If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go Might pop might pop with your hosts Salda Stefano Adam Schaefer and Justin Andrews You want to see me go off you have me talk to Ruben.  Oh Always promises. Oh, you're not trying to do that.  No, that's totally different See that go off all behind the scenes And all PC South comes out.  What English they love like vinegar and mayonnaise vinegar is what they do Oh, okay. Yeah, whatever Part of Europe so technically I'm still right.  Is that something you recently have found because no, that's what do you mean? Have I always first off? I don't it's like I eat it mayonnaise all the time like oh everybody dips their fries and mayo Common yeah, and we're in Europe. Are we huh? It's it and we're in Europe No, I'm just saying that Europeans do it. So I'm not the only one that does it. I'm not saying it's better either I'm just saying it's a different way so back to my question Have you always done this or is this something that you started to what point did you start dipping your fries in male?  It's sugar. It's sugar tomato.  Yeah, and listen, you know, here's the thing.  It's really good. Well, that's not that bad best food sales sells real mayonnaise. That's actually there Wow finally that's actually the label. Yeah, it was a real man. So as mayonnaise considered a brain-enhancing food Absolutely like that transition. It's absolutely not a brain-enhancing. No you can buy Paleo manate. I think you know what they make avocado. No, what is that? You know where you can get really good mayonnaise thrive markets got really good man. Yeah, you could get there No, they have the avocado male. We've ordered it from there already. That's really good Mm-hmm, and that's what I like to put that on my pizza What no, I'm just kidding. You do such strange things. I just kidding.    Yeah, and that was your son iron kids I mean, that's that's a balanced meal. What about you Justin? What did you have bologna mayonnaise and white bread? No, no, I didn't have nasty meat like that Like peanut butter and jelly.  I mean it's getting all over my face Can you not see just in my hands? Yeah, it's dripping in my lap. I would pay money to see that I would totally pay my I used to have a lot of bologna and cheese bologna and cheese sandwiches Here's a question. Okay.  Oh, remember that kid. That's my daughter becoming a psycho killer. See it's okay for a woman Psycho killer if you do that. So did you cut your sandwich diagonally or straight down? Did you made that noise too when you do yeah, I like would chop it down. What about you a diagonal you did diagonally too Yeah, why I went straight down. Oh, this explains a lot. It does explain a lot very very Yeah, interesting. I feel like diagonally is Diagonally is the right way. No, it's it creates two triangles.  If you cut it in half all the way down geometry what you've done is you've created two sandwiches What you guys have done is create two triangles with pointy edges It's just not it's way easier to eat it's way easier from an F from a from an evolutionary standpoint square square in whole It's gonna hit you. I'm trying to throw I got nice pointy edges that go like right in anyway. Listen. Here's the deal You're wrong on this one. This is actually what you're about to listen to is a very smart episode. I Know contrary to the intro that you just heard. No, we had max Lugavir on the show who's author of genius foods and He's making the rounds right now because this book is it should be out, right? Is that out? No, well, it's out now because this will go live when the book is out This goes live on Wednesday and the book just came out. I wish my parents had read this book No, this is so he had he has an interesting story. So he had a mother's stricken with a type of dementia He's a journalist with a biology background and he went deep in study to figure out like how do we prevent? you know these degenerative disorders from happening and this book is all about how to maximize the health of Your brain through diet and there's some crazy stuff that's coming out There's a recent study that he talks about in this episode where they actually showed How diet can be efficacious for? Depression this is a 2017 study. He talks about how inflammation plays a role in all of that how You know Alzheimer's is type 3 diabetes, which we've referenced before in the past We get into why babies are fat Why you're kids fat? No, not your kid.  Yeah, dude I think that was probably one of the most mind-blowing things that he draw. I mean he dropped all kinds of little Justin was a new one bombs a bunch of nugget bombs in there today. Yep. Yep. Yep. I make stuff up in it He's been on dr. Oz what four or five times already. So he's been on the Rubin report. So he's making the rounds Yeah, yeah, and he's me and him became best friends very quickly. Yeah, very very similar background Very similar story and background. Yes, it's very familiar. But anyway, you will enjoy this episode It's a great conversation about nutrition. His book is fascinating You can find his book at genius foods book Com you can find him on Instagram at max Lugavir that's L U G a v e r e So I highly recommend his Instagram his Instagram is a cleaner version of like what Sal Sal likes to do his helpies where he puts long posts and he has a terrible image, right? This guy actually puts really good images that are bits of information and drops a lot of knowledge is Instagram We appreciate the nipple hair. Yeah, absolutely. Oh If you want to know I haven't seen his page yet. Absolutely also listen this month We're giving you out access to our forum for free for enrolling at any of our fitness or maps bundles By the way, if you're you don't know what maps programs are Here's a quick rundown if you want to build a maximum muscle maps and a ball That's the program you want to do if you want to build a functional Physique like an athlete that's maps performance if you want to train Like like a bodybuilder or sculptor physique like a bikini competitor That's maps aesthetic if you want to work out at home or on the road without equipment So just using your body weight. Well, that's maps anywhere and then for correctional exercise purposes Especially if you're a personal trainer Look if you're a personal trainer you need to get the prime bundle so that you can help Train your clients and finally and finally he actually mentions how high inner high intensity interval training has been shown to increase the density of mitochondria in the cells of the body that's the powerhouse of the cells of the body and it's a lot of scientists now are saying that that is the key to Longevity health and performance. We also have a hit program or maps hit program Which you can get and you can get all of this by the way at mine pump media calm And if you get a bundle you get access to our forum for free So with that being said without any further ado here. We are talking to Max Lugavere author of genius foods. Enjoy the show Tell us a little bit about your story. Let's start off with that first before we dive into some of the some of the details I should say yeah, absolutely. So my background. I started as a journalist my My first job out of college was working for Al Gore He co-founded a TV network that was available in a hundred million homes in the US called current TV ways What was that like? That was pretty crazy. That was uh, are you now? Are you an Al Gore fan going into this? I mean not necessarily be honest.  I was pre-med I was a biology major and then I realized that I had a love of storytelling and creativity And I also struggled all throughout my schooling with executive function. I was always in the gifted program But I always it was really difficult for me to get good grades And so even though I had a passion always for science and and health actually dating back to like my software sophomore year of high school I didn't think that I had the Ability to keep up with the academic rigor that medical school would ultimately require and so I and then I also ended up really falling in love with film and cinema and documentary filmmaking and Music and so halfway through college I switched my major to double major in film and psychology and I didn't know what I was going to do when I graduated college I knew that I liked storytelling. I knew that I had a passion for Things that could you know stories that could ultimately make the world a better place I've always been a very empathetic and compassionate person But I didn't know how that would pan out in terms of a career I was lucky enough to have parents that kind of just you know encouraged me to do what I loved Which I think is uh is is rare but One day when I was walking around the communication center of my college University of Miami There was a poster Advertising this network this TV network that Al Gore was launching with partners that was gonna seize the reins of traditional media and give It back to the youth Okay, oh that sounds exciting super exciting Super excited. How old are you at this point? How old you so I was like 22. It's called the internet Well, but this was so back at back then, okay It was was not that long ago, but my space was still like the social network to be on right and YouTube had yet to really become a Phenomena so for me it was like this amazing Credible platform to tell stories the idea was they were gonna give like 50 kids Cameras and laptops to go around the world and shoot stories that were you know entertainment first But also could make the world a better place. That's right, and yeah, I thought it was a maze I thought it was a dream job, so I threw myself at the network along with thousands of other kids around the US and I Was one of the only ones to get a full-time job essentially was like a dream job where they ended up moving me out to LA Putting me on TV and giving me the reins to essentially work with Peabody award-winning Journalists and storytellers dude. What was that process? What was that? Yeah? What was that process like? I mean it was nuts. I went I was on national TV from the minute I graduated college Until about 2011 I'd be scared to death at that age. Yeah, it's insane. I mean imagine Leaving college literally and then winding up in the makeup chair every single day to get like TV friendly You know and like it was just insane. It was insane How did you deal with that? Was it was it? Did you ever feel like you were just did you get scared? I mean did you have moments to where your ego blew up? I mean, what did you what did you go through with that? I mean at a young age to to drop into that that's different.  This is my purpose and that's what drove you or was that was it conflicting with being afraid of doing it? I didn't know. I mean I definitely didn't have an aspiration of being on camera in college I didn't want to be an actor or anything like that. I just knew that I throughout my life, I've you know been able to go really deep in certain topics and And when I found topics like that over the course of my life I knew that I really liked to talk about them So for you know, one of the one of the most salient passions of mine has always been health and so I've I've always enjoyed really talking to people about health and I Recognize that throughout, you know college and whatever people would always come to me with their health questions And that's just sort of a pattern that emerged. I never had any professional aspiration But when I landed this opportunity to talk about my passions on TV and have a show where I could really curate topics And really be a generalist in that sense You know, it was it was I guess a little intimidating I definitely learned a lot over the course of the process, but I also tried to use it as a funnel for Things that I felt could leave my audience better off I really and like you guys like I feel like when you have a platform You've got to kind of think about yourself as being in the service of the audience, you know completely Yeah, and so and of course I learned that over you know, there were certain things that were not intuitive to me that That I that I ended up learning so for example when I first went on on on camera I thought that your audience would like you the cooler you made yourself sound Which obviously the exact opposite is true, right? Yeah, because you're not vulnerable otherwise, right? You got to see you got to look real. Yeah, I mean these are not the kinds of how did you put that together? Would you would happen? What did it sound like? I want to hear that voice. Well, it's just like, you know, hey guys America Just kind of want to make yourself seem like kind of a badass But like really the way we now know as adults like the way to actually be a badass is to be vulnerable and to be real and authentic um Which I guess is is kind of difficult to do when you're in a tv on a tv set, but um But yeah, I mean I there was a learning curve I remember the first shot that uh went on air on current I was wearing shorts in this set on set basically and uh because I was you know growing up I love wearing shorts and so I would like kind of try to wear them whenever I could on tv, which is just Rule number one not a good idea. You don't want to wear shorts on tv. Yeah But in this opening shot, I remember the camera was like it was on a jib Which is essentially like a crane right so the big camera on a jib and it was like coming from a really low angle Oh, perfect. You could literally see like all up my shorts Yeah, male Most downloaded video of all time Those are the kinds of things that you learn Did you ever have like a paradigm shattering moment during that process that that altered the way you acted on on the show?  