Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz1q2gqcYp8
[Music] what's up max how are you what up thanks for having me to meet you same i've enjoyed your content online so it's exciting to meet you in person thank you i'm glad to hear that so you were telling me before we got rolling i said save it let's just talk about it what did this uh alzheimer's thing that you're doing what are you doing yeah so i've been deeply immersed in the in the alzheimer's dementia prevention world for the past almost almost decade at this point um i'm not a just to lay it out up front i'm not a medical doctor i didn't take the academic route um i started college sort of on a pre-med track but what ended up happening was i ended up going into journalism straight out of college and i ended up working for a tv network in the u.s that was backed by al gore back in the day and so i got to hone my storytelling chops there but i had always been really passionate about health nutrition medicine things like that but in 2011 my my mother started to display the earliest symptoms of what would ultimately be diagnosed as a form of dementia called lewy body dementia which is a rare form of dementia robin williams had that yeah yeah terrible condition it's uh it's described as as feeling like having like you have both alzheimer's disease and parkinson's disease at the same time and certainly that's what i what i observed in my mom and so when she started to display those symptoms um it had taken me and my family completely off guard i had no prior family history of any kind of neurodegenerative condition my mom certainly wasn't old at the time she was 58 she was still you know a spirited youthful woman in middle age she had all the pigment in her hair and um for me i was in between jobs and i really had the opportunity i was grateful to have had the opportunity to to go with her at a different doctors appointments and i grew up in new york city so we had access to you know cathedrals to medical um
advice and and uh and examination and in every instance we were met with what i've come to call diagnose and audios basically a physician would run a battery of esoteric tests on my mom scribble down a few notes on a prescription pad and send us on our way but we had to ultimately take a trip to the cleveland clinic in ohio which is known for taking on really complex medical cases they build a team around the patient and it was there that for the first time my mom was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative condition she was prescribed drugs for both alzheimer's disease and parkinson's disease it wasn't um until a few years later that she actually received the lewy body dementia diagnosis but at that point i started to dive into the research because i had been trained as a journalist which you know you're not trained as rigorously as a as a phd scientist but you're kind of taught similar similarly to investigate things to maintain skepticism to you know ask questions and i started to look into the literature and just generally get a sense of what it was that my mom had been diagnosed with what what this what this you know what this entailed and i realize that in most cases dementia begins in the brain decades before the first symptom 10 20 30 years even by some estimates and so for me this became something really important to explore as a potentially preventable condition because i realized for the first time that i had a risk factor that my mom you know was my risk factor essentially i didn't i hadn't even yet looked into my genes at that point but um but so i uh i started looking into it and i came across all of these like fascinating insights which we can talk about but i decided at that point um that i to to sort of do what i could to help push the you know move the needle with this condition that i would use my skills which at the time were filmmaking because i had just come off
you know i was like producing content for tv and i was on camera i was a communicator as well and so i decided to do a documentary um on the topic of dementia prevention the first ever uh documentary on dementia as a potentially preventable condition we've all seen dementia documentaries on you know hbo and networks like that and they're always they always push this this very like doom and gloom mentality about the condition which i which i understand it is a very difficult condition it's america's most feared condition after all and this is a condition that you know ninety percent of what we know about alzheimer's disease in particular which is just one form of dementia has been discovered only in the past 15 years so it's a very rapidly evolving field of science but i felt like if we know that this is a condition that begins in the brain decades before the presentation of symptoms then to me what that is that's a very empowering insight that means that we have agency to change our cognitive destiny so i started shooting with my mom which was very hard to do um because you know i mean my the person who i love most in the world i was watching um decline right in front of the camera but also i decided to exploit my media credentials at the time to then talk to researchers and scientists around the world and i was doing my own research in the primary literature as well but i decided to um to yeah to go to these labs and clinics where they're really ushering in dementia as a potentially preventable condition and i actually signed myself up to become a a a study subject in one actually at weill cornell in new york and um and i actually became ultimately i became um a collaborator with the uh principal investigator there who's become my mentor over the years richard isaacson um and i got to uh co-author a paper in a clinician's textbook uh on the clinical practice of dementia prevention
because you know after all this time i've learned so much about um about the condition the ideology and so forth uh but this documentary i'm super excited for it it's um it's called little empty boxes and we have a trailer up at littleemptyboxes.com why little empty boxes well it's a it's a nod to something that my mom says in the film which is actually something it did you know my mom's condition it seemed like her cognition had just severely downshifted almost almost overnight um and so my mom never my mom never like forgot who i was or anything like that the presentation of lewy body dementia is different from alzheimer's disease and once you've seen one case of dementia just generally speaking you've seen one case of dementia every every dementia is different but in my mom's case it led to her often losing her train of thought soon after uh beginning to express an idea um and she would often say things that just you know didn't didn't make logical sense so it's sort of a nod to what um to something that she you know that she says in the film but uh i'm super excited because we we inked a partnership with a a wonderful foundation called the alzheimer's foundation of america and um and yeah i'm just super excited to uh is dementia purely genetic or is it caused by environmental factors or any other things that people consume [Music] great question um so though dementia though alzheimer's disease was coined in 1906 by a physician named aloise alzheimer the brain has long been thought of to sit in sort of the ivory tower of the brain guarded from what happens down below by what's called the blood-brain barrier but we now know that the brain is influenced by everything that happens down below and the the dogma especially with regard to
alzheimer's disease fundraising over the past couple of decades has really been that this is the this is a condition that you can't treat prevent or slow but we now have really solid data to say that we actually that it is a it is a potentially preventable condition so when it comes to uh our risk for developing alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia there are basically two categories of risk you have your non-modifiable risk factors of which there are three so you've got your age your genes and your gender so your age age is still the number one risk factor for developing alzheimer's disease right you can't change your age yet you um you have your gender if you're a woman your risk is double that as compared to a male's and you have your genes now genes is something that we can actually talk about because though you can't change your genes making them therefore a non-modifiable risk factor you can change the expression of your genes how your genes express themselves moment to moment so for example if you live in the united states and you carry a copy or two of what's called the apoe4 allele so it's basically a polymorph polymorphism meaning it's not a mutation it's actually a very common gene variant about one in four people carry the apoe4 allele in the united states that increases your risk anywhere between two and four fourteen fold depending on whether you carry one or two copies i think that's also the same genetic expression that makes you have cte cte yeah it it it makes everything more it makes your brain more vulnerable in general to insult whether that is from tbi uh exposure to pollutants exposure to unhealthy ways of eating do we know why it does that well it's interesting yeah so the apoe4 allele is thought to be the ancestral version
so it's the first version all all non-human primates are apoe44 so they carry the apoe4 allele not just one copy but two copies and yet they don't develop alzheimer's disease when you look to people we've evolved these different isoforms of the apoe gene so we have apoe2 3 and 4. and just to reiterate apoe4 is the ancestral allele so cultures that have um longer exposure to modern agriculture actually there's lower frequency of the apoe4 allele the thinking is that that agriculture right like when we became domesticated when we started basing our diets around grains we became more sedentary less uh generalized in terms of our um cognitive the the daily cognitive tasks that our ancestors would have undertaken that it's selected against the apoe4 allele so it's possible that that allele which again is very common one in four people carry it carry it is sort of the canary in the coal mine for the for the western way of life that if you adopt a western way of life and you eat you know today 60 of calories that adults consume come from ultra processed junk foods right we're more sedentary than ever before in human history we've got more stress we're exposed to more environmental pollutants that that is what dramatically is what pulls the trigger right because genes load the gun it's our diets and our lifestyles that pull the trigger but if you were to take somebody with that same genotype right and move them to a less industrial a less industrialized part of the world like say ibadan nigeria where the frequency of the apoe4 allele is just as common it has no asso it has little to no association with alzheimer's disease so just to put that another way what that suggests is if you're genetically at risk for developing alzheimer's disease in the united states you might simply move to ebitda nigeria or another less industrialized part of the world and see that risk abolished so with
this consumption of processed foods that is responsible for a large percentage of the calories that people consume today is the human body adapting to that is that why this apoe4 is less prevalent than it is in other cultures you know it's possible although with with age being the primary risk factor it's unlikely that um that that has put significant selection pressure um so i'm not i'm not actually i'm not sure but we do know you know there are i think gene studies where they've looked at um expression of genes that produce enzymes that break down amylase right like starch and things like that and those are increasing i think over time it's a little out of my wheelhouse but um but generally i mean yeah the standard american diet is completely aberrant from the diet you know that our ancestors consumed the diet that that really we attribute to the development of the human brain 60 of the calories that we consume today come from ultra processed packaged convenience convenience foods it's a massive problem i mean it's driving obesity it's driving type 2 diabetes if you have type 2 diabetes so going back to alzheimer's disease and this this gene expression so the apoe4 allele is you know you have it but it's not necessarily destiny and ninety percent of alzheimer's cases i'm sorry more nine like 99 of alzheimer's cases are attributable to some interplay between our genes and our environment there's a very small proportion of patients with alzheimer's disease that have a gene mutation that is a deterministic gene and this is called the early onset familial alzheimer's gene and that gene basically guarantees that you're gonna have alzheimer's disease but that makes up only one to two percent of cases the vast majority of people who develop alzheimer's disease um it's the interplay between their genes and their and their environment so excluding environmental factors like
pollutants and plastics and all sorts of other things that affect people's bodies what what are the other things that a person can do to make sure that they're at least are preventing the the possibility of this happening yeah like so if you're saying that like if if the symptoms take if it takes decades to exhibit symptoms what are they seeing when they say that the the people exhibit signs or exhibit some sort of a a future of dementia like how how can you see that what are you seeing yeah i mean so there you can't necessarily look inside the brain i mean you can there are studies that look at what's called brain glucose metabolism so something that you see in alzheimer's disease is a reduced ability of the brain to generate energy from glucose this is called glucose hypometabolism this is a very uh this is a defining feature actually of alzheimer's disease and i say alzheimer's disease again my mom didn't have alzheimer's disease but it's the most common form of dementia and so all the research on it really looks at mostly alzheimer's disease and then you get sort of like all-cause dementia in there but like these these more niche variants like lewy body like frontotemporal there's very little research on them so when i say sometimes i use alzheimer's disease and and dementia interchangeably but um but with alzheimer's disease one of the primary features is called glucose hypometabolism so the brain's inability to create uh energy from glucose so you see that decades before you see symptoms of dementia yeah especially with people who are genetically at risk about 10 10 percent reduction in the ability to generate energy with out of glucose which is the primary energy substrate for the brain under fed so if people see this if they get a test and they they find out that they have this apoe4 yeah and then they um get their glucose check how are they checking that that their ability to
process glucose yeah i mean they do what are called ftg pet tests scans um so they'll just look to see glucose uptake in the brain but um what does one get like if someone is saying oh my god i have dementia in my family and they're listening to this what can how can i find out what do they do you know it's that's not a test that you can easily get um they'll use it for uh study purposes like research purposes but it's not a test being used clinically um the the what correlates very closely with reduced glucose metabolism in the brain is your degree of insulin uh resistance in the body or sensitivity so if you are insulin sensitive you've talked many times on the podcast in the past about metabolic health insulin sensitivity versus resistance the sort of classic condition that we see here in the u.s characterized by insulin resistance is type 2 diabetes but what the studies have shown is that insulin resistance correlates very closely with reduced glucose metabolism in the brain so what you really want to do to keep your brain healthy is to make sure that you're as insulin sensitive as possible that's one thing that you can do that um you know you're checking off that box because when it comes to so we talked about the the and let me know if i should like you know kind of double click on any one of these because you know i know we're covering a lot but when it comes to the the other uh risk factors the what are called the modifiable risk factors you have 12 of them and one of them is diabetes so insulin resistance is obviously the hallmark of type 2 diabetes we know that insulin resistance is strongly correlated to reduced glucose utilization in the brain obesity is another modifiable risk factor studies show that as your waistline expands your brain shrinks total brain volume is actually in that explains burke crusher yeah call bert
he needs to know about this um so yeah obesity is no bueno it's not good you know i mean there's like this push online now like the health body positivity body positive yeah i think it's foolish yeah i just i i can't imagine being so sensitive to people's feelings that you ignore a very clear warning sign that they're doing something that's insanely unhealthy and preventable and it's something that should be broadcast to everybody everybody should know this is this is a real factor in a host of different problems that are going to happen with your body 100 i mean you can be more or less healthy at a given size right but to be not obese is healthier than being obese 100 yeah and by the year 2030 one in two americans are going to be not just overweight but obese i thought it was already there we're close we're 40 but we're getting there it's insane yeah it's and it's clearly connected to our diet and you know that's one of the things that i have enjoyed uh is a lot of your posts on diet and food but we should we'll get to that but let's before we get into that when you talk about preventative measures that someone can take other than decreasing your waistline losing weight what what are the other factors does exercise have any factor on dementia yeah exercise is medicine when it comes to the brain so and we can tackle this from a number of different angles but when you exercise you're literally pushing fresh blood up to the brain and blood carries oxygen nutrients antioxidants things like that um when you exercise you are increasing the expression of a protein called brain derived neurotrophic factor or bdnf which is sort of considered to be like a miracle grow protein for the brain uh you're increasing blood flow you're increasing the expression of bdnf you're changing the the neurochemistry of the brain essentially with a workout i mean i'm a different person when i leave the gym than i was walking into it so you
can subjectively you can feel that that it's doing something to your brain yeah you're reducing inflammation you're reducing blood pressure you're normalizing healthy blood pressure this is something that is uh this is i mean crucially important but one of the seminal uh trials that i use in my argument which is now you know finally being accepted by you know the the medical establishment but um the sprint mine trial found that for people who are aggressively treated for their high blood pressure with pharmacologic drugs but um but you know this ties into exercise because exercise is uh just as effective as blood pressure lowering medication meta-analyses show but for these people who were put on aggressive blood pressure normalizing therapy they reduced their the risk of developing mild cognitive impairment and mild cognitive impairment is sort of a pro drone it's it's considered like pre-dementia you'll often develop mild cognitive impairment before you're diagnosed with that's also burke crystal send him a message this is this warning sign this one's for you bert so yeah so i mean so exercise is like it helps to normalize blood pressure it reduces insulin sensitivity it helps to you know the hormonal milky we talked about insulin resistance physical exercise right particularly resistance training which is so important for people to do it is one of the best ways of fostering insulin sensitivity resistance training above cardio well car they're both beneficial they're both and actually i um i like to remind myself this because i dislike doing cardio like i don't like running on a treadmill i love lifting weights i've been doing that my whole life pretty much but cardio is super important because we we have a ton of evidence on cardio as it pertains to bdnf which is this brain derived neurotrophic factor and we know this because it's very easy to get a mouse to run on a treadmill and then to sacrifice it and see what's going on in the brain it's a lot harder to get a mouse to do squats and bench presses you know so from from like the basic science standpoint we have a lot
