Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #39 Max Lugavere Author of Genius Foods

Episode Date: June 25, 2018

We sit down with Max Lugavere author of Genius Foods and break down the impact of diet on cognitive function, the science behind brain foods, and how to optimize your life through nutrition. Check out Max Lugavere's book Genius Foods Max on Instagram Twitter Facebook and YouTube Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on Twitter and on Instagram Get 10% off at Onnit by going to Onnit.com/Podcast              Onnit Twitter         Onnit Instagram

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Max is the author of Genius Foods. Now, I read a lot of books. I enjoy reading a lot of books, and I read a lot of books on diet, but it's very few and far between when a book comes along that not only engages me, but brings a lot of new stuff to the table and really ties things together in a way that is manageable and usable. And Max has done that in Genius Foods. We dive into his book.

We dive into his story, what made him want to learn about health and wellness and why is it so important to him? And I think as with most people in the health and wellness field, there's usually some form of crisis that leads us to want to know more. And I think Max's story is incredible. I know you guys are going to dig this one just as I did. Check it out. On a podcast, Max Lugavere in the house.

Genius Foods. Let's jump right in. Let's do it. So we're getting a little background on Max. Yeah. And we're talking about you being from New York but living in L.A. now. Yeah, yeah. Continue.

Yeah. I'm from New York. I used to live in L.A. I lived in L.A LA for like 10 years. And then I moved back to New York about five years ago now because I'd spent 10 years away from my family. And I discovered maybe seven years ago now that my mom got sick, basically. And that's really motivated a lot of my work. But seven years ago, I moved back from LA to New York to be closer to my mom and my brothers and to kind of get a handle on what was going on with her health. Even though,

I mean, it was a little bit of a sacrifice for me because I had spent most of my 20s in LA. My social life is out there. It's a much healthier city. I always felt pulled to the West Coast even as a kid growing up in New York. And now I'm back in New York predominantly, but I'm spending more and more time in LA. So hopefully trying to make it, you know, make it back out there. And let's, let's take a deeper dive into your mom's health and how you really got started on this. Yeah. I mean, I've been sort of a health and fitness nerd my whole life, but I never really had any professional aspiration, um, in that field. I mean, I, I started college pre-med, but I ended up double majoring in film and psychology. Once I realized that I had a love for storytelling and creativity, I've always been

kind of a music junkie. Also, I've been a cinemaphile. On top of my love for health and nutrition, I was like a really early adopter. In high school, I remember being really into the ketogenic diet. I read a book, this was like 1997 by Lyle McDonald, all about the ketogenic diet, which is like a tome to ketosis, like no, you know, graphs or pictures or anything like that. It was like printed in soft cover, just this really reference dense book. And then my senior thesis in high school, I wrote on creatine. So I've been into this, like I've been in this game for a really long time privately, but then yeah, about seven years ago, I was leaving my job.

My first job out of college, I began working for a TV network that Al Gore co-founded. And it was called Current TV. So I was there sort of as a journalist. I got to work with some of the best storytellers, content creators in the world. And then I left the network to figure out where I was going to go with my career. I started spending more and more time in New York City. And in that sort of window where I was at once, you know, at this really pivotal, critical point in my career, trying to, you know, really kind of like get a handle on how, you know,

how I was going to transition this amazing job that I had for five years into something that was going to be like a more sustainable uh career i um began spending more and more time around my mom and you know she was 58 at the time she was blonde you know like like just she was just a mom and me and my brothers noticed that it seemed suddenly as if talking to her we were talking to a much older person. It was almost as if she had a brain transplant in a way. Her brain's processing speed had greatly downshifted. And she also had a change to her gait, which is the way a person walks. Her stride took on more of a shuffle appearance. And I you know, I had no prior family history of dementia. I didn't know anything about dementia. I didn't know anything about Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, any of the, any of these topics that now I would say, I, you know, I'm an expert in.

Back then I was just a kid trying to figure out what was wrong with his mom. And it led to me going around the country to, you know, the top neurology departments that we have. And ultimately, I found myself in Ohio at the Cleveland Clinic, which is, you know, one of our top medical institutions, right? It's like a cathedral to Western medicine almost. And it was there for the first time that my mom was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease. And that was probably one of the worst weeks of my life. I mean, I, you know, it almost seemed as if the world was caving in on me. I mean, certainly I was afraid for my mom. You know, I didn't know if she was going to die, what this really meant for her in terms of her health. When I started Googling the drugs that she was prescribed, I, you know, I mean,

that made it even worse because the drugs have no disease modifying ability. They're basically just what I've come to call biochemical band-aids at best, right. Um, and then at the same time I was like, shit, I, you know, I'm like 28 also, like I can't really go back to Hollywood now at this point and, uh, pursue what I guess at the time was a relatively fun career. But I found it really difficult to focus on anything but what was going on with my mom. And at a certain point, after that initial trauma subsided, I basically kind of had this lifelong passion for health and nutrition. And I just had a hunch that there had to be something in terms of diet and lifestyle that might be able to help my mom. So immediately, I went to PubMed and I started just searching for stuff. And at first, it was incredibly

