Max Lugavere is a health journalist who specializes in nutrition and the brain. He s also the author of the best-selling Genius Foods, Genius Life, and Genius Kitchen. In this episode, Max talks about the dangers of over-processed foods, and the benefits of whole-foods. He also talks about why we should all be eating more whole food, and why we shouldn t be eating processed foods at all. And, of course, he talks about Tucker and the Obama revelations, and whether or not Obama would be better described as a war criminal, certainly according to the Geneva Convention. Also, did you know the rumble button s gone now? You can t even give us a rumbling. You ll just have to give us like like everybody else, like like everyone else. If you're watching us on YouTube, only the first 15 minutes will be available to you, then we'll be slinking off into the home of free speech to give you the truth about Aducanumab and Alzheimer s, a drug that pledged to treat Alzheimer s. Is there a profit in it? Who knows what's going on? Remember, you can join us on Locals for a new and reasonable price! Join the Locals community when you get to see these fantastic conversations live on your favourite streaming platform, where you can get to know the locals community for a better, cheaper version of the festival of mutual awakening and understanding. Enjoy! Timestamps: 3:00 - The future is here! 4:30 - What s going on in the future? 5:20 - What's going to happen next? 6:15 - Is it possible for you? 7:00 8:30 9:00 | What s the good thing? 11:30 | What do you know in the good stuff? 12:00 Is it a bollocks? 13:00 Does it matter? 15:00 What s a good thing ? 14:00 Do you think it s good for me? 16:10 17:15 15, is it a Bollocks ? 15 + 6c 16c ? 17c & 6c & 5c? And so much more? + + + c? & + + & + + + And so on & And I ve got it?
00:01:16.000Thanks for joining us for this fabulous festival of mutual awakening and understanding.
00:01:21.000We've got a fantastic show for you today.
00:01:24.000Later, we'll be talking about Tucker and the Obama revelations, as well as talking about the nature of heroism and whether or not Obama would be better described as a war criminal, certainly according to the Geneva Convention.
00:01:49.000If you are watching us on rumble right now, remember, press the red button and join us in the locals community when you get to see these fantastic conversations live.
00:01:57.000If you're watching us on YouTube, Only the first 15 minutes will be available to you, then we'll be slinking off into the home of free speech to give you the truth about aducanumab and Alzheimer's, a drug that pledged to treat Alzheimer's that seemingly makes things a lot worse.
00:02:17.000Remember, you can join us on Locals for a new and reasonable price, but it's time now for me to introduce our fantastic guest today, Max Lugavere.
00:02:25.000Max Lugavere is a health journalist who specializes in nutrition and the brain.
00:02:42.000Max, the first thing that I want to talk to you about is our lethal, deadly, contemporary lifestyle.
00:02:46.000Is it true that 60% of calories that adults eat are coming from processed food, and that processed foods are sort of no food at all, and are almost akin to a poison?
00:02:57.000Yeah, I mean, they are foreign to our bodies.
00:02:59.000And the distinction really is, you know, processing occurs on a continuum.
00:03:04.000So when you slice an apple, you are processing it to some degree.
00:03:09.000Even mastication, I said mastication, grow up.
00:03:12.000Even by taking a bite out of an apple, that's a process.
00:03:15.000Yeah, but at least you're allowing yourself to masticate your jaw to do the work, which is what it was evolutionarily designed to do, right?
00:03:22.000If you bleach the apple into a soup, Yes, into a soup, right?
00:03:27.000Your jaw muscles don't have to work, your stomach.
00:03:30.000I mean, there are all these muscles throughout your body that are essentially getting a workout.
00:03:33.000When you consume a bolus of whole food, we digest food slower.
00:03:38.000It sends satiety signals to our brains in a more deliberate manner.
00:03:43.000And so people, there's actually research that shows that people who consume primarily these ultra processed foods, foods that have essentially been pre-chewed for you, Partially predigested tend to over consume them to the tune of about 500 additional calories So right there if you look at the fact that today 73% of the foods in your average American supermarket and probably I would I would reckon that the UK is close by Are ultra processed it makes sense why the obesity statistics now are so startling about 50% of Americans are not just overweight but obese and
00:04:13.000It's a good example of how our biochemistry has evolved alongside nature, which is kind of obvious because we're on the same planet and there's a sort of a natural and literally organic harmony between us.
00:04:26.000And even if you extract mastication and the digestive processes that evolved in order to digest the food that we eat, if you extract the necessity for that process, you induce a kind of new The new potential for mutation and sickness and illness.
00:04:43.000I wanted to talk to you just for a moment about, we recently have been talking about Bill Gates' growing meat in labs, funding a new sort of, not plastic coating, it's apparently an organic material that allows food to be preserved for longer.
00:04:57.000What do we think about the sort of technologization of food and centralised food and the pattern in food.
00:05:04.000Is this ultimately, as it claims, good for climate change and good for health or do you
00:05:07.000think that these endeavours have other motivations behind them? No I think it's a, as
00:05:12.000you here in the UK would call it, bollocks. Yes that's what we would say. That's what we would say.
00:05:16.000That's what we say, that's our language. Yeah I think it's quite inappropriate.
00:05:19.000What it does is it illustrates this phenomena known as nutritionism, where we apply science to the fact that we've co-evolved with whole foods, right?
