456. Sugar Cravings, Red Meat, and Your Health | Max Lugavere
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Hello, everybody. Today, I'm talking with Max Lugavere, who flew in from L.A. to Washington, D.C., to have this conversation with me.

He's a journalist who's become quite a well-known scientific researcher and popularizer, but also a creative investigator in his own right. He wrote a trilogy of books called

the Genius Trilogy, one on foods, one on life, and one, a recipe book on the kitchen, and is also the producer of a documentary that'll be released at the end of June 2024 called Little Empty Boxes. All of that was motivated by his mother's experience with a form of dementia known as

that involves the degeneration of these neurological tissues known as Lewy bodies. It's not Alzheimer's or frontal temporal dementia. It's another form of dementia. And he was very shocked by his mother's illness, which she developed when she was in her late 50s. And also by the dearth of effective treatment that was available to her and ended up obsessively concentrating on

into the dementias in general, concluding, as have many people in the last decade, that the dementia spectrum of illnesses, and that includes Parkinson's, by the way, might well be preventable with vaccines.

interventions that are early enough in life and that many of those interventions might be dietary in nature. And we discuss why that is and talk about the carnivore diet as well as a potential diagnostic investigative tool for the analysis of complex disease in general and

Well, I suppose in some ways celebrate the possibility that dietary modulation might prove to be the treatment of choice on the prevention side for these terrible degenerative neurological diseases. So join us for that. So I'm interested in diet, I suppose, despite myself.

I would say, because it's not my natural domain of interest. I'm more interested in psychological matters, let's say, than physical or physiological matters. I know they overlap, but my attention doesn't naturally gravitate that way. But I have definitely learned that many of the things that I would have been tempted to assume were psychological aren't. I mean, I've known for a long time, for example, that

the endogenous depression, the schizophrenic disorders and manic depression. I never thought of those as psychological disorders. I thought, no, those people are sick. We just don't know what's wrong with them. So I spoke with Chris Palmer in some detail on my podcast, and I just met him again in Boston. He's got a couple of research projects going.

finishing up. He's got 15 on the go looking at treatment of those disorders with diet. And the first three have been spectacularly successful. So diet, right. So let's start with your genius work and outline for people what those are and what you're doing with them and why. Let's start with that. Sure.

So I've written a trilogy of books, the genius trilogy, as it were. And my first book was called Genius Foods, and it came out in 2018. And it's a tome to, and an homage really, to the science of both dementia prevention, as well as the burgeoning field that's being referred to as nutritional psychiatry. So how diet plays a role in, you know, mediating mental health issues.

Insofar as it does play a role, there's this really exciting area of research looking at how our diets are able to influence our moods, which I think is incredibly exciting. I followed that up with a book called The Genius Life, which was a more lifestyle-centric guide. And then my third book came out in 2020.

I'm sorry, 2022, and it was a cookbook kind of bringing everything together. But my work really, I would say, primarily explores the intersection between diet and lifestyle and brain health. And the reason why I wrote these books is because I was personally affected by dementia, by a form of dementia called Lewy body dementia, which prior to even receiving that diagnosis in my family,

It's a condition that my mom suffered from. I became obsessed with trying to understand all that I could. How old was she when that happened? She was 58 years old. Right, right. When she first started to show these amorphous symptoms that... What symptoms did she show? So she had symptoms that both occurred concurrently.

Some of them were movement related. So rigidity, balance issues, stiffness. I guess rigidity and stiffness are similar. But yeah, a real lack of coordination, you know, reduced swinging in the arms. You know, I'm not a medical doctor, so I didn't have any framework with which to understand what I was seeing my mom exhibit. I thought, you know, movement symptoms as a musculoskeletal condition, right? It has to be. But then...

In tandem with those symptoms, she also displayed stark cognitive dysfunction. And it's not necessarily that she, you know, started to forget simple things like, you know, who she was, who her family members were. But it seemed as though her...

I've likened it to when you have too many tabs open in your browser window. It's just like the frame rate starts to stutter. And that's sort of what I saw in my mom, who was very much still in the prime of her life, had all the pigment in her hair, raised three boys, ran a business. And I had been a journalist prior to that. I had been a generalist journalist since college. Since graduating college, I had worked for a TV network that was co-founded by Al Gore.

It wasn't a political network, and I certainly was never really that into politics. But I was sort of like this young kid who was given the reins of this TV network that reached 100 million homes in the U.S. And so when my mom became sick, I— How old were you when she was diagnosed? I was in my late 20s. Okay. Yeah. Okay.

And I had just come off of that position, and I was in between jobs. And more so than being a journalist at the time, I was just a scared son. You know, I was a scared son seeing, you know, these awful symptoms, these mysterious... Yeah, there's not much worse than a degenerative neurological disease. Yeah. They're brutal, those things. They take you apart, like, atom by atom. Exactly. And there was no precedent in my family. So...

I, you know, as soon as that, that the immediate trauma of, of realizing that my mom had something serious going on with her brain health, it was a, it was the most profound call to action that I've ever felt in my entire life to do what I could to understand to the best of my ability, why this would have happened to a woman at the age at which it did. Why were you so compelled to, do you think, why were you so compelled to transfigure your life to come to the service of your mom? Hmm.

I mean, you know, my mom was the most important person in my life. And I'm the firstborn in an incredibly small family. And I've always had an incredibly close relationship with my mother. Right, so this wasn't okay. It wasn't okay. Whenever I had so much as a cough growing up, I mean, moments later, I found myself in the pediatrician's office. And when my mom became sick, you know, those around her were not

all that set up to really understand what was going on. I mean, we're not, you know, we, as a society today, we outsource so many different forms of literacy, right? We outsource culinary literacy to Grubhub, to our apps, you know, we outsource financial literacy to our financial handlers, right?

Health literacy is like, it's a huge, you know, area. It's a huge unknown. Like, we all collectively have, you know, these really scary knowledge gaps, which only become apparent to you when, you know, you're strong. Yeah, and then you just get more scared because you start to understand how big the knowledge gaps are. I've never recovered from finding out that the food pyramid was a scam. Yeah. That's just...

That was just, the degree to which that's a scam is, I don't know, is there a worse medical crime in history than that? No. I mean, telling Americans to load up on 7 to 11 servings of grains every single day. Yeah. And to find out that that was a marketing ploy by the Department of Agriculture and that they went against the advice even of their own

consultants who warned them that they would produce an epidemic of obesity and diabetes, which is, well, and not to say nothing of depression and dementia, which is exactly what we have now. Exactly. It's like,

I don't know what you even do when you find out that that's true. Yeah, and the unwarranted demonization of natural fat-containing foods, nutrient-dense foods like animal-sourced foods, which continue to be demonized. Even by the American Diabetic Association Society? I don't remember which one is still pushing the notion that, you know,

diabetics can eat carbohydrates. Like, actually, I don't think so. I don't think that's a very good idea since they're converted to sugar, for example. And then they're essentially glucose intolerant, right? Right. It's madness. And...

And, you know, with that demonization of these like natural whole foods, I mean, we live in a time where 60% of the calories that your average American consumes comes from what are called ultra processed foods. The center of the supermarket. Exactly. The antithesis to whole foods, right? So the idea that we're still demonizing whole foods to me is insane. Yeah, yeah.

And causes insanity, too. So it's not just insane. It's a cause of insanity. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is not... What do you think of RFK? Just out of curiosity, because I'm sorry, that's a non sequitur in a sense, but not exactly. Like, I've never seen another politician make an issue of RFK.

Yeah. Right? Of general health at the level that we're discussing it. I mean, obviously COVID became an issue and public health is an issue, but Kennedy is the only candidate I've ever seen who's calling out the reprehensible, mostly corporate actors who are poisoning people

Well, everyone, fundamentally. Yeah. I think he's an incredibly important voice in that regard. And I hope that no matter what happens in November, I hope that he finds a way to continue his advocacy. I mean, I'm obviously completely aligned with the notion that we do need to start doing things differently. Well, what's the obesity? What's the percentage of Americans now who are obese? By 2030, one in two.

And this is not just overweight. This is like frank obesity. Right, right, right. And so the morbidly obese would be one in five?

Yeah. Yeah. Unbelievable. It's unbelievable. And obesity is a risk factor for... Everything. Pretty much everything. Yeah. And the cure isn't fat positivity. No. No, definitely not. No. I mean, you can be more or less healthy at any given size, but it's less healthy to be obese than it is to be of normal weight. You know, I can understand the fat positive people in one way.

You know, I would say before I learned what I did learn about diet, I was never particularly judgmental about people who are obese. You know, I did, I suppose, to some degree, accept the idea that fewer calories, a little more exercise, you lose weight. And perhaps that...

would I say that some more willpower would be of use? I don't know if I ever really believed that because I dealt with people at all sorts of different problems and reducing it to something like inadequate willpower. Yeah, you got to be very careful about doing such things. But now when I see obese people, I think it's really too bad that you're ill. Yeah. Yeah. It is a disease. And it's a, it's a, there, I feel, I,

a strong sense of empathy for them because, you know, them, they're being gaslit, essentially. That's for sure. Because what you hear over and over again is this idea that all foods fit. There are no such thing as good foods or bad foods.

