In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I sit down with journalist and Alzheimer s advocate Max Blumberg to talk about his journey with his mother, who was diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia, a rare form of dementia, in 2011. We talk about her journey, how she became interested in Alzheimer s, and why she decided to pursue a career in the field of dementia research and prevention. We also talk about what it means to be a caregiver for a loved one with a neurodegenerative condition, and how important it is to be involved in the research and treatment of a condition that affects millions of people around the world. And, of course, we talk about how we can make a difference in the world by doing the things we can do to prevent this from happening in the first place. This is a great episode for anyone who is interested in learning about this condition, or who has a family member with this condition. I hope you enjoy this episode, and that it inspires you to get involved in something you can do something that can help change the lives of others. Thank you, Max! Joe and I hope that you enjoy it, and don t forget to share it with a friend or family member who is struggling with this disease. xoxo, - The Joe Rogans Experience. - All Day All Day, All Day by Day, by Night by Night, All Night by Day by Night - by Night all Day, all day, by Day - Joe and Night, by Morning Joe and Evening by Day - by Day all day by Night Joe and Day, By Night, By Day, by Night by Day Joe and All Day Joe & Night, all by Night? Cheers, Joe and Joe and Good Morning Joe! - Thank you for listening and Good Night, Joe & Good Night! - Thank You, Max, Thank You for listening? - Cheers! - Joe & Max, Cheers Thank You! - - Yours Truly, Joe and Cheers. -- The Joe and Max -- Cheers: - Max, -- Thank You to Max, Joe, All Day , Cheers? -- & Cheers - , All Night, , Thanks, Max ? ~ xOXO, "Thank You, Joe's Journey
00:00:41.000I 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 US that was backed by Al Gore back in the day.
00:00:53.000And so I got to hone my storytelling chops there, but I'd always been really passionate about health.
00:00:57.000Nutrition, medicine, things like that.
00:01:00.000But in 2011, 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.
00:01:14.000It's described as feeling like you have both Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease at the same time, and certainly that's what I observed in my mom.
00:01:23.000And so when she started to display those symptoms, It had taken me and my family completely off guard.
00:01:31.000I had no prior family history of any kind of neurodegenerative condition.
00:01:35.000My mom certainly wasn't old at the time.
00:01:37.000She was 58. She was still a spirited, youthful woman in middle age.
00:01:46.000For me, I was in between jobs and I really had the opportunity, I was grateful to have had the opportunity to go with her to different doctor's appointments.
00:01:54.000And I grew up in New York City, so we had access to, you know, cathedrals, to medical advice and...
00:02:24.000And it was there that for the first time my mom was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative condition.
00:02:28.000She was prescribed drugs for both Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.
00:02:30.000It wasn't until a few years later that she actually received the Lewy body dementia diagnosis.
00:02:35.000But at that point, I started to dive into the research because I had been trained as a journalist.
00:02:42.000Which, you know, you're not trained as rigorously as a PhD scientist, but you're kind of taught similarly to investigate things, to maintain skepticism, to, you know, ask questions.
00:02:54.000And 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 this entailed.
00:03:03.000And I realized that in most cases, dementia begins in the brain decades before the first symptom, 10, 20, 30 years even, by some estimates.
00:03:12.000And 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.
00:03:23.000I hadn't even yet looked into my genes at that point.
00:03:26.000But so I... I started looking into it and I came across all of these fascinating insights, which we can talk about.
00:03:35.000But I decided at that point to sort of do what I could to help move the needle with this condition.
00:04:06.000We've all seen dementia documentaries on HBO and networks like that, and they always push this very doom and gloom mentality about the condition, which I understand.
00:04:18.000It's America's most feared condition, after all.
00:04:21.000And this is a condition that, you know, 90% 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.
00:04:29.000So it's a very rapidly evolving field of science.
00:04:32.000But 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.
00:04:40.000That means that we have agency to change our cognitive destiny.
00:04:44.000So, I started shooting with my mom, which was very hard to do because, you know, I mean, the person who I love most in the world, I was watching decline right in front of the camera.
00:04:55.000But also, I decided to exploit my media credentials at the time to then talk to researchers and scientists around the world.
00:05:03.000And I was doing my own research in the primary literature as well, but I decided to Yeah, to go to these labs and clinics where they're really ushering in dementia as a potentially preventable condition.
00:05:13.000And I actually signed myself up to become a study subject in one, actually, at Weill Cornell in New York.
00:05:20.000And ultimately, I became a collaborator with the principal investigator there, who's become my mentor over the years, Richard Isaacson.
00:05:31.000And I got to co-author a paper in a clinician's textbook on the clinical practice of dementia prevention.
00:05:37.000Because after all this time, I've learned so much about the condition, the etiology, and so forth.
00:05:45.000But this documentary, I'm super excited for it.
00:05:48.000It's called Little Empty Boxes, and we have a trailer up at littleemptyboxes.com.
00:05:54.000Well, it's a nod to something that my mom says in the film, which is actually something, you know, my mom's condition, it seemed like her cognition had just severely downshifted,
00:07:09.000Though Alzheimer's disease was coined in 1906 by a physician named Alois 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.
00:07:23.000But we now know that the brain is influenced by everything that happens down below.
00:07:30.000The dogma, especially with regard to Alzheimer's disease fundraising over the past couple of decades, has really been that this is a condition that you can't treat, prevent, or slow.
00:07:41.000But we now have really solid data to say that it is a potentially preventable condition.
00:07:47.000So when it comes to our risk for developing Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia, there are basically two categories of risk.
00:07:55.000You have your non-modifiable risk factors, of which there are three.
00:07:59.000So you've got your age, your genes, and your gender.
00:08:17.000Now, genes is something that we can actually talk about because you can't change your genes, making them, therefore, a non-modifiable risk factor.
00:08:24.000You can change the expression of your genes, how your genes express themselves moment to moment.
00:08:28.000So, 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 polymorphism, meaning it's not a mutation.
00:08:40.000It's actually a very common gene variant.
00:08:42.000About one in four people carry the APOE4 allele.
00:08:46.000In the United States, that increases your risk anywhere between 2 and 14 fold, depending on whether you carry one or two copies.
00:08:53.000I think that's also the same genetic expression that makes you have CTE. CTE, yeah.
00:09:00.000It makes everything more, it makes your brain more vulnerable in general to insult, whether that is from TBI, exposure to pollutants, exposure to unhealthy ways of eating.
00:09:39.000We've evolved these different isoforms of the ApoE gene.
00:09:45.000So we have ApoE2, 3, and 4. And just to reiterate, ApoE4 is the ancestral allele.
00:09:51.000So cultures that have longer exposure to modern agriculture Actually, there's lower frequency of the ApoE4 allele.
00:10:01.000The thinking is that agriculture, right?
00:10:03.000Like when we became domesticated, when we started basing our diets around grains, when we became more sedentary, less generalized in terms of our cognitive, the daily cognitive tasks that our ancestors would have undertaken, that it's selected against the ApoE4 allele.
00:10:20.000So it's possible that that allele Which, again, is very common, one in four people carry it, is sort of the canary in the coal mine for the Western way of life.
00:10:29.000That 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?
00:10:37.000We're more sedentary than ever before in human history.
00:10:39.000We've got more stress, we're exposed to more environmental pollutants, that that is what dramatically is what pulls the trigger, right?
00:10:47.000It's our diets and our lifestyles that pull the trigger.
00:10:49.000But if you were to take somebody with that same genotype, right, and move them to a less industrialized part of the world, like, say, Ibadan, Nigeria, where the frequency of the ApoE4 allele is just as common, it has little to no association with Alzheimer's disease.
00:11:08.000So 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 Ibadan, Nigeria or another less industrialized part of the world and see that risk abolished.
00:11:18.000So 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?
00:11:33.000Is that why this ApoE4 is less prevalent than it is in other cultures?
00:11:40.000You know, it's possible, although with age being the primary risk factor, it's unlikely that that has put significant selection pressure.
00:11:51.000So I'm not sure, but we do know, you know, there are, I think, gene studies where they've looked at expression of genes that produce enzymes that break down amylase, right, like starch and things like that, and those are increasing,
00:12:09.000It's a little out of my wheelhouse, but generally, I mean, yeah, the standard American diet is completely aberrant from the diet that our ancestors consumed, the diet that really we attribute to the development of the human brain.
00:12:23.00060% of the calories that we consume today come from ultra-processed, packaged convenience foods.
00:12:32.000If you have type 2 diabetes, so going back to Alzheimer's disease and this gene expression, So the ApoE4 allele is, you know, you have it, but it's not necessarily destiny.
00:12:41.000And 90% of Alzheimer's cases, I'm sorry, more, like 99% of Alzheimer's cases are attributable to some interplay between our genes and our environment.
00:12:53.000There's a very small proportion of patients with Alzheimer's disease that have a gene mutation that is a deterministic gene.
00:13:01.000And this is called the early onset familial Alzheimer's gene.
00:13:05.000And that gene basically guarantees that you're going to have Alzheimer's disease.
00:13:11.000The vast majority of people who develop Alzheimer's disease, it's the interplay between their genes and their environments.
00:13:18.000So excluding environmental factors like pollutants and plastics and all sorts of other things that affect people's bodies, what are the other things that a person can do to make sure that they at least are preventing The possibility this happened.