00:07:02.000It is in fact a kind of an understanding that's somewhat more holistic That is regarded as inferior, that all things are turned into data, all things are made material, all things are objectified, no room for mystery and it doesn't always work.
00:07:19.000So let's just for a moment touch on one of the points you made earlier before moving into the rather more controversial subject which we won't be able to talk about on YouTube about this Alzheimer's drug that I understand you have sort of personal motivations in your investigation and desire to convey the truth around this drug.
00:07:36.000Before we get into that though, which we'll do exclusively in the other place, would you tell us a little bit about the obesity epidemic and its impact on health and the relationship between obesity, big food and big pharma?
00:08:20.000Particularly at a time when you're still developing, right?
00:08:23.000And the brain is undergoing rapid development.
00:08:25.000So this is reflected in the statistics that show us that 50% of adults are either flat-out obese, And 9 in 10 adults have some component now of metabolic illness.
00:08:37.000So metabolic syndrome, it's a constellation of symptoms about 9 in 10 adults now have that.
00:08:41.000So it leaves the dramatic minority in a state of good health, right?
00:08:47.000And so I think the food environment definitely plays a huge role in that.
00:08:50.000As I mentioned, 73% according to a machine learning algorithm of the foods available
00:08:54.000in your average supermarket are ultra processed.
00:09:38.000Yeah, and you really are what you eat.
00:09:40.000So this is a nutrient profiling system that was devised out of the Friedman School for Nutrition at Tufts University, which has this, it's like this very curious hierarchy, right, that places watermelon and kale at the top of the list, but just underneath that you see frosted mini-wheats, you'll see...
00:10:14.000No, I mean, watermelon and kale are perfectly healthy foods, but you would die if you, if you, you know, chose to base your diet solely on those two foods.
00:11:01.000Foods these foods were not meant to be compared across categories, right?
00:11:05.000But actually if you were to go to the Tufts University website, they did the exact same thing but obviously presented in a much more favorable light.
00:11:12.000So this is the problem with these kinds of systems that are heavily influenced by the food industry.
00:11:16.000How are these kind of, this kind of data, how is it funded?
00:11:25.000The food industry definitely has a hand in not just funding the school, but the researchers that are involved.
00:11:31.000I see that Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Gates Medical Research Institute were somewhat involved in creating what I can now call the Lucky Charms graph.
00:11:41.000How Lucky Charms are better at that for you than eggs and other whole foods.
00:11:46.000But also look at the pharmaceutical companies.
00:11:48.000Everybody is like There's essentially no industry that isn't complicit.
00:11:55.000And then when you look to the 2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans Committee that was just assembled a couple months ago, 95% of those members had ties to either the food industry or the pharmaceutical industry.
00:12:06.000And this nutrient profiling system was essentially designed to influence consumer purchases by making front of package health claims.
00:12:14.000And so to me, I mean, that's what a scoring system is essentially.
00:12:17.000It's so that a consumer would be able to compare food items from across different categories.
00:12:23.000And so I think it's a, yeah, it's a massive, it's a massive problem.
00:12:25.000But the idea that this is objective information, the idea that you could trust the science and regard it as empirical data rather than a set of facts that are organized Particularly to direct you to consume particular foods, to live in a particular way.
00:12:40.000We see this across all of public life.
00:12:44.000When you unpack information, it's often that information has a sort of a trail behind it of financial interest.
00:12:52.000And to see, as you say, Big Pharma, the kind of NGOs and foundations that frequently come up in our reporting is hardly a surprise in that crazy league of watermelon and Lucky Charms and little frosty wheat.
00:13:05.000Yeah, I mean, look, I'm pro-science in the sense that I wish I could snap my fingers and have the kind of study replicated that would show us, for example, the kinds of big looming questions in the field of nutrition, which is a field that I genuinely love.
00:13:20.000But the problem with following the science often is that the science follows the money.
00:13:24.000And so you get something like this, which is just a four-year-old would look at that graph and be like, something's wrong here.
00:13:32.000You know, it's plain that the reliance on a particular type of science has become a new orthodoxy.
00:13:39.000I think in the last couple of years we became used to being castigated with the idea that science was not a subset of corporate and globalist interests.
00:13:49.000and that happened while simultaneously some scientific voices were closed down
00:13:54.000other scientific voices were amplified but we can't go into too much detail on
00:13:59.000that while we are still on YouTube which are to a degree regulated by the World
00:14:05.000Health Organization's guidelines which similarly accept incredible funding from
00:14:09.000the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation of Lucky Charms. We're gonna leave now if
00:14:15.000you're watching us on YouTube to make sure how much say how do I say that drug
00:14:21.000And what is the problem with aducanumab, one of the great drugs that's given Alzheimer's sufferers a real opportunity to live a better life other than possibly it doesn't work?
00:15:28.000Yeah, so aducanumab is a monoclonal antibody drug that basically trains your immune system to identify markers on the plaques that are commonly seen in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease.
00:15:41.000So Alzheimer's disease is characterized in part by the presence of this immense plaque burden, plaques made of a protein called amyloid beta.
00:15:50.000along with some other, you know, proteinopathies like misfolded tau protein.
00:15:55.000And so Alzheimer's disease drug trials have a 99.6% fail rate.
00:15:59.000So the, the, the, it's just dismal when it comes to finding a drug to treat this condition,
00:16:04.000which by the way, begins in the brain decades before the first symptom.