of evidence on specifically what cardio does for the brain right but resistance training we know in terms of bolstering whole body resilience robustness uh we know that your muscles are a very important glucose disposal sink right so i mean we live in a time where your average american consumes 300 grams of carbohydrates every single day right our bodies don't have uh a way to store carbohydrates beyond what you know the storage capacity of our muscles and our liver tissue right it's not like fat you can store 3000 calories of of fat in a single pound of fat tissue right but you know your muscles your liver combine only about four or 500 grams of of glucose you know in a in a given day or or at a at a time rather and so um so yeah resistance training you're building you're you're building up your musculature which is going to allow you to continue to exercise and be mobile which we know is really important for the brain for glucose disposal it's crucially important so i think i think both are key you can obviously tweak your resistance training regimen to have a more sort of cardio aspect to it right like shortening the time between sets but i do think that there's value in doing in doing both you know um but yeah exercise it's just at this point like i think it was uh two or three years ago that the american academy academy of neurology finally made exercise a something that physicians could prescribe to treat somebody who's presenting with subjective cognitive cognitive impairment in the you know as a as a prophylactic so that they won't go on to develop mild cognitive impairment so it's really very progressive of them yeah i'm glad they're doing that now yeah i mean there's a lot of um and i've seen this personally like in in science like i'm a huge fan of science i my work relies on it and and the last thing that i would ever want to do is sort of undermine confidence in science but there's science and then there's the
science right you know and um especially in the field of alzheimer's disease there was this huge revelation recently that the past 16 years of um alzheimer's research in many ways was built on fraud yeah i read that that was one of the things that i wanted to talk to you about because it's so crazy please tell people about this because it's so insane and it's so hard to believe that this could happen in modern medicine and especially with something that affects so many people's alzheimer's but please tell people about this study yeah so basically the prevailing hypothesis as to what causes alzheimer's disease over the past century right has been what's called the amyloid hypothesis so ever since alois alzheimer discovered or named uh alzheimer's disease in 1906 and looked into the brain of the cadaver and saw these plaques aggregating around neurons right in the extracellular space around neurons the plaques have come to be sort of the force the the focus of um alzheimer's research really and the idea was that these plaques were the causative force in the in the condition um much like the plaque on your teeth right you see these plaques in the brain of an of a person with alzheimer's disease and so that's really been the target of drug therapy and the idea was that until we can find a drug that would uh reduce the plaque burden reduce the plaque get rid of the plaque in the brains of of a senior person right somebody who's at risk for developing alzheimer's disease that it's a disease that you can't prevent you can't there's nothing to do to treat um but the problem was that they could never actually tie the plaque to cognitive decline right like the clinically meaningful symptom the symptomology of alzheimer's disease that it messes up your cognition that it makes you you know that it makes you forget your loved ones ultimately forget who you are ultimately forgetting how to eat right and that and
and nourish yourself they could never tie those symptoms to to the plaque right until a paper published in the journal nature in 2006. so what happened was this researcher named silva sylvain lesni at the university of minnesota basically was looking into these the brains of mice who are bred to over express what's called amyloid precursor protein which is the precursor to amyloid beta which is the protein that makes up sort of the skeleton of these plaques that we see aggregate right so what he does what he did was he isolated a subtype that he called a beta star 56 and injected it into a uh young and healthy mouse or rat mouse and he saw the that mouse's cognition rapidly declined so that was the missing link right that he found a subtype of this amyloid beta protein that serves as the backbone of these plaques which could never be pinned to the cognitive decline itself right the memory loss itself but he claimed that he found it and when injected into the into the brain into the body of a healthy mouse he saw a rapid decline in terms of their of their cognition right so that was the missing link and so at that point um faith in the so-called amyloid hypothesis was starting to wane because they couldn't find effective drugs alzheimer's drug trials have a 99.6 fail rate so worse than for cancer or worse than for any other any other disease state really and um and the drugs that are currently after fda approved on the market they're biochemical band-aids they're minimally effective i mean they modulate various neurotransmitters but you know i've heard it described like uh you know trying expecting to remove amyloid from the brain of a person with alzheimer's disease and to see their cognition come back is sort of like thinking that if you remove all
the headstones from a grave you know people will come back to life right like there's widespread neuronal dysfunction and death in the brain of somebody with alzheimer's disease and in tandem with that uh scanning technology has allowed us to look into the brains of healthy controls and what we see is that there's amyloid plaque in the brains of healthy controls as well so there's no correlation between amyloid burden in the brain and one's cognitive abilities but nonetheless when this paper came out in 2006 it renewed fervor in terms of this hypothesis because he found the subtype of amyloid that could be injected into a young and healthy mouse that would then impair seriously impair their cognition right and so that that renewed interest in this in this hypothesis and it's what ultimately led to the fact that just a couple years ago two years ago um there was a highly controversial drug that was approved by the fda called agicanamab or adjuhelm and this is a drug that effectively reduced plaque burden in the brain for the first time they found a drug that could actually reduce blackburn in the brain but it didn't lead to any improvement in cognitive symptoms nonetheless it was given the green light against uh against tons of opposition that the fda received they put together a panel of 11 people neuroscientists neurologists right eight of them told the fda not to approve this drug and what was the reason for that the reason for that is that the drug didn't didn't move the needle on any clinically meaningful symptom were there significant side effects there were so 35 percent of the people in the trial had significant brain swelling and half of them had uh bleeding associated with that brain swelling because these are antibodies so adjacent map is an antibody that basically targets causes your own immune system to target the amyloid plaques right and so what that's doing is causing an inflammatory response in the brain right so 35 of the
patients in that in the in the phase ii trials i believe had horrible side effects and no clinically meaningful uh effect on um on their cognition but nonetheless because it effectively did reduce the amyloid black burden there was this intense pressure right to uh to get a green light because that's like right the amyloid hypothesis is right there right uh-huh so huge problem one of the big uh vocal sort of skeptics about this drug ajikanamab is a guy a vanderbilt researcher named matthew shragg so matthew tragg was like very vocal vocally against the approval of this drug which again doesn't do anything right like it's horrible risk of side effects no clinically meaningful effect on on on the on the symptoms that we want to improve right um for a patient with alzheimer's disease and um and so he was vocally critical of that and then he also was working on some other some other drug and he uh so what was revealed basically in the science paper that came out was that he was um dabbling in uh on a website called pub peer which is um a site where you can go it's known for post publication peer review so before paper gets uh accepted for publication it undergoes this peer review process right and so he found that there were a lot of sort of red flags that were being brought up on this message board essentially about this nature paper this like seminal nature paper that was published that found to it was like the missing link right between like the amyloid hypothesis and like the clinically meaningful meaningful um symptoms meaning memory loss and he did a bit of like image sleuthing which is not generally part of the peer review process right and he looked at these um the way data is illustrated in this in this paper as it is in in research generally it's called a western blot which is like a visual representation of of data the presence of proteins and so forth and he found that they were all
for the most part fabricated in fact this a beta star 56 wasn't found by any other team hasn't been found by any other team it it basically came to light that it was essentially fake the whole thing was faked what was the motivation for this person to fake all this because the thing i mean i think that we we like to believe that science is this good faith endeavor towards human flourishing right but in the industry of science there are flawed humans just like there are in every other industry right and scientists in general i see this all the time in nutrition online on social media right social media is a great like sort of they say that sunlight is the best disinfectant like social media is a great way to kind of see how this plays out right because scientists are notoriously territorial obstinate they you know their their reputation egotistical yeah their reputations are everything right yeah and um i mean it's just like i see it i see it every day it's humans yeah exactly yeah so yeah so there's bad apples right like i think a lot of people in science um like i'm i'm i live and breathe nutrition i'm it's the thing that i'm most passionate about like in life right like fitness nutrition sleep disease prevention my mom is what galvanized that that passion for me right and what my mom my mom went through and my desire to prevent it from happening to others that i care about and ultimately people you know from all walks of life but a lot you know a lot of people go into science go into medicine because it's just it's a career path right right it's a career path for somebody wanting validation it comes with prestige it comes with money comes with all the things that that like makes sense that a person would want right but then ego gets in the way and it and it becomes really problematic i mean you see it in nutrition all the time you see it nutrition like all the freaking time so this person that fabricated this study and fabricated all this data what
consequences are there for that person i mean i think that the the department of justice is is going to be looking into it but but um i'm gonna be looking into it i mean this is if they're not already yeah yeah if they're not already but i personally so one of the worst things about this right is it's not just like the lost time and all the money that went to continue looking down this sort of path of the amyloid hypothesis right looking in the wrong place really because amyloid is there but it's sort of like what you see in cholesterol in like atherosclerosis right like cholesterol it's like everybody like has pointed at cholesterol as being the bad guy because cholesterol is clearly there in atherosclerotic plaques right but what's causing it to be there that's the question that these researchers should have been asking all along and some have right like there there have been other like my mentor as i mentioned you know at cornell who have been lucky to lucky enough to work with over the years on certain projects um you know knew that that there was another way it's this glucose hypometabolism right it's like but there's no money in that there's no money in saying like make keep yourself as insulin sensitive as possible you know reduce your exposure to environmental pollutants don't hit your head too hard you know all these different modifiable risk factors it's not as it's not it's not druggable the way that this like amyloid beta protein um is is druggable and so i think the worst thing about it is that anybody who would advance an alternate viewpoint over the past couple of decades would be ridiculed and silenced by the quote amyloid mafia and i was the i i this happened to me when i first started doing my documentary um little empty boxes which when i first started doing it uh it had a different name i called it it was called breadhead and i could talk about why i named that but that was always a sort of a working title uh for the project but somebody at one of these foundations right like
um there's all these like big like alzheimer's foundations uh i'm lucky to be working on this project with one who really believes in me on the project the alzheimer's foundation of america but there are these other non-profits that really what they are is just like a front for you know perpetuating the status quo and keeping the sort of the funding pipeline open for drug discovery and so when i first got started doing working on this on my film i did a kickstarter campaign for it and one of these non-pro quote unquote non-profits right deeply invested in the amyloid hypothesis came out and wrote an uh an op-ed in the wall street journal disparaging me in my project and any other alternate sort of viewpoint and talking glowingly about that adjacent map drug which at the time had yet to be approved right and it was so like painful to me at the time because i was like working on this project out of the love and passion that i had for my mom and my desire to get the science out to catalyze you know interest in this science it takes 17 years on average for what's discovered in science to be put into day-to-day clinical practice so i was like that's that's time we don't have to lose when the brains of our loved ones are at stake and so yeah i was like directly sort of in the crosshairs at the time for this like this amyloid mafia i was like directly affected by it because this medication is profitable yeah because the medication is profitable and that the whole avenue was thought to you know if you could find a drug that would reduce amyloid burn in the brain i mean that makes that's going to make sure he's really happy and this drug is it still being prescribed yeah it's uh it's uh it's approved it's approved and so there's no real way of telling how many people have died from this drug because most of the people that are taking this drug already experiencing this neurodegenerative disease and you could easily chalk it off to that being the cause of death yeah i mean i i can't speak to like you know people's experiences on it currently but
i do know that um that the trials were you know i mean if i had a loved one based on what i know about this drug in those trials my my loved one currently would not be on that drug they would be perhaps experimenting with uh you know and this is a very difficult sort of road to go down i guess it's easier to say if i had dementia right if i myself had dementia i would be experimenting with a ketogenic diet on myself and other ketogenic therapies because ketogenic diets what they do so as i mentioned in the alzheimer's brain the ability to generate energy from glucose is reduced by about fifty percent forty five fifty percent its ability to generate energy from ketone bodies is unperturbed so the idea is that a ketogenic diet can essentially keep the lights on in the alzheimer's brain it's not a cure but um but there has been uh research um on patients with alzheimer's disease mild to moderate alzheimer's disease that ketogenic ketogenic diet intervention can actually improve functional capacity in those patients which is everything right yeah um so that's what i would do for myself uh for other people you know when my mom was starting to show these symptoms i attempted to put her on some kind of like ketogenic style diet but actually as you uh what's very interesting is that people that develop alzheimer's disease they they start to develop a sweet tooth and it's thought that that's sort of like the brain crying out for sugar essentially because it's just it's struggling to generate energy you know and dietary change is difficult for anybody let alone somebody with dementia so i can only yeah i can only speak for myself so even though this study has been shown to be fraudulent and even though that medication has shown to have some pretty severe side effects and even though the amyloid plaque hypothesis has kind of been disproven now as being the cause of it why are they still prescribing that drug yeah it's uh you know it's a because it takes 17 years right but once they have access to the fact that
that study was flawed not just flawed but fraudulent i mean that's it's pretty significant the impact that's happening they should pull it off the market i mean think about the num the sheer numbers of people that have dementia alzheimer's and these significant horrific problems and they're basing the treatment of it on fraud yeah and the fact that they still do it without like having this immediate cease like what could be other than generating more revenue other than generating more revenue like what what else could possibly be the reason for continuing to prescribe that drug other than ignorance yeah well i think that it's not that this paper came out and suddenly the amyloid hypothesis is uh you know has been debunked or whatever you know like there there is still a ton of money invested in this hypothesis and there are still a lot of researchers who think whether or not this drug is is the is the you know this is like version one right so there are still many researchers who think that this is like still the target still the appropriate target but once they realized that the study was fraudulent yeah and that when injected into these mice and it causes significant degeneration that this is not really accurate this is all fake yeah well so then they don't have a mechanism right right so why are they still prescribing a disease to combat the mechanism that's proven to be fraudulent yeah i think it's just because that's where all this you know there it's just there's what is the term it's like uh sunk cost fallacy you know i think people in in many ways are just so the you know whether it's like academia or pharma they're we're just so deeply invested in this hypothesis and it hasn't been debunked and this fraudulent paper didn't test ajikanamab the drug so you know
