Modern Wisdom - #709 - Max Lugavere - The Terrifying Link Between Diet & Mental Health

Episode Date: November 20, 2023

Max Lugavere is a health and science journalist, filmmaker, podcaster and New York Times bestselling author. To maintain peak health, nurturing an healthy mind and body is key. Simple daily habits and foods can make a massive difference to limiting and even reversing cognitive decline as you age,. Expect to learn why California is banning Skittles, how worried you should be about artificial sweeteners, tactics for how to kill your sweet tooth, why raising your baby vegan might be child abuse, the biggest issue with the demonisation of red meat, the specific ways you can prevent dementia from happening and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount on your Mud/Wtr subscription & freebies at https://mudwtr.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ Buy my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.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 Lugavir, he's a health and science journalist, filmmaker, podcaster and an author. To maintain peak health, nurturing a healthy mind and body is key. Simple daily habits and foods can make a massive difference to limiting and even reversing cognitive decline as you age. And today, we get to go through some of Max's favorites. Expect to learn why California is banning skittles, how worried you should be about artificial sweeteners, tactics for how to kill your sweet tooth, why raising your baby vegan might be child abuse, the biggest issue with the demonization of red meat, the specific ways you can prevent dementia from happening, and much more.

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That's join.woop.com slash modernwistom that's join.wup.com slash modernwistom. But now ladies and gentlemen please welcome Max Lugavir. Gavin Newsom signed Bill 418, which will prohibit any food containing brominated vegetable oil, potassium bromate, propylparaben, and red dye 3. California becomes the first US state to ban skittles and 12,000 additional products for cancer-causing additives. What's going on? It's hard to take a firm stance on this

because on the one hand, I do think it's largely virtue signaling and perhaps a bit of fear mongering. California's kind of known for doing that. A lot of products that are sold in California, for example, like coffee. And a product that's innocuous as instant coffee has to come with the warning label that it contains a chrylamide,

a compound that in vitro at least is a known carcinogen. You can find this on instant coffee sold in California. It's not uncommon to be in a parking garage, for example, and see a sign by the elevator or staircase that the, by being in the parking garage, you're going to be exposed to chemicals known to cause cancer and that are, you know, to radogenic, birth defect causing. So California is known for being a bit of a hypochondriac state. And so that's where I think a lot of this comes from. On the other hand, I am, I'm not a fan of big government,

I'm a fan of small government and less regulation as opposed to more, but I do kind of think that where regulation is perhaps warranted is in with regard to the food supply, the food system. Because if you let the market decide, you end up with things like Mountain Dew Flavored Hot Dogs, which we've seen go viral on social media. You're kidding me. Yeah, I mean, it's unclear whether or not these were real or computer generated, but

I mean, you see all the time, you know, there's like all kinds of crazy products in the supermarket that are just, you know, their sole intent seemingly is to hook consumers onto this addictive, hyper-palatable, hyper-calorie dense product. You see it in fast food all the time. I mean, I'm not sure what country I was in, but I was walking around and there was like a glazed, donut hamburger that some mega chain was offering somewhere.

So like, if you let the market decide, the market is ultimately going to cater to what the people want and people don't have like stop gaps, you know. Old roads lead back to haribo tank faststicks or something. Yes, there you go, exactly. Those kinds of products. So I do think that a little bit of regulation is important. And I think, you know, this perhaps is a step in the right direction because we know that the food supply is essentially toxic. We live in a world now where 73% of items in your average supermarket are ultra-process. This is according to a new study that came out that used a machine learning algorithm

that looked at all the products available to your average consumer in your average supermarket. And the vast majority of them are ultra-process, which we know has been linked to every poor health outcome imaginable these days. So, you know, when banning or at least regulating these kinds of products, which at the end of the day ultimately are proxies for ultra processed foods, like you're not gonna find red dye 40, right? In something that mom cooks.

I think that's a positive thing. But again, California is known for fear mongering. I don't necessarily know how evidence-based the fear that a lot of people have towards these products are. The recent Asperer-Tame controversy was a good example of that. I don't have a dog in the fight with regard to Asperer-Tame. You can find a quivicle evidence that diet sodas are actually very helpful with regard to weight loss.

You can find observational evidence that people who consume more diet sodas have higher risk of obesity, higher risk of other negative health outcomes. But the World Health Organization came out and said that it was a possible human carcinogen, which the data on that isn't really so black and white. Give me the, yeah, I've had so many conversations about Aspartane over the last six months

since that World Health Organization came out. Some people have said, most people have said the risks are overblown. The concern doesn't matter unless you're taking 8,000 coaks a day or something that the risk is so small, then a lot of people say, well, a small chance of cancer risk increase isn't a good thing. Then other people have said, well, the reduction in weight from switching from sugar, calorific drinks to non-calorie aspartame drinks, think about the difference that you get now in terms of weight loss and the downstream benefit.

Like, what's your read overall? How worried should people be about artificial sweetness? Yeah, I don't think the people should be that worried. This is where I think the limitations of data come in and you have to, you have to arrive at a set of values about these sorts of products. And for me personally, I avoid artificial sweeteners because I abide by what is sometimes referred to as the precautionary principle. You know, and you might say, it's sort of like borderline appeal to nature fallacy, but I think that the less time a food or product has been in the marketplace, the more skepticism, the more caution we should reserve for that product.

And yes, Asperger team is one of the most studied compounds in existence, really, well, particularly with regard to a consumable product, right? But there's also publication bias. It's a heavily commercialized product. And so for me, I choose to avoid like artificial sweeteners. I don't think that consuming them particularly in reasonable doses is going to be a health concern and certainly for people who are on weight loss diets and it is the sort of the one singular vice that allows them to better adhere to that diet. I think that's a positive thing. And ultimately, we're exposed to carcinogens,

innumerable carcinogens on a daily basis. I think ultimately, how to prevent cancer is to stack the odds in your favor by building your own resilience, your own robustness with exercise, with an antioxidant rich diet, and the like. So if a little bit of asperate, and sneaks in here and there, which I personally avoid, but again, if this is something that happens to be your vice and you're consuming it in a reasonable dose, is I think it's probably fine. What is your advice to somebody like me who has quite a

strong sweet tooth and has managed to condition myself into eating a savory meal and then looking for something just that's like a little finisher at the end, right? And a lot of the time I can make this work with blueberries or raspberries, sometimes they're not in the fridge, sometimes it's more blueberries and raspberries. What are your go-to, I have a sweet tooth craving

and I need to satiate that, but I don't wanna kill myself. Where do you go and where do you advise people to go? You and Steven Bartlett, he asked me the same question. Did he? Yeah. It's the British thing in us. Or maybe it's the fact that we're both from like super working class backgrounds.

And we're like, we've been given this sort of zero, some scarcity mentality around sweet things that it's a treat, I don't know. Yeah, it's great. I look, I have a sweet tooth too. I think we're programmed for that, right? I mean, sweet is for one of our hunter gather ancestors, the only time they would encounter the sensation of sweet,

sweet taste, right? It would be when fruit was finally ripe during the summer season and it would signal to your body to store fat, right? It causes an elevation of insulin. It floods your muscles with stored energy for later use, right? So we're hardwired to enjoy sweet. And particularly today when sweet is combined with salty, when it's combined with fatty, you get this hyper-palatable combination, sometimes referred to as the Dorito effect, right? It takes a food that was previously

an ingredient and it turns it into this concoction that pushes your brain to a bliss point beyond which self-control is seemingly impossible, right? I've gone through it, I've gone to my freezer, taken out the pint of ice cream, only aspiring to have a spoon full or two before I knew it, I was looking at the bottom of the pint. So I mean, that's kind of the problem with modern foods. But ultimately, I think with sweet, there are a number of non-chloric sweeteners

on the market that I think are relatively safe. I mean, Alulose is a naturally derived sweetener that I've known, and I have no commercial affiliation with any Alulose producer or anything like that, but there seems to be some evidence that it might even be, might even actually have health benefits associated with it. I think a Rhythritol is great. A Rhythritol is a sugar alcohol, but among the sugar alcohols, it's the more well-tolerated one. Some of them can draw water into the gut and have a laxative effect, which you don't

want. It's like, here's a chocolate bar sweetened with maltatol and sorbitol. Oops, you're going to get diarrhea if you eat more than half the bar. But a Rithritol is generally very well-tolerated. No one's going to go and buy a Rithritol and throw it well tolerated. But like, no one's gonna go and buy Arithritol and like throw it at a thing. Like, what's the food? Give me some foods that are gonna say, shape me.

Well, fruit I think is great. Look, ice cream, you know, there's observational evidence. It's like mind blowing, but that people who consume ice cream for whatever reason, they seem to have better health. You know, I think this is one of those. Presumably that's going to be a type of ice cream. It's not going to be, you know, your ultra-process, get it from a ice cream truck thing.