And that might be true at a population health level. You know, I mean, like, and there's no single food that's going to cause obesity in an individual, right? It's a dietary pattern of the over, you know, you typically involving the overconsumption of these ultra processed foods. Well, you're more likely to overconsume the foods that are, what would you say, pathologically delicious. Yeah. Yeah.

Right, and they'd be made pathologically delicious, the high sugar foods in particular. It's very difficult to resist them and no wonder. Yeah, there was a seminal NIH-funded study led by Kevin Hall, who's a highly regarded obesity researcher, who found that when you give people an ultra-processed diet to consume and you tell them to eat two satiety, it's called ad libitum feed in the literature,

They end up consuming a calorie surplus of 500 additional calories. So you do that every single day for a week. That's a pound of fat gain every single week. Right, right. And conversely, when they gave them these minimally processed foods, they saw them eat to the same degree of satiety, fullness, but coming in effortlessly at a calorie deficit of about 300 calories. So that's an 800-calorie swing. I wonder if that has anything to do with seasonality of grains.

Well, because I'm curious, as our initial agricultural ancestors, especially in colder climates, it's like maybe you wanted to pack on an extra 20 pounds before winter hit. And so maybe that's an evolutionary adaptation to ensure that from September to December, let's say, that you took full advantage of the harvest so that if lean times come, it makes sense, eh? Because islanders...

who've been on islands for many, many generations are much likely, much more likely to become overweight on a North American diet. And you're much more likely to go through starvation periods on an island as a population. And so people who are very...

what, either efficient in their metabolisms or perhaps liable to overeat in times of plenty would have been people who survived. So, you know, because it's interesting, right? If there's a stable degree to which you overeat high calorie foods, that indicates that there's, like, there's a reason for that. That's not just random.

Thank you.

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Yeah. It's an adaptive survival mechanism. Those of us who are the most adept at putting on and storing fat would make it through the famine of winter. Yeah, the winter. Well, and you can see why that wouldn't happen in the case of animal products because your cows...

your lambs, your goats, et cetera, they can survive the winter, no problem. You don't have a storage problem there. Yeah. And you don't have a seasonality problem, so there's no reason to pig out, so to speak. Right? Okay, okay, okay. So let's go back to your mother. So one of the also awful things about neurological diseases is that you're very damaged by the time symptoms show up. I've read with Parkinson's, for example, the relevant neurological tissue is 95% gone by the time any symptoms appear.

Right. So that's brutal. Yeah. So with Parkinson's disease, by the time you are diagnosed with the condition, about half of the dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra are already dead. And those are the neurons that produce dopamine that control movement and the like.

And this is a condition like many other chronic non-communicable conditions today. They don't begin overnight. They're simmering over a span of decades prior to the onset of symptoms. Well, you can predict probability of developing dementia with verbal fluency measures taken in people's 20s, right? There's long-term study of nuns.

They had fluency measures taken when they were very young. And so that's an early indicator of we don't know exactly what. Is it that the dementia process is already occurring that young? Or is that an indication that the neurological substrate is less robust? It's not obvious. Well, yeah, inflammation certainly plays a role in reducing cognitive function, being overweight. When people typically lose weight, they see an improvement in their cognitive function. Yeah, right.

Yeah, well, you know, the best, I looked for a long time into the literature pertaining to maintenance of cognitive function across time because there's a linear decrease in your

fluid intelligence, so that's G essentially, the central measure of cognitive ability, it starts to decline in your early 20s. It's pretty linear. And so that's a drag. And then you might say, well, what can you do to forestall that? And there are many companies, none of which seem to exist anymore on the internet, that were claiming that daily cognitive exercises could increase your IQ or forestall cognitive degeneration. But the literature always indicated that...

your best bet in that regard was both aerobic and non-aerobic exercise because the brain is such a rapacious metabolic, it has such rapacious metabolic demand. If you're physiologically compromised, then your brain's going to suffer first. So the best, so funny, the best thing for your brain is to be a gym jock. So that's really hilarious in a terrible way. Okay, so you saw this terrible story

illness take hold of your mother and that motivated you. Motivated you what?

Well, I'd always been interested in fitness and nutrition privately. And in fact, when I started college, my intent was to go into medicine, which I ended up pivoting away from when I realized that, you know, I really was a competent storyteller and creative person. And I ended up switching to a double major in film and psychology in college, which was

you know, on the one hand, kept one foot in the world of science, you know, as an undergraduate. But then also, I really kind of fell in love with documentary filmmaking, the idea of being able to tell important stories. And that was really my passion. That's what led to this role, getting to produce content for this TV network backed by Al Gore. So this is what

This is what led ultimately to my foray into the world of smart attainment. So essentially creating content, telling stories, investigating ideas that I felt were under-discussed. And when my mom became sick, I had this passion, this lifelong passion for nutrition, for health. I knew where to find quality primary literature, peer-reviewed research. How do you know that?

Well, in part due to my passion for it. So I've been familiar with PubMed and all those sources. And then as an investigator, as a journalist, the term journalism today, it's taken on a bit of a different meaning. But

You're, of course, not trained as rigorously as a PhD, but you are trained to, you know, like identify sources that are credible and be able to parse them from sources that are less so. You're trained to ask questions, to don a skeptic's hat.

Yeah. And those are the skills that I had when my mom became sick. And I'm not saying that, you know, diving into the medical literature as it pertains to dementia prevention, this burgeoning field of research, was easy for me at first. It's not easy for anyone. It's not easy for anybody. And also, most physicians never do it. Like, the public has an idea that there's not a lot of distinction between a physician and a scientist. Or...

Or they believe that physicians are scientists. And most physicians believe that. But they're not. Correct. And most physicians aren't trained to read research or assess it critically. And certainly not to participate in this generation. And so...

Well, the reason I'm bringing that up is because there's no reason to assume that if you're a journalist and you have the cognitive ability and persistence to plow through the literature, that you couldn't learn how to assess it. You can't. It's hard because the scientific papers presuppose a pretty high level of pre-existing knowledge. And so often if you dive into a new field, you have to go back down into the science.

simpler sources to just understand even the lexicon, but it's not like it's impossible. Yeah, but that's something that I actually quite enjoy. You know, I would read papers and I would read the, you know, I started just reading the introductions and the discussions and the conclusions and I would cross-reference and I would, you know, if there was something that I didn't understand, this is prior to AI, I would just cross-reference it in the hopes that some other scientist would

who's maybe more verbally fluent would have described the thing that I was interested in learning more about in a different way that would lead to it clicking in my brain, that aesthetic aha, you know? But yeah, so that was just like a relentless...

passion that had become an obsession because it was I was seeing the consequences of how much time do you think at that time when it was a relentless obsession how much time do you think you were spending every day doing that research every waking moment and I was for how long for how many like months or um it was probably a span of I mean it was a span of about

Six years prior to even, you know, the idea of, you know, having a book, like being able to write a book. Right, right. So that's about the equivalent of an extremely rigorous master's and PhD program. Six years. Well, that's about the same, I would say, for people who really hit it hard. It's six years of obsessive work. Now, do you have any idea how many papers you read? No.

Thousands. Thousands. Yeah, yeah. And I also, I, you know, at the time, I had become friendly with somebody who gave me their academic credentials to log in through their university libraries so I could download papers for free. Something that should be available to everyone since the taxpayer funds the bloody research. Yeah. But then also along the, along somewhere early on in my journey, I realized that I had an aptitude for what I was doing and for, you know, my ability to not just,

digest and synthesize into a cohesive narrative what it was that I was reading, but that I was able to communicate in a way that, you know, I started to garner the respect of the physicians in the doctor's offices that I would attend to with my mother. And ultimately, I became fairly close friends and collaborators with researchers in the field. So at a certain point... This was when? What years was this? Around 2011. Okay. I...

I started attending scientific conferences and I started sharing what it was that I was learning. And yeah, it was just a, it was a,

you know it was a journey that was arduous at first but i just i i kept reading and reading and synthesizing and reaching out to people how did you support yourself while you were doing this it was very hard i mean i wasn't making any money i actually because of what my what it was that my mom was going through i was living in l.a at the time i ended up basically um sacrificing my la life and moving back to new york to to

Be closer to my mom, to tend to her and to, you know, in essence, become a caregiver of sorts, not the primary caregiver, but to help out with her. And this is what I was going to say. So I also at a certain point realized that I had something that very few people, civilians, very few civilians have, and that is media credentials.

And so really early on, I realized that I could exploit my media credentials. I wasn't famous, but I had been on TV. I was verified on Twitter. And I started reaching out to researchers and scientists whose work I had been reading.

to ask questions and to essentially get in the room with them, so to speak, to be able to, you know, if there were any lingering questions or I needed, you know, something clarified or what have you. And I ended up forging relationships with these researchers because they saw the passion that I had for understanding this topic, the relative dearth of awareness that there was around, you know, dementia as a potentially preventable condition. And, um,

And yeah, that was a journey that began at this point over 10 years ago. But yeah, it's been incredibly fruitful in the sense that not only have I been able to write these three books, but I actually got to collaborate with one of my mentors in science, Richard Isaacson, who's a, you know, he's been, he's a neurologist at Weill Cornell, New York Presbyterian, who from day one has been, you know, really pushing this idea of Richard Isaacson.