overwhelming. But I think in the long run, it was one of the strongest calls to action that I've ever had in my whole life. And despite, you know, obviously it began with my mom and then at a certain point it sort of branched out. You know, I became very interested in the notion of prevention because, you know, as much as I would love to have a cure for my mom, it became abundantly clear to me that these are like any chronic disease. These don't begin overnight. And when talking about Alzheimer's disease, which is the most common form of dementia, you know, this begins in the brain 30 to 40 years before the first symptom. So it became really clear to me that this needed to be something that younger people needed to be talking about. And just personally, now that I have this new risk

factor for the disease, that I had to start being mindful about my choices as it pertained to my brain health. I think you're prototypical millennial in that, to me, intellectual capital is everything. I create music. I'm a person i'm you know really interested in in the full breadth of you know experiencing the full breadth of what life has to offer and the notion of me one day becoming demented i mean it's just a nightmare scenario so um so i started living the life that i was reading you know could potentially protect me against these sorts of diseases. And subjectively, what I noticed is that, you know, the more that I would adhere to this brain healthy diet that I was uncovering, the better my brain actually started to work in the here and now. And that was really interesting to me because, you know, I didn't,

I mean, I've, I guess I've heard the term neuroplasticity. I'd heard it and it was like this nebulous concept to me. Like you can't look in the mirror and see new brain cells sprouting, right? So the notion that diet and lifestyle can actually improve the moment-to-moment functioning of your brain, and especially domains like executive function, which is probably more important to your success as a person than IQ. It was just really incredible. And it actually created a feedback loop where the more I learned and the more that I started

integrating into my own diet and lifestyle, the more reward I got and the more compelled I was to just go further down that rabbit hole and then ultimately to start researching what was happening in my head. And so that kind of is what led to me writing genius foods which is um basically what i consider to be an owner's manual to the to the human brain yeah i've taken a deep dive into it and there's a lot of books that come out and you know they they kind of they kind of make some good points and then there's other parts where you're like meh yeah i guess you know but i mean i'm fucking glued to it it is and i'm not just pumping you up like i i promise you if you're like, meh, yeah, I guess, you know, but I mean, I'm fucking glued to it. It is, and I'm not just pumping you up. Like I promise you, if you're listening to this,

you will not be disappointed. It is an absolutely excellent book. The way you tie it together and the fact that you're not dogmatic about the ketogenic diet, which I'm a huge fan of. I mean, when you talk about your own executive function, your own cognitive capabilities, there has been no dietary intervention I've ever done

that turned my brain on, like truly being in nutritional ketosis and so that's for certain one pathway but also figuring out like when's the right time to have carbs because you're gonna fucking you're human you're gonna eat carbs again you know and what's the right carbs what are the best what are the best practices for that like everything you outline in the book including the breakdown of the superfoods which is really incredible because there's so much that I didn't know, you know, even about olive oil and some of these things that I was like, oh shit, you know, I was eating. We went out to New York, um, with product development to look at some products in New Jersey. And my buddy had lived there for 10 years, uh, in Soho and little Italy in different places.

And he's like, I want to take you to Little Italy. Let's go get some food. And I looked at their olive oil and it was that dark green and it had that spicy flavor. And I was like, this is the shit he's talking about. This is the good olive oil. I love that. This is the whole gamut right here. And it's cool because it, I mean, for me,

like being deep into nutrition and supplements and figuring these things out for myself, a lot of similarities in our paths. My great-grandmother died of Alzheimer's disease. And I remember when I was seven years old, she said, hey, it's Larry, come here. And I gave her a kiss and I was like, I'm Kyle. And I looked at my parents like, why is she calling me Larry? And she said, Larry is her son. You look like him when he was a boy. And was like i mean that just fucked my head up i was

seven years old like how could she think i'm her son who's my great uncle like way older than me you know and um parkinson's ran on that side of the family as well you know they talk about being a prisoner in your own body literally not being able to stop shaking you have no control over anything like you're just locked inside the cage of this meat wagon with zero control it's like well both of those options sound pretty fucked you know and you know i think what started it for me was diving into dr david perlmutter's work you know where they really first started calling these diseases type 3 diabetes. And it just so happens on my mom's side of the family, there's a lot of type two diabetics. So I don't do well with carbohydrates on either

side of the family. And that's not for everybody, but there are so many takeaways from this book, no matter what you're eating on how you can improve your diet and your cognitive function through food, which is so critical. Yeah. So critical. I mean, if you have type 2 diabetes, your risk for developing Alzheimer's disease increases anywhere between two and fourfold. So it's a dramatic increased risk. And just to touch on Parkinson's disease, my mom has Parkinsonian symptoms. And by the time you show your first Parkinson's disease symptom, half of the dopaminergic neurons involved in movement in the substantia nigra region of the brain, which is what the part of the brain affected by Parkinson's disease are already dead. So it becomes, I mean, to me abundantly clear that,

yeah, this is, I mean, we don't know everything about, I mean, we certainly don't know everything about Alzheimer's disease progression, which is the most common neurodegenerative disease prevention, I should say. And we definitely don't know, you know, everything. We're just at the tip of the iceberg in terms of knowing how to prevent Parkinson's disease. But, um, you know, there is really good and interesting research now on the role of gut health in Parkinson's disease, uh, etiology, which to me is like really, really interesting, um, in light of the gut brain axis and the, and the interrelationship between the two. But yeah, it's a man there. I mean, they're horrible diseases, you know, um, I've been in my mom's house and I've found her purse in the fridge, you know, it's, uh, really heartbreaking and it's not something that I