I mean obviously the shorts thing But did you ever say something or become really nerve or super nerve racking going into it? Do you have moments like that? Um, I think you know one of the big things for me was to know that when the camera's on you've got to sort of be Uh You know a higher energy version of yourself. I mean sometimes I remember I would um Roll into set just after waking up and I would be kind of like my voice. It's deep So sometimes it can be a bit it can sound a bit monotone even though internally. I'm feeling like excited I realize that that doesn't you know, sometimes I need to kind of uh You know articulate um, what's the word like just using more tonality? I guess or something like that inflections Yeah inflections things like that Helps I mean these are things that kind of after a while came intuitively to me But no that's at such a great point that I think you're you're kind of grazing over is I When we started interviewing all these people that I either been on tv or like youtube stars Something that I made a connection really quick and early on was holy shit These guys and girls are totally different in person than as soon as like the camera comes on. Oh, yeah, they turn it on Yeah, they some of them were like complete opposite personalities off camera And they just have this ability that once they turn their phone facing them when the cameras come on All of a sudden this lively personality comes out and it was like whoa But it makes so much sense because the person on the other side that's receiving that they feel that that energy that excitement That animation in the in the person like so that makes a big difference. Yeah, I think that's part of it And I think really what it what it ultimately comes down to is just having having a level of respect for your audience And not talking down to them not dumbing down your content really valuing the attention that they're paying to you I mean attention is sort of like the new limited resource, right? And so I just you know Working with the president programming at current who is sort of a mentor to me I really just learned to make everything that I do to be in the service of the audience And actually and I've taken all of those learnings and and I've used I continue to use them today So for example, I made a switch recently not to get off topic But I made a switch recently and how I approach instagram and I you know I basically realized that for a while I was using instagram to basically post Pictures of myself where I was looking cool, which I think is a lot what how a lot of people use instagram And I was like posting, you know, I might be able to nail a caption here and there but posting pictures of myself is not I'm not doing this in the service of the audience I'm doing this because I want the dopamine hit of getting likes on this photo And so a couple months ago. I decided look I'm just going to like Start creating infographics where I can really give people bite-sized adjustable information because my goal is to help people You know with health literacy help them make switches in their lives that are going to help them Be healthier and so that I would say is a direction that really stems from my those early days at current tv How was how was Al Gore dude? I mean Sal's a huge fan. So I want to know what you what you think about him He's um, you know, he was he was definitely a great boss like I got to see him every year at the company parties and big big staff meetings The network wasn't the Al Gore network. It was it was a network He was actually very hands-off when it came to programming It wasn't did you have any say into what you would be covering and stuff? Was there a lot of flexibility? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, they gave me free reign So I was basically yeah, I was I was hired by the by the president program programming of current because I embodied Who the network was ultimately seeking to empower. So when I was an undergraduate at University of Miami I made a short documentary that was the first ever film that I'd made Uh where I was ranting about hedonism and spirituality. That was my student film That's what I was really into when I went to University of Miami I was trying to reconcile the fact that I've always had a seeker's mentality about spirituality yet. I always Found this cognitive I found it to be a source of cognitive dissonance for me that Religious traditions have always said that to find enlightenment. You've got to deny the pleasures of the flesh You've got to you know, either walk across Coals lie down on nails Not have sex until marriage to me as an undergraduate really entering adulthood for the first time in south beach I was like, wait a minute There's got to be a better way To find quote-unquote how can I get around this? Yeah Yeah, exactly. So as an undergraduate I made this short film where I was like ranting to the camera about Uh, basically about that I was obsessed with a philosopher named judo krishnamurti who talked a lot about this stuff About how truth is really a pathless land and you really have to find it through your own self experimentation You know spiritually we talk about self experimentation today in terms of health and fitness But he's really the ultimate guru when it comes to self experimentation In terms of spiritual truth He's sort of like the anti guru guru. So I was like kind of obsessed with this guy Um and and his and his work and so I made this documentary. I was in front of the camera and the film Portrayed me basically as being the the ultimate one man band storyteller with something to say And current tv the network saw it and they were like look, this is like a young passionate storyteller This is who were ultimately he embodies who are ultimately trying to empower and they gave me this job And that that really is a pattern that as I mentioned, you know, I've I've always had throughout my life when I'm when I get passionate about something I all I want to do is talk about it and bring people with me along for the journey and That yeah, so I mean you find yourself getting obsessive about topics I do my brain is like a light switch So I'm either not interested in it or I'm completely obsessed with it and I can't sleep until I feel like I've got some Sort of grasp over it. I think everybody here can identify with that You're saying that I'm like, yep, how did the obsession with uh health start So, yeah, I've been really interested in health from high school. So my um I was a shy uh computer programmer introvert in in uh in college. I had bad hair. I wore braces I really gravitated to computers and programming and um, I also had a uh a mutual passion for Comic books and superheroes and one day so you were hit with the ladies Panties dropping all over the place. I wasn't into sports. I was always terrible at any kind of athleticism Um, and here and I here I thought him and I were going to connect the most but I think it might be you Yeah, he's like me right now. Well, you're describing sal right now. Well, but here's it really So I was um But so I went to and I went to high school in Manhattan in New York City and close to my high school One day I discovered a supplement store. It was a mom-and-pop supplement store near my high school and I walked in one day and There was a guy behind the counter who was always there and he was very knowledgeable And I saw the supplements on the wall Sort of being in a way like these sort of potions that could help me transcend my Nerdy-ness as a as a school as a school kid, you know almost in a way that could like make me a superhero and uh that sort of connected with my my interest in like In in programming. I found many of the same feedback loops that were there in programming were evident in or were present rather in In working out and I became really interested in bodybuilding actually at a in in high school and So much so that my senior thesis in high school I actually wrote a 12 page dissertation on creatine and the benefits of creatine And I was like really nerdy for this for sure sal bro. So we're sure already building creatine. Yeah, I think we just became back I mean, no, these are not the kinds of things that I could talk about with with girls, especially on a first date or most girls that I know but Well now or at least new in high school. So now I know now I know a lot of really cool girls that I can talk about this too But um, but yeah needless to say I was I was I became obsessed Um, I was working out all the time. I was trying all kinds of crazy diets I became obsessed with a book that I discovered in it was probably 11th Grade written by lau mcdonald on the ketogenic diet. So I became obsessed with this topic like very early on So I've always been while you read a book on keto in what year is that? That was in 1998. Oh, wow. Yeah, wow way way ahead of a lot of people for sure. Yeah And I mean I read the Dave Palumbo was a bodybuilder Uh, I used to advocate for ketogenic diets back in the late 90s too, but not a lot of people talking about it back No, no, although the keto diet's been around for such a long time, you know, it's uh, I mean that was before it became cool Exactly. So I've been into this for a very long time and uh No, you know, I mean other than than then starting college as a pre-med I had no Professional, you know, I I wasn't sure what I was how I was going to use this was really just a personal passion It made me feel good. I knew I recognized the mental health benefits of it. Um But yeah, I sort of Carried this passion for health and science with me all throughout life, you know, I was from an early age Uh familiar with pub med and how to find research whenever I had health questions um And at current tv, which was my first real job out of college whenever I had the opportunity to shine a light on health related topics, whether it was You know new science findings or how technology was beginning to augment health in really interesting ways I would I would seize that that opportunity When I left current tv to try to figure out where I was going to go with my career I was in my I guess late 20s. Um, yeah, this was uh, I guess 2008 around or 2000 Maybe 2000 no, sorry 2011 um It was then in my personal life, uh that um I was starting to spend more and more time back home where i'm from in new york Where my mom and my brothers live and I was starting to spend more and more time around my mom and my mom started to show very early signs of memory loss And what would ultimately be revealed were the ultimate were the early the earliest symptoms of Uh a very niche form of dementia And what did this look like? Because I think you know most people experienced the I forgot, you know where I put my keys type of deal But this was this this might have been this was