The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Fix Your Brain And Live A Genius Life with Max Lugavere

Starting point is 00:00:00 Coming up on this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Before we start, you know, with any dietary changes, it's really about making you the most resilient that you can be. Hey everyone, Dr. Mark here. I want to talk to you today about metabolism. Metabolism is one of the most overlooked key factors in your health. It's a process by which your body converts the food you consume into energy for immediate use or to be stored later. There are a lot of people who think you can't improve your metabolism, but

Starting point is 00:00:31 actually you can. There are many factors that impact how efficient your metabolism is. And one of the biggest factors, of course, is nutrition. Now, my wife and I recently started using an exciting new device called Lumen that measures your metabolism through the breath and gives you feedback on how your nutrition impacts your metabolism. Now, this is a really exciting development because for the first time, I can actually see if my nutrition is giving me what I need to meet my goals. Here's how it works. Lumen measures the carbon dioxide concentration in my breath and tells me if I'm burning fats or carbs

Starting point is 00:01:05 for fuel. It's fast. It's easy to use. It fits in your pocket so I can use it throughout the day and measure how my metabolism is working both before and after workouts. Now, one of the things that I really love about Lumen is that every day, Lumen tells me how to adjust my nutrition plan based on my body's actual needs. Now, the Lumen measurement is the first of its kind. They can provide this information outside of a lab and on the go. Before Lumen, you'd have to spend 45 minutes in a metabolic chamber to get this kind of data. If you're interested in improving your metabolism and getting personalized nutrition, you should definitely check out Lumen.

Starting point is 00:01:41 It also syncs with Apple Health and Google Fit. Right now, they're offering my listeners $50 off with the code HYMAN50. Just go to lumen.me and use HYMAN50, that's five zero, to personalize your nutrition and improve your metabolic efficiency on a whole new level. And now I want to tell you about a company called Thrive Market. They sell all my favorite snacks, my condiments, cleaning products, self-care products, and pretty much all the stuff in my kitchen for discounted prices, about 25% to 50% off. So I just order a box of all my favorite stuff to get delivered wherever I am, and then I can stock my pantry or my backpack with all my favorite stuff and all of its clean, whole food.

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Starting point is 00:03:09 and you can enjoy the power of this superfruit all year long. And Thrive Market has it for an awesome price. So not only does Thrive Market offer 25% to 50% off all of my favorite brands, but they also give back. For every membership purchase, they give a membership to a family in brands, but they also give back. For every membership purchase, they give a membership to a family in need and they make it easy to find the right membership for you and your family.

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Starting point is 00:03:51 food, body, and household items. And anytime you spend more than $49, you get free carbon neutral shipping. All you have to do is head over to thrivemarket.com forward slash Hyman. That's thrivemarket.com forward slash Hyman. I think thrivemarket.com forward slash Hyman. I think you're going to love them as much as I do. I'm proud to have them as a sponsor and be an investor in their company. All right, let's get back to the episode. Welcome to the doctor's pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's pharmacy with an F, a place for conversations that matter. And if you care about your brain, which I do, then this conversation is going to matter to you

Starting point is 00:04:29 because we have an incredibly brilliant guy, a true genius in my mind, Max Lugavere, who's been a longtime friend, an inspiration, even though he's half my age, because he digs into the science of what it takes to have a genius life, which sounds like a great aspiration. He's a filmmaker. He's a health science journalist. He's the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Genius Foods.

Starting point is 00:04:54 Become smarter, happier, and more productive while protecting your brain for life, which sounds so awesome. It's published in eight languages. And he's also the host of the number one itunes health podcast the genius life which i've been on so i'm so excited so max also appears on the dr oz show and he gets way more traction on the air and i don't know why because i'm like an advisor and i'm i i guess i'm all that old story rachel ray the doctors he's contributed to medscape vice fast company cnn the daily beast and nbc nightly news the today show wall street journal doctors. He's contributed to Medscape, Vice, Fast Company, CNN, The Daily Beast, and NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, Wall Street Journal. He just is the guy. I love him. He's a brilliant man,

Starting point is 00:05:32 and he's got a great heart, and he cares about this topic. And his new book, The Genius Life, Heal Your Mind, Strengthen Your Body, and Become Extraordinary, is a lifestyle guide to living happily and healthily with proven research-based lifestyle tactics. I like tactics. Tactics are good. So welcome, Max. Thanks for having me. What an honor.

Starting point is 00:05:53 What a pleasure. Now, like most of us in this space who have had to dig into the science, it always wasn't for a great reason. Like I became an expert in functional medicine because I became super ill and I had to figure out what to do about it. And you had a similar experience with your mother. And we've been in touch a lot

Starting point is 00:06:15 about your mother over the years. And she died last year and you dedicated your book to her. And for people who really don't know you or know your story, I'd love to share with the audience what happened with your mom and how did that inspire what you're doing? Yeah, my mom is the chief inspiration for everything that I do. She was 58. I was in my late 20s when she started to display these mysterious symptoms. You know, she had a, there was a change to her cognitive abilities. It had seemed almost as if overnight she had had a brain transplant with

Starting point is 00:06:50 somebody 40 years her senior. Um, and yeah, no, it's, it was crazy. And she also, there was a change to her gate, which is the way that, you know, a person walks and it was at the Cleveland clinic actually in Ohio long before I think you had gotten there but where for the first time she was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disorder and the the diagnosis was actually pretty murky it was unclear as to what she had but nonetheless she was prescribed drugs for both Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease and just to give some context I had no prior family history of any type of neurodegenerative disease. As I mentioned, my mom was not old. She was young. She was young.

Starting point is 00:07:26 She was 58. She was spirited, youthful. Young to me. I'm 60. That's like teenager practice. I mean, yeah. Somebody in the prime of her life. And when we got that diagnosis, it sent my world into a tailspin.

Starting point is 00:07:39 It was the first time in my life I'd ever had a panic attack. I remember sitting in the Holiday Inn in Cleveland, Ohio, after receiving those prescriptions from the well-respected neurologist who we saw just a few hours prior and Googling for the first time the drug names and looking at the Wikipedias for Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, which, you know, I mean, say whatever you want. Those are the places that I think most people go when they consult Dr. Google. Yeah, of course. And so I was no different. That's what I did. I went there. I didn't have a background in medicine, of course. And seeing how little these drugs, these pharmaceutical biochemical band-aids, how little they do for conditions as complex as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. I just, I started to, I mean, freak out, you know, what was going to happen to my mom? Was I going to lose her? Was she going to forget who I was?

Starting point is 00:08:39 And that really, that was the line in the sand where from then on, I became just fixated on trying to find a better way, looking for solutions in the medical literature that could both maybe act, you know, therapeutically for my mom. Um, but in tandem with that, I was also trying to understand why this would have happened to her and what could be done to prevent it from happening to myself. And one of the most shocking findings that I stumbled upon, which, you know, you know, you know, well, is that often dementia begins in the brain decades before the first symptom. Yeah. So it became very clear to me that this is something that if we really want to move the needle in this category of diseases, we really have to start today talking about prevention. It's so true. I think most people don't realize that if you have

Starting point is 00:09:13 Alzheimer's, the first changes in your brain can happen 30, 40 years before you forget your keys. And it's actually something you can look at on a brain scan. And I think it inspired you to ask a whole bunch of questions that someone really, without a medical degree, usually doesn't ask, which is what causes these symptoms. And your mother has something called Lewy body dementia, which is sort of a cross between Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and affects motor function and affects memory and cognitive function. And you sort of had to look in the literature and go like, well, what causes this? And how do I not get it myself? And so it was both from the love of your mother and self-interest that you sort of became an expert on how to fix your brain. Yeah. Yeah, it's become a major passion of mine to say the least.