i think that the fraudulent paper is the reason why that drug was approved yeah yeah it's a that is [ __ ] wild if you're a person it's all scams listening to this and they're dealing with you know my friend jessie may uh heard her dad had i know her alzheimer's yeah it's it was so hard for her i mean it's it was so terrible to watch her suffer while her her father who she loved dearly was just deteriorating oh it's super hard and you get drugs that you know one of them nemenda it's like an nmda receptor uh modulator and then you get another one donopezzle which works to boost you know acetylcholine they're just by their biochemical band-aids they do not nothing to address the underlying pathology and um and yeah i mean it was literally until it i believe 2020 was the year um or 2017 i think was the first time that the lancet neurology acknowledged that a significant proportion of dementia cases were attributable to modifiable risk factors so that's sort of their way of saying that look you can put there's a significant proportion of these cases that are potentially preventable right obesity type 2 diabetes yeah smoking excessive alcohol consumption air pollution hearing impairment alcohol uh air pollution air pollution really as of 2020 that has now been acknowledged to be a major contributor you know exposure to fine particulate matter like pm 2.5 has been shown to pierce the blood-brain barrier and amyloid i mean the thing about amyloid is that it's like our body our brains produce it it's not necessarily bad the same way that like cholesterol you know when you hear the term cholesterol like you know we think of it as this as this bad pathologic thing that we want to get out of our bodies right but cholesterol is vital to life right like we need it same with amyloid amyloid helps you formulate hormones hormones yeah i mean every cell membrane like requires cholesterol to stay supple and fluid
right which is vegans don't want to hear that ever they don't hear that they panic well i yeah i bought heads with them all the time of course yeah well it's an ideology you know unfortunately it's an ideology based on a really good premise the premise is you want to do less less harm you want to be a more ethical moral kinder person and i i respect their motivation the problem is in practice both in monocrop agriculture which is horrific for the environment and then also in the effects on the human body if it's very difficult to do correctly you know and we've had conversations before and unfortunately you know there's a lot of documentaries and a lot of people that are propagandizing this ideology they're doing it like it's a religion and that's how they treat it they ignore any evidence to the contrary they they won't even look at eggs which are really kind of i mean if you have chickens or if you know someone has chickens or if you can get eggs from a place that has free-range chickens it's like zero ethical dilemma it's they lay eggs every day yeah they're not going to be chickens it's just free protein if you let these chickens roam around and eat grass and bugs and do the stuff they're supposed to do you have literally one of the most healthy sources of food that's available to the human body and it's ethically free like if you're a person that's a vegan and you're doing it for moral purposes but you recognize the fact that you're not getting the appropriate amount of nutrition get chickens if you have a backyard get some chickens they lay an egg almost every day and they're better for you than any egg that you're going to buy in the store from grain fed chickens 100 and you don't have to worry about them being treated horrifically they just i mean i used to have chickens before the [ __ ] coyotes got them all but uh those back when i lived in california it's a long story but um it wasn't just the coyotes got them all it was like the fire burnt the chicken coop down or we almost lost the house
the fire burnt the chicken coop down then we had a smaller chicken coop and then that one wasn't as robust i had like a real serious one built by a carpenter and then we bought a store bought one because we had to get a chicken coop quickly and the coyotes figured out a way to get into it it was a [ __ ] blood bath nine chickens destroyed overnight oh my god yeah it was it was [ __ ] horrific um but those little [ __ ] they had been targeting my chickens for quite a while wow but it's good eating but the the eggs themselves are so good for you and again they're not going to become chickens these are non-fertilized eggs and people need to understand that i didn't know that toss 40 but that's how [ __ ] dumb i am i thought that like if you just like let the the egg go it would become a chicken and then and then someone goes no they don't even need a rooster to lay that egg i was like oh yeah oh yeah how could it yeah duh that was before i had chickens you're making me want to get chickens well listen it's a great way to have protein and it's really a great relationship you know you i would feed them worms i would buy these meal worms you know that you would uh they'd come dried and i would like shake the box of mealworms and the chickens would just run towards me full clip oh my god i would dump them out on the ground they would go crazy and eat them all that's so awesome yeah i mean they you never seen um savagery like a chicken eating a mouse though they would occasionally catch a mouse holy [ __ ] you think cats are vicious cats that have nothing on chickens have you ever seen a chicken kill a mouse i've never thought of chickens as like predators oh boy i mean well i'm gonna show you something jamie uh pull up a video of a chicken killing a mouse there's a there's a bunch of great videos online but i found this out by accident and this is how i found out my my um we had a house when i lived in california that had a glass uh wall and it used to be like a fence and then my wife was like wouldn't be better if it
was like a glass wall you could see the view was like yeah that'd be better so we put this glass wall in and unfortunately the hawks couldn't recognize that it was a glass wall so they would [ __ ] dive bomb and bang so it was kind of like karmic justice for whatever mouse they were trying to kill so they would dive bomb and slam into this glass fence and get knocked out or die and a couple of them died in my yard and were like [ __ ] so one of them died before you before you do this so one of them died and then one of them survived and my family i was out of town for the weekend doing stand-up and my family went to a local pet store and got what are called pinkies and pinkies are these little infant mice that they serve to snakes and reptiles and things like that so they got a few of them and fed them to this hawk you know they looked online what are the hawks heat and so the hawk ate all these pinkies and uh we had to wait until monday to get the hawk to this uh wildlife rescue center that takes care and rehabilitates hawks so one pinky was still alive and my kids were like we're gonna raise it i go listen you just fed them to this [ __ ] horrible raptor and now all of a sudden this one is going to be your friend and how traumatized it's going to be but all siblings got murdered by this [ __ ] giant dinosaur damn and i said it's not going to survive it it hasn't been weaned by its mother you know we we can't it's not gonna live it hasn't eaten in days i'm like this thing it's not gonna live i go i think i'm gonna feed it to the chickens they're like don't don't feed the chickens anyway long story short i go out into the chicken coop and i put that pinky down and they dive on that thing like nothing i've ever seen in my life oh my god one chicken grabs it the other chicken is attacking that chicken trying to pull it out of their mouth like they instinctively recognize that that's a food source wow so watch this so this is what happens when chickens see a mouse like immediately look they try to steal it from each other
savages oh my god i mean it's like their favorite food mice are their favorite food if you have mice and chickens the chickens will [ __ ] those mice up chickens are they're creepy little domestic dinosaurs you're right i mean yeah when you say that i'm like i mean that's what they are look they're still trying to steal from her and uh there's another one where a cat is playing with a mouse and the chicken's like let me show you how it's done [ __ ] and the chicken comes running over and like steals the mouse from the cat damn yeah did you see uh there's this amazing dinosaur mini series on apple tv no it's um it's so good and they actually portray raptors as dinosaurs with feathers yeah they think that now there's a museum in montana in bozeman and they show you two options of this raptor they show you one option like the jurassic park version and then they show you on the other side of this raptor they have it completely covered in like beautiful colored feathers just like a chicken which is most likely the case yeah they think the dinosaurs had feathers which makes sense fascinating i mean the the things we see now i mean if you look at an eagle that's a goddamn dinosaur yeah that's it right there which is really cool looking wow i mean that's most likely so jurassic park and all those films they're probably incorrect this is probably what it looked like because they've actually found still terrifying fossilized imprints of feathers with with the fossils of dinosaurs we've had these these clear indications that feathers existed on these creatures yeah wow fascinating so if anybody wants ethical like guilt-free karma-free protein that's as good as your body's ever going to get eggs yeah i actually erase totally i consider eggs to be a cognitive multivitamin actually because if you consider the fact that when an embryo is developing the the central nervous system and the nervous system in general
is the first structure to coalesce right so an egg yolk literally has everything in it that nature has deemed important to grow a brain which is so frustrating when people want to eat egg white omelets when i go to a store or a restaurant i see egg white omelet i'm like where's the [ __ ] whole egg oh yeah why are you serving egg whites it's insane it's i mean the yolk it's like again a cognitive multivitamin and it's it's no surprise that uh egg yolk people are you know like vegans are they they just see red right whenever you say cholesterol whenever they see that like there's cholesterol in a food but but it's it it should be no surprise that an egg yolk is rich in cholesterol because the brain is rich in cholesterol right like despite accounting for only two percent of your body's mass 25 of the cholesterol in your body is located in your brain that doesn't mean that you have to you don't need to eat cholesterol to support brain health your brain produces all the cholesterol it needs it's called de novo cholesterol synthesis but an egg yolk has a little bit of vitamin b12 it's got choline choline is one of these like crucially important micronutrients that ninety percent actually the adequate intake for choline is probably less than than what it should be for when you account for our brains needs but 90 percent of adults don't consume adequate choline and acetylcholine is a primary ingredient of many nootropics which there you go been shown to improve brain function yeah it's a super important neurotransmitter involved in learning and memory and in fact one of the drugs that's prescribed for alzheimer's disease modulates that uh that cholinergic sort of pathway um but yeah choline is crucially important it's found in in egg yolks i think egg yolks maybe is uh second place to like beef liver which is which is the top source for dietary choline but again something that we under consume and studies show that people who consume more choline have reduced risk for dementia and choline is like one of these foods all one of these nutrients could almost be considered a surrogate marker for animal protein intake because you find it in both plants and animals but it's much more concentrated in animal protein but speaking of which
what do you think about these uh desiccated supplements of heart and liver and testicles and all these things that you see being sold now i have a friend of mine who is in the medical field and he's very concerned about this because he's like i don't know what whether or not these things could contain prions whether they like how are they taking these like you're eating beef liver how is this processed what what is the source like how do you know what's in these things yeah it's a good question i mean i think we likely consume our ancestors probably consumed brain early on as a good source of dha fat which is one of the most important structural building blocks of the brain right docosahexaenoic acid dha fat and the brain is rich in that but um but yeah i mean i think i think it's a it's a valid concern although you know i haven't to be honest i haven't like looked looked into it too deeply i do think that liver is a great food it's one of the most nutrient dense foods there is um and i do think that there is a little bit of truth at least in the case of liver where like supports like like we know that beef liver is a top source of choline right and we know that choline directly supports liver health because it helps to export fat so choline is actually a good treatment for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease because it helps to get fat out of the liver so in that way i think eating liver can support liver health and the liver is like a crucially i mean it's a vital organ obviously but it plays hundreds of roles in the body it tastes good too you just have to eat cook it right yeah you know a lot of people don't like the texture they feel weird about eating it but once you realize the nutritional value of liver you know liver and onions is delicious yeah super tasty i think like cooking it kind of rare getting a nice sear on the outside yeah yeah i like cooking it in ghee oh okay yeah i have actually used beef tallow oh beef totally that's a good option i actually um my thoughts on dairy have evolved kind of recently yeah and um
yeah you know i i get like on social media especially like on instagram i get a lot of [ __ ] from pretty much everybody like the vegans don't like me right because i promote animal products the carnivores don't like me because i'm a big believer in the value of dietary fiber and plant you know phytochemicals and the like uh the evidence-based like credentialist community doesn't like me because i'm not a you know i don't have any credentials after my name um but uh but yeah and then the paleo community because i i recently have sort of come out sort of not being a huge fan of like butter and and ghee you know i'm a huge fan of dairy and dairy fat in general which dairy fat so all natural fat containing foods contains some proportion of saturated fat polyunsaturated fat monounsaturated fat right so like any natural fat containing food is going to contain some saturated fat so demonizing any type of fat i think doesn't make any sense including avocados yeah avocados are great like avocados are mostly monounsaturated fat i think people should steer clear from as best they can the grain and seed oils like the canola corn soybeans i definitely wanted to talk to you about that because controversial this is i've been trying to have this conversation with my family because they'll buy salad dressing and say it's healthy i'm like do you ever read what's in this [ __ ] i'm like unless it has olive oil in it it's probably not good for you like these shitty seed oils that they put in these salad dressings i eat salad with the salad dressing i feel like [ __ ] i feel like bloated i feel gross whereas i eat salad and i just put balsamic vinaigrette and olive oil on it and i feel great it feels like okay my body likes this and isn't like just consuming like vegetables by themselves is not as effective as consuming them with some fat yeah you're absolutely right so i mean a lot of the compounds that we want in in veggies are fat soluble so i talk a lot about the value of carotenoids so carotenoids are like plant pigments they're responsible generally in the
produce section you'll see yellow produce and orange produce rich in these compounds and two in particular um plant-based carotenoids i've become a big fan of called lutein and zeaxanthin and they've shown that people higher consumers of lutein and zeaxanthin have they they seem to be protected against uh vision loss certainly yeah if you look at any eye supplement they usually will have those two in them because they can help prevent age-related macular degeneration yeah now um what are the criticisms against seed oils specifically like i've seen you speak about grape seed oil which is a really fascinating one because it really wasn't something that was in the human diet until as you were saying that wine makers realize hey like we're leaving money on the table yeah grape seed turn this [ __ ] into oil yeah so again some industrious uh entrepreneur saw that as a byproduct of wine making you're losing out on all these grape seeds right and grape seeds are rich in oil like like all seeds are right so if you can extract the oil and get rid of the noxious like aromas and flavors then you've got something that you can sell right for for i think it's like a 500 or 600 million dollar a year business if not more these days um so grapeseed oil like any of these grain and seed oils like corn oil uh canola oil which comes from the rapeseed plant soybean oil they're referred to sometimes within the food industry as rbd oils refined bleached and deodorized yeah um because there they have like these like again these harsh bitter flavors right some of them like uh like the rapeseed contain toxins like urusic acid they might want to change the name of that seed yeah right doesn't it seem like a rude way yeah you know you want to murder fruit no you know what i'm saying yeah like why is it rapeseed exactly okay so um what it what's the negative
effect of things like like i would imagine that in the human diet consuming an exorbitant amount of this kind of grape seed oil is really not even possible like how many grapes would you have to eat to get with the seeds to get the kind of the amount that you would get from a tablespoon of like grape seed oil yeah i mean humans we don't even like generally we would we were reversed to seeds for a reason i mean if you've ever tried to chew into a grape seed it's bitter right you spit it out so that's why these oils didn't they didn't exist in the human food supply before 100 years ago we hadn't had the chemistry labs the erector sets required to extract these oils and then run them through all these myriad processes to to make them to some degree palatable and and and able to be utilized by the food industry they used to be used as engine you know lubricant and things like that that that's in industrialized seed oils have always been used as lubricants for engines yeah so when did they start using them what is this jamie what'd you pull up there okay produce 237 milliliters eight ounce fluid bottle of grapeseed oil one ton of grapes is required so 2 000 pounds of grapes to get 8 ounces of grape seed oil the finished oil is light yellowish green in color holy [ __ ] that's insane well that there you go so if you're cooking in grape seed oil you're essentially it's a crime against nature yeah it's it's just yeah it's the most unnatural thing and uh you know people listening to this might might say oh you know appeal to nature fallacy what's natural isn't always like arsenic is true but i think that that that like a platitude like that isn't very helpful right in the modern world so what are the negative effects of things like industrialized seed oils yeah so um i mean for one they all undergo that step called the deodorization step which is the step that removes the noxious odors and aromas from these oils
makes them palatable gives the oil it's basically the food industry's equivalent of the witness protection program right because it takes an oil and it makes it so bland and and free of any kind of character right that it can be used to roast nuts in it could be used to make granola bars it can be used to saute food in in a restaurant you can could be used to fry food in for example and the problem is one one of the problems with these seed oils is that that deodorization step creates a small but significant amount of trans fats and we know that there's no safe level of trans fat artificially you know man-made trans fat consumption their most uh recognizable form was in poly uh partially hydrogenated vegetable oils which were outlawed right five six years ago something like that but you can still find man-made trans fats on the market in the form of these grain and seed oils now the dose likely makes the poison as it does with most things but your average um american today is over consuming these oils well i mean they didn't exist again in the fu human food supply prior to a century ago and their use has increased anywhere between uh 250 and a thousand percent a thousand percent for soybean oil in particular which is the most commonly used grain and seed oil and so we're over consuming these fats they harbor these trans fats when we cook with them in particular when we expose them to high heat especially for prolonged periods of time they generate poisons called aldehydes and some of these aldehydes are really toxic i mean they're neurotoxic they're mutagenic meaning they're cancer-causing um you know one such aldehyde is acrolein aquiline is found in uh cigarette smoke um it's found in all kinds of industrial pollutants and we can see it in the brains of people with with alzheimer's disease like it actually is produced in cigarettes sorry to interrupt but how is how does cigarette smoke produce alkaline well i'm not 100 sure as to how it's produced in cigarette