different. Yeah, assuming Yeah, if you forget where your keys are that's normal if you forget what your keys are for that's Oh, wow, you need to go see a doctor Um, that's a good point. Yeah, so so basically it seemed like I mean my mom's Processing speed had downshifted severely Um, she began complaining of brain fog, which is not something that I'd ever heard her Complain about in the past. I mean my mom was what I would consider today a high performer if I knew her when she was my age I mean she ran a successful business in the 80s and 90s that she launched with her with her with my dad Um, who was her husband at the time? She raised three kids Uh, she was always very passionate about about learning and self-education and At a certain point my mom, you know still blonde still youthful still vibrant. Um It had just seemed as if You know talking to her Was different when I was when I would be in the kitchen with her cooking a meal for example And I'd ask her to pass the salt if she were standing next to the cabinet where a spice, you know happened to be I'd ask her to pass it It would take her five seconds to even process that command before she would begin to respond to it Where if I tell you to pass me something you hear it you respond instantly um It would be quicker for me to actually traverse the kitchen And reach into the cabinet and grab it myself Like you're talking to I mean we kind of intuitively know when we're talking to much older people that they're that they're processing speed Is not What you know is not that of a younger person or even a person in middle age But it almost seemed as if talking to my mom. I was talking to an elderly person and this was was this sudden It was Yeah, it was pretty sudden And it coincided with a change to her gate, which is the way that she walks Um, so my mom, you know, like any new yorker walks pretty fast She my mom was never had a driver's license.  Or were you or did that send you down the rabbit hole of learning? No, not yet So I thought actually initially that first of all, I thought my mom's moving problems were just because of the fact that she hadn't really ever worked out throughout her life She really didn't have the same kind of value of exercise that I think people have today Um, so I was like mom get to the gym, you know, maybe do some stretching I had no concept that how a person moves could be related to their brain function um Of course now I know, you know, I know otherwise, but um But yeah, it wasn't for me until a family trip to miami to uh Visit my dad. My parents were divorced at this time and this was one of the few cases where My mom and my brothers we all sort of descended on miami and and my mom and my dad Remained friends so we would stay with my dad Uh occasionally and this was one of those times we're all in miami um And we're all in the living room And uh the living room is connected to the dining room. There's a big breakfast bar that separates the two And we're all sort of sitting there and my mom to the whole family Announced that she Had been having memory problems. I mean previous previous to that It was just sort of something that she might have mentioned under her breath to me or in passing And that she had also Uh started seeing a neurologist and this to me um Sounded I guess a little bit more serious But then my dad who can be a little bit sardonic at times Chimed in and asked my mom. Well, if you're having memory problems, how could you how could you be having memory problems? What what year is it? And uh My mom Had to think about it. She couldn't immediately Tell us what year it was And me and my brothers were so ignorant at the time. We kind of chimed in and we started to poke fun I imagine how horrible that is. We were just so in the dark We're like, come on mom. How could you not know what year it is? And she started to cry In that moment and That to me is like When everything changed, you know, I realized that something was seriously wrong with my mom and I had to Essentially it was my call to action I had to uh You know really Dedicate time to figuring out what this was and because I was the only person in my family that really had an interest Um in health I realized and I also have you know, thankfully a non-traditional job Where I had the ability to kind of like take time away from my career to go with my mom I knew that I had to start going with my mom to doctor's appointments and Still I've you know, even at this point I had no idea what I was in for but I Went with my mom to a neurologist at nyu Really hard to you know come to any sort of conclusion. I mean they did MRI tests, but my mom wasn't diagnosed with anything We ended up going to uh, columbia university, which is in also in new york city One of the top neurologic departments in the us We went to johns hopkins and baltimore Ultimately the journey culminated at least for me um in a trip to the cleveland clinic The cleveland clinic I remember reading about Was known for taking a sort of all hands-on deck approach to people's health people with very complicated medical problems end up going to the cleveland clinic because even before I had The the definition of functional medicine This to me was sort of what the promise of functional medicine today seems to be is that they really take a root cause approach To try to figure out what the what the root cause is. Isn't that amazing that we're kind of just now getting around to this Yeah, exactly. That's crazy Because the way western medicine operates. It's one pill for every ill They basically treat the symptoms with pharmaceutical band-aids and they send you on your way, right? It's also extremely reductionist. It's you know, you they break everything down into such small pieces that it becomes impossible to find a root cause of anything because many times the root causes Link to so many different things to another system of the body that they they're not specialized or to all of them 100% yeah 100% and that is absolutely the case for the brain according to the latest and best available evidence and You know, I went to the Cleveland Clinic expecting it to be this cathedral to medical insight, right? Like I mean, it's one of the top so you were you were hopeful. We're very hopeful very hopeful very hopeful and And also, you know, I have a lot of respect for medicine. So I mean, I was not I wasn't going in as a skeptic but um It was there that uh that my mom for the first time was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease and And we were in a renowned neurologist's office and he ran a battery of physical and cognitive tests on my mom and Without addressing diet or lifestyle once He sent us on our way essentially with uh two prescriptions Was this your your first experience of your uh diagnose and adios? Yes. Yes. Yeah I've I refer to that a lot because that's what I experienced in every single time I mean in no case and even today I continue to experience it With my mom who's become essentially a walking pharmacy Um, but yeah, you know doctors the way the current medical paradigm is set up and you guys I'm sure are familiar with this You know, your average physician has less than 15 minutes to give to any one patient. So they don't take the time to talk about Well, not only do they not take the time to talk about diet and lifestyle, but you know, they're not they're not They don't know much about it. So you're we go to these doctors and we're scared and confused expecting them to be experts in all Things health and wellness, but they're not experts when it comes to nutrition. They're not, you know They get an afternoon of medical or exercise To arguably the most important things that you could probably apply exactly. Exactly. In fact, uh, many times you would if you bring up nutrition and exercise Uh, they'll get scoffed at many times if you go with a skin condition or a mental issue or a degenerative disease And you say hey, what about diet and they'll say, ah, it's it's not has no effect Sure, you can do that. But yeah 100% Yeah, I like to say, you know that people, you know as a First of all, I think I think science literacy is so important and I like to remind people that, you know, it's it's good to be a Skeptic, okay What's not good is to be a cynic and what I find is that so many of these doctors have just been put through the medical school Ringer it's not even their fault really It's not that there's some some kind of, you know, malevolent thing going on where doctors are just trained to shit on You know alternative approaches, but medical medical school is really hard Most doctors, you know end up coming out at the other end of the tunnel with depression and mental health problems themselves And there's way more You know doctors today spend at least 50% of their time doing administrative work To make, you know to meet their financial needs. So it's just like It's just a systemic problem. Um, and I found You know in most cases when bringing up diet in these doctor's offices is that they end up being Way more cynical Uh than they should be they just you know, they're down on what they're not up on when you when you went that time And they gave your mom those two medications and you left were you okay hopeful were you thinking like, okay? Here we go. This is gonna help or were you like No, I need to look deeper. Yeah Well, I mean the first thing that I that I did which I think anybody would do is I took out my smartphone And I googled the prescriptions because these are drugs that I'd never heard of before And what I realized actually it wasn't even you know, the the word alzheimer's disease and dementia wasn't even brought up In that neurologist's office. And yet my mom was prescribed One of the two drugs was for alzheimer's disease and that to me is when I mean that was the first time in my life I'd ever had a panic attack because I started really looking into what these Drugs do and I realized that they have no disease modifying effect. They're of limited efficacy and They're basically what dope like dopamine or neurotransmitter boosters or exactly exactly So what they do is the gold standard drug for parkinson's disease is basically like a is it is a dopa level dopa Yes, okay. Yeah level dopa and carbidopa.  They see it with like 20 30 years, right? That's when it normally starts for like alzheimer's and things like that. Yes, exactly. Wow exactly And that was diagnosed with alzheimer's and dementia at this point. She was diagnosed with uh dementia and the parkinsonian syndrome She wasn't diagnosed with alzheimer's but she had the symptoms of both She had the symptoms of alzheimer's disease, which is a memory disorder And she had symptoms that were more parkinsonian in nature. So she was prescribed both drugs No matter what variant of dementia you come in on generally if it's not um, uh, they'll give you the same thing They'll give you the same thing. Yeah, because what they're they're seeing. Okay, these these Basically these receptors for dopamine are dead. So let's just boost the dopamine to get more out of the leftover receptors Which may actually accelerate the process sometimes, right? Doesn't the receptors sometimes get hammered and maybe even get worse later on I know they lose their they lose their efficacy At some point where they do nothing for you at all absolutely So this is one of the problems with or one of the I guess potential dangers of messing with your neurotransmitters is that uh neuro Neurotransmitter the receptors for neurotransmitters become down-regulated when they're flooded with um With neurotransmitter and not only that but if the drug isn't necessarily working neurotransmitters are oxidative So I mean one of the Take take.  So if it's not actually working Then you shouldn't be on the drug This might be one of it's like one of the cases where the medicine starts to become worse than the disease I'm on yeah It's one of the one of the reasons why MDMA is so damaging because it basically floods your synaptic cleft With your own serotonin essentially burning away neurons because serotonin actually produces oxidative stress So but it's really fun I've heard And um, yeah, potentially useful.  