Starting point is 00:10:01 I mean, I think the brain is the most important organ. It really is who we are as neuroscientist df swab famously says it's actually he has a book by this by the same title we are our brains and to watch somebody who you love more than anything in the world descend into decrepitude is the hardest thing imaginable i wouldn't wish it upon my worst enemy and that being said you know there are ample things that we can now, that we can do in the literature to protect our brains as they age. And we don't know everything. 90% of what we know about Alzheimer's disease has been discovered only in the past 15 years, but we don't have to sit idly on our hands. And I think that's the point. Yeah. I think, you know, you've been part of our broken brain series and, you know, we

Starting point is 00:10:40 delve deeply into understanding the various aspects of why brains break and how to fix them. And as a functional medicine doctor, I've seen so many patients with these conditions actually get better. And once you start to understand the biology and how the brain works, what injures the brain, what are the things that we call dementogens. Wow, dementogens, wow. Yeah, and how do you do like a cognoscopy as opposed to a colonoscopy, which is how do you really look at all the things

Starting point is 00:11:12 that can impact brain function. It opens up a whole world of possibility of how to help these people. Your latest book, Genius Life, you expand on the genius food plan and the whole approach in there that was mostly focused on nutrition and how it affects brain health. And we know that our brain health and our cognitive function, our emotional wellness really depends on so many things,

Starting point is 00:11:36 like our gut and our hormones and our heart and our nervous system. And there's constantly cross-talking communication. The body is a web. That's really what we focus on in functional medicine. The body is a network, and it's all connected. And just because your stomach isn't in your brain doesn't mean it's not related to your brain and your immune system and everything else. So tell us about the research around things that you found that help us to understand how to prevent dementia and how to optimize your brain function. Yeah. So, I mean, to, to start off when I think, I think as a functional medicine

Starting point is 00:12:12 practitioner, what I, what I've been able to glean from my exposure to the field through, you know, colleagues like you and David Perlmutter and guys like that, you know, you're really having to undo the, the, the education in a way that you've had,'ve had in allopathic medicine that really kind of takes a reductionist approach yeah you know looking at the brain is separate from the body and in fact I can corroborate that when I had these experiences with my mother in the clinicians office at the most storied cathedrals to Western medicine yeah you know Cleveland Clinic Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Columbia in New York, NYU. I've gone to all these places with my mom. It's the same thing.

Starting point is 00:12:49 It's, you know, the- No second opinion. There's the same opinion over and over. Over and over and over again. Yeah. And I think that that can be very upsetting and it can, you know, it elicits a sense of hopelessness. And that's what I experienced, that same reductionist sort of approach.

Starting point is 00:13:05 I think what's given me the edge, again, not as a trained medical doctor or anything like that, but I think there's a certain level of creativity is required to connect dots and to see patterns where others might not. And as a functional medicine practitioner, my sense is that that's kind of how you're trained. You're trained to think about these topics in a more creative way. Um, and that's something that I just intuitively did when I started to experience what was going on with my mom. And I just intuitively realized that, you know, the brain is influenced by the body. How could it not be? Duh. Yeah. So, um, yeah. So genius foods really was a nutritional care manual to the human brain. Um, you know, unfortunately the brain doesn't come with an owner's manual. It was a book that really does

Starting point is 00:13:48 the body, but that's what the genius life to me, that's kind of where I was going with the text as I was writing the genius life to make it manual for your brain for the, for the, yeah. And the body and the, and to really, um, uh, unveil the connection that the brain has to the body. I think a lot of people don't realize that they're connected. You know, you can't look in the mirror and flex your hippocampus the way you can your bicep. So I think it's important for people to be able to, um, you know, regain a sense of, of bodily health because of all of the benefits that that's going to provide to the, to the brain, better mood, better mental health, better cognitive function. So it's sort of like a care manual to the body,

Starting point is 00:14:30 and it goes beyond nutrition. So nutrition is just one part of the story. As you know, you talk about that in Food Fix. But exercise, the relationship that we have with nature, the relationship that we have with temperature, the relationship that we have with light, the ever-present environmental toxins that your average human is exposed to on a daily basis. These are all the kinds of topics that I wanted to talk about in the book.

Starting point is 00:14:54 Wow. So people talk about lifestyles, what you eat, sleep, exercise, stress. You don't hear people talking about light and nature and temperature, right? Right, right, right. Fascinating. Yeah, they're all super important parts of the puzzle. I mean, the relationship that we have with light. They're all inputs that regulate our biology in ways that we are now understanding

Starting point is 00:15:13 that we didn't understand before. Well, consider this. So I started, I was thinking a lot about cancer because my mom actually, Labor Day of 2018, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and another horrific. She didn't die from the brain disorder. She died with pancreatic cancer. And another horrific... She didn't die from the brain disorder. She died from pancreatic cancer.

Starting point is 00:15:29 Yeah. I had just gotten back to LA from a trip, and I got a call from my brother, who was in New York with my mom, and she had turned yellow. So usually if you turn yellow, it's either you've eaten too many carrots or you've become jaundiced for whatever reason. And the difference is that the whites of your eyes become yellow when you're jaundiced.

Starting point is 00:15:46 And oftentimes you'll see a gallstone, but they did an MRI of my mom's abdomen, and what they found was a tumor on the head of the pancreas. And as you know, 90 plus percent of the time when they diagnose pancreatic cancer, it's already too late. And it was brutal and barbaric and it was the

Starting point is 00:16:05 worst thing i i ever experienced but that my mom developed not one but two of humanity's most feared conditions really you know made me start to think about the world in a in a new way and going back to light you know i mean there are certain instances where light it's been proposed and this is a a you know a rapidly evolving science we're just at the tip of the iceberg but can actually act as a carcinogen light yeah what kind of light well artificial bright light at night that suppresses the hormone melatonin melatonin is a key gatekeeper to the process known as autophagy which is when our cells clean house and through, you know, it's sort of like the con, the KonMari method for biology that it uses to clean up old worn out, uh, dysfunctional proteins and organelles.

Starting point is 00:16:51 It's also involved in DNA repair. So DNA damage is at the root of, of, um, cancer aging, get rid of waste and how we repair our systems is regulated by melatonin and light. Yeah. So, I mean, I think that's kind of a bold statement and it's a hypothesis that certainly warrants further testing to know for sure. But there is a well-documented increased risk of certain cancers seen in night shift workers, which make up 20% of the global workforce.

Starting point is 00:17:18 Yeah. So getting bright light into your eyes in the morning is crucially important for anchoring your body's circadian rhythm, which guides everything from how, uh, coordinated we feel, how much focus we're able to have, how much energy we're able to have, how well we digest and metabolize food. But in the latter half of the evening, avoiding exposure to extremely bright light, um, especially if it's on an ongoing chronic basis, I think is, is should we all be wearing those goofy glasses like Dave Asprey with the orange lenses? Amber glasses, yeah.

