The Skinny Confidential Him & Her Podcast - Max Lugavere On How To Heal Your Mind, Strengthen Your Body, & Become Extraordinary

Episode Date: October 27, 2020

#303: On today's episode we are joined by filmmaker, health and science journalist, New York Times Best Selling author Max Lugavere. Max joins the show today to discuss how to heal your mind, strengthen your body, and become extraordinary. We discuss tangible tips and strategies that you can apply to your own life to live try and live a healthier and more efficient lifestyle.  To connect with Max Lugavere click HERE To connect with Lauryn Evarts click HERE To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM To Call the Him & Her Hotline call: 1-833-SKINNYS (754-6697) This episode is brought to you by Jenni Kayne Jenni Kayne’s recipe for home and wardrobe: combine one part effortless style with two parts comfort. Add a dash of refined simplicity. Jenni Kayne believes in finding your version of the daily uniform—elevated pieces that make getting dressed the simplest part of your routine. Make getting dressed the easiest part of your routine at www.jennikayne.com and get 20% off your first order when you use code SKINNY at checkout. This episode is brought to you by BETABRAND and their Betabrand dress pant yoga pants. To try these pants go to betabrand.com/skinny and receive 20% off your order. Millions of women agree these are the most comfortable pants you’ll ever wear to work.  This episode is brought to you by RITUAL Forget everything you thought you knew about vitamins. Ritual is the brand that’s reinventing the experience with 9 essential nutrients women lack the most. If you’re ready to invest in your health, do what I did and go to www.ritual.com/skinny  Your future self will thank you for taking Ritual: Consider it your ‘Lifelong-Health-401k’. Why put anything but clean ingredients (backed by real science) in your body? Produced by Dear Media

The following podcast is a Dear Media production. Get ready for some major realness. And he's a cereal entrepreneur. A very smart cookie. And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you along for the ride. Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to The Skinny Confidential, him and her. We need to be able to separate talking about ideas around nutrition and empirical truths around food from talking about people. Like when I talk about the fact that junk food is not good for you and is deserving of the term junk food, I'm not saying that people who eat junk food ought to feel any, any shame or guilt about eating those foods. And I also don't think that people who, you know, are overweight should feel any less worthy than people who are not overweight. What we are saying is that you owe it to yourself, you know, in this one chance that we get to live a healthy life, to do what you can to, to procure better health

based on the best available science and evidence that we have. Coming in hot everybody with another episode. That clip was from our guests of the show today, Max Lugavere. And on today's episode, we are discussing the genius life, how to heal your mind, strengthen your body and become extraordinary. My name is Michael Bostic. I'm an entrepreneur and brand builder. Most recently, the co-founder and CEO of the Dear Media Podcast Network, as well as a co-host of this incredible show that you're listening to. And across from me is my partner in life, co-host, wife, baby mama, Baby mama. Lauren Everts of the Skinny Confidential. I'm just wondering what everyone thinks about your overalls on Instagram. Everyone liked them.

Everyone liked them. And you're behind on the trend. No. And let me teach you something about fashion, Lauren. I just don't. Like in your overalls, where is your dick? Where would it be? You know what it is?

I take it out. I put it down by my ankle. What are you talking about? How are you peeing? Like what's the situation? There's a zip. That's what you went into with this? You got this many questions? So you're zipping, you're pulling your wiener out. Are you wearing boxers or are you just freeballing? Don't worry what I'm doing down there. Maybe reach down and find out. Okay. Well, I feel like if I

want to reach down, I can just go through the top. People are here for a wellness episode, Lauren. They don't need to worry about what I'm doing. I'm really concerned about these overalls. He's been wearing these overalls around the house all day. And what's funny to me is they were in a pile of clothes that I thought that I could conveniently hide from you and you found them and you wanted them hung up on like a special hanger. I just, I just need a break. Quarantine's been a lot. I wanted them hung up on my shoulders to hold them up over my legs and body. So yes, he's been wearing these overalls, you guys, God help me. Okay. Today we have Max on the show. I am excited because this episode really talks about the body,

the mind, we get into mindset, we get into foods that we should be eating. He's a very smart guy. Get into things we should be cutting out of our diet, pretty much everything I'm eating. Did you just take a pause to like have to laugh at my joke? Like what? You didn't get that for a second? No, but it's like, you're not eating good. And then the overalls and we're in quarantine. It's just a lot like for my sexual energy. If we can get through this quarantine and come out the other side, still married, like then we can actually write a book on how to get, how to have a relationship. And I'm just worried that you're taking style tips from Taylor. I don't take any style tips from Taylor. Taylor is someone that would wear overalls. I think you're pissing a lot of people off. I think there's a lot of people listening to this

show that are big overall fans. You can't say anything in 2020. Listen, Lauren, you think we've said some controversial things in the past. You start bashing overalls. You're going to get the overall people. I like overalls. All the overall people are going to come out of the woodwork and start bashing you. I just don't like overalls on you. The thing you're going to get canceled for, for the first time being canceled, or the second time, third, how many times, is bashing overall people. Okay. Well, with that, let's welcome Max to the show. Pretty soon, I'm going to be the only host of the show because the overall people are going to be

pissed. Max is not an overall fan. So introduce Max to the audience, please, babe. All right. Here we go. Max. Max Lugavere is an American television personality and health and wellness writer. He resides in Los Angeles, California, and New York. He just came out with his second book, The Genius Life, How to Heal Your Mind, Strengthen Your Body, and Become Extraordinary. And on today's episode, we are covering a lot of ground when it comes to the body, health, wellness, taking care of your mind, all the things we all care about. With that, let's welcome Max to the show.

This is The Skinny Confidential, him and her. Writing a book is fucking gnarly. It's like Chinese torture. It's pretty difficult, but it's, you know, it's one of those things that I never like podcasting. If you would have asked me 10 years ago, if, you know, in the way that I saw my life sort of playing out, if writing a book was in that sort of that hand, I would have, you know, seriously doubted you. But having now written my second book and working on a third, I love it.

You know, it's like when you put good, good content out into the world, it's like one of the most gratifying feelings I think there is. I agree with you. I, but feel like really, really bad for me because I just turned in my book at 175,000 words and the publisher messaged me back and she said, did you send me the wrong copy? And I said, no. And she said, it's only supposed to be 75,000 words. Wow.

So I have to. They're going to have to hire an extra editor. They did. They did. They did. Okay. So I have to... They're going to have to hire an extra editor. They did. They did. They did have to. Okay, so writing your book, but it is a lot of work to be able to like sit down and focus. Did you do it in the morning or night?

My routine, typically, I find that I have the most clarity of thought in the mornings, like early in the morning. And I'm not like typically that early of a riser, but I wake up and I just feel like there's not as much noise in my head. There's not much static. First thing in the morning as there is like later on in the day. So feel like there's not as much noise in my head. There's not much static first thing in the morning as there is like later on in the day. So I tend to feel pretty creative first thing in the morning. But whenever inspiration strikes, you know, I tend to, it's not always predictable. So I'm always like on my phone, taking notes, jotting things down,

trying to just like make, you know, make notes for myself. Sometimes I write late at night. It really, it sort of depends, you know, you can't always predict when that sort of lightning bolt is going to appear. The noise is so, so, so true. How did you get into health and wellness? Take us back, walk us through all the steps that it took to get into what you do because it's very unique. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, I was always interested in nutrition and fitness just as a personal passion. When I was in high school, I got into bodybuilding, actually, not that I ever wanted to compete or engage formally with that topic, but I just, you know, as a sort of introverted computer nerd, I was very kind of, you know,