00:13:38.000So if you're saying that, like, if the symptoms take, if it takes decades to exhibit symptoms, what are they seeing when they say that the people exhibit signs or exhibit some sort of a future of dementia?
00:14:19.000This is a defining feature, actually, of Alzheimer's disease.
00:14:23.000And I say Alzheimer's disease, again, my mom didn't have Alzheimer's disease, but it's the most common form of dementia.
00:14:29.000And so all the research on it really looks at mostly Alzheimer's disease.
00:14:33.000And then you get sort of like all-cause dementia in there, but like these more niche variants like Lewy body, like frontotemporal, there's very little research on them.
00:14:41.000So when I say sometimes I use Alzheimer's disease in Alzheimer's.
00:14:54.000Yeah, especially with people who are genetically at risk.
00:15:00.000About a 10% reduction And the ability to generate energy out of glucose, which is the primary energy substrate for the brain under fed conditions.
00:15:10.000So if people see this, if they get a test and they find out that they have this ApoE4, and then they get their glucose checked, how are they checking that, their ability to process glucose?
00:15:41.000You know, that's not a test that you can easily get.
00:15:43.000They'll use it for study purposes, like research purposes, but it's not a test being used clinically.
00:15:52.000What correlates very closely with reduced glucose metabolism in the brain is your degree of insulin resistance in the body or sensitivity.
00:16:04.000So if you are insulin sensitive, you've talked many times on the podcast in the past, About metabolic health, insulin sensitivity versus resistance.
00:16:13.000The sort of classic condition that we see here in the U.S. characterized by insulin resistance is type 2 diabetes.
00:16:22.000But what the studies have shown is that insulin resistance correlates very closely with reduced glucose metabolism in the brain.
00:16:30.000So what you really want to do to keep your brain healthy is Is to make sure that you're as insulin sensitive as possible.
00:16:37.000That's one thing that you can do that you know you're checking off that box.
00:17:37.000I just, 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.
00:18:23.000Yeah, and it's clearly connected to our diet.
00:18:26.000And, you know, that's one of the things that I've enjoyed is a lot of your posts on diet and food, but we'll get to that.
00:18:34.000But before we get into that, when you talk about preventative measures that someone can take, other than decreasing your waistline, losing weight, what are the other factors?
00:18:46.000Does exercise have any factor on dementia?
00:18:51.000Exercise is medicine when it comes to the brain.
00:18:54.000And 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.
00:19:05.000When 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.
00:19:51.000The SPRINT MIND trial found that for people who are aggressively treated for their high blood pressure with pharmacologic drugs, but this ties into exercise because exercise is just as effective as blood pressure lowering medication, meta-analyses show.
00:20:07.000But for these people who were put on aggressive blood pressure normalizing therapy, they reduced the risk of developing mild cognitive impairment.
00:20:19.000And mild cognitive impairment is sort of a prodrome.
00:21:05.000I've been doing that my whole life pretty much.
00:21:07.000But cardio is super important because we have a ton of evidence on cardio as it pertains to BDNF, which is this brain-derived neurotrophic factor.
00:21:17.000And 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.
00:21:24.000It's a lot harder to get a mouse to do squats and bench presses.
00:21:26.000You know, so from like the basic science standpoint, we have a lot of evidence on specifically what cardio does for the brain, right?
00:21:34.000But resistance training we know in terms of bolstering whole body Resilience, robustness.
00:21:40.000We know that your muscles are a very important glucose disposal sink, right?
00:21:44.000So, I mean, we live in a time where your average American consumes 300 grams of carbohydrates every single day, right?
00:21:50.000Our bodies don't have a way to store carbohydrates beyond the storage capacity of our muscles and our liver tissue, right?
00:21:59.000You can store 3,000 calories of fat in a single pound of fat tissue, right?
00:22:03.000But your muscles, your liver combine only about...
00:22:16.000Yeah, resistance training, 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.
00:22:29.000You can obviously tweak your resistance training regimen to have a more sort of cardio aspect to it, right?
00:22:35.000Like shortening the time between sets.
00:22:37.000But I do think that there's value in doing both.
00:22:42.000But yeah, exercise, it's just at this point, I think it was two or three years ago that the American Academy of Neurology finally made exercise a...
00:22:52.000Something that physicians could prescribe to treat somebody who's presenting with subjective cognitive impairment in the, you know, as a prophylactic so that they won't go on to develop mild cognitive impairment.
00:23:17.000And the last thing that I would ever want to do is sort of undermine confidence in science.
00:23:21.000But there's science, and then there's the science, you know?
00:23:24.000And especially in the field of Alzheimer's disease, there was this huge revelation recently that the past 16 years of Alzheimer's research, in many ways, was built on fraud.
00:23:36.000That is one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about because it's so crazy.
00:23:40.000Please tell people about this because it's so insane and it's so hard to believe that this could happen in modern medicine, especially with something that affects so many people's Alzheimer's.
00:23:50.000But please tell people about this study.
00:23:52.000So basically, the prevailing hypothesis as to what causes Alzheimer's disease over the past century, right, has been what's called the amyloid hypothesis.
00:24:05.000So ever since Alois Alzheimer discovered or named Alzheimer's disease in 1906 and looked into the brain of the cadaver and saw these...
00:24:16.000Plaques aggregating around neurons, right?
00:24:19.000In the extracellular space around neurons.
00:24:22.000The plaques have come to be sort of the force, the focus of Alzheimer's research, really.
00:24:30.000And the idea was that these plaques were the causative force in the condition.
00:24:37.000Much like the plaque on your teeth, right?
00:24:39.000You see these plaques in the brain of a person with Alzheimer's disease.
00:24:42.000And so that's really been the target of drug therapy.
00:24:45.000And the idea was that until we can find a drug that would reduce the plaque burden, reduce the plaque, get rid of the plaque in the brains of a senior person, right?
00:24:55.000Somebody who's at risk for developing Alzheimer's disease, that it's a disease that you can't prevent.
00:25:29.000Until a paper published in the journal Nature in 2006. So what happened was this researcher named Sylvain Lesney at the University of Minnesota basically was looking into the brains of mice who are bred to overexpress what's called amyloid precursor protein,
00:25:50.000which 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?
00:25:59.000So what he did was he isolated a subtype that he called A-beta star 56 and injected it into a young and healthy mouse or rat mouse.
00:26:14.000And he saw that that mouse's cognition rapidly declined.
00:26:20.000That 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?
00:26:31.000But he claimed that he found it, and when injected into the body of a healthy mouse, He saw rapid decline in terms of their cognition, right?
00:27:08.000I mean, they modulate various neurotransmitters, but, you know, I've heard it described like, you know, 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,
00:27:25.000you know, people will come back to life, right?
00:27:27.000Like there's widespread neuronal dysfunction and death in the brain of somebody with Alzheimer's disease.
00:27:32.000And in tandem with that, scanning technology has allowed us to look into the brains of healthy controls.
00:27:38.000And what we see is that there's amyloid plaque in the brains of healthy controls as well.
00:27:41.000So there's no correlation between amyloid burden in the brain and one's cognitive abilities.
00:27:48.000But nonetheless, when this paper came out in 2006, It renewed fervor in terms of this hypothesis because he found the subtype of amyloid that can be injected into a young and healthy mouse that would then seriously impair their cognition,
00:28:05.000And so that renewed interest in this hypothesis and it's what ultimately led to the fact that just a couple years ago, two years ago, There was a highly controversial drug that was approved by the FDA called Aducanumab or Aduhelm.
00:28:22.000And this is a drug that effectively reduced plaque burden in the brain.
00:28:28.000For the first time, they found a drug that could actually reduce plaque burden in the brain.
00:28:32.000But it didn't lead to any improvement in cognitive symptoms.
00:28:35.000Nonetheless, it was given the green light against tons of opposition that the FDA received.
00:28:42.000They put together a panel of 11 people Neuroscientists, neurologists, right?
00:28:47.000Eight of them told the FDA not to approve this drug.
00:29:46.000One of the big vocal sort of skeptics about this drug, aducanumab, is a guy, a Vanderbilt researcher named Matthew Schragge.
00:29:55.000Matthew Schrag was very vocally against the approval of this drug, which, again, doesn't do anything.
00:30:03.000Horrible risk of side effects, no clinically meaningful effect on the symptoms that we want to improve for a patient with Alzheimer's disease.
00:30:13.000And so he was vocally critical of that.
00:30:16.000And then he also was working on some other drug.
00:30:19.000And what was revealed basically in the science paper that came out was that he was dabbling on a website called PubPeer, which is a site where you can go.
00:30:31.000It's known for post-publication peer review.
00:30:33.000So before paper gets accepted for publication, it undergoes this peer review process, right?
00:30:38.000And 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 it was like the missing link between the amyloid hypothesis and the clinically meaningful symptoms,
00:30:58.000And he did a bit of like image sleuthing, which is not generally part of the peer review process, right?
00:31:03.000And he looked at these, the way data is illustrated in this paper, as it is in research generally, it's called a Western blot, which is like a visual representation of data, the presence of proteins and so forth.
00:31:16.000And he found that they were all, for the most part, fabricated.
00:31:20.000In fact, this A Beta Star 56 wasn't found by any other team.
00:32:37.000My mom is what galvanized that passion for me, right?
00:32:41.000And what 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.
00:32:49.000But, you know, a lot of people go into science, go into medicine because it's a career path, right?