Richard, would he be a good guest? Oh, he's phenomenal. Yeah. He's a neurologist? He's a neurologist who essentially helped to create the field that is now referred to as dementia prevention. Back when nobody was talking about it. Back before the notion of being able to prevent this condition was even thought of as a possibility. It was something that he was...

uh, really advocating for, um, and, and studying and, and, you know, and, and raising funding for these clinical trials that he himself had run. And so I got to collaborate on a paper with him. Hmm. Um, Oh yeah, that's a good deal. Yeah. Published by Springer in 2019. It was a, um, a chapter in a textbook on the, basically, uh, an overview review, um,

looking at the clinical practice of dementia prevention and making that accessible to other clinicians. Because as you referenced, you know, most physicians are, in fact, technicians, you know, and many, but not all, physicians are essentially have become paper pushers for the pharmaceutical industry. Yes, well, and you can understand that in some sense. I mean,

Before the pharmaceutical companies were utterly corrupt, they did serve an educational function for general practitioners, let's say, who were overwhelmed by their practice and who didn't have the time to keep up on the relevant literature on each disease. And that's not surprising because that's really hard. But it does mean they can be captured. And that certainly happened. I mean, I worked with pharmacists for quite a long time in the

I say 2000 to 2010, something like that, watching how they were marginalized, but also with physicians watching how the pharmaceutical companies educated and then captured them. And that's not, well, it's not a particularly pretty sight, although I do understand how it happened.

And I can also understand the pharmaceutical company's economic motives. It's not inexpensive to produce new drugs. It's also very difficult, and they do have to be marketed. So that's all very complicated. All right, so you wrote this article.

that's a hell of an accomplishment for someone who's not a formal scientist. And so why don't you, we'll go back to the genius trilogy, I think, in a moment or two, but I would like to hear, now that we're into this, a little bit more about what you learned about the etiology of dementia in general and about its prevention, because that's going to be, both of those are going to be news to virtually everybody who's watching and listening. Well, depending on where you look, the estimates are that

At least 40% of dementia cases are attributable to what are called modifiable risk factors. So, you know, you have your non-modifiable risk factors, which are your age. You know, age is still the number one risk factor for dementia, unfortunately, today. Gender. Women are at twice the risk as compared to men.

And your genes, you can't change your genes, although you can change your expression. You can influence the expression of your genes, right? But those three things, age, gender, genes, those are your non-modifiable risk factors. But then you have about 12, if not more, modifiable risk factors. So these are the risk factors that essentially fall under your control. You have a degree of agency. And that is, I think, what is so exciting and empowering. And so just to discuss a few of them.

And happy to double-click on any that you find compelling, most compelling. You know, obesity, for example, that's one of them. We know that we have agency when it comes to whether or not we are obese, right? Yeah, or at least it's potentially controllable. Yeah. Okay, so is it obesity per se, or do you know if it's directly related to pattern of fat distribution? Like, is visceral fat a worse marker for potential dementia than obesity?

body mass index? Do we know? Yeah, well, there is an association. So as waist circumference grows, there seems to be an inverse relationship between total brain volume. So there seems to be an impact of, you know, perhaps the inflammatory cytokines produced by that visceral adiposity. We know that, you know, fat is an endocrine organ, essentially.

and that the adiposity that you accumulate around your viscera, I mean, that seems to be the most pro-inflammatory. Yeah, yeah, right. Okay, okay. So that is the link. It's inflammatory cytokines with visceral abdominal fat. Right. But also even subcutaneous adiposity

obesity is associated with impaired insulin signaling, right? So type 2 diabetes is another modifiable risk factor. We know that many people today are struggling from glucose intolerance, type 2 diabetes, free diabetes. Well, we should be able to get that up to everyone suffering from it if we keep on the track that we're on. I mean, I know that this is a horrible fact.

So the blood sugar curves that are used to diagnose you as diabetic when you're 20 are age-adjusted as you age. So if you take the typical 60-year-old and use the 20-year-old curves, many of the average 60-year-olds would be diabetic by 20-year-old standards or pre-diabetic, which means they're pre-diabetic. Like there's no reason for those curves to be age-adjusted as far as I can tell. And so that's a...

That means that diabetes as a factor among people 60 and older is radically underdiagnosed. And if diabetes is a risk factor for dementia, which we know, because I've heard dementia referred to, it's got to be for at least 20 years by people in the know as type 3 diabetes. Yeah. Right.

Thank you.

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She's not, to my knowledge, been in any other public-facing content. But I thought that that was an incredible way to frame— What's her name? Suzanne Delamonte. Suzanne? Suzanne, yeah. Suzanne Delamonte. Yeah, she's at Brown University.

And so it's funny that more attention hasn't been paid to her because that's a big deal if it's right. It's a big deal. Big deal. Yeah. So you talked about non-modifiable and modifiable risk factors, and we went through obesity and diabetes, which are also linked. What else? What else is modifiable? Hypertension. So high blood pressure. About 50% of adults today have hypertension. We're starting to see pre-hypertension in men.

in adolescence as well. Oh, good. But one of the seminal studies in the field of dementia prevention is referred to, it's known as the Sprint Mind Trial, which found that when people were with hypertension were aggressively treated via pharmacological means for their hypertension, they saw a dramatic risk reduction for the development of cognitive impairment, mild cognitive impairment, in fact, which is considered like a prodrome of dementia, a form of pre-dementia, if you will.

But we know that lifestyle modification, dietary exercise, for example, all are as effective as drugs. And when you have hypertension, essentially the blood vessels that are supplying blood, nutrients, oxygen to the brain are essentially damaged. And so, yeah, hypertension is incredibly damaging to the brain.

You said there were 12. Yeah. I think we should... Can we go through all of them? We can go through... Yeah. I mean, so those are the ones that I think that are most relevant to diet. Yeah, okay. But I think it's important at this juncture to...

state that diet is not the only, nutrition is not the only variable here. So I'll never know what caused my mom's dementia, unfortunately, although it's an investigation that's going to continue on through the rest of my life. But nutrition is one slice of the pie. And so among the modifiable risk factors, you have non-nutrition related issues.

risk factors such as exposure to excessive air pollution on a chronic basis, which as of the 2020 Lancet Commission on Dementia was finally acknowledged as being a risk factor for the development of dementia.

We've seen studies run in, for example, Mexico City, where they've seen pathological changes that are associated with Alzheimer's disease in the cadavers of adolescents and children. You know, people who have died in Mexico City, who have been exposed over the course of their lives to, you know, excessive levels of air pollution, like fine particulate matter, PM2.5, for example, that they see...

an undue aggregate of amyloid beta, for example, which is the protein that forms the plaques that is one of the defining characteristics. Is that an inflammatory consequence too or does anybody know? - Yes. - It is? Yeah, there's an inflammatory consequence, there's a cardiovascular consequence to being exposed to air pollution. With regard to your cardiovascular system, we know that what's good for the heart is good for the brain. And conversely, what's bad for the heart is bad for the brain. And so, air pollution plays a major role.

An area that I think is incredibly exciting, also very scary, but ultimately empowering, is looking at certain environmental pollutants like certain industrial solvents. For example, there's a compound that there's another fantastic neurologist who has become a friend and colleague, and I think his work is incredibly important. His name is Ray Dorsey, Dr. Ray Dorsey. He's a University of Rochester neurologist.

who has done a lot of work exposing the link between exposure to certain chemical solvents that are still widely being used in the United States, like trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene and the etiology of Parkinson's disease and related conditions like Lewy body dementia, which is the condition that my mom suffered from.

And so we know that, you know, what we breathe, what we eat, these are all having an impact on our health. But now the evidence is really starting to emerge that, you know,

That the brain is not, you know, does not sit in this privileged ivory tower where it's immune somehow to, you know, what it is that we're eating and the compounds that we're, you know, inhaling. The brain sits directly downwind of, you know, a lot of the insults that are being waged by modern life, modern living, you know, the...

the trappings of modern society come at a cost. And we're starting to see that they now are likely having an impingement in our collective brain health. So, you know, one of these compounds, trichloroethylene, which I just referenced, is still being used to spot clean in dry cleaning applications. And it's an incredibly volatile compound. It readily evaporates. It easily, you know, infiltrates groundwater, water,

Obviously, occupational exposure to these compounds is really bad. But there have been a small handful of epidemiologic studies that show that exposure to a compound like TCE, for example, is associated with a 500% increased risk of the development of Parkinson's disease. This is a compound that was used medically up until the 70s. It was used with, you know,

to decaffeinate coffee. It was used as an anesthetic for pregnant women. It's still being used as a metal degreaser. And again, it's used to spot clean in dry cleaning applications. Now I'm skeptical of all my suits. Yeah, well, you definitely want to not dry clean or at least make sure that the dry cleaner that you're using is a quote-unquote green dry cleaner because...

I think they'll be less likely to be using these kinds of compounds. But it's really scary stuff. My mom was somebody who worked in the garment industry in New York City. And so she likely was exposed to these kinds of compounds on a regular basis.

Certain herbicides and pesticides we know are occupationally linked to these kinds of conditions like Parkinson's disease. We breathe them in through our nose, right? They don't undergo the same degree of detoxification as an ingested compound. They can very easily bypass the blood-brain barrier. They access the olfactory bulb. Actually, a decline in sense of smell

is one of the earliest features of a preclinical feature of cognitive decline, dementia, and even Parkinsonism. And so, you know, as far as these conditions are, these compounds are in our environment, I think that that's, you know, on the one hand, it's very scary, but it's also empowering. The more awareness that we can have about reducing our exposure to these compounds, I think it's crucially important.

