptors,

and this is what allows glucose to enter the cell. And the way it works is sort of like a lock and key scenario. Exercise causes those glute four receptors channels to make their way up to the cell surface without the use of insulin. So you end up clearing that glucose from your blood and requiring less insulin to, to do the job, which all things considered is thought to be a beneficial, a beneficial, I guess,

consequence of exercise because you're doing more with less in the body. So you're becoming a more efficient, you're more efficient due to exercise at partitioning that onslaught of energy. So that's why later in the day after a workout, I think it's ideal to, to ingest, that indulgence, right? I've talked about what's called exercise snacking. So it doesn't have to be like an hour and a half long workout. You could just do some like air squats. Now that's if you're like really, if you're if you're really crazy, right? You don't have to do that. I don't picture, I don't picture too many people listening to this doing air squats before, before their, before their nightly dessert or whatever it happens to be. But that's where just going on a walk

after dinner can be really useful. Studies have shown that going on the, just going on a brief walk around the block reduces post-pranthial blood sugar, which all things considered, I think, is a positive thing. You can also utilize different compounds to help towards the same goal, like acetic acid or vinegar is a great means of reducing the blood sugar spike after you consume starches because they disrupt enzymes that break down the starches. Also, cinnamon has well-documented anti-hyperglycemic effects. So these are all, I think, really useful tools for people to have. But indulging every now and then, I think, is really important. It's really great. When I do, I use sweeteners that don't provide any added sugar and don't have any calories. So I personally

am a big fan of monk fruit. I'm a big fan of stevia. Stevia can have an aftertaste. Actually, so can monk fruit. And that's why you'll tend to see both combined with a sugar alcohol sometimes like arithritol. Arithratol is a sugar alcohol. People tend to be afraid of sugar alcohols because some of them can really upset your stomach and drive symptoms like gas, diarrhea, bloating, things that nobody wants. In fact, this is one of the reasons why prunes have such a well-known laxative effect because they're loaded, their natural source of a certain sugar alcohol.

I believe it's sorbitol. So you consume too much of that and you're going to the bathroom like nonstop. but erytheratol is different because it's fully absorbed in the small intestine so it doesn't draw water into the gut, it doesn't get fermented by gut bacteria, and you end up peeing it out. So erythritol, I find to be actually very well tolerated. Some people say that they don't tolerate it as well, which surprises me, because generally I find it to be very well tolerated and just, you know, the pharmacokinetics of it, it gets fully absorbed. So it's, I think, very unlikely to drive GI offset. And then there's another newer

sweetener on the market now that provides no calories called allulose, which I think is also pretty decent as well. I know the doctors at our clinic, they're, especially if people have like a long history of like gut issues or on antibiotics a lot as a kid or other stuff like that, they'll be cautious with a lot of the sugar alcohols because, again, if you have a sensitive stomach, you're going to have challenges anyway. I find xylitol is more of an issue for people than erythratol, but I'm one of those people that I don't do well with sugar. With the rhythmitol? With all sugar, pretty much all sugar alcohols. Wow. I just noticed my stomach's a little bit rumbly, but again, this goes back to processed foods, which even health foods are a part of that.

I think there was a no-sugar coffee mixer, like you add it to coffee. I don't want to call it out by name. And the company's a great company, and I was drinking it every morning. And it has xylitol in there, right? It doesn't have arithyrtol in it. But also as monk fruit, Steve yet, taste amazing, right? Taste amazing. But I was noticing for me, after a period of time, there was a part of my hand that was getting like really dry. And like my skin started getting dry, like the way that I used to before I like cleaned up my diet. And so I was talking to my functional medicine practitioner, they were like, I see this a lot with people who have, you know, sensitive stomachs if they're consuming a lot of sugar alcohols like xylitol. I was like,