would wish for, for even my worst enemy, you know, I mean, I don't have many enemies, thankfully, but, um, but they're, they're terrible diseases. terrible diseases and you know they say that when you lose somebody to alzheimer's disease you lose them twice because they they forget who you are you know they basically um their memory goes obviously um but then nobody's ever survived parkinson's disease it kills them ultimately so yeah i uh i wrote the book really to be, um, you know, not just, uh, eat more blueberries, eat more salmon, you know, things like that. There's a number of brain books, uh, on the market. But for me, I think what it became really important to, first of all, to under, you know, I'm not like an academic. So for me, I really wanted to learn what the hell was going on in our heads

in relation to our food as best as I could. And I really wanted to get down to like the most granular possible level. And so for me, you know, learning these concepts from the ground up really helped me, I think, paint a picture in the book that you're not going to get from other books. It's not just a rehashing of the same old material. And I think, you know, at the end of the day, it's like people have been told for decades that smoking cigarettes is not good for you, right? But it wasn't until they started putting like the diseased lung photos on the packages of cigarettes that people really started to stop, right? Like that had actually made an impact. so for me i thought that the best way to actually modify the behavior of my readers is to really illustrate how their choices are affecting their

brain health so i mean it goes it you know i mean it ranges from i talk a lot about the value of omega-3s which i'm sure you talk about on the show but um you know many people know that omega-3s are good for the brain but why are they good for the brain? I wanted to know. So for example, there's this property that a healthy and highly functioning brain cell needs to have. It's the property of membrane fluidity. So basically your brain cells, the way they interact with the outside world is through receptors that are allowed to surface basically so that they can hear the messages contained by neurotransmitters. And so you want neuronal membrane fluidity. What you don't want is membrane rigidity, which basically impairs the ability of these receptors to surface, sort of like a buoy, like bobbing up to the

surface of the ocean, right? When membranes behave more fluidly, then the ears of the neurons, these neurotransmitter receptors, are able to more effectively bob up to the surface. And that can help influence your memory, your executive function, your mood, things like that, your cognition. And so research shows that when we eat more omega-3s, actually our membranes behave more fluidly. When we consume more omega-6s, which we're doing, we're we're over consuming omega-6s obviously today um by an order of magnitude those neuronal membranes actually act more rigidly you know potentially impairing the way that our the way that our brains work that's what when people throw on inflammation they think like joint pain but we don't realize like systemic inflammation is literally making these parts of our brain

stiffer yeah exactly so yeah inflammation totally oxid stress, things like that. I mean, trans fats, think about trans fats. Trans fats actually make your brain cell membranes, like when a corpse stiffens, like rigor mortis, they're like the worst things for our brain cell membranes. And actually one of the main reasons why I think trans fat consumption has been associated with reduced memory function in young healthy people. So, I mean, it's those kinds of things that I think today, particularly when we're seeing an ever-increasing diagnosis of ADD and ADHD, that knowing how to best support healthy neurotransmitter function becomes super important. Um, and I actually struggled all throughout my schooling with, uh, you know, impaired attentional control, focus, distraction, things like that. Um, it's one of the reasons why, I don't know if you can relate to this, but you know, my teachers always loved me

cause I always was super curious. I would always ask lots of questions, but my grades always sucked. I always struggled to get good grades. And that's actually one of the reasons why, you know, as I mentioned, despite always having a passion for health, I didn't ultimately go into medicine because I just didn't think that I'd be able to keep up to the, you know, with the rigors of, of, um, studying medicine. I just like my brain never, I was never able to get my school working on time, things like that. So, so, you know, those are all aspects of executive function and i since i started eating you know more omega-3s fewer omega-6s um less unhealthy oils like canola oil grapeseed oil soybean oil things like that oil the worst flour yeah the worst

grapeseed oil that my executive function improved and honestly i mean i attribute to having written the book like to the fact that you know my brain was working in a way that was like, okay, Max time to focus, you know? Yeah. When you're talking about having pasta and things like that for dinner, I was like, that's, yeah, that's me. And I'm gluten intolerant, you know? So it's, it's, it's funny to look back on that similar story in school did pretty well on tests. So I could get away with a lot. My teachers didn't me because uh i was kind of a class clown and an asshole but um yeah you know i mean how many rounds of antibiotics i'd have a year probably five or six every year for over a decade in addition to gluten at breakfast lunch and dinner you know i mean just just copious amounts of pasta and cereals and the exact wrong food that

i could have in my diet and um it's it's one thing that you illustrate in the book which i love and and perlmutter talks about this in grain brain and brain maker 80 to 90 90 percent of our neurotransmitters are made in our gut people think about the cheat meal as you know a weight loss issue like i lost 20 pounds i'm gonna eat this shitty food and i might gain five of it back but that's okay and they're not thinking about the fact that that's going to make them fall flat on their face mentally and cognitively that they're going to be an emotional wreck they're going to sleep like shit they're going to recover poorly joint pain is going to come back the fucking cascade in all directions of

bad food choices and it's not to say that i don't cheat but as i've mentioned here a hundred times like cheat clean like make your own fucking pizza do do whatever it takes so you can have the food that you want but it's not going to hurt you as bad as ordering dominoes or going to fucking mcdonald's oh yeah well that's a problem that i have with the if it fits your macros movement yeah it's bullshit it's the worst it's the worst um yeah people i mean i get commenters all the time telling me that you know like with the shrug emoji like i've eaten a big mac every day but i've been able to lose weight because i'm you know eating fewer calories i'm like well that doesn't mean that the big mac is good for you yeah it doesn't