00:16:24.000Ten years ago, you couldn't mention Alzheimer's disease and prevention within the same sentence without getting ridiculed by the medical establishment, by the medical orthodoxy.
00:16:33.000So my first project, I'm a health and science journalist, so I didn't take an academic path, but my mom had a rare form of dementia called Lewy body dementia.
00:16:41.000And even prior to that diagnosis, you know, it was unclear the variant of dementia.
00:16:45.000And so I went down the Alzheimer's disease rabbit hole.
00:16:49.000And my first project was a feature-length documentary which I'm still working on.
00:16:52.000It's called Little Empty Boxes and it explores all of the different lifestyle and dietary factors that might predispose a person to developing this condition which now affects millions and millions of people worldwide.
00:17:03.000In fact, it's now the number one cause of death in the UK as of last year, dementia and Alzheimer's disease.
00:17:08.000So dementia and Alzheimer's is the number one cause of death?
00:17:12.000How come these sort of facts are so opaque and difficult to discern?
00:17:17.000Why is it that we're only just learning about it?
00:17:19.000This was ridiculed, so it's not, there's nothing conspiratorial about us not knowing that it's preventable, it's just that wasn't scientifically verified so it's understandable.
00:17:26.000But the idea that it's such a significant cause of death, it seems extraordinary to me that it's not something that we commonly appreciate.
00:17:43.000We see this at the highest echelons of academic medicine and nutrition science and the like.
00:17:49.000And this is why it takes, on average, 17 years for what's discovered in science to be put into day-to-day clinical practice.
00:17:56.000And so I've been working in this field trying to advocate for prevention for about a decade at this point.
00:18:04.000But it's really only the past couple of years, the past three years, really, that the tide has begun to turn.
00:18:08.000So in 2020, the Lancet Commission on Dementia published a statement saying that About 40% of Alzheimer's cases and dementia cases are attributable to what they call potentially modifiable risk factors, which basically means risk factors for dementia, the development of dementia, that fall under your control, i.e.
00:18:27.000And so things like obesity, things like diabetes, hypertension, depression, low education status, these are all variables that we have... Diet and poverty.
00:19:16.000So I began as a generalist journalist and when my mom became sick it was like an atom bomb going off in my world.
00:19:23.000She was the most important person in my life.
00:19:26.000And in every doctor's office, what I experienced with her, I've come to call diagnose and adios.
00:19:31.000And basically, a physician would run a battery of esoteric tests, write a prescription down, you know, or titrate up or down some medication that she was on and send us on our way.
00:19:39.000And by the end of her life, she was on 12 different pharmaceuticals that were, I think, you know, in tandem or individually making her worse.
00:19:50.000And so, I was very disillusioned by the tools that medicine had, you know, during that time when a person presents with the most feared condition for your average American, which is, of course, dementia at this point.
00:20:06.000And I took it upon myself to use my journalistic skills and my media credentials to reach out to people and start doing my own research, diving into PubMed.
00:20:13.000I mean, we live in a time now where, you know, all of the world's knowledge is available at our fingertips 24-7.
00:20:19.000And I found it to be incredibly empowering despite the fact that I had this real tragic thing occurring in my personal life.
00:20:25.000I exploited, I decided to exploit all those tools to the betterment of my, to the benefit of my family.
00:21:05.000I've never looked at it in those terms.
00:21:07.000We sort of sold the idea that there's an inevitability that we're on some preconceived, predetermined route towards illness and pharmacological solutions that our behaviors and our diets are not Considerable factors in, you know, particularly in this kind of condition.
00:21:26.000Yeah, and I'll give you another example where the pharmaceutical industry may be complicit, right?
00:21:30.000So that 40% figure that I listed off to you, that was what was indicated in the Lancet report, which said the potential for prevention is high.
00:21:40.000But I think that's a gross underestimate.
00:21:42.000And one of another massively modifiable risk factor for people is the chronic use of what are called anticholinergic drugs, which is a category of drugs.
00:21:50.000And I couldn't possibly list off all of the drugs.
00:21:52.000But these are drugs that are like essentially sleep aids and they help with, you know, to relieve symptoms of allergies for people.
00:22:01.000Chronic use of these drugs is associated with a dramatically higher risk of the development of Alzheimer's disease.
00:22:09.000Can you tell me about aducanumab and what in particular is important about this and the potential falsification of papers and how it got its FDA approval?
00:22:22.000So ever since Alzheimer's disease was first coined in 1906 by physician Alois Alzheimer, He looked in the brain of a cadaver, a woman who had died from the condition, and saw plaque, essentially, in the brain, clumped around brain cells, neurons, like the plaque on your teeth, essentially.
00:22:42.000And so from that day forward, amyloid plaque was thought to be the causal factor with regard to Alzheimer's disease.
00:22:50.000And from a pharmaceutical drug discovery standpoint, the mission has been, well, if we can get rid of this plaque, then we'll have a cure for Alzheimer's disease.
00:22:59.000But of course, as time goes on, we develop new imaging technologies.
00:23:03.000What we see is that people without Alzheimer's disease also have amyloid in the brain.
00:23:08.000Amyloid is produced naturally in all brains, essentially.
