The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 178. Max Lugavere: First Alzheimer’s Creatine Trial Shows Shocking Results!

Starting point is 00:00:00 There's now a bounty of evidence that creatine actually also supports cognitive function. I think creatine is something right now that's widely thought of as like the bodybuilding supplement. The Alzheimer's field has been rife with fraud. There have been other papers exploring how creatine might lay a therapeutic role for a patient with Alzheimer's disease, but the first clinical trial was just published and it's incredible. I believe the pendulum is going to swing back into reasonable thought-based care that actually is sensible, just common sense. There are many industries, many individuals that stand to gain from gatekeeping knowledge.

Starting point is 00:00:32 It's corrupt that people would want the public to be gatekept from this kind of information. You're not trying to say that there's corruption in our nutritional research, are you Max? I think people feel a little out of control with their healthcare choices. We are a lot more in control of our destiny than we think we are. My whole purpose has been to, and which is I think part of why we've gathered here today for this event, is to... Wow. Dude.

Starting point is 00:00:57 This is a surreal moment. Can we just take this in for a second? That we're at the White House and the message is resonating. By the way, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist, Gary Brekka. This is Max Lugavere. He and I have had an incredible relationship that we've built over the last few years,

Starting point is 00:01:30 just being in the same space, listening to you message. And we just both sat down here, and I think it hit us both at the same time, like, wow. We must be doing something right to have gotten this incredible opportunity to be here. Yeah. And I'm just, I'm so grateful. I mean, for me, it all goes back to my why.

Starting point is 00:01:50 I think you always have to remind yourself in these moments why it is that you are doing what you do. And for me, 12 years ago now, when my mom was first diagnosed with a neurodegenerative condition, I was completely in the dark, totally lost. And everything that has unfolded subsequently, all the knowledge that I've been humbled to have accrued

Starting point is 00:02:10 and all the experts that I've spoken to, it's, I guess, led to this moment. Yeah. And yeah, it's just wonderful. Well, I think that I just did a little post about this myself, and I know we're getting off topic, but my wife and I started on our mission 10 years ago in a strip mall in Naples, Florida. We took over a little bankrupt vitamin shop and grew it into a functional medicine business

Starting point is 00:02:32 and then decided we wanted to get a message out to the masses. We started a media platform with the podcast and everything. We started interacting with amazing people like you. And the message was so unified, you know, and I think it was about just getting back to the basics. You know, huge report coming out today. You and I have not seen it, but we have an inkling of what's in it. I think that it is going to potentially upend

Starting point is 00:02:54 modern medicine in a way that will be catastrophic and catastrophic in a good way. Like just getting back to the basic principles of whole food, movement, exercise, sleep, supplementation for deficiency, that this pandemic of chronic disease was exacerbated by chemical synthetics and pharmaceuticals not solved by any of those things. And because we don't have access to that report yet,

Starting point is 00:03:22 and I don't wanna steal the thunder from today's announcement, I wanna talk about a couple of other things that are really in the news that I know you're familiar with. You know, I've long since been a big fan of creatine. And I think creatine is something right now that's widely thought of as like the bodybuilding supplement.

Starting point is 00:03:38 And women in particular are afraid of creatine, I think, for the wrong reasons, because my opinion, you know, every woman over 40 years old should be on a minimum five milligrams of creatine a day for cognitive function, hormone balance. It has so many other attributes in our body. Can you talk a little bit about the study that just came out on creatine?

Starting point is 00:03:59 Yeah, so the first ever clinical trial testing creatine in the setting of Alzheimer's disease was just published. There have been other papers mechanistically exploring how creatine might play a therapeutic role for a patient with Alzheimer's disease, but the first clinical trial was just published and it's incredible. Now there are some important caveats.

Starting point is 00:04:23 It was a small trial, about 20 patients. It was a single arm, so there was no placebo group. But as a pilot trial to test the feasibility, to test the safety, the results were pretty impressive. So basically took 20 patients with Alzheimer's disease and put them on a 20 gram dose of creatine every day. Wow. Now that's a big dose.

Starting point is 00:04:43 So that's about four times what they would recommend. Some proponents of creatine every day. Wow. That's a big dose. So it's about four times what they would recommend. Some proponents of creatine would recommend creatine loading, so like 30 days of high dose and then backing down to five milligrams. So this is 20 milligrams a day. Right. So the thinking is that over a certain period of time, you know, muscles will saturate with creatine. If you're taking three to five grams a day, it takes about 28 days.