mean you're fucking healthy yeah you have no idea what that's doing to your insides exactly and what the long-term consequences of that are exactly every time you're ordering the french fries spiking insulin you're also getting in the trans fats like you talked to me in 20 years pal absolutely yeah you can look great in a bathing suit and still be hyper insulinemic you can be metabolically obese on the inside i mean that's an actual medical term normal weight metabolically obese it's just because you're thin you might have abs like that does not mean that you're healthy i'm gonna start throwing that at people as a slight jab yeah like like instead of skinny fat throw me that term your metabolic your normal weight metabolically obese yeah that's the new shit that's the new shit i'll be tossing that out

at paleo effects this weekend do it bro you're looking pretty normal weight metabolically obese i eaten that that yeah thankfully there's nothing but the best bone broths and and fucking keto shakes and seaweed snacks and jerkies grass-fed everything so i'm excited i mean just you know touching on insulin it's important to know that you know hyperinsulinemia can preced precede chronically elevated blood sugar by a decade. So you can have chronically elevated insulin, which is the body's chief growth hormone, in your body elevated for a decade before you become insulin resistant to the point where your blood sugar begins to be measurably higher chronically, which is obviously what type 2 diabetes is and even prediabetes. And 40% of Alzheimer's cases might be owed to chronically elevated insulin. So when I'm making my choices at every meal, I'm trying to keep tight reins on my body's production of insulin. And even in my cheat meals, I'm trying to have a cheat meal maybe after a workout. After a workout,

you've got the benefit of what's called insulin-independent glucose uptake. So just having a workout, I mean, causes your muscles to become like a sponge for glucose. I talk about this in the book. Like, I don't think that carbs are bad. Insulin is certainly not a bad hormone. If it was a bad hormone, it wouldn't be the most or one of the most conserved hormones in the animal kingdom, right? I mean, it's something that basically we wouldn't be here without insulin. It's the body's chief fat storage hormone. But today, we're more sedentary than ever before. We're eating about 300 grams of carbohydrates every single day, most of us on average. At least. At least. And so, you know, after a workout, like have your carbs, you know. I, for example, I have a, I love to do, you know, I have like a

fairly traditional like split in the gym. I love to lift weights, but my brother does jujitsu. We talk about carb tolerances and things like that. If you're doing super high-intensity exercise regularly, it might benefit you to have a little bit more carbohydrates. Yeah, and that's something certainly I've noticed. I didn't get into the ketogenic diet until I retired from fighting. I don't think fighters should do that unless it's in between fight camps.

But thanks to guys like Luis Villasenor, the Keto Gains guy, you know, with different ways to titrate carbohydrates with timing, you know, targeted keto, or you might have some fermented beet extract and things like that along intra-workout. I think that can be managed so you can still get the glycolytic benefits. That's if you're really trying to keep a tight rein on ketone production. But if you're just everyday people trying to lose weight and get the best, you know, maximize gains, that's something that we, you know, Ben Greenfield has been big on carbohydrate backloading. We obviously talk about that in Own the Day, Own Your Life, Aubrey Marcus's new book. And yeah, you have a huge

desire. The muscles are screaming for glycogen the liver wants it so it can dole out whatever glucose needs to go to the brain at night while you sleep and recover i mean the fact that you set the tone for that at the very least you know those carbohydrates are going to go where you want them to and not turn into fat on your body yeah let alone create inflammation and other issues yeah exactly because you got that that you know insulin independent so like even if you are in ketosis and you're fat adapted, you know, having carbohydrates in that, say you're talking about a hundred grams of carbohydrates, having a hundred grams of carbohydrates after a workout is, uh, you're going to, your pancreas is going to secrete less insulin

in that post-workout window because your muscles literally pull sugar from the blood. Whereas, you know, because the thing is the body is really good. The body can only look backwards. The body has no idea what you're going to do. So after a workout, your body knows that you just used all of the sugar stored in your muscles because you had that high-intensity workout, so you hit that glycogen threshold or that glycolysis threshold where you're burning through the stored sugar. And then it's gonna shuttle that that glucose back into the muscle where it can hang out and wait until your until your next workout um if you're just eating those carbs sitting at your desk uh your body has no idea that you're gonna work out after work you know

so it becomes completely point like that sugar is going to go probably to one place, your waistline. Whereas after a workout, your body knows that you just have that exercise. You've got that. And even a little bit of insulin in the post-workout window, it's an anabolic stimulus, right? It's going to help you grow mass. Yeah. Bodybuilders are huge into that. Get it in the 30 to 60-minute anabolic window.

But they're doing stuff. I remember this with creatine back in the day. And I'm sure you remember the 75 grams of dextrose with your 10 grams of creatine you know on purpose to spike insulin to drive up uptake of the creatine and other nutrients and that's fine i mean if your goal is mass but i think most people listening to this podcast are not trying to be professional bodybuilders yeah and just to put on five pounds of muscle that shouldn't be the fucking goal either like you can get that just from putting in good work and timing things correctly. And then as you gain muscle, you're leaning on at the same time.