compelled by the idea that we can do certain things in our lifestyles and take certain supplements and eat a certain way that can, in a marked way, have an impact on the way that we look, the way that we feel, the way that we perform. And I was never an athlete. I was like a computer gamer, actually. And so kind of discovering that and the science underpinning all of that was just super interesting to me. And actually, that's what led to me starting college on a pre-med track. So I started as you know, as a biology major, and I thought I was going to go into like sports medicine or something like that. But ultimately, I realized that I was a creative and I kind of pivoted from that. But my first job out of college was as a journalist. So I used to work for Al Gore. I was

like one of the main hosts for a TV network that he had called Current TV. And I did that for six years, which sort of brought under the fold, you know, all of my passions. I've,. I've been interested in health and nutrition, as I mentioned, but also technology and the environment and things like that, just a huge range of topics. And there I was a bit of a generalist, and I got to explore those sensibilities. But about six years into that job, my mom got sick. And she started to experience symptoms of brain fog. And there was a change to her gait, which is how a person moves. And I didn't know it at the time, but those were the earliest symptoms of what would ultimately be diagnosed as a form of dementia. And I left my job at Current,

which was the TV network, and I basically became a sort of independent investigator to try to understand to the best of my ability why this would have happened to a woman at such a, at such a young age, my mom was 58 at the time. And in tandem with that, what could be done to prevent it from happening to myself and others that I care about. So even though I wasn't trained as a physician, or as an academic scientist, I was trained as a journalist. And you're, you know, the training is not as rigorous, certainly. And there's a lot of, you know, journalists get a lot of shade thrown at them at them these days, and I think rightfully so. But you are kind of trained, I guess, in the best case scenario to investigate a topic, to be a skeptic, to ask questions, to be able to reach out to experts in the field.

And that's pretty much what I did as an independent. And my goal was solely focused on doing what I could to help my family. And that began about 10 years ago. And I've, you know, having had the framework for sort of understanding nutrition and health and certainly being passionate about it and now having a vested interest in the health of my mom and the sanctity of my family, I just became fixated and ultimately obsessed. And I realized at a certain point that I had an aptitude for it. And so I started putting out content on social media and people started gravitating to my message and the way that I was able to communicate nutrition science. And ultimately the opportunity to write a book arose.

And that's when I wrote my first book, Genius Foods, which spread around the world, which I'm super grateful for. First, I'm sorry to hear that your mom went through that. I had a grandmother that ultimately passed and had severe dementia. And it's tough to watch a family member go through it because you feel like you're losing a you're losing like a person before they're actually gone. And it's difficult. Do you, have you, with all your research, have you looked into, and I know there's studies out there, but like what the root potential causes are, are there things that people can do to kind of protect their mind and like guard against that? Because obviously we're seeing it a lot more and more. But I think like at some level, like

everybody at this point, not everybody, but a lot of people know somebody, whether it's in their family or a friend or a family member of a friend that is affected by dementia, Alzheimer's, et cetera. Let's take a quick break to talk about ritual. This is a supplement that I take every single day. I have taken it every single day for the last two years. I took it the whole time I was pregnant and I just really like it and I can't shut the hell up about it. So let me tell you about Ritual. Before we get into this, you should also know there's no sugars, GMOs, synthetic fillers

or artificial colorants. It's clean. It's vegan friendly. And it's made with key nutrients that your body can actually use so there's not all this shady additive shit that's in so many multivitamins that's the number one reason that i really like it and if you want more info on everything that's in it you can go to their site they break it down very very seamlessly before you head to the site ritual is formulated with key nutrients, including vitamin

D3. We need vitamin D3 right now. A lot of us are indoors a lot. And so to make sure we're getting that every single day and filling in the gaps in our diet with that D is very important. I know I initially tested very low on D and after taking Ritual, when I went to my hormone specialist, I can happily say I am good on the Dino. Another fun thing about Ritual is they developed a vitamin for men. So now you have sort of everything. They have them for women. They have them for pregnant women. They have them for men and teens. They're scientifically developed to help support each different life stage. So what I do with my Ritual is I put it next to my tongue scraper. I take it in the morning. It's pepperminty. It doesn't give me fish burps. And I take it on an empty stomach,

which is great. So like when I'm running out the door, I'll throw two in my mouth. Plus, best part, it's delivered straight to your door, which you know I love. And they have free shipping. You deserve to know what's in your multivitamin. That's why Ritual is offering all skinny confidential him and her listeners 10% off during your first three months. Visit ritual.com slash skinny to start your ritual today. I'm telling you, you guys are going to love these vitamins if you haven't tried them yet. Yeah, well said. I mean, and it's so true. Today, if you make it to the age of 85, you have a 50% chance of being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, which is a coin toss. And it's very tragic. And especially, I think, relevant to millennials, to us, the average millennial today is going to reach an age

over 90. And so for us, unless we can find real solutions to this, real means of preventing this condition, which I believe is possible, then half of us are going to be demented. And if you look at Alzheimer's drug trials, they have a 99.6% fail rate. So that's worse than for any other, any other condition. What's the reason for that? Well, the reason for that, one of the major, one of the major reasons, and, and, and also a reason why I sort of decided to, to engage with this topic in a, in a more sort of formal way is that dementia begins in the brain often decades before the first symptom. And this is true for other conditions as well. I mean, if you have a heart attack, the conditions that led to that heart attack didn't begin to simmer

the night before you showing up to the emergency room, right? It's like a year-long, decade-long, sometimes disease process that occurs. And we don't yet know what the, what the, there's all this debate, right? In medicine, we still don't yet know exactly what the cause is for, for heart attacks and things like that. And we certainly don't yet for Alzheimer's disease, but what we do know is that there are biomarkers associated with Alzheimer's disease that are evident in the brains of people as young as 20, depending on, on what genes you carry. And so I think that's one of the major reasons why, why drugs don't yet, you know, we haven't yet found an effective drug because they're essentially just biochemical band-aids on a decades-long disease process. And I think in many cases, in many, you know, instances, what we're seeing from the research, which is very cutting edge and, you know, it's a constantly evolving science, that we do have some degree of influence over our brain health. We now see that people who have, for example, type 2 diabetes, which is something that many people in this country have. Half of people

actually in the US are either type 2 diabetic or on their way there. They have a condition called prediabetes. And if you have type 2 diabetes, your risk for developing Alzheimer's disease increases anywhere between two and fourfold. So yeah, and that is largely a lifestyle condition. I mean, we essentially know what causes that, you know, and there's some debate about, you know, what comes first, but we know that it's a lifestyle condition, you know. Type 1 diabetes is a little bit less clear, but type 2 diabetes is, you know, we know that people who are obese have dramatically, you know, higher risk for type 2 diabetes. The two conditions are so interrelated that they're now being referred

to together with the term diabesity. So, yeah, I think that lifestyle factors are at play. And essentially what I started to do is I started to look at population studies, epidemiology, parts of the world where rates of Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia are low. And then also we have a number of clinical trials that are happening right now showing us that our choices matter, that if we adopt healthier eating patterns, that we are less sedentary in our lifestyles, if we have better sleep, that we can seriously affect the processes that we know are associated with these conditions. So it takes a little bit of like connecting the dots, I would say. And I kind of credit my background having not, you know, gone down the PhD route to

being able to do this, to being able to see the field, you know, or the myriad of different fields at 30,000 feet, and then being able to sort of connect them all. Because that's not something that I think is, or has been done, really. You know, when you sit in a doctor's office, doctors are actually, doctors aren't really scientists. I mean, they're trained as technicians to put into practice what's discovered at what's called like the bench, you know, and what I mean by that is what's discovered in the lab. But people who are working in the lab, they really focus on these like little niche sort of areas. And when you're just a civilian, like I was, and you're experiencing this firsthand with your with your, you know, with the person who matters more to you than anybody else in the

world, and you're going from doctor's office to doctor's office, and you're experiencing what I've come to call diagnose and adios, you do what you can to try to make sense of this. And I had, I guess, a background that allowed me to kind of turn over the different stones and the rocks and look into the medical literature and try to come up with a paradigm that, you know, that I think could help the next person prevent what it was that my mom suffered. Have you, have you met or collaborated with Dr. Christian Gonzalez? Do you know Dr. G? I do Dr. G. Yeah, actually I interviewed him. Yeah. He's, he's the man I interviewed him recently for. Similar stories though, because his mother got sick and it led him into a past,

like, like almost identical story. Like led him into the same path or like he had to go and deep dive because his mom was sick and he wasn't getting the answers. And like, he just got obsessed with trying to figure it all out. What are some micro things that you did for your mom? Like small things that made a big difference. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, again, like it was, I kind of had like this tragic, tragically rude awakening that there wasn't really that much that I was able to do for my mom. I mean, I tried. I tried to teach gently. But I think anybody with a sick loved one, sick loved one knows that you should do your best to teach.