Starting point is 00:05:06 If you choose not to do the loading period for your muscles to fully saturate with creatine for a ergogenic benefit or performance boosting benefit. But there's now a bounty of evidence mounting showing us that creatine actually also supports cognitive function, mental health, but it's unclear at this point how much creatine one needs to take in order for that creatine to be pushed to the brain.

Starting point is 00:05:33 Because at the dietary levels meet the muscle saturation needs. So it's actually been shown that vegans and omnivores don't differ in terms of their brain creatine saturation. So the dietary levels don't seem to modulate brain levels. Wow, I would have thought the opposite actually. That's what I think a lot of people thought. I would have thought the meat eaters would have

Starting point is 00:05:54 adequate levels of creatine. Because meat eaters ingest it through their diets, and vegans obviously don't because creatine is a carnivore nutrient. It's found exclusively in animal source foods. Meat and beef, red meat and fish specifically. But now we're starting to understand that actually it takes a much higher dose

Starting point is 00:06:13 to actually push creatine to the brain. It seems to be preferentially sucked up by the muscles, but if you take a high enough dose, a supplementary dose, then it seems to get pushed up to the brain. And we kind of had an inkling of this when there was that study published about a year ago. Yeah, we talked heavily about that. Sleep deprivation, yeah, when you would take

Starting point is 00:06:29 like a really high dose of creatine, it seemed to have an acute beneficial effect on cognitive function for someone who was sleep deprived. Right. But now, thanks to this new trial that was published, we've seen that when patients, again, it was a short-term study, lasted about 20 weeks,

Starting point is 00:06:49 or I'm sorry, eight weeks. Eight weeks, sorry, eight weeks. 20 patients, eight weeks, so again, small, 20 grams a day. They saw a statistically significant improvement across pretty much every cognitive score. Wow. Yeah. So this is something for the elderly. pretty much every cognitive score. Wow. Yeah. You know, so this is something for the elderly.

Starting point is 00:07:07 You know, I was actually talking to Bobby Kennedy about this a few months ago, and we were talking about supplementation modalities, treatments, care options, functional medicine alternatives that provide a benefit, but have very little chance of harm or no downside consequence. And he was saying how the lanes should be more open

Starting point is 00:07:32 to things that may or may not work but actually don't cause harm. Because there's a lot of pharmaceutical options that may or may not work, but then there's a permanent or semi-permanent detriment. You know, you have a tachyphalactic response, you build desensitization, you build a dependency or a reliance,

Starting point is 00:07:51 and those kinds of consequences are the kinds of consequences that really need to be measured. But creatine seems to be one of those that falls into the category of, there is indirect and direct anecdotal objective and subjective evidence that says this is beneficial for men and women and certainly in older ages seems to be more beneficial because of the depletion

Starting point is 00:08:18 and the lack of absorption. And so now we have a trial that says, eight across nearly every, excuse me, cognitive measurement, this is having an acute, you know, positive effect. Yeah, now it would be amazing to have had a placebo group. It would be amazing to see if we see significant cognition improvements at lower doses,

Starting point is 00:08:38 because 20 grams again is a high dose. Anybody who's ever had to suck down, you know, 20 grams of creatine sand. It is a sand, you know. Yeah, exactly. But you're a thousand percent correct in that, first of all, I mean, my work has been, and we talked about this on the last time I was on your show, there's been, the Alzheimer's field

Starting point is 00:08:59 has been rife with fraud. Yes, it really has. Yes. And it's also rife with taking the same objectives, the same sort of, you know, clinical narrative and trying to over and over and over again, trying to prove this clinical narrative of the amyloid plaques and the neurofibillary tangles, which of which we know now are consequences of not the genesis of, because those are really drug-centric, right? Because they want to provide a solution to manage that condition or to manage those symptoms, not really get what you're talking about to the root cause.

Starting point is 00:09:35 What is the genesis of it? And if we know what the genesis is, how can we reverse it? And for people that find themselves afflicted by it, is there a chance to slow stop or even reverse that disease? Yeah, and creatine mechanistically, it's literally getting to one of the root causes of the condition, which we believe to be an inability of the brain to properly generate energy.