Yeah, no. I mean, if you think about it, humans have been making ice cream for quite some time, and the ingredients, and I'm not saying that ice cream is a health food, by the way, just to make that perfectly clear. And this is a perfect example of where correlation doesn't equal causation necessarily. But yeah, ice cream, I mean, if you can buy ice cream made in the traditional way, I mean, it's egg yolks, right?

It's heavy cream, which is actually heavy cream is a great source of vitamin K2. Like there's nutrients in ice cream. So if you could find a low sugar version of it. Let's just take that. There are nutrients in ice cream. That's all I needed to hear. There are, actually. That was all I wanted. But yeah, I think it makes me think reflecting on my own sort of dietary habits that sweet craving that I've created in myself sometimes after I have a big meal. And unless I'm very disciplined,

that can lead me down a very dangerous path. You mentioned about kind of this unique blend of particular types of ingredients, particular types of flavors. Have you ever seen hunter gatherer tribes trying cheesecake for the first time? No, is that a thing? There's videos on the internet.

Whoa. So they give people who've never had processed foods before. and you think about cheesecake from a taste design, orification, you're familiar with that? No. So, orification is the way that food textures are designed to make them more palatable. Don't really think about this, right?

Because the obsession is with what's in the food, but the way that it feels in your mouth is a big determinant of your enjoyment of it. Ancestrality would have been very, very rare to have found something that had both crunchy and fluffy. And if you think about some of the most palatable foods, Oreos, you know, you've got this sort of crunch and then fluff french fries, same thing again, cheesecake, you've got that, but really dialed up with this perfect ratio of carbs and fat and sugar. There's tart across the top if you've got a little fruit compote type thing and you just get this blast of this orchestra in your mouth. They give

it to the thundercatherer tribes and their faces are just, you know, someone that's just chewed leaves for the last decade and eating meat that's just chewed leaves, right? For the last decade. And eating meat that's been cooked in variable, like, qualities. And yeah, you realize how hypernormal the stimuli of the foods that we're eating are. And this is the biggest lesson that I took from you. And it's been really, really useful for me that one of the main problems with ultra-process foods is not just what's been really, really useful for me that one of the main problems with ultra-process foods

is not just what's in them, but it is the fact that eating to satiety is so tough to do because it is built to push you past satiety. Exactly. Yeah, super well said. You know, I used to be more admittedly, and this is an area where I've evolved, I used to be more interested in what is the more optimal mix of carbs and fat for, for example, a weight lost diet or even for longevity. I think now where the science has evolved and also where my thinking has evolved as well is that it's really, it's about food quality at the end of the day.

And ultimately, ultra-process, this term, ultra-process, which was devised coined by the NOVA nutrient profiling system which was devised in Latin America, so people can go look it up. It's, there's actually a definition around what it takes to be classed as an ultra-processed food. It's a good screening tool. It's not even necessarily

the best diagnostic tool because certainly there are some ultra processed foods which are quite healthy. You know, you can take like a legume-based pasta, which is, you know, certainly a processed food might not necessarily be an ultra processed food, but processing is a continuum. And certainly there are some ultra processed foods that are healthy, you know, like a dark chocolate bars is, you know, fairly processed at this point. And it's, uh, and it can be quite healthy. We know that cacao, cocoa flavanols are really quite beneficial to you. But by and large, the vast majority of foods that Americans today are consuming are ultra-processed. And we know that these foods typically are very nutrient poor, so they're

depleted of any real nutritional quality other than perhaps energy and they are incredibly calorie dense and they're hyper-palatable, which makes them really difficult to moderate. So this seminal study published a couple years ago now, two or three years ago, funded by the NIH, found that when people eat to, eat ultra processed foods to satiety, they end up consuming a calorie surplus of about 500 additional calories. And today, in the United States,

that's a pound of weight per week, right? That's a thousand five hundred calories a week is a pound of weight game per week. Precisely, yeah. So, and you know, your average American today, that is largely what your average American is doing. Every day, they're consuming 60% of their calories from these ultra-processed foods. In the UK, it's a little bit lower.

It's about 50%. Yeah. Yeah. So you guys are doing a little bit better than we are over here. But American children are consuming 70% ultra-processed foods. And it's only trending up. It's like, it's not getting better. It's getting worse.

And we're now seeing connections between ultra-processed food, like dose responses, between ultra-processed food consumption and all-cause mortality and risk for cancer and risk for, I mean, dementia, even depression. So depression is linked to ultra-processed foods. Yeah, I mean, we're at the very tip of the iceberg with this in this field, which is being called nutritional psychiatry, looking at the role that diet plays in mental health. But there have been a number of associational studies at this point linking poor diet to worse mental health outcomes, like clinical depression and the like. The question has always been the direction of causality, right? So depressed people, obviously, like when I'm depressed, I'm reaching

for comfort foods, right? Which tend to be ultra processed. Can eating more ultra processed foods actually create symptoms of depression? That's been the sort of looming question. Well, we now have randomized clinical evidence, like empirical clinical data, suggesting that when people on junk food diets clean up their diets and adopt a more Mediterranean-style approach, which the Mediterranean diet is lauded in the Western literature as being the ideal human diet. I think it's one of probably many ideal diets. It's just a less processed diet at the end of the day and a diet that's more palatable to that is palatable to Western palates.

When people adopt a more Mediterranean style diet, they see some, they see remission from depression three times. At three times the rates has compared to standard of care, which was shown in the smiles trial, which is one of these like, it was the first and still highly regarded highly cited trials in this field of nutritional psychiatry, run at the Food and Mood Center at Deakin University in Australia. So, yeah, so food, I mean, Food is medicine and depression has been linked to inflammation. We know that inflammation is, we can modulate it via our diets and our lifestyles. Not for every, this is in the case for every person, but there's certainly a subset of the depressed population for whom inflammation is likely playing a role.

And there's a feedback loop going on here, right? The fact that you don't know which direction the arrow of causality is going in means that it could actually be cyclical. That we get depressed, so we eat food, which worsens the way we feel, which worsens the depression, which, dude, I remember, so I've spoken about this on the show before, throughout a good bit of my 20s, I thought I had like ambient depression that would creep up and then it would break through the activation energy surface and then it would go away again. And how depression would manifest for me is I would stay in bed for maybe, you know, two days at a time and I would refuse to get out of bed, but I would

eat. And one of the things that I would do is I would comfort, I guess binge and it would be very sugary, very sort of just like comfort eating foods. And there's a sensation that you get if you really pump like you know like a couple of muffins for breakfast and a few slices of pizza or whatever it is that you want to order from Uber Eats or something. And there is a sensation you get, especially if you haven't moved, you haven't got out of bed, you haven't seen any sunlight. And it presumably is the inflammation response

where it almost feels like your body's sort of throbbing, like in a satisfactory way. And your joints feel a little bit tight, and your brain feels very foggy. And then presumably off the other side of this absolutely huge glucose spike, I was able to then like fall back asleep. So I would do that, you know, I'd wake up, get food, eat, feel like shit, like put Netflix on it, whatever, curtains would be closed, wouldn't want to see anybody, you know, like meet the guy at the door, that sounds like I'm getting my fucking MDMA dealer to come down to it. Like he also came around, but he came around at different times. And that would be, that would be part of my cycle of of my cycle of low mood and it absolutely facilitated it and I used food ultra-processed, highly palatable foods that spiked my blood sugar as a comfort tool and it absolutely

made me and he was the other thing, it's not just about what you eat and the way that it makes you feel it is the story that you tell yourself about the sort of person that you are for having eaten that kind of food. Yeah. Right. And that is, that's really the sort of ruminative narrative based, I am a kind of person that does the XYZ. That's what I think really sort of drove it home

for me and made me feel like particularly, like unsatisfied with my stuff. I'm like, I shouldn't be doing this. I understand how important health and fitness is. I go to the gym, I mean, good shit. I was a fucking commercial model for 15 years in the UK. You shouldn't be lying in bed eating doffins, which is a combination donut muffin that was created in the UK.

There you go. Yeah. To let the market decide. Old roads descend into the hell that is duffin. But yeah, and I think that comfort eating, but in fact, that's something I'd love to know about from you. Like, what is it? Have you got any idea why people comfort binge eat?

Like, what's going on there? Are they reaching for something that's like a psychological piece of tape to? Like a psychological bandit of sorts. Yeah, I think when you eat high sugar foods, there's a, I mean, it can depress levels of cortisol, which is like the stress hormone.

We know that people that are like, for example, fasting, you can, I mean, fasting is a stress response, right? So sometimes when we're stressed out, we crave food because it's a way of signaling to our biology that everything's okay because ultimately food is a really important. We've saw for the food scarcity issue, but for a long time, I mean, food was the primary variable, right, that would indicate, and like, one of our ancestors successes or or ultimate demises, right, whether or not they were able to prick your food. And we've done that. And now that's sort of become the double edge sort of modernity.

