Modern Wisdom - #560 - Max Lugavere - How To Optimise Human Nutrition

Episode Date: December 3, 2022

Max Lugavere is a health and wellness expert, author and a diet advocate. Working out what to eat is hard. Which is odd because everybody does it. You'd think that the science of nutrition, a thing the entire human race relies on multiple times per day, would have some definitive answers. Thankfully Max can explain why it's such a mess and give some solid principles we can all use. Expect to learn whether carnivore is an optimal diet for us all to follow, whether organic and non-GMO actually makes that much of a difference, what to look for in a magnesium supplement, the actual science of seed oils, whether sunscreen is a danger, why nutrition science is so contested, why calories matter but they aren't all that matter and much more... Sponsors: Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a free bag of Colima Sea Salt at http://modernwisdomsalt.com/ (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Max's website - https://www.maxlugavere.com/  Buy Max's book - https://amzn.to/3gQJ1l6  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Max Lugovia, he's a health and wellness expert, author and a diet advocate. Working out what to eat is hard, which is odd because everybody does it. So you'd think that signs of nutrition, a thing that the entire human race relies on multiple times per day, would have some definitive answers. And it does not. Thankfully, Max can explain why it's such a mess and give some solid principles that we can all use. Expect to learn whether Carnivore is an optimal diet for us all to follow, whether organic and non-GMO actually makes that much of a difference, what to look for in a magnesium supplement, the actual science of seed oils, whether sunscreen is a danger, why nutrition science is so contested, why calories matter,

but they aren't all that matter, and much more. Max is a legend. I very much appreciate his balanced and science-based, heavily-caviated, rigorous approach to nutrition science, given that it is the realm of charlatans and snake-hole salesmen and like political campaigners who are ideologically pinned onto whatever it is that they want to believe in this particular week. Very, very good to have someone that is a balanced voice coming out of that world. I hope you enjoy this one. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Bax Lugervia. Look at you, fresh from the dentist. So smiley.

Dude, I chipped a back tooth on a cacao nib, the irony. It's a superfood and it was super effective at chipping a tooth in the back of my mouth. What do you want to do? Go figure. What was that thing that you shared a little while ago that had like frosted shredded wheat as the greatest superfood on the planet? Taking through that. Yeah, so that was something that was published by Tufts University, the Friedman School of Nutrition over there. There's great interest in developing what's called nutrient profiling system

among scientists and ultimately to be used for the public good. And so the food compass, which was toughs, is toughs sort of best take on what an idealized nutrient profiling system would look like came out. And it had all of these various different food items ranked. The supplementary material that came with the paper was, I don't know, it was like a couple, it was like a hundred pages long or something like that.

And it ranked every possible food in the supermarket. And basically, the reason why it's in the, why ultimately it's in the public's interest to create a food profiling system like this is because the public is confused about nutrition. The public doesn't know what to eat. For decades, we were told via the USDA food pyramid to load up on something like seven to 11, 6 to 11 servings of grains per day, right?

And that's been replaced by the my plate paradigm with which still implores us at every meal to include grains, to utilize vegetable oils and things like that. So the public is confused, right? And so, Tufts University thought that it was in the public's interest to create this food profiling system called the food compass. And it had a lot of flaws that were illustrated by a separate group headed up by a researcher named Tybeel who teased out various food items and put them on a hierarchy. So this was non extrapolation.

This was data taken from the supplementary material provided with the food compass paper. And it showed these completely asinine relationships between various foods that even a four-year-old would say, this is absurd, right? It ranked frosted minuids above a poached egg, for example. It put ground beef at the bottom of the chart for the most part. And it was just completely absurd, right?

It ranked egg substitute fried and vegetable oil above actual egg, which, you know, eggs, ground beef, dairy, these are some of our most nutrient dense foods. And so this chart went viral, which was basically a chart that was created by this separate group that published a reaction critique to the food compass paper, and which by the way went completely ignored by the journal that it was submitted to and also ignored by Tufts, just to show the ridiculousness of this food compass. And really, again, I don't think that it was like created out of malicious intent, but it completely underweighted foods for the nature of their processing.

So it basically didn't penalize foods appropriately for being ultra processed, which we know are a contributing factor to the obesity epidemic and the epidemic of chronic disease foods that are ultra-processed, now make up 60% of the calories that your average American consumes every single day. So, this is a major problem. We know that only 10% of Americans have good metabolic health. The rest are struggling with some type of metabolic illness manifest as either dysregulated lipids or an

oversized waistline or what have you. And so, you know, you fail to penalize ultra processed foods, which Americans are already overconsuming. You don't properly credit foods for containing protein, which is a very important macronutrient or dietary fiber. I think actually protein and fiber were given the same weight and they were both underweighted relative to other features. So, yeah, so it was a mess.

It was just a complete mess. And they have since, I've actually had a conversation with Darry, who's the lead researcher behind it. And we just, we have different views on, I think, the value of protein. But at this point, I've communicated and I've done, I've written three books and I've had many protein experts on the podcast and I think protein is incredibly important. And so I think it's kind of odd that we have such divergent viewpoints on that.

And again, I think there is value in creating a nutrient-profile system, but that ain't it. The food compass ain't it. You mentioned that diet science is kind of like built upon a foundation of a house of cards that it's you can manipulate data to wield any particular outcome that you want, which can fit a preconceived ideology. Explain to me, someone who doesn't understand nutrition science, how it is that so many different interpretations can come from something with the word science in the name. I don't see people in the physics community debating over the speed of light.

I don't see people in the chemistry community debating about what happens if you add magnesium to water. You know, like those seem to be closed systems, the same as our body. How is it that there are so many degrees of freedom that permit researchers to be able to do this fuckery? Yeah, well, I think it's because nutrition is a much more difficult science to study than, say, drug research. I thought you were going to say physics there, the physicist are about to be up in arms saying it's not rocket science, actually it's nutrition science. Yeah, well, I mean, I feel like rocket science is actually much easier to study than nutrition science.

Nutrition science is very difficult because people don't eat single foods in isolation, right? They consume dietary patterns and people don't consume the same dietary pattern one decade that they do the next. And people have different needs, of course, over the course of their lifespan. So, and different preferences, dietary preferences, taste, cultural paradigms, that nutrition sort of has to apply itself to. And making matters worse, nutrition is much less well-funded, right?

So a lot of the studies that you'll see, for example, showing us the benefits of a food item like blueberries are actually funded by the berry board. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, right? That doesn't invalidate the science, but it's like there's always going to be a there's always a vested interest. So you oftentimes will see, especially with more contested food categories like meat, right? Like, oh, well, that study I'm sure was funded by the beef industry. Well, you know, where else are you going to find that kind of money to do these studies, right? Like, you can't patent broccoli, you can't patent an egg. And so, there just isn't the kind of commercial interest in it the way that there is for drugs. And then on top of that, you apply the fact that people tend to make nutrition their identity.

And so there's a lot of ideology within the world of nutrition, right? There's a lot of virtue signaling. There's a lot of morality brownie points that are thrown about, depending on what dietary tribe you choose to adopt, right? And so, yeah, so there's what's called the diet wars online. And I'm just like, I find myself in the middle of it actually,

because my, the recommendations that I make tend to be among the more balanced of the recommendations out there. So I'm a, I'm a bigger threat to all of the groups, right? Because I actually present, I think, what I think is to be a very balanced message. And, yeah, so it's just a big problem. And the reason why I think it's so easy for you to spin your message and to wield science in a way that can basically prove any point that you're trying to make ultimately is that,

like I said earlier, it's sort of like built on a house of cards, like nutrition science for decades has been built primarily on epidemiology because to get human beings to adhere to long-term, multi-center randomized control trials, it's just impractical, actually impossible for the most part. I mean, we have a few seminal studies, like the Predymed study, which I often evoke. I mean, we have a few seminal studies, like the Predy Med study, which I often evoke. There's the finger study, which is particularly for my sort of interest vertical. It's the first ever large population randomized control trial to look at a dietary intervention as it applies to cognitive health and risk for dementia and things like that. But there's just not many of those.

So, you know, you rely for the most part on observational types of studies to make inferences about nutrition, and it's just all so incredibly weak. I mean, that's what you find out once you really get into it. And, you know, researchers do their best to control things for to control for example, for confounding aspects of epidemiology like healthy user bias, which basically is the the the phenomenon whereby somebody who's doing one thing healthy tends to do other things in their lifestyle healthy, right? Like somebody who is healthy tends to do healthy things. And so you can see that with people who eat lots of vegetables, fruits and vegetables, for example.

But it's the question that always arises, is the health of the population that you're studying due to the item that's being studied, or is it due to all of these sort of external variables? Right? And so researchers try their best to account for all of those things but there's just healthy user bias always creeps in and a good example that I like to give is quinoa right if you were to do like a population level study of all of the people in the United States who regularly consume quinoa chances are their health is going to be much better over the long term than the average person right that doesn't eat quinoa chances are if a person knows how to pronounce

quinoa right like we live in a country where the average reading level is, I don't know, what, third grade or something ridiculous like that, I don't know, don't call it. Point Noah. Yeah. Like your average person wouldn't know how to pronounce quinoa, right? Like I think that's a pretty fair assumption. So if you know how to pronounce it, you're already probably reading health blogs or shopping in a supermarket that carries quinoa, right? Or that lives in a city where quinoa is available or town where quinoa is available, right? So that's healthy user buys in a nutshell. If you're eating quinoa, you're probably also eating more whole grains in general,

which means you're also probably consuming more fresh fruits and vegetables, you're probably also more likely to work out, you're less likely to smoke, you're less likely to be sedentary. So is the health of that population due to the quinoa, or is it in spite of the quinoa, or is it maybe it has nothing at all to do with the quinoa? Maybe it's all those other external variables, right? That constellation of other variables that play a role, right? In somebody's ultimate health. And so when you take fruits and vegetables, for example, you see healthy user bias.