So that's, you know, that's another of the modifiable risks. Yeah, that's on the toxic exposure side. Yeah, which I think is incredibly important. My second book, The Genius Life, was really, you know, looked at that or, you know... How much of an overlap do you think there is between the dietary risk and the toxic exposure risk? Because obviously, well, and we'll get into this after we're done this section of the conversation, but obviously...

There's the carbohydrate, diabetes, obesity link, but then there's food toxicity link too. Yeah. Because lots of things that we think are edible would rather not be eaten and they have

Well, I mean, I've known for years that the typical plant, people are worried about the pesticides that are on plants, and fair enough, but they're not nearly as worried about the pesticides that are in plants, and there are plenty of them because, well, plants don't like being eaten by bugs, and most of them aren't that happy about being eaten by us either. And so they have got very potent chemical defenses, and they're not trivial. And I've wondered, because of my experiences with diet, I mean,

I lost a lot of weight because of the diet that I'm on, and I kept it off. And that's quite the bloody miracle. That's for sure. It's really something to... Like, I weigh what I weighed when I was in my 20s. You know, that's really something when you're 62. It's like, what the hell? Who knew that was possible? And I have about the same bodily composition that I did when I was in my 20s. And some of that's obviously from not eating carbohydrates, but...

There are other improvements that I've experienced that have made me wonder. Like I had psoriasis. It's gone. And some of the psoriasis patches had lasted literally decades. And they're gone. And I think, oh, well, I was obviously eating something that was causing that. Is that carbohydrate linked? Who the hell knows? But is it food toxicity linked or immunological? Allergic? I don't know.

Well, I think that most people, and this is where the whole, you know, the debate about the carnivore diet and all that, I think, becomes really interesting. You know, a robust organism such as yourself should be able to consume some of these plant, quote unquote, defense compounds and garner a degree of, you know, additional strength in so doing, right?

There's this notion of hormesis where, you know, low doses of a certain stressor, you know, or toxicant, if you will, might actually cause a response in the system that actually leads to an up-leveling of robustness, of vigor, of strength. Pharmacon means something like a little bit of the poison that kills you, cures you. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

And so that's where I think if you have a robust, for example, gut microbiome, you know, I think that most people should be able to derive value from these kinds of compounds. Yeah, well, that's the theory. I mean, when you look at the average health state of the typical person, it makes you wonder, right? And I've...

wondered how far down the rabbit hole you have to go to get to the bottom given how obese people are and well what I've seen as the consequences of a relatively radical dietary shift so well that's obviously one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you today let's let's turn then we went through quite a few of the modifiable risk factors let's turn from that if that's okay unless there's any others that you'd like to specifically highlight we could turn to that

to what you have been, what you found in relationship to diet and what you've been recommending. So are there other ways

modifiable risk factors that you think are worth concentrating on, we went through diet and exposure to pollutants and toxicity. Anything else that's directly relevant? Yeah, well, there's a newly identified risk factor and that is hearing loss. And that's, again, newly identified. So all the research that we need to make clear recommendations other than if you have hearing loss, a hearing aid actually can be a potential boon to health.

Oh, so it's actually the loss of the auditory input and not a correlation between the degeneration of the ear and the degeneration of the brain.

Or maybe both. No, I mean, I think insofar as we know that social isolation, which is in fact another, yeah, you become more and more isolated in your own world. And I think that that's probably harmful. We know that depression is another one. And these estimates are typically conservative. So I said at the onset about 40%, which was the number that was given to

you know, most recently in this 2020 Lancet Commission on Dementia Prevention. But I think that, I think, I think it's very likely that the majority of cases, at least with regard to Alzheimer's disease, and likely also even these Parkinsonian conditions, which

it's becoming increasingly clear that there's an environmental toxic aspect to them. I think that the majority, and this is just my opinion based on my assessment of the literature, are likely preventable. We don't have all the data yet, but I think given what we do currently know, we don't have to sit idly on our hands. For example, there's a class of drugs that are widely being used today on a frequent basis called anticholinergic drugs. And there are too many to list.

But certain allergy medications, sleep aids, over-the-counter sleep aids, we've seen are associated with a starkly increased chronic use or is associated with a starkly increased risk for the development of dementia, which is not something that was considered in this paper. So I do think that most cases are potentially preventable. And another reason why I believe this to be the case is that

Alzheimer's disease is not genetic. We have genetic risk factors, the most well-defined of which being the APOE4 allele, which about one in four people carry. And depending on whether you carry one or two copies of this SNP,

your risk increases anywhere between 2 and 14-fold. But this is not a deterministic gene. So with Alzheimer's disease, 2 to 3% of cases are the early-onset variant or familial, which is deterministic. But the vast majority... You find early-onset. So there's a certain genetic mutation...

that in certain lineages will essentially guarantee that a person develops Alzheimer's disease. But this is a very rare form of it. It's a completely different monster than late-onset sporadic Alzheimer's disease. And similarly with Parkinson's disease, the heritability of Parkinson's disease is incredibly low, 1% to 2% of cases. So these are all conditions that are

I think, mediated in large part by, you know, your environment. You might have a certain genetic, you know, predisposition, but, you know, for the vast majority of people that develop these conditions, it's not due to their genes. It's due to the interplay between their genes and the environment in which they live.

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you know somebody with the apoe4 allele who again in the united states is that seemingly at dramatically increased risk but you might move them to a less industrialized part of the world like ibadon nigeria for example where they've done you know this research or southern italy and you see that risk all but abolished and so it really is about the the genes and where we've you know

where we've tasked these genes, you know, the environment that we've tasked these genes with having to contend with. - Right, right, right. Okay, so let's turn to diet. Now you have these three books and then we don't wanna forget your film either. - Yeah. - Yeah. So these three books in the "Genius Trilogy", "Foods, Life and Kitchen". Let's go, if you think that's reasonable, let's go through them one by one, "Foods, Life and Kitchen". So foods, so what were you outlining in that book?

Yeah, so, you know, I think my approach has never been to demonize foods, certainly not whole foods.

But with Genius Foods, I... You should tell people what a whole food is just so they know. Yeah, so whole foods don't have extensive ingredients lists. They are the ingredients. So these are the foods that you tend to find around the perimeter of the supermarket, right? As you alluded to, it's the aisles of the supermarket. Stay away from the aisles in the supermarket. Yeah, I mean, you could dip in now and then to pick up some nice extra virgin olive oil, which has a ton of evidence in terms of its...

It's brain health benefits. We now have meta-analyses that show that extra virgin olive oil actually has a profoundly anti-inflammatory effect. And it actually shares some of these mechanisms with ibuprofen, which is a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug. But chronic use of that drug coincides with

heightened risk for cardiovascular events, for example. But extra virgin olive oil is essentially, you know, as anti-inflammatory as a low dose of that drug, but without any of the negative side effects, only good. Okay, so you could go to the aisles in the supermarket for extra virgin olive oil. Yeah, vinegars, spices. Spices are actually, few people realize this, but spices, aside from being a, you know, no to low calorie way of jazzing up your food,

are actually some of the most concentrated sources of some of these hormetic compounds, polyphenols and the like, which we believe play a role in health, in supporting a healthy gut microbiome and the like. But yeah, generally you want to focus your shopping around the perimeter of the supermarket. And so I'm a huge advocate of the consumption of whole animal source foods and whole plants, which is a very controversial statement to say today. I don't know why. Why do you think it's controversial?

Well, because we've got billions of dollars of, you know. Right. So it's not controversial. It's just anti-propagandistic. Exactly. Right. With the advertisements being a form of propaganda. Yes. Although they're the capitalist version of propaganda. Yeah. I mean, 73% of the items in your average supermarket are ultra-processed. Right. And so what's the difference between processed and ultra-processed? It's a fantastic and important question. So processing is a continuum.

You take an apple, you slice that apple, you're processing it to some degree. You blend those apple slices in a smoothie, you're processing it even further, right? Ultra-processing, the whole idea of an ultra-processed food, that was actually something, the term was first devised with this nutrient profiling system in Latin America called NOVA.

And an ultra-processed food is essentially a food that you couldn't possibly make in your own kitchen if you tried. Cool whip. Yeah, these are food-like products. Food-like products, that's right. That's a good one. They're sort of like food, except they're not edible. Exactly. Yeah.

I mean, I think like we've gotten to this place in society where we've ceased to be able, seemingly ceased to be able to put empirical definitions around anything. Yeah, yeah. Right? That's what happens when you live in the Tower of Babel. Really, words lose their meaning and everyone speaks a different language. It's incredibly anti-human, right? That's for sure.

And so... Okay, so ultra-processed... Okay, so you couldn't make that in your own kitchen. That's a good rule of thumb. So if you couldn't make it in your own kitchen, then perhaps beware of it or be wary of it. Right. If it comes in a box or a bag and it has, you know...

a shelf life that is years, you know, away. Um, if it doesn't expire, if it doesn't rot. So nothing will eat it except you, then maybe don't eat it. Precisely. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And, you know, I think like a little bit here and there, like, I like to be a pragmatist and, you know, I, um,

I've had the incredible privilege of getting to go on major national media where I get to reach people that still do today live in food deserts, you know? And so I try to temper my message with empathy for, you know, what some people today still in this country have to go through when it comes to finding and accessing and being able to afford even fresh whole food. Right.