there's this thing that I drink every single morning and I've drinking it for the last year and a half. It has xylitol. And he's like, look, just do a simple challenge. Just stop having that. See what happens. Give at least like, you know, 14 days. Cut it out. Didn't add anything else, remove anything, just natural variation in my diet. And that dryness started to go away. So again, everybody's different. And in general, this goes back to your first. point where, you know, chances are you're not going to do, overdo even sugar alcohols if the base of your diet is a lot of these is just basically whole foods and not a lot of processed foods that you're including in the mix. Yeah, absolutely. And you bring up an amazing

point that everybody's different. There's no one size fits all diet. We all react to foods differently. And so I think that that's a really important, really important part of the equation. There was, you know, there's, there's actually, uh, this push now towards like plant-based sugar-free ice creams. Well, I guess there's a push towards a lot of different things, you know, plant-based this and sugar-free that. But, but to add my own anecdote to the mix, I would typically, when I would want to, when I would want to have like an ice cream indulgence, right? Yeah. I would go and I would buy these sugar-free plant-based ice creams, coconut, usually coconut milk-based, sugar-free, usually have a lot of the sugar alcohols in it,

which I typically do pretty well with, but, you know, there's also like a combination effect that could occur, right? Totally. Like maybe it's the MCTs in the coconut milk-based ice cream combining with the urethal that's like leading to an upset stomach for some. So for me, I would buy these, like, these ice creams. And I would find that I could have a little bit, but if I had too much, my stomach would just be a disaster, right? And so lately, I've, I've been experimenting with just like regular,

and also like the ingredients lists on these ice creams are massive. Not that the number of ingredients in a product has any bearing on how good or bad for you a product is, but I think we can all agree that the more ingredients a product has, the more processed it tends to be, right? Yeah. So I made a switch. I was like, okay, how am I going to feel if I just eat like regular ice cream? like, God forbid, dreaded regular ice cream, right? And so I went to the supermarket and I bought like some just regular ice cream with like whatever the four or five ingredients is that it takes to make regular ice cream, right? Right, whole milk, cream, sugar, eggs.

Yeah, yeah. Maybe a little bit of salt. And because I'm not lactose intolerant. I generally like to be deliberate with my dairy consumption. Dairy is something that actually my views on that are evolving. Yeah, we'd love to talk about that. But yeah, we'll talk about that. But just straight up regular ice cream, I ended up feeling a lot better afterwards than I would

with these like more processed fake ice creams that purport to be healthier than regular ice cream, right? Totally. But in actuality, I found that I felt I was actually not prone to digestive discomfort after eating even a little bit too much maybe of regular ice cream. So I think that's an important experiment. And part of the larger aspect of when we reduce. the number of total ingredients, not that that's an automatic reason to discount a product, when we reduce the total number of processing, total number of steps that go into something,

even if we think of ourselves as somebody who eats fairly healthy, we could also see a lot of the same benefits that we're telling people who are traditionally eating extremely processed foods. And especially when it comes to some of these areas where, again, and they're just creeping in our diet more so, you know, when it comes to like the processed, quote-unquote, whole foods that we're getting exposed to. 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 kefer 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 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 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 bioavailable source of protein,

concentrated with essential amino acids, and in particular, lucine, 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 whey protein. Now, I'm not lactose intolerant,

And I do acknowledge that 75% of a global adult population is lactose intolerance. 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.

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, um, with, with, just whey protein. I mean, one of my favorite faux ice creams involves just way protein and 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 cup of Greek yogurt, and let's just say fat-free, right, that 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 K-2 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 K-2. You get about 80s. 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 K one deficiency is pretty, very much. rare. But vitamin K2, people tend to underconsume. And it has different physiologic effects in the body. It helps maintain calcium homostasis. 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 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. 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 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's 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 lipid, 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 sphingomylumylin, 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 looked 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, 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 of 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 in moderation like I'll consume like zero to two servings of 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 probably better to put like, it's probably better to stick with dairy components, dairy products that still have intact milk fat globule membrane because of all the benefits that that provides. Yeah, super interesting as we just continue to learn more how people's own individual experimentation, you know, changes. Like, I want to like weigh so badly.