00:32:54.000It's a career path for somebody wanting validation.
00:33:31.000This, 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?
00:33:47.000It's like everybody has pointed at cholesterol as being the bad guy, because cholesterol is clearly there in atherosclerotic plaques, right?
00:34:00.000Like, there have been other, like, my mentor, as I mentioned, you know, at Cornell, who I've been lucky enough to work with over the years on certain projects, you know, knew that there was another way.
00:34:12.000It's this glucose-hypometabolism, right?
00:34:14.000It's like, but there's no money in that.
00:34:15.000There's no money in saying, like, keep yourself as insulin-sensitive as possible.
00:34:20.000You know, reduce your exposure to environmental pollutants.
00:34:24.000All these different modifiable risk factors.
00:34:26.000It's not druggable the way that this amyloid beta protein is druggable.
00:34:34.000And 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.
00:34:59.000And I could talk about why I named it that, but that was always sort of a working title for the project.
00:35:03.000But somebody at one of these foundations, right, like...
00:35:08.000There's all these big Alzheimer's foundations.
00:35:11.000I'm lucky to be working on this project with one who really believes in me and the project, the Alzheimer's Foundation of America.
00:35:16.000But there are these other non-profits that really what they are is just like a front for perpetuating the status quo and keeping the funding pipeline open for drug discovery.
00:35:26.000And so when I first got started working on my film, I did a Kickstarter campaign for it.
00:35:32.000And one of these quote-unquote non-profits, right?
00:35:37.000Deeply invested in the amyloid hypothesis came out and wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal disparaging me and my project and any other alternate sort of viewpoint and talking glowingly about that aducanumab drug, which at the time had yet to be approved, right?
00:35:53.000And it was so painful to me at the time because I was 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 interest in this science.
00:36:02.000It takes 17 years on average for what's discovered in science to be put into day-to-day clinical practice.
00:36:07.000So I was like, that's time we don't have to lose when the brains of our loved ones are at stake.
00:36:12.000And so, yeah, I was directly in the crosshairs at the time for this amyloid mafia.
00:36:19.000Because this medication is profitable.
00:36:22.000Yeah, 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 burden in the brain, I mean, that's going to make shareholders really happy.
00:36:32.000And this drug, is it still being prescribed?
00:36:38.000And 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 are already experiencing this neurodegenerative disease and you could easily chalk it off to that being the cause of death.
00:36:53.000Yeah, I mean, I can't speak to, like, you know, people's experiences on it currently, but I do know that the trials were, you know, I mean, if I had a loved one, based on what I know about this drug and those trials, my loved one currently would not be on that drug.
00:37:11.000They would be perhaps experimenting with, you know, and this is a very difficult sort of road to go down.
00:37:17.000I guess it's easier to say if I had dementia, right?
00:37:50.000But there has been research On patients with Alzheimer's disease, mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease, that ketogenic diet intervention can actually improve functional capacity in those patients, which is everything, right?
00:38:06.000For 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.
00:38:14.000But actually, what's very interesting is that people that develop Alzheimer's disease, they start to develop a sweet tooth.
00:38:20.000And it's thought that that's sort of like the brain crying out for sugar, essentially, because it's just struggling to generate energy.
00:38:27.000And dietary change is difficult for anybody, let alone somebody with dementia.
00:38:33.000So 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,
00:38:51.000Why are they still prescribing that drug?
00:38:55.000Yeah, it's a, you know, it's a, because it takes 17 years.
00:39:01.000Right, but once they have access to the fact that that study was flawed, not just flawed, but fraudulent, I mean, it's pretty significant.
00:39:10.000The impact that's had— They should pull it off the market.
00:39:12.000I mean, think about 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.
00:39:28.000And the fact that they still do it without having this immediate cease, what could be, other than generating more revenue, what else could possibly be the reason for continuing to prescribe that drug other than ignorance?
00:39:45.000Well, I think that it's not that this paper came out and suddenly the amyloid hypothesis has been debunked or whatever.
00:39:54.000You know, like, 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 the, you know, this is like version one.
00:40:05.000So there are still many researchers who think that this is, like, still the target, still the appropriate target.
00:40:11.000But once they realized that the study was fraudulent, and that when injected into these mice and it causes significant degeneration, that this is not really accurate, that this is all fake, So then they don't have a mechanism.
00:41:44.000They do nothing to address the underlying pathology.
00:41:49.000And yeah, I mean, it was literally until, I believe 2020 was the year 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.
00:42:08.000So that's sort of their way of saying that, look, there's a significant proportion of these cases that are potentially preventable, right?
00:43:40.000And we've had conversations before, and unfortunately, there's a lot of documentaries and a lot of people that are propagandizing this ideology.
00:43:48.000They're doing it like it's a religion, and that's how they treat it.
00:43:51.000They ignore any evidence to the contrary.
00:43:59.000I 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.
00:44:17.000If 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.
00:44:29.000Like 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.
00:44:38.000If you have a backyard, get some chickens.
00:49:54.000There's a museum in Montana, in Bozeman, and they show you two options of this raptor.
00:50:00.000They 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 beautiful colored feathers, just like a chicken.
00:51:01.000I consider eggs to be a cognitive multivitamin, actually, because if you consider the fact that when an embryo is developing, the central nervous system, and the nervous system in general, is the first structure to coalesce, right?
00:51:12.000So an egg yolk literally has everything in it that nature has deemed important to grow a brain.
00:51:17.000Which is so frustrating when people want to eat egg white omelets.
00:51:20.000When I go to a store or a restaurant and I see egg white omelet, I'm like, where's the fucking whole egg?
00:51:27.000It's, I mean, the yolk, it's like, again, a cognitive multivitamin.
00:51:30.000And it's no surprise that egg yolk, people are, you know, like, vegans are, they just see red, right, whenever you say cholesterol, whenever they see that, like, there's cholesterol in a food.
00:51:39.000But it should be no surprise that an egg yolk is rich in cholesterol because the brain is rich in cholesterol.
00:52:38.000I think egg yolks maybe is second place to like beef liver, which is the top source for dietary choline.
00:52:45.000But again, something that we under-consume.
00:52:47.000And studies show that people who consume more choline have reduced risk for dementia.
00:52:52.000And choline is like one of these foods, 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.
00:53:03.000Speaking of which, what do you think about these desiccated supplements of heart and liver and testicles and all these things that you see being sold now?
00:53:14.000I 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.
00:53:21.000Whether or not these things could contain prions?
00:53:38.000I mean, I think 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?
00:53:48.000Docosahexaenoic acid, DHA fat, and the brain is rich in that.
00:53:51.000But yeah, I mean, I think it's a valid concern, although I haven't, to be honest, I haven't looked into it too deeply.
00:54:00.000I do think that liver is a great food.
00:54:02.000It's one of the most nutrient-dense foods there is.
00:54:05.000And I do think that there is a little bit of truth, at least in the case of liver, where like supports like.
00:54:11.000Like we know that beef liver is a top source of choline, right?
00:54:14.000And we know that choline directly supports liver health.
00:55:04.000Yeah, you know, I get, like, on social media especially, like on Instagram, I get a lot of shit from pretty much everybody.
00:55:11.000Like, the vegans don't like me, right, because I promote animal products.
00:55:14.000The 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.
00:55:22.000The 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.
00:55:30.000But yeah, and then the paleo community, because I recently have sort of come out sort of not being a huge fan of like butter and ghee.
00:55:38.000You know, I'm a huge fan of dairy and dairy fat in general, which dairy fat, so all natural fat-containing foods contain some proportion of saturated fat, polyunsaturated fat, monounsaturated fat, right?
00:55:50.000So like any natural fat-containing food is going to contain some saturated fat.
00:55:52.000So demonizing any type of fat, I think, doesn't make any sense.
00:57:25.000If you look at any eye supplement, they usually will have those two in them because they can help prevent age-related macular degeneration.
00:57:33.000Now, what are the criticisms against seed oils specifically?
00:57:39.000Like, I've seen you speak about grapeseed 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 winemakers realized, hey, we're leaving money on the table with all this grapeseed.
00:58:08.000And get rid of the noxious, like, aromas and flavors, then you've got something that you can sell, right?
00:58:14.000For, I think it's like a $500 or $600 million a year business, if not more, these days.
00:58:21.000So grapeseed oil, like any of these grain and seed oils, like corn oil, 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.
00:59:13.000Like, 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, grapeseed oil?
00:59:24.000Yeah, I mean, humans, we don't even, like, generally, we're averse to seeds for a reason.
00:59:29.000I mean, if you've ever tried to chew into a grapeseed, it's bitter, right?
00:59:33.000So that's why these oils didn't exist in the human food supply before 100 years ago.
00:59:38.000We hadn't had the chemistry labs, the erector sets required to extract these oils and then run them through all these myriad processes to make them to some degree palatable and able to be utilized by the food industry.
00:59:51.000They used to be used as engine lubricants and things like that.
00:59:54.000That's industrialized seed oils have always been used as lubricants for engines.
01:00:55.000So, 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.
01:01:06.000It's basically the food industry's equivalent of the Witness Protection Program, right?
01:01:09.000Because it takes an oil and it makes it so bland and free of any kind of character, right, that it can be used to roast nuts in.
01:01:19.000It can be used to saute food in a restaurant.
01:01:22.000It could be used to fry food in, for example.