Is that like, food is available constantly with a swipe of, you know, your finger on your app. You can have whatever it is, your heart desires to arrive at your doorstep within 15 minutes. So I think that's certainly part of it. Also the associations that we have with these kinds of foods that maybe they evoke, our childhoods in a way, like we reach for foods that remind us

of a more peaceful time in our lives when the stakes were perhaps a bit lower. So I think there's a lot of different variables potentially play, but I think it's also really important to not stigmatize and pathologize ultimately being depressed because depression and stress are part for the course of being human, particularly today. I mean, we're living in tumultuous times, and inevitably, all of us is gonna encounter something in life that serves as a depressive stimulus.

I mean, I've been depressed in my life, and it wasn't attributable to my diet. I've been really depressed because of what was going on, for example, in my family life, with everything that my mom went through, and the journey that has gotten me to this place. And so it's important to not pathologize these kinds of normal human emotions, which I think is really common, especially in our world, where everything has become lately all about

optimization and the 1500 steps that you have to do every morning before your morning coffee to optimize your day and to... Well, get back to talking to Max in one minute, but first I need to tell you about mud water. Mud water is a coffee alternative which tastes like cow and chai had a beautiful baby together. It is nearly winter time, which means you might want to hold onto your hot drink, but not have the caffeine crash and jitters that comes along with coffee. And mud water is the alternative. It's got four functional mushrooms, each of which was chosen for a specific purpose.

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modern wisdom. That's mudwtr.com slash modern wisdom. I brought this up with with Hubert Manier yesterday, I called it the peril of overoptimization. I have a friend who is a world-class DJ who messaged and said, dude, loving the show, blah, blah, blah. I have to say I'm starting to fall out of love with DJing because I watch a lot of good health communication podcasts on the internet and every time that I DJ and stay up till 4 in the morning, I feel guilt about not hitting my morning waking circadian rhythm.

So his love, his main passion in life, he is feeling that become tarnished because he has guilt around the gap between his potential optimized version and his realized optimized version. Do you see this as a trend among people? Well, yeah, I mean, certainly, and I'm not an expert in disorder eating or eating disorders, but that is one of the what I've been able to glean from experts that I've interacted with and ultimately people have suffered from disorder eating is that it's important to remove the morality from food.

I think if you have a healthy relationship with food, it's important to have empirical definitions around food. Like obviously, a four-year-old might be able to look at a certain food item, a bluffing. Duffin. A Duffin. And identify that that's maybe not as beneficial food item, a bluffing? Duffin. A Duffin. Yeah. And identify that that's maybe not as beneficial as a stock of broccoli or an egg or a piece

of grass-fed, grass-finished beef or something like that. So I think it's important to have to maintain definitions around food. We live in a time where seemingly it's impossible to define anything. And I think that's not helpful. But on the other hand, it is really important to remove the shame that we feel around food because at the end of the day, one single food, one single meal, isn't in any way going to sway your biology in the towards the direction of health or disease. It's about the dietary pattern as a whole. It's about... We don't live in the on average though, right?

Yeah. If we don't have the perspective. What we have is what is the lead measure of the thing that I'm doing? What is the story that I tell myself about that? Oh my god, I'm such a piece of shit. This is exactly why such and such a person left you. This is exactly why you're not realizing you're... This is going to be the beginning of the end. You know, it's very much a scarcity, fear mentality.

Yeah. I think it plays into it. Yeah, it's a big problem. I've actually heard this, it referred to as holistic derangement syndrome, which is a... Wow. Yeah. Let that settle in. That is so good.

Holistic derangement syndrome. Yeah, this sort of obsession with overoptimization, with understanding that, where was this grass finished or is this grain finished? Can we check with that, was that actually butter that the chef cooked it in because if there's a seed oil in this? Do I tell you about that study that I learned in the expectation effect? David Robson's thing about glucose? No, dude, gluten, sorry.

So, David Robson, the expectation effect, everyone should go and read his book, everyone should go and read your book, genius food, everyone should also go and read the expectation effect by David Robson, really great science writer from the UK. And they bring people into the lab to try and work out what's going on with gluten intolerance. That gluten intolerance is nearly 10x over the last 30 years, I think. Human biology hasn't changed that much. Maybe the diet landscape has changed a lot, but like gluten's gluten, right?

And the intolerance shouldn't have changed that much. They wanted to work out whether it was due to, in some part, this expectation effect. That people were hearing a lot of demonization about gluten. So they bring people into the lab, set them down. People that are in there do and do not have biological intolerances to gluten, they they bring people into the lab, set them down. People that are in there do and do not have biological intolerances to gluten, they've done the tests. They said, everybody down, they give everybody the same meal, they tell everyone that it's got gluten in, it's got no gluten in.

Within minutes, people are running to the toilet with diarrhea, they're breaking out in hives, they've got inflammation, they've got tension headaches, no one ate gluten, no one in the entire room ate gluten. And you had all of the symptoms. Wow. I've gluten intolerance manifesting. It's wild. So I can no seabow effect. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah. I mean, I'm very much immersed in the wellness world, and I love the wellness industry, but I will concede that. I think it has done some damage in the sense that there's a lot of misinformation now

about what foods are beneficial, what foods are less so. And I've been, I've drank the Kool-Aid at certain points in my life where there was a time when I thought dairy was sort of like an unclean food, and that it wasn't ideal from a health standpoint. And now I mean, I'm the biggest advocate of consuming dairy. I think dairy is a great food if you tolerate it, for example. You know, there's like this idea that clean eating is somehow dairy-free, it's gluten-free,

it's free of all the things, right? And I think it's, it's, again, really important to educate with nuance around these topics because the proportion of our population that is celiac is non-trivial. It's one to two percent and a lot of people with celiac or I'm sorry, celiac. So, you know, one to two percent is celiac and then there's this spectrum of symptoms

that people will get that is a true that is thought to be attributed to gluten called non-celiac gluten sensitivity, and that's thought to be I mean, that's a real thing, and that's widely underdiagnosed. So a lot of people are do experienced symptoms when they ingest gluten, and gluten is something that when they ingest gluten. And gluten is something that, you know, the dose, if you want to consider it that, and speak in terms of gluten as something

that is ultimately dozed, is higher than it's ever been. I mean, we, now we breed wheat to contain higher levels of gluten because it provides a mouth feel that we enjoy, it's that gooey texture. And also we're eating wheat. I mean, wheat is one of these like foundational to the day-luge of ultra-processed foods that your average person is now consuming and mass.

It's wheat with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and wheat snacks all in between. So the dose of gluten that your average person is ingesting is massive. And I'm not saying that people need to avoid gluten if they're not explicitly sensitive to it, but it is a protein that humans don't properly break down. It does stimulate a protein in the gut called zangulin, which basically leads to increased permeability, sort of increased passage of ingredients from the compounds from the lumen of the gut,

in through circulation, through what are typically tight junctions that are closed. Oh, this is like leaky gut. Yeah, right. Yeah, I've learned, so I had, I went to fountain life in Dallas and I had a full body MRI, brain angiogram, heart angiogram,

gut microbiome analysis, dexascan balance everything, full, full, full, full, full, works. And they came back and they said, you need to take Amra, colostrum, colostrum. Yep, they said, we need to just, it's not bad, but your gut could be less leaky. And that was the first time, I thought,

I didn't even know what the fuck leaky gut was. I didn't know if it was due to gluten or anything else, but yeah, I think this, like, colustrum products generally are gonna be more widely discussed. Yeah, so it seems like overall gluten, just something to probably keep in the back of your mind regardless of how well you think that you tolerate it.

Yeah, and also the, it's also the context in which in which the gluten is being consumed, I think, which also plays a role, and is not something that's being discussed enough. So we live in a time of widespread gut dysbiosis, right? Again, and not to keep harping on this because I don't want to sound like a broken record, but your average American adults diet is by and large ultra processed. One of the consequences of this is that most people aren't consuming adequate fiber. Now, fiber is not an essential nutrient, but your average American today, I believe, consumed somewhere between five

and 15 grams of fiber a day, right? So fiber is one of these non-essential nutrients, but it seems to be associated with positive health outcomes. It seems to be associated with lower levels of inflammation, greater longevity, and the like. And so there is a degree of resilience that we should all be able to cultivate with regard to our gut health that we're simply not because, again, we're just, we're eating predominantly junk foods in the background with the background of a low fiber diet.

And so, whereas, you know, we might, we should have the resilience that it takes to be able to ingest a protein like gluten and be all right with it. Well, we're eating more gluten than ever before in human history, we're eating less fiber than our ancestors likely ever consumed. It's estimated that our hunter gather ancestors were consuming upwards of 150 grams of fiber a day,

which is like orders of magnitude more than we're consuming today. So it's like, it's the dose, it's the compound, it's the context, everything matters. And so, can you explain to me what's going on with these new products that are low netcub, some cereals have this, some bars have this, what fuckery is happening on the back end, what are net carbs, and is there any sort of wizardry going on

which is hiding something in the deep dark annals of the ingredient profile? Yeah, very likely. So a lot of these, you know, net carbs really are mainly a concern for people who are on a ketogenic diet. And I think it's really important to lay out upfront. A lot of people are on the ketogenic diet because I think it's the ultimate diet for weight loss.