smoke but it is a byproduct of like the burning of garbage and you know it's created in in myriad industrial processes um so it has something to do with the heat probably the heat and whatever the plant compound heat and oxygen yeah the the coalesce you know the coalescing of heat oxygen light so what about if it's not being heated up like what about seed oils as they exist in salad dressings and the like well i think one of the big fears um another big fear with regard to these oils is that they might not be acutely inflammatory so i think a lot of people and this get this is what tends to get pushed back among the evidence-based crowd on social media you'll hear claims that these oils are inflammatory and i think this is more an issue of semantics they're not acutely inflammatory but they may be chronically inflammatory because they provide the precursors to our bodies inflammation pathways particularly the omega-6 fats omega-3 fats are generally speaking anti-inflammatory right they're able to convert to compounds called resolvins which quite literally resolve the inflammatory cascade but omega-6 fats provide the backbone to these pro-inflammatory signaling molecules in the body which are responsible for heat pain redness swelling things like that and inflammation underlie you know it's a process that is not bad but when it's chronic and low grade it's associated with you know all of these chronic conditions that we're talking about certainly alzheimer's disease other forms of dementia but also cardiovascular disease type 2 diabetes and the like now are they going to actually stimulate an inflammatory response you know i don't think so unless maybe the oil is is highly damaged but if it's we'll just say like it's a fresh oil which none of these oils are fresh because they're all on a self shelf forever too yeah in plastic right right which is like i mean if you look at extra virgin olive oil you'll you'll seldom find a good extra virgin olive oil and plastic because producers know what they've got this is
like liquid gold right but these grain and seed oils you know they're sitting on the shelf in plastic they're sitting uh you know with extra virgin olive oil for example one of the tips that i offer people when buying extra virgin olive oil which i think is medicine in many ways to the brain is you want to buy it in small bottles right small glass opaque bottles because extra virgin olive oil unlike wine only degrades over time so there's no like appreciation that occurs with time the same thing is true for these grain and seed oils but they sell them in these big tubs right we leave them in our warm kitchen environments and these oils are very prone to a process called oxidation which is like essentially a damaged oil right like you wouldn't you wouldn't see a piece of rotting food on the counter and intuitively think to yourself that looks good right you can't necessarily see it happening in these oils but nonetheless we're told over and over again to integrate them into our diets and our lifestyle so they're easily oxidized they um they provide the raw materials in abundance to our bodies in inflammation pathways right and we likely consumed them in a ratio that was you know maybe around four to one omega-6 to omega-3s uh you know for most of our evolution and today we're consuming them you know weigh in a way higher ratio 25 to 40 to one omega sixes two omega threes so i just don't think that this is like i like to take the precautionary principle approach right these oils again they didn't exist in the human food supply right i don't have all the data to to convince the most ardent evidence-based practitioner i like to say that my approach is evidence-based but not evidence-bound i think that we need to be highly skeptical of foods especially foods and supplements and products that haven't been around all that long right this is a mass sort of experiment being laid out on a vast stage and i don't think that we have the we don't have good data to say what they are or aren't doing right to us necessarily but i do think that
because these oils are so easily oxidized and they're of particular relevance to the brain right i think that matters we don't yet know what they're doing to our brains lipid peroxidation is a major feature in the alzheimer's riddled brain right we know that as we consume more of these polyunsaturated fats which again are what predominate these grain and seed oils these highly easily oxidizable types of fatty acids right we know that in nature where you see a higher proportion of polyunsaturated fats you see a higher proportion of vitamin e vitamin e literally exists and exists in nature to protect pufas to protect polyunsaturated fats we know that your average american is under consuming vitamin e like 10 of uh of americans consume adequate vitamin e so as our uh intake of these polyunsaturated grain and seed oils increases our need for vitamin c increases we're not consuming adequate vitamins i mean vitamin e vitamin e yeah yeah you said c um sorry vitamin e and so we're under consuming vitamin e um that's going to have consequences right because vitamin e literally its role in the body um is to protect lipids right from oxidizing and um and you can look to parts of the world like in israel are you familiar with the israeli paradox no so the israeli paradox israelis do everything right in accordance with what the nutritional and the medical orthodoxy would say to do about nutrition right they consume more of these omega-6 dominant grain and seed oils and anywhere anyone on the planet you think that we consume a lot of grain and seed oils here in the united states they consume 10 more and they have you know i don't know it could just be that they're they're more health-conscious so like healthy user bias infuses all of these which we could talk about but like this is a big confounding aspect of of uh nutritional epidemiology but in israel they consume about 10 more of these types of oils than we do here in the us and their their health is horrible they have the same amount of
heart disease they have skyrocketing rates of cancer right um type 2 diabetes and the like but nonetheless you look at their diets and they're in the picture of like they would be like the prized client of any you know these like more orthodox dietitians so when if someone does have some sort of salad dressing should that salad dressing always be stored in the cold yeah so extra virgin olive oil is i like to say that it's extra virgin olive oil is like the primary oil that i use i generally you know i use avocado oil when i'm cooking at very high temperatures but for the most part extra virgin olive oil is an oil where you can look at the entirety of the hierarchy of evidence and we see that it's beneficial it's also the oil used in the mediterranean dietary pattern which is to suggest that we use any other oil is not an evidence-based recommendation when the mediterranean dietary pattern is the is the the dietary pattern that the medical and nutritional orthodoxy is seemingly in love with for every other reason right so they exclusively will use extra virgin olive oil and um and we know that extra virgin olive oil is very heat stable so it's it's about 15 saturated fat the rest is monounsaturated fat you get a tiny proportion of polyunsaturated fat but the fats in extra virgin olive oil are they're already chemically stable and you know the the small amount of puffas in extra virgin olive oil are protected by the the vast array of antioxidants that extra virgin olive oil contains extra virgin olive oil actually has a compound in it called oleokanthal which is as anti-inflammatory as low-dose ibuprofen whoa yeah which is a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug that chronic use of that drug is associated with cardiovascular events and the like you get all the benefit of like regularly taking an anti-inflammatory drug if you just routinely use extra virgin olive oil
one of my wife's friends told her that olive oil is bad for your vision does that make any sense doesn't make any sense to me no zero i i was like what yeah how where'd you hear that she's like that's just what she told me no i'm like okay i'll find out i'll talk to matt today yeah it's um it's pretty good i mean it's like from a cardiovascular standpoint it's a great source of monounsaturated fat how could it be possibly bad for your vision is there any pathway that makes any sense to you i think maybe she misread something that was saying that these the grain and seed oils are bad for your vision i mean they're you know highly oxidizable and we know that your eyes are neural tissue essentially so it's what's not good for the brain is gonna be not good for the eyes and vice versa so as far as oils that should be put on say like salad dressing like what oils do you feel like are acceptable i think extra extra virgin olive oil is primary yeah i think like avocado oil is good but it's you're missing out on the opportunity to get some of those phytochemicals in olive oil extra virgin olive oil particularly what is the difference between extraversion and other olive oils so extra virgin olive oil is just like you crush olives that's how you get extra virgin olive oil and then you protect that oil the the other types are um well there's filtered and unfiltered extra virgin olive oil but you generally want to buy filtered i know some people might see filter unfiltered and think that that's the one to buy right because it's more pure but actually what you end up getting with filtered with sorry unfiltered oil is little olive micro particles and water which can accelerate the degradation process of the oil so you want it to be filtered okay and should you store that in the cold or can it be stored in a closet or a pantry i think just in a you know you want to keep it away from the stove but in general you want to keep it in a you know it doesn't have to be refrigerated but you do want to make sure that you're buying it in glass
darkly colored bottle and the best extra virgin olive oils are going to have a harvest buy or sorry a harvest date on the bottle because again extra virgin olive oil it's a fresh fruit juice right so it only gets worse over time so you want to buy the freshest extra virgin olive oil extra virgin olive oil that you can find and how long should you keep it for you want to consume it like as quickly as you can so i like to buy if you're like a single person like me you want to just buy like a small like as small of a bottle as you can find and then use that and then just keep buying those small bottles right if you're a big family and you're using it all the time like a bigger leader bottle i think will suffice but we can look to like you know randomized controlled trials like the predimed study which is one of these like seminal nutrition studies because it's a huge population multi-center trial rct that found that when people used a liter of extra virgin olive oil a week in their families they had profoundly improved cardiovascular health metabolic health brain health and even like uh i believe anthropometric features like they're like their waste wow yeah so if you're consuming salad dressing it should just be virgin olive oil yeah that's my take extra virgin olive oil and is there anything negative about balsamic vinaigrette no balsamic vinaigrette i think is great um first of all balsamic vinegar vinegar in general is uh acetic acid is the is the primary uh ingredient that you'll see across all vinegar variants and it can help to reduce um there's a uh it can induce satiety so actually vinegar is a good like one of these like foods that's like oddly satiating um it can reduce uh postprandial glycemia so like the blood sugar spike after a meal so vinegar is a great great food the balsamic vinegar does have a little bit of sugar in it but i don't mind like i'm not you know like i think that the benefits outweigh the risks and also vinegar balsamic vinegar has a compound in it uh i forget what the acronym stands for
but the acronym is dmb so people can easily find it it's one of these like long complex chemical chemical designations but uh that's been shown to actually support gut health like support the microbiome particularly for people who consume a lot of red meat which is awesome which i do i consume like i'm a big advocate for you know the consumption of grass-fed beef and things like that so um as far as salad goes um just extra virgin olive oil either balsamic vinaigrette or regular vinegar is is there a benefit to having regular vinegar over balsamic vinaigrette i think only if you're like really counting like counting calories which i don't endorse like that's not you know i i think balsamic vinegar is great you also get a little bit of resveratrol in balsamic vinegar because of the yeah so i think that the i think balsamic vinegar is great i happen to love it and also people that eat a salad every day so this is a really cool research from rush university found that people who eat a big bowl of dark leafy greens every day have brains that perform up to 11 years younger wow yeah so this could be like healthy user bias like again nutrition even my the recommendations that i make like you know a lot of health user buys compounds many um of these kinds of studies in the world of nutrition because we just don't have many long term randomized you know large population multi-center randomized control trials right but the research shows that that that regular consumers of dark leafy greens so i like to say like a salad a day that's what this research found that they have more youthful brains by up to 11 years and when you actually look at what dark leafy greens have in them first of all they're one of the most nutrient dense foods that we have i mean most the most nutrient dense foods that we have access to are going to be animal products right but dark leafy greens are up there because they're so calorie sparse and they are a good source of folate and
vitamin c and we also know that they're one of the best ways to get those carotenoids like lutein and zeaxanthin which is not just associated with better cognitive aging and lower risk for cognitive decline but in young and healthy college students they've actually shown that when you give people who are already thought to be at their peak of cognitive prowess supplemental lutein and zeaxanthin that you see an improvement by about 25 in visual processing speed wow yeah as a university of georgia 25 that's incredible yeah now is there any concern about oxalates i think only if you know that you're sensitive to them i'm not uh how would one find out i think if you have like you know kidney stones like in your family things like that like if you are generally you would know you know i think there are genes that play a role in this or if you know somebody in your family or if you yourself have had them before you know calcium oxalate is what you want to be careful with but i don't think that like eating a salad a day is going to put your risk is there any benefit of cooking leafy greens versus eating them raw or vice versa certain leafy greens can definitely be made more digestible when um when you cook them uh but but you know there's always like a give or take when you cook or store vegetables some micronutrients become more vital bioavailable some become less so i tend to recommend you know sort of a mix like a like a like variety you know some cooked some raw but in general with the salad recommendation you know with dark leafy greens like arugula kale spinach things like that i don't think that spinach is probably the highest with regard to oxalates so you know if you're sensitive to oxalates um you know you might want to cut down on your raw spinach consumption i used to drink kale shakes all the time and i
would mix it with coconut butter and a bunch of other stuff in there and fruit but then i got concerned about oxalates yeah i just don't think you know i think if all you're doing is eating kale day in and day out like there's a famous uh case report published in the medical literature of a woman who've heard that bok choy could help prevent type 2 diabetes and so she ate she was eating like two kilograms a day of raw bok choy she grew a goiter wow but i think most people are not gonna you know i think the benefits outweigh the risk there are benefits and risks associated with eating anything so i think each person has to look at each food and also i don't believe that there's a one-size-fits-all diet like i think that some people like it makes sense to me why some people would do well on carnivore diets right to me it's about kind of identifying what foods work best for you right and even things like you know dietary fiber a lot of people say that they have difficulty digesting dietary fiber but it's not necessarily the problem a problem with the fiber you likely haven't cultivated a microbiome to contend with whatever you know quality or quantity of fibers that you're consuming so is that if like you make a shift in your diet and then your microbiome does not have enough time to keep up with or adapt to that shift yeah exactly so people that that from one day to the next will go and just dramatically increase their fiber intake which i think sometimes you go on some of these like vegan run social media accounts they make it seem like fiber is like the only nutrient that like that you need right and so a lot of people then like dramatically increase their fiber intake and that sets them up right off the bat for bloating gas like you know all kinds of digestive problems um one of the things that carnivore people talk about is plant defense chemicals right there those that's a that's a big one plants don't want to be eaten the way they i mean that's paul saladino's claim yeah right what do you think about all that i mean i think paul's very smart he's a
we're friends um but i disagree with him on uh on you know on that i think that you know a lot of these plant defense compounds have uh have a beneficial hormetic effect in us the the issue is if you're if you don't react to them well is it a problem with the compounds themselves or is it a problem maybe you've got some degree of gut dysbiosis right you've lost some degree of gut resilience to be able to to be able to reap the full benefit from those types of compounds right i think that this i mean it makes a lot of sense today right we live in a time where there's widespread gut dysbiosis got problems problems with the microbiome right where you know many people are born via c-section for example which medically is certainly indicated in some in in some instances right but they're not being breastfed overuse of antibiotics and we live in a society especially over the past two years it's become overly obsessed with you know what i call hygiene theater and so you know i think that that we've lost a bit of resilience in our gut and so that can sometimes affect how we you know whether or not we're able to re-benefit from these compounds that are to some degree toxic right but in a robust system that that quote-unquote toxicity fosters anti-fragility right if your system is already robust then putting a little bit of stress into the system that's going to foster anti-fragility which is a concept that i love right making yourself harder to kill which i think is a great sort of way to frame you know your your wellness like nutritional approach right but if you have you know an impaired microbiome for example or if your gut mucosa has become degraded which is the sort of this like demilitarized zone between your gut lumen and your gut epithelium right if that's become degraded over time and what would cause that to become degraded well generally it's caused by not consuming a fiber because we see that when you don't consume enough dietary fiber over time the bacteria certain species of bacteria in your gut will actually eat the mucin that comprises this this gut mucosa that sort of acts you know it's like this sort of
