Upgrade Yourself w/ Max Lugavere

This is the environment show. Hi everybody, welcome back to Max out. Today is going to be very, very detailed stuff and it's going to be something that is going to impact you in the way that your brain works, your body works, your entire outlook on life is going to be different. Very special man with me here today.

I guess he's a health and science journalist. He's a podcast, he's a researcher. What I know is he's brilliant and I was telling him off camera, the IQ gap between the two of us is rather significant today. So I'm going to pretend to hang with Max.

Today will be the most detailed information you've ever received on your life on food, your body and how to make yourself more well is the way that I would describe it. So Max Lugavere, welcome to the Max out show with Ed Mylatt. Great to have you. Great to be here and what an appropriate name.

I feel like we're really going to max out today. My son's name is Max by the way too. So very easy for me to remember your name and we're preparing. But I got to tell you in preparation for this, I'm blown away.

When I introduce gas, I want to make sure I do it. I'm just as well to tell the truth. I consider you one of a kind right now in the world in the way that you think you articulate the breakthroughs you've discovered already about the body, the mind and how food in particular impacts it. So today guys is going to be very, very special.

But what I want to do, I think you found your calling and I think it's important for my audience to know that maybe a lot of you listen to my shoulder, they don't know what they're calling as yet. And I don't think you knew what yours was until the situation started with mom, right? And that just sort of changed your life. So just tell everybody how you even began the journey of being so great at what you do.

Yeah, thank you so much, Ed. I've heard wonderful things about you and I've been a fan for a while. So it's a real privilege to be here. But I'm glad that you've allowed me the opportunity to start with my why because it really was something really tragic that occurred in my personal life that sent me off down this path.

I never, if you would have asked me 10 years ago, what the next 10 years of my life was going to look like, I never would have predicted what I'm currently doing right now. The reality is I was a pre-medical student in college, but I ended up pivoting and going into journalism. So I used to work for a news information, TV network in the United States where I got to be, I was a bit of a generalist. I like myself to have been a stem cell at the time, undifferentiated.

And although I got to cover my passions, which tend to be health, nutrition science related, I really didn't have a singular focus like I do now. It wasn't until about six years after taking on that role that in my personal life, my mother got sick. And as anybody with a sick loved one knows, I mean, the world basically stops when that happens. My mom was young at the time, she was about 58 years old.

And this was in 2011 where she started to complain of brain fog. And brain fog is a term that you often hear thrown about in wellness literature aimed towards laypeople. But from one day to the next, your mother starts complaining about this thing that she never had previously experienced. It becomes really unsettling.

But I had no prior family history of any type of dementia, any type of neurodegenerative disease. So I was like, yeah, it's just probably part of getting older. But in tandem with that, my mom had a change to her gait, which is the way that a person walks. And the combination of the fact that it seemed like almost as if overnight she had had a brain transplant with somebody 30, 40 years for senior and the fact that suddenly her stride had begun to look more like a shuffle, it was just really, I realized that it was something that I had to step in and get involved with and go with my mom to these various doctors appointments to try to see what was going on.

I had no framework for understanding dementia, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, which are terms that ultimately not only would I become very familiar with, but I would end up taking my career to understanding, you know, sort of the mechanisms underlying them. But in every doctor's office, what I experienced with my mom, I've come to call diagnose an adios. Basically, you go to a doctor's office, they run a battery of esoteric tests and they send you on your way. But it wasn't until 2011 at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.

And mind you, I grew up in New York City, which is where my mom lives. We have access to great hospitals in New York City, but we literally had to travel to Cleveland, Ohio, one of the top, you know, cathedrals to academic medicine that there is in the United States to get some kind of diagnosis from my mom. And it was there for the first time that she was diagnosed with neurodegenerative disease. And that was for me, it was like, you know, the sound effect in the movie with like the record stopping.

All of my prior interests, passions, kind of fell to the background and I became singularly focused on understanding to the best of my ability, why this would happen to my mom, what could be done to help her slow down the progression of the disease and intended with that, what could be done to prevent, you know, cognitive decline from being something that I ever have to contend with or something that, you know, others that I care about have to have to deal with. And so that became really my life's mission to understand all the various diet and lifestyle factors that come to play with it when discussing how to optimize the way that our brains work and to shield our brains against decay in the long term. Yeah, I'm very sorry, by the way, about your mom. And I wanted you to start with that because you guys, Max, always obviously been a very bright guy.