When you see, when you look at, conversely, meat consumption in this country, it's well known that people who consume more meat tend to smoke more, they tend to be more likely to smoke, they tend to be more likely to be sedentary, and the like. So meat always, at the population level, it's very easy to find studies that associate meat with poor health, right? But is it because of the meat itself? Like if you found somebody that was eating a paleo diet,

for example, like a pristine diet with very high quality food, grass-fed, grass-finished meat, you know, you likely wouldn't see a negative health effect from the meat. In fact, you probably see a health benefit. And ultimately, there are no long-term randomized control trials to show that red meat has any negative effect. In fact, it's quite the opposite.

Red meat is a wonderful repository of high-quality protein of carnitinutrients like creatine, like torin, like carnitine, like vitamin E. And so, yeah, I think that we need to get back to, like regain a bit of common sense when it comes to nutrition. And unfortunately, common sense isn't all that common these days, particularly when you look at all these different diet tribes.

You've mentioned there about grass fed, grass finished. And I imagine that non-GMO and organic and such like would be thrown into the mix with that, how big of a deal is it to be someone that is optimizing for non-GMO, organic, grass-fed, grass-finished food? How big of an influence does that make on the food profile that you're reading? That's a good question. And this is actually, I think, probably going to be a surprising answer. It doesn't make that big of a difference. actually I think probably going to be a surprising answer. It doesn't make that big of a difference. You know, there's a lot of debate about organic versus conventional. And I think when it comes to produce, the big like bang for your buck when it comes to organic produce is that you're reducing

your exposure to synthetic petroleum-based pesticides, which you're not necessarily getting with pesticides, which you're not necessarily getting with conventionally produced. Like with organic, you're seeing a reduction in exposure with conventional, you're seeing increased exposure, right? Now the system isn't perfect. The organic the way that organic labeled stuff is produced isn't perfect. Like there was a study that came out recently that found that even organic wine had detectable levels of glyphosate in it, right? But I do think that that's if you are wanting to hedge your bets and adhere to the abide by the precautionary principle, which I think is smart, then organic would be the smart choice. But it's not necessarily more nutritious than conventionally grown produce.

You might see higher levels of various phytochemicals in organic because these plants essentially develop defense compounds, right? And when they are doused with these herbicides, pesticides and the like, their responsibility, the onus, is sort of offloaded from the plants themselves onto these external endogenous chemicals, exogenous chemicals that are sprayed onto

them. So you see a reduction in, for example, polyphenols, which could include compounds like flavonols and flavonoids and things like that. But we don't really know. We haven't yet quantified the health benefit, the sumids and things like that. But we don't really know, we haven't yet quantified the health benefit, the sum total health effect of that. When it comes to vitamins and minerals, there's really not much of a difference.

And also when it comes to animal products, the differences are also really small. Now, it's going to a grass-fed, grass-finished, and whatever it is, colon, colon raised, colon finished. Yeah, I mean, they're there. There are differences. So Grass Fed is going to be a better option for you. It is healthier.

Part of that has to do with the fact that Grass Fed Grass Finished Beef is going to be leaner than conventionally produced beef. So it's going to be more similar to the kinds of, for example, wild game that we probably evolved consuming, because cows are actually not wild creatures. We created cows. And the modern cow is a very fatty animal.

So I do think that there's probably some benefit to going grass-fed, grass-finished, if for the fact that it's a, you get a higher proportion of protein and less overall fat. And in fact, you get a higher proportion of a particular type of fatty acid called stearic acid in grass-fed, grass-finished beef, which is actually beneficial to health.

So it's a saturated fat, but it's a beneficial saturated fat in that it's neutral from a cardiovascular standpoint, and actually has been shown to boost mitochondrial function. You get about five times the omega-3s in grass-finished beef as compared to grain-finished beef, but that's just a relative increase. The absolute concentration of omega-3s in beef is really not that much, right? It actually is quite insignificant compared to, for example, wild salmon. You get about three times the vitamin E in grass-finished beef. So it's definitely, it's got a healthier profile for sure, but that doesn't make conventionally produced beef unhealthy, right?

It's still a great source of protein, it's still a great source of creatine. So, you know, I like to, and because of over the past decade, I've been honed by getting to reach a wide sort of audience, right? People from across the socio-economic spectrum, I don't like to let perfect be the enemy of wide audience, right? Like people from across the socioeconomic spectrum, I don't like to let perfect be the enemy of the good, right? So if you live in a part of the country or the world where all you have access to is conventionally produced beef, I don't want people to shun that, right?

Because it's still gonna be a better option for dinner for most people than the ultra processed option, right? Like the box, mac and cheese. But um... There's definitely something going on here. I can imagine people who are avidly non-GMO enthusiasts saying, but what about the damages to the chemicals in my body,

to the DNA, to the breakdown of the telomere length, to... there is something, I think, like sacred about the way that people feel about putting stuff into their bodies. And when you have a particular bias or you've read something or seen something online, and then you then start to attach your sense of identity to that, it's very difficult to then drag people back from it. The same person that wouldn't think twice about eating something that's been packaged in plastic and left on the shelf for six months would have a problem with going GMO because of some natural, I think we saw this as well with the vaccine, right, that somehow the exposure to COVID as an infection risk was more natural than taking the vaccine.

And maybe there's an argument to be made that that that could be the case. My point being that as soon as it comes to putting it in or on your body, there's a like a sacredness that comes to it, I think. Yeah, and I applaud people who who who feel that, right? And I personally like I buy organic when I'm eating the skin or the peel of whatever produce it is that we're talking about. And I buy grass-fed grass-finished beef. That's the only type of beef that I bring into my house. I buy only wild salmon. But I also have to acknowledge that I can afford those things.

I live in Los Angeles where I have access to the best supermarkets in the world, living in Los Angeles, California. And so yeah, that's all like, if you have the ability to do that, then I think that you absolutely should. But again, I think that we can't let perfect be the animated good when people are, especially these days, strapped for cash, and people live in all different parts of the country that I came in and imagined, that I'll probably never get to visit, where they buy, literally, people buy groceries at gas stations. And so, yeah, that's all absolutely true.

That's why I'm a big believer in what's called the precautionary principle. And I think that like, that's where the data sort of ends and where your own principle, you mentioned it twice now, and I have no idea what it is. So the precautionary principle is basically like, when we don't have enough data to act on something or to make a fully informed decision, then we take the more cautious approach,

right, as opposed to just gungho running into the fire, so to speak, right. I think a lot of the times, you know, some of these newfangled products that we see on the market, whether it's like a food item or a supplement or a medicine, we take the approach of it being innocent until proven guilty, right? That's great for a justice system, but it's not so great for when we're deciding what to put into our bodies, right? So for me, the approach should instead be guilty until proven innocent, and that's sort of what the precautionary principle sort of implies. Because we can see many times throughout history where the food industry has let us down, right?

Has essentially foisted a product, or an ingredient, or whatever, onto the human public. Only later to have then been recalled, only after serious and immeasurable damage has been wrought. A perfect example of that would be the ubiquity up until only about 10 or so years ago of partially hydrogenated fats, which are trans fatty acids, man-made trans fats, fats that were engineered from vegetable oil to behave more like saturated fat at room temperature, so they could be used in ultra-processed foods to replace traditional fats like butter, ghee, lard, and things like that. And so those were on the market for decades, as the heart-healthy alternative to those more traditional ancestral fats.

We later found out that those were poisonous to the brain, to the cardiovascular system, and they were ultimately outlawed by the FDA, but only after decades of humans being exposed to them on a regular, near regular basis, right? Other examples, lead in our paint, right, or lead in our gasoline for that matter. There are compounds that are, that we are unwittingly exposed to, right? Because they are, because other industrial products have them in them. For example, it was recently shown that benzene is, you could find it in sunscreen sprays, right?

So we spray our children with these carcinogens, right? Every summer when they, you know, head out to the beach of the pool. There was, asbestos has been found in talc powder. So it's just like, the industry has violated our trust enough times, where I think it's completely reasonable for your average person or parent to just be a little bit more skeptical than the media or the evidence-based voices on social media are telling them to be. You've mentioned their oils. I went to a bachelor party a couple of months ago,

and there there was a bunch of guys that are pretty deep down the rabbit hole of no seed oils, optimized diet, all the rest of it. And we walked through whole foods together. And I figured, I mean, whole foods, you know, this is the pinnacle of rich white people shopping for food, which is good for them. So I'm like pointing at different things. I'm like, can I have that? No, can I have that? No, can I have that? No, everything has estrogen, seed oils, canola oils,

some other bullshit in it. First off, what's the problem with seed oils? Why are you so anti-seed oil? Yeah, so seed, the debate on seed oils, actually seed oils are having a moment right now, where if you so much as mentioned seed oils, there tends to be a gaggle of, quote unquote, evidence-based diet warriors that come after you, the dietitians and the like. And that's because they're controversial because they do... They're seen as being a heart-healthy alternative, again, to these traditional ancestral fats, but they're in novel food.