Starting point is 00:17:50 Like amber colored blue light blocking glasses. I think that among all the wellness biohacking gimmicks that are out there, I think that those are among the most useful, yeah. Yeah. And it's powerful because I remember reading a number of years ago about studies in animals where they would give them melatonin and it would suppress cancer.

Starting point is 00:18:07 And part of that has to do with the light, which actually inhibits melatonin. So if you're living as a hunter-gatherer, the sun goes down, you maybe got a few candles. Maybe they didn't have candles back then. Maybe they didn't have fire when we started out. And our bodies are designed that way. And now we have this incredible light that's such an issue. I remember reading a book a number of years ago called Lights Out. You ever come across that book?

Starting point is 00:18:31 By T.S. Wiley? Yeah. Yeah. And it was like an eye-opening book, literally. And it was about how the invention of the light bulb correlated with all these chronic diseases we're seeing now. Huh. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:18:45 Heart disease, diabetes, cancer. little light bulb correlated with all these chronic diseases we're seeing now. Huh. Yeah. I don't, I mean. Heart disease, diabetes, cancer. And it talked about the biology of light and how it impacted us. And we don't even think about it. And we just are on our phones all night or have computers in our beds. We have bright lights and there are ways to fix it. So what are the ways people can fix the light problem? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:19:08 Well, I think there's two things first of all you want to make sure that you're getting good quality light early in the day so preferably before noon so not only is that going to help anchor your body's circadian rhythm but it's going to help protect you against blue light induced melatonin suppression later in the day so that bright light you know the suppression go outside don't wear sunglasses go outside don. Go outside, don't wear sunglasses. Go outside, don't wear sunglasses or don't wear sunglasses when you're driving to work. If you have a half an hour commute to work. Then get through your windshield. Yeah. Yeah. It's all about the light intensity. What you need is about a thousand lux of light.

Starting point is 00:19:36 And there's an app that I have no affiliation with, but it's called Lux. And you can, there's some questions as to how reliable it is, but I think it could give you a good relative sense to the light intensity in your ambient environment. So if you download the app, you can kind of just, you know, make sure that you're spending time in an environment that's at least 1000 Lux in the morning, because that seems to be the light intensity that the melanopsin proteins in our eyes are sensitive to that basically kicks off this 24 hour timer. Yeah. Um, so that, I think that I think is crucially important. And, and so in order to actually have good sleep, you need to get outside and get sunlight in the morning. Yeah. Yeah. 100% good sleep begins actually the morning of, and 1000 lux of light. Yeah. Those, these melanopsin proteins

Starting point is 00:20:22 in your eyes that are sensitive, they act like a, like a light switch. They're not super sensitive because as you mentioned, then a hunter gatherer exposed to campfire or the stars in the sky would have their circadian rhythms all messed up. Right. Um, so it's not that sensitive. It requires again, a thousand lux and you can easily achieve that by standing by a window for about a half an hour. And even on an overcast day, you're going to get at least a thousand Lux. Now, the problem is maintaining that circadian rhythm has become one of the central challenges of modern life because that light intensity, which 150, 200 years ago, nothing would be a thousand Lux. No, there would be no artificial, you know, light source that would reach a thousand Lux, right? But today we have TV screens,

Starting point is 00:21:04 we have smartphone devices. You can easily walk into a drug store or a supermarket and the lighting inside those bright fluorescent lights are easily a thousand lux. Yeah, that's true. So it sends your circadian rhythm deep into the abyss. And that's one of the reasons why I think, and why it's been proposed that, you know, there's, we see ill health, you know, associated with people. It's true. You know, uh, one true. One of the founding kind of father doctors of functional medicine, one of my mentors, Sidney Baker, wrote a book called The Circadian Prescription, which was all about exactly this circadian medicine.

Starting point is 00:21:38 And there's even things like chronobiology where there are different chemotherapy drugs that work better at different times. Different organs are active at different times, and they work better. And I think he even described in the book how in sports, if you look at the statistics, that teams that have to cross time zones typically lose more than the ones who don't and who are playing at home.

Starting point is 00:22:00 Interesting. Yeah, so it's a huge factor. So besides light, what else have you found that was sort of unusual in your targeting optimization of the brain and the body or the brain body or the body mind or the mind body? Everything. It's the same thing. There is no separation. It's the point. No separation.

Starting point is 00:22:18 I talk about the relationship that we have with temperature and how important that is. Cryotherapy. Cryotherapy. Yeah. Saunas. Hot and cold. Yeah. with temperature and how important that is. So cryotherapy, cryotherapy. Yeah. Saunas. Yeah. And I'm,

Starting point is 00:22:27 I'm a, I always try to make things like my recommendations achievable by average people. So you might not have access to a sauna. You might not have, have not have access to a cryotherapy chamber, but just getting into colder water, taking a cold shower or exposing your, wearing your skivvies like on your terrace during the cooler months can all

Starting point is 00:22:44 be a great way of activating these ancient thermoregulatory mechanisms that we all have in us that we've allowed to gather dust because we all live in a state of chronic climate control and i think that by staying in that in that climate comfort zone all the time it undermines some really powerful um you know reparative and restorative, uh, pathways that we have in our body. So what's the science of that? Well, I mean, cold being exposed to cold air boosts the proliferation of brown fat. So, I mean, we were all afraid of gaining more, even more fat on our waistlines and on our hips,

Starting point is 00:23:20 but brown fat is actually something that we want to have more of. It's metabolically active. It's brown because it actually has a lot more mitochondria than normal white adipose tissue. But you have the energy factories in your cells. Energy factories in your cells, yeah. They give you more energy, but they also, this brown fat actually burns fat and it burns sugar. And we can actually increase the amount of brown fat that we have on us.

Starting point is 00:23:40 It's not actually visible. You can't see brown fat. It only accumulates in a few parts of the body, in our armpits, around our collarbone, down our spines, shoulder blades. That's where you're going to see the brown fat. You can't actually see it because it's really relative to the amount of white fat that we carry. It's like a very small, small in concentration, but it's really good for our metabolic health. So whether that means turning down the thermostat. So you get more brown fat

Starting point is 00:24:06 if you expose yourself to cold. Yeah. Because brown fat, it's there to, it burns calories to generate heat. So when you're in a cooler environment, this brown fat is burning calories to generate heat. Brown fat was actually originally identified in babies. Babies, when they get cold, they can't when they get cold they can't shiver babies can't shiver so they have this brown fat that basically acts like an internal heating pad yeah and for that reason it wasn't known whether or not we carried this type of fat with us through adulthood but now not only do we in fact carry this brown fat with us which acts like an internal heating pad that burns calories as i mentioned but we can encourage its proliferation.

Starting point is 00:24:47 Well, the Tibetan monks knew this for years. They have a practice called tummo. You know about this? No. Oh, tummo is amazing. It is a technique called drying of the sheets. And so they train the monks to activate their brown fat through meditation. And they have them up in like the Himalayas and

Starting point is 00:25:06 the monasteries way up in the freezing mountains. And they practice by dipping cold sheets in ice water and they wrap the monks in the sheets and the monks have to dry the sheets with their internal body heat. And when they can do that, they send them up overnight into the snow with basically a loincloth and they have to stay alive wow and they do and it's quite an amazing practice and uh you know we've had such a surge of things like saunas and cryotherapy and you know they're we haven't talked about on the show but there's something called zombie cells zombie cells like senescent cells yeah the things that tend to kill us where are these sort of senescent or aging cells, and they just create a lot of nasty immune effects and inflammation in the body,

Starting point is 00:25:48 and it's hard to get rid of them. Cryotherapy or cold exposure is one of the key mechanisms for getting rid of these zombie cells. It's amazing. It helps extend longevity. And personally, you know, I found that when I was really sick, and even now it's a standard part of my practice, I go into a hot sauna or a steam, really hot, and then I turn the bath, big bathtub, only cold water, and I jump in. Wow.