But ultimately, you have to teach gently and that people are going to live the way that they want to live. And that some disease progressions, you can't really, you know, like at a certain point, you, you know, you're not God, you know, and I'm not really a religious person, but I tried to do what I could in my mom's life to make those incremental changes. So, I mean, one of the things that I talk about in my book that I think is really damaging is the fact that we've, you know, our, the modern diet has become saturated with grain and seed oils, like canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, grapeseed oil, things like that. And I grew up consuming these oils. My mom actually, the irony is that my mom grew up kind of afraid of heart disease because her father had passed from heart disease. And so the messaging that my mom grew up with in the mainstream media

was that to avoid heart disease, you want to avoid saturated fat. You want to avoid dietary cholesterol and the oils that you find in the supermarket that are free of dietary cholesterol and low in saturated fat, and also, you know, conveniently all have that red heart healthy logo on it, tend to be these grain and seed oils that are, you know, a billion dollar a year business. And those are the oils that I grew up consuming and that we had in my house growing up. And so when I learned about how damaging those oils are to the brain, I got rid of those in my mom's house. What did you replace them with? So I'm a huge fan of extra virgin olive oil and avocado oil. You know, humans have been

pressing olives to make extra virgin olive oil for thousands of years. And these newer oils that I talked about, like, you know, canola, corn oil, we haven't had the chemistry labs to make those oils, you know, prior to, you know, just under 100 years ago. So I replaced them with olive oil, which is actually a fresh fruit juice, you know, because olives are fruit. And they actually, when you look at epidemiologic studies, you see that people who use extra virgin olive oil, they tend to have dramatically reduced rates of Alzheimer's disease and other conditions like cancer, heart disease, and things like that. It's a staple oil in the Mediterranean region of the world. It's full of plant compounds, some of which have been shown to be as anti-inflammatory as low-dose ibuprofen, which is a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug. So yeah, so that was the oil that I, that is, that I, you know, stock my mom's kitchen up with. And that's pretty much the oil that I use exclusively today, like in my kitchen, in my cooking. Is there a brand? We have to know,

is there a favorite brand? There's not, you know, that's a, it's a, it's a common question that I get asked. And I actually, I don't, I like to try new olive oils. Like I like to, I like to try different brands. I think that's one of the fun aspects of like being, you know, having become a bit of a, an olive oil connoisseur. If all I did was buy the same brand of olive oil day and day, I don't get boring. Got it. I agree. I agree. I like to mix it up too. You say that a lot of people that are incredibly stressed out are skinny fat. Yeah. Can you speak on that? I feel like I'm always stressed out. I need to get it under control. He's always stressed out. How can we get our stress under control? And why does that, as you say, make us skinny fat? Well, stress is an

indiscriminate killer for many reasons. I mean, it does cause us to seek out, you know, to engage in comforting behaviors. And I think for many people, especially today, it's to, you know, go to the kitchen and eat comfort foods, which, you know, more often than not, tend to be these hyper palatable, ultra processed junk foods that are manufactured with the explicit intent of making us repeat customers, right, and going through the whole bag. And I think that's one of the problems with underlying the obesity crisis today, that, you know, so many of us, about two thirds of us are either overweight or obese, the fact that these that, you know, so many of us, about two thirds of us are either overweight or obese. It's the fact that these foods, you know, we're told to just eat less, move more, you know, all things in moderation, but these foods are not designed to be consumed in

moderation. So that's one of the, I think, ideas that I like to share with people that, that I think is most empowering. For me, it's all about informed consent. And when you're cracking open, you know, a bag of cheese puffs or a pint of ice cream, what most people don't realize is that those foods are not designed to be consumed in moderation, right? So it's like that slogan, once you pop, you can't stop. That's a truism with scientific backing. And we now know that, you know, those kinds of foods, they light up your brain's reward pathways and they just become super easy to overdo. By the time, actually, this is what's funny. By the time you feel satiated from them,

you've already eaten too much. And that's one of the problems with these ultra-processed packaged foods. Too often when we can't stop ourselves, when we can't pump the brakes, we feel like it's a moral failure. It's not actually a moral failure. It's that these foods are literally designed to make us over- them. I cannot stop eating flaming hot Cheetos if I have one. I mean, I can't stop. I just don't even do it. You just can't stop eating them. So that makes total sense. You guys know what I really like? I really, really like my wife's ass in those beta brand work pant yoga pants. You do. You can't stop pinching my ass. Can you say that to start a read? I don't know, but I did. Okay. So these are the Beta Brand dress pant yoga pants that I have

been talking about for the last year and a half. I get the black, I get the skinny ones. They are so comfortable. You can wear them at home when you're doing Zoom calls, but you can also head out and do an errand. Okay. So they're so versatile. You can wear them anywhere. My favorite part about them, I've talked about this many times, is that they're wrinkle resistant. So when you take them off like I do and throw them on the floor, they don't get wrinkled. And then when you pick them up the next morning to put them on, because let's be honest, we don't always wash our pants. It's easy and they're not wrinkled, which I love. I've been reading a lot about what successful

people are doing in quarantine. And so many of them say that they get dressed because they want to get into that work mindset. So now you can be comfortable in your dress pant yoga pant, but you can also be in the work mindset, which I love. It's sort of a win-win for everything. If you're not a fan of the black skinny ones, no fear. They have boot cut, straight leg, skinny, cropped, eight pocket, and more. They have all different colors on their website. I'm telling you, check them out. They launch new styles weekly.

Right now, Skinny Confidential, him and her listeners, can get 25% off their first order when you go to betabrand.com slash skinny. That's 25% off your first order for a limited time at betabrand.com slash skinny. Find out why women are buying five different pairs of these pants, you guys. You're going to go to betabrand.com slash skinny for 25% off. All right, let's get back to the show. I do the same thing, like paleo puffs or like I discovered this new brand of like, you know, sort of like a healthier pretzel. I go through the whole bag. Yeah. And I don't. But here's the thing. I don't feel guilty about it. I know that that's probably what's going to happen when I crack open the bag. So for me, it's informed consent that I think is like the difference.