So they haven't been in the food supply prior to, I don't know, 60, 70 years ago. And humans are now consuming more of these types of fats than ever before in human history. And just to sort of define what seed oils are, because I think sometimes there's confusion about that. The seed oils that people are currently talking about are the refined, bleached, and deodorized cooking oils, right? The industrially processed seed oils, we're not talking about sesame seed oil, which is created just by pressing sesame seeds.

The seed oils in question are the ones that come from, for example, soybeans or corn or grape seeds, which we weren't able to produce prior to 100 years ago, because we didn't have the chemistry, the chemistry labs and the machinery able to extract these from their constituent food items and then run them through these various processes to make them palatable. Because if you were to extract, for example, oil from grape seeds, grape seeds used to be thrown away. Grape seed

oil is now a byproduct of wine making and it has to go through all these steps because it would otherwise contain noxious aromas and flavors. And so these are ultra processed oils. And we know that ultra processed oils, ultra processed foods are defining characteristic of the modern chronic non-communicable health crisis, right? So for some reason, these seed oils, these industrially refined seed oils, get a pass by the nutritional and the medical orthodoxy. Because relative to saturated fats, they will lead to lower levels of LDL cholesterol,

and now I think more specifically, APOB, which is a sort of indicator of cardiovascular risk. And so these oils being very unsaturated, right? You have your saturated fats, you have your unsaturated fats, and among your unsaturated fats, you have your mono unsaturated fats, and then you have your polyunsaturated fats. Polyunsaturated fats are gonna be more unsaturated

than mono unsaturated fats, which are a little bit closer to being saturated and then you have your saturated fats. So it's a little bit of a chemistry lesson, but these polyunsaturated fats are still loved by the medical and the nutritional orthodoxy because relative saturated fats, they lower LDL, which is thought to be a risk factor

for cardiovascular disease. The problem with them is that they are very prone to a form of chemical degradation called oxidation. So they go bad. They rot essentially. You can't see it. It's not, this is not a process that's visible to the naked eye the same way that when you slice an apple and you leave it on the counter and it goes brown, it turns brown. That's like rust, that's aging, that's decay playing out right in front of you. In a way that the naked eye can see, you can't see this happening to grain and seed oils, but it happens because they're stripped from the antioxidants, right? The chemicals that would

otherwise protect them in their whole food form. They're stripped of those compounds when they're removed from their whole food form and then they're run through all these myriad processes, right? Some argue that they are processed using hexane, but I wouldn't necessarily worry about that. Hexane is a neurotoxin, but you can't really find any detectable levels of hexane in the end product. But they're exposed to very high heat in the production process. One of the steps that they all undergo is a process called deodorization, where they're exposed to very high heat.

Heat is one of these catalysts of this oxidative process. And that damages the oils, right? It accelerates this aging process, and it also creates trans fats, which we've already established. There's no safe level of trans fat consumption. So you're eating these very easily oxidized fats that are generally already oxidized by the time you consume them, right? I mean, even if you were to get fresh oil straight from the jug at your local supermarket, there's a good chance that a significant amount of it

is already has already undergone this process, right? But then you ingest them in restaurants, right? Like when you eat fried food, where the oil has been sitting in that fryer for potentially days, right? That process just, it continues, and it continues continues and it continues and it continues. And by the end, you're eating this mutated fat, which contains trace levels of trans fats, about 5% trans fats, and these oxidation byproducts. And what happens is that those essentially

damage you because it's not like sugar. Sugar is one of these sort of compounds where you ingest that your blood sugar goes up, the sugar gets stored, or you use it if you're doing high intensity exercise. The fats that you consume integrate themselves into essentially who you are, they integrate themselves into your cells. And so this can create over the long term, potentially, an inflammatory process.

It's not that the oils are acutely inflammatory, but they do provide the chemicals that are the precursors to your body's inflammatory pathways. And so you have all of these sort of like, you have all of this kindling laying around in your body, right? So it's not that you're like setting a fire by eating these oils, right? Like they've actually done studies. You don't see an acute inflammatory effect when you feed, we'll say fresh oil to a human study participant, but you are providing somebody's body

essentially with the kindling necessary for this inflammatory process. And so the thinking is that and we don't really have the long-term studies to say this with certainty. So there's a bit of speculation here, but again, this is a novel food and I think that we do need to do these kinds of longer-term studies to say this with certainty. So, you know, there's a bit of speculation here, but again, this is a novel food, and I think that, you know, we do need to do these kinds of longer term studies, and there's a lack of longer term research that's been done. That you're basically,

you've got the kindling around for your bodies inflammatory pathways so that when you ultimately do encounter an inflammatory stimulus, that you're going to see essentially an over-response, right? We also don't know what these highly oxidized products do in the brain over the long term. We have very damning animal research. We don't quite have the human data. Although there was a very interesting randomized control trial in humans that showed that when people that were prone to migraines, which is a neuroinflammatory phenomenon, right? Migraines, you know, neuroinflammation is involved in the migraine process. And as somebody who suffers from migraines occasionally, this was particularly relevant to me,

but this was a really, really important study that found that when people either increase their consumption of omega-3 fatty acids, which are, have the effect of resolving inflammation, or increase their consumption of omega-3 fatty acids and reduce their consumption of these vegetable oils, these grain and seed oils. They saw an improvement in migraine symptoms, but only when they reduced their consumption of vegetable oils. So, they saw like a little bit of an effect when they just ate more omega threes, but they saw the biggest, the greatest magnitude of effect when they increase their omega

three intake, but also dramatically reduce their consumption of vegetable oils. In short, seed oil is not good. No bueno. Yeah. Now, I don't think that they're good. I don't think that they're good. And I think that we have, we need to do more research, but for even the most, whoever's listening to this, who thinks, okay, well, this person that I follow said that they're great. Whether or not that data ultimately reveals itself to us, there's no reason to consume them.

Because the Mediterranean dietary pattern, which is the dietary pattern that we know is associated with robust risk reduction for cardiovascular disease for neuro generative disease, they don't consume these vegetable oils. They consume extra virgin olive oil as the primary oil, right? There is no long-lived population on earth for whom which seed oils make up a significant calorie contributor, right? So you might not believe that these oils are harmful to you. I'm always willing to adjust my stance when new data presents itself, but there's no reason to consume them. When you have a fat like extra virgin olive oil available to you, which has all these health

benefits, you can't say the same for these grain and seed oils. Humans have been consuming extra virgin olive oil for millennia because to make extra virgin olive oil, all you do is you press olives, right? Same with sesame seed oil in Asian population. Sesame seed oil has been consumed for millennia, right? It's got all these benefits. It's loaded with vitamin E and compounds called lignins, which might play an anti-cancer role. These grain and seed oil oils, they're new foods, right? So, again, guilty until proven innocent. They haven't been proven innocent. You've mentioned a couple of times about how sort of novel foods that we're not necessarily used to eating is something that we should be skeptical of, at least. And it seems

like the paleo communities sort of really trying to take this and run with it. What is the closest that we can find to what would have been a ancestral diet regime. And I'll do that and I'll spend more time in nature and I'll do CrossFit and whatever. I was with Michaela Peterson this weekend in Miami and then I was with Safedine who is a Bitcoin guy and also a big carnivore. So I've spent four days basically being force fed a rhetoric about the carnival diet. Now, Michaela is kind of like a, I think, a bit of a unique case because her autoimmune disorders are so chronic and kind of highly attuned that a lot of the stuff that she has as takeaways

for her, I'm not convinced are as applicable to everybody else because she's talking to a very unique cohort that has all of these different, like, whatever, maladaptive properties that, that, of their physiology. Safety on the other side, on the other hand was just somebody that was doing it because he wanted better cognition. He wanted to feel healthier. He was overweight. He was blah, blah, blah.

And yet you're saying that we're not carnivores, you're saying that an omnivore approach. I noticed that you had a couple of cups of leafy greens are in your, you must have every single day approach. Why are you not a carnivore? Yeah, because I think a lot of the, just like Michaela and Michaela's great were friends and I'm completely sympathetic to her learnings, and ultimately her teachings. I think that a lot of the people in the so-called evidence-based community

that you'll see online tend to be, they tend to be down on what they're not up on. I'm not down on what I'm not up on. I'm just like, I think that there should be room at the table for all perspectives. But I think the problem with the carnivores is that it tends to be a cohort for whom, many of them suffer from autoimmune conditions.

They suffer from digestive issues. And so that's a cohort for whom I think removing a lot of these, whether it's fod maps or cellulose or some of these just not, difficult to digest plant material, which we're not, we don't easily digest. I think that's where you'll see a reprieve in symptoms, right, for somebody who's maladapted to that diet.