And if you prefer, if a ketogenic diet is a diet that you are most easily able to adhere to, then by all means have at it. And I also think I have to add all these sort of nuances and disclaimers because, because hashtag science. And I think it's important. all these sort of nuances and disclaimers because, because hashtag science. Yeah. And I think it's important. The ketogenic diet, I think, is a really important diet, particularly in the context of neurological conditions, epilepsy primarily, but also, I think now we're starting to see

neurodegenerative age-related conditions like Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. It's a very low carbohydrate diet. And so net carbohydrates come into play because people want to be able to consume processed foods while still allowing ketogenesis, right? Still allowing for ketone generation by eating low carbs. But I think one of the problems with this is that a lot of these low carb foods are so high in calories that it's like you might as well eat the original food.

Like unless you really have a medical reason for being in ketosis. And so a lot of the food manufacturers that produce these keto foods, they achieve having low net carbs despite having a ton of calories by using either fibers which are inaccessible to us. We were unable to humans unable to break down fiber into its, into glucose. So it passes through the small intestine, basically, unadulterated and then it becomes food essentially, like a food substrate for the bacteria that live in our large intestines. And this is true for fibers found in whole foods. What remains to be seen is whether or

not these extracts that are now being used as sweeteners in these ketogenic products function the same way. I think the jury is still out. The FDA last I recall is investigating ingredients like tapioca fiber syrup and all those kind of chikari root fiber to see if they actually do pass through the small intestine assimilated, undigested, which would allow them to maintain that they are, in fact, fibers. But I've seen people, because now there is this sort of trend of people wearing non-diabetic wearing continuous glucose monitors.

And I've heard reports from people that follow me that they'll eat a lot of these keto products that allegedly have very few net carbs and regardless, they still see a pretty significant spike in their blood sugar, which would suggest that these fibers are not actually going on. Something's going on. So at the end of the day, I think, you know, and this is again another area where I've evolved, I used to, by default, opt for these fake foods with the fake fibers that have low net carbs. But now, I think, you know, ultimately ultimately, a cookie is a cookie, ice cream is ice cream. So if you're going to reach for one of these foods and you don't have a medical necessity

for being in therapeutic ketosis, you might as well offer the real thing and be cognizant of the overall calorie count of these products because at the end of the day, I mean, they're junk foods. What do you think of this trend of young girls avoiding eating meat and protein and instead replacing it with salads and smoothies and just rough age for days? Horrible. Yeah, so I'm a huge advocate, an unapologetic advocate for omnivory. I think it's, you know, there's this push at the public health scale to towards plant-based diets.

And also online, you see obviously, you know, a lot of women in particular have embraced these diets. I think in part, and I'm not, obviously I'm not a woman. I don't know what their lived experiences like, but what I've been able to glean from my friends and other experts in this area is that a lot of women avoid meat and protein and they opt instead for salads because they think that it's going to make them smaller to eat that way, to eat like a rabbit.

And this is a big problem. You know, a lot of women today have body image issues, I think, perpetuated at least in part by social media. The fact that you see people, men and women that have phenomenal bodies that are, you know, usually augmented either male, I just to interject that have phenomenal bodies that are usually augmented either. Do you think? I just want to interject that. Male body to some of Malfia will overtake women

within the next two decades. It's on track to overtake it. Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. I mean, the pressure to look a certain way now on social media, I mean, they're augmented, they're augmented like behind the camera, right? And then post.

And then post. Yeah, post being posted, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So it's, yeah, it's really problematic. And so, you know, the pressures, I mean, women have always faced body pressure, right? I think this is a fairly new arena for the fellas, but yeah, women, I think,

have always wanted to, particularly since the 90s, like appear smaller. There's this idea that eating meat, I think, is masculine, that it's going to make you bigger, that it's harder to digest. I mean, steaks should actually be, steaks should be very easy to digest. The problem is a lot of people that are on low meat diets, they're depriving their bodies of the raw materials required to create stomach acid. So if you're on a low meat diet, then you decide, you know, once in a blue moon to have

a piece of red meat, well, you might be low in the minerals required to generate adequate stomach acid to allow you to properly digest that food. And you will mistake the discomfort after eating that meat as, oh, this is what meat eating meat is like for all people, right? You've conditioned your stomach to not be able to do the thing. So what is the result for girls in the way that they look and feel by being roughage-pilled? Well, I mean, roughage is like, I'm the biggest advocate of eating dark leafy greens. I think dark leafy greens are an incredible food, but if that's all you're eating,

they are hard to digest. I mean, for example, when anybody's who's ever had like a procedure on the large bowel, they're told, you're told prior to the procedure to go on a low residue diet. A low residue diet is a low fiber diet. Red meat is low residue. Basically, the residue is the indigestible material that makes its way down to the large intestine that gets then fermented and

can potentially create, particularly if you're unadapted to it, symptoms like gas and bloating and things like that. Stakes should be one of the easiest foods to digest. And so on the other hand, you have women and people in general, not just not to single out women, but people that, you know, they base their whole diets around cellulose, you know, like greens and indigestible plant material, and they wonder why they're walking around bloated all the time. And they're also, you know, studies show that people who are on vegetarian and vegan diets, they tend to eat less protein. We know that protein is really important for a number of reasons, satiating at the very least, but it also helps to preserve and grow your muscle tissue. It's

important for providing amino acids, which are the back bones to your neurotransmitters. So yeah, there is, I think, a consequence to basing your diet around just like to basing your diet around just like, rabbit food. Well, it seems to go hand in hand with a trend that at least as far as I can tell is kind of falling away now, which is like the thigh gap obsession, very willowy kind of, the London lock model,

super sort of stringy thing. But even within that, there's a softness to the body type, right, of people, both guys and girls, that do that because it, again, thankfully is falling away and the pivot from thin-spot to fit-spot, I think has actually largely been really good in that encouraging resistance training, encouraging high calorie meals, prioritization of protein, more focus on training, even like a bit of G-flux theories thing coming in, like let's try and create a calorie deficit

through both calorie restriction but also through training increase. So both sides of the Kaya Co equation. But you see, and I see it as well, man, like I see a lot of the girls that we used to work with at our events company, you're 18, 19, 20 years old and you're dancing for our events company and you want to look good in your dances outfit on stage or whatever. And the girls that would push a little bit harder on calories and train would have a different

kind of physique in the way that it presented. The skin seemed a little bit thinner and tighter and more translucent, and you could see the shape of their bodies underneath it as opposed to someone that's just dieting themselves into the ground, 1,300 calories a day in a desperate attempt to try and get down. And there's like a softness. There's a softness despite There's like, yeah, there's a softness. Despite they're not being much there. What is there still feels like that? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is a recipe. When you zoom out and you extrapolate

out 10, 20, 30, 40 years down the road. I mean, that's a recipe for sarcopenia at the very least. It's accelerated muscle wasting and just a lack of strength as one ages, which is fairly common these days. The worst is sarcopenical obesity. So it's like excess adiposity, along with being under muscleed. Oh, yeah. Dr. Gabrielle Lyme was on the show this week talking about her muscle-centred medicine. Great.

Yeah, this is a big movement. I think this is, again, so much sort of convergent trends happening here. We've got maybe the sign side coming in. We've got that. But yeah, dude, I mean, it's super, yeah. And not even to mention the important minerals and micronutrients that women are potentially missing out

on that are particularly important to the pre-menopausal woman. So, for example, heme iron, which is found primarily in red meat. Red meat is the ultimate iron supplement. Women who are premenstrual, I mean, there's like, anemia is super common. Iron deficiency anemia is super common today. Well, women lose quite a bit of eye in 1728 days. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, a bit of eye in one, seven, twenty eight days. There you go. Yeah.

So, I mean, we're going to get, we're going to get red flag from mansplaining, I'm sure. Baaah. Baaah. Baaah. Don't tell me how my periods work. Yeah. I don't even like them. No, but, no, you're 100% right, though.

I think, like, you know, their women, and the Fitzbo thing, I think think is great, you know, in the sense that it's got more women sort of aware to the benefits of resistance training. The, and, you know, a lot of us have worked really hard to dispel the myth that resistance training is going to lead to a bigger bulkier body. It doesn't, you know, women have testosterone, but one-tenth the testosterone of men, and it's really important for, you know, for libido, it's important for wellbeing,

body composition, but it's not gonna make you, it's not gonna lead to you ending up looking like Chris Bumsdead. Bro, I said this yesterday to keep him in. Do you realize how desperately hard I've tried for a decade and a half to become bulky? Like I work most moments of every day to put things into my body and do stuff to my body to become bulky. Like, I work most moments of every day to put things into my body and do stuff to my body

to become bulky. Like, you're not accidentally going to do a couple of supernated bicep curls and then look like sea bum. Exactly. It's not gonna creep up on you. And if it does, please tell me the protocol that you were doing. Same.