Two things. Tell people what a food desert is so everybody knows. And second, do you actually think it's possible to just eat a little bit of ultra-processed foods? Because I'm very curious about that. It isn't obvious to me that... Like, my experience with that has been that it's easy to eat none rather than some. Because the problem with some is that, well, how about some more? Yeah. Right? And that's really...

a vicious conundrum when it comes to high-fat, high-sugar foods. Yeah. Because they're hyper-delicious. Well, this is, yeah, this is where I think the education around this topic is crucially important because people are usually not armed with the knowledge that these foods have a profound impact on your behavior.

So it's seldom informed consent today, right? Because we're told that all foods fit. Food is food. There are no such thing as good or bad foods. Yeah.

All calories are equivalent. Yeah, and so people think that it's a moral failure when they go to the freezer, they take out the pint of ice cream, intending only on having a spoonful, and before they know it, they're looking at the bottom of the pint. It's not due to moral failure. That's what you're programmed to do. And in fact, that's what food scientists are paid lots and lots of money. To make sure you do. To make sure that you do, yeah.

Now, is it possible if you're able to understand the impact that these foods have on your behavior and cultivate a quote-unquote healthy relationship with them? Yeah, I think it's possible, but it's just very difficult. Well, our rule in dietary modification has always been don't have it in the house. Yeah. Right, because you'll eat it, especially if you're hungry.

Precisely. It's like that 90s horror movie, The Gate. I don't know if you're familiar or you saw that movie, but it's like once you open up those floodgates, it becomes really difficult, if not impossible, to pump the brakes. So with regards to

not being able to pump the brakes, let's say. Do you know if, let's take sugar as an example. One of the things I've been curious about, because I know that microorganisms, they're very sneaky little things, and they can affect complex organisms in ways that are in some ways horrifying and unimaginable. And so I wonder, do you know if there's any evidence that a sugar-centered gut biome

contains microorganisms that produce sugar craving? Well, I don't know of any hard evidence, but I would say that it's likely. I mean, we know that the enteric nervous system, the gut communicates with the brain. Yeah. Well, also those organisms would have a distinct advantage. If they could make their host crave what they need to survive, then they're going to live. And there's lots of

evidence that such things are possible in the natural world. Not only possible, but actually quite likely. Yeah, and also your body gets used to what it is that you feed it regularly, and it starts to crave the things that you feed it regularly. Yeah, sure, your appetite. Well, look, you can see that with foods like olives and coffee, and alcohol, I suppose, even. No child likes their first olive, right? You have to cultivate the taste, and it's partly because

So the taste and reward systems are quite interesting in their relationship because each, the satiety system and the reward system are separate from the taste systems, which you can tell because you can eat something to satiety and it still tastes the same, but you don't want it anymore. Now, you could imagine a system where

The more ice cream you eat, the less you can taste it until you can't taste it at all, so you quit. But that's not how it's set up. And the satiety and reward systems are somewhat separate for each taste category. So when people say, well, I still have room for dessert, what they mean is, well, I've satiated the umami system for protein, but not the system for carbohydrates or sugar. And

then that system is also modifiable by learning so that you can learn. It's weird because when you learn to appreciate olives, bitter foods really fall into this category because bitter

They're very difficult to like on first exposure because we don't like bitter things. But once you learn to like them, you really like them. And so that shows you that that's a testament to that modifiability of, well, the taste and the satiety system by experience. And so, of course, your body's going to adapt to what you eat because...

It's obvious why that would be the case. Yeah, and I think that there's a degree of... I mean, this is more your wheelhouse certainly than mine, but somebody who has...

you know, a higher degree of openness, you know, can embrace these more complex flavors. Yeah. Whereas, you know, I still encounter a lot of people today who, you know, adopt, who have adopted and stick to what I call the 12-year-old boy diet, where they're, you know, they really only seemingly can appreciate really simple flavors and mouthfeel. So what would the 12-year-old boy diet be?

French fries and hot dogs? It's kind of like, yeah, French fries, hot dogs, ketchup on everything. It's like the standard American diet, you know, to a T. Right, ketchup on everything. Just things that are like incredibly palatable, no complexity. I think it's a, yeah. Chicken fingers? It makes sense when you're 12 years old, right? Yeah, but I mean, chicken fingers are great. I'm not, you know, I'm not hitting on chicken fingers, although I haven't had a good chicken finger in a long time, because they're usually deep fried in all kinds of, you know,

who knows what these days but um but yeah i think cultivating a a broader palette i think is incredibly important but essentially yeah your body will start to crave what it is that you most routinely feed it and it'll become better at processing those whatever it is those food components happen to be you know so for somebody who's chronically eating you know high a high carbohydrate diet their bodies get better at burning you know glucose for example

Somebody who's on a highly fat-adapted ketogenic diet, for example, they become better at burning fat. And that's why there's this phenomena known as physiologic insulin resistance. For somebody who's on a very low-carbohydrate diet for sustained duration, there is a degree of...

physiologic insulin resistance that occurs where, you know, they'll start to consume, you know, something as innocuous as a bowl of blueberries and they'll see their blood sugar go through the roof. That's not because the blueberries were unhealthy ever. It's just that they, you know, their bodies have become so well adapted to burning fat as a fuel source, you know, at the expense of carbohydrates. Right, right, right, right. Okay. So in your book, your genius book on food,

Does that outline, what does it outline precisely? Obviously, it talks about the difference between

and say ultra processed foods. So those are manufactured foods. - Correct. - So if it's made by a giant corporation and it's in a box. - If it has an ad on TV, likely. - Okay, if it has an ad on TV, oh, that's an interesting market. - Yeah, it's a good heuristic, right? - Yeah, sure, sure. So if it has an ad on TV, avoid it. - Yeah, to the best of your ability.

And so what I tried to do in the Ingenious Foods was highlight the specific foods that I thought that would stand out to me over and over again in the literature as being particularly supportive of brain health, whether it's by way of their nutrient density or by way of the, we'll say, prevalence of certain phytochemicals, which have shown to be particularly supportive of brain health, for example.

And this is something that I think I really broke the news on with Genius Foods was the role of dietary carotenoids. So these are plant pigments.

that actually also accumulate in animal tissue. For example, in the beef of a grass-fed, grass-finished cow, you see an abundance of carotenoids, which gives the hue of the fat tissue of that marbling in a piece of a grass-fed steak, for example. It's a different hue. It's slightly more orange in color, similar to a pastured egg yolk. You see a higher prevalence of these carotenoid compounds, which we know are

Well, we've known for decades at this point play a role in supporting eye health. So certain carotenoids like lutein and zeaxanthin can help prevent... Are those in golden rice? Um...

I think beta-carotene...

Interestingly, many people are not as good at converting provitamin A to retinol in the body. I still think it's a great source of vitamin A, but provitamin A...

and ultimately retinol, but yeah, vitamin A is naturally found in animal source foods like egg yolks. Okay, so a diverse range of colorful whole foods. Yes. Plants and animals. Ever heard of a data broker? They're the middlemen collecting and selling all those digital footprints you leave online. They can stitch together detailed profiles which include your browsing history, online searches, and location data.

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Say that again. I think that red meat is a health food. And I'm not like, you know, and this is an opinion that I've established based on data well before I had any kind of, you know, financial relationship with the kinds of companies who produce the meat that I personally, you know, eat and feed to my family. Yeah. But I think it is an incredibly nutrient-dense food. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, cows go to a lot of work to make it. Yeah. I mean, all those stomachs, right? Right. That they have. Right, absolutely. So that's the right kind of ultra-processing. There you go. Right? It's like nature's form of ultra-processing. And yeah, and so I think that's an incredibly important food. Right, so it's remarkable that that's been demonized. And the thing is, the demonization doesn't quit because for a long time, I suppose, it was driven by idiotism.

quasi-scientists and people who are maneuvering in the same domain as the food pyramid liars. But now the climate people have got a hold of it as well. But for whatever reason, animal-related food, while there's also the ethical issue, which isn't trivial, I would say, you know, that's not something that can be easily ignored or should be. But...

But red meat is definitely the target of propagandists continually. And that's really not good if it turns out that it's actually useful, like seriously useful for us.

And we have what? What's the FDA recommended daily allowance? RDA for carbohydrates? There's no RDA for carbohydrates. Yeah, there's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. Right. Which is really, that's something to be said repeatedly. Yeah. Because that's really kind of shocking. It is. We have a daily requirement for certain essential fats, certain fatty acids like omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. Yeah.

Proteins. Protein is massively important. Yeah. There's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate, which is to say that you shouldn't eat them. Right. But it's very strange that that's not essential. Correct. And also, I mean, you look at the data and beef consumption in the United States has declined over the past few decades. It's on a downward slope. And...

And yet we continue to blow up. We get sicker, we get more obese, and it's a whole food at the very least. It's a pristine source of dietary protein. It comes concurrent with all kinds of nutrients that we know play a role in good health. I mean, it's actually, I mean, it is a source of phytonutrients. Most people don't realize this, but the phytonutrients that a cow ingests makes its way into the tissue of that animal just as it does us.

creatine, taurine, carnitine, carnosine. I mean, these are all, I think, really important nutrients and it continues to be demonized. Some people will say, oh, well, it's a source of saturated fat.