01:01:24.000And the problem is, one of the problems with these seed oils is that that deodorization step creates a small but significant amount of trans fats.
01:01:33.000And we know that there's no safe level of trans fat, artificially man-made trans fat consumption.
01:01:38.000Their most recognizable form was in partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, which were outlawed, right?
01:01:46.000Five, six years ago, something like that.
01:01:48.000But you can still find man-made trans fats on the market in the form of these grain and seed oils.
01:01:54.000Now, the dose likely makes the poison, as it does with most things.
01:01:59.000But your average American today is over-consuming these oils.
01:02:04.000Well, I mean, they didn't exist, again, in the human food supply prior to a century ago.
01:02:10.000And their use has increased anywhere between 250 and 1,000%.
01:02:16.0001,000% for soybean oil in particular, which is the most commonly used grain and seed oil.
01:02:22.000And so we're over-consuming these fats.
01:02:26.000When we cook with them in particular, when we expose them to high heat, especially for prolonged periods of time, they generate poisons called aldehydes.
01:02:34.000And some of these aldehydes are really toxic.
01:02:37.000I mean, they're neurotoxic, they're mutagenic, meaning they're cancer-causing.
01:02:41.000You know, one such aldehyde is acrolein.
01:02:56.000Sorry to interrupt, but how does cigarette smoke produce alkaline?
01:03:00.000Well, I'm not 100% sure as to how it's produced in cigarette smoke, but it is a byproduct of the burning of garbage, and it's created in myriad industrial processes.
01:03:13.000So it has something to do with the heat?
01:03:24.000So what about if it's not being heated up?
01:03:28.000Like, what about seed oils as they exist in salad dressings and the like?
01:03:32.000Well, I think one of the big fears, another big fear with regard to these oils is that they might not be acutely inflammatory.
01:03:40.000So I think a lot of people, and this is what tends to get pushback among the evidence-based crowd on social media, you'll hear claims that these oils are inflammatory.
01:03:50.000And I think this is more an issue of semantics.
01:03:52.000They're not acutely inflammatory, I think?
01:04:13.000But 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.
01:04:24.000And 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.
01:04:35.000Certainly Alzheimer's disease, other forms of dementia, but also cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and the like.
01:04:42.000Now, are they going to actually stimulate an inflammatory response?
01:04:45.000You know, I don't think so, unless maybe the oil 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've all undergone...
01:04:52.000It's sitting on the shelf forever, too.
01:04:56.000Which is like, I mean, if you look at extra virgin olive oil, you'll seldom find a good extra virgin olive oil in plastic, because producers know what they've got.
01:05:06.000But these grain and seed oils, you know, they're sitting on the shelf in plastic.
01:05:09.000They're sitting, 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?
01:05:21.000Small glass, opaque bottles, because extra virgin olive oil, unlike wine, only degrades over time.
01:05:27.000So there's no, like, appreciation that occurs with time.
01:07:06.000We don't yet know what they're doing to our brains.
01:07:09.000Lipid peroxidation is a major feature in the Alzheimer's riddled brain, right?
01:07:13.000We 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?
01:07:24.000We 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 in nature to protect PUFAs, to protect polyunsaturated fats.
01:07:36.000We know that your average American is under-consuming vitamin E. Like 10% of Americans consume adequate vitamin E. So as our intake of these polyunsaturated grain and seed oils increases, our need for vitamin C increases, we're not consuming adequate vitamin E. You mean vitamin E? Vitamin E,
01:08:59.000But nonetheless, you look at their diets and they're the picture of, like, they would be, like, the prize client of any, you know, of these, like, more orthodox dietitians.
01:09:07.000So, when, if someone does have some sort of salad dressing, should that salad dressing always be stored in the cold?
01:09:22.000Extra virgin olive oil is like the primary oil that I use.
01:09:24.000I 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.
01:10:11.000You get a tiny proportion of polyunsaturated fat.
01:10:13.000But the fats in extra virgin olive oil, they're already chemically stable.
01:10:17.000And the small amount of PUFAs in extra virgin olive oil Are protected by the vast array of antioxidants that extra virgin olive oil contains.
01:10:27.000Extra virgin olive oil actually has a compound in it called oleocanthal, which is as anti-inflammatory as low-dose ibuprofen.
01:11:42.000I think avocado oil is good, but you're missing out on the opportunity to get some of those phytochemicals in olive oil, extra virgin olive oil, particularly.
01:11:52.000What is the difference between extra virgin and other olive oils?
01:11:55.000So extra virgin olive oil is just like, you crush olives.
01:11:58.000That's how you get extra virgin olive oil, and then you protect that oil.
01:12:01.000The other types are, well, there's filtered and unfiltered extra virgin olive oil, but you generally want to buy filtered.
01:12:09.000I know some people might see unfiltered and think that that's the one to buy because it's more pure, but actually what you end up getting with unfiltered oil Is little olive microparticles and water, which can accelerate the degradation process of the oil.
01:13:06.000If you're a single person like me, you want to just buy as small of a bottle as you can find, and then use that, and then just keep buying those small bottles.
01:13:15.000If you're a big family and you're using it all the time, a bigger liter bottle, I think, will suffice.
01:13:20.000But we can look to randomized control trials like the PREDIMED study, which is one of these seminal nutrition studies, because it's a huge population, multi-center trial.
01:14:30.000I think that the benefits outweigh the risks.
01:14:32.000And also, balsamic vinegar has a compound in it.
01:14:37.000I forget what the acronym stands for, but the acronym is DMB, so people can easily find it.
01:14:42.000It's one of these long, complex chemical designations.
01:14:46.000But 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.
01:14:54.000I'm a big advocate for the consumption of grass-fed beef and things like that.
01:14:59.000So as far as salad goes, just extra virgin olive oil, either balsamic vinaigrette or regular vinegar?
01:15:09.000Is there a benefit to having regular vinegar over balsamic vinaigrette?
01:15:15.000I think only if you're really counting calories, which I don't endorse.
01:15:31.000And 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.
01:15:44.000So this could be like healthy user bias.
01:15:47.000Like, again, nutrition, even the recommendations that I make, like, you know, a lot of healthy user bias confounds many of these kinds of studies in the world of nutrition because we just don't have many long-term randomized, you know, large population, multicenter randomized control trials, right?
01:16:02.000But the research shows 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.
01:16:13.000And 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.
01:16:18.000I mean, the most nutrient-dense foods that we have access to are going to be animal products, right?
01:16:23.000But 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.
01:16:41.000But in young and healthy college students, they've actually shown that when you give...
01:16:46.000People 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.
01:17:11.000I 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.
01:17:27.000But I don't think that like eating a salad a day is going to put you at risk.
01:17:31.000Is there any benefit of cooking leafy greens versus eating them raw or vice versa?
01:17:38.000Certainly, fig greens can definitely be made more digestible when you cook them.
01:17:43.000But, you know, there's always like a give or take when you cook or store vegetables.
01:17:49.000Some micronutrients become more bioavailable, some become less.
01:17:54.000So, I tend to recommend, you know, sort of a mix, like variety.
01:18:02.000But in general, with the salad recommendation, you know, with dark leafy greens like arugula, kale, spinach, things like that, I don't think that...
01:18:10.000Spinach is probably the highest with regard to oxalates.
01:18:12.000So, you know, if you're sensitive to oxalates, you know, you might want to cut down on your raw spinach consumption.
01:18:18.000I used to drink kale shakes all the time and mix it with coconut butter and a bunch of other stuff in there and fruit.
01:18:25.000But then I got concerned about oxalates.
01:18:30.000I think if all you're doing is eating kale day in and day out, like there's a famous case report published in the medical literature of a woman who heard that bok choy could help prevent type 2 diabetes.
01:18:42.000And so she was eating like two kilograms a day of raw bok choy.
01:19:14.000And even things like, you know, dietary fiber.
01:19:17.000A lot of people say that they have difficulty digesting dietary fiber, but it's not necessarily a problem with the fiber.
01:19:23.000You likely haven't cultivated a microbiome to contend with whatever, you know, quality or quantity of fibers that you're consuming.
01:19:30.000So 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?
01:19:40.000So people 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 vegan-run social media accounts, they make it seem like fiber is the only nutrient that you need, right?
01:19:53.000And so a lot of people will then dramatically increase their fiber intake, and that sets them up right off the bat for bloating, gas, all kinds of digestive problems.
01:20:03.000One of the things that carnivore people talk about is plant defense chemicals, right?
01:20:23.000You know, a lot of these plant defense compounds have a beneficial hormetic effect in us.
01:20:30.000The issue is 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?
01:20:40.000You've lost some degree of gut resilience to be able to reap the full benefit from those types of compounds, right?
01:20:48.000I think that this, I mean, it makes a lot of sense today, right?
01:20:50.000We live in a time where there's widespread gut dysbiosis, gut problems, problems with the microbiome, right?
01:20:56.000Where, you know, many people are born via C-section, for example, which medically certainly indicated in some instances, right?
01:21:05.000They're not being breastfed, overuse of antibiotics.
01:21:08.000And we live in a society, especially over the past two years, that's become overly obsessed with, you know, what I call hygiene theater.
01:21:14.000And so, you know, I think that we've lost a bit of resilience in our gut.
01:21:18.000And 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?
01:21:33.000If 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?