Starting point is 00:26:16 And it's pretty invigorating, but you feel afterwards like your whole nervous system is awake, and you're alive, and you're energetic, and it clears your head. It's pretty striking. it is striking it's when i had chronic fatigue syndrome it was one of the few things that gave me like a half an hour an hour of feeling some respite wow yeah i use uh that that therapy regularly for i have low back issues i think a lot of people do i feel it's like a powerful analgesic like i it's i get instant pain relief. What it does for my mental acuity and my mood is, I mean, I don't think that there's a drug as powerful as what that does.

Starting point is 00:26:52 And it's, there's a- Jump in a cold lake, it'll wake you up. It'll wake you up, yeah. But I also want to mention before moving on from cold that there've also been a number of studies where they've taken people with type two diabetes, which is very common. Many people have blood sugar issues.

Starting point is 00:27:06 Pretty much every other human in America. Yeah. And they found that when taking subjects with type 2 diabetes and exposing them to just mildly cool temperatures, I believe anywhere between, I think it was somewhere between 60 and 66 degrees Fahrenheit, which is not super cold. By making no other changes to their diets or lifestyles they were able to achieve a a 40 improvement in insulin sensitivity which is uh you know an effect size that you would expect by putting these patients on an on an on a new exercise regimen yeah just exposing them to cooler

Starting point is 00:27:37 temperatures wow so you don't have to get out of your chair you just have to freeze just yeah activate that brown fat yeah leave your thermal comfort zone life begins at the end of your chair you just have to freeze just yeah activate that brown fat yeah leave your thermal comfort zone life begins at the end of your comfort zone your bio your best biology well that brings up the next subject which is nature is medicine because we're so isolated from nature both the light experience we have isn't based on natural light cycles the temperature experiences we have aren't based on being exposed to the environment like we always have been. And it has really detrimental health effects. So you talk about, you know, nature and how that is really, the disconnection from nature is really a source of problems for us. Major. Today, we spend 93% of our time indoors,

Starting point is 00:28:22 you know, in big cities. And there's a lot of this research now coming out of Japan on forest bathing. There's actually a Japanese word, I believe it's karoshi or karyoshi, or I could be butchering it. But essentially, there's a very significant portion of the population that gets worked to death in Japan. And there, I mean, 90%, 93% of Japanese people live in cities, so they're far removed from nature. And so this nature bathing line of research has really become a major focus. Wow. Yeah. And it's now being studied, you know, increasingly around the world, the relationship that we have with nature, especially as our cities become more and more

Starting point is 00:28:58 dense and more and more polluted. But in the genius life, I talk all about the, how air pollution can affect cognitive function and put us at increased risk for Alzheimer's disease. Uh, 20% of Alzheimer's cases might be owed actually to heavily polluted air. And today, 52% of Americans live in environments with heavily polluted air. Isn't there like the, there's something like UV app on your phone where you can tell the air quality, air quality index. Yeah, you can, I where you can tell the air quality air quality index yeah you can i believe you can actually i think the weather app on on an iphone tells you yeah um the air quality but yeah my niece lives in houston she says every day they get warnings not to go outside

Starting point is 00:29:36 i mean it's scary and our indoor home air can be just as polluted if not more polluted it can be than outdoor air but in regard to outdoor air what i think is um really the most pressing of concerns where brain health is concerned is what's called fine particulate matter so particle airborne particles that are two and a half micrometers or smaller that are actually able to enter we breathe it we breathe these particles in they enter circulation and they can pierce the blood-brain barrier and enter brains and they're doing studies now in very polluted parts of the world like in mexico city where they'll take children and they'll actually see like these fine these particles like magnetite which is made of iron in the brains of children

Starting point is 00:30:19 and what's very interesting mark you know uh like rud like Rudy Tanzi up at Harvard doing all this research on viruses in the brain and how it can... The microbiome of the brain. Yeah, the microbiome of the brain and how amyloid might be a response to an inflammatory insult in the brain. Amyloid is like the gunk that clogs up your brain if you have Alzheimer's and it's sort of a response to inflammation, sort of like a band-aid in a way. Yeah. to inflammation sort of like a band-aid in a way yeah what they're seeing now is amyloid presence in brains that that you know of people who have inhabited very uh highly air polluted you know areas with very high level concentrations of air pollution yeah so whether it's like magnetite you know or other fine particles or the herpes virus amyloid is like this protein which may be actually

Starting point is 00:31:03 coming to the rescue but the point is that being in a place where there's a high concentration of air pollution might actually be creating this inflammatory insult to the brain, which is causing this very early presence of the pathologies that we associate with Alzheimer's disease. So connect back to nature, because you're saying we should all move out of cities

Starting point is 00:31:23 and become farmers? More connected to nature, yeah. That would be good. Yeah. I mean, there are some things that you can do. So spending more time in nature I think is super important, especially if you are at heightened genetic risk for Alzheimer's disease. So if you're an APOE4 allele carrier, making an effort to spend more time in nature.

Starting point is 00:31:42 And that's a gene that increases your risk. If you have two of those genes, like getting all 14 yeah um so doing that also getting out in nature is crucially important because of the exposure to the sun so exposure to the sun i think is very important we were talking all about circadian biology exposure to bright light crucially important vitamin d vitamin d uh deficiency is thought to be a risk factor for developing Alzheimer's disease. There's a review of environmental risk factors that I talk about in the book, and vitamin D was one of the top. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a big deal because, you know, depending on the data you look at, up to 80% of us are insufficient or deficient.

Starting point is 00:32:21 And the way the reference range works is it's based on a population measure. So you take a group of people, you measure the spectrum of the levels in a population, and then you look at sort of what's the average, right? And you have like two standard deviations from that, and you can kind of determine what's quote normal. But but normal isn't optimal if you were a martian you landed in america today 75 of americans are overweight it would be normal to be overweight it does not mean it's optimal so the levels we often see in the laboratory ranges are not really where we should be hitting the levels can be 20 or 30 but you should really probably have 45 50 60 at least and i think you probably 80% of us are deficient or insufficient,

Starting point is 00:33:08 and that leads to depression. It leads to increased Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cancer, so many different things. And I think there's been mixed data about whether placing it, fixing it or not, and I think it's complicated because when people are eating garbage and they throw vitamin D in there. It's not going to help. Yes, correct.