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by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. You posted a study talking about two minutes of exercise a day, reduces cancer risk by up to 20%. Yeah, I mean, this kind of research comes out all the time and it's super interesting and it's not to say that all you need to do is two minutes a day of exercise, right? That's not the point of the study. But what it, I think the drive home message is that we're not impotent to these kinds of conditions,

which now seem to be so rampant today, right, like cancer. I've had a number of cancer experts on my podcast as of late, actually Thomas Saferead, you know, as a wonderful expert in this field. Also, Joe Zondell is a good friend of mine who is another cancer expert. And the resounding advice that you get from both of these experts is that exercise really is medicine. I mean, it's super, super important. In terms of reducing inflammation,

in terms of building your robustness, your resilience, yeah, it's crucial. And so I don't know if two minutes a day isn't necessarily going to suffice, but yeah, I mean, again, like today, the milieu of the Western, not just diet, but lifestyle, we're largely sedentary, like leisure time physical activity is at an all time low. And we're starting to see increased rates of cancer now among younger people. There was another study that made major headlines recently that found that rates of cancer and particularly malignant cancer among cohort that typically you wouldn't see much of this type of cancer

in is now increasing, right? Rates of breast cancer have, I think, doubled since just 50 years ago. So, I mean, there's something in the modern world, you know, one variable, myriad variables that have become essentially toxic. And I think one of the variables that is essentially toxicogenic is the fact that we are now that so many of us are sedentary.

It's a big problem. And it doesn't take a ton of exercise. Like, you don't have to be like a Jim Bro, like you or I, to take a ton of exercise. You don't have to be a gym bro, like you or I, to reap the benefits of exercise. But I think it is super important to have an exercise routine and particularly one that prioritizes resistance training. I mean, this idea that you can just be active.

Like a lot of older adults I think are told to just be active, right? Which I think is typically taken as just walk, just like walk as much as you can. And walking is great. Walking is great, no matter where on the age spectrum you are. But I think resistance training has long been sort of thought to be this past time of bros. And I think that's a big problem. I mean, we're proudly, proudly, yeah, past time of bros. There you go. Dude, the 10 minute to 15 minute walk after reading, for me, is about as close of a super power as I've been able to find.

And I first got taught this from Stuman Gill, like four years ago, back pain expert, flew up to Canada to see him, and he was doing it primarily for the relieving of lower back pain and what he was doing was you need to walk small doses frequently and a good cue for that is when you Have something to eat you're gonna wait at least multiple times a day go for the walk afterward and he mentioned at the time There's some benefits to downstream, maybe mentioned a couple of bits. And just the last five years, Mark Bell and Stan Effeding, right, with the, he calls it the 10 minute walk, but 15 seems better. And if you're eating, you know, if you get one in on a morning to get some sunlight in the eyes, because your hibberman

piled, and then you have three meals a day, and you do, if you can get a nice 10 to 15 minute loop from wherever you are, that's also your 10,000 steps sorted. That's also going to improve your insulin sensitivity. That's also going to help you to blow off a little bit of that spike that you get post eating. It's going to the muscles, like the contralateral muscles that run across the stomach. It actually helps to move food or at least it does for me. Whatever big meal, I actually feel like the food is able to move through my digestion more easily

if I go for a walk after the two nights that we've been here. We've had big dinners both times, cheesecake factory and buffalo wild wings because I am a child. And both times we've been for a walk for 15 minutes afterward. I can go to sleep more easily on an evening time. It's just it's a real phenomenal hack and I think that struggling to get your walks in, maybe you're concerned about what's happening with insulin, maybe you want to get a little bit more time outside in nature and be away from your phone. I love these habits where you can stack a bunch of different things on top of them. I get some more time outside. I'm going to get some more sunlight. I'm going to get some more time outside, I'm gonna get some more sunlight, I'm gonna get some more fresh air, I'm not gonna be on my front blah, blah, blah. It's a real 10 minute walk,

15 minute walk after eating, pregnant, I'm all in. Yeah, I mean walking moves, there's so many benefits to walking, but I mean, you have fluids in your body that don't have their own heart, and so for example, lymphatic flow, right? Like walking helps to promote that,

which is involved in, which plays a role in digestion. We know that just a short walk, post-mealmeal reduces that post-prandial blood sugar spike, which is thought to be beneficial, particularly if you have glucose tolerance issues. We know that walking helps to remove fat in the blood. Super important. We see that there's an association, particularly in younger people between around 7,000 to 10,000 steps a day and lower risk of all cause mortality. And then about 10,000 I think to 12,000 steps among older people.

The whole 10,000 steps a day thing is a little bit BS, but there actually was a meta analysis that came out fairly recently, I think over the past year, that found that it is actually a zone that's not too far off from that 10,000 step that seems to be associated with. You need to pick a number. You know what I mean? Exactly. Yeah, it depends on how quickly you walk, I suppose. There was a New York Post article titled,

I'm raising my child vegan. It's not as simple as you think, and you replied and said, child abuse. Yes. What's going on? Yeah, I mean, I think and you replied and said, child abuse. Yes. What's going on? Yeah, I mean, I think we are biologically adapted to be omnivores. And we know that the neonate relies on the mother

deriving adequate nutrition from her food. And there are the, if you look at the most nutrient dense foods available to your average person today, there's literally a paper people can look at published by Bill at L two to three years ago that ranked all the most nutrient dense foods, particularly by nutrients of concerns. Nutrients that people tend to under consume today, zinc, vitamin B12 and things like that. And animal products were took all the top spots with the exception being dark leafy greens, which are thought to be very, very nutrient dense because they're so calorie sparse,

and they're a good source of vitamin C and folate and calcium and the like. But animal products are most nutrient dense foods. And when you're a pregnant woman, you are eating for two. So, you know, we already see that pregnant women tend to under consume protein, you know, consumption of colon, which is a really important nutrient for, I mean, you put colon, right? City colon in your, in your neurotropic beverage right here, like super important for brain development, for cognitive function, vitamin B12,

crucially important. There's so many DHA fat, like preformed DHA fat, which is found exclusively in animal products. You can consume omega-3s from plants, but humans are very inefficient at converting it to its usable forms in the body. And so, I mean, that's from the standpoint of pregnancy. Like, if I were at the stage in my life where I were looking to procreate, I would want to procreate with an omnivorous woman.

And it's like saying something like that is controversial today, but it shouldn't be. Absolutely. It wants to procreate with an omnivorous woman, ladies. This is the sign that you have been looking for. It's the bad signal. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, that's that been looking for. It's the bad signal. Yeah. Yeah, so I mean, that's super important.

I think like you, with regard to plant-based diets, you can cobble together a diet that leads to better biomarkers and ultimately look at plant-based diet compared to the standard American diet is gonna be a healthier choice, right? You can cobble together a diet that, you know, with the use of protein supplements, perhaps, can afford

you a fantastic body composition. But I think from the standpoint of pregnancy and ultimately development and childhood development, I think it's really important to, yeah, to allow your child, who's inevitably going to be a picky eater as it is, because that's inevitably a child. Because they're a child, yeah. I think it's really important to not cross off the list because of some silly ideology, one of the most nutrient dense, the most nutrient dense category of foods

available to your average human. What do you have any idea what will happen to a child who is lacking in many of the sort of things that a vegan diet would cause that to be a bereft. Yeah, I mean, look, let's get stunted development, failure to thrive. I mean, I just think it's, I think you're, it's essentially sometimes referred to as nutritionism,

this idea that humans with all of our hubris can distill food into its constituent nutrients and then replicate food in a way with processed alternatives. I mean, if you take something like the product's soilent, it's a perfect example of that, right? It's like, what happens when Silicon Valley people try to create food, they break down a food into its constituent nutrients, right? The data that makes a food food according to them. This is the code of food. Yeah, this is the code of food and we have this ultra-process,

ultimately crap product, but here it is, right? Like you're not gonna develop a deficiency disease if this is all you consume every day. And so that's like nutritionism. And I think it fails time and time again because we didn't evolve with these nutrients and isolation. We've evolved with food and we have a handful of nutrients that we know are essential, but that list of what's essential,

what's conditionally essential and what's non-essential is changing all the time as it should. And foods don't just contain these single nutrients in isolation, right? Like an orange isn't just, doesn't just provide vitamin C, right? There are countless other innumerable, like nutrients that we have yet to even name likely compounds in, you know, in an orange that might have an entourage effect that might increase the absorption, the bioavailability of the vitamin C, for example, and the RDA

for vitamin C is set to avoid scurvy at the population level, right? But that doesn't mean that we're all consuming adequate levels of vitamin C to promote optimal collagen synthesis, for example, which we know vitamin C is involved in. So, you know, foods have all of these different nutrients and you take a food like red meat, right? Like red meat has, it contains vitamin B12, which somebody on a plant-based diet might say,

well, that's the one essential nutrient you can't get on a plant-based diet. I can just take a vitamin B12 supplement. But what about the constellation of nutrients that that vitamin B12 comes with, right? Like the hem iron, the carnitine, the carnacene, the creatine, which we know is really important from a standpoint, muscular health, right? And so you're just depriving a baby of, you know, of all of those different nutrients. And look, the standard American diet isn't great either. Like, you have a lot of children these days that have early onset hypertension,

early onset type 2 diabetes. So I'm not saying that the alternative is the standard American diet. But I think that you can, that yeah, that like you can, the ultimate optimal diet for, certainly for developing human, but also for an adult.