There's no reason you can't do that. You don't have to have, unless you're Ronnie Coleman, you shouldn't have a 12-week mass cycle of eating everything in the kitchen sink and then 12 weeks of cutting where you're eating asparagus and chicken breast every night. Bodybuilders are like, you know know i think the ultimate biohackers although they're not necessarily healthy but they're so in tune they're extremists yeah you know there's no doubt and the discipline there i mean there's it's a fucking hard deal i mean everybody's yeah you just shoot steroids look i could take fucking everything under the sun i'll

never look like arnold let alone one of these new age guys you know so they're they're they are very disciplined very scientific about the approach and you know to use uh to steal one from aubrey and joe rogan like they don't feed based on mouth pleasure you know and that's something that we do constantly we're constantly looking for mouth pleasure as a reward and that's because the brain is interlinked with that it's not just candida or something is calling for the donut. Like either it's through some type of reward system from when we grew up, mommy and daddy got in an argument, we go get a McDonald's ice cream cone, all is better.

Or if it's not ingrained in us that way, it's just something we know, hey, I'm gonna eat this thing that is scientifically engineered to taste the way that it does. And it's gonna fire every fucking neurochemical in my brain that says, yes, yes yes this is it because it's making me fat because that's what we're designed to do that's what rob wolf talked about and where to eat like we want that kind of food to fatten up

on purpose because we're not designed to have food 365 days a year 24 7 yeah and i was really happy that you touched on the different forms of fasting in your book, because that is absolutely critical for everyone to adopt, whether you're eating carbs or not. It's such an excellent way for us to have cellular clearing and autophagy and just get the most out of our longevity. It's something that anyone can adopt. Talk about that for a minute. Yeah. So intermittent fasting, there's a few, I highlight some of the most well-studied protocols. So there's the 16 to 8, which is, you know, there's some good human trials on it, not, I wouldn't say large population long-term by any means, but there's sort of that protocol or the lean gains protocol, which, you know, depending on where you've first learned about it. Then there's Walter Longo's fasting mimicking diet, which is basically

a five-day consecutive, very low calorie plan, which is, there's very interesting research there. Or alternate day fasting, which was coined by Krista Varaday, University of Chicago. So, I mean, there's like all these different protocols. Which is the right one for you? Well, it's probably going to require a little bit of self-experimentation. What I recommend to people to do is to forget about the nuances and really to just focus on the fact that your body has a national, although probably at the national level, like we've definitely, yeah. Our bodies, we're diurnal creatures, right? So we want to eat during the day. And we have an inclination in the morning when we first wake up to burn fat. This is because when you wake up in the morning,

your cortisol levels are the highest they're going to be typically throughout the day. We tend to think about cortisol as the stress hormone, but it's actually the body's waking hormone. It's like the hormone that wakes you up actually at the end of your sleep. And cortisol, like insulin is the body's chief anabolic hormone, cortisol is the body's chief catabolic hormone. So when cortisol is elevated first thing in the morning, it's liberating stored sugar, stored fats. I mean, it's like releasing sugar from the liver, things like that. And so, yeah, I don't like to eat during that window because that's like the perfect fat burning window. And especially if you, what I think is really interesting, if you eat breakfast in its most commonly consumed form in the United States, which is predominantly carbohydrate grain-based crap, right?

You're basically causing insulin to become elevated while cortisol is elevated. And think about the fact that, first of all, that makes no sense from an evolutionary perspective because you're having two diametrically opposed stimuli occurring at the same time. You've got the body's chief anabolic hormone, which is there to cause storage and growth. And you've got the body's chief catabolic hormone, which is really there to break things down and use up stored fuels, both elevated at the same time when you eat that morning breakfast, which is typically rich in carbs, right? The problem with that is that insulin acts like a one-way valve on your body's fat cells. So it basically allows calories to flow in, but it doesn't let calories come out. And so

you've got in that window in the morning, if you reach for the bowl of oatmeal or the bran muffin, you've got cortisol exerting its catabolic effects on your muscle tissue and on the sugar stored in your liver. But it's not able to do that on your fat tissue because you've got insulin elevated. So basically it's able to redistribute your weight from muscle to fat. So it's exerting its catabolic effect on your muscles. Um, but you're not losing any fat because you've got insulin elevated after that high-carb breakfast. So that's why I tell people don't eat for an hour or two or three after waking up. I don't really obsess over the – I'm not super rigid when it comes to the time that I start eating. And then on the other end of the day, again, we're diurnal.

So you want to not eat super late at night. There's really interesting research there that uh shows that independent of calories you know if you're if you're eating super late at night it can help you know with fat storage and conversely by cutting off your consumption of calories earlier in the day at about 2 p.m which i don't expect most people to do but you actually increase fat oxidation um rob wolf's the only guy that I know that's gotten rid of dinner. Oh, really? Yeah. I think he's balls deep though. He's the guy that I could see him or Greenfield doing that. Greenfield's gotten rid of breakfast. He does lunch and dinner. My wife and I do the same. Although we have brought our window in, we noticed it's a bit easier if we cut,

if we're done eating at 5 or 6 PM, it makes it easier to have that first optimized coffee around 9 or 10 a.m. and, you know, eat a good-sized lunch and a big dinner earlier on. I think that's doable for a lot of people to fit in a 16-hour fasting window. Yeah. I mean, today I woke up at 7 a.m. and I ate at 10 a.m. and I had like breakfast foods. I had, you know, eggs and avocado and broccoli and things like that. But sometimes I'll push it to 2 in the afternoon. It really completely depends. I don't think it's productive to get hung up over the times necessarily. I mean, follow your body's own natural.