Starting point is 00:33:26 You know, if they're not exercising, they're smoking, they're drinking a lot, they're eating crap. Take a vitamin D. It's not going to do anything. But in all things being equal, people who are low in vitamin D have a higher risk of this. And if you clean up your lifestyle and you're still low in vitamin D, it'll make a big difference. Yeah, I'm glad you brought up context because one thing that, that very few people know, you could be spending as much time in the sun as you want, frolicking all day, you know, in the, in the, in the beautiful warming rays of the sun, or even supplementing with vitamin D. But if you're not getting adequate magnesium in your diet, which 50% of the population does not get adequate magnesium, the enzymes that convert

Starting point is 00:34:03 the vitamin D that your skin creates into its active hormone form in the body, all are magnesium dependent. And magnesium, half of us don't consume adequate magnesium. It's found in dark leafy greens, pumpkin seeds, dark chocolate, almonds. And a lot of things cause us to lose magnesium. Stress, coffee, alcohol, sugar, all those things we love. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:34:27 Magnesium is like an anti-aging. It's a macro mineral. We don't consume enough of it. And it's involved in all of the DNA repair enzymes. We were talking a little bit about DNA damage. They all require magnesium as a cofactor. It's involved in ATP synthesis, so energy production. It's so true.

Starting point is 00:34:44 I see it so much in my practice. These patients come in with all these magnesium-deficient symptoms, and they think I'm a genius when I give them magnesium and they go away. Things like migraines or headaches, constipation, muscle cramps, twitching, palpitations, anxiety, insomnia, anything that's irritable, twitches or spasms in any way or cramps is usually magnesium deficiency. And it's so easy when people take it, they go, oh my God, I didn't know I was so low. And I think you're right. It's a, it's so prevalent. And I think, uh, as you age, also your skin doesn't really convert magnesium. I mean, the vitamin D as well, either, right? Yeah. If I make,

Starting point is 00:35:21 um, specific recommendations in the book for people, no matter where they are in their life, no matter what age they are. It's important. Context is everything, really. But you're right. People who are overweight, people who have darker skin complexions, people who are older, they probably are going to need to spend more time in the sun to create the same amount of vitamin D.

Starting point is 00:35:41 Yeah. I once learned from Michael Hollick, who's a vitamin D expert. He said, if you really want to get adequate vitamin D without taking vitamin D, you have to basically be practically naked between 10 and two in the daytime for 20 minutes, uh, south of Atlanta. Wow. You know, that probably isn't happening for 99% of people. Yeah. It's tough. It's tough. And, you know, that probably isn't happening for 99% of people. Yeah, it's tough. It's tough. I try to get into the sun as much as I can.

Starting point is 00:36:12 Because the other thing about the sun, we as humans, you know, I think that reductionist approach that we were talking about, I think we're hardwired to try to break everything down. And I forget who, maybe it was Michael Pollan, but in nutrition, they call it nutritionism. Yeah. Where they like to break down foods into just the bare essentials to see if we can replicate it in a pill form. And that hasn't really... Or identify, or we even do worse. We sort of identify the bad ingredients like saturated fat or sugar or whatever. And so we focus on regulating those in food. And then

Starting point is 00:36:42 the food companies just kind of dial up or down different ingredients to sort of make it quote healthier but it's not really it's still junk food yeah right exactly and so i think we can apply the same thing to the benefits of of getting sun exposure uh on our skin and in through our eyes so i mean vitamin d is created when the uvb rays from the sun reach our skin but uva rays might actually be useful in terms of creating nitric oxide and actually helping us lower our blood pressure. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:37:10 So blood pressure is another topic that I talk about in the book because it's so related to brain health. If you want your brain to be performing well, if you want it to age well, you really have to make sure that your blood pressure is in a healthy range. And getting the right amount of sunlight can help. Can help. Yeah. Getting the right amount of sun. Now. Can help. Yeah. Getting the

Starting point is 00:37:25 right amount of sun. No, no. You know, mental health is such a big crisis in this country. The one in four people experience major depression in their life. It's the biggest cause of the economic burden of chronic disease, not from direct healthcare costs, but things like disability, loss of quality of life, not being able to function very well in your life. And vitamin D is one of those things that seems to really impact depression. So you talk about a study in the book that has to do with vitamin D and depression. Can you talk more about that? Well, vitamin D is important for the synthesis of serotonin,

Starting point is 00:38:02 which is a neurotransmitter involved in mood. It's a happy chemical. It's a happy chemical. That's what Prozac does. It of serotonin, which is a neurotransmitter involved in mood. It's a happy chemical. It's a happy chemical. That's what Prozac does. It increases serotonin, right? Increases serotonin. SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, can boost serotonin at the synapse, which is... Serotonin is also involved in focus and attention and executive function. But yeah, so vitamin D is important in the, in the synthesis of serotonin from its raw material, raw materials. Um, one of which is

Starting point is 00:38:32 tryptophan and amino acid. So making sure that your vitamin D levels are in a normal, healthy range, uh, important, and you can easily get your vitamin D levels tested from a doctor. It's a very cheap test. Uh, the recommendations that I make in the book are to make sure that your levels are somewhere between 40 and 60 nanograms per milliliter, which seems to be a range where we see the lowest risk of all cause mortality. Um, yeah, I mean, I remember reading a study, it was incredible that women who had vitamin D levels less than 45, had a 60% higher chance of having preterm labor. And when you think of the cost of neonatal intensive care and taking care of preterm babies, it's staggering.

Starting point is 00:39:18 And you're talking about pennies for a vitamin that can literally prevent preterm labor. So it's really connected to almost everything. And the difference is with vitamin D is that not everybody needs the same amount, right? So what should we be taking? Correct. Not everybody needs the same amount. You really, before you start taking vitamin D as a supplement, you ought to get your levels tested. You know, when we make, when we synthesize it from the sun, our skin basically makes what we need and it breaks down the rest. It's almost impossible to get too much vitamin D from the sun. Although lifeguards can have levels of 150.

Starting point is 00:39:56 That's amazing. Yeah. And that's not toxic. Right. I mean, it increases calcium absorption. So I always like to recommend vitamin K2 for people that are in, I mean, especially at those levels. But with a vitamin D supplement, I think generally there was a research calculation that suggested that for the general population, 2,000 international units a day would be ideal to get the average person to an optimal level. But people, again, have different, you know, people who are older might need to supplement more. People who are overweight might need to supplement more to get the same improvement. And also, again... Yeah, people who are overweight tend to be low in vitamin D because it's a fat-soluble vitamin,

Starting point is 00:40:46 so it all gets sucked into the fat and it doesn't get into their system that we need. Yeah, it gets sequestered by fat tissue. The same also can occur with other fat-soluble vitamins like A, E, K. Yeah. I don't know if you read this morning, probably not, because you probably don't read the JAMA Pediatrics Journal every day, but... Not pediatrics, no. But I do. And I read this paper this morning that showed that women, when they were pregnant,

Starting point is 00:41:17 took 2,800 units of vitamin D compared to 400, which is in the typical prenatal vitamin, that there was a dramatic reduction in the bad effects on bone when their kids were born. In other words, their kids, their babies had much higher bone density, and then their risk later in life of osteoporosis was dramatically reduced. So that's almost 3,000 units, which most doctors don't even think about recommending. And some people may need up to 5,000 or 10,000 if they're not good absorbers, and there's genes that affect that. Some people might need only 1,000, but I think 1,000 or 10,000 if they're not good absorbers, and there's genes that affect that. So you might need only 1,000. But I think 1,000 is minimum for most people,

Starting point is 00:41:48 and it takes about 1,000 units to raise your blood level 10 nanograms per deciliter. So if you're 20, you need at least 3,000 to get up to 50, right? And then you can see how you do. But I think people need to measure it, they need to check it, and they need to make sure they're okay. And if not, take the right supplement. And not the kind that you often get from your doctor, I hate to say, which is vitamin D2, which is not an active form of the vitamin, but vitamin D3.