bacteria-free zone in your large intestine that separates your the interior contents of your gut and your gut microbiome from your epithelium does that balance out if say someone does try to incorporate a carnivore diet or maybe even uh version of the ketogenic diet that issues plant protein or plant matter are you does that eventually bounce back i mean is that like a temporary effect where this bacteria searches for fiber doesn't find it anymore and then attacks the mucous membrane yeah you know it's it's definitely complicated um and i'm i you know my understanding is that uh sometimes the root cause of these problems can be bacterial overgrowth um and so when you do an elimination diet like a carnivore diet for example you starve out the bad bacteria right and so you can kind of create like a milieu that's then that ultimately then becomes more friendly to the reintroduction of these kinds of fibers at which point you can start to build up you know that resilience and that and that mucosa again i think that the the carnivore diet diet's a really great like can be a great short-term therapeutic diet um but uh but again i think like running around being afraid of like these these plant quote-unquote toxins the evidence on the consumption of fruits like if fruits and vegetables were really trying to kill us they're doing a terrible job like well i don't think anyone's saying fruits are trying to kill us other than like there's arsenic and apple seeds and things like that fair fair fair it's really they're talking about plants yeah yeah but the but the research on them suggests that people who consume more tend to live longer now i'm not like i i definitely advocate for like both you know and i'm a big animal protein you know and i think that like people have different tolerances to different vegetables right i know somebody who if he's in the same room as an allium which is like garlic leeks shallots onions and things like
that uh you know he's just like he has to quarantine himself for a different reason you know really um so it's uh everybody's different the hermetic effect totally makes sense if you take into consideration other hormetic effects that we accept as being beneficial like the sauna yeah or like a cold plunge things along those lines where your body is reacting to this intruder or this uh invasion of excess heat or cold and producing this beneficial effect to the overall body yeah i totally i mean i totally agree that as well i mean i'm a huge fan of sauna um especially with regard to dementia prevention if you use asana two to three times a week you slash your risk of developing dementia by 22 percent wow four to seven times per week 65 wow there's not a drug on the market that is going to slash your risk of developing dementia by 65 percent that's incredible yeah that's incredible um and what is the protocol well they do this research which is actually really great that they do it in finland the university of eastern finland is where a lot of this this good sauna data comes from and they generally do it yeah i mean on a daily basis i think the key is to do it for as long as you can do it to to get to that feeling of discomfort you know you want it to be a stress on the body and then and then you leave and then you do it again i think generally that's the the that seems to be like the traditional protocol there and when you say feeling discomfort like how deep into the discomfort well what i do is i actually i'll put my fingers on my on the radial artery in my wrist and um and you know sometimes you can get a sense that like your body is having a mild aerobic exercise session right yeah so i mean you know there's only so much of that that you can take with the between the sweating and um your heart rate is increased uh you get to you get you get this like feeling of um dysphoria that that like washes over you and i mean sometimes i there's a sauna that i go to sometimes
in la gets up to like 225 degrees oh you go to a russian bath house yeah yeah they they don't they don't play around they don't play around yeah and i literally sometimes i say to myself wow i feel like i'm dying and i'm probably in that moment actually dying yeah you know yeah that's the whole key yeah yeah i mean that's that's the the argument against the uh this thing about a hormetic effect of leafy greens so the most favorable sauna duration and temperature associated with lower dementia risk we're 5 to 14 minutes per session at a temperature of 80 to 99 degrees celsius yeah what is that in fairness that's [ __ ] high 99 degrees celsius is like 220 degrees right yeah higher temperatures over 100 degrees celsius were in fact associated with an elevated risk for dementia okay so if you go too hard yeah i i took my sauna temperature down a little bit i was at 189 degrees for 25 minutes and i took it down to 185 all right well it was at 189 for 25 minutes and i took it down to 185 for 20. because i was just i was so exhausted when you get out of there at 189 i was like i think i'm [ __ ] myself up and ed when hanging out with larry hamilton unfortunately that's psycho he uh he gets it up to 220 degrees and he puts oven mitts on and he gets on an airdyne bike in the sauna wow yeah he goes hard gotta get hit different at that well i also think you have to take into consideration whether or not he does a cold plunge first because if you do a cold plunge first 185 degrees is not just tolerable it feels great so i go from the cold plunge which uh at home i have this morosco forge which is 34 degrees and here i have a blue cube at the studio which is great and it is uh it goes to 37 degrees so just slightly warmer it's freezing as [ __ ] but it's also circulating so it circulates almost like a river that makes even colder oh it's death you sit in that [ __ ] thing it sucks but um it's really easy to go from that into the sauna at 185 degrees you go into the sauna at 185 it feels like it's nice so what would be torturing you normally is like really easy to tolerate for long periods of time so generally i do a 20
minute session at 185 degrees and it's rough then i go into the cold plunge for three minutes and it's easy not in the cold plunge is not easy but it's easy to go back into the sauna the coal punch sucks no matter what it's it's like slightly easier for the first few seconds if you come out of the sauna but very quickly your body's freezing oh man yeah and so then i do three minutes in the cold plunge and then back into the sauna and 20 minutes goes by like nothing i mean i i get to 25 30 minutes and i feel still feel fine it's just starting to suck a little bit and then i go into the cold plunge for an additional two minutes and i finish it off cold wow yeah i mean the cold plunge is like a state change for me i love it yeah but you acclimate you know over time especially with the sauna like he's been doing that like uh the whatever the assault bike is he doing that yeah this whole bike is like i mean that's torture he's a psycho yeah but he's also in incredible health for i mean how old is laird i believe he's 56 or 57 he looks fantastic he's surfing every day you know i mean he's the pinnacle of health and so 58 years old wow i was actually drinking his coffee uh in here he has a turmeric coffee i mean look at the guys yeah stud and just really well versed in the benefits of all these different anti-inflammatory compounds his layered superfood coffee is what we have in the uh i don't know did you get one of those i'll get that is that what i'm drinking here that's just black rifle that's black coffee we use his we use black rifle coffee in his machine but his machine combines that with coconut oil and turmeric and all these different compounds cacao there's all these different things a gift one yeah dude it's great but um so layered uh his protocols like i i'm not sure if he goes in the cold punch first if he goes in the cold punch first then it kind of makes sense that he can get in that sauna and ride that air dye machine at that at such a high temperature nuts because i was doing it for a while but i i actually burned my throat i was uh my old studio i had i was
cranking it up to 205 and i was doing like 20 minutes and when i'd get out of there i mean i would lie down on my jiu jitsu mats like i just got shot i was so tired and i was starting to like like my throat was burning and i was like jesus christ i'm cooking myself like a brisket like this not smart like i need to take this down a notch so over time my experimentation has gotten me to this place of 185 degrees for 20 minutes seems to be just uncomfortable enough and that's what i did today so i do 185 and then three and if i have to time i do an additional 20 plus minutes in the sauna after that and then another cold plunge but i always end on cold yeah i mean there's probably an effect where just being in it longer and like you're able to be in it longer when it's at a lower temperature is beneficial um it's still pretty hot yeah 185 is still pretty hot it's like when i got up to like 190 ish it's like it just was it just felt like i was too tired afterwards like this can't be good like i'm too worn out yeah and i'd come in here and i'd be like struggling i feel that way too yeah after like uh repeated bouts of like the the russian like banya that i do in l.a sometimes and the cold plunge yeah did they beat you with the leaves what's it called plaza or something i've never i've never had that done it's a little too intense but i love it i'm obsessed with sauna i think it's great i think that i think the real bang for your buck comes from like the fact that it is an aerobic exercise memetic right so it's like the best workout that you can get while sitting still yes that's amazing i think what it does for your blood pressure is amazing because we already right like we already uh talked about the fact that having you know normal blood pressure is key to keeping your to keeping your brain healthy and there was actually also a risk reduction from the same lab at university of eastern finland showing you that stroke risk is reduced um was a 40 decrease in all-cause mortality from amazing four times a week 20 minutes a day and i think the their
protocol was like i think they said 175 degrees yeah that's what they used and the thing about like finland is the sauna capital of the world which is why i love that the research has been done there because if you were to do that here it would be a perfect illustration of healthy user bias right right because people who have access to saunas here are probably also well they're going to the gym regularly right they're probably mindful of what they put in their bodies there in finland you've got on average one sauna per household right so it's like taking a shower so you kind of like control automatically for all those different you know um confounding potentially confounding variables in finland and for them it's such a smart way to like manage the cold weather yeah that too because it changes what like what cold is to you have you been to finland no i've never been oh you should go i would love to there's a place in helsinki i'm gonna butcher it's pronounced pronunciation but it's called loily or something and it's like the most beautiful saunas you've ever seen in your life right on like this uh it's like right on the water so you get out of the sauna then you go dip into whatever sea that is over there yeah yeah sounds great it's so great yeah it's um i i think it's one of the most important things that i do and i do it right after cardio too so it maintains my high heart rate so like today i did i do a kettlebell workout and then i do the airdyne bike so i go from the airdyne bike right into the sauna and i'm already sweating and exhausted and my my heart's already pounding as i get in there and it's 185 degrees wow and my heart rate just stays compounding it stays pounding you're a beast well it's just i'm just trying not to die yeah i'm trying to maintain i'm 55 now so it's like i've the the one thing that i've that's shown to me uh to really have a benefit on the way i feel other than exercise the way i i've just my overall like sense of well-being in my body is sauna and the cole plunge combination it's really had a significant effect so great one thing that i think that people i've
been talking about this a bit recently on social media that i think is actually pretty important that um that nobody i've i haven't seen anybody else talking about this but how detrimental uh frequent use of antiseptic mouthwash can be really particularly post-workout so i go to a gym and there's mouthwash like in the you know like in the cleanup area and i look at all the people swishing with mouthwash after after a workout and i'm like you're you're hurting your gains by doing that post-workout really how so so some of the so obviously blood pressure you know we've hit on it a few times but um when we eat foods that are rich in compounds called nitrates like beets arugula arugula is the top source calorie for calorie um dark leafy greens in general great source of these compounds called nitrates right sometimes you'll see supplements like on the market that are like nitrate like you know beet root powder right to boost nitric oxide in the body yeah we rely on oral bacteria our oral microbiome to reduce nitrate from our produce to nitrite reducing means that they it removes these bacteria remove an oxygen molecule and it's that nitrite that enters the nitric oxide pathway to boost nitric oxide which has this the overall effect of reducing blood pressure and increasing blood flow right right which is why all these post-workout or pre-workout supplements have that in it yeah exactly but if you um frequently swish with antiseptic mouthwash so not all mouthwashes but alcohol-based bacteriocytal mouthwash you're nuking indiscriminately the bacteria in your mouth that are pivotal critical in that pathway does that same effect happen from the consumption of alcohol like consumption of whiskey or tequila or something like that it definitely changes the microbiome it probably has an effect uh we know that i mean alcohol is something that does have some degree of benefit right if it's like a stress relieving
tool for you if you use it as a social lubricant but in general we know that ethanol is a neurotoxin and that alcohol inflames the gut it drives um the translocation of of endotoxin from the gut into circulation people who even moderately consume alcohol have accelerated shrinkage in the hippocampus the memory center of the brain so you know i think i think alcohol is one of these things where like you know if you have a healthy relationship with it and you drink infrequently i think it's fine but um but yeah it's uh i don't know exactly you know if it's like i don't think that research has been done yet um like what what a transient uh bit of alcohol but we do know that this bacteria is on the tongue so presumably if the alcohol is sliding down your tongue right right then it's gonna have an effect yeah it has to yeah and when you're talking about these mouthwashes uh post workout um so is it specifically post workout or is there a time ever where those mouthwashes are not dangerous what do you got there jamie so post workout mouthwash could inhibit the benefit of extra exercise right results show blood pressure lowering effect of exercise wise was diminished by more than 60 percent yeah over the first hour of recovery that's incredible and absent two hours after exercise when antibacterial mouthwash was used holy [ __ ] yeah 40 of the us population uses antiseptic mouthwash every day what about gum gum uh it depends you know if it's not if it's not changing the oral microbiome um significant everything you eat is going to change the microbiome to some degree right but we just we don't want to nuke the good bacteria that we want for this nitric oxide pathway well when you have like a gum that like freshens your breath or you know mint is that what it's doing is it is it nuking the microbiome of your mouth i mean i this is i mean highly controversial i personally choose to avoid artificial sweeteners and i know a lot of these gums have artificial sweeteners in them um you know there is some data suggesting that it might change the the gut
microbiome right artificial sweeteners now in terms of gum you're not necessarily consuming the artificial sweetener but the artificial sweetener is there in your mouth right i have no this is just i'm in speculation territory here but um but you know i think that it could it conceivably might have an effect but i don't think that that research has been done yet now when someone uses toothpaste especially toothpaste with fluoride yeah does that have a detrimental effect i mean i personally avoid fluoride and fluoride does have a uh antiseptic effect as well as a bacteriocidal effect as well so if you if you uh rather work out and then brush your teeth with fluoride based toothpaste paste afterwards would that have a similar effect as this mouthwashes conceivably research hasn't been done but i would i would that would be my hypothesis yeah but what about a non-fluoride base like a toms of maine natural type of toothpaste that's what i use i mean the tooth the toothpaste that i use i i look for nanohydroxyapatite i don't know if you've ever talked about that here on the podcast but that's a that's sort of a fluoride alternative that they've been using in japan for some time that has been that has shown to have a remineralizing effect on par with fluoride but hydroxyapatite is a fully natural our bones are made of hydroxyapatite our teeth are made of hydroxyapatite so solely natural doesn't have any endocrine disrupting potential the way that fluoride does fluoride is also a suspected endocrine disruptor um which i think is not good but it also has what does that mean that it can affect your hormones so endocrine does i mean endocrine disrupting compounds are everywhere we're exposed to 1400 different hormone scrambling compounds on a daily basis and um and fluoride is one of them so it scrambles your endocrine system it could if you i mean we ingest fluoride in the drinking water sometimes there's this debate i mean typically with toxins you get what's called uh a dose effect right the dose makes the poison that's sort of like one of the hallmark
platitudes in the field of toxicology but the reason why endocrine disruptors are so treacherous and so difficult to study is they possess what's called a non-monotonic dose response so you might have increasing uh risk of a certain effect with a higher dose with these endocrine disrupting compounds but you might have a completely different effect at a low dose so that's what makes them tricky tricky to study and and and um and also you know just treacherous in general in terms of their you know their effects on our health and i imagine it would be cumulative like this is not something you'd see a significant change in your body immediately it'd be like a slow burn yeah you never know i mean the environmental working group found that you know umbilical cord has between 200 200 and 300 different industrial chemicals like waste products in umbilical in a population representative sampling of of of of fetuses um that there's like bpa right in a bill like bisphenol a which is a known xenoestrogen right we've known for 100 years at this point that it acts like estrogen in the body and it's everywhere these are like the in the everywhere chemicals i mean you had an expert on the show talking about how it's you know reducing the anode genital distance in males yeah dr shanna swan yeah countdown and it's all about phthalates yeah these compounds are everywhere bisphenol is is a super common one any any time you're drinking out of plastic if it doesn't have bisphenol a it's going to have bisphenol s generally unless it says no bisphenols which is rare meanwhile you have a bottle of water yeah well you know you can't unfortunately well unfortunately a metal that's a steel glass of water if you want that's what i should have been drinking yeah we have a filter machine and we we switched out from bottles of water a few years ago to this smart yeah it just seems like a smart thing to do yeah but um but going back to the mouthwash i mean they've done