00:23:12.000And so They would try all these different drugs trying to get amyloid out of the brain and that became that's called the amyloid hypothesis that became the domineering kind of route of drug discovery with the idea that if we can get rid of this this this villainous plaque that will find a cure for the condition right and so three spending three billion dollars a year on drug discovery
00:23:36.000But by the year 2006, with Alzheimer's drug trials having a 99.6% fail rate, worse than for cancer, heart disease, any other condition, faith in that hypothesis was starting to wane until a paper was published in the journal Nature by a University of Minnesota researcher named Sylvain Lesny, which essentially Claim to have isolated a subtype of amyloid beta that, when injected into a healthy rat, caused severe cognitive deficits.
00:24:11.000And so this was thought to be the missing link because, as I mentioned, cognitively healthy people have amyloid in their brain.
00:24:16.000So researchers up until this point weren't really able to connect Amyloid beta with the most important symptomology, the most important symptom with regard to Alzheimer's disease, which is the severe and profound cognitive decline, until this paper was published where they claimed to have found the subtype, injected into a mouse, boom, we have like cognitive impairment, right?
00:24:39.000And so since then, since 2006, that paper came out in Nature, which is like winning an Academy Award if you're a research scientist, right?
00:24:45.000It's been cited thousands of times because science is cumulative.
00:24:48.000It builds on papers that have come prior.
00:24:51.000citing this paper and it really renewed faith.
00:24:53.000It put, it sent a lot, it funneled a lot more money down this path and renewed faith in this
00:25:00.000The problem was, and this was published last year, late last year in Science Magazine,
00:25:06.000a Vanderbilt researcher named Matthew Schrag was known for kind of like scouring these
00:25:12.000post-publication peer review websites where people look at papers that have gone through,
00:25:16.000already gone through the peer review process but have flaws that they might flag
00:25:20.000indicate and send off to the publishers.
00:25:23.000And the peer review process doesn't look at, you know, they'll crunch numbers occasionally, but they don't look at, for example, Western blots, which are imagery, which is like basically like data presented in a more illustrative format.
00:25:36.000And what Matthew Schrag found was that this 2006 paper, the images, the data was essentially fabricated.
00:25:45.000There were artifacts indicative of Photoshop, like a cheap Photoshop cut and paste job.
00:25:50.000So the paper was deemed completely fraudulent, like that data didn't exist.
00:25:56.000And so again, since then, since 2006, All of this other research has come out building on top of it.
00:26:01.000It funneled billions and billions and billions of more money looking into this path, this amyloid hypothesis.
00:26:07.000Of course, it's wasted time, right, which is heartbreaking for anybody with a loved one with the condition.
00:26:12.000And again and again and again, we see that amyloid is not the cause of the condition.
00:26:17.000Certainly, when it builds up to the pathologic degree that we see in Alzheimer's disease, it becomes problematic, of course.
00:26:22.000But it's like claiming that Um, cholesterol is the cause of heart disease.
00:26:26.000It's like, what's causing the cholesterol to aggregate there?
00:26:29.000What's causing the amyloid to aggregate in the brain, right?
00:26:31.000It's there at the scene of the crime, but it's not necessarily the victim.
00:26:33.000It's like claiming that firefighters cause fires because firefighters are always there at the scene of the fire, right?
00:26:42.000And so there are other theories as to why Alzheimer's disease develops and, you know, there's the metabolic theory of Alzheimer's and the like.
00:26:50.000But this new drug, aducanumab, that was approved by the FDA, despite a panel of, it was about 11 or 12, I think it was 11 experts, the vast majority of them either disagreed with its approval or remained silent, like lips were sealed on its approval.
00:27:14.000It might be better than nothing for certain patients, like a small subset of patients, but in the majority of patients that took it...
00:27:22.000Were a significant proportion of the patients that took it.
00:27:24.000I don't, I can't say for sure if it was the majority because I don't recall.
00:27:27.000It led to severe side effects like brain swelling, bleeding, accelerated brain atrophy, which is already, you know, par for the course if you have Alzheimer's disease, like dramatic atrophy of the cortex of the brain.
00:27:44.000It's just like this like this band-aid that probably does more harm than good.
00:27:48.000So it possibly did nothing, it possibly made things worse.
00:27:52.000Experts at the point when it was up for approval had doubts about it, questioned it or didn't speak about it and it was approved anyway.
00:28:01.000Do you suggest that this is the type of thing that frequently happens and do you imagine that there are other motivations for its approval other than its efficacy?
00:29:21.000Max, it seems like what you're tracking is a food industry that promotes foods that likely contribute to senility, dementia, Alzheimer's and related conditions, then a drug industry that offers medications that are not effective And I begin to get the idea that we're on again a conveyor belt where one end of it we're sort of blobbed up with sloppy food as bad for us and basically poisonous and then treated with medications many of which have to be used in conjunction with others this sort of symphony of shoddy medications that are often not have not been effectively trialed.
00:30:02.000And increasingly what we're finding is that the motivation for the pharmaceutical companies, for the food industry, for the FDA, is not scientific excellence or nutritional heights, but profit.
00:30:15.000And it's pretty plain that it's become gargantuan and out of control.
00:30:19.000As we often discuss on this show, I don't think anybody begrudges industriousness or Even a profit motive but when it reaches the point that it has done in the examples that you conveyed is a problem.
00:30:32.000Also what's a problem is that when you try to have a conversation about these kind of subjects is that you're subject to incredible censorship.
00:30:38.000Now am I right in thinking that the mainstream media opposed the documentary that you've already mentioned in which you try to present some novel ideas on Alzheimer's, its relationship to diet and the lack of effectiveness of many of the medications?