And now he's literally changed millions of people's lives, millions, and including mine. And just so you know, sometimes the greatest tragedies in your life are going to spur the calling of your life and be open to that, be open to the possibility that maybe you haven't fallen, maybe these times you think they're so difficult for you right now, maybe the seeds are being planted of the rest of your life and the work you're going to do. So let's get into it. Let's get into it.

I want to tell you, I'm told you this up here. I have some vascular issues, cardiovascular disease that I discovered early. And so I am interested in vascular health, just in general. So I have a little bit more knowledge than the laymen just because of I've been trying to do research for myself.

I've got a wonderful doctor named Amy Donin that treats me. But I want to talk a little bit about insulin just to begin with. And it's impact, insulin, it's impact overall. I know about inflammation in the body, but also on dementia and Alzheimer's specifically.

And speak a little bit if you can about insulin and then like finding metabolic dysfunction in the brain when it's impeding the brain's ability to produce energy early on, those two things if you could start with that. Yeah, I mean, just as you're talking, you know, when discussing cardiovascular disease, when you have chronically elevated insulin, so it's a condition called hyperinsuline, it causes your body to hold onto sodium, which can actually raise blood pressure and blood pressure. You know, having chronically elevated blood pressure, hypertension, which is something that many, many adults have, I don't quote me on the statistics, very high. It's also starting to emerge in people, you know, at ages way younger than we would expect to see hypertension.

But that's one of the most common modifiable risk factors for dementia. And I say I use the term modifiable because we know how to basically counteract high blood pressure in our bodies. But when we are eating diets that cause that hormone insulin to stay chronically elevated, it causes your kidneys to hold onto sodium essentially. And on just one day, 24 hours of a low carbohydrate diet, you cut the amount of insulin secreted by your pancreas in half.

So for anybody experiencing chronically elevated levels of insulin, this is worthwhile to know. And so just to do a little primer, insulin is a hormone secreted by your pancreas that causes your muscle cells and your liver to basically suck up glucose that's in the blood. So whenever you eat, you know, and this is totally physiologically normal. So whenever you eat brown rice, you know, or a bagel or anything with carbohydrates in it, even, you know, just regular old table sugar, your pancreas responds sort of like a blunt instrument.

It's a creeds, you know, some of this, some of this hormone. And it causes glucose to be taken up by your muscle cells and your liver. And that's totally okay, you know, when used acutely. The problem is today your average American is sedentary and consumes about 300 grams of carbohydrates every single day.

So we live in a state of chronically elevated levels of insulin. And insulin is not inherently bad, but the problem is that insulin is a very powerful growth hormone. And it's also used in metabolites like in its crucially important in terms of dictating the energy substrate that your body is using as a fuel source. And so when you have chronically level chronically elevated levels of insulin, it not only prevents you from using fat as a fuel source, which is, you know, not a trivial point because your brain loves to use fat for fuel.

In fact, 60% of the energy that your brain can make can has the ability to come from fat. Wow. Yeah. Yeah.

And we basically prevent our brains from being able to use fat as a fuel source because we're just, we're in this state of chronically elevated insulin levels. And so, you know, the sodium point I think is really important. But you know, when it comes to vascular health, your brain is fed blood and nutrients, oxygen included by a network of micro vessels. So any sort of outage along that pathway is going to lead to cognitive dysfunction.

And in fact, the second most common form of dementia is called vascular dementia. So for anybody with cardiovascular issues, you really want to make sure that you're staying up on that. And we can talk about, you know, the sort of dietary lifestyle practices that I think can be helpful in that context. Let's say on there really quick, just a very simple thing.

First, then we're going to go kind of deep there. I've heard you say that, you know, carbs are not great, but the idea, if you're going to eat your carbs, not having six meals a day and spreading these carbs out all day, but potentially that it's more healthy. Am I, maybe if I'm wrong here to eat your carbs in a concentrated time period and not spread out throughout the whole day? Yeah.