It tastes good. There's so many great qualities that are out there, like goat way, sheep's wet, 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. Like I went from being on like acutane, different jail, 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 have 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. And 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 kefer 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, you know, 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 way to some degree. But more like straight up, like dairy or heavy cream is what you've been trying.

Yeah. Yeah, that's sort of what I started to like reintegrate. I, 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. And I'm not a, I'm not anti-collestrel 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 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 a flag in the ground, exactly. So for me, I don't want to cause an underemptuant. do elevation of my LDL levels when when there's no really benefit in doing so. We know that saturated, certain saturated fats, and I talk about this in the book, do 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 people. I'm definitely one of those people. Okay. Yeah. So, and this is interesting because I recently brought coffee back into my diet, 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. Yeah. 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.

Yeah. 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 to cause this like this elevation of of LDL. So I'm getting this essentially getting the same

product, the same end product, which is like a creamy, indulgent, unctuous cup of coffee, right? 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. history of high cholesterol or other stuff, or just looking at any sort of markers that are there. How from where you get your lives done? Yeah, I mean, I try to do it.

I try to do it once a year. 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 make me, 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 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 were you having before and how does I compare it 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?

Well, I know that I was in my coffee 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, 400, 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 reset button. And then I brought it back at a much lower dose and I try to the best of my ability to drink it 45 minutes after I wake up, to an hour after I wake up. So 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 or 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 yeah 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, 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 um but so yeah so so i brought it back and also uh 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 um coffee has a compound in it called cafe stall which is sort of a double-edged sword it's a it's a 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. French press and use a pour over or a coffee machine or whatever, just something that 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 pourover 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, I'm not making it up.

It's a compound in 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 cafe 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 PCSK9 inhibitor. There's a new class of cholesterol lowering drugs on the market that are called PCSK9 inhibitors. So most people are familiar with statins, statins reduce.

the ability of your liver to synthesize cholesterol. But PCSK9 inhibitors, the way they work is they increase, by inhibiting this protein, PCSK9, 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 of the more, 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 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 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 explain that, right? Sure. And this is a pretty, pretty significant mechanism. Pretty plausible.

How much you think? I mean, 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 problems, processed foods and might have a tendency to lean towards higher LDL, would you, 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, 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 steward.

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 stearic acid, for example, has a neutral effect on lipids like LDL. And in fact, could actually potentially play a positive role for health that's been shown to 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 overdue. doing 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.

Gee is a derivative of butter. Gea 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 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 be too concerned.

I'll caveat that by saying I'm not a medical doctor. But I personally would not be, you know, 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.

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. Yeah. And just more of what we can expect when we look at the patient as a whole and just follow all the rules inside of precision medicine. What you described is basically me.

My LDL was much higher than that, you know, but all my other things. I even went in just because family history, other stuff, being South Asian, there's a lot of cardiovascular disease in that category, mostly because of sedentary lifestyle, a lot of fried food, a lot of sugar, other things, those are not in there. But I even got on top of what the tests you mentioned, I went and got a calcium score test just to make sure, like, all was good because my LDL was really high, but still hedging our bets, and because of some other stuff, I had an expert on the podcast who, um, microbiologist who was talking about in some people who have had challenging gut health histories, which I

was on a lot of antibiotics as a kid, my gut got messed up, um, high amounts of concentrated saturated fat, concentrated, like in one go, like butter, MCT, that sort of thing. Yeah, coconut oil, yeah. Coconut oil, in my case. I was consuming a lot of coconut oil. I was cooking with coconut, a lot of oil. Right. that can also have an endotoxemia reaction inside the body,

where you get all this, you can get leakage into the bloodstream and bacteria and other stuff and things like that. And so just hedging took out a lot of that sort of added fat that you talk about in my diet out, went back to just whole foods. And in my particular case, I did remove grass-fed beef because I noticed that I was still having some challenges with it. And I love grassbread beef.