And alas, we live in a time where people have gut issues, right, there's widespread gut dysbiosis. Many of us are born via C-section when there's no medical necessity to do so. Sometimes there is, right, but often times... What's bad about that? Well, you get a bit of what's what sometimes referred to as a bacterial baptism when you're born vaginally, right? And there's there's lactic acid bacteria, bifidobacterium. There's all kinds of vaginal flora and

fecal bacteria that get, you know, all over the baby. And that sort of provides the neonatal immune system with sort of like the seeds of what will ultimately train its immune system, right? To better recognize the difference between self and other, right? And so a lot of the time. Is there an issue with water births, if that's the case? Not, I think that's probably a little bit better

in water birth. Although I don't know for sure, but yeah, in a water birth, everything is just like in the water, right, like in the wash. And so you're just like, it's a, it's a back to, it's actually, you know, it's a baptism in the more colloquial way that we. It's got a nice big bucket, let's collect it all.

Yeah, I mean, they're now starting to swab babies. I don't know if they're doing this bite default, but if you're expecting, I think you can ask the physician to do this, because we're now starting to see the importance of this sort of bacterial induction into exposure into these various different kinds of microbes. But it all comes back to the microbiome. We're recognizing the role that the gut microbiome, and we have a microbiome, by the way, everywhere.

There are parts of our bodies that were once thought to be sterile, like mammary tissue, for example, where the pancreas that we're now seeing are teeming with bacteria. But when most people refer to the gut microbiome, they're talking about the community of about 30 trillion microorganisms that live in the primarily in the large intestine, the colonic microflora. And that ecosystem is thought to really train the immune system. The majority of the immune system in your body is primed to focus on what's happening in and around the gut, because the gut is actually your largest interface with the outside world. You might be inclined to think that it was your skin, right? Your skin is a pretty tight barrier between the inner contents of your body, right,

and the outside world. But you're a loom in, you're digestive loom in, which is basically the tube that begins at your mouth and ends at your anus, right? Like that's actually, that's actually your largest interface with the environment. If you were to take out the elementary canal and like spread it out, it would take up the area

of a studio apartment, if not larger than that, right? So that's actually a much larger interface with the external environment. And you can eat, you know, I mean, we were, we've evolved eating like dirty produce, right? Like, are the, are our ancient world was a lot less sterile than it has become. And in fact, you know, you can look to the hygiene hypothesis, which provides a sort of framework for understanding why we're seeing such soaring rates, especially relative to historically rates of allergies and autoimmune conditions and the like. And Michaela suffers from an autoimmune condition or multiple, right? And a lot of people that are seeing a reprieve of their symptomology on the carnivore diet

have like these autoimmune conditions, right? And so the microbiome really is there to train the immune system. But when we're born, whether it's via C-section or we're not breastfed, which provides another way of strengthening the neonatal immune system, or we over consume antibiotics. When we're young, which is a time when our microbiomes are particularly plastic, right? We've heard of this concept of neuroplasticity,

but we have like almost like microbiome plasticity. Our microbiomes are more plastic early in life, right? When they're first forming. And so there are more plastic early in life, right, when they're first forming. And so there's all these like different aspects, right, like our obsession with sterility, with hygiene. This all, I think, has become problematic from the standpoint of the immune system. And so that's where, for people,

and so, by the way, that's like widespread, right? So for somebody who has those kinds of issues, I think it makes sense that a carnivore diet would at least provide temporary relief, right? Because you're removing some of these plant compounds. Many plant compounds exhibit was called molecular mimicry where they look so closely like compounds in nostrils. It's actually in a way like a plant defense phenomena, but

to the underdeveloped immune system, it can actually trigger like an autoimmune reaction, right? Like you can see that with glide in, which is the proteins in gluten, where somebody who is predisposed to, for example, celiac disease, you'll see this aggressive, violent, almost autoimmune effect in the small intestine. People with autoimmune thyroid condition, there's this enzyme in the thyroid, transglutaminase, which actually looks a lot like various plant compounds. Yeah, so I think that for some people, the carnivore diet makes sense, but I wouldn't

say that it's because plants are a problem. It's not that fiber is the problem. It's that we have all these other factors due to modern life that are leading to so many of us having gut dysbiosis and the like. But for the general population, I still think vegetables are great because if you have already a degree of robustness in the system, and then you add this sort of like, whormedic stress, like this sort of external stress into the system, then you have a strengthening effect. But you all have to have a baseline level of strength to benefit from those whormedic

phytochemicals that so many people like Michaela seem to do better without right. So that's what's like my long-winded answer. But yeah, I think that fruits and vegetables and grants of the carnivores tend to be more against vegetables as opposed to fruits, especially these days. But I do think that vegetables are beneficial.

But you know, it's not a one-size-fits-all recommendation. Like even person to person, people who are tolerant and will ultimately benefit from vegetables have to find which are going to be the most well tolerated for them. Yes, the fruit and meat diet is something that I'm hearing more about at the moment, which is basically just a middle finger to vegetables and carbs. That seems to me. So, what about oxalates? I've been warned off oxalates if you have too many green vegetables. Apparently, that's a bad thing.

Yeah, that's another thing that I think for most people is a non-issue. I mean, first of all, spinach is like the highest in oxalates. So, if you are sensitive, and people who are sensitive are going to know that they're sensitive, whether they've, you know, suffered from gout or whether they're prone to developing kidney stones. Gout, dude, what a fucking medieval disease. Jesus Christ. That's me and Henry VIII, dealing with our gout.

I know. I know. It's not super common, but I mean, generally, you know, you know, I think people with kidney stones because there's like this accumulation of calcium oxalate in the kidney, like there's that there are contributing, I think, genes to this. But I think for most people, especially if you're not over consuming raw spinach, I just think it's like a non-issue. People will often point to kale

and other dark leafy greens as being a source of oxalates, but it's very low. Like you're not really getting a lot in kale, for example. So I just think it's a non-issue, right? I think that the recommendation that I make for people is one to two cups of dark leafy greens a day, which if you actually think about that, that's not a lot of greens. But researchers at a Russian university found that people who eat between one and two cups

of dark leafy greens every day have brains that perform up to 11 years younger. That study could be attributable to healthy user bias, just to be perfectly transparent and clear, right? Somebody was eating a salad a day, like most people aren't eating any salad, right? So if you're eating a salad every single day, I mean, generally, you're probably a health conscious person, but we know that dark leafy greens, yes,

they have, you know, they might have some concentration of oxalates, but they've got a lot of good going for them as well. They're one of our most nutrient dense foods. You're not gonna find a better source of folate than dark leafy greens. You get vitamin C and dark leafy greens. You also get really important phytochemicals, like lutein and ziazanthin in dark leafy greens.

There was a study that found that plant flavonoids, right? So these are plant defense compounds, that plants that were high in flavinoids. Actually led to a boost in BDNF, brain-deriviner or trophic factor, which supports cognitive health and an improvement in cognitive function. They compared it to fruits and vegetables that were low in flavinoids. They didn't see an effect. They compared it with the baseline diet, didn't see an effect. It was only the high flavonoid containing fruits and vegetables that led to this cognitive boost,

and dark leafy greens were among them. If I was trying to design a diet to make myself think as poorly as possible, to slow my thinking, I want to be muddy, I don't want to be able to have good recall, I want my verbal agility to fall through the floor. What should I eat? Yeah, I mean, I think you just got to consume the standard American diet, like just tow the line for the status quo.

60% of your calories coming from ultra-process foods, just over-consuming grain and seed oils, lots of fried foods, refined grain products. I mean, that's like really the worst of the worst. Minimal fruits and vegetables. And then you throw in all the lifestyle factors on top of it. I mean, exercise we're now seeing is medicine for the brain.

So if you really want to deprive the brain and make your brain suffer, it will be sedentary, right? Brain suffers a top sedentary body, but it thrives above a body that is in motion, right? A body that is doing what body is supposed to do, right? Moving and... Did I start nerding out to you at all brace place about my new bike desk that I got. I tell you about this. No, but let me tell you let me fucking red pill you about the

bike desk. So imagine a static bike kind of like the one that you'll get in like lifetime fitness or whatever and it's one of the ones where you're a little bit more sat back and the pedals are out in front of you and there's a backrest. So you can imagine there's usually handles down by the sides like this. Then place a lifted up desk on the top of it with a thick armrest that you can put in. It's purpose built for this. It's called an exoputic, exowork desk. And what you can do is the seat goes up and down, slides forward and back, and then the backrest has got angle on it. Then the desk goes up and down, forward and back,

and also has tilt on it too. So you can lock yourself into a really nice, posturally, a great position. It's a Stume-A-Gill, I sent my photo to Stume-A-Gill, the number one back mechanic on the planet. I was like, is this gonna fuck me up? He didn't reply, so I'm gonna guess it's okay, but anyway. Point being, 180 accumulated minutes ish of zone two cardio per week is pretty hard to do like it's really really difficult to do because

Zone two sucks for me. It's quicker than a walk and slower than a run So what am I what am I gonna do out and about the nature thing trying to double it up with nature's kind of hard? Also 180 minutes just generally to add on top of maybe a strength and training routine. There's not a ton of time left for that. However, if you have a bike desk, what you can do is you can do up to and no higher than moderate difficulty emails or a little bit of admin.