She was you know, my My grandmother's cognition was fine And yet this disease that I had previously considered to be an old person's disease was sort of bubbling up in uh in In my mom and so I had this hunch that there had to have been something that changed between my grandmother's generation and my mom's that led to My mom developing this This condition and my hunch because I have a bias towards diet and lifestyle as being Profoundly important when it comes to your health and how you feel Um, I just I you know my theory was that there had to be something related to diet and lifestyle And I started I mean immediately I went into pub med And I started looking at um potential dietary and lifestyle interventions um And also when I learned So I learned that one of the reasons why these pharmaceutical drugs are so ineffective And you know one of the reasons why 99.9 or 99.6 percent of alzheimer's drug treatment trials fail Is because as you mentioned Alzheimer's disease begins in the brain decades before the first symptom So almost in tandem with my quest to see if there was anything out there that could help my mom I became really interested in the notion of prevention And this was because if you subtract 30 from my mom's age at the time you get me And I became really interested in doing whatever it is that I could do to prevent this from ever happening to myself Does that scare you when you kind of computed that in your head? I mean, yeah, it was terrifying right it was terrifying um, I mean I recognize that I've always been very health conscious and that I've always valued exercise and working out and so you know, I wasn't Immediately afraid and also I figured you know what what 30 years isn't exactly cause for concern You know, that's a big window of opportunity for me to right change my diet and do whatever I might be able to do to protect my brain, but um Alongside my research. I also remembered, uh, you know, I a couple a couple years prior I had seen a ted talk by terry walls the ted x talk. We had a review show. Oh, did you awesome? She's bad ass awesome Yeah, I mean it was sort of this, uh I mean it's funny how, um You know foreshadowing it was that I actually really loved that ted talk when I had watched it Um, but it's something that I remembered seeing when I started to think about like where I might go for clues as to how diet and lifestyle might affect brain function I mean obviously she talks about the role of diet and lifestyle in multiple sclerosis, but um There was a lot less information out there at the time when I began researching this for Uh, diet and alzheimer's disease let alone other variants of dementia so I just began looking and I stumbled upon this really interesting insight that relates alzheimer's disease Which is the most common form of dementia not necessarily what my mom had But I figured that anything that pertains to alzheimer's I might be able to you know, maybe glean and use On my mom so to speak. Um, particularly if it's a safe recommendation um And I stumbled upon this insight that alzheimer's related to type 2 diabetes Some scientists call it type 3 diabetes. In fact, I'll call alzheimer's type 3 diabetes Yeah, yeah, so the scientist these scientists who coined that term susan de la monta at brown university I've been to her lab and I've I've interviewed her and um And that was a really uh interesting and paradigm shifting insight for me because you know type 2 diabetes According to most experts that you'll ask is a lifestyle disease brought on by sedentary lifestyle Uh a diet that's become saturated with hyper processed foods um And so even though my mom had never been diabetic I was like, okay, what insights can I get from studies on metabolism and Use that to say, well, you know, if the brains if the metabolic health of the brain Is related so closely to the metabolic health of the body What insights might I glean what actionable steps? Uh and foods and and practices might I be able to take from the studies on metabolism? That might potentially be able to help my mom So this was there was a level of dot connecting there that I was making that I think most clinicians and even phd's for example are not able to do because Clinicians, you know, they think only in terms of evidence-based Uh, you know things that they can prescribe lest they have a malpractice suit waged against them And phd's tend phd's tend to lose sight of the forest for the trees because they're so focused on these Really tiny niche topics and we need both right so i'm not i'm not uh saying that there's anything Um, this is where your journalism background probably really came in handy Yeah, and and I think a level of creative thinking as well because you know like I had to learn all of these things from the ground up And for me to be able to integrate them into a way that makes sense for me that I can communicate effectively to people I've got to be able to tell it like a story like sort of a story of how we might you know protect our health so that we may enhance brain function and and the like so Um, so I started looking into like all these different areas I was looking into metabolism What are the latest diet studies and randomized control trials? Which are the only kinds of trials that can actually prove cause and effect Say on diets that we might eat to improve metabolic health I started looking at low fat versus, you know low carb and became really interested there Um, I also started looking into the latest research an understanding of vascular health and how to prevent cardiovascular disease because even though You know, you'll go see a cardiologist and you'll go see a neurologist and never the you know Neither the twain shall meet right because As you mentioned, you know medicine typically takes such a reductionist approach I was like well the brain is fed nutrients and fuel By a network of micro vessels that if you were to take out of your brain and line end to end would stretch 400 miles long So there's got to be something to say about nurturing vascular health I mean the second most common form of dementia is called vascular dementia Which is basically due to a series of strokes Micro strokes in the brain But there are vascular issues at play too when it comes to Alzheimer's disease and likely the niche form of mental Monstrosity that my mom had developed so so it's just like putting all of these together And obviously, you know, like my I said my brain works like a switch. So I just became obsessed I was losing sleep to hours and hours of research. I was digging into the primary literature. I was um, just you know doing everything I could to understand and you know granted I didn't have training as a scientist, but I did find that Uh, you know, it's very empowering that we live in a time where all of the world's knowledge is available To us at our fingertips. So not once did it seem to me to be sort of a A barrier to finding the answers that I wanted that I wasn't a medical doctor I was like we have pub med, you know, many studies are available to us for free Um, I started reading the introductions to these studies which provide context I started reading the discussions which provide a sort of in, you know, English language analysis of what the results are of of these studies Ultimately ended up finding somebody who gave me their login to an academic Portal so that I could download all research papers. Yeah, so I had access to all papers It was like being a kid in a candy store.  All right I have one right now No, it's you know, uh, what if you have the right speed over a little bit Yeah, if you if you have the right motivation Today, uh, you can learn anything and we are seeing the emergence of citizen scientists and citizen doctors and discoveries are being made right now through Forums I have family members who have chronic health issues It who made discoveries through belonging to groups of people with these issues Through their compiled anecdote are driving research now, which this wasn't the case before so many barriers to be able to Be able to even read some of these things before which no longer exists So if you have the right motivation, which you did definitely did in your smart person I mean you can make some pretty incredible how receptive was she because I one of the challenges I've always had is when I deal with someone who's close to me and I don't know how familiar you might be with this one So I have a best friend man. We go all the way back to elementary school And he has this disorder or they can't even pin what it is But he has these um, he wakes up in the middle of the night and he acts out as dreams And they extremely dangerous like he'll jump off the bed And there's been stories of people that have the same same condition that will walk out of out of their Window and showed that because they think they have a dream that the place is burning on fire and they jump out and it's really scary for them and and they've No one can quite put their finger on exactly what it is And they say that like 90 98 or 95 of the people that go through this Like he's going through end up with parkinsons And so I've been trying to send him all this research around parkinsons And then how to be preventative with a lot of it and I just think that I feel his frustration because I know he's going to all these medical doctors and these doctors aren't able to Tell him certainly what it is. Yeah.   Well, she willing to try everything or are you struggling with that at all? Yeah, so I mean initially there was some pushback because obviously I'm my mom's son, you know How could I possibly know more than her about nutrition, right? My mom grew up in a time when the nation was in a frenzy over what seemed like an epidemic of heart disease So my mom's always been very attuned to the messaging from the government over the past 50 years About how a person might eat to prevent heart disease So growing up, even though my mom was health conscious, even though my mom had access to healthy food We always used corn oil.  And you know, if not Maybe even improve her health is what she thought, right? So me coming in and saying mom you've got to reduce the carbohydrates. You've got to eat more fat healthier fats You've got to ditch the corn oil Eggs are not going to kill you in fact eggs are really important when it comes to brain health And there's no relationship for most people when it comes to dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol You know, she just it was kind of a hard sell for my mom to say the least but eventually Um, she started buying into these to these notions. She got rid of the corn oil. Thankfully I started You know, I got rid of the bread and all that stuff in her house, which I think doesn't really serve anybody You know, if you're metabolically healthy, I think bread is maybe benign if you're working out a lot Obviously and you've got bigger uh more skeletal muscle you can dispose of greater amounts of glucose And if you're not gluten sensitive, I think fine, but to me bread is the ultimate processed food masquerading as a health staple Right. Um, oh yeah, people don't realize like you like we needs to be extremely processed for us to even be able to eat Exactly And not only that you you touched on a part that I think is most important that that I've seen just in my 15 plus career Of being in health and fitness is the decline of movement.   We're not moving at all and even people that exercise are still considered sedentary So I think a lot of that has to do with that. I think you know 50 plus years ago We were way more physical and way more active So our body's utilizing a lot of that where now it's we're just food's so different too Did you so when you just you just touched on a few things with lower carbohydrate more Healthier fats cholesterol is probably good for you when you consume it when you're discovering this information when you're reading about it Are you blown away? Yeah Blown away.  