So basically the thinking there is that, and it depends person to person. So I don't really advocate for a one size fits all dietary, you know, dietary paradigm. I think it's different, you know, athletes are going to have a much higher carbohydrate tolerance than non athletes, for example. But generally, yes, the research that I've seen in my book Genius Food suggests that when you, if you take 100 grams of carbohydrates and you consume those over the course of the day, you're going to secrete a certain amount of insulin to basically clean up those carbohydrates to get that glucose that those carbohydrates yield out of circulation and into your muscle or into your liver, right?

But if you then take that 100 carbohydrates spread out over six meals, for example, and then you concentrate it into one meal, the area under the curve, like the total amount of insulin that's secreted, I believe is less. So in terms of just, you know, secreting less insulin, you know, over a given window of time, it makes, I think the most sense, and this is, I think especially relevant if you are pre-diabetic or if you have type 2 diabetes, or if you're, if you're, for whatever reason, you're carefully watching your blood sugar to be mindful of the amount of, you know, when you're basically consuming those carbohydrates. Also, we tend to be more insulin sensitive earlier in the day. Okay.

So this is where circadian biology comes in. So I would say, you know, it probably makes more sense to eat those carbohydrates earlier in the day. Okay. So, but it's also, go ahead, go ahead.

Yeah. I mean, I think to some degree, it's, you know, the, the, the functional and practical implications of this, you know, if your diet is, is built predominantly around ultra processed, you know, lab made foods and it's kind of splitting hairs, you know, but if your diet is generally optimized and you're predominantly whole, minimally processed foods, and I think that these are really interesting sort of tools that you can play with to just optimize your diet even further. Okay. That's huge.

I'd never heard anybody say that before, right? Like I'm always the six meal a day, kind of the traditional bodybuilding fitness type deal where I thought I was causing less spikes by doing that. And sounds like that. I'm really sustaining the levels of it.

And you see, I mean, I'm really, I'm really, really curious to get it out of the way faster. I want to talk about some biomarkers for Alzheimer's and dementia. For example, do you recommend I do a quarterly, I do a quarterly fasting blood sugar and fasting glucose test because this, this prediabetic thing is such a concern, insulin resistance is such a concern. Do you recommend that?

And are there any other biomarkers? I just can't get over max, how few people ever get their blood drawn? They don't know what's going on in their body. And I think, you know, maybe you recommend it as well, at least once a year at some age, get your labs drawn and see what's going on.

What are some of the biomarkers and do you like those fasting tests? Yeah. You should always, you should always be looking under the hood, I would say at least once a year. Yeah, so I think you're talking about a fasting blood glucose and fasting insulin, which can both be actually very useful.

So with those two numbers, those two numbers independently are very good at, you know, because for all things being equal, you want to make sure that your blood sugar is within the lower end of the normal spectrum, because having high fasting blood sugars is not good. Blood sugar literally can become tough. Blood sugar is actually toxic in the blood. You need a certain amount of it, but it damages the proteins of which you are constructed.

And so all things being equal, I think you want to make sure that your blood sugar is within a normal healthy range, and then your insulin also, you want to make sure that you're not using a lot, you're not having to use a lot of insulin. Your pancreas isn't having to secrete very much insulin to keep that blood sugar at that normal healthy level. And so when you actually take both of those numbers, you can do a very simple calculation off the top of my head. I can't recall quite how to do it, but it's very easy.

I talk about it in my book, but the number that this calculation yields is called a Homa IR, which is a useful measure of your insulin sensitivity or insulin resistance. So we're talking about insulin insulin is this hormone many people today struggle with insulin resistance, which is sort of the consequence of chronically elevated insulin levels. And the reason why this Homa IR, which is a measure of insulin sensitivity or resistance is useful is because we can see that having a higher degree of insulin resistance in the body is correlated to a worse ability to generate energy in the brain. So what happens in the brain in dementia is you have something called glucose hypometabolism.

So hypo means under. So you're actually you have a less than ideal ability to create energy using glucose, which is the primary energy substrate for your brain that's always in circulation to some degree. And we see that if your insulin resistant in the body, your brain is basically likely struggling to create energy with sugar. So that's a very good that's a very good test to get your Homa IR.