Like if you start pushing yourself into the creative realm, it's not happening, or at least for me, I can't think very well. And then I get frustrated that I'm not doing my work, but I also get frustrated that I've got to slow my legs down. And I can sit and happily just turn out emails for 60 minutes and I'll have burned 600 to 700 calories and I'll sit at whatever, like 120, 130 BPM.

And I'll just sit and move away. And I feel great once I get off it. Like the, I'm posturally, I feel fine. The seat's super comfortable. And it's 310 bucks or 350 bucks for this thing. It's fucking great. I can't believe that more people aren't on it. And I got myself one as a little treat this summer.

Treated myself to an exercise desk. This summer because it was the choices between that or do a Ben Greenfield approach and get a treadmill to stand and walk on. But with that, I figured it's going to be harder for me as I'm moving to actually be able to type stuff, especially if I was doing admin heavy work. So yeah, I got that and that's my current solution for getting some extra zone to it. Genius. I was going to ask if you podcast while using it, but I guess the noise would be pretty silent. It's a magnetic sound. Oh, yeah. You can tell that I really went down the rabbit hole of the different features, but no, it is silent. However, you could take calls on it. There's

something about, I've taken a few calls and I get the impression that the person I'm on the call with feels like I'm a bit of a dick. I think what the subtext of seeing somebody sat on an exercise desk while talking to you is, this conversation isn't sufficiently important for me to hold off my exercise until it's finished. And interesting. I'm sure that if you were to actually quiz somebody about it, that's, and of course, it's fine. But the emotional response that we have isn't always necessarily rationally thought through. So I figured, like, if it's audio only, sweet, you can get away with it. If it's on video, I wouldn't do it. Emails, edits and show notes

and back and forth, the admin bits and shit, perfect. So yeah, how are the recommended? Something else that I've been thinking about a good bit recently, especially since I had human on earlier this year is magnesium. You are big magnesium guy, big magnesium guy. What should people look for when it comes to choosing a magnesium supplement and also a diet that will contribute to better levels of magnesium.

Yeah, magnesium is super important. It's a co-factor in hundreds, something like three, anywhere between 300 and 600 enzymatic processes used in the body, were rely on magnesium, which means that magnesium is essentially the rate limiting element here, right? In hundreds of processes in the body, that range in their importance from ATP synthesis, so the energetic currency of cells, ATP, all the way up to DNA repair.

So DNA damage is at the root of aging, but also tumorogenesis, right? So cancer, essentially, you can chalk up to DNA damage among other things. And so magnesium is one of these things that is so important, and about 50% of the population under consumes magnesium. And yeah, it's fairly easy to find. So actually, if you go to the produce section of the supermarket, anything green, anything that contains chlorophyll, which is a plant pigment, is going to contain magnesium. If you actually go to Google Images and search for chlorophyll and hemoglobin, you'll see that they actually look almost identical except for at the center of the hemoglobin molecule,

you'll find iron, but at the center of the chlorophyll molecule, you see magnesium. So anything green generally is going to be a good source of magnesium. Also almonds are a fantastic source of magnesium. Just one handful, you got about 25% of your daily value for it. Dark chocolate is another great source of it. Generally you need about 400 to 500 milligrams of it every single day. That makes magnesium what's called a macromineral. So unlike zinc and copper, which are trace minerals, you only need about anywhere between two and 15

milligrams of those, magnesium is something that you need more of, almost like sodium. Sodium is another example of a macromineral potassium, is another example of a macro mineral potassium is another example of a macro mineral. And the problem with under-consuming magnesium, this was actually an idea proposed by aging scientist Bruce Ames, who coined what's called the triage theory of aging. So I already mentioned that DNA damage at the root cause of aging, right? So when minerals or other vitamins, for example, are scarce in the body, they get triaged, essentially, to the processes that are more important with regard to survival, right? So if ATP, the generation of energy, right, that's a lot more important to survival than DNA repair, which is more of like a long-term

project in the body, right? So if you are shorting your body on magnesium, you're probably going to have enough to create energy, right? But you're not going to have enough to create the DNA damage that's happening on a day-to-day basis in your brain, just due to, like, time passing. So magnesium is one of these essential supplements that I generally will take every single day, and the kind that I reach for is magnesium glycinate. There are other forms of magnesium. Magnesium is generally pre-pile-. You'll find citrate, you'll find magnesium carbonate. There's also magnesium 3 and 8, which is thought to support more directly cognitive health. But magnesium glycinate, I like, because it doesn't have the effect of acting like a laxative, which magnesium citrate.

Magnesium citrate, you take enough of that. You're going to find yourself in the bathroom soon after. It draws water into the gut. But magnesium glycinate, it's just magnesium bound to a glycine molecule, and also glycine is something that we tend to under-consume today as well. It's an amino acid, which is involved in metabolic health, and I think we pretty dramatically under-consume magnesium, especially your average omnivore. And so when you get magnesium glycinate or bisclicinate, which is two glycinate molecules, you're basically getting like a double whammy.

And it's a great source of magnesium. You don't have to take it with food or anything like that. And so that's generally, that's generally my go-to. It's also a great, it's important for my grain prevention. This is one of these nutrients that actually there's good data on it. It's also, most people aren't aware of this, but it can actually help prevent noise-induced hearing loss. There have been a number of studies over the past couple of decades where they'll use people that are in the army, like servicemen and women who are exposed to really loud

noise on a daily basis. You couldn't expose civilians to this degree of noise because it would be unethical. Like no IRB, no institutional review board would let this pass, but you take people that are already due to their occupations, right? Exposed to really loud noise. So those are the kinds of people that you can actually, like, easily enroll in a clinical trial like this. And they've shown that magnesium at a dose around the level that I've already described about 400 and 500 milligrams, if I recall correctly, is a really effective prophylactic for, meaning it can help prevent noise-induced hearing loss

for people that are exposed to loud noise on a regular basis. So I value my hearing immensely. Like I love music is like one of my favorite things in life, right? So when I, after like exposure to loud music or whatever or loud noise, like if I, if I go to a concert that night, I'm taking, you know, pretty high dose magnesium just to like offset any of the potential damage. The real front line of hearing loss club promoters. Right, this is who we really should. You want me to give you some nice test subjects for people that have spent way too much time in overly loud DJ booths club promoters. That's me. You can tell the DJ that he needs to stop playing drum and bass because there's a fight over the

far side of the club or standing at the back trying to work out why the lights aren't moving and I've got my head next to some huge basebeer, or whatever it is. My business partner has lost 16 dB off the top end, and I think 14 or 10 dB off the bottom end of his hearing. Thankfully mine's not that bad, but he's got tinnitus, he's got a bunch of other things. So I'm going to guess that it's act as a prophylactic, it's protective, but not regenerative. Is that right? Yeah, right. So it's gone, it's gone.

Sorry Dave, you can't hear what I'm saying in any case. I don't know why I'm apologizing. Yeah, I mean, we don't have any data on it. You know, any regenerative potential, but yeah, no. I would take it more as a prophylactic and, man, be just careful going forward. What's your issue with mouthwash? Oh, man, mouthwash. So mouthwash, we talked a little bit about the fact that we have like bacteria everywhere,

right? And we are just at the very, very, very tip of the iceberg in terms of understanding the role that, you know, all of, you know, whether it's like bacteria or viruses or fungi even play in our health, right? Like, we are, we are essentially super organisms, and the gut microbiome plays a role. So too does our oral microbiome. And about 40% of people in this country regularly use antiseptic mouthwash, which basically indiscriminately nukes the bacteria in the mouth, right? What could be the harm of this, you might say to yourself, well, maybe you're mitigating bad breath, maybe you're preventing cavities, the reality is, which we're now starting to

see, is that there is a whole host of potential downstream consequences that occur when we routinely nuke the bacteria in our mouth. So it turns out that they're not just doing bad things occasionally for certain people, right? They're actually also doing good things. And so by regularly using antiseptic mouthwash, what you're doing is you're killing off bacteria that among other things are involved in the nitric oxide pathway in your body. So when we consume fruits and vegetables that contain compounds

called nitrates, right? So beets, for example, beetroot powder is a very popular fitness supplement, dark leafy greens, like arugula, particularly rich in compounds called nitrates, right? When we consume nitrates, the bacteria in our mouths, as we chew them, right, the bacteria on our tongue specifically, reduce nitrate to nitrite rather to nitrate, which is then what enters its nitric oxide pathway. And nitric oxide is a gas that we create in our blood vessels that increases blood flow, reduces blood pressure, and acts as a signaling molecule. So it's also involved in insulin signaling, And acts as a signaling molecule. So it's also involved in insulin signaling.

It's involved in insulin sensitivity, which we know is a really crucial characteristic of metabolic health, right? And so when you nuke that bacteria, you're basically disallowing the bacteria, or you're basically negating your ability to derive a cardio protective effect of healthy foods, fruits and vegetables that you're basically negating your ability to derive a cardio protective effect of healthy foods, fruits and vegetables that you're eating like beets or dark leafy greens,

because you're basically handicapping your ability to generate nitrite. And so they've done studies that have found, that these are not perfect studies, the baseline health of the study participants, not that great, obese participants, but what they found was that obese participants that regularly used, frequently rather used antiseptic mouthwash.