If you're hungry and you want to eat, eat. I think most people eat for that mouth pleasure, not even necessarily because they're hungry. They just eat because it's become so ritualized and ingrained in our society. Like the minute noon hits, it's lunchtime, right? So you got to go out and eat that calzone or whatever when maybe you weren't even,

you know, sign filled right now. I, cause I, I used to eat that kind of shit like 15 years ago, you know? Oh yeah. Yeah.

I did it. I mean, when I was in college at ASU playing football, I was trying to gain weight. So I'd eat and not knowing i was gluten intolerant uh two pizzas at night and a box of krispy kreme donuts to top it off mcdonald's three days a week i mean just fucked my body up beyond beyond repair i'm trying to work hard to repair it now i mean you're you're in pretty good shape well thank you from the outside i'm. Why do we say that? Normal weight, metabolically obese.

Oh, man. I did the teller test after Greenfield had the guy on. And 35 years old on the outside, 41 years old on the inside. Wow. But we're reversing that. Yeah, we are. We're talking to Greenfield about the stem cells and obviously with the diet and everything dialed in.

There's no doubt that by the time I'm 41, I'll be on the inside than i am i did the tele years test uh and uh i was 35 when i did it i'm 30 well i'm still 35 but i did it early fucking 25 yeah well it's a work this guy is i'm uh tell you so that i was 27 biologically hell yeah so there you go let's get that going for you emotionally probably younger than that you're way younger than i tell you what yeah i'm 41 should i act like a 41 year old does that give me street cred to act like i've got that much wisdom dude i don't know my 40s now you are tell no tell them you're wise oh tell them 36 you're 36 okay i turned 36 this month actually so nice there you go are you an aries not that that means shit yeah yeah all right i find it cute when people ask that like oh hey

what oh you're born then oh yeah that oh what does that mean that it should avoid uh talking to my boss this month and bet on these numbers not sure i don't buy it um shit yeah who was the guy that did that was that dr sachin panda that was talking about that with with cutting yourself off before the sun goes down sachin panda i don't know if he's done he does a lot a lot of animal research i'm not sure exactly if he was behind the human study okay um but yeah he's definitely a major a major researcher in the chronobiology space i think it's going to be a an increasingly important topic as we learn more about it yeah i think that's a big one you know and and certainly

the thing too like that people are so averse to fat and it's it's what makes us full yeah you know it's really it's it's like i even when i'm not in ketosis just adding more good fats like avocado and and egg yolk and coconut oil and butter and all these things to the diet, that's the only time that I'll stop eating. That's the only time where I'll have a plate of food and I'll stop short and box the rest. Whereas if it's a pretty carb-heavy meal, I'm finishing that food. Even if I'm fucking stuffed, it's still going to go all the way down no question i can't put i can't pump the brakes right you know but but with fat you can pump the brakes yeah and it gives you power you know it's like that one of the first things people talk about when they go low carb high fat or they even just start adding more good fats to their diet is like

they have a little bit of power they don't't need snacks every two hours. They're not a slave to food where you really just feel called to eat every two to three hours and you're hangry if you don't. Yeah. There's also, I mean, there's good evidence to say, you know, to show that protein actually is probably the most satiating macronutrient. There's really, there's this really interesting hypothesis called the protein leverage hypothesis, which basically stipulates that we eat in order to meet our protein requirements because protein i mean really uh the body's made of protein right so it's an incredibly important macronutrient is probably the hardest to get for the you know majority of our time as hunter gatherers and so um yeah i mean i think that like it's pretty difficult to overconsume protein.

I mean, you know, you just at a certain point, you don't want to eat anymore. That's why people that are like concerned about eating too much protein, I think, you know, it's really as long as you're eating good quality protein dense foods, you know, like, which is why I'm an omnivore. I'm not a vegetarian. I think it's like really easy to, you know, to fill yourself up when you're eating things like steak, chicken, stuff like that. Um, I mean, if I'm eating a, if I'm at a steakhouse, I'm leaving that restaurant stuffed. If I'm eating a, you know, at a place that's more, I don't know, um, less, less protein focused. Yeah. Like a Thai restaurant, like you end up being hungry an hour later. Yeah. So protein is, uh, I think really important, you know, it provides the, the, you know, building blocks for focused yeah like a thai restaurant like you end up being hungry an hour later yeah so protein is

uh i think really important you know it provides the the you know building blocks for our body's neurotransmitters protein you know i mean we're made of protein essentially and especially if you're doing high intensity exercise lifting weights resistance training things like that like you need that protein one of the things that pairs with protein that's excellent is cholesterol break that down for people because that's something that another one like fat that people have been averse to in the past thanks to Ancel Keys and different turd sandwiches that have come along and shifted the way we eat throughout society.