You know, early in life, which somebody susceptible to their brain producing less energy, how would you what age would that begin to show itself? Well, unfortunately, they've shown that people with certain genetic risk factors for Alzheimer's disease show very small decrements in their ability to generate energy as early as the age of 20. Yeah, so whether or not that correlates to impaired cognitive function, I don't think that that's necessarily the case, the brain, you know, the brain is very resilient organ. And it's able to use different fuel sources, you know, sort of like a hybrid car.

But but that same hypometabolism we see in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease, and it's reduced by about 50%. So, so that sort of biomarker that's associated with Alzheimer's disease, you can kind of see signs of it very early on in people who are genetically at risk for Alzheimer's disease. And that's not a, you know, this, the genetic risk factor that I'm talking about, it's called the APOE4 allele, which about one in four people carry. It's not a death sentence to develop dementia by any by any means, but it is interesting that, you know, that those, that those people that carry that gene have this reduction in glucose metabolism in their brains, and we know that impaired glucose metabolism is also associated with insulin resistance.

So if I happen to be one of those four, you know, one in four people that carry that allele, I would be even more diligent about my dietary lifestyle choices to make sure that I'm staying as insulin sensitive as possible. Hey guys, we're going to get into what Max recommends at some of those diet and lifestyle choices that he knows benefit you were going there in a minute. But I just want to stay max with measurables just for a minute because I just, I cannot get over how many people I meet in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, and I've not had a lab drawn in 10 years, 15 years. And so I want to talk a little bit about like plaques, amyloid plaques, I'm doing some research about that.

I want you to talk about those a little bit just what they what they are for most people's identification. And then for me, when I get my lab drawn, I used to get your normal HDL LDL feels very little. My I now get the particle size measured on HDLs and on LDL and lipoprotein, little a and all these other markers that I'm tested for that I'm convinced not only affect the heart but also the brain and here I am acting like I know. But I'm curious as to your recommendations about these plaque build ups, what's amyloid plaque, why is it matter?

And does particle size matter when you're getting your labs drawn? Both people are like, I'm an HDL 62. My LDL is, you know, 125 and I'm done. But that really that's kind of old school, almost not very useful information, is it not?

No, you're right. In fact, the high HDL thing has really been called into question over the past couple of years. You know, we used to think that anything that you can do that's going to raise your HDL is going to be protected against cardiovascular disease. But they've tested a number of drugs that raise HDL and they've shown really to be disappointing from the standpoint of cardio protection.

Yeah. So I mean, high HDL might just be something that occurs in somebody who is otherwise metabolically healthy and trying to raise it with diet and lifestyle. I don't think is the sort of holy grail of cardio protection that we're hoping that it would have been. Really?

Yeah. I mean, I think the key is you want your HDL to be healthy. You want your HDL to be functional. HDL, you know, as you mentioned, it's a lipoprotein and lipoproteins are vulnerable to oxidative modifications.

So, you know, in the presence of sugar in your blood, they can become damaged, these particles. And so you want your HDL and your LDL to be healthy. That really, I think is the most important thing. I mean, they still look at low HDL as being one of the signs of metabolic syndrome.

But really, you know, I think getting a lipoprotein analysis is important. Making sure that your LDL particles are large and buoyant and fluffy, I think, is important. Yes. No one talks about this.

So yes, right. I want to do that. Yeah. So I mean, that's what's referred to as pattern A, sort of a pattern, an A pattern of your LDL phenotype, you know, making sure that those particles are basically what happens when your liver creates the class, the majority of cholesterol in circulation.

Your brain creates some cholesterol, cholesterol is created locally too, but by and large your liver creates most of the cholesterol that's in circulation in your blood. And when your liver creates this cholesterol, it gets shipped out on these lipoprotein packages, these LDL particles. And they start out very big and buoyant because they're basically, they enter circulation carrying a payload of cholesterol and triglycerides and they get centered around your body. And this is very, I mean, this is physiologically totally healthy and totally normal.

The problem is that some people, you know, whether it's with genes or because of the way that they're eating, they encounter essentially plumbing problems, where, you know, before long normally you want these LDL particles to, they get smaller and smaller over time while they're in circulation because they're dropping off their, you know, what the, these little packages basically, it's like a UPS truck. Although UPS trucks don't get smaller, but in this, you know, analogy, it works. And yeah, and so before long what you want to happen, you know, the liver basically pops up what's called these LDL receptors to basically suck the particles back in, they get disassembled, broken down, used to create bio acids and things like that. And then that whole process starts again, the problem is some people, whether it's through genes like people who have, you know, any of the many genes that are associated with familial hypercholesterolemia, so it's like genetically elevated problems with their LDL plumbing, or diets that are excessively high in saturated fat, you have a reduction in the receptors in the LDL receptors on the liver, which can then cause these particles to stay in circulation for too long, you know, in in close proximity to, you know, for example, sugar, like chronically elevated, you know, blood sugar can do this.