Yeah, I mean well the first thing that I started to do is I started to I I started to think with skepticism over foods and products that have been in the human food supply for a shorter period of time So rather than look at fairly new food products and dietary constructs Um as being innocent until proven guilty I was like we should start thinking more about these things as being guilty until proven innocent Well, I like that mentality. Yeah Um, and I realized that you know for the entire for the pretty much the entirety of my life I thought of of grains and whole grains particularly as being Additive to health. I used to really, you know, I would avoid white rice at the plague But if you were to put a brown rice bowl in front of me, I'd eat it in its entirety and probably go back for seconds And I realized that there's actually no biological necessity for grains So this is something that we're only Fed spoon fed literally no pun intended Um as a sort of this this modern construct that has no basis in in scientific evidence I mean most of our dietary recommendations are are they stem from epidemiology So nutrition science in humans is a very difficult. It's very difficult to do this kind of research Let aside from population level evidence, we can look at populations. We can see how they eat We can see how they how long they live. We can see their health spans essentially, which is you know, how long they're able to live free of chronic disease and We can say look, you know people that live a long time they eat x they eat y they live z but I think what our nutritional guidelines have done they've made the grave mistake of attributing causality to correlations And that those correlations have really formed the basis of our nutritional guidelines, right, which is uh, really unfortunate Right, let's feed this rat this chemical for six months. Oh, it's fine Yeah, it didn't even besides that exactly the the the fat hypothesis was uh, they they actually Took out a lot of important information to fit their theory of saturated fat causing heart disease and that became national policy This is one of the reasons why i'm so opposed to government guidelines for pretty much anything but especially when it comes to nutrition because When you when it becomes this guideline and you put it out nationally Like if you're off by a little bit and you make a mistake It's that it's that's going to cause a lot of problems exactly with everybody and it drives Thousands of yeah versus letting the market kind of decide and there's always going to be mistakes made there too But you find that you know, there's there's more You know opportunities to figure out what works versus what doesn't work versus going to school it was like I was I was having dinner last night with my parents and You know I was having this conversation with my with my mom and she's like Yeah, when you eat meat it needs to fit in the palm of your hand And the majority of your food needs to be carbohydrates because that's what we teach in school And i'm like no that's that's so that's so wrong for a lot of people But it's just it's just been it's been fed to us for so long and it's cost so many problems When you started making these changes with your mom and her diet Did she start to notice improvements in her health? Well, so you know when I came down from the mountain with all these insights in tow and I became really interested in the ketogenic diet Because again, I've been familiar with the ketogenic diet since 1998 98 so when I when I started to look at brain metabolism and I came across the work of mary newport who's a neonatologist who has been a really I think impactful pioneer in terms of spreading the word about the value of ketones for the for the alzheimer's brain um I became you know familiar with her work and I I essentially tried to put my mom on a ketogenic diet and uh I think you know The most I was able to keep her on it for were two weeks when people develop uh alzheimer's disease They there's a shift in food preference that occurs Where people that maybe never have had a sweet tooth begins to crave sweet starchy foods Yeah, and so this goes back to the type 3 diabetes hypothesis in the alzheimer's brain So the brain can use two fuels primarily To generate ATP That is fat and glucose Uh, generally speaking, you know for somebody on the standard american diet consuming 300 grams of carbohydrates per day The brain is primarily using glucose to generate ATP glucose is sort of like the brain's gasoline And as a byproduct of glucose metabolism, it creates free radicals And what happens in a lot of these neurological conditions, especially alzheimer's disease parkinson's disease There's sort of a tilting of the scale where there's more oxidative stress happening in the brain Then we can effectively mop up so to speak And glucose metabolism creates oxidative stress because it creates a lot of these free radicals Ketones are considered to be sort of like the brain's electricity in that sort of glucose gasoline analogy In that it's a much cleaner burning fuel source and also um There's an inability of brains with alzheimer's disease to properly Metabolize or create ATP out of glucose. In fact, the alzheimer's brain's ability to create ATP out of glucose is diminished by about 50% So they're starved of their main energy. They're starved of their of their main energy source And yet interestingly their ability to generate ATP through With ketones is actually not deterred by alzheimer's disease aging or even certain genes that are well known to be alzheimer's risk genes um and so Yeah, so I was like, okay, so we gotta, you know, put my mom on a ketogenic guy to sort of supplement This sort of brain energy that is likely being lost in my mom. My mom again didn't have alzheimer's disease but There seems to be what's called glucose hypometabolism Evident in a number of neurological conditions and even it even without having a neurological condition Carriers of the of the most well defined alzheimer's risk gene have Reduced glucose metabolism in their brains evident from the 20s from from a very young age He weighed prior to symptoms So I tried to put my mom on this on this ketogenic diet and by the way, that's why um alzheimer That's why it's speculated that alzheimer's disease Patients have this craving for sugar because it's like they need more of it more of it. Yeah, they need more of it Which is ironic because those are the these foods, especially in the modern food supplier These exact exact kinds of foods that drive inflammation Which seem to promote this Reduced inability of the brain to create energy. So it's like this it becomes this vicious cycle um But at the end of the day, you know putting a patient with dementia on such a rigorous Dietary protocol. I mean being on a ketogenic diet is not easy Um It's really hard. It's a it's a huge strain on the caregiver and it's hard for the patient And so at a certain point I realized that I had to um You know take a step back teach Uh gently but then take a step back because I I didn't I was starting to get really emotionally Invested in my mom's diet and I would become upset when I would go to her house and I would See a bag of potato chips open on the counter or that bag of kind bars or whatever You know granola bars that have you know way too much sugar. That's what I was seeking for I knew that I had it because it's so hard man when you got somebody who's doing it because she's got a lot That's going on inside for her man. She's probably Depressed and sad and angry and frustrated and then dealing with craving I mean there's got to be a million things going through her head. It's so hard to break through Somebody like that. So what was that process like dude? Well, that's why I'm so sensitive to Um the the struggle of the caregiver. I'm not my mom's caregiver, but um You know sometimes you hear people today because you know, I mean information on the fake news is real You know information on the internet can spread like wildfire and there's a lot of people now In the health and wellness space throwing around the r-word reversed when it comes to diseases like alzheimer's disease And I think it's very responsible because when a person when a patient has dementia particularly when it's advanced Um damage is done, right? I mean these are diseases again that begin oftentimes Decades before the first symptom so so yeah, so I want to you know, I try to teach uh At first a little bit more um, you know with a little bit more force But at a certain point I didn't want it to affect the my mom's quality of life Um or your relationship with her, right?  I've got to hide this food from max, you know Like because I'm I'm neurotic as hell when it comes to nutrition and the things that I eat And the supplements that I take and all that stuff But um, but you know, I don't expect other other people to similar experience with me again with my parents Like I can't even talk about nutrition with them anymore because they get so angry Because I'll go in their house and I'll start throwing things away And it's like okay if I want to have a good relationship with my parents I got to chill I can't always be like this, you know Otherwise I won't be able to connect with them anymore What were some of the things that you Some of the things that really shocked you the most as you Went down this path and really and you wrote this book now you wrote a book called genius foods Which was spurred on by this experience that you had with your mom What were some of the things that you wrote about in your book that were kind of shocking to you or or mind blowing? Well, I would say I you know, definitely the notion that um, alzheimer's disease begins in the brain decades before the first symptom You know alzheimer's disease is something that affects five million people today in the u.s And those numbers are expected to explode in the coming years and this is just one kind of dementia I mean there's a number of other neurological conditions and With the oldest millennial now approaching 40 to me which is shocking To me it became very clear that this is something that young people need to talk about I'm not talking about in the context of younger people being caregivers I'm talking about younger people carving out their own cognitive destiny decades from now And over the course of the research and putting into practice all of the things that I was learning About you know from an evolutionary lens the kind of diet that we might want to consume To help our brains not only survive but thrive I started putting them into practice in my own life And I noticed that my brain started working better as well. I mean I I mentioned to you guys I struggled with grades growing up. These are you know aspects of one's executive Or one's cognitive abilities called executive function an executive function is thought by some researchers to be more important in terms of a person's overall success life success then IQ and This includes abilities like focus being able to tune out distractions planning decision making aspects of one's one's personality And even to some degree altruism and feeling connected with with other With other people these are all factors that are heavily Mediated by the kinds of foods that we're eating and the ways that we're living our lives And I noticed that my brain started to work better.  It just didn't appeal to me But that attitude alone was what made me do it.  What did you notice first? Yeah, well, some people some people tend to feel You know an improvement in executive function when they do eat carbs and sugar But it's not clear whether or not the carbs and sugar are actually improving a person's ability to Think or if when they're eating those carbs and sugar, they're essentially treating their own withdrawal from their last meal I would argue that yeah, I would argue that as well. So once I started cutting out the grains and sugar for my diet My energy levels definitely stabilized and I mean it was sort of like the the tide in the harbor lifting all boats I mean, I definitely felt like my energy levels were more stable and reliable and consistent throughout the day I mean, I would have massive energy swings Um, and I you know, I've always been metabolically healthy I've never been overweight and I was always in what I what I call the 1% of grain consumers I was I was religious about consuming grains only in their whole grain Form and yet nonetheless my energy levels were like a roller coaster throughout the day You know, I would start every day with a whole wheat bagel. I would be starving by lunch Probably end up having another like sandwich or something for lunch or a brown rice bowl Which was like my favorite thing to eat um And then before dinner, you know dried fruit fruit snacks, you know, uh I remember I found these whole wheat cookies and I would just I would eat six of them at a time because they were a whole wheat Um, so Yeah, so once I started cutting all those foods out of my diet.  