Is a diet that incorporates both animal products and plant products? It's interesting to think that the child abuse thing is a really interesting frame of it because you are locking in to this neonatal human, a kind of development that they didn't choose. you are locking in to this neonatal human, a kind of development that they didn't choose, that they had no volition in saying yes or no to. And I guess largely until the age of probably 14 or 15 when they can use the stove themselves

and actually fully understand what's going into them, even throughout preschools and so on and so forth, you're still largely doing that. But when it's you have to, what you eat is what your child eats in some regard. It's wild. I have a friend Alex who was a vegan philosopher for a good while. He was ethically convinced by Peter Singer's work, animal liberation, which I still think from an ethical perspective, I think that we're going to look back on what we do now with much of animal farming and think of it as abhorrent.

I think you're going to look back and see it as not quite sort of holocausty, but in that sort of realm, oh my God, we had sentient animals and we did this to them, right? He became completely vegan piled, he became an advocate, he is an unbelievably effective debater at everything, but particularly for veganism. And he found, after going vegan, that making a commitment, making a sacrifice to the philosophy that he, the ethics that he'd been convinced by, he found that he was suffering. His body and his mental health had both taken a pretty big, like an increasingly big hit from this. And he posted the day that he became unconvinced

that he could meet an adequately balanced vegan diet. He immediately felt like it was his, he was compelled to tell his audience because again, he came here, he got here from being ethical and being truthful and high integrity with his ethics. And then, as soon as those had changed, he decided to put a post out and I said, don't do this, you are opening yourself up to a ton of criticism criticism wait until you can do the video and he said Well, yeah, but what if someone sees me eating salmon on a train or something in the UK like I'm not gonna feel in line So again, he was like hoisted by his own ethics again

He got absolutely pilloried by the internet for doing it We you know you were supposed to you said that you understood and a blah blah blah and then he did a video talking through How he was struggling to be able to eat a completely balanced, sufficiently robust plant-based diet. And again, people had massive problems. And now, I think he's probably won your hands-ish. Well, mental health is way better. His pursuit that he goes after in life is flourishing. His energy levels have improved all of this stuff. Again, this isn't for me to say, like vegans, you're condemning yourself to a life of low energy misery, but there are people out there for whom the limitations

that you place on yourself by going on a vegan diet make getting a balanced diet so much more difficult again. And if you're a 24 year old YouTuber and writer, who maybe still needs to do a bit of growing up, life's hard enough as, you're just trying to get it before midday. You know what I mean? You're trying not to go out and party with your friends too much.

You're trying to learn what productivity is. And how do I do my taxes? And I've got a relationship where I'm not in whatever. You know, these are additional levels of complexity and difficulty that I don't think you need to add into your life. And yeah, you know, this is very, very much kind of fallen by the wayside now and Alex is out on the other side. But I really respected him for what he decided to do with that.

He said, look, I've given this a crack. I'm still ethically convinced by veganism, but physiologically, I don't think that I can do, I don't think I can commit to this. And yeah, out the other side of that, he's now just, he's crushing it. He's absolutely crushing it. Also, I mean, as you referenced,

when you're younger, you have more resilience. Like a younger body is a more resilient body. I mean, think about referenced, when you're younger, you have more resilience. Like a younger body is a more resilient body. I mean, think about all the late nights, all the, I mean, for me, like when I was in college, I used to drink a lot. I don't have a problem with alcohol, but like I would consume alcohol, I would do other things, like, and your body rebounds really fast when you're young,

right? Because you have... They have rubber and magic. Yeah, we're a highly adaptable species. That's one of the amazing things about being a human being, right? But as you get older, I mean, I'm telling you, I have a lot of friends that are in middle age and that are still clinging onto this idea

of a plant-based diet being optimal. And again, they look sarcopenic, you know? I mean, you can find vegan bodybuilders. Like those outliers exist, you know? Some of them are augmented, don't necessarily cop to it, all good, not judging, or maybe judging a little bit because they attribute, they tend to attribute their gains to being vegan.

Not to the exogenous testosterone. There you go. Again, you can cobble, like, we know that plant protein at this point, an animal protein, when you consume enough protein, the muscle gains are comparable. So that, you know, there's no issue there. But, again, for most people, for most people that are not obsessive fitness junkies,

it's a big problem. They tend to under consume protein. And as you get older, you become anabolic resistant. I'm sure Gabrielle Lyon talked about this. You become resistant to losing. So, the little losing that you're getting on a plant-based diet is becoming even less effective, as you get older and whether it's antropause or menopause, you're fighting a losing battle with regard to your hormones ultimately unless you're on, you know, HRT.

And so it's a huge problem, but younger people, you know, maybe they adopt a vegan diet for a few months or years and they feel good, right? The body has stores of certain vitamins. They're, again, more resilient. They're more adaptable. And so it's fine, but yeah, it's not uncommon these days to see whether they're influencers on YouTube or on Instagram that were previously vegan, either covertly eating animal products, which I've heard happens, like they're doing it covertly, or they make the switch, right? Because I mean, I mean, I'm eating steak wrapped in spinach and no one can see what's inside of this.

Dude, it happens, it happens. And with regard to mental health specifically, there are so many nutrients in animal products that are just required by the human brain. I mean, we attribute the development of the human brain to access to the nutrients found in animal products, right? So this idea, again, it's just hubris, right? It's hubris, right?

It's hubris and I hate the P word, but I'll use it privilege. That we think that we can cobble together a diet that mimics the diet, the kind of diet that we have. We know better than nature. We don't need to use, no, no, no, no, no, we don't need to grow it and pull it out of the ground. And we can do it from code.

From first, we'll matrix our way into creating a diet. Yeah, it's wild man. Talk to me about this new film that you just finished. You very kindly sent me a link so that I could get first access to it last night. Yeah, so it's called Little Empty Boxes and people can watch a trailer at LittleEmptyBoxes.com and it's the first ever dementia prevention film and it's about 75% narrative, 25% science, but the narrative follows my mom. And why I do anything that it is that I do is because my mom got very sick at a very young age.

She developed a rare form of dementia, called Louis Body Dementia. And I mean, this was 10 years ago that I began working on the project. And back then, I didn't know anything about Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease or anything like that. I was just a scared son looking to do whatever was possible to help his mom in a time of immense trauma and tragedy. And so the film kind of is like a time capsule. It documents everything that my mom went through, the descent into dementia. It's really, really difficult. And it's been a labor of love. And ultimately the film is a tribute to my mom, but it's also a tribute to the science.

So as much as I think, we get into debates on the interpretations of science, particularly in the field of nutrition, which is, you know, where my passion happens to lie. I'm a huge fan of science, and I think it's incredible. And so the film, I created to be a tribute to this growing field of acceptance, known as dementia prevention, whereas 10 years prior, you couldn't mention dementia and prevention within the same sentence. You'd get like produce thrown at you, because dementia for a long time was thought

to be an unpreventable condition. Like even the Alzheimer's Association was one of the largest nonprofit organizations, for years and years and years, would drive home this fear-based talking point, I think primarily to raise funding, that dimensions the only Alzheimer's disease, the only condition that can't be prevented, treated, or slowed. We know now, thanks to incredible research, that the potential for prevention

is high. The documentary is a testament to that, and it offers some, I think, really actionable tips. And it's in many ways the prequel to my work, you know, because since embarking on this production process, I've written my books, I've launched my podcast, and you know, I'm grateful that many people, and mind-blown actually, that many people consider me an expert in this field because I'm ultimately a lay person like I'm somebody who really began just to be able to you know with the intent of cleaning answers for their mom, but I've learned a ton you know over the course of my journey, but the documentary really is to is to document what it's like being a caregiver for somebody with dementia and to show people what it really is like and how valuable an important prevention is,

because dementia begins in the brain decades before the first symptom. And this is something that is when you look at the science coming out about dementia, Alzheimer's-based therapeutics, Alzheimer's drug trials have a 99.6% fell rate. They're just dismally effective, if at all. And this is because this is a condition that manifests in the brain over a span of years, if not decades. So it's really important, I think, for people, like younger people, millennials, you know, you're, you think, for younger people, millennials. The oldest millennial is now in their 40s. And so the time is like, there's no better time than right now to start thinking about your brain with your choices

because I mean, once it goes, it goes. What are the big myths and realizations about neurodegeneration, dementia, Parkinson's stuff like that? Like, what were the big, un-predicted insights that you got on this journey? Well, I think for one people think that it's genetic. You have genetic risk factors. So the ApoE4 alleles, the most well-defined of the Alzheimer's and ultimately neurodegenerative risk factors.