And so they become damaged and increases the likelihood that they're going to get stuck in the vessel wall. And that's really where you start to see, I think, the beginning of atherosclerosis. Can that affect the brain too, right? I mean, people that are prone to my family's prone to both.

So there's dementia in my family, and there's heart disease in my family. And so, you know, these things matter to me, but when it comes to that, I cut you off there, I apologize, I know you're going to keep going, but is that also true in the brain where it plaques accumulate in the brain as well in the vascular areas of the brain, or is that the neck or how do we how does it impact the brain? Well, so the same kinds of vascular problems that you can have anywhere in the body, you can have in the microvascular that feeds blood and nutrients to the brain. So that's where you can start to have a problem from the from a vascular standpoint.

The amyloid plaques and tau tangles that you're referring to, it's sort of a different different machinery there, different mechanism. But nonetheless, the same problems that are going to cause is back up of LDL particles in the blood that's going to cause inflammation in your blood vessels chronically elevated blood sugar, all incredibly damaging to the brain. There's no question about it can create inflammation in the brain, damage the blood vessels going up to the brain. And inflammation in the brain is really what is responsible, I think, for this increase in amyloid beta and the tau tangles that we see.

So when we talk about amyloid beta and tau, these are the sort of hallmark proteins that are associated with Alzheimer's disease. There are other forms of dementia, you have vascular dementia, as I mentioned, you have Parkinson's disease dementia, you have a lewy body dementia. So dementia is an umbrella category and Alzheimer's disease is simply the most common form of dementia. And so because it's the most common form of dementia, that's why there's all this research money that goes into it.

And so amyloid is most closely associated with Alzheimer's disease. But we all generate amyloid in our brains. It all tends to increase as we get older. And for a long time, amyloid was thought of as sort of the analogy that what cholesterol is to heart disease, amyloid was to Alzheimer's disease.

So that analogy works really well. But the same way that we now know that cholesterol is not necessarily the villain in cardiovascular disease. It's sort of like, you know, it's this molecule that's there at the scene of the crime, certainly, but it's not necessarily the causal player, at least in the early stages. The same thing we're now seeing with amyloid.

So amyloid for the longest time, because you could easily open up the brain of a deceased person who had died from Alzheimer's disease and you see these plaques and tackles in the brain, it was thought that amyloid beta was the cause of Alzheimer's disease. So what do we have to do to get this amyloid out of the brain? But, you know, many, many drug trials later, what we've seen is that drugs that are actually effective at reducing amyloid burden in the brain don't cure the disease. So the question has then become what is the what are the earliest things that what are the earliest problems, you know, or the earliest biomarkers that are associated with Alzheimer's disease that we can intervene on earlier to prevent this amyloid buildup in the first place.

And we know that, you know, inflammation in the brain, because the brain doesn't really have an immune system the way that the body does, amyloid seems to be responding to neuro inflammation. We also see that sleep is incredibly important when it comes to keeping the brain clean of these plaques. We know over this, just since just as of a couple of years ago, there's a newly discovered system in the brain called the glymphatic system, which I think many people are starting to become familiar with that when you sleep, your brain actually flushes cerebrospinal fluid throughout your brain and cleanses it of these proteins that build up over the course of the day. And the thinking is the more of the protein that there is lingering in the brain, the higher the odds that it can basically clump and form the plaques and tangles that we associated with that we associate with Alzheimer's disease.

So that's why that's where sleep really comes into play as well. Okay, I'm glad you went there. So now we're going to shift into some thank you, by the way, I'm glad we're going to shift into some practical stuff. So practical thing number one, you need to sleep a bunch.

It's healthy for your brain. You don't understand why. It just is best number one. Number two, I want to talk about length.