00:30:53.000So when I first got started, an ambassador for one of these drug discovery funds, which is a nonprofit, right?
00:31:01.000It's like you go to its website and you would think it was the most benevolent organization with the care of the patients as their sole priority.
00:31:09.000But when I first got started on this project, I did a Kickstarter campaign for it.
00:31:13.000And so it went kind of viral and we're raising money.
00:31:15.000and all that and thankfully it was successful and we're now nearing the finish line finally.
00:31:20.000But this ambassador wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal basically comparing my
00:31:26.000efforts to, I think the headline was, Alzheimer's disease, the cure for Alzheimer's disease
00:31:32.000isn't going to come in the form of coconut oil and other quack, you know, speculative
00:31:39.000So this is even before that Lancet paper that said the potential for prevention is high, right?
00:31:43.000But, but they, these, these, this, this, whether it's the, you know, the drug discovery funds or the researchers, people tend to be down on what they're not up on in the field of academia, right?
00:31:56.000This kid comes along trying to- Are you that kid?
00:32:06.000Lugavere, with a name that sounds like a radical and an outlaw, you turn up with your new documentary where you want to talk about diet, the efficacy of certain medicines, presumably your personal experiences with your mother, and immediately there's opposition when it's at the kickstart.
00:32:23.000starter phase. Yeah, immediately. And it was heartbreaking at the time because I thought
00:32:28.000that this film had the potential and it does, it will do massive good for the world, but
00:32:33.000because it took the spotlight for a second during that time off of, off of, we gotta
00:32:41.000Alzheimer's disease is the only condition that can't be prevented, cured, or treated.
00:32:44.000Let people get it, then cure it with toothpaste.
00:33:42.000But I think, you know, you can work a few levers to make a plant-based diet work if you're dedicated to it.
00:33:49.000And, you know, as I know you are, and many people are.
00:33:52.000Because you just think there are valuable nutrients, proteins, and things like taurine and stuff in meat that we just can't live without.
00:34:00.000Yeah, I think, like, when we try to distill an entire food category, such as animal source foods, to one essential nutrient, like vitamin B12, we're practicing that reductionism that we talked about earlier.
00:34:13.000And I think we've co-evolved with our food, we've co-evolved with all of the many what are called carna nutrients that are found in animal source products that are, you know, plug and play.
00:34:20.000But ultimately, I think the big wins today for anybody navigating the standard American or the standard, you know, British food environment to be not overweight, to be not type 2 diabetic,
00:35:11.000I think if you're going to point a finger at kale or even oatmeal, which I think he's been doing quite a bit lately, and say that is the smoking gun for all of our health ills, I think that that's baseless.
00:35:22.000But I think he does present some really good ideas as well.
00:35:27.000We've got to come to a kind of consensus of truth together.
00:35:30.000Tesla said, and I can't believe I missed this question, Max, you mentioned earlier that Alzheimer's can be detected decades before symptoms.
00:35:39.000Well, um, so it's not that it can necessarily be detected, we can look for what are called risk factors at this point.
00:35:44.000They can do imaging, they can look at brain volume, they can look at amyloid burden, but they're not doing those kinds of tests clinically, and that really is the holy grail of prevention, is to find the biomarker that dictates whether or not a person... Are you saying that biomarker hasn't yet to be found?
00:36:02.000But there's not enough trialing and research because that's not profitable, it's in fact expensive.
00:36:06.000There was a blood test, and I wrote about it in my first book called Genius Foods, called IRS-1, where it was predicted with 90% accuracy something, or even higher than that, whether or not somebody was going to develop it.
00:36:16.000But I think at this point it's good to know your genetic risk factor, to know whether or not you're a carrier of the ApoE4 allele, and then to look at all the other biomarkers that we know are associated.
00:36:26.000Most closely you want to look at your metabolic health, So you want to make sure that you have a nice healthy blood sugar, you're not a type 2 diabetic, you're not overweight or obese, and I would also do my best to minimize at this point exposure to environmental pollutants, toxicants, air pollution, things like that.
00:36:38.000If you know Duggan Oku, who's a great member of our community, and if you're not a member of our community yet, press the red button.
00:36:44.000There are all sorts of incredible benefits, including regular scans to prevent... Oh, we don't do that.
00:36:52.000No, Dugganoku is a member of our community and he asks, hey Max, I want to ask you, through Russell of course, don't be cheeky, a question pertaining to diversity.
00:37:01.000How do you feel that there is evidence to support the notion that diet may be more unique than what we're led to believe by our societies?
00:37:06.000I've personally tried for years to figure out the diet which matches me best, sometimes living exclusively on grass.
00:37:20.000What, how do I find a diet which matches me best while staying away from food that are filled with chemicals, plastics, or genetic modifications?
00:37:34.000So there is no such thing as a one size fits all diet.
00:37:36.000I like where he was going with that question.
00:37:38.000And there's also, you know, everybody's different and then everybody has different microbiomes.
00:37:41.000So you know we can say things like vegetables and things you know of that nature are good for you But if you don't have the microbiome cultivated to contend with a sudden onslaught Increase in fiber then you're gonna be paying a digestive penalty for that so you know you gotta I think a little bit of Experimentation is really important, but again.
00:37:58.000I think as long as you're you're sticking mainly to minimally processed foods Omnivory I think for most people is gonna do the most good Things like that.