Starting point is 00:42:15 And you can get that over the counter now. And you can get 1,000 units and others. But you want to make sure you measure it, right? Yeah. I mean, vitamin D2 is the plant-based form of vitamin d and vitamin d3 is the animal based form it's bio-identical to what we create in our own skin so you always want to make sure that you're taking vitamin d2 i mean sorry d3 okay so there that brings up a sticky question so it's usually made from lanolin and other things that you can get it from sheep and stuff and they're fat um so what if

Starting point is 00:42:46 you're vegan what do you do is it that's a good question uh i've vegan sources of vitamin d3 um that's hard to get yeah right yeah it's just one more of those nutrients that you're just not really optimizing yeah and often people don't convert vitamin d2 to d3 and if you're a vegan you want to make sure you're you're checking vitamin d3 and you can also check d2 so you can see you might have a really high d2 but a very low d3 so it's important to make sure i once took care of this hasidic rabbi and um he had a really bad thyroid problem and i said you really need to take this combination thyroid but um i don't know if it's okay why is it well it comes from you know pig it's a whole thyroid extract from pig and it's not kosher is

Starting point is 00:43:31 it's fine as long as it's for your health and as long as you're not eating it and it's a medicine it's fine that was very interesting yeah so you know the other thing you talk about in your book, sort of connected to this whole circadian biology and how we can reset our clocks is this idea of when we eat. Because we often focus on what we're eating, how much we're eating, but we really don't focus that much on when we're eating. And there's a lot of interesting research lately on the when, on fasting, intermittent fasting, time-restricted eating, all kinds of ideas that people are having that extend lifespan, that reduce the risk for many diseases. So tell us more about the importance of when. Yeah. Well, it seems that there's this eating paradigm that's emerging in the literature

Starting point is 00:44:22 and it's being called early time restricted feeding. So basically eating an earlier dinner seems to be associated with improvements in blood pressure and blood sugar independent of weight loss. So a lot of people online will say that intermittent fasting is really only useful insofar as it, you know, it has an ability to help us control the amount of calories that we consume. But it seems to be the case that by not eating too late at night, you know, because as I mentioned, light is a major time setter that the brain uses to know what time of day it is and optimize its processes accordingly. But food is another time setter. And it's a time setter for the periphery, for the clocks that are in our metabolic organs, you know, in the organs of

Starting point is 00:45:00 digestion and what have you. And so eating too late at night might actually negatively affect things like blood pressure, blood sugar. So people like do intermittent fasting or what we call time-restricted eating. They'll eat at noon and they'll eat to eight at night. Is that a bad idea? It should be more like eight in the morning till four in the afternoon. I mean, that might be ideal. The issue is that we're not waking up with the sunrise and going to sleep with the sunset like our ancestors might have used to do. We, I mean, wake up a lot later. We go to sleep a lot later. So I think that to try to recreate the optimal eating paradigm for the bodies that we've inherited might be a futile effort. So the recommendations that I make are to not eat for an hour or two after you wake up, especially if you wake up with an alarm clock, because the

Starting point is 00:45:49 problem is a lot of people who wake up artificially with an alarm clock to, you know, wake up, get ready for work, their melatonin levels actually haven't properly, it's likely that their melatonin levels haven't come down. So they could be groggy when they wake up. Groggy, but also less insulin sensitive, you know know so if you're eating a if you're drinking a glass of orange juice or eating a bran muffin or whatever first thing you probably shouldn't do anyway for breakfast right that's not a genius breakfast right your listeners are savvy they're not eating like that right but um i hope you're not but um but no i mean there there's a that is a mechanism by which you know your blood sugar can stay abnormally high.

Starting point is 00:46:26 Whereas if you just perhaps are to wait an hour or, you know, and also a way that you can make sure that your melatonin levels have come down is again, to get that bright light in through your eyes in the morning. So eat light for breakfast. Eat light for breakfast. Yeah. Eat light, eat, eat light, especially if you have to wake up early. And then to eat a, I mean, I would say that if you have to wake up early.

Starting point is 00:46:49 And then to eat a – I mean, I would say that if you were going to eat a heavy meal, do it in the daytime and then eat a lighter dinner. Of course, you'll be wanting to take a siesta in the afternoon. Yeah. So the Spanish had it right. That's right? Yeah. But, you know, the thing is I agree.

Starting point is 00:47:05 I always said you shouldn't eat three hours before bed because your body's getting ready to repair and heal. If it's digesting, it doesn't do such a good job. And if you want to gain weight, the best way to gain weight is night eating. It's the best way. Yeah. And it's not because – here's the thing. So, like, sometimes I have these confrontations with people in the fitness world who say, well, you know, a bagel isn't magically going to be 200 calories at 8.01 p.m. if it's only 100 calories at 8 p.m. And that's true.

Starting point is 00:47:32 The calorie content of food doesn't change from one time to the next. But it might actually, the disruption of your body's circadian rhythm might negatively affect hormones involved in energy metabolism, in hunger. So eating late at night could actually make you more hungry the following day. My favorite study I read when I wrote my book,

Starting point is 00:47:49 Ultra Metabolism, like 15 years ago or more, was they fed people the same calories in three meals over the day or they fed them like one meal at night. And the ones who had the one meal at night with the same amount of calories gained weight. Wow. Compared to the other group, even though they eat exactly the same amount of calories.

Starting point is 00:48:13 Yeah. Because it might reduce leptin, which is the metabolic throttle, essentially, that dictates our resting energy expenditure. It might actually increase levels of ghrelin, which is a hormone involved in hunger. So these are all the indirect ways in which late-night eating can actually make you gain weight.

Starting point is 00:48:35 And leptin also actually causes reduction in inflammation. It's anti-inflammatory. Yeah, Yeah. Yeah. So the system that, you know, that we've inherited is very complex, but there's a great way of expressing it that I was able to glean from my interview with Sachin Panda, who's one of the leading experts on circadian biology. At a certain point in the evening, you have to kind of consider the kitchen having closed. You know, when you go into a restaurant after an hour. Happened to me last night. I was in Washington, D.C. and I went with my friend, Congressman Tim

Starting point is 00:49:11 Ryan. We tried to go out of Miss Mexican place. It was like this healthy vegan kind of taco place. And they were shut. They're like, yeah, it's closed. Yeah. They had to find some other place. Yeah. So, I mean, if you just think about your body in the same way and, you know, it's a little bit of a term of art. You could digest anything at any time of day. Does that mean it's going to be optimal? Not necessarily.

Starting point is 00:49:32 So, at a certain point, I would say give yourself an 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. cutoff and say the kitchen's closed in your body. And that's it. You're winding down. You're getting ready for bed. You're not going to be as insulin sensitive in the evening as you were during the day. Also, metabolism, especially when eating lots of carbs, can cause insulin to spike, which can negatively affect hormones like growth hormone. It can affect the way that your brain cleans itself up because of an interaction with insulin

Starting point is 00:50:02 degrading enzyme, which we know dismantles the plaques that are associated with Alzheimer's disease so it's just often called type 3 diabetes yes it's basically diabetes of the brain if you're diabetic your risk of Alzheimer's is four-fold higher that's 400% higher yeah that's staggering it's a great we also talk about a couple other things that are really great for the brain like exercise which I think 80 plus percent of Americans don't get it so what's the connection between brain a couple other things that are really great for the brain like exercise which i think 80 plus percent of americans don't get enough of i know so what's the connection between brain health and exercise well exercise is such a big topic and a lot of people are talking about it i just think

Starting point is 00:50:35 it's really important to underscore that exercise is you're always talking about how food is medicine exercise is medicine yeah i always just say if exercise was in a pill, it would be the most powerful drug ever invented. It really would be. It really would be. So I'm a big fan of resistance training. I think this is something that not enough people are talking about. Women, I see, can be afraid of weight training. They don't want to get too big and too bulky.