01:21:40.000Making yourself harder to kill, which I think is a great sort of way to frame, you know, your wellness, like, nutritional approach, right?
01:21:48.000But if you have, you know, an impaired microbiome, for example, or if your gut mucosa Has become degraded, which is sort of this like demilitarized zone between your gut lumen and your gut epithelium, right?
01:22:04.000And what would cause that to become degraded?
01:22:06.000Well, generally it's caused by not consuming enough 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 gut mucosa that sort of acts, you know, it's like this sort of bacteria-free zone in your large intestine that separates the interior contents of your gut and your gut microbiome from your epithelium.
01:22:47.000I mean, is that like a temporary effect where this bacteria searches for fiber, doesn't find it anymore, and then attacks the mucus membrane?
01:22:57.000Yeah, you know, it's definitely complicated.
01:23:01.000My understanding is that sometimes the root cause of these problems can be bacterial overgrowth.
01:23:10.000And so when you do an elimination diet like a carnivore diet, for example, I think?
01:23:35.000It can be a great short-term therapeutic diet.
01:23:39.000But again, I think running around being afraid of these plant quote-unquote toxins.
01:23:44.000The evidence on the consumption of fruits...
01:23:46.000If fruits and vegetables were really trying to kill us, they're doing a terrible job.
01:23:49.000I don't think anyone's saying fruits are trying to kill us, other than there's arsenic and apple seeds and things like that, right?
01:24:00.000But the research on them suggests that people who consume more tend to live longer.
01:24:05.000Now, I'm not, like, 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?
01:24:18.000I know somebody who, if he's in the same room as an allium, which is like garlic, leeks, shallots, onions, and things like that, You know, he's just like, he has to quarantine himself for a different reason, you know?
01:24:32.000The hormetic effect totally makes sense if you take into consideration other hormetic effects that we accept as being beneficial, like the sauna.
01:24:39.000Or like a cold plunge, things along those lines, where your body's reacting to this intruder or this invasion of excess heat or cold and producing this beneficial effect to the overall body.
01:24:53.000Yeah, I totally agree with that as well.
01:24:56.000I mean, I'm a huge fan of sauna, especially with regard to dementia prevention.
01:24:59.000If you use a sauna two to three times a week, you slash your risk of developing dementia by 22%.
01:25:22.000Well, they do this research, which is actually really great that they do it in Finland.
01:25:28.000The University of Eastern Finland is where a lot of this good sauna data comes from.
01:25:32.000And they generally do it, yeah, I mean, on a daily basis.
01:25:35.000I think the key is to do it for as long as you can do it to get to that feeling of discomfort.
01:25:42.000You know, you want it to be a stress on the body, and then you leave and then you do it again.
01:25:47.000I think generally that seems to be the traditional protocol there.
01:25:52.000When you say feeling discomfort, how deep into the discomfort?
01:25:57.000What I do is I'll put my fingers on the radial artery in my wrist and sometimes you can get a sense that your body is having a mild aerobic exercise session.
01:26:10.000There's only so much of that that you can take between the sweating and your heart rate is increased.
01:26:17.000You get this feeling of dysphoria that washes over you.
01:26:24.000There's a sauna that I go to sometimes in LA that gets up to 225 degrees.
01:26:41.000Yeah, I mean, that's the argument against this thing about a hermetic effect of leafy greens.
01:26:48.000So, the most favorable sauna duration and temperature associated with lower dementia risk were 5 to 14 minutes per session at a temperature of 80 to 99 degrees Celsius.
01:27:13.000Yeah, I took my sauna temperature down a little bit.
01:27:18.000I was at 189 degrees for 25 minutes and I took it down to 189 for 25 minutes and I took it down to 185 for 20. Because I was just, I was so exhausted when I get out of there at 189. I was like, I think I'm fucking myself up.
01:27:34.000And when hanging out with Laird Hamilton, unfortunately, that's psycho.
01:27:38.000He gets it up to 220 degrees and he puts oven mitts on and he gets on an airdyne bike in the sauna.
01:27:49.000Well, I also think you have to take into consideration whether or not he does a cold plunge first.
01:27:55.000Because if you do a cold plunge first, 185 degrees is not just tolerable, it feels great.
01:28:01.000So I go from the Cold Plunge, which at home I have this Morosco Forge, which is 34 degrees, and here I have a blue cube at the studio, which is great.
01:28:13.000And it goes to 37 degrees, so it's just slightly warmer.
01:28:17.000It's freezing as fuck, but it's also circulating.
01:30:18.000We use Black Rifle Coffee in his machine, but his machine combines that with coconut oil and turmeric and all these different compounds, cacao.
01:30:35.000So Laird, his protocols, I'm not sure if he goes in the cold plunge first.
01:30:40.000If he goes in the cold plunge first, then it kind of makes sense that he can get in that sauna and ride that Airdyne machine at such a high temperature.
01:31:38.000Yeah, 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.
01:32:27.000I think what it does for your blood pressure is amazing because we already talked about the fact that having normal blood pressure is key to keeping your brain healthy.
01:32:38.000And there was actually also a risk reduction from the same lab at University of Eastern Finland showing you that stroke risk is reduced.
01:32:46.000Well, it was a 40% decrease in all-cause mortality.
01:34:31.000I'm 55 now, so it's like the one thing that's shown to me to really have a benefit on the way I feel, other than exercise, my overall sense of well-being in my body is sauna and the cold plunge combination.
01:36:17.000But if you frequently swish with antiseptic mouthwash, so not all mouthwashes, but alcohol-based bactericidal mouthwash, you're nuking indiscriminately the bacteria in your mouth that are pivotal,
01:36:46.000We know that alcohol is something that does have some degree of benefit, right?
01:36:51.000If it's like a stress-relieving tool for you, if you use it as a social lubricant.
01:36:55.000But in general, we know that ethanol is a neurotoxin and that alcohol inflames the gut.
01:37:00.000It drives the translocation of endotoxin from the gut into circulation.
01:37:06.000People who even moderately consume alcohol have accelerated shrinkage in the hippocampus, the memory center of the brain.
01:37:14.000So, you know, 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.
01:37:22.000But, yeah, I don't know exactly, you know, if it's, like, I don't think that research has been done yet.
01:37:29.000Like, what a transient bit of alcohol.
01:37:32.000But we do know that this bacteria is on the tongue.
01:37:35.000So, presumably, if the alcohol is sliding down your tongue, right?
01:37:41.000And when you're talking about these mouthwashes post-workout, so is it specifically post-workout or is there a time ever where those mouthwashes are not dangerous?
01:39:00.000Now, in terms of gum, you're not necessarily consuming the artificial sweetener, but the artificial sweetener is there in your mouth.
01:39:07.000This is just speculation territory here, but I think that it conceivably might have an effect, but I don't think that that research has been done yet.
01:39:16.000Now, when someone uses toothpaste, especially toothpaste with fluoride, does that have a detrimental effect?
01:39:25.000I mean, I personally avoid fluoride, and fluoride does have antiseptic effect as well.
01:39:33.000So if you rather work out and then brush your teeth with fluoride-based toothpaste afterwards, would that have a similar effect as this mouthwash does?
01:39:54.000I mean, the toothpaste that I use, I look for nanohydroxyapatite.
01:39:58.000I don't know if you ever talked about that here on the podcast, but that's sort of a fluoride alternative that they've been using in Japan for some time that has shown to have a remineralizing effect on par with fluoride.
01:40:12.000But hydroxyapatite is a fully natural...
01:40:52.000That's sort of like one of the hallmark platitudes in the field of toxicology.
01:40:56.000But the reason why endocrine disruptors are so treacherous and so difficult to study is they possess what's called a non-monotonic dose response.
01:41:05.000So you might have increasing 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.
01:41:14.000So that's what makes them tricky to study and also just treacherous in general in terms of their effects on our health.
01:41:33.000I mean, the Environmental Working Group found that, you know, umbilical cord has between 200 and 300 different industrial chemicals, like waste products, in a population representative sampling of fetuses.
01:42:16.000Anytime 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.
01:42:23.000Meanwhile, you have a bottle of water right now.
01:42:45.000But 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.
01:43:09.000But in this exercise study, they used a prescription antiseptic mouthwash called chlorhexidine.
01:43:15.000And so it's clear that people who are using mouthwash regularly are seeing a health impingement as a result.
01:43:24.000Now, is there a non-antiseptic mouthwash?
01:43:28.000Is there something that makes your breath smell good that's...
01:43:33.000I think they have xylitol-based mouthwashes that I believe are selectively antiseptic.
01:43:41.000But I believe that good oral health shouldn't require much more than flossing regularly, brushing with something that doesn't have fluoride in it, and also eating a diet, a biologically appropriate diet.
01:43:56.000I mean, grains and grain products are the worst thing for your dental health.
01:44:01.000And if you think about it, an animal in the wild without its teeth is quickly a dead animal.
01:44:07.000So I think that whatever is going to be good for the oral microbiome is going to be good for systemic health and vice versa.
01:44:12.000And so grain products, refined grains, added sugars, I mean these are the worst foods, right?
01:44:16.000Like anything that's gonna cause any kind of like starch-dominant food product that is easily retained in the gum line, major driver of cavities.
01:44:28.000I want to talk about that, about grains, but I want to also talk about fluoride.
01:44:52.000Yeah, I think there's some truth to that, but I don't think that...