Well, in some detail about you went there earlier and I'm glad we're going to go there. We're going to talk about what we put in our mouths now. And you said process foods versus really healthy raw real foods, real meats, real greens, what have you. I eat like a lot of people I bet that listen to the show.

If I started to add up how much processed food that I eat in a given day or week, it's pretty scary. I'm talking about protein bars, protein chips, things that I, at least in my mind, I think are healthy because they're getting me protein low calorie really quick tastes pretty good. It's a snack. But I mean, I ate a ton of processed food.

Why is that bad compared to eating what you, I don't what you would call it real food, everything. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I think it's important to make the distinction, right?

Like processed food sort of has this really negative connotation associated with it, especially these days. But when you cook your food, you're processing it. So it's not, it's not necessarily that processing is like this, this evil, this evil thing. It's, it's the ultra pro, it's when food has just become so pulverized and removed from its natural form that's hardly recognizable from its original form.

You know, when you take a steak or something or a piece of like raw meat and you cook it and you're paying your processing it, when you put, you know, whole foods in a blender, you're processing that food. The problem with ultra processing, which is what, you know, food industry does, is it creates foods that are what are called what food scientists refer to as hyper-palatable. It becomes really difficult to moderate your consumption of those foods. These foods are designed to be over consumed.

And by the time you've reached satiety, when eating these foods, you've already over consumed them. You've already, yeah, they've shown this actually recently. There was a national Institute of Health study led by obesity researcher named Kevin Holl, you can look up the study that found that when people were given an ultra processed diet to consume ad libitum, meaning like you were able to eat whatever you wanted until you reached a point of satiety, they ended up eating a 500 calorie surplus every single day. When, you know, when just eating to feel full, which is something that every human being wants to feel right when eating food, I mean, it's like, it's a privilege and great thing to be able to feel full and something that we all want when we're eating.

They, in the crossover trial they then did was that they gave the same subjects access to a minimally processed diet and to the same degree of satiety. So, eating also until they were full and satiated, they ended up eating at a calorie deficit of 300, you know, 300 something calories. Yeah. So, I mean, that ultra processed food diet, which by the way, today is how most people are eating most of the time, 60% of the calories that we consume today come from ultra processed foods.

That right there explains the obesity epidemic, you know, because because we're just constantly processing these ultra processed foods, where it's really difficult to pump the brakes on them, we end up over consuming them. And, and the other problem with these foods is that they're minimally nutritious. So, not only are we walking around, you know, with ever expanding waistlines, one in two people by the year 2030 are going to be not just overweight, but obese. And half of us are either type two diabetic or pre diabetic.

90% of us are deficient in at least one essential nutrient. So, we're overfed and we're undernourished. And when you put those two features together, that's why you're seeing accelerated aging. You're seeing, you know, I think, you know, just, you know, just unprecedented rates of cardiovascular disease of, you know, certain cancers and of dementia.

I mean, because the brain partakes in, you know, whatever's going awry in the body, the brain suffers the consequences of that as well. And these ultra processed foods, is there an ingredient or two that must be avoided? Like, hey, this is really toxic and bad for your body. We're looking at the list of ingredients in something chemicals in there.

Is there a one or two that are just no-nose? Well, I love that you asked that question really, really getting practical. I think that the kinds of ingredients you really want to watch out for are refined grains. So that's one and refined grain and seed oils.

So refined grains, you know, the wheat flour, the rice flour, the, you know, the corn flour. I mean, I'm not dogmatic in my approach. Eating a piece of a whole corn on the cob is one of my favorite things to eat in the summer. You know, I eat white rice on my sushi.

Like, I'm not dogmatic about like, you know, grains or the devil or anything like that. But in these ultra processed foods, I think refined grains really are problematic. I'll give you another reason why, actually, just because it's interesting. When you eat, say you eat a handful of whole nuts, right?

And you look at the calories in, you know, on the back of the nut package or whatever, and you see whatever, we'll just say it's 500 calories of worth of whole nuts. You're actually only absorbing about 70% of those calories because, you know, when you chew whole nuts, the particles are too big to be fully digested. It's a whole food. You actually end up pooping out a significant amount of those calories.

When you eat, yeah, when you eat pulverized wheat, corn, rice flour in these ultra processed foods, you're absorbing 100% of those calories. Not only that, not only that. So I mean, the calories, not really calorie when it comes to nutrition fact labels. Not only that, but those calories get absorbed really rapidly and really high up in the small intestine.