studies that show that frequent users so just to be clear this is two or more times per day of antiseptic mouthwash have a 50 increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes and a doubling of risk for the development of hypertension which is high blood pressure [ __ ] from just using mouthwash that's insane yeah and it's antiseptic the that's an observational study so correlation doesn't equal causation just have to you know mention that but in this exercise study they used a prescription antiseptic mouthwash called chlorhexadine and you know so it's like it's it's clear that people who are using mouthwash regularly are seeing uh you know a health impingement as a result now what is there a non-antiseptic mouthwash is there something that makes your breath smell good that's beneficial or not negative i think you know they have like xylitol based uh mouthwashes that i i believe are selectively you know antiseptic but you know i believe that um good oral health like shouldn't require much more than flossing regularly brushing you know with with something that like doesn't have like you know fluoride in it and also eating a diet like a biologically appropriate diet right i mean grains and grain products are the worst thing for your dental health right like and if you think about it an animal in the wild without its teeth is quickly a dead animal yeah right so i think that whatever is going to be good for the oral microbiome is going to be good for systemic health and vice versa and so grain products refined grains added sugars i mean these are the worst foods right like anything that's going to cause any any kind of like starch dominant food product that is easily retained in our in the gum line major driver of cavities i want to talk about that but i or about grains but i want to also talk about fluoride like why is it even in the water yeah i mean that's uh that's a that's a good question i don't know but isn't the whole idea about it it's supposed to like stop tooth decay
i think i think there is some yeah i think there's some truth to that but i don't think that why our widespread tooth decay is due to a lack of fluoride i think it's more due to the fact that our diets have become aberrant yeah um i mean i'll tell you i haven't used fluoride toothpaste in some time and i when i was a kid i was the kind of kid that every time i would every time i would go to a dentist there would be a new cavity i just like would always dread going to the dentist because like there would always be something for them to fill yeah and ever since i demoted grains and grain products you know to the occasional indulgence in my diet right i haven't had like a single cavity that's a anecdote certainly but um but i think it's it's not like a mystery why these kinds of things develop why we why we have tooth decay it's just that we just eat crap you know we eat crap all the time it's shocking how good grains taste yeah that's what sucks what sucks is like i am just a gigantic fan of pasta and bread i don't eat it very often but when i do i [ __ ] love it and it's you know it's the occasional thing for me now and after i eat it i feel like [ __ ] but it's amazing how good it feels while you're consuming it like what is that pathway like what's going on in your brain where like a plate of lasagna is so damn rewarding you know i think i think what it is is that these kinds of foods tend to have that quality known as hyperpalatability they tend to bring together you know sugar whether it's like the sugar in the tomato sauce wheat flour fat copious fat amounts of fat salt right yeah i mean these foods typify the standard american diet yeah and these are the kinds of foods that now we consume by the majority 60 of our calories now come from these kinds of foods ultra processed foods or these hyper hyperpalatable mixed foods mixed dishes like the lasagnas the pizzas the burgers and things like that i'm sure you saw that chart that was recently published where they rated the nutritional benefits of food i shared it it's the food compass please tell people about this oh my god so
great is it on your instagram yeah it's at the top i pinned it at the top of my instagram it's absolutely nice crazy yeah so tufts university and i recently had a conversation with the principal investigator and i believe that our conversation was had out of good faith and he he was interested in hearing my perspective yeah so i shared this watermelon good kale good i agree with that watermelon's great right watermelon is tasty i don't know about kale being on the same why is kale and watermelon together because watermelon has all that sugar in it and also seeds if you eat the seeds that's not good right this i mean basically what this this was a an attempt by researchers at tufts university to create a food uh a nutrient profiling system this isn't the first right there's actually a profiling system that was devised in latin america called the nova profiling system which i actually am a fan of it ranks foods in accordance with how processed they are which i think is like actually quite important can be quite useful in the context of this of the standard american diet with an obese population but this is uh the toughest attempt and we can clearly see that it underweights protein and it doesn't properly penalize foods for being ultra processed let's read it out because there's people that are just listening so tufts they made this chart with three different color systems green to be encouraged yellow to be moderated and red to be minimized so frosted mini wheats which is sugar on top of grain is at 87 and it is in the green to be encouraged whereas ground beef is the lowest yeah at 26 which is to be minimized but ground beef is just protein and fat yeah it's really generally healthy for you yeah 100 but what studies can they point to that say ground beef is to be minimized i look at a boiled egg like that's just egg just an egg right and and what comes in higher right you see egg substitute fried and vegetable oil comes in higher than just a boiled
egg it's so crazy egg substitute fried in vegetable oil is 62. right that's so nuts is that what the [ __ ] is an egg substitute skinless chicken breast 61 honey nut cheerios 76 how the [ __ ] is that real yeah i mean they they basically um they score in accordance with this this formula that they've developed where you know they'll give a certain amount of points for protein a certain amount of fiber and micronutrients but they clearly they clearly don't properly penalize foods for being ultra processed right right um honey nut cheerios i mean ultra processed foods joe are every 10 increase in ultra processed foods ultra processed food consumption associated with a 14 increased risk of early mortality every 10 increase in ultra processed food consumption associated with a 25 increased risk for dementia recently published research right so this this chart clearly is a is in my view right and and until i'm convinced otherwise an instrument designed to sell ultra-processed food put it back up jamie it's uh yeah it's a so look at this there's another thing that i wanted to point out here because this is so nuts orange juice with calcium here's something that people need to understand orange juice is just sugar water yeah it's got some vitamins in it but it's just sugar water if you want an orange eat a [ __ ] orange an orange it's self-limiting yeah i have a friend and they they ordered fresh squeezed orange juice like oh as long as it's got the pulp in it like listen man that's just your body is not doesn't know what the [ __ ] is going on if you're drinking 16 ounces of orange juice that that is a jolt of sugar to your system that's not that different than a glass of coca-cola 100 yeah it's i mean it's mind-boggling also it's like that chart doesn't take into account context right like it doesn't take into account the fact that as we mentioned 50 of the population
it's almost 50 percent of population that that's obese right yeah half of the population is either diabetic or pre-diabetic so it has some degree of glucose intolerance and you're going to say that that's like that orange juice is a healthy choice for somebody who has essentially glucose intolerance right because they're insulin resistant but it's so unnatural to drink a juice like that yeah and that's what people need to understand it's like when you're eating a fruit that's how it's designed by nature to be consumed you're getting all of the fiber you're eating the the tissue of the of the fruit you're eating everything that's like you eat an apple you're supposed to eat it out apple juice is so crazy like my kids were at disneyland and they got an apple juice and i said can i see that and i looked at it it was like [ __ ] 29 grams of sugar i'm like that is so crazy you just get this jolt of sugar to your system i mean if one thing if you just did a crazy crossfit workout and your [ __ ] legs are buckling and you want to get a jolt of glucose in your system okay have an apple juice but for just a regular person to consume apple juice you're thinking you're drinking something healthy and it's just a trick yeah it's i mean it really is absurd and it's like you know whether we're talking about the the you know the alzheimer's paper that was that was fraudulent or this which you know i don't think that there's any malice like behind this i really don't but just ignorance yeah and also conflicts of interest like did you there was a paper that came out recently that found that among the uh the the people called on by the 2020 dietary guidelines for americans committee like those committee members 95 percent of them had conflicts of interest with pharma with the food industry right like general mills craft astrazeneca right those are the people coming up with our dietary guidelines right so they're not going to say minimize like your consumption of ultra processed foods because the food industry would never let them not only that you ever look at those folks that's another part of the problem the
people that are recommending health choices they all look like [ __ ] yeah like that woman barbara ferrer the woman who was locking down los angeles oh my god that poor lady like go outside i don't know what you're eating but eat something different like that lady looks terrible and to have someone like the belgian minister of health have you ever seen that lady no never seen that lady oh buckle up buckle up for this one i don't know what the [ __ ] belgium's up to but this just this is like it's a joke it's like a punch line to a joke oh my god like this is absolutely the last person you should be taking any health advice from oh god imagine yeah that's the belgian health minister she's morbidly obese yeah i mean it's mind-boggling i mean that's crazy yeah a vegan diet is unhealthy and dangerous for infants well i agree with that oh she's right she's like a broken clock yeah right twice a day yeah not digital clocks by the way no they're never right it's uh i'm happy that she said that though yeah that's it that's a big issue well that is a big issue there was a a woman recently that was uh jailed because her child died um from malnutrition because uh she was feeding it a vegan diet i mean i don't know what the [ __ ] she was giving her baby but no it's terrible it's uh i just actually became a became an uncle my my little brother uh had the we have the first baby in the family a little girl and um i'm learning about like you know breast breast feeding and all the things right but uh what's interesting is that their pediatrician told us that like he he'll often see vegan moms come in and they they're suffering from crazy like osteoporosis and like you know low bone mineral density because like the mammary tissue doesn't care what the mod like the mammary teacher just wants to make the best milk possible it doesn't care if the woman if the the mother is getting it from her diet if not it'll take the nutrients from
them from the mom right right so take it from the bones and the muscle of the mother yeah yeah and in the brain right for the dha fat if need be oh and so that's what they call mommy brain yeah that lack of sleep oh man yeah it's fascinating it is fascinating um another thing i wanted to talk to you about is glyphosate there's a recent study that showed that glyphosate appeared and see if you can find what the actual numbers were but it was a shocking number of people's bodies containing glyphosate which is roundup which is an herbicide that when you talk about people consuming large amounts of vegetables and large amounts of grains one thing to take into consideration when you're dealing with monocrop agriculture is the use of pesticides yikes disturbing weed killer ingredient tied to cancer found in 80 of us urine samples now immediately upon publishing this i went on to twitter and i saw this shill for these um herbicide companies that was talking about just a minimal amount a tiny amount of parts per million you can't even find it if you're looking for it nothing to see here like what the [ __ ] are you talking about it's poison there's zero amount of that that should be in your body when it's in eighty percent of the us population like how bad is that yeah i mean you've got these like apologists for the whether it's the food industry or the cosmetic industry the guy in particular that i'm talking about has he was wildly and just defending this but he's completely connected to these companies and and people are pointing it out like you have been paid for by these companies like you you are in the pocket of these companies yeah i mean we know that it's a it's an endocrine disruptor it's it is bacteriocyte all right like i mean it's it's a it's an it's a it's an antibiotic essentially um and you know i don't
to be honest like glyphosate is something that like you're reducing your risk if you're eating more animal products right like it's very it's it's abundantly found in grains gmo products and things like that gmo products are actually bred to bgmo so that they can't stand heavy spraying it's used as a glyphosate is used as a desiccant um quite strongly in fact on like oats and oat products and things like that and is there a way to clean these things before you use them to filter out glyphosate or is it something that's just a part of the the grain yeah it's a good question i mean i think soaking and rinsing like produce well with regard regard to grain i'm not sure with regard to produce i do think that there's a there's both an effect with like rinsing and like soaking in particular um in vinegar and salt and or salt vinegar and or salt um and uh and cooking i think it i don't think it's a very heat stable compound but i'm not you know like i think people should should avoid it like like i generally if i'm eating the skin this is i mean personally there's online i mean i'm sure you've seen but the debate between like whether or not organic is is better for you than non-organic nutritionally like in terms of micronutrients there's no real difference you'll see higher levels of certain micronutrients um inorganic and you'll see higher levels of certain like for example nitrates in non-organic produce right so you can't really say that one is more nutritious than the other studies do show obviously aside from reducing your exposure to glyphosate and other petroleum-based herbicides and pesticides you're reducing your exposure potentially to heavy metals there was a meta-analysis that found 50 uh cadmium levels were reduced by 50 in organic produce as compared to um conventional and then you see higher levels of these like plant quote-unquote defense compounds in organic produce
which uh depending on you know where you stand on these plant defense compounds i mean likely you know i think provide benefit um to uh to human health that's the hormatic effect that's like the hormetic effect yeah um and so these these genetically modified uh organisms these gmos these plants that are designed to be able to tolerate glyphosate how are they doing that like what is happening to these plants what are they doing to the plant that allows them to spray this toxic [ __ ] all over them and they keep growing yeah you know i i wish i could give like i could give like a really sort of like buttoned-up informed answer i'm not i'm not 100 sure what i will say is that uh there's only a small handful of crops that are gmo like it's there's only like 10 crops that are gmo you know sometimes you'll see like non-gmo asparagus but asparagus was like never gmo you know but it's the it's it's generally i believe it's it's soy it's corn it's like saying gluten-free milk gluten-free milk yeah yeah uh but yeah they're gmo primarily i think to be able to withstand heavy spraying by these chemicals and again precautionary principle i think the less there is around the the better i mean people will say that it's like the most heavily studied you know herbicide in history you know but um also causes cancer yeah i mean like i'm yeah i'm i would rather reduce my exposure to that and uh you know and and yeah it's just like it's fair that not everything that's natural is good for you not everything that's unnatural is bad for you but like i'm not gonna put like my health in the hands of monsanto which i which is now bayer i think after yes they purchased it right but like those companies don't give a don't give a [ __ ] about it about your health right and when you do finally get sick there's no recourse like who's going to be there right and also
correlation does not equal causation they you have to prove that this is what caused your illness yeah and there's this complex situation that we have here where we have these enormous cities that have millions and millions of people and you have to feed these people and monocrop agriculture is the most efficient way to provide these people with produce and monocrop agriculture with herbicides is the most efficient way to grow agriculture and it's like it's so complex and so difficult to get out of because all these people that are proponents of regenerative farming whenever i ask them if it's scalable they always do this like yeah like fucking's never been done like when you're talking about being able to provide grass-fed beef for 330 million people show me right show me how you can provide organic produce to 330 million people show me no it's not pot it's not possible right and that's that's true you know like grass-fed gras grass finishing and feeding and finishing beef on on the on open pastures i mean that takes a ton of land yeah right but not everybody first of all not everybody's gonna choose to eat the way that i max lugavir recommends right eating right like people have their own preferences their cultural yeah moors and things like that right um but today i mean that's why that's where i think it's another another area where the like the vegan the argument for veganism like falls short is that if you're partaking in in modern society if you're shopping in a modern supermarket there's blood on your hands right there's like nobody is is uh inculcated from the fact that today like modern plant whether it's modern plant agriculture or modern animal agriculture like animals and people are being exploited right it's doing a number on the environment and the i mean if you really want to be like live the most sustainable uh and and quote-unquote regenerative lifestyle i mean you're going to be growing your own yes and that really is
probably the only option yeah growing your own produce and doing it in the way where you're making your own compost and harvesting your own eggs like you were doing yeah that's probably the best way but you know obviously if you live in a city that's a giant problem yeah and if you don't have the financial resources or the land that's a giant problem because if you want to grow a significant amount of fruits and vegetables you're going to need some land yeah but also like sickness is massively environmentally taxing right it's a massive resource sink and the nutrition and the calories and you know what you get from beef is you know you get a lot more in a much smaller package right like one cow can feed a family and i'm not like an environmental expert or an expert agriculture but i know that one cow can feed a family for months yeah right two months something like that easily and so if you're looking to if you're looking to reduce the area under the curve for suffering for environmental damage it makes a lot more sense to me that you would you know lean in on you know lean into animal agriculture also animal agriculture in regards to grass-fed grass-finished beef you're talking about an animal that has free range because that's the only way they can consume that much grass they have to be in these open pastures they they get to roam around they're not contained in pens because that wouldn't be efficient they move around and the ones that use regenerative agriculture the benefit to that is they use the manure and the manure helps grow more plants it helps they use it as fertilizer it also helps the the the the richness of the soil and keeps the the soil maintaining yeah which is so important because topsoil in this country is like really [ __ ] especially in these monocrop agriculture environments they're pouring nitrogen on the soil and all sorts of other industrial fertilizers they're trying to use just in order to allow these plants to have the nutrients to