It tastes great. And it was one of those things that I was weighing out. Like, should I do it? Well, you could do leaner. I mean, a beef tenderloin is of, like, most people don't know about tenderloin. Like, there are, I did an Instagram post on just breaking down the different beef cuts. There are leaner cuts out there. Yeah.

And I'm not saying that you need to eat beef. Sure. I know that I talk a lot about it because I think it's a very nutrient dense food. You don't need it. But there are like lean options. I got to try that. I got to definitely try that. Yeah.

And anyways. you know, things started heading in the right direction. I'm due for a test next week, so I'll give you an update and let you know. Yeah. But my calcium score test came back, you know, is zero, which means that there's no calcium plaque buildup that's there. My CRP, everything else was in a great range. So, again, it's all about looking at the totality of everything that's there.

And but being willing to question certain stuff if you see that your labs are heading not in the right direction. Let's pivot for a second. 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 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 macro mineral. We need it for good health.

especially, you know, as you get older, a lot of people, a lot of older adults suffer from hyponatremia. 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, we'll 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 the easiest way to take an ingredient and turn it into food. You know what I'm saying? Like if you have a rabbi, 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

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 margarons 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 culinary 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 think it's about 25%. Obviously people with hypertension, the proportion is 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 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, 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 he's a nephrologist, a kitty doctor. He ended 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 human beings, that you can induce high blood. pressure just by giving people like strong amounts of of a 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 your your your blood pressure increases. So I think that that's a bigger problem and 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 is no different. And so with regard to sodium, I think it's the hype is,

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, in 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. So backwards. You know, on the topic of like ultra-processed foods, there's also the complete opponent of just eating a eating just throughout the day, literally morning to evening, eating just all the time, you know, grazing all the time, eating all the time, just continuously eating. Where does fasting playing for you and what do you follow and do you ever go about longer periods of, of a fast, uh, to give your system a break? Yeah, really good question. I generally do a sort of mild intermittent and fasting, I guess, protocol where I try not to eat for the first two hours of my morning, with the exception of, I guess, coffee in there, electrolytes, maybe some heavy cream now in my coffee.

And heavy cream is fine. I mean, coffee and cream both technically break a fast, but the cream has no protein, no sugar in it. So it's some of the mechanisms that we're attempting to, some of the strings that we're attempting to pull with fasting, like prolonged mTOR inhibition or spending more time in a low insulin state. Heavy cream coffee are not going to perturb that. So I don't really consider either of those as breaking my fast, so to speak. But when it comes to food, I generally will have my first meal of the day at about 1030 to 1130 every day, depending on sort of what my circumstances, I generally like to go into meetings and if I have to give a presentation, I like to do that in a

fasted state just because I feel more alert. I also like to exercise while fasted. That's just my personal preference. So I'll typically work out in the morning and then right after that, I'll go and I'll get some, I'll break my fast with my first meal of the day. And generally, I'm prioritizing protein. This concept of an anabolic window has been sort of debunked over the past couple of years, but if you're in a fasted state and you exercise, you do really want to make sure that you're getting protein, like a good 30 to 40 grams of protein soon after your workout. And so that's generally what I'll do. So I'll go and I'll, you know, optimize for protein, have some grilled veggies, maybe a salad, which is what I had today.

And then at the latter end of the day, I try to curtail my food consumption to two to three hours before bed, sometimes longer, but it's just impractical for me because I like, I enjoy having dinner with my brothers, friends, whenever I have the opportunity. So I think being social is really important. And if we're being dogmatic about fasting and we're foregoing social opportunities, I don't think that we're doing it. I don't think that's it, you know. But I do try to curtail my food consumption to two to three hours before bed. The research that I've seen that seems to be coming out And granted, these are small studies and they primarily utilize men. So they're not done typically in women, unfortunately, especially premenopausal women.