01:44:55.000Our widespread tooth decay is due to a lack of fluoride.
01:44:59.000I think it's more due to the fact that our diets have become aberrant.
01:45:04.000I mean, I'll tell you, I haven't used fluoride toothpaste in some time, and when I was a kid, I was the kind of kid that every time I would go to a dentist, there would be a new cavity.
01:45:13.000I just would always dread going to the dentist because there would always be something for them to fill.
01:45:18.000And ever since I demoted grains and grain products to the occasional indulgence in my diet, I haven't had a single cavity.
01:45:27.000That's an anecdote, certainly, but I think it's not a mystery why these kinds of things develop, why we have tooth decay.
01:46:03.000Like, what's going on in your brain where like a plate of lasagna is so damn rewarding?
01:46:09.000You know, I think what it is is that these kinds of foods tend to have that quality known as hyperpalatability.
01:46:17.000They 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?
01:46:26.000I mean, these foods typify the standard American diet.
01:46:29.000And these are the kinds of foods that now we consume by the majority.
01:46:33.00060% of our calories now come from these kinds of foods, ultra-processed foods or these hyperpalatable mixed foods, mixed dishes, like the lasagnas, the pizzas, the burgers and things like that.
01:46:44.000I'm sure you saw that chart that was recently published where they rated the nutritional benefits of food.
01:47:06.000Tufts University, and I recently had a conversation with a principal investigator, and I believe that our conversation was had out of good faith, and he was interested in hearing my perspective.
01:47:43.000There's actually a profiling system that was devised in Latin America called the NOVA profiling system, which I actually am a fan of.
01:47:48.000It ranks foods in accordance with how processed they are, which I think is actually quite important, can be quite useful in the context of the standard American diet with an obese population.
01:49:11.000Because what the fuck is an egg substitute?
01:49:13.000Skinless chicken breast, 61. Honey nut Cheerios, 76. How the fuck is that real?
01:49:21.000Yeah, I mean, they basically score it in accordance with this formula that they've developed where, you know, they'll give a certain amount of points for protein, a certain amount of points for fiber, micronutrients, but they clearly don't properly penalize foods for being ultra-processed,
01:49:42.000Are every 10% increase in ultra-processed food consumption associated with a 14% increased risk of early mortality.
01:49:50.000Every 10% increase in ultra-processed food consumption associated with a 25% increased risk for dementia, recently published research, right?
01:49:58.000So this chart clearly is, in my view, right?
01:50:02.000And until I'm convinced otherwise, an instrument designed to sell ultra-processed food, right?
01:50:56.000Also, it's like that chart doesn't take into account context, right?
01:50:59.000Like, it doesn't take into account the fact that, as we mentioned, 50% of the population, it's almost 50% of the population that's obese, right?
01:51:08.000Half of the population is either diabetic or pre-diabetic.
01:51:10.000So it has some degree of glucose intolerance.
01:51:12.000And you're going to say that that orange juice is a healthy choice for somebody who has essentially glucose intolerance because they're insulin resistant.
01:51:19.000But it's so unnatural to drink a juice like that.
01:51:53.000You just get this jolt of sugar to your system.
01:51:56.000One thing, if you just did a crazy CrossFit workout, and your fucking legs are buckling, And you want to get a jolt of glucose in your system.
01:52:16.000And it's like, you know, whether we're talking about the Alzheimer's paper that was fraudulent or this, which, you know, I don't think that there's any malice behind this.
01:52:28.000There was a paper that came out recently.
01:52:31.000That found that among the people called on by the 2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans Committee, like those committee members, 95% of them had conflicts of interest with pharma, with the food industry, right?
01:52:44.000Like General Mills, Kraft, AstraZeneca, right?
01:52:48.000Those are the people coming up with our dietary guidelines, right?
01:52:51.000So they're not going to say minimize your consumption of ultra-processed foods because the food industry would never let them.
01:52:56.000Not only that, you ever look at those folks?
01:54:32.000My little brother, we have the first baby in the family, a little girl.
01:54:38.000And I'm learning about breastfeeding and all the things, right?
01:54:42.000But what's interesting is that their pediatrician told us that he'll often see vegan moms come in and they're suffering from crazy osteoporosis and low bone mineral density because the mammary tissue doesn't care The mammary tissue just wants to make the best milk possible.
01:55:03.000It doesn't care if the mother's getting it from her diet.
01:55:06.000If not, it'll take the nutrients from the mom.
01:55:28.000Another thing I wanted to talk to you about is glyphosate.
01:55:31.000There was a recent study that showed that glyphosate appeared, and see if you can find what the actual numbers were.
01:55:39.000But it was a shocking number of people's bodies containing glyphosate in them, which is Roundup, which is an herbicide.
01:55:49.000That 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.
01:56:03.000Disturbing weed killer ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of U.S. urine samples.
01:56:12.000Now, immediately upon publishing this, I went on to Twitter and I saw this shill for these herbicide companies that was talking about, oh, it's just a minimal amount.
01:57:59.000I mean, I think soaking and rinsing like produce...
01:58:01.000Well, with regard to grain, I'm not sure.
01:58:04.000With regard to produce, I do think that there's both an effect with like rinsing and like soaking in particular, in vinegar and salt, and or salt, vinegar and or salt, and cooking.
01:58:19.000I don't think it's a very heat-stable compound, but I'm not, you know, like I think people should avoid it.
01:58:24.000Like 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 whether or not organic is better for you than non-organic.
01:58:37.000Nutritionally, in terms of micronutrients, there's no real difference.
01:58:40.000You'll see higher levels of certain micronutrients in organic, and you'll see higher levels of certain, for example, nitrates in non-organic produce.
01:58:50.000So you can't really say that one is more nutritious than the other.
01:58:53.000Studies 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.
01:59:04.000There was a meta-analysis that found cadmium levels were reduced by 50% in organic produce as compared to conventional.
01:59:12.000And then you see higher levels of these like plant quote-unquote defense compounds in organic produce.
01:59:19.000Which, depending on, you know, where you stand on these plant defense compounds, I mean, likely, you know, I think provide benefit to human health.
01:59:29.000That's the hormetic effect that we were talking about earlier.
01:59:34.000And so these genetically modified organisms, these GMOs, these plants that are designed to be able to tolerate glyphosate, how are they doing that?
01:59:45.000Like, what is happening to these plants?
01:59:48.000What are they doing to the plant that allows them to spray this toxic shit all over them and they keep growing?
02:00:04.000What I will say is that there's only a small handful of crops that are GMO. There's only 10 crops that are GMO. Sometimes you'll see non-GMO asparagus, but asparagus was never GMO. But generally, I believe,
02:00:45.000Yeah, I would rather reduce my exposure to that.
02:00:56.000It's fair that not everything that's natural is good for you, not everything that's unnatural is bad for you, but I'm not gonna put my health in the hands of Monsanto, which is now Bayer, I think, after they purchased it, right?
02:01:10.000But like, those companies don't give a fuck about your health, right?
02:01:14.000And when you do finally get sick, there's no recourse.
02:01:26.000And 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.
02:01:37.000And monocrop agriculture is the most efficient way to provide these people with produce.
02:01:42.000And monocrop agriculture with herbicides is the most efficient way to grow agriculture.
02:01:51.000It's so complex and so difficult to get out of.
02:01:54.000Because all these people that are proponents of regenerative farming, whenever I ask them if it's scalable, they always do this, like, Yeah.
02:02:47.000That's where I think it's another area where the argument for veganism falls short, is that if you're partaking in modern society, if you're shopping in a modern supermarket, there's blood on your hands, right?
02:03:03.000Inculcated from the fact that today, whether it's modern plant agriculture or modern animal agriculture, animals and people are being exploited.
02:03:15.000It's doing a number on the environment.
02:03:17.000If you really want to live the most sustainable and quote-unquote regenerative lifestyle, you're going to be growing your own Yes, and that really is probably the only option.
02:03:30.000Growing your own produce and doing it in the way where you're making your own compost and...
02:03:35.000Harvesting your own eggs like you were doing.
02:04:00.000And the nutrition and the calories and, you know, what you get from beef is...
02:04:07.000You know, you get a lot more in a much smaller package, right?
02:04:09.000Like one cow can feed a family, and I'm not like an environmental expert or an expert in agriculture, but I know that one cow can feed a family for months, right?
02:04:21.000And so 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.
02:04:52.000The ones that use regenerative agriculture, the benefit to that is they use the manure and the manure helps grow more plants and it helps they use it as fertilizer.
02:05:01.000It also helps the richness of the soil and keeps the soil maintaining.
02:05:09.000Which is so important because topsoil in this country is like really fucked, especially in these monocrop agriculture environments.
02:05:15.000They'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.
02:05:57.000But in general, whether it's increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, right, which is like a plant's food, right?
02:06:03.000It'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?
02:06:34.000I never would have thought about it that way.
02:06:36.000I wrote about this in my second book, The Genius Life, but generally, yeah.
02:06:41.000So it's the confluence of factors, right?
02:06:43.000It's like what we're doing to the soil, it's the fact that there's more carbon in the atmosphere.
02:06:46.000So our plants are actually becoming less nutritious in terms of their micronutrients, but also the macronutrients are being depleted as well, right?