grow oh my god but they've determined that this topsoil in these farmlands has been minerally deficient for a long time well that's why our produce is becoming less nutritious over time our produce is actually developing its own form of plant obesity if you can imagine that so there's a few potential reasons for this but it's it's been referred to as the ionome the the sum total nutritional value of our plants has declined over the past 50 years by about eight percent on average some nutrients you know we see greater nutrient loss um others we see we see less but in general whether it's uh increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere right which is like a plant's food right it's causing plants to develop more starch less protein which is going to have a net effect on the population that eats those plants right more starch less protein that's fascinating so the increased level of carbon in the atmosphere is damaging to plants because we've always heard that carbon dioxide carbon dioxide is what a plant consumes and they they produce oxygen with that yeah well it's like it's a ratio yeah you're increasing the availability of what plants consume wow i never would have thought about it that way i uh i wrote about this in my second book um the genius life but generally yeah and so it's the confluence of factors right it's like what we're doing to the soil it's the fact that there's more carbon in the atmosphere so the plants are actually becoming less nutritious in terms of their micronutrients but also the macronutrients are are being depleted as well right we're diluting protein in the plants and when that happens when you dilute protein i mean you're going to have an effect on i mean we don't we haven't yet been able to quantify it but um but when you dilute protein right in an organism you're you're reducing the amount of immune amino acids you're increasing the amount of energy that you're giving that animal um that potentially could be a recipe for you know for for obesity yeah the contributing factor the argument that
always drives me nuts um when people talk about um like uh what is and what is not sustainable you know this is this is what people always want to discuss like when you discuss like you should eat grass-fed beef you should eat well that's not sustainable but i think your argument is best in that most people aren't going to listen anyway yeah they're just not but if you're listening and you're a person who's really taking the the you really are taking this information in and you're really trying to make steps to have an overall better metabolic health and overall just you want your body to function better you can't think about sustaining the entire world right like it sounds [ __ ] but we're on a sinking ship kids okay and you're alive so you have choices to make right now with your life and if you're listening to like this is the argument that people always said to me like when i talk about how i hunt and i'm one of the reasons why i hunt because it's healthier meat and because i just want i want a more ethical relationship to food and like well everybody can hunt well guess what they're not gonna you know most people are not gonna hike miles and miles into the mountains and not cardiovascularly fit enough to do it they don't have the training to do it they they don't have the motivation to do it they wouldn't be able to and they wouldn't be able to execute in the in the actual moment of choice you know the the difficult moment of truth when you have to pull the trigger or release an arrow they're going to [ __ ] it up yeah so they're not going to survive so that's not what we're saying but we're saying for the people that do want to take these steps and are motivated to change their life for the better there are options available that are better for your overall metabolic health they're better for your mind they're better for literally better for the environment for everything yeah absolutely and you know i think that um it would be immoral for a physician right sitting across from a sick person to have their guidance be informed by anything other than what's
going to be best for that person right if you're a physician and you're considering what's going to be best for the planet right now you could say well max he's an [ __ ] he doesn't care about the planet i absolutely do care about the planet i absolutely do care about animal welfare but when if you're sitting across the table from somebody who's sick or you're broadcasting a message to to a sick population right you have a responsibility to that population right to that person and so for me my number one priority is to personally eat and to recommend to people what in my estimation is gonna be the best to avert these kinds of conditions right and i'll tell you that my mom my mom i'll never know what what was causal with regard to what she had developed but you know she was a she was basically vegetarian she never ate red meat my mom was actually very much attuned to messaging surrounding heart disease she was always afraid of developing heart disease so she ate a very low saturated fat diet she also cared about animals so she never ate red meat she never ate eggs she ate whatever grain product she saw on the mark in the supermarket that had the red heart healthy logo on it that you know that would end up in this in the in the shopping cart we always had the corn oil by the stove again with the red heart healthy logo on it always had that never any butter in my fridge always margarine in those in those tub that's the kind of food that i grew up consuming because my mom was very much attuned to like what the orthodoxy said about heart disease at the time and she didn't have the internet of course to you know to for exposure to like dissenting opinions on that um but yeah i mean i do think that my hypothesis is not to not to like you know blame her in any sense but i do think that like you know had she had integrated some of these more nutrient dense foods more minimally processed foods into her diet that it would have protected her to some degree well if if your assertion is correct in terms of like preventing alzheimer's it seems like all those
things were negative like all the things she's doing the margarine the grains the yeah other than junky fast food yeah my mom wasn't a big my mom wasn't a big fast food consumer um and you know this is like all i have is like retrospective like looking back and and kind of trying to ascertain you know how she lived you know while i was exposed to it it's not that i you know she had it like she was following any particular diet or anything like that but um but yeah she was a big animal animal rights advocate lots of grain products um not a ton of protein like you know occasionally she would eat like lean skinless chicken breast you know or a piece of fish but um but was always like very very concerned about like cholesterol and things like that so i do think that like that's a dietary that's that is like the standard american diet you know that is to me um what you know how not to eat if you want to protect your brain over time based on like all the research that i've done since then and it sucks because so many people think it's the way to eat to be healthy yeah and it's it's such an uphill battle to try to convince those people and or try to have a conversation with them when someone says what about cholesterol you're not worried about your cholesterol i just always like oh where do i go with this this is such a long conversation to have with a person that has this orthodox opinion that's been kind of drilled in their head by the food pyramid and by all the scare tactics that people have heard about we well we've talked about this before in the podcast but it bears repeating how saturated fat was the the whole uh more fraud by the sugar companies and that these sugar companies literally bribed scientists to lie about what was causing heart disease and they started blaming it on saturated fat and tried to try to take the blame off of sugar absolutely yeah there was that um you're referring to the 1967 jama paper right that was seemingly the nail in the coffin on the issue as to whether or not it was sugar or saturated fat
that drove the epidemic of heart disease that we were seeing in the you know mid-century and the sugar research foundation paid each of those scientists 48 000 equivalent of today's money to basically say that it wasn't sugar that was the problem it was saturated fat it's such a small number and it [ __ ] millions of people so many but it's like you know money these these personalities right these like the the the obstinate territorialism yeah um and ansel keyes who really is like thought to be the father of the diet heart hypothesis was like this very you see this all the time like this very overbearing personality right that's like that's a uh the way that they the same way that they described in the science article sylvain lesni the guy who you know who renewed uh vigor for the amyloid hypothesis it's like you know they have these like they have like this celebrity and charisma first of all any having any charisma as a scientist you're going to go places right like because so many of them so yeah so it's a it's a big problem and saturated fat i think is like you know the the plant-based community and still you know much of the medical orthodoxy are myopically focused on ldl cholesterol specifically now i think it's it's pivoting a little bit to apob so all apob containing lipoproteins but you know when you take out red meat from your diet for example yeah your apob or your ldl cholesterol might be a little bit lower right but you're not that's not a risk-free swap right you're removing from your diet a rich source of highly bioavailable micronutrients like vitamin b12 like zinc like creatine which supports brain energy metabolism like carnosine which helps to support healthy you know blood sugar regulation in the body and of course protein like an amazing pristine source of highly bioavailable highly digestible proteins so like to be myopically focused on these single marker indicators of you know related to cardiovascular risk i think doesn't make any doesn't make any sense no it doesn't make any sense but people don't know that information and when they hear about ldl cholesterol or hdl
cholesterol they don't know what's good and what's bad and why is one bad and why is one good and that's a misnomer isn't it that like one is good cholesterol and one is bad cholesterol yeah so i mean neither are good or bad hdl has long been considered the good cholesterol because when it's elevated it's associated with better health right um why is that well it's probably reflective of good health it's it's not necessarily causal because they've actually engineered drugs to raise hdl and it does nothing in terms of reducing cardiovascular disease risk so usually what i think the current thinking is that hdl is more reflective of good health so if it's high you know it shows that you're doing something right so you want it to be high um ldl is a little more complicated it can it's responsive to you know there are many different things that it's responsive to but primarily certain types of saturated fatty acids so when you hear on social media for example that saturated fat is bad that's pseudoscience because a fat isn't a fat same way that protein is in protein carbs aren't necessarily carbs you know like they're all like underneath those umbrella terms there are different types that determine how we respond biologically to them so when it comes to saturated fat i mean you've got different kinds of saturated fatty acids one type of saturated fatty acid that's actually elevated in grass-fed grass-finished beef is stearic acid steer named for cows actually has a neutral effect doesn't it doesn't increase uh levels of ldl cholesterol and actually might improve functioning of the mitochondria so we can't just say that saturated fat is bad also in dairy dairy is one of these things where when you look observationally people who consume full fat dairy not even low fat or reduced fat dairy have better cardiovascular health better metabolic health and dairy proportionally has more saturated fat than any other fat source right because as i mentioned all natural fat containing foods have
some proportion of saturated fat polyunsaturated fat monounsaturated fat if you look at beef fat tallow it's about 50 monounsaturated fat some small proportion of polyunsaturated fat and then some you know minor again minority proportion of saturated fat but dairy is actually mostly saturated fat so you'd think that if saturated fat was this like dietary boogeyman right that consumer regular consumers of dairy people consume a lot of dairy fat would have the worst cardiovascular health and that's not what we see we see the exact opposite now how do you feel about raw dairy versus homogenized or pasteurized dairy great question so raw i'm not actually um i'm not actually to me the dairy doesn't necessarily have to be raw and when we look observationally you know raw is not something that's factored in because the vast majority of people are not consuming raw dairy right um but we do see that full fat dairy is is quite healthful well low-fat dairy is pretty nasty i think that low-fat so here's a deal with dairy i think that low-fat is often confounded by the fact that low-fat dairy products are often ultra-processed dairy products that have added sugar in it i don't think it's necessarily the removal of dairy fat that make it healthier they add sugar to just to make it palatable exactly [ __ ] nasty yeah it's weird it's like dirty water yeah i regularly consume i mean i consume full fat dairy products i put heavy cream in my coffee every day um which i think is i love heavy cream it's uh fat soluble so or it's fat so it helps to make the fat soluble polyphenols in coffee more bioavailable it doesn't have any proteins it's not going to bind those polyphenols and also it's better for you to have full fat dairy full fat heavy cream yeah i love full fat heavy cream um is there any benefit to raw dairy i think i mean they say that the there are enzymes in it that are supportive um i don't know how like you know how much science there is on that on that recommendation
um you know i will if if it's available to me i buy raw dairy but it's not something that i necessarily go out of my way uh to find um i do you know i think it's it's probably better to consume it raw right like but i it's natural yeah um because the the opposite of that is like it's it's exposed to heat and dairy has fat in it it's got got some component of or some proportion of polyunsaturated fats which are heat sensitive um so you know you want to protect those fats generally and a baby consuming breast milk i mean that breast milk is raw milk right so but the one thing about dairy that i think is worth talking about is that it's thought that the reason why we don't there that we don't um necessarily exhibit the predicted effect that you would expect based on the high proportion of saturated fat and dairy is thought to the fact that dairy is is attributed to the fact that dairy contains something called milk fat globule membrane so i know it's like kind of a mouthful but milk fat globular membrane is basically the lipoprotein in dairy that keeps the dairy fats perfectly suspended it's like an emulsifier so that dairy which is mostly water milk is mostly water right the fats don't actually float to the top it's like perfectly the fats are perfectly dispersed throughout so the triglycerides in dairy fat are wrapped up in a bubble and this bubble is called milk fat globular membrane and it's made up of actually some really healthy compounds like phosphatidylcholine which choline we talked about you know in its benefit to the brain there's also a little bit of sphingomyelin in dairy and full fat dairy which is a core component to myelin the myelin sheath in our brains that help insulate neurons and if you think about like the purpose that dairy serves for a neonate it's to help grow a brain i mean it's like the whole body's growing but primarily the brain is the organ that's under like the most rapid growth in organization and so it makes perfect sense that dairy
would have uh components in it that are like really beneficial when it comes to brain health and so um so yeah so i think that full-fat dairy is is uh is really quite beneficial but when you look at a dairy product like butter interestingly when you feed a person if you were to feed a person both heavy cream followed by butter you'd see that butter actually leads to an adverse effect on blood lipids whereas heavy cream doesn't and butter is made from heavy cream right it's like churned cream but the churning disrupts this membrane this lipoprotein called milk fat globular membrane and i think that's why it's that's why butter can have this like negative effect on blood lipids so actually when i when i discovered this when i realized this it uh caused me to actually demote butter to be more of like a yolo food more of like an indulgence food interesting um yeah so explain this adverse effect and like how is it measured yeah so butter and heavy cream are both the same foundational ingredient right but when you and actually if you were to put heavy cream in coffee the cream would easily like would would uh just disperse throughout the coffee right butter sits at the top right so you can clearly see that chemically something has changed after it gets churned and becomes the food product that we know and love and call butter so the milk fat globule membrane which is present in full fat heavy cream and other dairy products it's thought to that that actually is like quite beneficial from the standpoint of brain health but also affects how we um [Music] metabolize the fats in dairy so in clinical trials what they've shown is that you can feed somebody that's
controlled for fat calories right you can feed somebody dairy cream and it won't have any effect on their ldl cholesterol right if you feed somebody butter it will you'll see an elevation of ldl cholesterol and i'm not you know i don't believe that we should do everything we can to get our ldl as low as possible because again like foods that are that are generally very beneficial and healthful like you know grass-fed red meat and things like that eggs um the benefits outweigh the risk but with butter i think potentially you're causing an elevation of your ldl cholesterol and ultimately your apob for no real reason butter's not a very nutrient-dense food you know you get a little bit of vitamin a in it retinol which is you know not bad but um but uh but yeah so butter can have this negative effect that that you don't see in other dairy products so for me dairy is great it's just that butter is one of these dairy products that um i think you know especially if you're prone to hypercholesterolemia if you're prone to elevated levels of like ldl apob um it might serve you to reduce your consumption of butter is there any benefit to or have there have there been a study comparing grass-fed butter to uh butter from cows that eat grains because it looks very different yeah grass-fed butter is a rich much more yellow butter yeah whereas like milk or a grain fed butter is like it's almost white yeah because probably because there's a higher proportion of carotenoids in the butter but um in general i wouldn't you know i think the butter can be great like there's again like vitamin a there's these carotenoids there's cla there's butyrate there's all these like interesting vitamin k2 and butter which are you know which are significant and they're and you know that's great but if you are um you know for example if you have hyper if you have familial hypercholesterolemia which many people