How can we get our stress under control? What are some some little things we can do throughout the day? Let's extend this podcast about eight hours. No, honestly, though, because one thing I've been doing and please elaborate on anything that's like this, like breath work is something I love. I think it really helps with my stress. Do you have any other little tips or tricks that you do daily to practice getting your stress under control? Definitely. So here's the thing, the way that I think about stress and the way that I've written about stress in this book, The Genius Life, is that there's sort of two ways that we can manage our stress. One is we can get rid of the source of stress, right? And so that's like if you're in a bad relationship or if you are working a job that you hate and you can afford to leave that job and find something else. Those are obviously

very effective ways of dealing with stress, right? Getting rid of the source of stress. But today we have sources of stress that sometimes we can't get rid of, you know, whether it's a financial burden or somebody in the family who's sick, which I've, you know, personally experienced, or stress about the current political climate or, you know, the pandemic, which we're all experiencing. And so the way to deal with stress at that level is to bolster your resilience to stress. And the way to do that, if you can't get rid of the stress, is to do things that actually make you a more robust organism. And I love to talk about the value of exercise in that context. I mean, exercise is one of the few

things that, I mean, it floods your brain with a neuro, you know, biological chemical cocktail, essentially, of neurotransmitters that help calm you down and make you happier and adjust your mood. It also helps to do things like sitting in hot saunas or doing cold water immersion, which are acute stressors on the body. But what happens is that by basically encouraging your resilience and your adaptation to those stressors, those acute physical stressors, what happens is it's called a really empowering concept that you can actually will yourself to, you know, whether it's get to the gym or do exercise at home or, you know, take an ice bath or take a cold shower or sit in a sauna, that you can actually bolster, you can will yourself to become such a robust organism that this spillover effect will actually make you more resilient to

sources of psychological stress in your life. That makes so much sense. It's almost like working out your adversity muscle. The more adversity you're exposed to, the more you're able to deal with it. And Tony Robbins always says like he wakes up and he does that ice bath in the morning because he wants that to be the hardest thing he does all day for mental clarity. Yeah. I love that. Working out. I mean, that's like brilliantly, brilliantly stated. Yeah. I also think there's something that is less talked about where it's like, and maybe like this is, I don't know the way to say this, but I feel like a lot of people are addicted to the stress. Meaning, so let's talk about like social media or the pandemic or like the politics, for

example, if that's stressing you out and every time you go on Twitter or Instagram or you listen to a podcast, you're getting stressed out and you're getting upset and you're getting angry and you're yelling at the phone and commenting. Like you are looking for that stress and enabling that stress to come into your life. It's very possible, like you said, to just use the example of getting away from it. Anybody that's got a smartphone in the pocket, if they're being triggered or getting upset by things they see online, they have the ability to stop looking at those things. But we're in this hamster wheel now where we have to look at everything. And there's a book I love, I'm sure you've heard of or read

called Sapiens. And it's like, we didn't evolve to get instant feedback or to see instantly what was going on. Like if you lived, if you and I lived a town over in the past, like I wouldn't know what you were doing and you wouldn't know what I was doing until, you know, months, weeks, you know? So I wouldn't see like, Hey, Max just wrote this book and he's a little bit further ahead of me and he's doing so great on his podcast. Like I didn't, I didn't have that external stress. You know what I mean? And like, we're so connected now. It's a problem bit further ahead of me and he's doing so great on his podcast. I didn't have that external stress. You know what I mean? And we're so connected now. Yeah. It's a problem.

It's like we got to get back to being sure. It's good to use these as tools, but you got to get we got to get back to a place where we can disconnect from them when we need to. Yeah. Yeah. It's basically, you know, our brains evolved in these local to think linearly and locally to think about what's going on in our immediate communities and to be able to, you know, add to do simple arithmetic, right? But today we live in a world that's exponential,

right? The exponential growth of technology, it's Moore's law essentially. And we live in a world that's global. So you're right in that our brains, you know, have not been able to catch up to the blistering breakneck pace that technology has advanced right before our very eyes. And, and then also social media, you throw into the fact that like our social media feeds are algorithmically governed to show us either what is like the, you know, to basically show us the most engagement generating content off the bat. And usually that content, you create the feed, you create the feed. Yeah. Or the creative feed, the feed is created for you. And it's, and it's created similarly to these ultra processed foods that are, that are, that are implicitly designed to create over consumption. These feeds are designed to create engagement and what's going to create engagement.

Usually it's content that is negative. It's content that is very sort of over the top grandiose. It's not just like, it's not boring. It's essentially, it's never boring content. And if you're looking at a bunch of political content, like it doesn't matter which way you lean, but if you're looking at something that's upsetting and you keep looking at those videos and comment, it's going to serve you more and more of those types of content. There is little ways though, that you can manage it. I think for instance, Michael and I, and this is just Michael and I's decision.

Everyone's obviously different. We don't watch the news in our house. It's never on. It's smart. Like we listen to Mozart or Bossa Nova or something that's going to stimulate our brain or a book on tape. The news is never on. So that's just one way to just cut that.

Matter of fact, we got rid of all like cable. Like we only look at, you know, like Apple TV. It's so nice. It's like we don't, you know how I remember my parents when I was little, they'd have the news on in the background all day long. And it just, it just feels like I don't need that. And also you can also curate who you're watching every day. I mean, pick three to five people that you absolutely love that are bringing you immense value and just consume their Instagram stories. Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree with that. I mean, the news,

what I call it essentially these days is panic porn. You know, it follows the mentality that if it bleeds, it leads. And so they front load what's, you know, what's going to be most anxiety producing at the top of the hour because they know that it's going to get you to pay attention. Advertisers love it. And, you know, they keep sort of baiting you with like the carrot, right, the carrot analogy to keep watching so that you get to the end of the news broadcast, which makes shareholders happy. It boosts the bottom line, but it does horrible things for your mental health. So I think that that notion of either limiting or just severely moderating your consumption of news media is very smart. There's that amazing Duncan Trussell quote, you know, somewhere, some poor fool is sitting under a waterfall, you know, without his phone, not having any idea of how

afraid or angry he's supposed to be. And it's so tongue in cheek, but it's true. You know, like I think a lot of the adversity that we're, that we experienced today, a lot of the stress is self-created. There's Pete, you know, I've been tough on the mainstream media this year. And I want to say that it's, I recognize there are great independent journalists and great journalists that work within these companies. I understand that there are, but as a whole, when I'm just saying, like, say if I'm picking on CNN or Fox news or NBC, like these are big businesses that, like you said, they're serving a lot of panic, a lot of like, they need to get ratings. And so

what I don't like about it is you can't have these really in depth conversations and keep it calm. Like it's just got to be constantly like riling people up. It's not to say that there's not great people in those organizations because I catch Flack saying it here, but like I firmly believe, and I'm just going to stick by this, that if you sit there and you watch any of these news channels all night long, all day long, like whichever news channel it is, like all of these mainstream ones that are competing for ratings against each other, I think it's a poor decision to make for your personal life. Yeah. And it's totally defeatist to, you know, this idea that the media cares about your health ultimately. Like chronic stress powerfully handicaps your immune system. You know, by having chronically elevated levels

of cortisol, which is, you know, the body's stress hormone, you handicap your immune system. You hinder your body's ability to fight infection. And it has a number of downstream effects too. As you mentioned, it can contribute to that unfortunate phenotype of skinny fatness. You know, you actually have, I believe it's something like four times the cortisol receptors in your adipose tissue in your viscera. So like in your midsection, which is the most inflammatory and dangerous type of fat to store. So that apple shaped body tends to be associated with all kinds of, you know, chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease and things

like that, because your fat tissue in the midsection secretes inflammatory hormones and things like that. And that's where if you're stressed out, generally, that's where you're going to accumulate most of the fat in your body. You can almost predict if you see somebody and they have skinny arms and legs, but they have a huge bulging midsection that they live a very stressed out life. Hot little break to tell you all about Jenny Kane. These are the two things I got off the site. I'm telling you, you guys have to check them out. They're both different, but just hear me out. The first thing is they have this earthy candle. I bought 10. Okay. They're so neutral. And I don't know why I'm having this moment where I just want to

be around nature. So I have this fountain in my room and the candles match the fountain. So I do the candles with the fountain in my room. And then upstairs we have the candles too. And like I said, they're neutral and they're big and they burn for so long. I'm obsessed. I literally bought 10. So if you're quarantined and you're looking for a candle that gives off those earthy, nude, neutral vibes, this is your candle. The other thing I bought that you must check out is called a sweater coat. They have all different colors. They have oatmeal. They have like a gray, but I got the black one. So it's basically this sweater that's open and you can squish the sleeves up. So it kind of looks oversized and then it has big pockets and it's a sweater that I will wear

throughout all of winter. It's such a staple. It's cashmere and it's a classic. I'm telling you, go on Jenny Kane's site and look up the sweater coat. I cannot live without this. I am so happy I have it for winter. Like I said, they have all different colors. I got a medium in it. I like it a little bit oversized. So check that out. Get the sweater, oatmeal, black or gray, and then also add the candles to your cart. I'm telling you. They also have so many fun things that can fit into your daily uniform. So what you're going to do is you're going to go to JennyCain.com, make getting dressed the easiest part of your routine at JennyCain.com, and get 20% off your first order when you use code SKINNY at checkout. That's J-E-N-N-I-K-N-Y-N-E.com, promo code SKINNY.