They tend to use postmenopausal women so they can control for the monthly rhythm and stuff like that. But with the research that has been done, clinical trials that have been done, we can see that even when controlling for calories. So even when not trying to push these subjects into a calorie deficit so that they lose weight, we still see that there's an improvement in various cardiometabolic features like blood glucose regulation, blood pressure, and the like. So from that standpoint, I think it's good to eat an earlier dinner. From the standpoint of metabolic health. From the standpoint of weight loss, I mean, I think some people wield intermittent fasting

as like this miracle weight loss formula. I don't think it's that. I think it can provide a means of controlling calories, which for some people, it's going to be very effective and very helpful. So by curtailing your food consumption to 8 to 10 to 12 hours a day, which, by the way, most Americans are consuming the full 16 hours that they're awake, from the moment they wake up until the moment they go to bed,

they're eating, metabolizing some kind of food, right? but what circadian biology is showing us is that aside from the calorie control aspect of it, we seem to see an improvement in various cardiometabolic features when we curtail our food consumption. Also from the standpoint of brain health, I think it's useful. The grandfather of intermittent fasting may as well be Mark Mattson, who is a researcher at the NIH, who for at least a decade at this point has been showing us the potential brain benefits that come from fasting, such as an increase in BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is sort of like a miracle grow protein for the brain.

I don't know if that has necessarily been elucidated in humans yet, but every prevention-minded neurologist that I've spoken to with their patients tends to integrate some kind of intermittent fasting protocol. So yeah, that's that's typically what I do. And I think circadian biology is, you know, there's not a single organ system that's not affected by circadian rhythms in one sense or another. And our eyes are the master time setter for our body because they interact with what's called the super chisomatic nucleus in our hypothalamus, which is, again, sort of like the big bend of our genome. but food plays a role too in activating what are called peripheral clocks. And so we're diurnal creatures.

We're meant to eat during the day. So that's why I think it's important to curtail your food consumption until to a few hours before you go to sleep. Also, for people suffering with digestive discomfort, this is something that I discovered and wrote about Ingenious Kitchen, which I wasn't familiar with before writing the book, but the migrating motor complex, which is this system that gets going after 90 minutes of not eating, that basically serves as a housekeeping wave that flushes debris, bacteria, dead epithelial cells from your stomach, all the way down to the end of your small intestine.

It's a great way to help prevent or even possibly treat SIBO by just not eating, by not snacking too much. And so after I discovered that, that sort of phenomena, it was reason enough for me to think twice before snacking in between meals. So now generally I'll eat when I break my fast in the morning, I'll eat before I go to bed. Maybe I'll have, you know, a piece of fresh fruit and and a protein shake or a cup of Greek Greek yogurt sort of midday. But I now try. I don't always succeed. I don't think that you have to do this every day. But I try to go about four hours in between in between meals and snacks. That's great. It's always nice when somebody walks you through just their approach. Again, that doesn't mean that's going to be yours, but it becomes a little bit more

realistic. And you're like, okay, great, I could do this. Or I could try this and I could see if it works for me. While we start to wind down towards the time that we have over here, I want to go back to that post that I had reference. You know, we're interweaving, why do I feel sheddy 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 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. Yeah, yeah. 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, 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'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 about 14% or something like that. So movement is so key, right? And I think that's one of the major reasons why people tend to feel crappy today, is that 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 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 cardio-resportory 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, exercising, 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, given your ability, the 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. Well said. All right, a couple of random thoughts that I want to get your thoughts on. Let's do it. Okay. The world of nutrition can be kind of confusing for a lot of people. And you do a good job on your Instagram. If you're not

following Max on Instagram, please check them out. Even if you're not, even if you're completely opposed to social media, just sign up and, you know, check out his post. because I think you do a really good job of just breaking things down. And you tackle a lot of topics where one group or another might have very strong opinions on it. Like people telling individuals to be fruit phobic and talking about why we should not fear, you know, having a whole piece of fruit and regularly having fruit in our, you know, diet. Or people attacking things like eggs or, you know, whatever. You do a really good job about it.