do um or if you know it's just it's just one of these foods that like i would not consume as liberally as say i'm consuming like the heavy cream or or full fat greek yogurt or even fat-free greek yogurt which is a great like high-protein food um but yeah always i mean you're always going to get higher nutrient density when a cow eats its biologically appropriate diet um also you know when a cow is grass finished versus grain finished it's a leaner animal like i know you love to like hunt right like wild game is way leaner than a modern cow particularly a grain finished cow yeah it's a completely different thing completely different thing so to me that says something about the relative like proportion of fatty acids that we're meant to consume right like sure so well that's one of the weird things is that we've become accustomed to the taste of a sick cow yeah that's what grass-fed versus grain fit is when you see a grain-fed cow and it's heavily marbled like i don't like wagyu or kobe beef like when people offer cool we have kobe beef like that thing's dead that's a not just dead now but i mean while it was alive it's [ __ ] yeah like you look at all that fat in the the tissue that's not normal what you get a grain-fed steak and compare it to a grass-fed steak first of all the grass-fed steak is a darker color it's a richer darker color there's far less fat on it and it tastes different it's like a healthier animal too because they're wandering around in these these pastures so they're using their muscle tissue and so that muscle tissue is more dense it's chewier but you know people like it tender but that's that's not normal like if you eat an elk steak that [ __ ] is that's dense you know and you have to cook it appropriately like you have to cook it at a low temperature until it reaches an internal temperature and then you sear it on the outside that's the best way to cook it oh yeah these like grain finished cows i mean they're loaded or the what the wagyus yeah specifically it's that's that's called intramyocellular lipid
like you only get that if you're diabetes right you've got type 2 diabetes and obesity how do they do grass-fed wagyu because i've seen that too and it looks good that's a good question how are you doing is it like a specific breed of cow that they're doing that just generally retains more fat yeah i mean sometimes don't they put like ports into the cows like one of the cow's stomachs that's that's from that um was that food inc where they they talked about that that's that's from animals that are eating grains and they develop like abscesses and real problems and they have to ventilate their stomachs because of all the gases oh god yeah not good no good no yeah i mean i'm definitely definitely a huge fan of like you know the grass finish but also i think it's important and this is something that like that i you know i think one of the reasons why people gravitate to my to my content is that like i'm i try to be as non-dogmatic as possible and um and even for somebody who doesn't have access to the most pristine beef that i have access to living in los angeles you know like even and i i hate to promote the factory reform system because it's terrible and i you know it's like an animal holocaust every day it's like worse but still for somebody like living in a quote-unquote food desert that doesn't have access to the kind of beef that i have access to um that's you know still gonna be a better option for dinner than boxed mac and cheese yeah you know and what a cow eats determines mainly the content the nutritional value of its fat right so if you don't have access to the most pristine beef grass-fed grass-finished beef just you can go slightly leaner you know because that's like that's generally like um a way a way to circumvent that you know because what the grass like grass-fed grass like it doesn't make any sense to eat grass-fed grass-finished filet mignon because the filament is a lean piece of meat right but if we're talking about a rib eye or ground beef
yeah it does make sense to buy a leaner to buy leaner beef because um because you're just you know sort of skimming off like what's what is ultimately determined by what a cow eats even if grass-fed filet mignon wouldn't you be getting a healthier piece of meat probably but uh i'm not sure how i would quantify that they're both lean grease fed and the protein is still pristine and it's really just the fat like for example the difference between grass finished and grain finished you get about five times the omega-3s in grass finished beef in general is not a great omega-3 source so just to put that out there you're getting just in absolute terms a much smaller amount of omega-3 fatty acids as you would get from a piece of salmon for example but still five times the omega-3s as compared to uh grain finished you're getting three times the vitamin e which we know is super important to help protect the fats that are already in your body we need vitamin e vitamin e is crucially important you get much less fewer fat calories overall and of the saturated fat you're getting a higher proportion of stearic acid which we know is actually quite beneficial so i do think that it's probably uh healthier to consume you know but that none of none of those um features are really gonna matter if the meat is super lean right because we're talking primarily about like it's fat it's fat content wow we certainly covered a lot is there anything else do you like to bring up oh man anything else you think needs to be discussed you know i just i'm i love educating people and helping people clearly separate yeah fact from fiction it's i think it's my life's purpose you know like i really feel like aligned with what i'm with what i'm supposed to be doing i'm
super excited for uh the documentary um little empty boxes again little emptyboxes.com i host my own podcast called the genius life which i love to do um i love to bring on like you know dissenting opinions and and kind of like expose my audience to his broad array of perspectives have you had debates with vegans um you know i haven't primarily because i don't think that debates are a good platform i don't think that the discussions i should say yeah i do sometimes yeah like but not not on the some on the podcast yeah as long as they're not um annoying you know uh yeah but no i've i've definitely had um experts on the show who lean more lean more plant-based i just you know after doing all the interviews that i've done what i what i've seen is that you know you bring on somebody who's like a medical doctor and you ask them about nutrition and they start opining as if they're authorities on nutrition because they're medical doctors and most of them are unaware even of their own biases yeah which i think is a big problem you know i had somebody on the podcast who uh she's a lovely woman um purports to be like a nutrition expert um from uh from like indian an indian background right and like generally i know like if you're from an indian background like you're not going to be super pro beef you know it's just like not in the culture and that came out like in the in the interview that she was like auntie and like leans more leans more plant-based and so you know i i see it the podcast not as a platform for me to like debate people i'm not like one of those because at the end of the day like i think something that i'm really passionate about or i know that i'm really passionate about is is fostering scientific literacy like you know i don't really call myself like an expert other people have called me that and and i'll you know like i'll take it if that's if
that's what you perceive from me but really i mean i hope to be i think for people a role model because at the end of the day i was just a guy who stood up because his mom was sick and i think this is something that we all experience right but i you know whether it's my upbringing or you know the the the fortuitous sort of first job that i had in college you know i felt out of college i felt uh entitled to to answers and to like reaching out to people and um of course along the journey i realized i had an aptitude for aggregating and assimilating and communicating science but um but i want people to like do the research for themselves and like you know to to always be willing to challenge their own assumptions and beliefs about things right because you you know people these days they watch a netflix documentary and they they their whole they throw their whole diet yeah into upheaval and it's like a huge pr i think it does harm like it does harm and nobody's talking about this well not only that there's quite a few netflix documentaries one that gets brought up all the time that's full of [ __ ] yeah you know it's like most of what they talk about is just factually inaccurate and they don't take into account bioavailability they don't take into account many factors that contribute to poor health from these diets that they're promoting particularly vegan diets yeah i mean what percentage of people that start vegan diets wind up eating meat at some point in time i think it's something like 84 oh yeah it's huge i think you know there's like this i think you know like i probably agree there's more that we agree on than what we disagree on and and i think primarily people you know like one of the things that i that i really hope people take away from this is to reduce their consumption of these ultra processed foods you know that for some reason or another made it to the top of the food compass nutrient profiling system but
essentially like you know ultra-processed foods we know that when you tend to make them what you you know the when you make them the bulk of your diet they drive their own over consumption like we tend to over consume them because they have this quality of being hyper palatable and hypo satiating and what makes a food satiating there are three factors that make a food satiating one it's protein content protein is the most satiating macronutrient so like a lot of people that are struggling with being overweight they go to their doctors and they get you know told this like advice just like cookie cutter advice to just eat less and move more right so they focus on the quantity of what they're eating right like how much they're eating but what so few people understand unfortunately today is that what you eat determines how much you eat and so by focusing on protein right protein is the most satiating macronutrient we know we need it it fosters resilience and robustness frailty there was a study that came out recently that found that among people who are genetically at risk for developing alzheimer's disease it was the frailty that determined by threefold um who's gonna who's gonna develop it or not basically so you were protected the stronger the more robust and resilient you were resistance training all that stuff obviously plays a role but protein you know regularly reaching for high quality protein i think is crucially crucially important and the best you know the highest quality protein comes from animal products if you're eating enough protein you know quality becomes less of an issue so you know if you're on a plant-based diet vegan diet just make sure that you're getting enough protein but it's that's hard to do without protein supplements and we know that plant-based protein powder is harbor heavy metals so there's all these factors that like that come into play that i think about you know day to day um the second factor that makes a food satiating is fiber it's fiber content
and that's not because we have some innate need for fiber but because it mechanically stretches out the stomach and we do see you know thanks to metanallies and such that fiber consumption is associated with longevity reduced inflammation and things like that um but you want to you know make sure that you're reaching for foods that that contain fiber fibrous vegetables right and then the third factor that makes a food satiating is its water content water you know before we had access to running water right like we would either look for water on the savanna or whatever or we would eat food because food by and large provides water right like produce even animal products are a good source of hydration um like i have a cat my cat gets its hydration primarily from the meat that it eats you know and so when you look at ultra processed foods they're depleted of all three of those features right they're wat they're dehydrated because water impedes shelf stability they lack fiber they lack protein they like protein primarily because protein is expensive right protein has high margins so it actually from a bottom line perspective it makes sense why the powers that bee would want to be would want to deplete our food environment of protein right i mean some people will say oh they're making us weak i think it's just like bottom line right like it's like rapidly digested carbohydrates are just cheap to produce right now we're seeing this flood on the market of all these like fake meat products which is another thing that i talk about all the time like on my podcast like it's the the eq it's like the the food equivalent of it's uh it's human pet food is what i is how i refer to it basically it's no different than like kibble made for humans right and um and these are the kinds of foods that like yield big exits because they're proprietary formulas like there's obviously profit to be made in meat and dairy and things like that but you don't get the kinds of like you know proprietary formulations that you get with these like plant-based products that then like go public and have these like huge company valuations
well the good news is they're sinking because people aren't buying them because they're disgusting and also people have seen the studies you know there was the one study about uh plant-based meat and with rats so i'm sure you saw that that what right like rats develop liver damage oof we see we can find that it's like these things are they're filled with seed oils yeah that's what these plant-based that's what like what they're trying to do is they're trying to emulate what a burger looks and tastes like which is so strange it's like are you opposed to burgers or not because why you have why do you have a fake one like i never understood like fake chicken and then now fake beef just if you want to eat vegetables eat [ __ ] vegetables don't do that 100 or eat meat like they're not nutritionally equivalent the carbon footprint of producing these things is massive like yeah i mean we don't even know but um here it is rat feeding studies suggest the impossible burger may not be safe to eat yeah yeah it of course it's [ __ ] impossible so uh soy sell that say that word where is it a protein a plant-based impossible burger contains a protein called soy ledge hemoglobin leg hemoglobin derived from genetically modified yeast the company recently added another gmo ingredient soy protein from genetically modified soybeans tests conducted by moms across america found the impossible burger test positive for residues of glyphosate yeah there you go shocker the levels of glyphosate detected in the impossible burger by health research institute laboratories were 11 times higher than the non-gmo project verified beyond burger in 2015 the food and drug administration denied the product gras status which is generally recognized as safe but in 2017 it issued a no questions letter not assuring safety but protecting the fda from liability if adverse effects are found oh god [ __ ] off but you see how it works is that like for this to be good for you beef
has to be bad for you right right for for oatley to be good for you regular milk real milk has to be bad for you right right there they have to create this this uh this divide right essentially right like for sunblock to be good for you right the sun has to be bad for you right right and it's a big promise why people are so sick that's why people are so sick that's the thing i've said you know the problem with following the science is that the science follows the money it's a it's a massive it's a massive scam and that's why i think like yeah you can show me all the data you want but like the longer a food or product has been around i think the safer we can assume that it is and the less time it's been around right i think the the greater scrutiny i'm not saying that they're all bad right like if i need medical assistance i'm going to a hospital right if i'm in like crazy pain for women i'm going to go to a witch doctor i'm not going to go with her no so i'm not i'm not anti-medicine or anything like that if i had that blockbuster drug or whatever to give my mom i would have given to her in a heartbeat you know right but um but it's just like these kinds of conditions take years if not decades to manifest right right like that's what's important to note yeah like you're you're not dealing with something that's going to show an adverse effect instantaneously you're going to deal with an accumulative effect over time it's going to be detrimental to people that take this thing that has been approved because of money not because it's effective or generally beneficial to your health but because a bunch of people have been paid off and there's so much of that there's so much of that where these these people that give their opinions on these things have been bought and paid for 100 and that's why it's so important to have people like you out there and i i'm very happy that you're you're doing what you're doing and i'm very happy that you get that message out there so people understand like there's a lot of factors involved in what's recommended and what what people
consume and that stupid food compass all this nonsense it's like there's so much of that that is absolutely provable provably not beneficial to your health that these things are being recommended and it's nuts 100 so thank you max thank you thank you matt you're you're a very important person i i really i think your your podcast is great your your videos that you put out are great and you know i think it's uh it's so nice how well-informed you are and reasonable and the way you distribute the information it's excellent that means a lot coming from you as i said walking in here there's nobody that's more the man than you like you're you know i love the like the courage that you exude on every topic and you know i've you know been such a big fan of yours so well i'm a big fan of yours too so i'm glad we did this and let's do it again and uh oh tell everybody uh one more time the name of your podcast uh your instagram all that jazz yeah so my podcast is called the genius life available on all podcast platforms uh my instagram is at max lugavir m-a-x-l-u-g-a-v-e-r-e and then check out the trailer to little empty boxes which is uh the first ever dementia prevention documentary which i hope to uh have out soon at little emptyboxes.com and how do you um the this g the genius like you have a book too what is the book yeah oh my god i forgot i'm not i'm not like money whatever selling products it's not my thing i'm like just really passionate about you know helping like educate people but yeah i've written three books the first book was called genius foods and it really is a nutritional care manual for the human brain so anybody genius foods genius foods did you do an audio of that as well yeah it's um genius foods is it's being used around the world like clinicians will use it um to recommend to their patients it's uh it really is like you'll get like phd level knowledge um when you read genius foods and anybody you know
if you're at risk for you know dementia or if you have a loved one or if you just want to know how to better fuel the brain because we also talk about this new field which is being called nutritional psychiatry so how to get your brain to work better in the here and now it really is everything you need to know about about food and the brain the second book was called the genius life and in that i do a deep dive in terms of um endocrine disruptors and um you know nature immersion all the sort of more lifestyle stuff and then my third book just came out it was called genius kitchen and it's a two-in-one sort of like wellness guide and cookbook but um i just bought it now i thought i bought it but i bought it now amazing all right max you're the [ __ ] man thank you very much appreciate you very much bye everybody [Music] [Applause] you