I think stockpile fat and never allow The you know themselves to have the opportunity to burn such a great point.  In fact, in fact, there's a really interesting, uh thing that I learned over the course of the book which Um, my book the book is full of like these really interesting sidebars Um, and I think the one that I'm that I'm most proud of there's a lot There's a few that I'm proud of but I really like the one where I talk about why human babies are born so fat So a lot of people, you know, when a human baby is born fat or sorry when a human baby is born They actually come with a body fat percentage that's higher than any mammal So like I think the body fat of a human baby rivals out of newborn baby seals But why is that interesting? It's interesting, right? I mean it's not adorable too. They're adorable We like to we like to pinch that fat. But why is that fat there, right? So the human baby Complets its cognitive development in the world Unlike our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, you know If you were to look at a chimp when a newborn chimp is born a chimp is born ripped But a chimp is also born packed with a catalog of cognitive instincts and abilities that a human baby is not born with A human baby's brain continues to develop in the real world This is what many people call the fourth trimester, right? And it's also one of the reasons why I think humans have been able to accomplish as a species What humans have been able to accomplish is we're the most social species.  But the newborn baby's brain the brain is actually using 90 percent of that baby's metabolism So all that's fascinating.  You know what I mean?  That's exactly what it is So that brain is literally that that a neonate that that human baby is literally a walking Developing brain and that fat is there to supply the energy in the form of ketones to the brain In fact, if you look at mother's milk, which is arguably the best food For a for a new high fat. It's high fat.  So that baby is spending a lot of time Wow, I did not know that.  I mean if you look at uh, I mean this This is here's a statistic that blew me away years ago Is I learned that if you're even if you're a lean athlete you store about 30 000 calories worth of potential ketones that you can run off of At any given moment the most you'd store in terms of glycogen is about 6000 calories So in terms of an energy source like even if you're lean You've got way more fat that you can call upon to utilize for energy than you can With with glucose like we're designed to run off of fat And probably because we were hunters and we killed something we ate it And then we had to wait until we killed the next animal And so we went for long periods of time without food Absolutely and our ability to store sugar is really limited I mean you can only store about 100 and 125 grams of glycogen in your liver Maybe 400 500 in your muscle, but your muscle can only use the glycogen that that it has stored So basically your your brain's only backup source of glucose is the liver which only contains about 100 grams Of uh of of glucose which you could easily tap out in the one hour sporting event. You're done with that Exactly, exactly. But we have a virtually unlimited capacity to store fat And again, the brain loves to use fat for fuel This is something that we were that we're elegantly designed to do And the minute insulin which is the hormone that becomes stimulated when we consume, you know carbs Predominantly becomes elevated ketone production comes to a grinding halt So you can imagine your average american consuming more than 300 grams of carbs per day First of all, the brain is given no choice, but to use glucose, which as we mentioned is a dirty fuel Do you think this is a the major problem of obesity right now? I mean, I think it's so fascinating that we Continue to get smarter and evolve, but yet these diseases continue to we continue to see a rise Do you think this is the main reason why? I think yeah, I mean, I think definitely where we've got we do less leisure time recreational activity than ever before in history We're more sedentary than ever before. We're eating more carbs than ever before Um and usually these carbs come in the form of ultra processed foods, which are hyper palatable So they're basically prone to overconsumption Um And when we eat these carbs because we're so sedentary because you know very few of us Relatively speaking are hitting the gym. We've got nowhere to dispose of that glucose So I mean the more muscle you have on your body the greater your ability to dispose of glucose This is an incredibly important function of muscle. I mean aside from just making you look better naked, right? And helping you lift heavier things like muscle muscle basically serves the the function of being banks for glucose So that when you do decide to eat that brown rice bowl or or overindulge on fruit Which we very likely probably did seasonally as hunter-gatherers it gives you an ability to store Those carbs god literally in the context of modern life We've told people to do the exact the wrong things like when it comes to exercise And we've said this so often on the show Probably and this is in the context of modern lifestyle The most important form of exercise you could be partaking in is exercise that builds muscle because of that because you're surrounded by hyper palatable carbohydrates and processed foods muscle directly combats the Insulin resistance and the the problems that arise from consuming too many carbohydrates far more than Doing cardiovascular activity, which is a very manual way of trying to burn You know glycogen and doesn't really improve your body's ability to store it Definitely and there's a strong relationship actually between upper body strength and lower body strength and brain health So I mean having more muscle in your body is really important Again for making sure that your your blood sugar stays within healthy levels to you know, obviously promote insulin sensitivity, which is really important Um Also interestingly the same stimulus that makes your muscles bigger works on your brain cells So we now know thanks to animal studies that um High intensity interval training actually stimulates mitochondrial biogenesis in your muscle tissue. You create more mitochondria But this also occurs in the brain as well. So Really important going back to the brain's metabolic health. I mean mitochondria or sort of like the You know the cornerstones of uh of healthy brain metabolism And we can support them by doing high intensity We've traded we've traded acute disease for chronic diseases. What's happened in modern life And I don't think people realize that the reason why we eat the way we do is humans a long time ago Uh discover well in the context of all of human history. It's not that's actually quite recent We discovered that we could Plant things and grow them and you know eat them And so we made this huge shift in in how we eat and when you look at the crops that we grow Here in modern western societies These are the crops that we've learned to grow the most of and you know to just make them the most efficient So we eat a lot of corn a lot of soy a lot of wheat And it's not because those were always a part of human, you know History or work more corn is because those are the easiest to grow and we were able to stop starvation from it Which is a great problem to solve But now we've got this other problem where if that's all you eat or if that's a majority of what you eat We're encountering chronic health problems like like never before Who are some of the people that you interviewed and talked to uh that to put your book together Who's some of the experts that you interviewed and and work with well? I definitely so I mean one of the first people that I interviewed was susan de la monta who Coined the term type 3 diabetes, which has since been referenced over and over and over again in medical literature and lay literature alike I've interviewed Dr. Alessio fizzano, who's one of the Well, he's the founder of the center for celiac research at harvard. He's one of the leading experts on gluten and auto immunity um, I interviewed uh One of the researchers that has basically given us the strongest evidence to date that our cognitive health is something that we have a say in When it comes to diet and lifestyle I've uh, actually, you know for the course of the book. I've actually contributed to research at the alzheimer's prevention clinic in New york at wild Cornell medicine and um, one of my mentors who is the uh director there his name is richard isaacson He's a good friend of mine and um, we've collaborated on research and and traded notes as well So I mean I really I tried to call information from everywhere, you know if it if it pertains to having a better brain um I mean, I'm I'm interested. I'm obsessed and uh, and I try to synthesize it all in genius foods It also aside from dementia prevention. I'm really interested. So, you know, I noticed that my brain started working better I started to really look into this topic. Um, there's not quite a name for it. I call it cognitive Optimization, but it really is this burgeoning line of research that looks at how various foods and nutrients affect um People that are cognitively healthy young cognitively healthy people They're not typically a population that's studied Um, but there's really interesting research on how certain nutrients can actually improve the way that your brain functions in the here and now even if you're young Which is kind of striking because we already consider young people to be at their peak of cognitive abilities So what are you finding? Well, you know, most people in this country are deficient and at least one essential nutrient um, and these nutrients are readily contained in the whole foods that we're not eating so, um You know take dark leafy greens, which I think the cdc found that only 10 percent of uh, Americans are consuming an adequate amount of of vegetables These foods contain really powerful chemicals called carotenoids. Um, which I sort of highlighted in the book In particular, uh, lutein and zeaxanthin which are which are founded vegetables and and egg yolks and fat of grass-fed cows because these um carotenoids are found in plants which cows eat when cows are fed corn They don't uh embed the carotenoids in their fat because corn has very few So when you get a grass-fed cow one of the main health benefits of eating grass-fed meat is that The carotenoids that these cows basically Ingest when they consume grass embeds themselves into their fat. So these carotenoids basically um They are really important for eye health. They help shield the macula against, um, you know potentially damaging frequencies of light But it's also been recently shown that these same carotenoids actually make their way up to the brain Where they can boost something called visual processing speed. So this is really important for athletic performance Um, and just overall, you know the way that you are able to visually Take in a stimuli process it and respond to it. Um It's a it's a key, you know aspect I would say of your cognitive function and university of georgia researchers found that in young healthy college age students They were able to boost Their visual processing speed by 20 when supplementing that's significant when supplementing with lutein and zeaxanthin these two these two plant-based carotenoids which are readily found in kale spinach avocado and also in uh, They're what make um, pastured egg yolks look so orange And so Yeah, these carotenoids, you know, really important in terms of boosting your health and and coincidentally Um, although it's I don't think it's a coincidence These same foods that are high in in these carotenoids also are associated with reduced brain aging So going back to the dementia space. I mean it's all related. So um Again going back to like dot connecting Um, we really connect the dots. I think in a in a in a cool way in the book And then also we make the leap to this other burgeoning field called nutritional psychiatry, which to me is really interesting growing up in new york city I would always struggle with uh seasonal effective disorder I would get really depressed come wintertime and so mental health is something that's become Really important to me, you know, and also I think everybody Just as a as a natural part of living in 2018 Occasionally deals with depression anxiety things like that um, so I document in the book Uh, really interesting research on how food can improve mood Um, I talk about and I've interviewed the researcher who published the first ever randomized control trial to use a diet as uh as an anti-depressant published in 2017 We just had uh, mckayla peterson on the show. It's the jordan peterson's daughter and she had severe Depression since since the age of 12 and autoimmune issues and whatnot and through diet She was able to go off all almost all of our medications, especially her her Anti-depressant drugs and she had to go on a radical diet. She actually only eats meat Um at the moment and I do think there's an autoimmune component there But it's you're you're hearing more more of it. But there's always so much pushback, especially when you talk about The psychological effects of food What's that been like for you? Have you been getting a lot of pushback from people? Uh, I mean to be totally honest. No not not a lot of pushback at all. Yeah, which I'm which I'm really happy about It's the way you deliver it.  