Starting point is 00:51:01 I've been trying to get jacked for 20 years. It's not easy. It doesn't happen overnight. Resistance training training going to the gym getting stronger building muscle prioritizing protein at every meal it's going to re it's going to cause your it's going to cause a recomp of your body essentially and um i've been trying i started about 60 years old i'm in the gym uh it's struggle street but i i'm starting to like it. But I think it's working. I can see a big change in my body and I feel stronger and less pain and it's good.

Starting point is 00:51:32 Yeah. I mean, if nothing else, having more muscle on your body provides a sink for excess energy, for excess glucose, excess starch and sugar that's going to make its way onto your plate inevitably you know as much as we try to abide by the blood sugar solution you know and others who have told us to you know to really that i mean great book uh it's it's important to to note that like a new york city apartment and i know you know this mark there's not a lot of place to store stuff nope And that's especially true in the body of sugar. We have very limited, you know, there's very limited options in terms of where we can store the sugar that we consume.

Starting point is 00:52:14 Muscle. Muscle is one of those places. And by growing the muscle, by getting to the gym, you provide a sink basically to soak up extra sugar that you might consume or starches or car what you know what have you that's good because you know yesterday i went to a class called yoga sculpt which is basically like yoga with weights oh wow which is hard as heck but i you know i i told myself it was good for me max would be happy with me if i if i did that you're looking you're looking lean i mean good good. I know. I didn't want to say this.

Starting point is 00:52:49 I probably shouldn't say this, but I eat healthy and exercise. It's like I have to make sure I don't lose too much weight. Wow. There's also something that happens with exercise that's really cool, which is that it stimulates this chemical in your brain. It's like miracle grow. Can you tell us about that? Yeah. So exercise stimulates a protein called brain derived neurotrophic factor or BDNF. Or miracle grow.

Starting point is 00:53:11 Miracle grow for the brain. Yeah. It promotes the survival of our existing brain cells. It promotes the growth of new, healthy, new brain cells. So it makes new brain cells and it increases the connections between your brain cells so your brain works better. Yeah. You can actually, I believe there's a YouTube video where BDNF is sprinkled on dendrites, which causes them to sprout. Those are like parts of your nerve cells. Yeah. It's like the physical correlates of memories, actually.

Starting point is 00:53:38 And so it's like a chia pet. And we can cause this upregulation of BDNF in our brains by exercising. And I think for a long time, the emphasis was on aerobic exercise. And aerobic exercise is great. We know that aerobic exercise can cause growth of the memory center of the brain, the hippocampus, which is vulnerable to Alzheimer's disease and aging. But we now know, thanks to new research, that whatever the exercise modality is that you enjoy doing even resistance training can boost bdnf so just being more active that's great so you talk about this thing in the book uh which is like a marathon in 10 minutes yeah how do i do that yeah how do you basically

Starting point is 00:54:16 get the benefits of running a marathon in just 10 minutes it's high intensity interval training so along with resistance training i think hit HIIT training, H-I-I-T, crucially important. Which is basically exercising as hard as you can until you're about to throw up and then stopping. Is that it? Pretty much. But doing it, but here's like the good part. You only have to do it for a few seconds, like 10 to 20 to 30 seconds, pushing yourself to your max effort and then recuperating and then doing it again. And so what the study found is that when you take subjects and you have them do this HIIT routine, about a two-minute warm-up, and then four or five cycles of all-out either cycling or swinging around the big heavy battle ropes,

Starting point is 00:54:54 which is something that I enjoy doing, or doing sprints up a hill, that people are able to achieve the same boost to their cardiorespiratory fitness as people who are doing like 30 to 45 minutes on, of a steady state cardio on a treadmill. It's really true. There's some great studies that I reviewed about this, where if you do a high intensity interval training, you, you literally can exercise like fraction of the time and get far more benefit than if you ran an hour a day,

Starting point is 00:55:20 you burn nine times percent more fat and you actually increase your metabolism. And what's incredible about it, it's not just the calories you burn when you exercise, because you're going to burn more calories if you're running for an hour than if you're doing high-intensity training. But it speeds up your metabolism so that when you're sitting down or you're on your computer or you're watching TV or you're sleeping, you're burning more calories. And people who are fidgeters also tend to burn more calories too. Yeah. People who overeat tend to fidget more.

Starting point is 00:55:50 And fidgeting is a great way to burn calories actually. Fidgeting falls under the category of non-exercise physical activity that I talk about in the book. It's called NEAT, non-exercise. Yeah. How NEAT is NEAT? You can burn anywhere between 300 and a thousand calories every day just with fidgeting, with chasing your cat around the living room. Yeah. I used to be

Starting point is 00:56:10 that guy in medical school who kept knocking the kid in the seat in front of him. It wasn't very popular, but I was always fidgeting. He probably loved you. But yeah, going back to high intensity interval training, what's amazing about it is it kind of does to your cells what calorie restriction does. And calorie restriction we know is one of the few ways of extending lifespan in smaller organisms right high intensity interval training the way that it works is it creates a momentary energy crisis for your cells where your cells basically say to one another we've got to keep up or we're going to die and what they do to keep up is they create healthy new mitochondria. Yeah. They, uh, there's a process called mitophagy. It's sort of like autophagy where old worn out, um, mitochondria that have become dysfunctional basically get

Starting point is 00:56:56 gobbled up. And this is one of the, I mean, mitochondria that don't function well is at the root of aging at the root of neurodegenerative conditions. So by doing high intensity interval training, we basically get to, it's like the fountain of youth for our, for ourselves and our mitochondria. A few of these things you've talked about are, you know, um, very interesting and they have to do with ways in which the body gets stressed that activates a healing response, right? Whether it's the exercise intensity, whether it's the cold therapy, these have powerful effects like that.

Starting point is 00:57:32 It's called hormesis, which is a medical term for it. And it's actually such a good thing to push yourself a little bit because it actually activates all these healing and repair mechanisms. The time-restricted eating, the when to eat, the cryotherapy the the exercise intensity those are all very scientifically validated mechanisms for activating these healing

Starting point is 00:57:52 systems in our body and they're not that hard right yeah they're not that hard roll around naked in the snow roll around naked in the snow run as fast you can till you're thrown up for 10 minutes a few seconds yeah and make sure you don't eat before bed and it's so cool it's so cool and one of the coolest things about it that i talk about in the genius life is this spillover effect that happens and i don't i haven't seen this talked about in any other book so i think this is kind of a novel idea that i one of the novel uh ideas that i've answered in the genius life it's that this notion of cross adaptation. So by rolling around in the snow or by sitting in a sauna or by exercising vigorously, these are physical stressors,

Starting point is 00:58:31 that hormetic stress that's so good for us, right? We know that when we take cold showers, we acclimate. When we go to the gym and we get in better shape, we become more capable of doing more exercise. But here's where cross-adaptation is amazing. It can actually make us more resilient in other areas of our life. So by getting more resilient, by acclimating and getting more resilient in the gym and taking these cold showers and sitting in a sauna, you actually can become more psychologically resilient. There's this spillover effect. It's called cross- called cross adaptation, whereby you actually can adapt psychologically by imposing a stress on your body physically. And clearly all this is going to help us fight coronavirus, right?