So this is two times or more per day, we're at double the odds of developing hypertension and they saw a 50% increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes. So the hypertension thing makes perfect sense because as we established these nitric oxide supporting bacteria play a role in helping to reduce blood pressure. And those studies are correlational so they don't establish causation. But there was another study that came out that was a little bit more telling. This was a randomized control trial that found that when people in the post-exercise window, one of the many benefits of exercise is that it has an anti-hypertensive effect, meaning

it helps to normalize your blood pressure. It helps to keep your blood pressure at a nice and healthy range, which we know, like having healthy blood pressure is crucial for having a healthy brain. I mean, it's healthy for, it's important for many reasons, but we know that the brain relies on healthy blood pressure, right? And exercise is one of the best ways

to keep your blood pressure nice and healthy. So what this randomized control trial found was that when people switched with antiseptic mouthwash in the post workout window, they basically negated the anti-hypertensive effects, the anti-hypertensive effect of that workout, right? So typically after a workout, you see this drop in blood pressure over time, and the people, the participants who switched with antiseptic mouthwash, they didn't see the benefit.

They didn't see that benefit. In this study, a type of mouthwash that's typically prescription was used. It was called chlorhexidine. It's not necessarily reflective of what you might see with one you know, one of these like commercially available amounts. Like this for me, something like that. Yeah, but I mean, you look on the bottle of like that brand, for example, and it says kills 99% of bacteria.

That's not a good thing, you know? And it's well known that people with type 2 diabetes are at increased risk of periodontal disease, right? But it's also that, you know, people with periodontal disease, right? But it's also that people with periodontal disease, with dysregulated oral microbiomes, are likely, that is, it's likely a bi-directional relationship, right? And so I think advertising this is something

that's somehow good for diabetics. It's a big problem. I think probably pretty harmful. So we do need to do more research on this, but yeah, I mean, mouthwash is something that, like, unless you're using it for medical reasons, I would say, stay away from it. You know, if you use it now and then that's totally fine. But if you're one of these, like, frequent users two or more times a day, that's definitely a habit worth changing. You also mentioned earlier on the dangers associated with certain types of sun cream, maybe

all types of sun cream. What do I do if I want to be out in the sun and I don't want to get burnt? So I think it just comes back to developing a healthy relationship with the sun. And going back to the mouthwash thing, there are a lot of practices that have been, or like, paradigms that have been sort of put into place by our public health officials that, I guess, made sense when they were instituted at the time, right? Like, I can see how fluoride in the drinking water serves a public health good because of the fact that so many people today are over-consuming ultra-processed foods, refined grain products

that easily gets retained by oral bacteria. That's why you see widespread dental decay. We're not seeing widespread dental decay because of like a lack of fluoride, right? If you actually eat a biologically appropriate diet, you're not going to need the mouthwash. You're not going to need the fluoride and your toothpaste, right? And obviously, people have different like genetic like tendencies to develop, you know, cavities and the like, not everybody's the same, but, but the same goes with the sun, like we've been told that there's no safe level of Sun exposure, but

The Sun is crucially important the Sun is medicine in many ways I mean the Sun actually directly on our skin helps to create nitric oxide right? It's the UVA rays that actually acts like a Hormetic stressor on our skin and Just under the surface creates nitric oxide, which is important for lowering blood pressure, right? It's also well established that exposure to the UVB rays from the sun help us to synthesize vitamin D, which is a steroid hormone responsible for regulating about 5% of the human genome, right? It's important for cognitive function. It's important for healthy immune function and down regulating an overactive immune system. So there's actually really compelling data on the role of vitamin

D in quieting autoimmunity in the body. MS in particular, there's a, you know, vitamin D is like one of the only vitamins that has a relevant clinical impact on multiple sclerosis, right? And we get vitamin D for the most part from the sun. It's also crucially important to anchor our body circadian rhythm. We know that every organ system is responsive to cues about what time of day it is. And the sun is the chief light, bright light in particular, is the primary time-setter for the human brain. So, yeah, if you're going to spend time in the sun, I think the way to do it is to gradually ramp up your sun exposure and to not burn, right? But like, I think by eating a helpful diet, you're going to have some degree of protection against this, you know, probably

more so than somebody who's on like the standard American diet. But you have to develop a responsible relationship with the sun. You don't want to just sit out all day and burn. There's actually no reason to. We generate more vitamin D. It's more effective to have smaller increment doses of sun as opposed to, for example, the phenomena whereby like you spend no time in the sun and then you go on vacation and you just, you know, from one day to the next, you're spending zero time in the sun to spending four hours, five hours in direct sunlight. That is not good for your skin, it's not good for your health, and it's not an effective way of producing vitamin D. The more effective way of producing vitamin D is to actually spend less or amounts of time in the sun, but on a daily basis. So this whole notion that the sun is bad for you, there's no safe level of sun exposure. Yeah, it's pseudoscience.

Is there any safe way to put something on your skin as a lotion or a topical solution of some kind that can help to mitigate exposure to the sun. I'm going to watch a baseball match, which I've learned can sometimes take like four hours in this country and it's going to be in the middle of the day, in the middle of the summer, and I'm going to get exposed to the sun and I can wear a long sleeve top and I can do all the rest of it, but my face is going to be in the sun or whatever else. There are certain situations in which people can't avoid sun exposure and haven't had time

to build up a month's worth of 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening of sun exposure to get them a base tan. What should they do then? Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. I am a fan of sunblock in the appropriate context and the sunblock that I think is the best to use are the mineral based sunscreens. Like, because they're actually sunscreens,

they provide a physical barrier between your skin and the sun. So zinc oxide, titanium oxide, I believe, those are the two primary ones. You generally want to steer clear from the chemical based sunscreens, the industrial, the synthetic industrial produced sunscreens, like the oxybed and zones, and the avow-bed zones. Now, if I'm desperate, it's better to use those, I think, on an infrequent basis,

then, to burn, just to be super clear. But we're now seeing that those actually are easily able to enter circulation so that they do absorb them. And new data is starting to show us that we absorb them at alarming rates and at a concentration that we actually don't really have a sort of full picture on the data of with regard to how they affect our biologies. There was an alarming paper that came out that showed that, you know, if you use sunscreen in a level that is typical, right, you slather your body with it, it actually absorbs into circulation and reaches a level that surpasses the FDA's threshold of toxicological concern.

So this is something that we don't know, like the long-term, and I'm not going to, you know, it's probably not good, right, like what these compounds are doing in us when used chronically and over the long-term, particularly if you are a child, right? If you're still developing. Because many of these compounds have exhibited endocrine disrupting abilities, right? So the ability to scramble your hormones, Avalbenzone, Oxybenzone, these are well-established endocrine disruptors. And if all they did was stay on the surface of your skin, you know, I think the concern would be a little bit sort of less, but now we see that they easily enter circulation. So I would definitely opt for the more the more mineral-based ones, which I don't think there's that level of concern. Another thing that you could do, and this isn't going to be as effective as using sunscreen if you're exposed to

as effective as using sunscreen if you're exposed to the sun in broad daylight in one of these high UV areas of the world. But astasanthin is actually a compound that's found in wild salmon and you can supplement with it. And it's sort of like an internal sunblock. They've done studies where they've shown that there is a degree of photo protection provided by Asta's Anthem, which is this compound that is created. So wild salmon, it's what gives wild salmon, it's characteristic red hue, but the salmon aren't born with that color. They actually get it when they consume algae. And algae sit at the top of the water surface, exposed to the harmful radiating rays of the sun all day long.

Algae can't swim away, they can't put a t-shirt on, they can't move into the shade, I will. So what they do, they generate this super powerful antioxidant called astazanthin, which is specifically designed to protect them from the sun's rays. And that's why they've done these clinical studies to see, well, what can this compound potentially do in us? And they found that, aside from protecting eye health

and from improving skin appearance, it actually can also provide some degree of skin protection. So I'm a huge fan of Ashes Anthem. It's another one of these staple supplements that I've been taking Ashes Anthem for about 15 years at this point. Really, really good data on it. I learned, I was in Zambia filming a mini documentary

a couple of weeks ago, and I learned how easily hippos burn, which you might not be familiar with, apparently really susceptible to the sun. And they get all pink on the top of the heads and on the little snouts. They get old pink and they get burned if they get caught out in the sun. She's bad for them. All right. So you've mentioned there, Astor, that Astor's and then, are there any other supplements that you take that you consider a staple of your routine that would not be common or that you think that people should be more aware of or should have a look at.

Huh. Yeah, I mean, I think like, official oil is fairly common, but I'm pretty religious about my official oil supplementation regimen. I take about a gram. I've heard that there are certain types of fish oils that you do want and certain that you don't. Do you want the ones that smell fishy or the ones that don't smell fishy after you've had them? You want the ones that don't smell fishy. And actually, one thing that I do is I actually chew occasionally the fish oil, especially if I'm buying like a new bottle, like a fresh bottle,

I'll chew it, which a lot of people, you know, listening probably going to be like, that's gross Max, but fresh fish oil, if it hasn't gone bad, actually shouldn't have any overt fishy flavor. And so, because, you know, like, fresh fish doesn't stink. It's only like, if you walk through a fish market, it's all the dried, oxidized fish oils that, you know, residues that are still lingering, that's what stinks, right? But fresh oil, fresh fish oil shouldn't have any discernible. Maybe like very slight, but it shouldn't have any discernible. Is it efficient?