I mean I You know, I really want to my my goal one of my goals is to try to get this message out beyond What I call the paleosphere, you know, like I think it's so important to not just speak to the echo chamber chamber of your social media Networks and really get this information out to the people that need it So I think about like the doc the audience that I talked to you on the dr Oz show for example, which I've been really lucky to get to talk to Um, you know when making a recommendation to people I have to be cognizant of the fact that 66% percent of the US population is either overweight or obese, you know, 50% are either diabetic or pre-diabetic, which is essentially glucose intolerance So do I think that grains are toxic like many people would suggest in the in the paleo world today? No, not for somebody if you're working out and you're going to the gym and you're not eating a whole lot of processed foods and the like But for the majority of people in the in the western world, which you know are Have become basically in you know intolerant of glucose Yeah, probably like why are you eating grains which are basically energy dense? You know chains of glucose stored in the endosperm of these plants when you could be eating dark leafy greens Which are full of micronutrients that we know That you're not getting right. So what is it? What is the If you could could you just still like what a what a healthy? Diet would look like for the brain yeah, well so And you touched on this a little bit earlier, you know, I started using like the evolutionary lens to try to figure out what diet we might have consumed in the time in which our brains evolved and And how we might be able to emulate that diet today. So we know that for 200,000 years since we've been anatomically modern humans if not, you know long before that The the land was our buffet, right? There's 50,000 edible plant species around the world And yet as of 10,000 years ago when we became essentially slaves to the handful of crops that we could domesticate We essentially turned our backs on that diet which paved the way for the fact that Today our diets are dominated by three plants. Okay wheat corn and rice. So again these plants help to Uh prevent starvation and help to grow the species by providing a really cheap source of calories But they're very nutrient dense and so over time Our brains actually lost the volumetric equivalent of a tennis ball. This has been well documented And oh repeat that a lot of people don't know that yeah, so so our brains actually lost volume so smaller Yeah, so we we ate a certain way for you know 100,000 180,000 years that led to the evolution of our brains this magnificent supercomputer Which we are each heir to today. We turned our backs on that diet and our brains shrank So I was like, okay, well We haven't really had we've had grains for a relative blip on the radar in terms of our evolutionary timescale for about 10,000 years So clearly they're not essential. There's no essential grain out there and grains don't provide nutrients that you can't find more efficiently anywhere else so My first the first thing that I did was I cut cut grains out at least initially To see how I would feel because I realized that these are not Needed for the brain and I started to look at the nutrients that the brain needs to thrive So, I mean, we have a handful of of nutrients that we know that the body needs to avert To avoid what are called deficiency diseases? So these are the 42, you know vitamins and minerals that that we know that we need but a lot of the Recommended daily allowances for these vitamins and minerals are set only to avert Again, deficiency. So vitamin D. We know is the you know, whatever I think it's like 400 or 800 international units that we're supposed to intake every day is really Set only so that a population might avoid rickets for example um But I started to really look at You know all of these nutrients the kinds of foods that they're found in and I was like Well, you know dark leafy greens are really the best that you can get when it comes to Just a broad array of micronutrients that we know that we need magnesium for example folate Which is folate I've become, you know, especially for people that carry the FTHFR gene mutation Folate's really helpful in terms of your body's methylation cycle and keeping an amino acid called homocysteine low When you have elevated homocysteine it actually accelerates the rate of brain atrophy And by eating folate by eating it or supplementing with it particularly and also importantly you've got to you know Do this in tandem with vitamin b12 and vitamin b6 um Really important and these are found in folate is named for foliage. That's where the name get you know comes from so Dark leafy greens. I really started to build my diet more around those, you know kale spinach arugula arugula going back to heart health for a second arugula is the the top source of of nitrates in the diet um Really important for the healthy functioning of your of your vasculature. So I started eating more arugula more spinach things like that Then I started looking at fats. What are the healthy fats to consume? So Really good evidence on extra virgin olive oil At the population level extra virgin olive oil is the hallmark of the mediterranean diet They consume lots of extra virgin olive oil But as we mentioned, you know, that's a part of a dietary pattern We can't tease out from that kind of research whether or not extra virgin olive oil is causally involved in the mediterranean Dietary pattern or it's just sort of there as a, you know, just a an aside, right? um But actually there are really good studies being done on extra virgin olive oil both animal trials and there was a very uh, really good long term large population randomized control trial done out of barcelona spain called the predimed trial where they actually put um patients on three diets one was a Low-fat diet, which is still widely recommended in two versions of the mediterranean diet, which is already high in fat But one was supplemented with even one version of those of those of the mediterranean diet was supplemented with even more extra virgin olive oil About a liter additional per week And they found that um at the end of I believe it was that's a lot. It's a lot. It's a lot. It's like 8 000 calories Yeah, that's a lot. Um, that's what I do I'm italian. We basically bathe in it. So bathe in it. Yeah Gargle it. Yeah, I mean Yeah, they use it. I mean in the mediterranean regions of the world they use it as a sauce They pour it on things like cooking it.  They're probably like, what is this? Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's got no flavor. Yeah, so max walk me through like a because and we're for the audience It's listening. We're gonna make some really cool youtube videos along these lines but Walk me through like a morning to night Normal day of eating and your choices and then why you took those choices and you're covering some of them right now But like walk me through a day and why you choose those foods cool So I mean I wake up in the morning I drink a glass of water if I'm doing a particularly low carb You know iteration of my diet. I'll throw some mineral salt in there You know when you drop insulin which you do very very easily on a low carb diet your kidneys spill sodium So sodium is a very important electrolyte. It's a nutrient. It's been demonized again by The wet the modern, you know dietary guidelines, but um very important and very actually one of the Probably most um noticeable Aspects of my protocol is when I'm doing very low carb to add a little bit of salt It gives me, you know, it keeps my my blood pressure up like but not uh, not You know up in a negative way. It just keeps it so that I feel like I've got a sense of energy um And also adds in some other trace minerals as well That an hour two after two hours after I wake up. I'll have my first meal of the day I don't like to eat first thing in the morning, you know first thing in the morning We have a hormonal milieu that wants to burn fat cortisol is at its peak that it's going to be throughout the day First thing in the morning, right and cortisol is the body's chief catabolic hormone.  Well, I don't think it I don't think it kills it. It helps it. I think yeah, doesn't help it Yeah, you don't accelerate coffee coffee. Yeah coffee encourages Uh, ketosis, so why not why not drink that are you not a coffee drinker or well? I do drink coffee No, I don't drink coffee. I um, I try not to drink it for you know 45 I try to wait until that cortisol that peak morning cortisol spike begins to subside Um before I before I have my first cup Um, but yeah, I do drink I do drink black coffee. I'm a big fan and the research on on coffee I think is very uh supportive of it as being a sort of health tonic Again within like sort of a range, right? We were talking about this before we started recording, but Some is probably better than none, especially if you're not sensitive to it, but too much doesn't necessarily Equate to better health either, right? That's right. Justin.   I don't always do this, but I do think you know when you're trying to maintain um High intensity output Really important to have that that glycogen in your muscles. Um, you know, we hit a certain threshold in high intensity work Where we need glycolysis really to push through a lift So, um But then again, I'm not a power lifter. I'm not really into bodybuilding so much anymore.  