Stock the candle and stock the sweater coat. So what are like a couple of things, maybe give us three things that you can add into your diet, herbs, foods, fruit, whatever that you can add in that will help with stress. So in my first book, which is called Genius Foods, I kind of borrowed the term superfoods. And I looked at all the foods in the medical literature that based on their nutritional constituents, I felt could give the brain sort of the most bang for the buck in terms of nutrients that could help it protect it as it ages, guard it from environmental stress, from environmental toxins, and also provide the raw materials to help you grow new brain cells, which we now know the adult brain can do up until death. So some of my favorite foods, you know, and to some degree, I think, you know, having this conversation in Los Angeles, you're preaching to the choir, but

avocados are an amazing food. They're rich in what are called carotenoids. Carotenoids are like plant compounds. You know, anytime you go to the produce section of your supermarket and you notice all the colors, which is one of the reasons why I think experts say eat the rainbow, those colors are usually there as a result of the presence of these carotenoid compounds. And what they've shown is that carotenoids protect brain tissue. And they were first identified in the eyes. Eyes are actually an extension of your brain. Eyes are neural tissue. And we know that carotenoids protect eye health. So two in particular, lutein and zeaxanthin, if you look at any eye health supplement at

the drugstore, usually they're going to have those two compounds in them, maybe also beta carotene. But we now know that lutein and zeaxanthin also accumulate in brain tissue and protect brain tissue as it ages. And we've also seen, there was a really interesting study at University of Georgia where they found that when giving college students supplemental lutein and zeaxanthin, they see an improvement. They see a boost in their visual processing speed, which is interesting because young college age students are already thought to be at the peak of their cognitive prowess, right? So typically the foods that I recommend are going to, to some degree,

degree contain these compounds. So avocados are an amazing source, dark leafy greens like kale, another top source. As I mentioned, they're great for your eye health, also really, really good for your brain health. I also happen to be a big advocate for properly raised animal consumption, which I think can be controversial these days, but I'm a huge fan of grass-fed beef and wild salmon. But I think beef is sort of an interesting food to talk about. Primarily, I mean, I get kicks out of it, out of talking about it because it can be so controversial, but it's just as much a superfood as goji berries and chia seeds are. If we worried about every topic that's controversial, we wouldn't be talking about

anything because everything's controversial these days and I don't care. So I'm just going to, we just got to, you just got to say whatever you got to say because I love that. Listen, people get that this is controversial to even say that, but it's true. Like if I, if I have to worry about everything that's controversial, like I've never going to be, I've never been able to talk again. Yeah. I think you should lean into the controversy. You know, if it's controversial, generally that means that, that, that implies that it should be talked about, that we need to be talking about it more. And so I think grass fed beef is like one of these foods that the, the nutritional value of it is just,

it's, you, you, you can't debate. There's like little room for debate. I mean, you know, we can argue about the proportion of meat, you know, the proportion that meat should take in one's diet. There are vegans and there are carnivores. And we have this sort of polarization in the nutrition community because of these different factions that have sort of splintered off. But I think in the context of a diet

that also includes plants, I think grass-fed beef is just almost a perfect fit. Let me- Belcampo is my favorite. It's the best. On the planet. We were connected through Anya. Yes. Shout out to Anya. Hi, Any my favorite it's the best on the planet we were connected through anya yes shout out hi anya she is the best that burger is i don't i used to like in and out i don't even like in and out anymore because now you're having the real stuff good yeah belcampo

is the shit it is let me let me bring up another controversial subject while we're on and like you know we'll get some people riled up and and i don't see how this is controversial but but it is. So there's a big topic on diet culture right now. And there's a lot of people attacking diet culture. And I think like, you know, I don't participate in diet culture because I just don't, it's not something that gets me super excited. I just don't just kind of stay out of it. But I am interested in obviously trying to live the healthiest life I can live and look the best that I possibly can. I think the problem with what's happened is whenever anybody's talking about diet now, they are reinforcing with like the way you look, right? Like it's all about looks and how skinny

you are and how fit you are. And I think what that does to people that maybe are just getting on their journey or maybe don't feel what's part of that community, it turns them off and they feel attacked or they feel that it's discouraging or they feel like they're not included. And I empathize with that because listen, not like we all struggle with the way we look and the way we feel. But I want to talk about how you can address a healthy diet to look and feel your best. And it doesn't, that's not putting it in a, you know, it's not like you don't have to look like a and create longevity for your life while also recognizing that, you know, some like getting, being out of shape is not a good thing. It's not all about looks. It's just like, if I'm looking at it from the frame or the reference of how can I live as long as possible and stay as healthy as possible. And I don't think that has to do with diet culture. I think that has to do with like health and longevity. Absolutely.

Yeah. I mean, the truth is every action has an opposite and equal reaction, right? And so the demonization of fat, for example, as a macronutrient over the past couple of decades has led to now the pendulum swinging to the other side where people are eating fat bombs and putting butter in their coffee and coconut oil in their smoothies, which I don't think is necessarily a smart idea, you know, either, even though I'm very happy that fat has now been sort of exonerated and is out of the doghouse. I do agree that diet culture and, you know, the promotion of like detox teas and fit, you know, fit fat burning supplements and

ultimately like media, right? Like media perpetuates basically one body type. Yeah. They're perpetuating like your diet is like based on how you look, but like, listen, if I was, if like, I just want, like I said, I just want to live a long time and be healthy. So I don't care what I look like in that product. Like if, if I can look really good for the next 10 years, but I'm not, but I'm going to die in 10 years. Like, I don't want to live like that. I would rather like, I'm trying to talk to the audience and talk to myself about how do I create longevity in healthy practices? And I think we've gotten to a place where some people have gone to the extreme, like, you know, way too far into the looks and diet and they're like starving themselves and not looking great. And the other people are like, well, I'm just going to

stay how I am and love myself. And there's a difference between like loving who you are, but also wanting to be as healthy as you possibly can be to create longevity. And that's, I don't know, like, I'm probably going to stumble and get this wrong, get people mad. But like, for myself, selfishly, I want to know how to create longevity in the healthiest way possible. Of course. Well, the movement, you know, what, so, you know, and I have strong feelings about this, like the healthy, the health at any size movement to me is doing, has done more harm than good. We know that being obese is not good for you. I mean, yes, there's a small fraction of people who are obese, who, you know, maybe have what, you know, what we would describe as,

as metabolic health, but that's now, is that going to be the case for you 20 years from now? No, I don't think so. And I think, you know, one of the other problems that I see in the, in the pushback to diet culture is that we can't have, you know, empirical and reasonable conversations about what constitutes healthful food and what constitutes crap food. You know, today we live in a time where 60% of the calories that your average person consumes come from what are called ultra processed foods. These are foods essentially made in a lab that provide no real nutritive value other than calories. And I think that's a problem. I think that we need to talk about the fact that certain foods are good for you and certain foods are bad for you. And we need to be able to separate