Thank you. It means a lot coming from you. You're welcome. You're welcome. So one of the things is it's very easy to get attention for a very strong, strongly held opinion, whatever that might be. So I had an idea which was, I want to start a nonprofit, fund it a little bit. And if anybody writes about nutrition or is advocating one particular diet, and actually you don't advocate a particular diet, but it really feels like this is the right way to approach things. every quarter they have to have, you know, through a third party, their labs uploaded into the system, vetted, you know, it's by a third party.

And again, you know, just like if you're going to have strong opinions on how other people should be, you should be part of the open source database of being able to look at everybody's labs and track them over a period of time. What are the good things about that? What are the bad things about that? Oh, man. Well, nobody's going to do it for one. But I kind of respect, well, actually, I don't know about that because some of the carnivore guys have been pretty transparent about their labs. Oh, there are people that are out there that have done it. I just don't think everybody's done it.

Right. Not everybody's done it. I think that we would then start to argue about like what, what's optimal versus what's not, right? I mean, you'll have vegans showing their labs and maybe their LDL levels are on the floor. And then you've got carnivores and their LDL levels are maybe, you know, higher. I'm sure that both will be in pristine metabolic health otherwise, but then they'll, then, and maybe. Yeah. I think there's a lot of people, it's just human nature.

I think there's a lot of people that talk about getting rich who may not actually have a lot of wealth themselves. There's a lot of people who talk about kindness who may not be the kindness to their own family members that are there. I think it's human nature to talk about something and maybe not always do something. So I just wanted to toss that in. Yeah. I mean, I would share my labs with people. So your game, you're in. I'd be in, yeah.

There's this call for nutrition researchers to disclose in nutrition papers what diets they adhere to in terms of the research. Right. Because we know, as I mentioned earlier, people tend to make their diets, their identities. If you're reading a nutrition paper and it seems to point to poor health outcomes due to animal product consumption, right? And the authors of the paper are all vegan and maybe some of them have authored vegan diet books. Wouldn't you think that that would be important to know when a clinician is reading that paper? Absolutely. But they don't do that. I mean, they'll disclose diet books usually and things like that, but they don't disclose their diet proclivities personally.

So I think that's important. So yeah, going back to your question, I think it could potentially be useful. Although, yeah, I mean, I just don't know. I think that there are still too many unanswered questions, like that people who are like you, inquisitive and like me that know, that are aware of that, right, that might be able to interpret that data with a more open mind. Some might, some, for example, in the plant-based community, might see, still might see somebody like Sean Baker's LDL levels and be like, oh, he's, you know, on the fast track to having a heart attack. And that might, that might support their confirmation bias. So I still worry about that, that the, the problems with interpreting that data were it to get out there and, and, and,

and see a wider audience. Fair enough. All right. Well, keep you posted if I haven't ended up doing it. Are you serious? That's a good, that's a cool idea. That's a good question. Because I also know, too, I've changed my mind over the years. Yeah. I've changed. I was grown up vegetarian. I went vegan. My acne cleared up like a miracle and I thought, oh my gosh, this is the fucking answer. Yeah. And I just kept on that path until I started feeling like my brain wasn't working as good as it was.