Brand the E-Us, official? I mean, I've been using Nordic naturals for years. I have no affiliation with them. So I don't work with them. I think in the past I did, do a little bit of like, because I have my own podcast, it's called A Genius Life. I think I have work with them in the past, but I'm not currently. I just generally, I go to Whole Foods and I buy it with my own money,

because they just taste the freshest to me. You could also smell the bottle. That's another good thing to do. Smell the bottle, it shouldn't smell overtly fishy. You're gonna get a slight, I think, probably odor, but and that's not the only good brand. You can, one good thing to look for on fish oil bottles is IFOs, IFOS, it's the International Fish Oil Standards.

It's this third party independent organization that routinely tests fish oil for oxidation and oxidation byproducts. So it's sort of a way of, it's just like one more sort of notch on the belt of knowing that the fish oil that you're getting is of sufficient quality that they've been able to

afford to submit for testing and that the IFO's got behind it. So again, it's not associated with any of these like fish oil brands, but you'll see it on some brands. I think a Whole Foods brand itself actually is IFO certified. So, Master's Anthem, Fischoyles, make sure that they are of a good quality and don't smell too fishy. What else?

Yeah. I take creatine. I take creatine not, I'm an omnivore, so I wouldn't expect to get a cognitive benefit from it, although people who are not omnivores, people who are vegan and vegetarian, there's some data that suggests that creatine supplementation can actually lead to a cognitive boost. Creatine is a compound that's naturally found in muscle meat. An organ meets to some degree, but you primarily get it in muscle meat, and so you ingest enough of it as an omnivore to provide the brain with all of

this sort of exogenous creatine that it needs. But they've done, there's one or two studies that have that have the signal was that creatine supplementation can actually boost cognitive function and people who don't regularly consume meat. But I take it, I take about five grams a day. It's a, there's a robust safety record, and efficacy record for creatine is an ergo genic compound, meaning it helps to support physical performance. I think it's a great supplement for both men and women.

It might lead to a very slight weight gain, but it draws water in intramuscularly. So it's not like you're not gonna see puffiness. It's like water that's like literally like in your muscles And it helps to boost energy essentially in the gym Which can then lead to you know long-term Strength gains and the like so I think it's a great supplement. Don't take it without checking with your doctor first if you have a medical condition You always want to check with your with before adopting any new supplement, but generally

I think creatine is a good one. I also think protein powder is great. I'm a big fan of way protein. Way protein is very high biological value. It's a great source of loosein and other essential amino acids. Lootin in particular is loosein rather. It's very important for simulating muscle protein synthesis, but it of course comes with the whole complex of essential amino acids. It's also a rich source of cysteine, which can help support glutathione

synthesis. So there's actually a role for way protein for supporting immune function, which is really important, helps to promote the synthesis of glutathione, which is your body's master antioxidant. So I'm a huge fan of way protein, I think. I protein. I think protein is one of these macronutrients that's like almost magical for what it does to the human body, right? It supports your musculature and muscle and strength is really in many ways the currency of longevity. So you want to support your musculature

and away protein in general is a great way to do that, a great way to do that, a great way to do that, no pun intended. It's the most satiating macronutrient. Much more so than carbs and fat, you can look to the protein leverage hypothesis. We definitely like, in many ways it seems our hunger, our drive to eat is driven by our necessity for amino acids and protein more generally. And actually protein also drives up levels of GLP1.

A lot of people these days are talking about semaglutide, which is a GLP1 agonist. It's been hailed as a revolutionary weight loss drug. It's prescribed for helping better manage blood sugar. And one of the reasons why it's so effective for weight loss is that it reduces appetite. It slows trans it slows what's called gastric emptying. So the transitive of the contents of the stomach into the small intestine. It also boosts insulin sensitivity. Or rather it boost it releases, it causes a release of insulin.

And so you've got this like revolution or you're right, like weight loss, drug, stomach lootide, but actually you can boost GLP1 yourself by just prioritizing protein in your diet. And so that's one of the many reasons why I think people who even incrementally increase their protein consumption will see a degree of body recomposition, right? Less fat mass, greater lean mass. So protein is, yeah, protein is where it's at. On top of those, one thing that I've found that's interesting at the moment, I think you and Ben Greenfield both seem to agree on this, is that the healthy community, the fitness

community, that are kind of considering what 20 years ago would have been revolutionary, making sure that they're getting sufficient protein in, making sure that they're doing some sort of strength and weight training protocol, even if you're a woman who's not looking to get much more muscular, focusing on sleep, ensuring that they've got proper sleep hygiene. Both of you seem to be kind of taking that they've got proper sleep hygiene. Both of you seem to be kind of taking recommendations for fitness, not into a more complex round, but certainly beyond just that. If you are looking at what you consider to be sort of the typical fitness crowd at the moment,

what are the habits that you think that they are missing mostly, that they're probably not thinking about at the moment. Well, I think the typical fitness crowd is tends to be obsessed, well, there tends to be a lot of obsession within the fitness community, a lot of like body image issues, a lot of fractured relationships with food, that's just my observation. And I don't actually consider myself

part of the fitness community, maybe because I didn't come from a personal training background or I'm not a bodybuilder, I'm not an athlete, I'm not a powerlifter. I've always been interested in bodybuilding, but I think that I'm versed enough in fitness and nutrition science, but with sort of one foot also in the world of longevity, where I can sort of like filter the, what the data says about how to best, for example,

lose fat or gain muscle through the lens of like, okay, well, what's also gonna be best for like my long-term health, like the long game, right? There's this concept that I've become kind of interested in that is, it's a fascinating concept. And it's like, it's a very unfortunate phrase. It's antagonistic pleotropy. It's just, it's a mouthful.

And it's like something, not sexy. It's like not what something that your average person is going to remember but it's a very powerful concept and it basically is like The things that are good for us, you know as we're developing and as we are approaching peak reproductive Shape right like to be in like our our strongest and most robust physical form

aren't necessarily also going to be what's going to get us to the age of 120 for that matter. And so I think it's a really interesting thought experience to try to reconcile. Like, okay, well, what if we did want to do both? What if we did want to get into like, Fengreen field shape, for example, right? to try to reconcile, like, okay, well, what if we did want to do both? What if we did want to get into like, Ben Greenfield shape, for example, right?

But also, like, have our bodies in fighting form when we're also like 80 and 90 and 100. And I feel like sometimes, like, you've got like the world of longevity and you've got the world of fitness, and they're kind of like siloed off, right? But I'm actually very interested in bridging that divide and reconciling those two seemingly divergent ideas. And so one thing that I think is really important that people in the fitness industry

don't really talk about very much is the value of food quality. I mean, I see so many people in the world of fitness boiling it all down to calories in, calories out. And calories, yeah, they matter, right? But like, they're not all that matter. Like food quality, I think, plays a major role. And especially for somebody who's scratching their head, wondering why diet after diet seems to fail for them, I think it's really important that people know that food quality in many ways dictates the quantity of food that one is inclined to consume, right? There was this really great seminal study that was performed in 2018 funded by the NIH, Kevin Hall let it, who's a well-known obesity researcher, who found that when people were

given access only to ultra-processed foods, they tended to over-consume their energy requirements for the day by about 500 calories. So that's a 500 calorie, essentially, in other words, energy surplus. That they consumed when just eating to satiety, right? Like eating to a point where they felt like, okay, I could walk away from the table now. This was a crossover trial. So then what the researchers did was they gave them access to a diet that was less processed,

right? Like a minimally processed diet, like the kinds of foods that you might find around the perimeter of the supermarket as opposed to in the aisles of the supermarket, when they found that when eating to the same degree of satiety, I've had enough, I'm good. The subject ended up eating at a 300 calorie deficit. So that right there, that's an 800 calorie swing determined, not by somebody counting calories in there in an Excel spreadsheet or with an app, right? That was determined purely by the quality of the food that they're consuming. So oftentimes a lot of people when their diets fail, they tend to feel a sense of moral failure. Like why couldn't I just count my calories, you know, more rigorously or, you know, why did I over consume the pint of ice cream? I intended only to have one scoop and, you know, before I knew it, I was looking at the bottom of the pint.

Well, it's because that food quality in many ways dictates the quantity of the food that you feel compelled to consume, right? When you're basing your diet on higher protein foods, on foods that are more minimally processed, maybe it's like because you eat them more slowly than something that's more refined, right? That you have this release of hormones, right? Like GLP1, for example, that makes you less inclined to overeat.

And I think that that's like something that you don't often get in the fitness community that tends to make things all about calories, right? It's just like that you don't often get in the fitness community that tends to make things all about calories, right? It's just like, calories in, calories out is a mathematical maxim. It's a platitude that, yeah, it's true calories in, calories out. The key to fat loss is being in a calorie deficit, but where it fails is that it's really shitty advice.