00:38:07.000I think you're you're probably in the clear I Max, Dootie1947 says, Alright mate, I love my fried egg.
00:38:14.000Organic, on toast, whole grain, with olive oil on it every morning.
00:38:30.000It's very chemically stable, owed to its predominance of monounsaturated fat, which is very chemically stable, and it's about 15% saturated fat.
00:39:39.000I like to be really clear, actually, about what I know and what I don't know.
00:39:42.000But with regard to depression, my first book was a deep dive into the topic of nutritional psychiatry, which is a growing field right now, and it's very exciting.
00:39:51.000And it's showing us that for a subset of depressed patients, diet may play a role.
00:39:58.000The mechanism here, it's being referred to by some as the inflammatory cytokine model of depression.
00:40:04.000That depression is the result of chronic low-grade inflammation that's occurring in the body.
00:40:09.000And we basically can control, to some degree, with our diets and our lifestyles, our overall inflammatory status.
00:40:17.000And so we know that eating a diet that is rich in ultra-processed foods, you know, packaged shelf-stable vending machine foods, if you will, And an overly sedentary lifestyle, a lifestyle that relegates sleep to an afterthought, a lifestyle that is chronically stressed out.
00:40:31.000We know that those are all pro-inflammatory and that that can have a downstream effect on the brain and our cognitive processes certainly as well as our mental health.
00:40:42.000And so there are studies now coming out of Many highly regarded academic centers like the Food and Mood Center at Deakin University.
00:40:51.000One study that I cite fairly regularly is the SMILES trial, which found that for clinically depressed patients who had really crappy diets, half of them were given the standard of care in Australia.
00:41:04.000The other half were given a Mediterranean dietary pattern to adhere to.
00:41:10.000They saw three times the rate of remission from depression in that group that was given the Mediterranean dietary pattern to consume.
00:41:17.000Olive oil, you know, animal products, dark leafy greens, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, things like that.
00:41:23.000And the other group, you know, obviously they didn't have the improvement in symptoms to the same degree and they didn't see the same rate of remission.
00:41:32.000So, we're seeing now that, you know, in the form of clinical randomized control trials, that diet does have a pretty powerful influence, right?
00:41:39.000And we know that micronutrients like magnesium, which half of Americans don't consume adequate amounts of, we know that that's related to many, many processes, hundreds of processes in the body.
00:41:48.000We know that it can play a role in the reduction of anxiety and depression and things like that.
00:41:56.000There are nutrients in animal products, in shellfish, that play a really important role in mental health.
00:42:02.000And I like what you said about inflammation, that we're like inflamed as individuals and as a culture.
00:42:08.000What do you think about fake meat, the sort of the vegan streak, the way out, Bill Gates' hobby course, fake meats, what are they, any good, or vile blobs of nothingness?
00:42:21.000I mean, I think that they don't hold a candle to actual meat in terms of a nutritional value.
00:42:28.000But I'll concede that many vegans enjoy it because it just tastes good.
00:43:32.000We'll post the links to both of those in both of our chats.
00:43:34.000And also Max's latest book, The Genius Kitchen, is out now.
00:43:38.000And as Max mentioned, his podcast, The Genius Life, is also available.
00:43:44.000Now, if you want to be a member of our community, one of the ways that I reckon you can reduce inflammation and also get some Awakened Wonder Pants, it starts today.
00:43:54.000If you are an Awakened Wonder, simply by pressing the red button, you can join our team meetings, post-show shows, meditations, podcast recordings.
00:44:07.000Now, last week, the world was lit up to a degree by Tucker's controversial interview with that dude that made them Obama revelations.
00:44:16.000So in Here's the News today, we used that to begin an analysis of Barack Obama's time in office and his status as an elder and hero of the Democratic Party.
00:44:27.000How can this status be maintained when you scrutinize Obama's time in office, particularly around war?
00:44:42.000Tucker Carlson's interview regarding Barack Obama shows we live in a truly divided news space.
00:44:48.000But when analyzing the record of former presidents, what should we be looking at?
00:44:52.000Their private lives or their record in office?
00:44:57.000You'll be aware of the viral video that Tucker did recently.
00:45:00.000Let me know in the comments if you saw it, if you care about it, if it was interesting to you.
00:45:03.000Some people thought it was good, other people thought it shouldn't have been made because it's too salacious and it's an unreliable witness.
00:45:41.000So, let's have a look at what everyone else is talking about at the moment, before analysing
00:45:44.000the reality of Barack Obama's record as a president.
00:45:51.000I suppose all of us are interested in the private lives of great figures and the idea that there might be more to them than meets the eye.
00:45:57.000And with such a significant and notable president as Barack Obama, it's just extraordinary, salacious, intriguing to even hear about him spoken of in this kind of context.
00:46:05.000Certainly there's a conversation to be had.
00:46:07.000Ex-owner Elon Musk called out Tucker Carlson for not providing objective evidence in allowing a convicted fraudster.
00:46:24.000As if he was sort of balanced on Twitter while it was happening.
00:46:26.000As says for yourself, Carlson captioned the video, which has amassed nearly 40 million views as of Thursday.
00:46:31.000This is further evidence of a completely bifurcated news space with independent media on the rise.
00:46:36.000The previously unprecedented possibility that a story like this could be broadcast on this scale.
00:46:41.000And for us, also an opportunity to look at the greatness of Barack Obama and the idea that Barack Obama is still a figure that will be trotted out in order to maintain Biden's credibility as a president.