Is that the one that Chris Hemsworth realized that he had? So he realized that he was a homozygous carrier. He was an APOE 4-4, which increases your risk around 12 to 14 fold. 12 to 14 fold. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, so how low is this? It could be 12 to 14 fold from 0.1 to 0.12 or whatever.

Yeah, that's an interesting question. We always get to consider the base right now. Yeah, like the absolute risk. Today, about 5 million people in the US have Alzheimer's disease, so 5 million out of 300 million. It's this fairly low proportion, but that number is set to explode in the coming years. The rates of Alzheimer's are increasing,

and I think it's clear that we have what are called modifiable risk factors, and the rates of those modifiable risk factors are also increasing. So, for example, if you have obesity, your risk for Alzheimer's disease increases. If you have type 2 diabetes, your risk for Alzheimer's disease increases between two and fourfold. If you have hypertension, today one and two adults have hypertension, that increases your risk. Stacked on top of each other. Yeah, exactly. So we're seeing increasing rates of all of those conditions. And so that's what is that doing? It's not doing our brain health, our collective brain health, any

favors. And so that's one of them that it's genetic. You know, the vast majority of dementia cases are attributable to an interaction between the genetic risk factors that you may carry and the environment. But also with regard to genes, which are a non-modifiable risk factor, of course, there's what the concept of polygenic risk. So you might have genes that we have yet to elucidate that are canceling out the risk of said risk genes. Two to three percent of Alzheimer's cases are attributable to a deterministic gene called early onset familial. Again, tiny minority.

But as recently as 2020, the Lancet Commission on Dementia pointed out that at least 40% of Alzheimer's cases are preventable. And I think that's a gross underestimate because in that paper, it didn't even talk about, it didn't even talk about exposure to environmental toxicants or drugs. We know that people who routinely take anti-colonurgic drugs are at higher risk of developing dimension. That wasn't even elicidated in the paper.

So I think the vast majority of Alzheimer's cases are potentially preventable. And I don't claim to have all the answers. We don't. Certainly, but yeah, there is a lot that people can do. If you were to, I always like inverting stuff like this. If you were to try and design a lifestyle for someone that would onset their predisposition or lack of

neurodegeneration as quickly as possible. What would you prescribe that person? If you were like some demon from hell and you want to try and make this person's brain degenerate toward some dementia Parkinsonian style thing, what would you get that person to do? Yeah, I would deprive them of sleep. We know sleep is crucially important. Sleep is when your brain is actually cleaning itself of proteins that are associated with the condition. So I'm like beta, tau protein, we see increases in cerebral spinal fluid on just one night of short and sleep.

So I would deprive them of sleep. Sleep is really important with regard to brain health. It's important with regard to mental health, but it's very important with regard to how your brain actually functions. So there's that. Chronic stress is a killer. We know that chronically elevated cortisol leads to shrinkage of the hippocampus, which is the most vulnerable structure of the brain.

The first one of the first structures of the brain to be affected by Alzheimer's disease. It's where, you know, it's the memory processing center of the brain. We know that chronically elevated cortisol, which is rot by chronically elevated levels of stress, is not good from a brain health standpoint. It also creates an inflammatory effect in the body. I would, from a dietary standpoint, I would give a person exclusively ultra-processed foods to consume.

We know that these kinds of foods not only create inflammation in the body, but they drive adiposity or obesity. We know that they create the phenomena of insulin resistance, and we know that insulin resistance is not good from a brain health standpoint. Actually, in Alzheimer's disease, you see a reduction in the brain's ability to generate energy from glucose. And in the Alzheimer's affected to generate energy from glucose.

And in the Alzheimer's affected brain, that ability is diminished by about 50%. And the brain is a ravenous energy consumer. And so, I mean, that's just like lights out for the brain, right? You can imagine how detrimental that might be. Well, we see that the level of glucose metabolism in the Alzheimer's affected brain is actually very strongly correlated with the degree of insulin resistance in the body.

So you want to make sure that you're as insulin sensitive as possible. And so one way to do that is by optimizing for protein in your diet, we're starting to see all this research now come out about the value of dietary protein, minimizing your consumption of ultra-process foods, make sure that you're at a healthy weight. And then finally, this kind of fun're at a healthy weight, and then finally this kind of funnels into the lifestyle recommendation, which would be if you want to develop dementia, as soon as possible, make sure that you are highly sedentary and that you never exercise. The brain thrives at top of body that's moving and that's exercising, and there's tons of evidence now on this, both as a preventative strategy and also as a way to slow down the

progression of neurodegeneration. So make sure that you're resistance training and I mean, I can't underscore that enough. Resistance training is super, super important. We're seeing a correlation now. Andy Galpin is one of these guys who's become fairly prominent in our space, just published a paper looking at whole body strength and cognitive function. And there's just one of many papers, right? That has come out showing us the link between robustness, strength, and it's not even necessarily muscle mass, right?

So it's like not, we don't all have to look like sea bum, right, after all, or you, to procure better brains. It's just about being strong in body and resistant training is the best way to do that and optimizing for protein again. So, yeah, I mean, right there. Okay, so if that's the demon's prescription of what you would do if you wanted to onset it, when it comes to strategies and tactics that people can lean on,

a food type, any supplementation, any other lifestyle interventions, what is there on the positive side? of food type, any supplementation, any other lifestyle interventions. What is there on the positive side? Yeah. So, it's very, the diet dementia recommendations are... All the evidence is... I don't want to say weak, but we have the best idea for what a brain healthful diet might look like is referred to as the mind diet, which is this diet that's

been cobbled together by an epidemiologist of observational research that combines some of the attributes of the Mediterranean diet, some of the attributes of the Mediterranean diet with some of the attributes of the dash diet, which is the dietary approach, to stop hypertension, because again, hypertension is one of these important modifiable risk factors. Hypertension is high blood pressure. So, it's a Mediterranean diet combined with the dash diet, with a sprinkling of foods that we've found specifically play a brain beneficial role.

For example, blueberries. The mind diet only recommends, in terms of fruit, the only fruit that the mind diet recommends makes a recommendation for our blueberries. Pretty dialed as a fruit. I know that we want to know, but it's blueberries are blueberries, pineapples, bananas, triple A rated fruits for me. No, blueberries are great. But I think that's where the limitations of that kind of dietary recommendation comes in because avocados are a fruit.

And if I had to pick a fruit that I thought was potentially most beneficial to the brain, I think avocados are actually probably the most beneficial fruit to the brain because they have the highest proportion of fat protecting, specifically fat protecting antioxidants of any fruit are vegetable, which is of particular relevance to the brain because the brain is made of fat and not just any type of fat, but the brain is comprised primarily of polyunsaturated fatty acids, which are especially damaged prone. They're the most chemically unstable of fatty acids. You have your polyunsaturated fatty acids, which are especially damaged prone. They're the most chemically unstable of fatty acids.

You have your polyunsaturated fatty acids, your monoinsaturated fatty acids, and your saturated fatty acids. Saturated fatty acids being the most chemically stable. Your brain is comprised primarily of polyunsaturated fats, DHA fat, dekosa hexaenomic acid, and arachidonic acid. We need to protect these fats, right? The brain is a crucible for oxidative stress because it's metabolizing 25% of every breath you take in a container the size of a grapefruit. So it makes up 2 to 3% of your body's mass, yet it counts for 25% of your body's oxygen

metabolism. So again, crucible for oxidative stress, what can help protect the brain under those circumstances anti-oxidants? And so fat protecting antioxidants, really important. I think avocados are, again, one of the best brain foods that you can consume. They're also rich in compounds like lutein and zizanthin, which we know are really supportive of cognitive function, wonderful source of potassium, which we know is really important for cardiovascular health.

So, you know, the mind diet is a great starting place, but there was just a randomized control trial that put the mind diet, compared the mind diet in an at-risk population, I believe, and found no benefit over just a calorie deficit in an older adult population. So, you see what I'm saying? So nutrition science is incredibly weak and that's where you can't be prone to scientism, which is like this, you know, adherence to scientific data as if it is religious doctrine.