Yeah. Cholesterol, oh my God. I mean, without cholesterol, we die, right? So it's kind of ridiculous that it's been so demonized over the past couple of decades. For the vast majority of people we now know that eating cholesterol has no bearing on cholesterol circulating in your body um i mean there's always exceptions in biology there are people that are hyper absorbers you know those that have uh what's called familial hypercholesterolemia they

might hyper absorb cholesterol from the gut um so you So I try to really make the effort to not claim that there's a one-size-fits-all diet because everybody's different. We all have different genders, fitness levels, things like that, genetic backgrounds. But yeah, cholesterol is an incredibly important nutrient in the body and in the brain. Every cell in your body requires cholesterol to function properly. the brain. It might actually be an antioxidant. Does that mean that we need to chase cholesterol as a nutrient? No, because actually your liver creates about four egg yolks worth of cholesterol daily. And in the brain, your brain synthesizes its own cholesterol as well. It's called de novo cholesterol synthesis. So I think

what's more important, what I talk about in the book, um, is keeping your body's, uh, cholesterol system healthy. I think that's the, that's the real, I think, relationship between cholesterol and disease because there's a relationship, um, certainly between cholesterol and disease. It's not a causal one, but, um, you know, our bodies, our livers produce lipoproteins, these LDL particles, NHDL particles. But if you allow an LDL particle to sit in circulation for too long, it goes from being large and fluffy to small and dense. And this small and dense LDL pattern is associated with disease.

And so in the book, I talk about how to basically prevent that transformation. And the way to prevent a large, fluffy, buoyant LDL particle from becoming a small and dense LDL particle is to facilitate LDL recycling by the liver. So the liver plays hundreds of incredibly important roles in the body. LDL recycling is one of those roles. It's got LDL receptors on its surface that basically before too long are there to basically pluck an LDL particle out of circulation where it can then be turned to bile, passed, what have you. The problem is when we overload the liver with eating too many refined carbohydrates, excessive saturated fat, things like that,

and especially when those two are combined, which typifies, you know, the, your typical, uh, processed food, the liver becomes less effective at, um, recycling cholesterol. And so that's one of the proposed mechanisms by which, uh, you know, these particles can shrink and thus become more dangerous, um, to you. So I talk all about this in the book and again, everybody's different. different, but especially for people that have genetic risk for Alzheimer's disease, one of the proposed mechanisms by which the APOE4 allele, which is the most well-defined Alzheimer's risk gene, imposes increased risk, both for Alzheimer's disease and cardiovascular disease, it affects the way the liver recycles cholesterol. So for them, and I think people in general, like I don't, uh, I'm not a person in the low carb community that advocates for eating excessive saturated fat. There's no evidence really to warrant that as a recommendation,

certainly. And one of the reasons, one of the mechanisms by which saturated fat does raise cholesterol, it raises LDL and HDL. So, I mean, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it basically reduces the amount of LDL receptors on the liver. So we want our livers to be as efficient as possible. Our livers perform hundreds of roles in the body. They store sugar, obviously, in the form of glycogen. They recycle cholesterol. They create these LDL particles. They purify our blood. They create endogenous antioxidants and things like that. So we really want to like, they're really important. We really want to like support our liver. And I don't think that eating, you know, tons of butter and things like that is

really important. On the other hand, animal research and population level research and trials show that extra virgin olive oil, which is predominantly a monounsaturated fat, helps the liver reduce, you know, purge itself of fat that accumulates. Fatty liver is obviously something that we're seeing reach epidemic proportions. I'll toss that in there too. I'll say you got a fatty liver, bro. Yeah, you got a fatty liver, bro. Your liver is looking real fat. That's not a good thing and uh and so yeah it seems that extra virgin olive oil really um has a fatty acid ratio that really seems to help the liver become more efficient so

talk a bit about that talk a bit about because that was really interesting to me you know i mean talk a bit about what differentiates people just go to the store and they're like it's organic olive oil i'll get that one you know like break down what really good olive oil looks like and what it does for you well i think that organic is probably the best um organic when it comes to vegetables there have been studies in the past that have compared conventionally uh grown produce to organic and they look at the amount of vitamins in the produce and they're like oh they're fairly comparable there's no difference between organic and conventional but actually it's now understood that um some of the most valuable nutrients

or compounds rather in these in these plants are not necessarily the vitamins and the essential nutrients but polyphenols which actually um are able to explain, I think, the antioxidant value of these vegetables far more sort of completely than just the vitamins that they have. These polyphenols actually stoke our body's own detox pathways. And they're produced as a defense compound in the plant. And so I think that when you hose a plant down with antifungals and herbicides and pesticides, you basically take the pressure off of the plant to create these defense compounds, essentially, because they basically are being defended by the chemicals that they're being sprayed with against the threat of predators.

So extra virgin olive oil, it's so good for us in part because it's got tons of phenolic compounds that are anti-inflammatory um that have been shown to encourage autophagy things like that and uh and yeah so i think that um and it's been shown i believe that um poly that uh plants grown organically have more of these polyphenols in them um and you don't have to deal with glyphosate then and obviously yeah fucking horrendous to the body in the microbiome yeah i mean you know i try to stay as like close to the the evidence as i can but um you know i think like when it comes to these kinds of things like pests we don't know the long-term impact of

pesticides on humans right but what i argue is that you know these are these are compound these are chemicals and compounds that are so tied to commerce right that we're never going to have the kinds of answers that we want so i think it's important for people to like really kind of like look out for themselves and stack the odds in their own favor because like the food industry doesn't give a shit about your health well there's hundreds of millions of dollars on the line exactly them to look good for them to look like it doesn't hurt you exactly you know i mean how aspartame is fucking allowed into our food supply is beyond me it's not allowed in europe it's not allowed in a lot of countries but it's fucking in our chewing gum it's it's in all sorts of shit uh i mean it's everywhere and it wreaks havoc on the

gut totally like one of the problems is i, with these food-like substances, right? We consider them innocent before proven guilty, right? Whereas I think, and this was the case, obviously, with hydrogenated oils, right? That were like allowed in our food supply. Meanwhile, they're poison, essentially. Now, thankfully, they're banned. But they were innocent until we were able to prove them guilty. And so think about how many countless Americans were consuming them on the daily before we had enough evidence to say, yeah, we got to pull the plug on these hydrogenated fats, right?