Starting point is 00:59:13 One hopes it's crazy. Well, yeah. I mean, you're building your immune system, you're building your resilience, you're building your health. That's the best way to fight it is to build your own immune system. I mean, there's a study, I mean, we haven't talked about stress yet, but there was a study I remember reading a number of years ago where they literally injected cold viruses into people's noses to see who got sick. And they gave them a stress questionnaire. And the ones who were the most stressed got sick and the ones who weren't stressed didn't get sick. And you see that people, you know, people are exposed to all kinds of colds and some people get sick, some people don't. Why? It has to do with a lot of factors, but that's one

Starting point is 00:59:47 of them. All right. So you've got this incredible book, The Genius Life. It's a great book. I really recommend it. It's really a tremendous contribution to our understanding about how to actually fix our brains and fix our health. But you make it really simple for people. You have this 21-day plan for genius living to help reset our brain and our body to its factory settings, which sounds so good. And it's like when your computer gets completely screwed up

Starting point is 01:00:16 and you have to just turn the thing off and reboot it, right? And how does it help fight fatigue, anxiety, depression? How does it optimize your brain health? And how does it help you live longer and healthier? So tell us what this 21-day plan is all about. Yeah, it basically puts all the pieces of the puzzle together. I know that the information that you've gleaned here can sound overwhelming, but I think knowledge is power. And so long as

Starting point is 01:00:40 you act on that knowledge, that's really where you're going to see the most bang for your buck. So the book is really all about the simple things that you can do every day that are going to add up cumulatively to big health wins and you're going to feel them immediately. So whether it's, you know, that small steps for big wins, small steps for big wins, that could have been the subtitle of the book. Um, you're, you're a pro at this. Uh, but yeah, it's, so it's, it's taking all of those, all of those different topics, which I'll admit, circadian biology, nature, each of these topics can be its own book. But what I've tried to do is I've tried to deliver the most relevant and actionable research in a way that's easy to understand, easy to apply, achievable, so that people can really start to feel better today. And so what I do is I go through a four-week program where week one is really getting your stress levels down,

Starting point is 01:01:33 boosting your resilience to stress, which we talked about. This is a big topic. And also going through your kitchen and your medicine cabinets and kind of questioning a little bit some of the industrial chemicals to which we're routinely exposed, compounds that might be serving as endocrine disruptors. Yeah, right. You've got to get rid of all the toxins in your home, the things you wash your hair with,

Starting point is 01:01:53 and putting your skin and your cleaning supplies and the ingredients in your food and all that, right? Yeah, just sort of cutting down. Before we start with any dietary changes, it's really about making you the most resilient that you can be. I mean, for example, sleep. If you are trying to radically change your diet and you're underslept, I mean, you're not going to be met with success. Because sleep is like...

Starting point is 01:02:21 I use this metaphor from Game of Thrones. I'm a big Game of Thrones nerd. And in Game of Thrones, it's, you know, at this point, the show's water under the bridge. So I don't feel like I'm spoiling anything. But you've got to kill the Night King before all the zombie White Walkers fall. By killing the Night King, that's what gets all the zombies basically defeated. And so by optimizing your sleep, that's the equivalent of killing the night king all your other all the other problems are going to become much easier to tend to once you once you improve your sleep which is which is crucial sleep is sacred it's meds it's

Starting point is 01:02:53 another form of medicine um and so that's all week one and then week two and three we go into some dietary modifications really my goal with the dietary recommendations that i'm making this book is really in part to heal people's relationship with food, which I think has become so fractured today. Yeah. That relationship that people have the food, you know, there's like the macro wars is, you know, is car carbs, fat. I don't know what to eat. I make it really simple for people. I say that the best thing that you can do is to avoid ultra processed foods. And we talked about this too. So much. Yeah. On, on, when you were on my show yeah um which is amazing i think that if you if you do nothing else cutting down on the on the consumption of ultra processed foods it's true

Starting point is 01:03:30 i started joking that you know i i coined this term pegan it was a son of a joke a paleo vegan and my latest book food fix was number one in paleo and number one in vegan on amazon i'm like okay that's it and i think you know they have way more in common with each other than they do with our traditional American diet. They both believe in whole foods and lots of plants and, you know, just good ingredients and not eating crap. Compared to the traditional American diet or SAD diet, the standard American diet,

Starting point is 01:03:59 they're more alike than they are compared to that ultra-processed diet. So I think that's such an important strategy. Well said. I mean, just like ultra-processed foods, I mean, one of the things I feel like few people realize is that the mere processing of food can make a food inherently more fattening. If you were to take whole nuts and you chew nuts, almonds, macadamias, whatever, a significant portion of the calories that you're consuming you actually end up pooping out whereas if you were to just process lightly those nuts in a in a grinder and turn nuts into

Starting point is 01:04:32 nut butter like almond butter you're absorbing 100 of those calories and so this is this is true of ultra processed foods that so make your own nut butter in your mouth is that the make your own nut butter in your mouth and i like i like butter too. So not to demonize nut butter or any food really. But ultra processed foods are extremely calorie dense. You're absorbing 100% of the calories. They're not satiating. And so there's that. And then I also make the recommendation to focus on protein, really to bring protein

Starting point is 01:04:58 back to the table. I think that's something that the fitness community has embraced for years. But I think most people are kind of confused about the role that protein plays in health. That's like a whole podcast in and of itself. We got to come back and talk about protein. We'll come back, yes. So much controversy, plant protein, animal protein. Should we eat less meat? Should we eat no meat? Should we focus on only plant proteins? I've written a lot about this and I think protein quality matters. I think the utilization of the proteins are different if it's plant or animal protein. I think there are a lot

Starting point is 01:05:31 of plant proteins that are great, but you have to eat a lot to get the equivalent of what you'd get. You eat three cups of beans and good luck if you can eat them to be equivalent to the amount of protein that you'd get in a six ounce piece of fish or chicken. Yeah. I'm eating three cups of beans. I'm going to have to work from home that day. Exactly. Well, Max, you are a genius and I, I love what you do. I love the intelligence you bring to the work you do. I think those who aren't acquainted with Max, you better get acquainted. His new book, the genius life, healal Your Mind, Strengthen Your Body, and Become Extraordinary, which sounds like a great aspiration. I'm on that track, is out.

Starting point is 01:06:13 You can get it on Amazon, anywhere you get your books. Go to GeniusLifeBook.com to learn more about the book and Max's work, and you will not be disappointed because he's the real deal. And, uh, I'm so excited to have you on the podcast and to learn from you. I've learned so many interesting things today that I actually didn't know. So it was really good for me and I hope you all learned something.

Starting point is 01:06:34 And if you love this podcast, please share with your friends and family on social media, leave a comment. We'd love to hear from you. Share with your friends and family, as I said, and, um,

Starting point is 01:06:44 subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next week on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional.

Starting point is 01:07:08 This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner,

Starting point is 01:07:29 and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.

The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Fix Your Brain And Live A Genius Life with Max Lugavere

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