So it basically sends your blood sugar through the roof before your body really even has an ability to, you know, you're still eating while your body is like, you know, what do we do with this sudden influx of sugar, essentially? So I think it's important to avoid foods that are based predominantly on those kinds of grains. Very, very interesting. So a couple of things on going in our mouths again.

I've heard you talk about baby broccoli or broccoli sprouts. And this is like, some people think this is splitting hairs, but it's not, I don't understand like, is it like sulfateen or the NRI of two pathways, whatever the heck it is, but I know a little bit, right? Why is baby broccoli or broccoli sprouts way better than like broccoli in particular? Why?

That's a good question. So when you chew broccoli sprouts or any cruciferous vegetable, you basically break apart the cell walls where two chemicals that are kept in isolation in the plants unite in your mouth to create a new compound in that compound in the case of cruciferous vegetables is called sulforaphane. And sulforaphane, sulforaphane. Yeah, it's considered an insect, like an insecticide, a natural insecticide that plants create, right?

Because plants can't, you know, tooth and nail their way out of, you know, out of being eaten, right? So what they do is they practice chemical warfare. And so they create these compounds that if you were a smaller critter, maybe an insect, a mouse, a mold, the compound would make you sick. And so, you know, when a mouse gnaws on these plants, it creates, it creates these compounds, you know, sulforaphane is just one of them, but there's, you know, I mean, the plant kingdom is just full of these like natural defense chemicals.

What we see is that sulforaphane in somebody like you or me, you know, big robust organism, actually has a number of beneficial and protective effects via a mechanism called formesis. So formesis is when you consume a plant compound and, you know, if you were to consume a lot of it, it would be toxic. But in small doses, it actually has a beneficial effect. So like a counterintuitive beneficial effect, because here we have this toxic chemical, but in small doses, it's actually good for you.

The same thing actually applies to exercise, you know, you could exercise enough where it would kill you, right? It's a stressor on the body, but in small doses, exercise actually makes you more robust, more resilient, you know, single praises about exercise, you know, for hours. But sulforaphane is great because it's been shown to increase levels of a compound in the body called glutathione, which is the, yeah, it's the body of master detoxifier, master antioxidant. It's being studied now as a means of, you know, it's cancer protective effects.

It's also been suggested in a small clinical trial, I believe, to produce symptoms of autism. So for anybody that has that in the family, I think it's worth looking into, you know, it's just one of the many benefits of eating a very diet that includes cruciferous vegetables. Okay, glutathione. I love glutathione.

So I can't explain this. I'd like you to explain it to me. So I do some, I haven't done it in a while, because of COVID, but before my traveling, I get depleted, I do IV therapy, even just some time to get hydrated, I'll take IV hydration. One, I'd like your opinion on that, actually two, what's your opinion on that?

Am I just peeing it all out or does it help? But here's what I know. When they put glutathione in my IV, something amazing happens to my body. There's a calming effect.

I can feel that, I feel B12 when they put it in, you know, you get all wired, the other stuff I don't really feel. For some reason, glutathione, I can feel better, actually, when it's in my body. So do you recommend someone supplements with it? Why is that happening or am I crazy?

And what do you feel about IV therapy? Yeah, I don't really recommend, I don't make the recommendation that people supplement with glutathione. I mean, I have glutathione, I take sometimes liposomal glutathione supplements, but I, you know, I'm not, I really am pretty convinced that supplements should be used very diligently and deliberately based on your diet and your specific deficiencies and even in some cases, genes. But no, I generally don't recommend that people supplement with it.

I just don't think that you need to if you're eating a diet that is supplying the raw materials for your own, your body's own glutathione synthesis. So sulfur containing amino acids is very important, grass-fed beef, eggs, things like that. You know, anything with sulfur in it is actually going to be really good for you. Sulfur is a rate limiting, you know, element in the synthesis of glutathione.

And so when you consume, for example, cystinrich, you know, foods, you're going to basically be supplying that. Also, glycine, glycine is really important. So it's one of the reasons why I think collagen is worth consuming. And collagen is actually a supplement that I think is worth looking into because we don't tend to eat a lot of collagenous tissues at this point.