It's fascinating that 3% of the saturated fat that your average American consumes comes from steak. The vast majority comes from what are called mixed dishes, ultra-processed foods, dairy, which is actually, even full-fat dairy is neutral, if not beneficial from a cardiovascular health standpoint.

I mean, and so, yeah, I think the demonization of red meat is a real shame and it's a big problem. And the evidence that's used to demonize it is incredibly weak. Right, right, right. As is most nutritional science. Most. Stunningly weak. Stunningly weak. Yeah, yeah. Correlational studies in the field of nutrition are not helpful. No. And the other studies...

where you could infer causality, they're unbelievably difficult to do. It's hard to get people to modify their diet and to stick to it. And yeah, it's very difficult research to do. So I can understand why they default to correlation studies, but they're not helpful. Too many variables. Those are the kinds of studies that make up our dietary guidelines. I mean, those are the kinds of studies that again and again, you know, implore us to consume grains at every meal. And I think, you know, it's just...

Do grains qualify as a whole food? Well, certainly the form in which they are most frequently consumed today, absolutely not. Most people today, you know, the form of grains which most people consume are refined grains. Muffins. Yeah, exactly. Right. Health cake. And even if you were to go to Google Images and look at the image of the food pyramid, which thankfully has been retired, you know, what it's been replaced by is, you know, I would say not that much better. Yeah. Although it is an improvement. But, I mean, it was literally the illustrated form

USDA food permit, it was like pasta. It was like loaves of bread. Yeah. Like you're telling me that that's essential for good health, that I need to be eating seven to 11 servings of this on a daily basis. And so if you actually look at what a grain is, I mean, you know, most grains today actually in the supermarket are fortified because they're so nutrient impoverished.

that they have to have added nutrients, nutrients added to them to make them serve any sort of dietary value at all. But they're essentially pure, it's essentially pure energy. It's cattle feed. Now, I'm not saying that grains can't play a supportive role to health. I mean, certainly you look at, you know, for example, bodybuilders who are in fantastic physical shape. You know, it's not, they do, you know,

you know, many of them on social media, the more prominent ones, do use performance-enhancing drugs. But, I mean, grains can be used to facilitate exercise performance and the like. And I think if you... Well, and you can say, too, like, socially speaking, you know, the first order problem that our society had to contend with was getting everyone enough calories. Yeah. Right? And...

you could see some utility in generating cheap calories. I often think about corn syrup in that regard. Corn syrup is a very cheap source of calories. But when the problem is obesity and not starvation, corn syrup seems like a very bad solution. Correct. And so, you know, I'm willing to give the Department of Agriculture, let's say, its credit for assuming that, or for

ensuring that calories per se are in plentiful supply, which is the case. But man, we're paying a vicious price for it on the other side of it.

Yeah, well, I mean, we live amidst the first time in human history where there are more overweight people walking the earth than underweight. Right, right, right. And so we've solved the food scarcity problem. I mean, you'd be hard-pressed to find anybody in a state of energy deficit today in the Western world. Yeah. And increasingly in the developed world, except when that's used for political... Like, most of the starvation, in particular, in the developed world is purposeful, not...

the consequence of economic inadequacy, right? It's targeted. And so, yeah, and that's a good thing that we solved that problem. But-

But these problems are not trivial either. Yeah. And they're getting worse. Correct. And I'm not saying that grains cause, you know, Alzheimer's disease. That's never been my stance. But, you know, we do have to look at this as a food quality problem. And grains, I don't believe, are, you know, particularly when you have all these other options in the supermarket, like grass-fed, grass-finished beef, wild fatty fish, salmon, for example, sardines, eggs. You know, eggs are one of nature's

cognitive multivitamins. A study was just published that found that, you know, just consuming- They were demonized too. They were demonized too, yeah. And interestingly, and this is, again, and to preface, I'll never, just to reiterate, I'll never know what caused my mom's dementia. I don't know if it had anything to do with nutrition. It could have had everything to do with nutrition. I don't know. I'll never know. But, you know, my mom was somebody who, for the entirety of her life, was concerned about heart disease. And so whatever the messaging was around heart disease is something that my mom adopted and

and ingrained essentially in not just her diet, but my diet growing up. And so, you know, my kitchen was always filled with, you know, low fat, fat free, cholesterol free food.

food-like products that had adorned by the Red Heart Healthy logo on them, which you still see ubiquitously in the supermarket, right? And eggs were one of those foods that we threw out essentially in lieu of these more, you know, processed high margin replacement products. And, and,

And an egg is literally a cognitive multivitamin. I mean, it contains a little bit of everything required to grow a brain, right? So it's postmarked by nature. You know, this is here. This is what you need to grow a brain in an egg yolk, right? Even if it's a chicken brain. Even if it's a chicken brain. Yeah. But studies are now starting to show that they're an incredible cognitive multivitamin. A study was just published that found that, you know, all it takes is one to two eggs a week in this one study.

And there was something like a 50% risk, close to a 50% risk reduction for the development of Alzheimer's disease. Wow. We know that choline is one of the most important nutrients. In fact, about 40% of the effect that they saw in this observational trial, they thought was attributed to the fact that egg yolks are the top source of choline in the standard American diet.

And yet 90% of adults today don't consume the adequate intake for choline on a daily basis. So that's the consequence of demonizing eggs. There you go. You demonize eggs. Great. 90% of adults don't consume adequate choline, which is crucially important. It's the backbone to acetylcholine, which is the neurotransmitter involved in learning and memory, right? Yeah.

It forms the, you know, skeleton molecule of our neuronal membranes, which are crucially important for our, you know, brain cell communication, our ability to perceive the world. So it's a fantastic food. And, you know, I remember when my mom first served me, you know, that egg, my first egg, she was like, you know, she warned me not to consume them with any, you know, significant frequency because they might clog my arteries. Right.

And we know the dietary cholesterol for the vast majority of people. Well, the data was there a long time ago showing that this... I knew this in like the 1980s. The decreased risk of heart disease reported as a consequence of cholesterol lowering was swamped by the increase in suicide that was caused by the fact that cholesterol is a precursor to serotonin. So...

Even if fewer people died of heart attacks, which is probably not true anyways, more people committed suicide. So,

That's part of the problem with the complexity of dietary studies, right? You need to control for a lot of variables and you need to measure a lot of outcomes. Yeah. But with these observational studies, I mean, there's always residual confounding. Yes, always. There's no way of controlling it. There's no way. No, no. You can't do correlational dietary studies. Yeah, you just can't. No, no. They should never be published. Yeah, I mean, I'm pro...

You know, that's a flag that I've planted, no pun intended. Yeah. But it's not hard to imagine a world where all of the mountains of evidence that we have observationally looking at how fruits and vegetables impact human health, the positive effects that we see at the epidemiologic scale...

that that could potentially be a false positive because everybody and their mother knows that fruits and vegetables are good for you, right? And eating fresh fruits and vegetables today is an incredible privilege in a time when, you know, 60% of the calories come from these ultra-processed foods. It can be really difficult to find access to fresh fruits and vegetables, right? I mean, we do have RCT data showing us that there are beneficial compounds. I've talked about some of the phytochemicals in it.

But conversely, red meat, it's also very easy. Okay, so let's talk about that a bit because I was, obviously, at some point, we're going to get into the issue of the carnivore diet. Yeah. And so, I guess the first thing I'd say is, and you're making some allusion to it now, obviously, what are your thoughts about the carnivore diet and its potential advantages and dangers?

I think, I mean, I think it's potentially a great therapeutic diet for people that have, you know, a predisposition to autoimmunity. Yeah, okay. And it's not something that I would ever behold anybody.

Here's the other thing is that diet zealots, particularly today on social media, they seem to be very emotionally invested in what other people eat. I don't care ultimately what other people eat. Yeah. I feel the same way about that, you know, at, say, a moral level. Right. But like you, you want people to be able to make informed decisions, not decisions clouded by what I call covert activism. Right. Or overt activism for that matter. Yeah. Yeah.

Or, you know, misinformation or disinformation about what it means to eat healthily today. Ultimately, I don't care. You know, if somebody wants to. Otherwise known as lies. Yes, precisely. So, yeah, I mean, I would, for people that have seen a reprieve of symptoms from some of these awful conditions that people suffer from. Yeah. Like, keep doing it. Yeah. Yeah.

I think that for somebody with a robust gut microbiome who, you know, I think people should be able to tolerate and not just tolerate, but to derive, you know, a health benefit from, you know, many of these so-called plant defense compounds, you know, even cruciferous vegetables, which have become demonized in certain carnivore circles, you know.

due to certain glucosinolate compounds or compound like sulforaphane, which there are actual randomized human trials that show that these compounds can actually help us detoxify from some of these environmental pollutants that we know play a role in disease.