It's just not good advice. That that's what your average person is also, that advice is exactly the advice of the food industry wants people to be giving out as well, because with that advice, there's no such thing as a good or bad food. It's like you can have the soda, You can have the ice cream. It's not our fault that you didn't moderate your consumption of the ice cream. You fat pig, right? It's your fault. But that's because people are not, they're not being told that these foods are not designed to be consumed in moderation. Right? So I didn't mean to fat shame right there. That's not the intent. The intent was to say that that's how the food industry thinks of you. That if you weren't able to lose weight, because on this calorie-centric approach to weight loss, you weren't able to just eat less and move more, it's your fault. That was a moral failure on your part. That's not

the case. The case is that we live in a toxic food environment. A food environment that ultra-process foods are omnipresent. They're always at arm's reach. And they're designed to be hyper-palatable. They're designed to push your brain to a bliss point beyond which self-control is essentially impossible. And granted, there is variation here. Some people will be better able to moderate their consumption of ice cream, and some people can't. People have their different trigger foods, right? Like, but I think like talking about

the behavioral aspects of food, and the relationship that we have with food, I think that's crucially important. Way more important for the long-term sustainability of one's sort of fitness lifestyle than the more calorie-centric approach, which tends to be paraded by people in the fitness community over and over and over and over again. Yeah, well, I'm good friends with James Smith and Duran Katal, and both of them are, they're

Mr. Calories, both of them, like the Calory couple. And they're right, like the fundamentals of weight loss when it comes down to the thermodynamic sort of underpinnings of it are calories in and calories out. But the means by which you get there, it seems to be what you're saying matter and awful lot. It's like, do you want to swim upstream or do you want to swim downstream when you're trying to control the calories that you eat? And then on top of that, you know, if it fits your macros bro lifestyle that me and all of my lifting friends were a part of 15 years ago,

like when that first came on the scene, it was phenomenal because you could cut and eat haribo. It couldn't eat many haribo. You couldn't have much cheesecake, but you could. It basically told you that as long as you hit these three numbers by the end of the day, nothing else matters.

Like all that you're bothered about, your macronutrients by the end of it, and it's any calories, bro, is the solution. But that definitely led to a bunch of disordered eating from me, because I never learned the value of padding out a meal with a shit ton of vegetables. Like, okay, like I could have my carbs come from these four or five pieces of haribo,

or I could have like two sweet potatoes. And it would be the same. It's the same, in terms of the very narrow view that I'm having of how many carbs are in it, probably gonna end up being the same, something similar. Uh, and yet the experience of eating it of how many carbs are in it, probably going to end up being the same, something similar. And yet the experience of eating it and my subsequent sense of hunger is wildly different. And then that's before even talking about micronutrients, minerals, fiber, all the rest

of this stuff. So yeah, I think that short and snappy taglines are always gonna be sexy because they help to minimize down something that's by its nature kind of complex into something which is really simple and easy to understand. But a lot gets lost in translation, I think. Yeah, and again, I think that there's a seat at the table for all of the different perspectives.

And I've seen some of James's content, I think he's phenomenal, you know? but like I think you also have to understand context and where these people are coming from. And you know, I think like many of them who in the path have come after me need to understand where I'm coming from, right? Like these are people who are like fitness professionals and you know, they have a certain kind of experience, right? A lot of the people that gravitate towards that content, these are people that are already very obsessed with their bodies.

And they're amenable to constantly tracking things like that. I'm more thinking of it from a public health standpoint. And also, I've been honed by my experience of getting to reach like people, yeah, I reach a lot of fitness bros on social media, right? But I also, you know, I've been able to do a lot of like television in the United States where I reach people that are not on Instagram, you know, that are not obsessed with fitness. They're just like obese overweight and they have no idea why, you know.

So like for me, I think you've got to, yeah, you have to talk about calories. Calories definitely play a role, but you can't, I don't think that you can really lead with that. I think we have to talk about the behavioral aspects of food. And because once you plant the seed of knowledge, I think that that generally for the motivated person is going to then be able to adopt behavioral change and create healthy new habits for themselves. Eating while distracted, watching TV, if you're

eating while you're watching TV or reading a magazine or scrolling through your phone, you're going to be inclined to consume about 15% more calories than if you're just like present with your food. And so over the long term, that is gonna add up quite fast, in fact, right? So, you know, like, be more present with your food. Don't just eat mindlessly on the go. Like, that's another thing

that I think can really help people, right? There was a study recently that looked at people who ate late at night, like late night eating, compared to early time restricted feeding. This is a super controversial area, right? People are like, you know, it's sort of intermittent fasting and, you know, you see the calories in calories out people saying like, it's intermittent fasting, doesn't do anything, it's all about SICO. Well, yeah, at the end of the day, it is about calories and calories out,

but this study was so interesting about it. Was that it found that people who ate late dinner, dinner late at night, about 9 p.m., compared to people who, it actually might have been a crossover trial. So where, you know, subject participants were sort of like their own controls. What they found was that late night eating led to It actually might have been a crossover trial, so where subject participants were sort of like their own controls.

What they found was that late night eating led to increased hunger the next day. Increased hunger the next day, people were more inclined to, they consumed about 60% more calories, and they saw a reduction in their resting metabolic rate by, I believe, about 5%. Why would that be the case? Well, it's just that hunger is driven by hormones, and hormones are influenced by our circadian biology.

This is now what we're starting to see, right? So this doesn't mean... Typically, though, when it comes to an intimate and fast, most people that do it, David Sinclair and Alex Readman of the world, will fast through the morning and eat later in the day. I see very few people proposing an intermittent fasting regime, which involves eating upon waking and then fasting from the 4pm slot until 8 in the morning. So the data is actually coming out, suggesting that that sort of late start and followed by a late dinner is actually the wrong

approach. We're diurnal creatures, so we're meant to eat during the day. I'm not saying that we need to eat as soon as we wake up, right? But we're meant to eat sometimes shortly after we arise. I think like when intermittent fasting first came on the scene, so to speak, people didn't think it really mattered so much, like where you placed that feeding window, whether it was 12 to 8 or 2 to 10. But what we're now starting to see is that our metabolic furnace is primed to digest and metabolize food when it's light out, because when the sun goes down, that's really when our ancestors would have kind of winded down and gotten themselves ready for bed, right?

You also don't need as much energy late at night. You're just not doing as much stuff late at night, but now due to the ubiquity of artificial lighting and the like, we're sort of constantly in this sort of vagus environment where our brains don't really have a good sense of what time of day it is. But, ancestrally, we would have probably been foraging and eating generally when the sun was up and for maybe some short time after the sun went down. But this whole notion that eating late at night is somehow biologically appropriate.

That's a very modern phenomenon. I mean, today we're eating 16 hours a day. Your average adult is consuming and metabolizing food 16 hours a day, you know, which is like the entire time that they're waking up. Actually, they're digesting food probably even longer than that, right? Because you're, if you're eat right before you go to bed, then you're actually digesting while your body should be like priming itself for the restorative and repairative processes that occur during sleep, not metabolizing, not digesting and

metabolizing your food, right? So what the studies are now starting to show is that early time restricted feeding. So people can actually go to PubMed and look this up. It's sometimes abbreviated in the medical literature as ETRF, an acronym that stands for early time restricted feeding. literature as ETRF, an acronym that stands for Early Time Restricted Feeding. What we're seeing is that early time restricted feeding compared to late time restricted feeding actually coincides with a number of cardiometabolic benefits. So it's not that something that you eat at 10 p.m. has more calories than if you were

eat at 6 p.m. That's not the case. Again, it doesn't refute calories and calories out. But it seems to be the case that eating late at night can lead to, well, next day hunger, as I already mentioned, reduction in resting metabolic rates, small, but they were able to see this in that trial hormone

dysregulation, so various hormones that are involved in satiety and hunger and metabolism, like leptin and grellen were dysregulated. But then also blood sugar regulation and blood pressure are affected by late night eating, it seems. What you eat still trumps when you eat, but I mean, say you can't or don't want to change what it is that you're eating, right? This is a modification that

you might potentially make that could over the long term have a positive effect on your health. So yeah, I wouldn't push the eating, because I used to do this. I used to like not eat my first calorie until like, you know, like 2 p.m. or something ridiculous like that. Now generally I wake up at around 7 or 8 a.m. and I'll eat at around, you know, 10 or 11 a.m. And I try to on my best days not eat too late after 7 p.m. That doesn't always happen. You know, dinner today is our most social meal So I think it's important that people don't get dogmatic about this You know, you don't want to go you don't want to forego social opportunities

In the name of early time restricted feeding but but there is a signal there like in the medical literature that I think is like worth Worth listening to for sure. Dude, a lot of things I think to throw out of the window at the moment, maybe my, again, clip promotion career that I was doing where I finished at three in the morning and come home and eat the food that I'd prepared earlier on at 4am, might contribute to a little bit of the hunger that I was having. And also the mouthwash thing for me is huge. I've been an avid mouthwash user thinking that I was doing something good for my dental hygiene

that turns out might not be quite so good for my body overall. And look dude, let's bring this one home. I appreciate the fuck out of you. I really love your work. Where should people go if they want to check out the things that you do and the books that you've got and all the rest of it? You're the man. Thanks Chris. Well, I have my own YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash Max Lugavir, where I put up a lot of my content. I have a podcast called The Genius Life. I've written three books.

Now, Genius Foods is my first book, which is a New York Times bestseller. It's like a deep dive. It's like a nutritional care manual for the human brain. So I highly recommend people check that out. Or if you like to cook, I put out a cookbook called Genius Kitchen and then I'm super active on Instagram So but I'm easy to find so you know come and find me. All right, man. Cheers. Thanks Chris you