I think we need to consider modern foods and food constructs as guilty needing to be proven innocent. Why are we so willing to give monsanto and these huge companies the benefit of the doubt money money yeah that's not a conspiracy theory yeah these are these are billion and billion billion dollar corporations that literally lobby congress to get shit passed through and people in congress stand to make money from yeah them having their shit in our food supply exactly meanwhile we're like try intermittent fasting try skipping breakfast and people are like they're they're like raising a skeptical eye right yeah as if like we evolved with breakfast for the vast majority of our but when it comes to things like pesticides we're like oh wait a minute no you know there's

like we've need we need the evidence we can beat nature here's how we're going to do it dude yeah well i mean you brought up a great point something i wanted to talk about but forgot was we didn't if you think about it the ancestral movement and you know there's lots of arguments about what paleo man ate and all that shit but that has nothing to do with it what we do know is they didn't have a fucking refrigerators yeah so it's quite likely or box cereal so they didn't wake up first thing in the morning, roll out of bed and pour themselves a giant bowl of wheat product with sugar and cover it in milk that has no fat in it. You know, like that was for certain that no culture did that.

Yeah. And now that's something we do, you know? So really, if we try to map, you know, you look at things like 10 000 steps like why is that important well we walked around more we moved more we moved constantly and then we took rest we had siesta we had times of a midday break you know nobody's getting that now in the modern world either so i mean there's so many things that we can take and try to piece together we're really as the movement passes and i'm thinking of this because we're you know i'm going to paleo effects you're going to be there um how do we reconstruct what we're fucking missing you know there's so much to that and it gets overlooked as like i'm in the modern

look i'm down with science i get the nad vitamin push uh treatments you know iv vitamins shit like that like why can't you just get in your your food? Well, the soil's different now. So it's still important to eat organic. It's still important to eat a wide variety of plants and vegetables and things like that. And the best, highest grade meat that you can afford and really just dial that in. But at the same time, like, yeah, man, it's not the same.

We don't have the variety we used to. And we're not gathering our own food we're not out foraging we're not out on hunts for days at a time we're not forced to fast we choose to fast yeah if we choose yeah i mean i think you know you're right our food's different i mean a cow is a modern invention you know and it's for the most part the land animal that, you know, most, most Americans are consuming, uh, you know, the most of along with chicken. Um, but, uh, but yeah, I mean, yeah, it's, it's, that's why I think supplementation, things like that. Like I'm, uh, I'm all ears to like seeing good research on, on this stuff. I mean, there's even some speculation amongst, uh, researchers that are,

you know, because there's more carbon dioxide in the air, plants eat carbon dioxide pretty much. So they're growing faster because there's more CO2 in the atmosphere. And as a result, they're storing more starch and less minerals on top of the fact that monoculture is causing our soils to become depleted, right? So produce is nowhere near what it used to be. And I mean, you know, and that's for people that are actually like eating vegetables. Most people today are consuming most of their calories from just three plants, wheat, corn, and rice. So, you know, it's no secret that Americans are, well, I call, you know know our current state of affairs we're overfed but undernourished you know because obesity is reaching all-time highs type 2 diabetes you know one in two adults are

either diabetic or pre-diabetic and yet the vast majority of people are deficient in at least one essential nutrient so yeah it's all about i think well, doing what you can to get back to the kind of diet that we consumed, you know, in the time in which our brains evolved. That's what it's all about. And it's going to take a little bit more work. But thankfully, we live in a time where, you know, if you don't have access to grass fed beef, there are services now that'll ship it to your front door. You know, if you don't have access to, I mean, Amazon obviously is like, you know, doing well in terms of, you know, making, uh, healthier foods accessible, but, um, but yeah, I think it's really about, uh, just getting the information out there and, you know, people like you, people like me, like, I think we're all part of this, this movement really helping usher humanity into some, you know, I think greater vision of what it means to truly be healthy in 2018 and beyond. So. Hell yeah,

brother. Yeah. It's been, we can, we can, we can cut it there, man. We hit our hour.

You've been fucking excellent. Where can people find you on social media and online with a genius foods is available on Amazon and every major retail book center. Correct? Yeah, definitely pick up Genius Foods wherever you buy books. It's available. And find me on social media.

I'm pretty big on Instagram. You know, I'm super active there. I'm on Twitter. I'm on Facebook. And then people can go to my website, maxlugavere.com, join my mailing list. But yeah, I'm super accessible and available. So come say hi awesome brother we'll

throw up the links to his social media in the show notes for people to click and say what's up thanks thanks for joining us brother thank you man thank you guys for listening to the on it podcast with max lugavere please check out his book genius foods it is absolutely incredible as i said in the intro it's just an amazing book. It's not too often that I read a book on diet where I'm completely blown away. And I think Max does an amazing job of breaking down all the foods that we should eat to optimize our brain. Thanks for listening.