That's just not how it works, right? Like nutrition science is harder to study than drugs and yet it's much less well-funded. So a Whole Foods diet is my prescription. It's a diet that incorporates both animal products. I think grass-fed, grass-finished red meat is a brain health superfood, along with avocados and dark leafy greens and shellfish,

I think are incredible. Like gooms I think are incredible, but yeah, I think I'm never 100% and avoiding the ultra-process foods as best, process foods as best you can. Foods with refined grains, foods with added sugar, foods with refined bleach and deodorized seed oils. I think that's the way to go. I noticed that at no point in this preventable

neurodegeneration conversation, have you mentioned doing Sudoku? Yeah. Or brain training. Yeah. Or a crossword puzzle or anything like that. Is this just so low down on the sprinkling, on the cake, and everything else is the foundation? Or is there something in the brain training? No, that's a good question.

I think keeping active and staying socially engaged and doing things that require that draw on a complex array of cognitive processes, I think that's very helpful. And there is evidence that that can help build what's called the cognitive reserve, which is super important. So the cognitive reserve basically stipulates that the more you have to lose,

the better off you're gonna be. It's a form of cognitive resilience that you're building. Sudoku, things that are like really kind of more like on the simplistic side, like crossword puzzles and so go. Speak for yourself when I can't do so. Same, yeah, I mean I don't remember the last time I've even attempted, but it's essentially like they're better than nothing, right? Better than nothing, but they're too simplistic to really have what's sometimes referred to

as a spillover effect where they can actually improve other cognitive domains. Whereas engaging more in real life is actually the best way to build that cognitive reserve. Like engaging in real life, learning a new instrument, perhaps learning a language, learning a new skill, those are all super important because they're more complex than just sitting down and, you know, putting in numbers game. Yeah, I had Roy Baumeister and Robin Dunbaugh on the show within the last year, and Dunbaugh was talking about how the most computationally difficult thing that humans have to do is tracking the social intricacies of all of their friend groups.

I know Max and I know John and I know that Max and John used to be friends, but they're not anymore on the reason because of that, it's because of Fred and Fred is friends with Dan, but Dan and Max, they don't get on because of this thing from before. His argument is that although we look at the brain and we use the brain largely for this sort of beautiful cerebral, consider the nature of the universe man, am I really enacting my logos forward, like all of that stuff? But what it was therefore was to track between 1,150, intersecting hierarchy-based relationships. And from a computational perspective, I think again, that's one of the reasons why relationships are

it's like the ten minute walk, right? It's not just the walk. It's not just the insulin. It's the outside being single biggest determinant of how long you're going to live. It's the quality of your relationships. It's more than smoking. It's more than diet. It's more than your weight, you know? And if you can manage to use, hopefully not a drama-ridden set of friendships, but if you can use all of the different friendships that you have as a push, as a, that is part of your cognitive horse power backup, I think that that's a really good way to do it. 100% yeah, loneliness is a toxin on par with alcoholism these days, is what we're starting to see. And that I think you referenced a Harvard, the Harvard study is like the longest

running study on human happiness. 80 years, longitude and no. There you go. Yeah, I think it's crucially important. This is something that I struggle with. I live in Los Angeles, which is a city that can at times feel very alienating and isolating, but I'm very grateful that I have a... Comber to Austin, baby. Yeah, I know. I'm thinking about it.

But I do have a great friend group, which you're obviously, of course, a part of, but I also have my family close, and I feel super lucky, and my heart goes out to people who don't have that. But yeah, loneliness is not being alone. That's, I think, it's important to make that decision. It's good to make friends with your mind to the point that you can actually be comfortably alone.

But if you're not happy about it, you know, if you feel like your social life is lacking, it's definitely somewhere. Story that you tell yourself again, right? There you go. Like we said about the food, it's not just the food that you eat, it's not just the relationships you have, it's the story that you tell yourself. What does it mean that this is the case?

What do you think that your mum would think about what you've done to your life now, about your work, about the way that you're influencing people, about this film, what do you think she would, which she would think about it? Oh, man. Well, my mum was my biggest fan. And my, my news too.

She'll be listening. I love it. I love it. I mean, yeah, moms are the best. And I'm very lucky that I had a great mom. And a very kind mom and a mom who raised me with like, I think the best values that you could raise a child with. And I think that's why the people that follow me,

follow me because they know that honesty, integrity is super important to me. And those are 100% values that I got from my mom. Like growing up in my household to be called a liar was like the worst thing, the worst thing. And so yeah, she was an incredible, incredible mom. Not perfect, no mom is, no person is, but yeah, she was wonderful,

and she supported me from day one. She was, you know, I mean, I come from a very small Jewish family and my parents grew up very poor, and they made it for themselves. They teamed up and they created a business and it led to a really great childhood for me and my brothers,

but she never pushed me into any one career direction. Like she wasn't like, I definitely expressed interest early on in wanting to go the medical school route to be a doctor, but when I pivoted out of that, she didn't give me any crap for it, which I'm super grateful for. She just allowed me to pursue my passions. So yeah, I think that she would be, and she was, she saw my first book come out, she was very, very proud of me and, and you know, it's funny, like you can never be a prophet in your own land as a term of her recently. And well, I would try to tell my mom, like, you know, as I was learning,

I was like trying to like come to my mom with all these like new learnings and insights, and she adopted a lot of them. Like, you know, she started exercising more and you know, which I think was helpful. And we, you know, I got rid of some of the more processed things in her in her kitchen cupboards. But she would never listen to me ironically when it was like me just kind of talking to her from across the kit,

the dining room table, it was only when I got to go on shows like the Dr. Oz show, you know, that she would then start to actually pay attention to whatever. My son has Dr. Oz, it's still of approval. I don't have to listen to him now. Yeah, there you go.

You're like messaging Dr. Oz, being like, yo, I've just found something new out and I know that my mom won't listen to me. Would you mind if I come back on because I need to tell her through the television because the only way that this works? Yeah, or even when it, like, even if it's something that I had been telling her for months,

somebody else would say it on the dog garage, which is like, Max, I heard this guy talking about the benefits of kombucha. Mum, that was me. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and you know, it's really interesting to me to see this, this arc for you. You know, somebody that's now stepping in, that's giving people evidence-based, very,

apart from the child abuse thing, which I actually think is accurate. But largely un sort of volatile, it's not tribal, it's just like, here's some evidence to do with it as you wish. I know it seems like alchemy, right? You take a situation that wasn't very good and then you turn it into something which is like, I know it's like the progeny of this situation, you know, the epitaph that's been written is the nudging that you have done.

And think about how many centuries, millennia of human life has been added because of the information that you and the millions of people that have listened to your podcast have learned about, that's like fucking insane, that's crazy. I want a great tribute to give to someone. That's like fucking insane. That's crazy. I want a great tribute to give to someone. No, it is insane. And I know that I have a responsibility

that I don't take lightly. And I continually remind my audience that I'm not perfect. I don't claim to have all of the answers, but I do the best that I can. And my life circumstance has, and you know, my, whether you want to call them innate or whatever, my skill set and my passion and the circumstance that I, you know, endured with my mom has led to, you know, I guess a certain knowledge base.

And I feel like you have to do in life the things that you can't not do. And as somebody who's really empathetic and compassionate at the end of the day, what I was learning as I was going through this with my mom, I couldn't keep to myself. I had to share. And I realized, of course, along the way that I had an aptitude for what I was doing, I realized that I enjoyed it. And it started to build a following. And look, I know that there are some people out there

that no matter what I say, we'll never listen to me, because I don't have credentials after my name, and I'm fine with that. I'm not here for you. I'm here for the people who have seen my work, who can fuel my integrity, and those are the people that I try to reach.

And like, you can't please everybody in life, right? Like, you're not pizza. So, yeah, so again, I try to do the best that I can, and I'm always learning, and I'm always challenging my biases and my assumptions, and I try to align myself with people that I think are, are, you know, who are in the space who are also doing it from a place of benevolence. There are experts in the space who I believe are not doing, who are not operating from a place of benevolence. You know, but I am. I love what I do and I aspire to lead my audience ultimately to a greater vision of life. And just super grateful that honestly, anybody is paying attention.

Oh, yeah. Max, I'll give you ladies and gentlemen, why should people get, when's the film at? What date? So we're looking for a knock on wood. We're looking for a Q1 or Q2 2024 release. So at some point in 2024, we're hoping for a global theatrical release. That's as much as I can say at this juncture. But people can check out little empty boxes.com. We have a trailer and people can join the newsletter there. I don't send out regular updates,

but anything specifically related to the film, people can sign up for local screenings and what have you to learn how to become an advocate for the film. They can sign up for that little empty boxes.com. And then I have my own podcast, which hoping to get you on soon enough. We're gonna do it, I promise. We're gonna do it.

It's called The Genius Life on all podcast apps, and then I'm on soon enough. We're going to do it. I promise. We're going to do it. It's called The Genius Life on All Podcast Apps and then I'm super active on Instagram and Twitter and all the places. Hell yeah. Max, I appreciate you. Thank you, man. Thanks, Chris. you