So if you're eating a Uh a bowl of dark leafy greens with fat-free dressing, which so many people do You're actually your absorption of these most imp of you know, some of the most important compounds in those greens becomes negligible What a great point. Yeah, it becomes negligible. Um, whereas by adding fat to that salad You actually it becomes sort of like a slip and slide for these uh nutrients to enter your system um Then I try not to snack too much and by the way, I don't I never count calories I always eat until I'm full sometimes I'll go back for seconds I think when you're when you're eating whole foods like this, you know, and especially when you focus when you put a focus on protein um You know getting that feeling of satiety is so important and protein is the most satiating macronutrient so This is really key. Uh, we can get into why I think it's really interesting, but um Moving on to the day. I think you know, I try not to snack so much, but uh, you know, if I'm around the house Sometimes I do I always reach for um knots very important And dark chocolate is uh, what I call genius food, you know rich in these these flavonols that have been shown to be really beneficial to the brain um Also a great source of magnesium very important 50 of the u.s population doesn't consume enough magnesium So, you know, I like to tell people if it's as easy as eating more dark chocolate, you know have at it Um And then for dinner, you know, again, I like to eat a lot So I'll usually, you know roast a piece of fish or have a grass-fed beef burger or something um Without the bun throw it on either a bed of dark leafy greens or I'll roast up some vegetables um Chicken, you know, I love to you know go for like an organic rotisserie chicken I love to bake up some uh chicken legs really good I used to go only for white meat, you know, and I was like really into the sort of lean protein thing, but actually Um chicken legs are a great source of collagen protein collagen is really important as well Um, you know, we used to eat the whole animal now. We only eat muscle meat, but when you eat like a chicken leg Um Cartilage tends to be found around the joints of animals and so you get a lot of that Really important Yeah, I think a lot of people don't realize when you stick to whole whole natural foods and you tend and you avoid Grains on top of it your your body's natural systems of satiety Or work pretty well. Yeah, you tend to not overeat as a result of that I think it's hard. It's harder to overeat Of course, there's lots of other reasons why people overeat. There could be emotional reasons for it, but When your foods and this is just through my experience.  Absolutely.  When you take a baked potato or you know try eating a stick of butter It's not that good But the minute you combine the two it becomes what's called hyper palatable.  I mean we can do this in our own kitchens But food manufacturers are super aware of that. Yes, they know mastered it Yeah, because they know that you know when it comes to these hyper processed foods once you pop you can't stop, right? so Do you get a lot of um people asking for like recommendations for supplementation and and um like how do you feel uh, particularly about like this boom in in people trying to get like You know these supplements to increase your cognitive performance. Oh like new tropics like that. Yeah, I have a shitty diet Right, exactly. Yes, they're avoiding that topic 100%. Well, that's it. I mean I I'm not a big fan and I There's for most people I would say there's so many low hanging fruits in people's diets and lifestyles that to Throw a supplement on top of that. I think is is bad news. I like to say I mean my official answer to that whenever people ask me is that you know food is the ultimate newotropic Um, so I'm not a big I never take any brain supplements. Um, I just you know, I focus on foods I mean drinking drinking coffee coffee has caffeine caffeine's a newotropic most of the newotropics that you'll pay a lot of money for Basically are just like jacked up caffeine cocktails with some other things that are probably not super effective Right. Um, absolutely. Yeah, who do you hope to reach with your book? Or what do you hope to accomplish with it? I mean, I think it's you know, I I hope I think it's relevant to every person I mean, I really do I think you know, whether or not you have alzheimer's in your family or any kind of every Every the the human brain is highly delicate and damage prone particularly in the modern food environment and so You know in so far as our brain really is the battery that makes everything that we love possible And helps us to connect with one another and loved ones. I think you know, it's something that we need to protect Um as if our life depend depends on it because it does Um, I also think that with so many people today struggling with memory problems and You know one in six adults is now on a psychiatric drug one and seven younger people between the ages of 18 and 39 complain of memory problems I mean, I think You know, our brains are clearly not working the way that they ought to too often today You know proper brain function is a is a is a privilege afforded to too few when I think it should be a right I mean, if you're alive, you are you are literally the heir to this incredible flagship product of darwinian evolution. It should work the way it's meant to and So, you know, I really hope it's a book that I think everybody can read it's written so that everybody will be able to get something from it Um, but in particular if you do have a family history of dementia if you're if you're scared of of cognitive decline of alzheimer's disease, I wrote it to be the ultimate tome to Dementia prevention and in a way that I think is probably going to be more impactful I hope it's going to be more impactful than the current books that are out there about dementia prevention because it's not packaged in the Language of dementia prevention So that's my secret like trojan horse goal is that people read it wanting to learn about how to increase energy How to increase focus cognitive resilience all that stuff and in the end inadvertently end up preventing their own dementia That's my like secret goal because trust me, man. I've like Seen the monster that is dementia. I see it every day.  There's a lot of misinformation out there and You know, I just think that uh Getting this message out to young people people that are not typically attuned to dementia related content That's why I don't really use the term dementia In terms of its in terms of its marketing and I'm trying to really steer the conversation in terms of prevention because Because again people it begins in the brain decades before the first symptom and people don't realize just how expensive it is to treat Alzheimer's and dementia some of the two of the most dementia is one of the most expensive It's one of the biggest costs that we incur with our with our health care costs And it you know, if you combine that with like diabetes It will bankrupt us 100 percent. We're on a trajectory to become bankrupt if we don't figure this out Soon, uh, and I think it's I'm glad you're putting out a book like this. I'm glad more of this information is going out because This is not just a problem for out of shape unhealthy people This is a problem for everybody even if you are healthy and fit Because at some point you may have to pay for all the stuff or at least you're gonna, you know, incur the The side effects of this, you know Economy crashing because people are just not healthy.  Yeah, I appreciate you writing this book. I appreciate you coming on the show, man Dude, great conversation. Thank you so much for having me. It really means a lot. Yeah No, I'm looking forward to the youtube So make sure you guys check out that because we'll definitely put up some cool videos with max for sure He's got a ton of good information. Definitely. Thanks again max. Thank you guys Thank you for listening to mind pump if your goal is to build and shape your body Dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance Check out our discounted rgb super bundle at mind pump media dot com The rgb super bundle includes maps anabolic maps performance and maps aesthetic nine months of phased expert exercise Programming designed by sal adam and justin to systematically transform the way your body looks feels and performs with detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos The rgb super bundle is like having sal adam and justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price The rgb super bundle has a full 30 day money back guarantee And you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at mind pump media dot com If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five star rating and review on itunes And by introducing mind pump to your friends and family We thank you for your support and until next time this is mind pump


on everyone Sam here with late in sports cards we're been 22 upper deck skybox metal universe champions hobby one box break number 22 random pack style we're gonna do the random now again we've got 15 participants 15 numbers 1 through 15 representing which pack number you're gonna get we're gonna roll the dice and go 10 times on each one two three four five six seven eight nine ten Jerry F down Nathan B 10 times on your pack numbers 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 15 down to 1 wow interesting reversed the numbers there all right Jerry Jerry F at 15 Hanow at 8 Thomas M at 6 Austin P 10 Darrell M 13 Maurice E at 7 James H 12 Sean P 5 Michael G at 3 Alvin at 2 Andy C for Alvin at 14 Chen Kai W at 9 Hanow be at 11 and Nathan be at 1 let me get these copied over really quick to the website for you guys well miss one Bobby and then we'll get ripping results for number 22 save there's your link sort this by number all right good luck so again we're open the box we'll have three stacks of 5 1 through 5 6 through 10 11 through 15 good luck everybody here we go 1 through 5 6 through 10 11 through 15 starting off at Juan we've got Nathan B Tiger's sweet to Tiger PMG that's the most excited I've ever seen Donnie get over our car really was the tiger PMG Troy Merritt 12 Felix there's the the great one stop Viking there's Alan Iverson and a fresh foundations J Johan Datsun number two Alvin see it up come on baby I got one there you go Puka that's gonna be a Z-Force Ken Griffey Jr. the kid nice one there Alvin congrats buddy Kenneth Walker and Kendall Brown number three Michael G I did actually see that Viking Michael G at 3 rice young Caleb Williams Oswald Piranza Max Christy needy-cappy Z-Force Jeremy Sohan that is gonna be number to 150 ice one there Michael Jeremy Sohan and a Peyton Watson fresh foundation Andy Andy see it through for now chanjow jambalaya Joe Alphelix let's go man that's awesome one of the most classic clear inserts of all time that is freaking awesome dude congrats Andy let's go man oh first jumble I have pulled this year that's sick we'll get that into a mag for you buddy hell yeah dude Bryce McAllen's and a Diego Jota wow that's awesome that's freaking cool Sean at five now on Pete around that out our first stack here tie-tie Mickey Ward Kendall Brown Caterina Macario on the Metal Universe card got Jeremy Sohan and Malik Willis alright we're going on to number six that's gonna be Thomas M look here Thomas see it my friend Walker John Pack Zalatoris the kid and a Ricardo Pepe alright we got number seven Maurice look at Maurice Lee T Rids that is a cut above Allen Iverson nice a hi there you go Maurice scratch buddy a cut above on the insert fresh foundation Malik Willis and Marcelo Meyer on the Metal Shriders number eight Hano Hano again here at number eight if you get one treasure cut from NT football man I'd have to look at past year's list that's the only thing John Sam Meyer Max Moa Costa say Intimidation Nation of Griffey that is a Caleb Willis Norse Christmas Island I don't think so Chen Kai W at nine now and a problem happy Caleb Houston Z-Force Michael Jordan there you go Chen guy grads buddy Ron Acuna and a Kenny Pickett and Austin at 10 rounding out our first stack right Armando Cruz shade on sharp Metal Universe CJ Stroud nice one there on the premium and Henry Davis alright last stack here we got Hano B 11 Shields so on that's a Marcelo Meyer got a 2,500 degrees Marcelo Meyer nice one there again Hano on the insert and Marcelo Meyer Marcelo Meyer back there Hano James James H at 12 now slow this looking in the future die cut is Bryce Young for the Panthers now Alabama in that picture obviously Michael Foster and an Isaiah Spiller on your fresh foundations pretty solid pack there James Darrell M Darrell coming up now at number 13 here Sheriff Hova Olga Carlin that is Alex Alcala on the premium and a Christian Hernandez Alvin Alvin at 14 here see it Alvin I'll see a tiger for Alvin the Pettus Walker Kessler that's a Catarina Macario on the Z-Force nice one there love these Z-Forces Matt Corral and a Peyton Watson metal shredders that's Alvin and pack number 15 Jerry is finishing us off good luck here Jerry tiger master T. Nicolay Jovic metal universe Scoot Henderson metal shredders and an AI metal shredders very solid break there that's gonna do it guys thanks again for getting that filled up coming up next we've got top scrum jumbo