00:46:53.000The reason that Barack Obama remains a significant political figure is precisely because Joe Biden is observably in decline and associating him with Barack Obama is still a powerful boost to his image as a senescent occupant of the White House.
00:47:08.000But are people who deify Barack Obama overlooking some pretty crucial facts about his time in office?
00:47:13.000Putting aside this viral video, let's have a look.
00:47:16.000Now, as I've told you loads of times, I was super optimistic when Barack Obama came into office, but perhaps the defining aspect of his time in office was the financial crash of 2008.
00:47:25.000This was a seismic moment not only Not only for the presidency of Barack Obama, but for the
00:47:29.000In my view, we are still reeling from the consequences of that financial cataclysm,
00:47:42.000So let's have a look at a few bullet points of Barack Obama's time in office.
00:47:45.000He bailed out the banks in 2008 instead of, of course, bailing out ordinary people.
00:47:49.000He prosecuted more people under the Espionage Act than all previous presidents combined, and that's essentially silencing Americans who criticize American foreign policy or American deep state, notably Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, both prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
00:48:03.000But perhaps most significantly of all, there were 10 times more airstrikes in the covert war on terror during President Barack Obama's presidency than under his predecessor George W. Bush.
00:48:12.000Obviously because of Iraq, we all think of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, whose names are synonymous with war undertaken for profit to capture resources, a war that was delegitimized by the failure to find WMDs.
00:48:23.000And to imagine that Barack Obama conducted more covert airstrikes than that administration is surprising and still feels at odds with how we perceive Barack Obama.
00:48:31.000During his presidency, Obama approved the use of 563 drone strikes that killed approximately 3,797 people.
00:48:38.000In fact, Obama authorized 54 drone strikes alone in Pakistan during his first year in office.
00:48:44.000One of the first CIA drone strikes under President Obama was at a funeral.
00:48:47.000Murdering as many as 41 Pakistani civilians.
00:48:50.000That's extraordinary because at that point we were still in the euphoria of the election of Barack Obama, truly believing this was an opportunity for hope and change.
00:48:57.000We had not yet had our expectations damped down by the events of 2008 and the revelation
00:49:02.000that it doesn't really matter who you vote for.
00:49:04.000You are primarily going to get a system that serves corporate interests, financial interests,
00:49:39.000This I think is the thing we have to remember most of all.
00:49:41.000We get caught up in the soap opera of these characters and really the interests that they truly represent are uninterrupted by the democratic fluctuations in which we participate.
00:49:51.000Let me know in the comments if you agree.
00:49:52.000The following year, Obama led 128 CIA drone strikes in Pakistan that killed at least 89 civilians.
00:49:58.000Just two years into his presidency, it was clear that the hope that President Obama offered during his 2008 campaign could not escape US imperialism.
00:50:06.000What I kind of like about that sentence is the indication that there's no point blaming Barack Obama, that Barack Obama essentially is just on a conveyor belt of Visual distractions that we temporarily are enamored of, while real power carries on behind the scenes.
00:50:46.000Much more important than anybody's private life, 21 children were murdered.
00:50:50.000And yet we think because, oh, this happened in Pakistan, or it's just somehow we package it off as necessary and ultimately kind of irrelevant, don't we, if we're honest?
00:50:58.000Now, here's a short commercial from one of our bold partners, Winning Tobacco.
00:51:03.000With so many important things to talk about, you don't want me nagging you about your diet, particularly when I don't eat that healthy, not all the time.
00:51:09.000But I will share with you that the Mayo Clinic says if you want to help prevent heart disease, lower blood pressure, and cholesterol, eat, as you know, five servings of fruits and vegetables every day.
00:51:28.000Each fruit and vegetable in Field of Greens was medically selected by doctors to support your vital organs like hearts, lungs, kidneys, and immune system.
00:51:37.000Flu season is here, there's a couple of ways you could deal with that, but I trust Field of Greens to help me stay healthy throughout the whole flu season, and it's my choice if I drink Field of Greens or not.
00:52:11.000Now, let's get back to this rather devastating and difficult news.
00:52:14.000Ten of which were under the age of five.
00:52:16.000Additionally, twelve women, five of them pregnant, were also among those who were murdered in the strike.
00:52:20.000These blundered acts of murder by not only President Obama but the US government are morally reprehensible.
00:52:25.000I suppose this is the kind of information that we have to bear in mind when we look at the accepted stance with the current war between Ukraine and Russia.
00:52:32.000That America's role is to back brave Ukraine, and Ukraine are brave, for moral reasons, for humanitarian reasons.
00:52:39.000How can that be the case when a president still regarded as a hero participated in the murder of women and children?
00:52:46.000This is beyond the Even more civilian casualties came out of Afghanistan throughout Barack Obama's time in office.
00:52:50.000have to say, kind of irrelevant, because the momentum of this system is so potent and powerful
00:52:55.000that even dead children are just regarded as almost irrelevant shrapnel and collateral
00:53:01.000damage in the operations of this unforgiving system. How can we begin to believe that any
00:55:11.000With the exception of the wars themselves, the claim that former President Barack Obama is a war criminal also lies within the double-tap initiative.
00:55:18.000Double-tap drone strikes are as disturbing as they sound.
00:55:21.000These attacks are follow-up strikes on first responders as they rush to the bombed area trying to assist any survivors.