talking about ideas around nutrition and empirical truths around food from talking about people. Like when I talk about the fact that junk food is not good for you and is deserving of the term junk food, I'm not saying that people who eat junk food ought to feel any less, you know, any shame or guilt about eating those foods. And I also don't think that people who, you know, are overweight should feel any less worthy than people who are not overweight. That's not what any of us are saying. What we are saying is that you owe it to yourself in this one chance that we get to live a healthy life, to do what you can to procure better health based on the best available science and evidence that we have. So to that end, I mean, I think we all, you know, whether it's low carb or low fat, I think most of us would be well suited to eat less packaged processed foods. You know, I think generally I might have a bias towards a more low carbohydrate way of eating because

there's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. And for the most part, you know, especially today when most of us are sedentary, especially relative to our ancestors, we're just eating too many carbs. And, you know, those carbs tend to be from grain products and grains in my view are just a low quality food. You know, it's essentially cattle feed. You know, I don't like the cows that I eat to be fed grain. I certainly, you know, it's not a food that I want to base my diet around. So the bear claw you ate this morning is not getting fed to the cattle. Neither am I. And by the way, I don't encourage people to strive for perfection.

I'm not perfect. And one of my favorite Stephen Hawking's quote, without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist. This is not about being perfect. It's about doing the best you can with the information that you have. And so what I'm trying to do is to provide information so that when you make decisions day to day, that it's, again, it's informed consent. You know, I'm going to eat this whole bag of flaming hot Cheetos because, you know, I want, I choose to have this planned

indulgence. Yeah. I think that's the, I think that's the thing though, is like, it's people have pushed perfectionism for so long and an idea of what perfectionism is in diet culture. And I think it'd be people as a society would be better suited if they led with, hey, these are healthy ways to improve so that you can live longer, feel better. And then like, yeah, like the look, there's a looks aspect to it,

but like that should be secondary or third or the last part of the conversation. The first part should be really like, this is a healthy way to live. And I think the problem is that people are leading with the vanity part first, which is like, this is how you look. And it makes people feel disincluded or it makes them feel like they don't want to try or it makes them feel like they can never get there. But if we've lived this long. If you go back 200 years of the 1800s, you live to 40, you're an old man, old woman. We're going 80, 90. And if you

would have told people back then, hey, you got 80 years and you'd be a whole different thing. I think that's why you're starting to... People have to think about longevity a little bit more now because we never had to think about it before. What are some diet lies? You talk about this on your Instagram, the lies that were being fed. So for instance, go very, very detailed for you said one margarine is better than grass fed butter. Oh, yeah. Like give us a bunch of those that we just think in our heads are truths, but they're actually lies. Just pervasive diet myths. Well, yeah, that fake butter is better for you than real butter. Real butter is a wonderful food. It's chemically very stable. It's not going to oxidize, become rancid, and ultimately become carcinogenic like some of these

grain and seed oils that we've been told to adopt instead of butter. So I go to war with like margarines and those kinds of fake spreads all the time. I think most people would be very well suited to cut them out of their diets. If a little bit sneaks in here and there, it's sort of a dose makes the poison scenario. But generally, like if you look in my kitchen, none of the products that I have in my kitchen contain canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, anything like that. I know that I'm ingesting a little bit when I go to restaurants because for the most part, restaurants all cook with these kinds of fats. So again, it's not about dogma or anything or perfection or anything like that. It's about just doing the best you can. I have a big problem with the whole sort

of calorie counting culture, the obsession with calories. Again, to me, it goes back to giving people the tools to understand how food affects their behavior. So what we know from research that was performed very recently, it was either 2018 or 2019 funded by the National Institutes of Health, we know that ultra-processed foods drive our hunger in a way that minimally processed foods do. If you're basing your diet around foods that come in a package, you will have already over-consumed them by the time you feel satiated to the tune of about 500 calories a day, if that's all you're eating, which by and large is how many people eat. So it's not hyperbole. As I mentioned, most people, 60% of the calories that they consume come from

ultra-processed foods. Whereas if you basically stick to whole foods, again, whether these are low-carb foods, low-fat foods, if you're sticking to foods where you know exactly what's in them, the ingredient lists are not 20 ingredients long, by sticking to foods where you know exactly what's in them, the ingredient lists are not, you know, 20 ingredient long, 20 ingredients long. By sticking to minimally processed whole foods, you basically, you can, you effortlessly eat at essentially a calorie deficit. So for people that don't want to become obsessed with food or count calories, which in my view is a very, is actually a very obsessive thing to do. And it's somehow prescribed as a sort of antidote for food obsession, which I don't understand at all. Stick to minimally processed foods, just whole

foods. And these are foods like dark leafy greens. Have a big salad every day. One of the sort of big rules that I, or not a rule, but like a tip that I offer in my first book is that you should have a big fatty salad every single day. In fact, research out of Rush University shows us that people who do this, who just eat a big salad every day, have brains that perform up to 11 years younger. So dark leafy greens, kale, arugula, spinach, very satiating, you know, because it's full of fiber. Fiber mechanically like stretches out the stomach, turning off hormones that are involved in hunger.

And then also I think it's really important to prioritize protein. So another myth is that protein is somehow bad for us or that we eat too much protein. So another myth is that protein is somehow bad for us, or that we eat too much protein. We eat enough protein in this country to not see protein deficiency, but a lot of the latest research really suggests that we don't actually eat enough protein for optimal body composition. Didn't you say you were protein deficient, Lauren? You didn't? No, I'm insulin resistant. Insulin resistant. Yeah, you talked about that earlier. I just found out. Was there anything I could eat? But didn't you say you weren't eating enough protein at one point? Yes, I found out I was not eating enough protein and now I am.

But I don't know if protein deficient was the actual word. Is insulin resistant? Is there anything that we can do to change that without medicine? I mean, yeah. Well, you know, this is not medical advice for you, but generally speaking, yeah. Resistance training is one of the best things that you could do to fix insulin resistance. Also looking at your sleep, you know, your average person on just one night of shortened sleep, they're temporarily insulin resistant the next day.

You can have an altered insulin response due to exposure to environmental toxins and things like that. But for the most part, I would say anybody who thinks that they might be insulin resistant, cut down on the carbohydrates, adopt a diet that has more whole foods in it as opposed to these ultra processed foods, and then definitely engage with resistance training. I mean, resistance training is one of the best things that you can do. Are you down with all this EMF, I think it's EMFT, taking the house and putting all these boxes for electricity in your house? No. No. That's nothing to do with wellness for you.

Because I'm starting to hear more and more about that from the wellness industry. Yeah. I only tend to talk about what I know about. I don't jump on bandwagons. I think that's one of the things that my followers appreciate about me. So I don't doubt that they could be having an effect. It's just that I'm not aware of what effect that they're having. And so I don't sort of obsess the things that my followers appreciate about me. So I'm not, I don't doubt that they could be having an effect. It's just that I'm not aware of what effect that they're having. And so I don't sort of obsess. You're under the waterfall. You're under the waterfall with that one. Yeah. I'll join you. Yeah. What's been your most popular post in the wellness world where people, you just couldn't even believe it. And people were so intrigued.

I know you did a post on ketchup from Europe and ketchup from the United States. Is there any posts like that, that has just really resonated? People love my healthy swap posts. So like, you know, I'll make recommendations to people to just make really simple swaps in their diets, in their lifestyles that can help boost their health. Oftentimes these swaps are free. Taylor needs to write these down. Listen, I might need to write them down too. Give us a couple of swaps. Go. This is a good game. Well, just off the top of my head, swapping like milk chocolate for dark chocolate, which is going to be way higher in polyphenols, way higher in compounds like magnesium for you.