Obviously, you can get a certain dose, if you will, of phytochemicals from eating animal-sourced foods. But carotenoids like lutein and zeaxanthin, which we know are very beneficial to brain health, you're not going to find a better source of them in the supermarket than kale, for example, which people love to hate on. But foods like kale, spinach, dark leafy greens, cruciferous vegetables, I think that

I do think that for most people, the benefits outweigh the risks. If an elimination diet where you remove all fruits and vegetables for a time helps, I think that's amazing. Well, that's a good, useful thing to discuss procedurally. I mean, when we were trying to address my daughter's...

immunological problems, which my wife was on at a very early stage because she intuited that there was a dietary relationship, but it turned out to be so complex. I mean, we couldn't have possibly imagined that

eating nothing but meat was the solution. Like who in the hell is going to ever think that? I knew that fasting was a reliable treatment for arthritis. And that's well documented in literature. Virtually everyone who's arthritic, if they fast, they go into remission. But then when they start eating, the symptoms come back. And so, well, and maybe that's not true. If all they start eating again is red meat, but those studies hadn't been done and still haven't been as far as I know. Um,

We had tried Michaela on some different elimination diets, but they made no sense. Like the food classes that were eliminated and kept seemed random to me. And well, and to Tammy and to Michaela. And she started to experiment. They started to experiment with more radical elimination diets and by trial and error. And also because of Sean Baker came to experiment with only beef, which worked.

And so, you know, and we've talked to hundreds or maybe thousands of people now who've tried variants of the carnivore diet and had radical, especially weight loss transformations. Like I talk to people at my lectures all the time who are, they're shell shocked because they've lost like 150 pounds in 18 months. And so they're not even the same people physically. And while they're happy about it, obviously, but also completely different.

They're shocked by the fact that that worked. Now, I would say, and you tell me what you think about this, is that if you are suffering from chronic health conditions, especially if you're also overweight...

An elimination diet is worth trying on the off chance that something you're eating is causing your symptoms, because who knows? And the simplest elimination diet is obviously just beef. Yeah. Right? So why not go down to one variable? And if it doesn't work, like we've talked to many people, and I know people say, well, anecdotes aren't data. It's like,

No, but they're hypotheses. Yeah. And many of the same anecdotes start to look a lot like data. So anyways, we've talked to many people who've reported remission of their diabetic or arthritic symptoms within two weeks of an only beef diet. And so we are thinking that it's more like three months is a good trial. And if it doesn't work, well, okay, the loss is...

some restriction for three months and that's about it. And it's not like it's easy. I'm not saying that. And you may suffer some complications in the transition to the new and more restrictive diet, but you can live on just beef. So like what the hell, if you're half dead and radically overweight, three months isn't much of a risk. And so I'm wondering what do you think about that line?

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Beef is an incredibly nutrient-dense food. It's highly satiating. Yes. It's loaded with protein, obviously. You're restricting the consumption of large swaths of the most problematic foods accessible to a modern human today. And so it doesn't surprise me that at least in the short term, you're going to see an improvement. Yeah, yeah.

And so I guess my question is, and I think Sean Baker is very smart. Yeah. But I had him on my podcast recently and I posed this question to him. Like, you're performing already at such a high level on beef and I don't doubt that you're healthy. You seem healthy. Yeah, he's quite the monster. Yeah, and I'm not going to gaslight somebody who's on, you know, a carnivore diet and asserting that they're thriving on it. Yeah. Like, who am I to say that you're not, right? Yeah, right. But, you know,

My question to him was like, okay, so you've established that this diet is working well for you. Why not add in some of these foods that we know have compounds that might... Be lacking in beef. Yeah, or might give you an additional benefit. For example, an all-meat diet might not have...

very particularly high levels of magnesium, which we know plays hundreds of roles in the body, right? Everything from repairing DNA damage to energy synthesis. It's a cofactor that is required in the synthesis of ATP, for example. Some of these carotenoid compounds that I mentioned earlier. Those are definitely open questions. Yeah, maybe you're getting a small amount of them

in your meat-only diet, right? But maybe a little bit more might give you an additional cognitive. And we're just playing like nutritionism here with these like individual nutrients that have been studied that I can reference that I know about. But there are swaths of nutrients

in the plant kingdom that, you know, have been identified as playing, as having a potential benefit to human health. Yeah. Even something as innocuous as white rice, right? Where it's had all the anti-nutrients sloughed off, right? Like for somebody who's, you know, such a physical specimen as he is, like maybe adding some carbohydrates into that system, you know, so that you get a little bit of additional glycogen in the tank before, you know, because he's still trying to like break records. Yeah, right. As a madman. Right, right. The best possible way. Yeah.

maybe that might serve an adaptive purpose. So I can understand that. I guess my criticism of that, to the degree that a criticism is warranted, is it's extremely complex to...

And this contradicts to some degree something I said earlier, you know, that you could reduce to a carnivore diet and then add back. It's very complicated to add back, right? You really have to think like a scientist and you have to be very disciplined, you know, to experiment with one thing at a time in addition. And then also to figure out

Well, how do you know if it's helping? Like, what's your measure? And over what time frame? You know, so like I've tried to add things back to my... I added salmon back to my diet. And it turned out that it made me anxious. And I have no idea why. And it's a pretty robust effect. And it took a fair while to manifest itself. And so you have these terrible complex problems with adding things back, which is...

Well, maybe if you added phytonutrients, for example, of the sort that you were describing, it would take a month to see a difference. And it would be hard to measure except in certain circumstances. So, like, how do you know? And that's the problem with any scientific investigation. And the advantage to just eating beef is that it's really...

It's simple, right? It's like, no, just do this. And it wouldn't surprise me at all if there would be ways of... It might surprise me, but I could imagine that there would be ways of improving your diet beyond what you would get with merely meat. But man, it really... It's a conundrum to figure out how to go about doing that. Yeah. Well...

The other thing that I think is important is that there's really no, there's no such, nutrition isn't a hat. There's no such thing as a one size fits all pattern that's going to work for everybody.

And, you know, in your family, you obviously have, you know, you have these health concerns, which I think are important to acknowledge and to, you know, and to recognize that you're a scientist and you've, you know, you've done the work and you've found this one diet, this diet that works for you. Yes, kicking and screaming all the way. And I think that's amazing. But, you know, for somebody who...

who is not immunologically compromised, right? And who was born vaginally and who didn't take a ton of antibiotics growing up and was breastfed and who hasn't traveled all around the world and had infections and surgeries and things like that, that these are all like it's death by a thousand cuts today.

And so you throw into that milieu chronic sedentary lifestyles, which you know has a negative impact on the gut microbiome. We know that obviously an ultra-processed food diet has a negative impact on the gut microbiome. All of these industrial chemical additives also are playing a role. We've lost resilience in the gut, I think. And that's why so many of us do seem to do better, seemingly, on these incredibly restrictive diets.

elimination diets, right? Well, we've changed our cooking habits dramatically too. I mean, slow rising yeast doesn't produce the same bread as fast rising yeast, right? Because it has a longer time to break down the gluten, for example. And so a lot of the traditional ways of cooking things that made them edible have been replaced by rapid, cheap, which is advantageous, factory mechanisms, but

you know, we have no idea what we left behind in consequence. And so it may also have been that 40 years ago or 50 years ago, when people were cooking more traditionally, things were a lot more edible than they are now. Now, I would also say, I don't know what you think about this, like, because I don't know the science in this. You know, as the world is urbanized and as the cultures have mixed, a much more diverse range of food products have become available. Now,

You might say that was advantageous, but I also wonder about that because, you know, I noticed, for example, when I moved from Montreal to Boston, I developed allergies. Well, I developed allergies to oak leaf mold. There was no oak leaves and no oak leaf mold in Canada, not any place I had been. And so I moved somewhere that was a completely different environment and I was not immunologically prepared for it. I just, I guess I wonder too, is it possibly a consequence of the fact that

we can eat so many diverse things that weren't available before? You know, people would have had their traditional diet and really not strayed beyond that. Like I can remember, certainly I can remember the first time I had Mexican food, you know, I was probably 16 or 17 and that was a real foreign cuisine, which is a,

strange thing to contemplate. Now, I kind of grew up on German, English, and Ukrainian food, right? And certainly, Chinese food was also foreign and not common. We had a Chinese restaurant in this little town I grew up in, but that certainly wasn't a staple. So,

I know that in principle, hunter-gatherers had quite a diverse range of food products at their disposal, but they would have been eating those habitually from day one. They wouldn't have been introducing new foods along the way. So do you have any thoughts on that? Do you know anything about that? Well, what grows together goes together, typically. Yeah, right. And yeah, but I don't think as a species we would have made it this far had we not been as incredibly resilient people

and adaptable as we are capable of being. Right. You know, I think... We've never had to live in factories, though. Yeah, that's for sure. Yeah, yeah. That's an environmental novelty. Yeah. So I do think that there is...

We're meant to be resilient. The idea that so many of us, statistically, you take 100 people and you feed them each a peanut, one or two of them is going to die from a peanut. I think that that's a maladaptation. And I think it's probably due to the fact that we're doing many things wrong. Yeah.