And I just felt, and my digestion, which was great for a long time, started acting up again towards the end when I was eating a lot of, you know, quinoa and brown rice and these other types of foods in my, in my, in my, diet and then found out the world of functional medicine connected with some great doctors, ran my omega quant test, you know, still like one of my top tests for anybody, you know, you could do it home and look at your omega-6 to omega-3 to omega-6 ratio. Mine was completely off. Wow. And I was like, I think I got to start eating fish. And I felt better within weeks. And like I felt like my brain just turned on again. And I also cut out a lot of grains at the same time. So that played a role too. So I just know that I've changed my mind over a period of time. And I think that this goes in my second question, you know, in this world that we live in, well, it's a statement

rather, and I want your hot tape on it. This world that we live in, polarization often gets a bad rap, right? Like, things are so polarized. Things are so polarized in social media and other things like that. And I'm not going to say that polarization is, there are parts of it, especially when it comes with unkindness, accusations, you know, whatever it might be. But largely, I think polarization, a lot of different opinions and people doing a lot of different things, I think it's actually a good thing. And I think the good thing that comes from that is that people are all trying to share and put out their idea of what they feel is the best way possible. And I think it's access to more information that kind of sifts through it. And by the way, there's no going backwards. Like,

what is the answer to polarization? Everybody has the same opinion and looks at it. things the same exact way. So you have a hot take on that from the world of nutrition or even broader than that? Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I know that my first, my on-ramp to the health and wellness world was before my mom, it was, it was like books, right? Like written for the lay audience. Like diet books are not meant for an academic audience. And so that was my on-ramp. And then you kind of learn the more time you, the more you marinate in the wellness world, you realize that people are just kind of, you know, we have nutrition data, but nutrition science is really hard to do. And it's left a lot of unanswered questions. And so it's left room, I think,

I think for the better, for people to come and put their sort of spin on things, right? To to lend a bit of philosophy to the conversation, right? Like my, I have a sort of, I have like the data when it comes to nutrition, right? But I also am guided by my philosophy of what it means to eat properly today and the kinds of companies that I want to support with my dollar, right? So, and so, and I know that, you know, for example, Dr. Hyman has a, has a philosophy that permeates his work. Dr. Gundry has, has a philosophy that permeates his work. A lot of, a lot of physicians do that have written that have written books and and I think that the plurality of voices I'm grateful for it I think that that's a net positive it's just more tools more

information more points of entry and access for your average person to engage with these topics and then hopefully you know hopefully I know that Dr. Hyman does it so well but hopefully prominent voices are are responsible enough to then implore their audiences to do their own kind of inquiry and to iterate and to tinker. I know that one of my favorite parts of personally, one of my favorite passages of Genius Foods, which was my first book, is actually the closing thoughts, a little couple of paragraphs that I wrote at the end of the book, final thoughts, where I talk about the fact that like, this is everything that I believe to be true, but ultimately, science is evolving, right? It's not this end all, be all indicator of truth, right? It's a,

process of asking questions and finding answers. And what we accept to be true today might be disproven five years from now. So I think that people really need to, I think it's great that we have all these different voices out there and that some are polarizing, some are not. As long as we can communicate respectfully with one another and with an open mind and be kind to one another, I think that that public health as a whole is going to benefit. There are some people in the space, unfortunately, that are, I see as being the bad apples who are polarizing, but then they're also vitriolic and they're abrasive. And I don't appreciate those personalities.

Kindness and respect. That has to be the foundation. The foundation. Yeah. That's, I mean, that's something that you exude. You exude both of those qualities. And that's why I think you're so great at what you do, among many other reasons. I'm so glad that your brain is now working at 100% capacity because we need your we need your

brain drew and we need all the brains of the people that are listening as well yeah uh brother two recipes from the new book that you think are going to be you know hits for the audience just just talk about them and then uh let's uh let's chat about you know how people can find the the book and and but give us two two recipes that you think that really stand out two recipes well Okay, so one of my favorite recipes in the book is a plant-based, because I do actually have some plant-based recipes in the book. It's a plant-based mac and cheese using carrot noodles. It's really good. So it's a carrot noodle.

We use like a spiralizer-based vegan mac and cheese, so there's no dairy in it. And it's just really damn tasty, like really savory and delicious. Wow. And what's like the, what's like the base of the cheese? Is it like nuts? It's a nutritional based, nutritional yeast based cheese. And then we've got some, I mean, I utilize nuts in the book. It's really good.