That's a swap that your health will thank you for. I make recommendations to swap out certain like kitchen utensils. So cutting down on your use of plastic. So I mentioned that certain environmental toxins can actually affect insulin responses in the body. Exposure to BPA is one of those. So BPA, bisphenol A, it's a plasticizing compound. Michael's parents love BPA. Your house is built. You're going to put my parents on blast? In plastic.

They love BPA. I'm going to tell them that you brought this. I'm going to tell them to listen to this specific part. You're going to be in trouble. Yeah. I mean, BPA is not good. I think that whole generation loves BPA. I mean, plastic.

Yeah. Plastic was a big part of like in the 50s, you know, being able to just fill your home with stuff, you know, it really was like plastic was a compound that, I mean, for all intents and purposes, like changed the world. Well, that's because when it came, like I talked to my dad, he's 75. And I was like, when he, when he was a kid, he was like, yeah, we didn't have that much plastic. They didn't, you know, the mass production of plastic items didn't exist until, you know, as he started, you know, like, like probably around our age, a little bit younger and so on. So like,

it was really like plastic experience, a boom during the, the, you know, what I guess would be our parents' generation. Of course. And the discovery of BPA actually played a huge role in that. But what most people don't know is that BPA was originally identified as being a xenoestrogen. So it actually affects your body like estrogen does. And this has been known for almost a century at this point. So they got all those soy boys out there now. That's what they call them, the soy boy beta boys. Well, here's the thing. That's controversial to say. The soy boys are going to come out after me. Well, see, I think in the wild, you see all kinds of, you know, gender issues with, you know, exposure to environmental toxins, which are now being run off into our oceans and to our streams. And I would not be surprised if, you know, years from now, decades from now, we see that it's

exposure to, you know, all of these endocrine disrupting compounds, whether it's BPA, whether it's, you know, the chemicals used to create nonstick pans, parabens, phthalates, things like that, that have, who knows, fluoride, you know, have all been shown to affect the way our delicate system of hormones works in our bodies and also have been found in utero, right? Like in amniotic fluid and in, you know, in the placenta to be affecting brain development and things like that. I mean, for example, thyroid hormone, we know that thyroid hormone is involved in brain development and we're exposed on a daily basis to compounds that affect levels of thyroid, the way that our thyroid hormone functions. So that's just a total different rabbit hole that we could go down and I would love to- Let's go down it because I have a low thyroid

and I'm on medication for it and it's made me feel so much better. I was feeling so bad, so fatigued and so tired and now I have so much more clarity. Is there anything I can do naturally? Well, see, I've become sort of interested in ways of avoiding endocrine disrupting compounds, some of which affect thyroid function. I mean, you know, our diets and our food affect thyroid function. So people who are on ketogenic diets for prolonged periods of time can see suppressed thyroid function. You know, you need to bring carbohydrates back in and, you know, some people will see sort of a normalization of thyroid function after that. But, you know, we're being exposed to, you know, in some cases, high levels and in other cases, low levels of industrial compounds that affect the way that your endocrine system works.

And, you know, for a long time, toxicologists thought that for every toxin, the dose made the poison. So escalating danger with an increasing dose of whatever that toxin happens to be. But what we now know is that compounds that can affect the way our hormones are working, you know, I would put thyroid, thyroid, our thyroid hormone is a hormone. We can have differing effects at doses that are far lower. So the term for this is actually non-monotonicity. So you can have a non-monotonic dose response, like a low dose response in a way that's much more difficult to measure than what you would see from a high dose of the same toxin. And this is one of

the reasons why I think these compounds are hard to regulate, they're hard to study, and why I think we ought to all follow, we owe it to ourselves to follow what's called the precautionary principle, you know, taking a sort of guilty until proven innocent approach to many of these industrial compounds that we engage with every day, whether it's cosmetics that we slather on our skin, to, you know, the containers that we eat our foods out of, to ingredients that are actually added to food for the purposes of acting as preservatives. You know, like parabens. Like a lot of people look on their cosmetics, on their underarm deodorant to make sure that they're paraben-free. Parabens are also used in food as a preservative because it prevents the growth of microorganisms. And that's one of the other potential dangers of basing your diet around these ultra-processed foods.

Do you have a swap for Taylor's daily Panda Express order? Is it a daily addiction? I don't know what he's doing back there. Taylor is eating probably Panda Express as we said. Earlier it was McDonald's. That's why he needs an alarm that's so army military style to wake him up because he's just eating Panda Express and McDonald's every day. One time we had a guest in here and he pulled out a bunch of Indian curry and I almost flipped over the table and killed him because this is small quarters. I finished eating the McDonald's

literally as he walked in the door. I heard the door open. I threw it in the trash. I just took the last bite. So thankfully, nobody saw. Well, now everyone knows. I mean, I mean, just, you know, at the surface level, I mean, without even going into the kinds of oils and additives that these that these, you know, fast food companies put in their food, a lot of the time food is kept warm in the restaurant environment in plastic, sort of like sous vide. Yeah. They use like a sous vide method to keep food warm, which is a wonderful way of adding plastic to your food. So for that reason, I think, you know, eating fast food is just no bueno, not a smart idea.

I'm looking at my water bottle right now to see if it's BPA free and I don't see that it's BPA free. So it's giving me anxiety. Yeah. I try to minimize, I mean, and again, I'm not perfect. I don't try to, you know, encourage people to aim for perfection, but you don't know where plastic water bottles have been stored prior to their being in the refrigerator at your, you know, your local market. And these, we know that these compounds are able to leach into the foods that we're consuming. Oh my God. There's so much to think about. If you had like a magic wand, like Harry Potter, I'm just kidding. If you had a magic wand and you could get rid of like three things in the world or ingredients, and I know we've already gone over oil, so maybe we'll skip that one. But three things where it's like, I would eradicate that

from the planet and just get rid of it so people can't eat it or have it or ingest it. Is there any three that come to mind? Maybe that's to put you on the spot. Well, no. I mean, I think like, you know, cutting down on our consumption of food out of plastic, definitely not heating food in plastic. I think that's a major one. You know, they've shown that these compounds can induce insulin resistance. There's also, you know, an association people who eat more packaged products. Well, it's kind of obvious as to why there would be higher levels of insulin resistance in those people, because, you know, they're eating more fast food, which, you know, fast food is obviously very easy to overconsume. So I would say, you know, doing what we can to avoid food and plastics that we're not

ingesting plastic. I think that's important. Also refined grain products. So I, as I mentioned, I'm not a big grain consumer. I don't think that grains are toxic or anything like that. Like I eat rice on sushi. In fact, I had sushi last night with rice in it. But I think for the most part, especially today, we're so sedentary and many of us are already struggling with insulin resistance, pre-diabetes, type 2 diabetes, that this is just a very low quality food to consume, you know. So I would say cut out the like or at least minimize, you know, refined grain products and even whole grains. You know, I don't think that whole grains are a particularly nutritious food either. The grain and seed oils, I think are very problematic and also food additives. So, I mean, in my first book,

Genius Foods, I talk a little bit about dietary emulsifiers, certain of them. One is called polysorbate 80 and the other is called carboxymethylcellulose. If you have any of these in your food. What are they? Like what, I mean, for someone as ignorant as me, like where do you see that commonly? Emulsifiers are usually added to foods to offer basically solubility, like to give foods that otherwise wouldn't be soluble, smooth and creamy mouthfeel. So for example, like nut milks or ice creams is where you typically find them, coffee creamers. And now there's also a question of dose, but what they've shown is that these foods can actually erode the lining of the gut,

the large intestine, which is called the mucosa, which is where we tend to have this extremely high concentration of microbes that we know are potentially very beneficial to our health. And these emulsifiers actually act like a, almost like a soap, like they basically strip that lining. And so I'd be really careful to not consume foods with those additives in them.