02:06:57.000And when that happens, when you dilute protein, I mean, you're going to have an effect on I mean, we haven't yet been able to quantify it, but when you dilute protein in an organism, you're reducing the amount of amino acids, you're increasing the amount of energy that you're giving that animal.
02:07:15.000That potentially could be a recipe for obesity or a contributing factor.
02:07:20.000The argument that always drives me nuts when people talk about what is and what is not sustainable is You know, this is what people always want to discuss.
02:07:31.000Like, when you discuss, like, you should eat grass-fed beef, you should eat...
02:07:43.000But if you're listening and you're a person who's really taking the...
02:07:47.000You 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.
02:07:58.000You can't think about sustaining the entire world.
02:08:26.000Most people are not going to hike miles and miles into the mountains.
02:08:29.000They're not cardiovascularly fit enough to do it.
02:08:32.000They don't have the training to do it.
02:08:33.000They don't have the motivation to do it.
02:08:36.000They wouldn't be able to execute in the actual moment of choice, the difficult moment of truth when you have to pull the trigger or release an arrow.
02:08:51.000But 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 literally better for the environment, for everything.
02:09:08.000And I think that it would be immoral for a physician 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.
02:09:21.000If you're a physician and you're considering what's going to be best for the planet, right?
02:09:28.000I absolutely do care about the planet.
02:09:30.000I absolutely do care about animal welfare.
02:09:31.000But if you're sitting across the table from somebody who's sick or you're broadcasting a message to a sick population, you have a responsibility to that population, to that person.
02:09:42.000And so, for me, my number one priority is to personally eat and to recommend to people what, in my estimation, is going to be the best to avert these kinds of conditions.
02:09:53.000And I'll tell you that my mom, my mom...
02:09:56.000I'll never know what was causal with regard to what she had developed, but she was basically vegetarian.
02:10:50.000But yeah, I mean, I do think that my hypothesis is 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.
02:11:04.000Well, if your assertion is correct in terms of preventing Alzheimer's, it seems like all those things were negative, like all the things she's doing, the margarine, the grains, other than junky fast food.
02:11:21.000My mom wasn't a big fast food consumer.
02:11:25.000And, you know, this is, like, all I have is, like, retrospective, like, looking back and kind of trying to ascertain, you know, how she lived, you know, while I was exposed to it.
02:11:35.000It's not that my, you know, she had it like she was following any particular diet or anything like that, but...
02:11:40.000But yeah, she was a big animal rights advocate.
02:11:47.000Occasionally she would eat lean, skinless chicken breast or a piece of fish, but was always very, very concerned about cholesterol and things like that.
02:11:57.000So I do think that that's a dietary...
02:12:25.000This 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.
02:12:38.000Well, we've talked about this before in the podcast but it bears repeating.
02:12:41.000How saturated fat was the whole more fraud by the sugar companies and that the 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.
02:13:05.000You're referring to the 1967 JAMA paper, right?
02:13:07.000That 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 mid-century.
02:13:17.000And the Sugar Research Foundation paid each of those scientists $48,000.
02:13:23.000Equivalent of today's money to basically say that it wasn't sugar.
02:13:39.000And Ansel Keys, 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?
02:13:47.000That's like, that's the way that they, the same way that they described in the science article, Sylvain Lesney, the guy who, you know, who renewed vigor for the amyloid hypothesis.
02:13:58.000It's like, you know, they have this celebrity and charisma.
02:14:02.000First of all, having any charisma as a scientist, you're going to go places, right?
02:14:07.000Like, because so many of them- Have zero.
02:14:15.000And saturated fat, I think, is like- The plant-based community and still much of the medical orthodoxy are myopically focused on LDL cholesterol.
02:14:24.000Specifically now, I think it's pivoting a little bit to ApoB, so all ApoB-containing lipoproteins.
02:14:34.000Yeah, your ApoB or your LDL cholesterol might be a little bit lower, right?
02:14:39.000But that's not a risk-free swap, right?
02:14:42.000You'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 blood sugar regulation in the body.
02:14:58.000An amazing, pristine source of highly bioavailable, highly digestible protein.
02:15:05.000So, like, to be myopically focused on these single marker indicators of, you know, related to cardiovascular risk, I think, doesn't make any sense.
02:15:15.000No, it doesn't make any sense, but people don't know that information.
02:15:18.000And 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.
02:15:42.000Well, it's probably reflective of good health.
02:15:45.000It's not necessarily causal because they've actually engineered drugs to raise HDL and it does nothing in terms of reducing cardiovascular disease risk.
02:15:56.000I think the current thinking is that HDL is more reflective of good health.
02:16:00.000So if it's high, it shows that you're doing something right.
02:16:26.000They're all underneath those umbrella terms.
02:16:29.000There are different types that determine how we respond biologically to them.
02:16:34.000So when it comes to saturated fat, I mean, you've got different kinds of saturated fatty acids.
02:16:38.000One type of saturated fatty acid that's actually elevated in grass-fed, grass-finished beef is stearic acid.
02:16:45.000Stear, named for cows, actually has a neutral effect, doesn't increase levels of LDL cholesterol, and actually might improve functioning of the mitochondria.
02:16:54.000So we can't just say that saturated fat is bad.
02:16:59.000Dairy 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.
02:17:09.000And dairy proportionally has more saturated fat than any other fat source, right?
02:17:16.000Because as I mentioned, all natural fat containing foods have some proportion of saturated fat, polyunsaturated fat, monounsaturated fat.
02:17:26.000It's about 50% monounsaturated fat, some small proportion of polyunsaturated fat, and then some, again, minority proportion of saturated fat.
02:17:35.000But dairy is actually mostly saturated fat.
02:17:37.000So you'd think that if saturated fat was this dietary boogeyman, that regular consumers of dairy, people who consume a lot of dairy fat, would have the worst cardiovascular health.
02:17:59.000To me, the dairy doesn't necessarily have to be raw.
02:18:05.000And 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.
02:18:12.000But we do see that full-fat dairy is quite healthful.
02:18:22.000I 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.
02:18:30.000I don't think it's necessarily the removal of dairy fat that make it healthier.
02:18:33.000They add sugar just to make it palatable.
02:19:34.000Because the opposite of that is like it's exposed to heat and dairy has fat in it.
02:19:39.000It's got some component of or some proportion of polyunsaturated fats which are heat sensitive.
02:19:45.000So, you know, you want to protect those fats generally.
02:19:47.000And a baby consuming breast milk, I mean, that breast milk is raw milk, right?
02:19:51.000But the one thing about dairy that I think is worth talking about is that it's thought that the reason why we don't necessarily exhibit the predicted effect that you would expect based on the high proportion of saturated fat in dairy is attributed to the fact that dairy contains something called milk fat globule membrane.
02:20:15.000So, I know it's kind of a mouthful, but milk fat globule membrane is basically the lipoprotein in dairy that keeps the dairy fats perfectly suspended.
02:20:28.000So that dairy, which is mostly water, milk is mostly water, right?
02:20:32.000The fats don't actually float to the top.
02:20:35.000The fats are perfectly dispersed throughout.
02:20:37.000So the triglycerides in dairy fat are wrapped up in a bubble.
02:20:41.000And this bubble is called milk fat globule membrane.
02:20:43.000And it's made up of actually some really healthy compounds, like phosphatidylcholine, which choline we talked about, you know, and its benefit to the brain.
02:20:50.000There's also a little bit of sphingomyelin in dairy, in full-fat dairy, which is a core component to myelin, the myelin sheath in our brains that help insulate neurons.
02:20:59.000And if you think about, like, the purpose that dairy serves for a neonate, it's to help grow a brain.
02:21:04.000I 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.
02:21:11.000And so it makes perfect sense that dairy would have components in it that are, like, really beneficial when it comes to brain health.
02:21:19.000And so, yeah, so I think that full-fat dairy is really quite beneficial.
02:21:24.000But 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 and Followed by butter.
02:21:36.000You'd see that butter actually leads to an adverse effect on blood lipids.
02:21:45.000But the churning disrupts this membrane, this lipoprotein called milk fat globule membrane.
02:21:51.000And I think that's why butter can have this negative effect on blood lipids.
02:21:59.000So actually when I discovered this, when I realized this, It caused me to actually demote butter to be more of like a YOLO food, more of like an indulgence food.
02:22:31.000So 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.
02:22:42.000So the milk fat globule membrane, which is present in full fat heavy cream and other dairy products...
02:22:52.000It's thought that that actually is quite beneficial from the standpoint of brain health, but also affects how we metabolize the fats in dairy.
02:23:04.000So in clinical trials, what they've shown is that you can feed somebody this controlled for fat calories, right?
02:23:19.000You'll see an elevation of LDL cholesterol.
02:23:22.000And I'm not, you know, I don't believe that we should do everything we can to get our LDL as low as possible.
02:23:27.000Because again, like foods that are generally very beneficial and healthful, like, you know, grass-fed red meat and things like that, eggs, the benefits outweigh the risk.
02:23:36.000But with butter, I think potentially you're causing an elevation of your So,
02:23:52.000yeah, so butter can have this negative effect that you don't see in other dairy products.
02:23:59.000It's just that butter is one of these dairy products that I think, you know, especially if you're prone to hypercholesterolemia, if you're prone to elevated levels of like LDL, ApoB, It might serve you to reduce your consumption of butter.
02:24:12.000Is there any benefit to, or have there been a study comparing grass-fed butter to butter from cows that eat grains?