And so... So, okay. So tell me what happened with your mother. And then tell me how you eat. Yeah. Well, you know, she... It was really sad. She, for eight years, struggled with Lewy body dementia. And for most of that time, I was there with her, just a concerned son trying to do what I could to help improve things. But one of the earliest insights that I...

was able to glean from the literature, which is, I think, counterintuitive, and most people are completely unaware of this, is that, you know, as we alluded to earlier, these conditions don't begin overnight. They take decades to manifest. So, you know, essentially, dementia and many of these kinds of conditions that are now saddling modern society, these are diseases of midlife with symptoms that appear in late life. But by the time you're diagnosed with dementia, I mean, you're essentially in

the late stage of that disease. Right, right, yeah. And that's why Alzheimer's drug trials have a 99.6% fail rate because you're trying to treat the condition, you know, well past the point at which, you know, a simple, you know, pharmacological solution is going to have any sort of practical impact. Right, so even if, the thing is, is that at that point, even if the drug stops the disease cold,

a tremendous amount of damage has already been done. Already done. So, it not only have to stop it, it would have to heal it. Yeah, I mean... And that's hard with neural tissue. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, how are you going to get back the 50% of dopamine-producing neurons, you know, in the substantia nigra? Right, right. Like, you're just not. And with Alzheimer's disease, by the time, you know, a person is diagnosed...

One of the salient features of Alzheimer's disease is what's called glucose hypometabolism. So this plays into the type 3 diabetes, as it's been termed, that by the time you're diagnosed with the condition, your brain's ability to derive energy, to create energy from glucose, which is its primary fuel substrate, is diminished by about 50%. And the brain is a ravenous consumer of glucose. Right.

it makes up 25% of your basal metabolic rate, despite only accounting for 2% to 3% of your body's mass. So it's a ravenous consumer of energy. And so any power outage in that organ is going to lead to failure. And so by the time you're diagnosed, that's already starkly diminished. And so, yeah, it wasn't really positive. I mean, in every doctor's office, what I experienced with my mom, I've come to call diagnose and adios.

And, you know, a physician would essentially prescribe a new drug or titrate up the dose of something that you were already on, but minimally effective, if effective at all. And by the time my mom passed in 2018, she was on 14 different pharmaceuticals. Right, right, right. And there's no physician on earth who can predict the way these 14 different drugs... No, definitely not. Not even two? Probably not even two. Yeah. Certainly not 14. Not even God knows. Yeah.

And so the level of toxicity, right? Yeah. Which isn't to say if there was that blockbuster drug that came along that I wouldn't be first in line at that time to fill that prescription for my mom. But it's just very unlikely to be the case. In fact, there's all kinds of fraud within the field of Alzheimer's drug research that came out a couple of years ago, which is something that was incredibly disheartening.

There was a paper published in 2006, for example, that was completely fraudulent. Finally, actually, over the past week, in fact, they finally are pulling that paper. They're retracting the paper. But it was a paper that renewed interest or renewed the funding pipeline for this drug target, the amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer's disease, where, you know,

They, in 2006, a researcher at the University of Minnesota, basically what he did was he identified, he claimed to have identified this subtype of amyloid that was responsible for the cognitive decline, which was a big sort of the missing link, essentially connecting this really druggable target, right? The amyloid beta plaque that accumulates in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease and

and drug research, he claimed to have found it in this 2006 paper, you know, which had subsequently been referenced thousands of times in the medical literature, you know, continued to, you know, foment this, like, the glut of research money, you know, going down this amyloid hypothesis pipeline for Alzheimer's drug research, which was completely fraudulent. That paper is now finally being retracted. God. But that's, it's just like, that's the situation, you know? Yeah.

And so it was, you know, incredibly disheartening. I tried to, I did get my mom on an exercise regimen, which I thought was helpful at the very least in terms of lifting her spirits, but I think probably played a role in slowing the progression of the disease somewhat.

And with Parkinson's condition, you know, exercise is important for everybody, essentially. It's important for people with Alzheimer's disease, mild cognitive impairment, any form of dementia, really. But with Parkinson's disease, there seems to be really good data there. But ultimately, nothing really helped, you know. And so it was really sad. And then Labor Day of 2018, my mom was actually diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and passed away three months later. So this is where I think...

Part of what separates me from, I think, other people in the space is that the degree of sickness that I've seen firsthand, profound. And it occurred to the person who meant the most to me of anybody in the world. And I saw up close and personal the dearth of treatment options, the diagnose and adios of it all. And I was very privileged in the sense that I grew up in New York City.

I got to go to cathedrals, to Western Medicine, the Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, NYU, Columbia. I mean, I've been to them all with my mom. And it became so important. Once I learned that these conditions take decades to foment, it became so important to me. The most important thing in my life to evangelize this science, because I think it's so... So what should people do to learn what you know and what they should do relatively rapidly? Yeah.

Well... Your books. Yeah, I think... Which... Is there one in particular? Genius Foods is a nutritional care manual to the brain. It's an encyclopedia of... You know, and there's... And it was... It came out six years ago. There's not much that I would change in the book. Maybe a few tweaks here and there. But in general, the science has really stood the test of time. Okay. Which was my intent in writing the book. And...

And so, yeah, it really is everything that a person needs to know. But from a high level, Little Empty Boxes, my documentary, this is the first documentary ever to tackle dementia through the lens of prevention. And so anybody who's ever experienced dementia, they're going to find incredible solace in the film and seeing what it was in my family. And where can they get access to Little Empty Boxes?

So it's available for pre-order now at littleemptyboxes.com. Okay, littleemptyboxes.com. Do you want to just run over the description of the film for us? Yeah. And tell us what... Of course. How you made it, why? Well, we know why, but what's the film about? What will it offer people? So this is the... Okay, here's Kathy Luglia. Good morning, everybody. I just clipped some coupons that I'm going to never use. I'm going to kiss my son, Max, right now, who's holding the camera.

How's mom? It's like her brain has low RAM. Do you remember what the date is today? Um... Well, how about the month? No. We know that Alzheimer's disease starts in the brain at least 20 to 30 years before the first symptom of memory loss. The million dollar question, actually probably the trillion dollar question is, why do people get Alzheimer's disease?

The rates of Alzheimer's have skyrocketed. What did we change? The federal government in 1980 starts its guidelines. You take away butter, meat, dairy, eggs, cheese, all those things you ate. What do you eat on your plate? What's left? The brain only takes as much sugar as it needs. The overall problem is inflammation. Inflammation burns. What happens in Alzheimer's is you have low inflammation, but chronic low inflammation.

This is the aisle of food-like products. Diet, stress, sleep, toxins, all these things have a huge impact. The question is, how far gone are you before it's irreversible? I hope I'm a good mother. You're an okay mother. I need to go back and be closer with my mom. I don't want really to take so many x-rays. Get me out of here.

The best way to explain the inexplicable is to compare the human genome as a piano with 23,000 notes. You need to track 300 of these 23,000 notes to play the song "Alzheimer". It's not destiny that you develop this. Diseases like Alzheimer's start long before the symptoms are seen. The question is, what are you going to do about it? You've done all the tests.

But it's not enough. You've got to be there to help me. Ma, he said you still got it. You still got it. You still do. There they are in the park for the first time. So now it's really up to us. So we'll do our best. So this project is the first thing that I ever did in this space. And this is before I had the knowledge that led to subsequently my books, my podcast. I have a podcast called The Genius Life.

The documentary is a time capsule of me just being a terrified son, doing whatever is humanly possible in the realm of diet, lifestyle, initiating this investigation that ultimately would become my life's work, but to try to help my mom. And it's an incredible, I think, experience.

human interest story. It's something that I think anybody who's ever had a sick loved one will relate to. And it's mostly a peak, a very intimate peak into what it's like to not just have dementia, but to be a caregiver.

And it also, with very broad strokes, paints what a roadmap towards prevention might look like. I see, I see. So it's not a, it doesn't provide easy answers, a one-size-fits-all solution. It's not one of these diet documentaries that's like promoting an agenda. It's just like, let's get back to reason and common sense when it comes to diet and undo a lot of these mistruths that we've been force-fed, no pun intended, you know,

you know, over the past few decades that has really, in many ways, affected us all. You know, it's affected us all. I mean, it's in grains. Oh, definitely. Here's another point. It's in grains. God only knows how it's affected us because we don't know how erratic a population that's radically unhealthy will become. Yeah. Right. And we may well find out. Yeah. And we're all getting older. I mean, the oldest millennial now is in their 40s, right? So this is a, this is, now is the time.

And so it's a film that I think really, I think reveals what is, I think, the most important question of our time. And yeah, I think it's the most important project I've ever done. All right. And it's available for pre-order. When does it launch? June 27th. June 27th. Well, good luck with that. Thank you so much. Yes. Yes. Thank you very much for talking to me today. You're the man. Yeah. Much appreciated. Much appreciated. And so the Genius Trilogy?

The podcast is Genius Life, and the new documentary is Little Empty Boxes. That'll be out closer to the third week of June. Yep, June 27th. Yeah, well, good luck with that. Seriously. And for everybody watching and listening, we'll continue this discussion on the Daily Wire side of the platform, of the podcast. And, well, I'm going to talk to Max a bit more about the development of his interest over time. I think that's what we'll focus on. And so...

If you're inclined, join us there. Thank you very much for your time and attention. Thank you to the film crew here in Washington, D.C. That's where we are today. On the stage at the Museum of the Bible, as it turns out, which is a very cool museum, a testament to the book that spread literacy around the world, right? And that was really the prototype for books as such. So if you're in D.C., give the Museum of the Bible a go.

It's well worth the time. It's a beautiful building as well. Award-winning building. Beautifully designed. So, and Max, thanks again for coming today and for coming here in person. That's much appreciated. To all of you watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention.

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