It actually reminds me of another one of my favorite recipes is a Brazil nut pesto with kelp noodles. So I'm a huge fan of pesto, which is usually made with pine nuts. And pestos usually also placed on. on like pasta, like wheat-based pasta. But this is actually a recipe that I created. It's out of this world delicious, but it also purposefully supports thyroid health. Kelp noodles are an amazing source of iodine,

and Brazil nuts are one of the top sources of selenium. So it's like the best pesto you've ever had, which you can use on anything, but this recipe, we combine it with kelp noodles. And it's just really good. I mean, it charges you up. It just like charges your body up, especially for people that that don't regularly consume selenium and iodine, which are important

nutrients for thyroid hormone production. So there's that. There's a few different like quote unquote pasta dishes in the book. The whole book is gluten-free, grain-free, minimal dairy in the book, although I do utilize in a handful of recipes, some ghee butter just for the flavor profile. There's another recipe in the book. Sorry, I'm like, you asked for two, but there's a, Bacalao recipe.

Bacala. Have you ever had Bacalao? It's a Portuguese dish. No, I have not. Yeah, it's salted codfish. It's amazing. It's actually one of my, it's probably my favorite recipe in the book

because it's a recipe that my mom used to make for me. And we're not Portuguese, but for some reason, my mom got into making this recipe for me. And I'm the only person in my family that ate fish, so she would make it expressly for me. And I would just, like, go to town on it. I would love when she would make this for me.

so freaking good and very you know all healthy fats and baccalaus is salted codfish it's it can easily be found at most supermarkets and it's um it's flaky and salty and just and loaded with protein so delicious and uh and then and then there's like a dessert there's a bunch of desserts but um but in particular i have this dessert dish that it's uh it's dark chocolate covered fresh blueberries So I provide a show people how to basically melt down chocolate And you go and you get fresh blueberries from the store I've had never had these before like this is a this is an OG recipe from the genius kitchen But it's it combines two of my favorite genius foods blueberries and dark chocolate

And really easy to make takes about 20 minutes to make it actually takes less than that it takes two minutes to make But you then put the you heat the chocolate down eat the chocolate and then you put you have to put them in the fridge and they come out, kids love them, they're amazing. I've tested the recipe with some friends that have kids. And yeah, it was a staple for me. I mean, I was like, I was like going overboard probably. I was eating it like, I was making this thing like every day. My brothers would come over, my friends would come over.

They'd like they'd want these like chocolate covered blueberries. Because the blueberries explode in your mouth, right? But then they're underneath this like hard, dark chocolate shell. So tasty. I love it, man. Yeah. Those are great. Maybe we can get one, you know, sometimes I know like authors do like,

one recipe. It doesn't have to be one of those, but one recipe we can link to. It can be on your website. We'll include in the show notes. Absolutely. Yeah. People can check out, you know, sample recipe. And the book is out. And what's the website for people to grab the book? Genius Kitchenbook.com. You'll have, find links to all the different stores. If you live abroad, there's a link to book depository, which offers free worldwide shipping. So you can order from a book depository or your favorite bookstore of choice. We've got all the different links at GeniusCitchenbook.com. And, uh, but you know, but you know, Yeah, also it's available at all or should be available at all independent bookstores.

We love supporting local bookshops. It's on Amazon. It's on all the places. So it's pretty easy to find. Amazing. And you got the podcast as well, Genius Life podcast. We're actually recording this out of your studio. It's a great setup and space over there.

And so we'll link to that in show notes. Max, a pleasure. Thanks for jamming out with me. We chatted for about two hours. I felt like we covered a lot of different topics. I really appreciate it. I know. This was awesome.

Always a pleasure. Grateful to call you, not just to call you. collaborator, but one of my best friends. Thank you for bringing you. I just want to go on record saying that. Love you, man. Love you too, brother. Appreciate it. Appreciate it.