00:55:27.000That's a level of mendacity that's difficult to incorporate into the image of Barack Obama as a hero that's brought on to make Joe Biden more electable.
00:55:36.000Isn't that kind of information enough to help us to revise our systems?
00:55:40.000To recognize that what's required is radical change?
00:55:43.000That the distinctions between the two parties and successive presidents isn't significant enough?
00:55:48.000If this is the kind of thing that's deemed acceptable business as usual, surely business as usual is precisely what needs addressing.
00:55:54.000Well, in 2012, an attack on the Shawwal Valley aimed at Taliban commander Sadiq Noor reportedly killed up to 14 people in a double-tap drone strike.
00:56:01.000These attacks are both morally and legally reprehensible as they are conscious acts of murder against civilians, which is, again, this, from any other entity, would be used as legitimization to criminalize an entire state, wouldn't it?
00:56:13.000If someone came out behind a podium, you know, with the Stars of Strife and the Eagle and everyone had a listen, guess what they're doing in Syria or Iraq or Russia?
00:56:20.000They do this thing called double-tap strikes.
00:56:23.000actually bomb an area and then when the first responders come to help the victims, many of
00:56:26.000whom are children under five and pregnant women, they bomb them as well. You go, well actually I'm
00:56:30.000willing to participate in a war against them, give us the stuff, I'll go, I'll go, that needs to be
00:56:35.000stopped. Oh you don't need to go anywhere because it's happening here and in fact the person that's
00:56:38.000making those decisions is being sold to you as a hero. And again I'm not naive enough to suggest
00:56:42.000that Barack Obama is somehow the generator of that kind of malevolence, he's rather just a temporary
00:56:47.000occupant of an office that demands that in order to support the interests that truly run America.
00:56:52.000That's what we're saying again and again on this channel.
00:56:57.000The price of even our inhibited freedom is a machine that murders children and says there's nothing wrong with it.
00:57:05.000A machine that sells us poisoned food and tells us there's nothing wrong with it.
00:57:09.000That props up pharmaceutical industries and energy industries that couldn't operate under their own financial capital but require your taxpayer dollars to subsidise and fund them and tell us that there's nothing wrong with it.
00:57:20.000There are so many more questions that require asking.
00:57:24.000before blithely accepting some of these people as heroes.
00:57:27.000Drone strikes conducted by the United States during a five-month long campaign in Afghanistan caused the deaths of unintended targets nearly nine out of ten times, leaked intelligence documents suggest.
00:57:37.000Nine out of ten times, most of the time, should probably not happen.
00:57:42.000In my recent conversation with Sam Harris, when he talks about terrorists and their potential ecstatic state when conducting jihad, there's a kind of fetishisation of the presumed evil of religious ideology.
00:57:51.000But secularism leads to murder of this nature, just under the cold rational dispatch, collateral damage, no note, no funeral, no need for redemption, culpability or explanation.
00:58:01.000So the idea that some types of violence are worse than others is one that has to be resolved.
00:58:07.000And of course, Daniel Hale, the whistleblower, who revealed that information is celebrated as a hero around the world in prison under the Espionage Act that Barack Obama used more than any other president in history.
00:58:18.000These drone strikes make a strong case for categorizing Obama as an international war criminal.
00:58:22.000The 1949 Geneva Conventions ratified by the United Nations explicitly provides protections for not only the wounded but also for medical and religious personnel, medical units and medical transports.
00:58:33.000Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court states that internationally directing attacks against personnel, installations, material, units or vehicles involved in humanitarian assistance or peacekeeping missions in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations is classified as a war crime.
00:58:47.000These classifications, these words, they're meant to mean something.
00:58:50.000You know, of course, that America could not appeal to the International Criminal Court to condemn the actions of Russia in Ukraine because they would know that they'd begin a conversation where they'd have to say, we have done the same, we have done worse.
00:59:02.000This is the truth of American foreign policy, the influence of the military-industrial complex, and the set of interests that the American government truly represent.
00:59:09.000This is the truth of a hero, albeit a partisan hero, like Barack Obama.
00:59:13.000That they represent those kind of interests.
00:59:16.000That if we were to obey the Geneva Convention, which obviously we're just going to ignore, then you'd have to say, no, Barack Obama, look, is just literally a war criminal according to that definition.
00:59:25.000You just have to dispatch with that definition in order to maintain the heroic status of Barack Obama, which people are willing to do.
00:59:50.000The law also states, "...intentionally launching attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians also constitutes war crimes for the guilty party."
00:59:58.000Through the drone strike program and double tap attacks, there is no question that former President Obama and his administration violated international humanitarian law.
01:00:06.000Obama's symbolic significance cannot outshine his relationship with the imperial endeavors of the American empire.
01:00:12.000And yet it seems to the Democratic Party they do exactly that.
01:00:15.000Barack Obama is still regarded as a hero.
01:00:17.000In order for him to be regarded as a hero, you have to just wipe away the Geneva Convention.
01:00:22.000You have to completely ignore the murder of children.
01:00:25.000It's impossible, isn't it, to combine those facts.
01:00:27.000And even if you put aside the idea that Obama is somehow personally culpable, although evidently he was the president, I don't know how much higher up the chain you would need to get, You have to accept that the system itself is in need of radical re-evaluation.
01:00:38.000And these are the kind of things that should be at the forefront of our mind, and this is what we should be demanding of any democracy, or indeed any nation, worthy of the name.