What are your thoughts on intermittent fasting? Intermittent fasting, I think is a great tool for people. I'm really interested in circadian biology and we are what are called diurnal creatures. So we're meant to eat during the day. So from that standpoint, I think it makes a lot of sense that, you know, that a human would want to eat when the sun is up, when all cylinders are firing, when we're at our most insulin sensitive. And then to not eat, you know, too far, you know, past sundown, to not eat too close to bedtime.

We have a master clock in our brains called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. And it basically dictates that 24-hour cycle that, you know, influences immune function, you know, endocrine function. But we have what are called peripheral clocks in our body, you know, in our liver, in our kidneys, in our pancreas that are influenced not by light because they can't perceive light, but by whether or not they're being used to digest food. And so I think it makes a lot of sense that that, you know, curtailing your food consumption to a certain hour, for me, it's usually around eight or 9pm. And I tend to go to bed around midnight every night. So I give myself two to

three hours before I go to sleep where I'm not consuming any food, that that seems to work. And there have been a number of studies that have shown that, you know, ultimately, what dictates like your I think it is a very valuable tool for weight loss. Sometimes it's prescribed as a magical tool for weight loss, which I don't think it is. I mean, it's a great way to control calorie intake, but there are studies that show in humans that independent of weight loss, that by eating earlier dinners, what's called early time restricted feeding, that we actually see an improvement in glycemic control, so like how our bodies manage blood sugar and blood pressure, which are all very important things. I mean, when we talk about brain health, you really can't talk about brain health without

talking about blood pressure, which is one of the major modifiable risk factors for Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia. And the idea that we could, especially for people living in food deserts, right? Like food equity is a big topic these days, as I think it should be. You know, some people just don't have access to the bel campos and the grass fed and organic foods that we do living in LA, right? But the notion that you could just like eat an earlier dinner and not eat after that and somehow have a positive effect on your blood pressure and your blood sugar control to me is a very enticing promise. And that's what the literature in humans is seeming to suggest. Sleep. Sleep. Seems like you're very interested in that. When do you recommend starting to wind down and when do you recommend waking up or is

it different for everybody? You know, some sleep experts think that it's different for everybody. We have what are called chronotypes. So I tend to be like a night owl. I like to stay up late. We just talked about this with Ben Greenfield. Did you? Yeah. And I love the concept. Yeah. Because I think people get stuck in this, like you have to be a night owl.

And it's like, and I think learning, like I learned, I used to think I'm gonna get up at 5am and I realized I'm maybe better getting up 637 and like it's working better for my health and the way I sleep. Yeah. I mean, I used to feel kind of guilty about not being an early bird. Yeah. Same. Because some of my most productive friends are early birds and I like to sleep. I like, you know, I like to allow myself to wake up when, when I naturally wake up and I also like to stay up late. Yeah. So I think it's, I think it's different for every person, but what we do know is that sleep is super valuable. I mean, whenever, whenever you're able to get it,

making sure that you get between seven and nine hours of it, I think is really important. We know that when you sleep, your brain is actually cleaning itself of proteins that can aggregate and form plaques associated with Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. So, you know, I try to go to bed not too late. I think consistency is also important. So I'm in a routine right now where I go to bed at around midnight every night and I wake up generally at around like 7. and sometimes sometimes that depends like if i'm working out particularly hard my body needs more sleep so i like to to you know to offer it that do you sleep with the shades open i do not because i'm to some purists i bet ben no ben sleeps with everything like i don't know shut down yeah ben's in a tomb somewhere

with like a bunch of like chili pads like five of them probably goes outside and goes to his underground cave yeah he's probably hooked up to some kind of crazy thing he's probably like got some weird headphones on and like a mask he's he's you know hanging upside down like a bat i know i know he's he's definitely extreme no i think it's important for your room to be kept dark we've there there have been some studies now that show that even exposure to low level light, like five lux of light, lux is a unit of light measurement, can actually affect next day cognitive function. So I try to do what I can to make sure that my room is as dark as possible. I don't have a system where, I think it could potentially be useful depending on what time

you go to sleep to have like your curtains like rise when the sun comes up, but I don't have anything like that. That'd be nice to just like at 6 up, but I don't have anything like that. That'd be nice to just like at 6 a.m. they just rise. I'd like that. Just like baller status. Yeah, to have something like that. Yeah, if you're getting me a gift, I could fuck with that. I think those are like kind of much more cost effective than they used to be.

Okay, we'll look into it for my birthday. What's a book, a podcast, or resource that you would recommend to our audience besides yours, obviously, The Genius Life that has brought you value? Oh my God. I'm so happy that you asked this because I just discovered a book over the past week that has become my favorite book that I've ever bought. That's a bold statement. Yeah. I'm now going to buy this for gifts for all of my favorite people. It's a really great book. It's called On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee. It's like a, oh my God, it's like almost a thousand, it's like a reference book. It's called On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee. It's like a, oh my God, it's like almost a thousand, it's like a reference book. It's not a cookbook, but every single aspect

of food and cooking is broken apart into exquisite detail in this book. And he goes into the science of everything from every food item to seasonings, to herbs, to flavors like vinegar, to beverages, to every type of sweetener. And it was just revised for 2004. So it has like, you know, sweeteners like stevia and things like that, to cooking methods, to meat, to dairy, to vegetables. It's just like, it's one of the most thorough things. And you can literally open it up to any page and find something like interesting and mind blowing that you'll remember for the rest of your life. It's a really cool book. So yeah, I'm super glad that I that I discovered that. And your book, pimp yourself out to the audience. Tell us about both your books. Yeah, so my first book is called genius foods. And it is a nutritional care manual for the human

brain. So if you're concerned about brain health, if you want to boost your mental health, have less depression, less anxiety, it's used, it's recommended by physicians all around the world. It's recommended by, you know, all types of healthcare practitioners. I've been very, very humbled to see that. And it's been published in a number of different languages at this point. So that's Genius Foods. And then the Genius Life just came out. And that is more of a sort of lifestyle guide. And it's less specifically sort of focused on dementia prevention and more on just overall sort of how to, how to, you know, adjust your life to make the simple tweaks that are going to add

up to big health wins with sort of a focus on improving your body composition. So for people that want to, you know, shift their body composition to a more positive state, whether that's add more muscle or lose some fat and do it in a way that doesn't require, you know, obsession over calories and macro counting and things like that, that's, you know, I would say that would be the genius life would be the book for you. And then I have my own podcast called the genius life, which has almost 130 episodes, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's so awesome. If they were going to start with one episode, which one would you recommend? Oh my God. That's such a hard question to answer. I could never answer that question for this show alone.

That's a hard question. Why? Man, an episode that I always go back to, I'm sure that I have other favorites since then, but it's in the 30s. I interviewed one of the world's like leading experts in extra virgin olive oil, which I'm a huge fan of, yeah.

And you also had a cat expert on your podcast. So if you guys have a cat, go listen to that episode too. Yeah, that was a more recent one. Yeah, how to make your cat love you more. And Max, you have such an incredible Instagram. What's your handle for our audience? It's at Max Lugavere, M-A-X-L-U-G-A-V-E-R-E. Thank you for coming on.

Come back anytime. Thank you so much for having me. And I can't wait to welcome you guys on my show. Yeah, it'll be fun. That'll be awesome. Thanks, Max. Hold up before you go. If you want to win the new Skinny Confidential PopSocket, it just dropped. Then let us know your favorite part of this episode on my latest Instagram at the Skinny Confidential and a couple people from the team will drop into your inbox and send you guys the cute new PopSocket.

As always, make sure you rate and review the podcast on iTunes. It takes five seconds. We appreciate you guys' support and we'll see you next time.