02:24:30.000Whereas like milk or grain-fed butter is like, it's almost white.
02:24:35.000Yeah, probably because there's a higher proportion of carotenoids in the butter.
02:24:39.000But in general, I think that butter can be great.
02:24:45.000There's, again, vitamin A, there's these carotenoids, there's CLA, there's butyrate, there's all these interesting vitamin K2 in butter, which are...
02:24:57.000But if you are, you know, for example, if you have familial hypercholesterolemia, which many people do, or if, you know, it's just one of these foods that, like, I would not consume as liberally as, say, I'm consuming,
02:25:12.000like, the heavy cream or full-fat Greek yogurt or even fat-free Greek yogurt, which is a great, like, high-protein food.
02:27:32.000That'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.
02:27:48.000I mean, I'm definitely, definitely a huge fan of, like, you know, the grass finish.
02:27:53.000But 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 content is that, like, I try to be as non-dogmatic as possible.
02:28:04.000And even for somebody who doesn't have access to the most pristine beef that I have access to living in Los Angeles, you know?
02:28:13.000And I hate to promote the factory farm system because it's terrible.
02:28:19.000It's like an animal holocaust every day.
02:28:22.000But still, for somebody living in a quote-unquote food desert that doesn't have access to the kind of beef that I have access to, That's still gonna be a better option for dinner than boxed mac and cheese.
02:28:39.000And what a cow eats determines mainly the content, the nutritional value of its fat.
02:28:45.000So if you don't have access to the most pristine beef, grass-fed, grass-finished beef, you can go slightly leaner because that's generally a way to circumvent that.
02:28:59.000It doesn't make any sense to eat grass-fed, grass-finished filet mignon because a filet mignon is a lean piece of meat.
02:29:05.000But if we're talking about a ribeye or ground beef, yeah, it does make sense to buy leaner beef because you're just skimming off what is ultimately determined by what a cow eats.
02:29:18.000Even if grass-fed filet mignon, wouldn't you be getting a healthier piece of meat?
02:29:23.000Probably, but I'm not sure how I would quantify that.
02:29:27.000They're both lean, grass-fed and grain-fed.
02:29:29.000And the protein is still pristine, and it's really just the fat.
02:29:33.000Like, for example, the difference between grass-finished and grain-finished, you get about five times the omega-3s in grass-finished.
02:29:40.000Beef, in general, is not a great omega-3 source, so just to put that out there, you're getting, in absolute terms, a much smaller amount of omega-3 fatty acids as you would get from a piece of salmon, for example.
02:29:51.000Still, five times the omega-3s as compared to grain finished.
02:29:55.000You're getting three times the vitamin E, which we know is super important to help protect the fats that are already in your body.
02:30:01.000We need vitamin E. Vitamin E is crucially important.
02:30:04.000You get much less, fewer fat calories overall.
02:30:08.000And of the saturated fat, you're getting a higher proportion of stearic acid, which we know is actually quite beneficial.
02:30:14.000So I do think that it's probably healthier to consume, you know.
02:30:19.000But none of those features are really going to matter if the meat is super lean, right?
02:31:36.000But no, I've definitely had experts on the show who lean more plant-based.
02:31:42.000I just, you know, after doing all the interviews that I've done, 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.
02:31:55.000And most of them are unaware even of their own biases, which I think is a big problem.
02:32:00.000You know, I had somebody on the podcast who...
02:32:31.000Because at the end of the day, I think something that I'm really passionate about, or I know that I'm really passionate about, is fostering scientific literacy.
02:32:42.000Other people have called me that, and I'll take it if that's what you perceive from me.
02:32:48.000But really, I hope to be, I think, for people, a role model.
02:32:51.000Because 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?
02:32:56.000But I, whether it's my upbringing or the...
02:33:47.000You know, it's like most of what they talk about is just factually inaccurate and they don't take into account bioavailability.
02:33:54.000They don't take into account many factors that contribute to poor health from these diets that they're promoting, particularly vegan diets.
02:34:12.000I think, you know, there's like this...
02:34:14.000I think, you know, like, I probably agree...
02:34:19.000There's more that we agree on than what we disagree on.
02:34:22.000And I think primarily people, you know...
02:34:26.000One of the things that I really hope people take away from this is to reduce their consumption of these ultra-processed foods that, for some reason or another, made it to the top of the Food Compass nutrient profiling system.
02:34:39.000But essentially, ultra-processed foods, we know that when you make them the bulk of your diet, they drive their own overconsumption.
02:34:51.000We tend to overconsume them because they have this quality of being hyperpalatable and hyposatiating.
02:34:57.000And what makes a food satiating, there are three factors that make a food satiating.
02:35:03.000Protein is the most satiating macronutrient.
02:35:06.000So a lot of people that are struggling with being overweight, they go to their doctors and they get told this cookie-cutter advice to just eat less and move more, right?
02:35:17.000So they focus on the quantity of what they're eating, right?
02:35:36.000There 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 Who was going to develop it or not, basically.
02:35:49.000So you were protected the stronger, the more robust and resilient you were.
02:35:53.000Resistance training, all that stuff obviously plays a role, but protein.
02:35:55.000You know, regularly reaching for high quality protein, I think, is crucially important.
02:36:00.000And the best, you know, the highest quality protein comes from animal products.
02:36:03.000If you're eating enough protein, you know, quality becomes less of an issue.
02:36:07.000So, you know, if you're on a plant-based diet, vegan diet, just make sure that you're getting enough protein.
02:36:11.000But that's hard to do without protein supplements.
02:36:15.000And we know that plant-based protein powders harbor heavy metals.
02:36:18.000So there's all these factors that come into play that I think about, you know, day to day.
02:36:24.000The second factor that makes a food satiating is fiber.
02:36:27.000And that's not because we have some innate need for fiber, but because it mechanically stretches out the stomach.
02:36:33.000And we do see, thanks to meta-analyses and such, that fiber consumption is associated with longevity, reduced inflammation, and things like that.
02:36:40.000But you want to, you know, make sure that you're reaching for foods that contain fiber, fibrous vegetables, right?
02:36:45.000And then the third factor that makes a food satiating is its water content.
02:36:50.000Water, you know, before we had access to running water, right, like we would either look for water on the savannah or whatever, or we would eat food because food, by and large, provides water, right, like produce.
02:37:01.000Even animal products are a good source of hydration.
02:37:26.000So it actually, from a bottom line perspective, it makes sense why the powers that be would want to deplete our food environment of protein, right?
02:37:34.000I mean, some people will say, oh, they're making us weak.
02:37:36.000I think it's just like bottom line, right?
02:37:38.000Like it's like rapidly digested carbohydrates are just cheap to produce, right?
02:37:43.000Now we're seeing this flood on the market of all these like It's fake meat products, which is another thing that I talk about all the time on my podcast.
02:37:54.000It's human pet food is how I refer to it.
02:37:58.000Basically, it's no different than kibble made for humans, right?
02:38:02.000And these are the kinds of foods that yield big exits because they're proprietary formulas.
02:38:08.000There's obviously profit to be made in meat and dairy and things like that, but you don't get the kinds of...
02:38:12.000You know proprietary formulations that you get with these like plant-based products that then like go public and have these like huge company valuations.
02:38:20.000Well 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 plant-based meat and with rats so I'm sure you saw that.
02:38:45.000That's what these plant-based, that's like, what they're trying to do is they're trying to emulate what a burger looks and tastes like, which is so strange.
02:38:54.000It's like, are you opposed to burgers or not?
02:39:54.000The 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.
02:40:03.000In 2015, the Food and Drug Administration denied the product GRAS status, which is generally recognized as safe.
02:40:12.000But in 2017, it issued a no-questions letter not assuring safety but protecting the FDA from liability if adverse effects are found.
02:40:58.000And 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?
02:41:11.000I think the greater scrutiny, I'm not saying that they're all bad, right?
02:41:14.000Like if I need medical assistance, I'm going to a hospital, right?
02:41:18.000If I'm in like crazy pain for whatever reason- You're not going to go to a witch doctor?
02:41:21.000I'm not going to go to a witch doctor, no.
02:41:22.000So I'm not anti-medicine or anything like that.
02:41:24.000If I had that blockbuster drug or whatever to give my mom, I would have given to her in a heartbeat.
02:41:29.000But it's just like these kinds of conditions take years if not decades to manifest, right?
02:41:39.000Like you're not dealing with something that's going to show an adverse effect instantaneously.
02:41:44.000You're going to deal with an accumulative effect over time that'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.
02:41:57.000But because a bunch of people have been paid off.
02:43:14.000So I'm glad we did this, and let's do it again.
02:43:16.000Oh, tell everybody one more time the name of your podcast, your Instagram, all that jazz.
02:43:22.000Yeah, so my podcast is called The Genius Life, available on all podcast platforms.
02:43:27.000My Instagram is at MaxLugavere, M-A-X-L-U-G-A-V-E-R-E. And then check out the trailer to Little Empty Boxes, which is the first ever dementia prevention documentary, which I hope to have out soon at littleemptyboxes.com.
02:44:14.000Genius Foods is being used around the world.
02:44:17.000Clinicians will use it to recommend to their patients.
02:44:23.000You'll get PhD-level knowledge when you read Genius Foods.
02:44:27.000If you're at risk for 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.
02:44:39.000It really is everything you need to know about food and the brain.