Starting point is 00:09:59 So creatine, it helps the brain, it's involved in neuroenergetics. The brain's ability to generate ATP, which is its energetic currency. And in Alzheimer's disease, there's an inability, a stark inability for the brain to properly generate ATP from its primary fuel substrate, which is glucose. So with creatine, the thinking is,

Starting point is 00:10:21 you're actually getting to the root cause, as opposed to these anti-amyloid drugs like Licanumab and Adjacanumab, which are just attacking this sort of downstream phenomena, this amyloid plaque buildup, which is not a free ride. I mean, the risks are significant, brain swelling, brain bleeds, and even death

Starting point is 00:10:46 in some of these trials. Yeah, this is exactly what Bobby was talking about is those kinds of consequences for the potential of doing something good that may or may not work, but have the potential of causing permanent irreversible damage, neuroplasticity changes, other things. I think what's so exciting now for folks like you and I is that I feel the cover lifting for us. I feel the lanes beginning to widen for things like

Starting point is 00:11:16 supplementation, peptides, functional medicine alternatives, lifestyle changes, interventional changes that are largely in control of the patient or the client that wants to go on this journey and not so much being practiced upon. And that's really exciting for guys like you and I, and especially given your background and history with your mother and you talk about this in your documentary. Had some options like this been available, maybe there would have been a different course. 1000%, yeah. I mean, I would have loved to have explored creatine

Starting point is 00:11:57 as an option with my mom. We obviously didn't have this data back when she was alive. And it's unfortunate the drugs that she were prescribed, I mean, were little more than biochemical band-aids. And I don't think that they helped her at all. In fact, I think they probably contributed to her net decline over time. But, you know, these drugs, I mean, these creatine,

Starting point is 00:12:22 it's not a cure. My whole purpose has been to, and which is I think part of why we've gathered here today for this event is to really shift the spotlight to prevention, which I think is- And awareness too, right? Because I think we are a lot more in control of our destiny than we think we are.

Starting point is 00:12:42 I think as humanity. And sadly, folks like you and I are somewhat in a little bit of an echo chamber because the people that are listening to us and are in our peer groups are becoming more and more aware and we're accepting of this. But my message has always been to try to get this to the masses, to really push this down into humanity

Starting point is 00:13:03 so that at a basic level, people can get a fundamental understanding of what they can do so they can feel, I think people feel a little out of control with their healthcare choices. Like it's actually not their choice. They don't have any governance over it. Yeah, well, there are many industries,

Starting point is 00:13:21 many individuals that stand to gain from gatekeeping knowledge, gatekeeping scientific literacy. You're not trying to say that there's corruption in our nutritional research, are you Max? It's not just corruption. I mean, it's corrupt that people would want, the public to be gate kept from this kind of information,

Starting point is 00:13:40 but we live in an incredible time. I mean, if you're not optimistic today, you're just not paying attention. We have all of the world's knowledge at our fingertips, 24 hours a day, we have access to PubMed, we have access to AI. I mean, my own scientific literacy and health has improved thanks to my access to, you know, these large language models, it's incredible.

Starting point is 00:13:58 And so I think it's such an auspicious time to be alive and to really seize the reins of your health. And that's why I think everything converged to allow a day like today to happen. There's so many aspects of, whether it's technological advancement, our collective optimism, our collective desire to shake up the status quo,

Starting point is 00:14:21 that's paved the way for a day like today, and it's momentous. Yeah, and definitely a parabolic rise in awareness. And for folks like you and I to potentially be a small part of affecting public policy, I mean, we're talking about generational changes, our children's children, our children's grandchildren that will benefit from it.

Starting point is 00:14:39 And it's sad that the pendulum had to swing so far that it just got, it went from the sublime to the ridiculous to the totally absurd. And now I believe the pendulum had to swing so far that it just got, it went from the sublime to the ridiculous to the totally absurd. And now I believe the pendulum's gonna swing back into the middle, into reasonable thought-based care that actually is sensical, just common sense. Common sense.

Starting point is 00:14:57 You know, it's astounding to me when I travel the world how people don't believe that just getting back to the simple basics of your habitual patterns during the day can have just this dramatic effect on the long-term trajectory of your health. Man, I wish we had more time. Yeah, brother. Dude, but sharing this moment with you,

Starting point is 00:15:16 you and I have been on this journey. You're a pioneer in the industry. I quote you all the time on a lot of my podcasts and I wish you the best in your journey. Likewise, thank you, brother. Yeah, thanks for being a part of it. Yeah, proud to be a foot soldier on the ground with you and everybody involved.

Starting point is 00:15:32 This is not a, there's one of my favorite lines from David Mitchell, who is the author of Cloud Atlas. I am but one drop in an endless ocean, yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops. Wow. Yeah. And so I'm just proud to be here and to have a voice and yeah, good things ahead. Proud to be on the stage with you too, brother. All right, good luck. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:15:54 Until next time, guys, that's just science.

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The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 178. Max Lugavere: First Alzheimer’s Creatine Trial Shows Shocking Results!

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