You know, you don't think that you break down those supplements in your stomach and you're never getting any benefit to taking something like I've had other people tell me, hey, you're taking a collagen supplement, you're not getting any of this, it's destroyed before it gets to you. Yeah, you do break it down. So it's not a one-to-one, you know, it's not like you consume collagen and it becomes collagen in your joints. But you are increasing your supply of glycine, which we don't consume up of, your average person consumes about two grams of glycine every single day.

And you create in your body another two grams of glycine. And that is why glycine is actually not considered an essential amino acid because we create it to some degree. But I don't think that we create enough for optimal health, especially today when we consume lots of muscle meat. And the reason for that is, so there have been research calculations that speculate that we need about 15 grams of, it depends on your weight and what you're eating, about 15 grams of glycine a day.

And that our needs for glycine increase with higher consumption of another amino acid methionine, which is more present in muscle meat. And we use glycine to create collagen. So by not consuming adequate glycine, again, we only ingest about two grams of every single day, you might be actually limiting your body's ability to create to create collagen. And collagen is super important.

I mean, it's important for, I mean, it's like the most abundant protein in the body. And production of declines as we get older, it's important for the health of your veins or arteries. So yeah, it's one of those things that I think if you're not eating cliginous tissue in animal products, I think it's worth supplementing it. By the way, thank you.

I told everybody the beginning of being like, feverishly writing notes, the cool thing about the show is I listened to it in the car, like, all right, well, I'm gonna listen to it all the way back into no-pad out and start writing all this stuff down. So I really appreciate it. And for me, I'd say I'm borderline obsessed with my own health just because there is dementia in my family. I don't know that frankly, it's so long back.

I don't know if it was dementia, particularly the form of dementia, Alzheimer's specifically, but it's there and certainly heart disease as well. And I like that you're telling some of these markers that we can test for. How do you feel about eating less or less frequently? So intermittent fasting has been a very popular thing.

I had Dr. Ian Smith on who's written a book on it, or just gaps in between consumption of food. Is there a benefit to the brain to doing that, to the body to doing that? Or you don't subscribe to that?

No, I first became interested in intermittent fasting when I discovered the work of Mark Mattson over at NIH, who was one of the early pioneers in this field looking at what happens in the brains of fasted mics. And what we see is that when fasted, there's an increase in levels of BDNF or brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is a protein that helps ensure the survival of your existing neurons while also promoting the growth of new ones, which is pretty important. That basically right there underlies the characteristic that we call neuroplasticity. So the ability of your brain to change and say you full over time as you get older, which is something that we all want.

I know a lot of clinicians now who are using fasting as a tool for neuroprotection. At the very least fasting is going to allow you to spend more time in a low insulin state. So we already talked about insulin. And so it's ability to help sensitize you to insulin.

I think it is potentially very useful. It's also a tool for calorie control, certainly for people. And I also think that in light of circadian biology, which we touched on a little bit earlier in the chat, I think it makes sense to have a somewhat constrained eating window today where you're not eating too close to bedtime. And research has shown us that independent of weight loss, because ultimately calories and calories are out will dictate whether or not you gain or lose weight.

But independent of that, it seems to be the case that earlier dinners, like what's called early time restricted feeding and a longer fasting window actually can have benefits to your blood sugar control and your blood pressure. And these are both all, as I mentioned, really important when it comes to preserving the health of the brain. Also sleep, doesn't it, Max? I mean, if you're digesting food, prior to your digesting heavy when you're asleep, your body is really not at rest, right?

It's not at rest. Yeah, well said. You have a master clock in your brain. And I talk about this in depth in my most recent book, The Genius Life, because circadian biology is such a fascinating topic.

And it's so exciting because we're just at the sort of tip of the iceberg in terms of, in terms of, you know, understanding the full breadth of its implications. But yeah, I mean, we, so this master clock in our brain, it's called the suprachysmatic nucleus and it's housed in the hypothalamus. So these are big words, but basically the hypothalamus is like the hypothalamus is where you, it's the sort of hub of some of our most primordial drives in the brain. And so it makes sense that this master clock would be there because it's, you know, it's part of, you know, we've had, since well before we were human beings, we've had a relationship with light and darkness, you know, the sun that diurnal rhythm, you know, that every single organism from the dawn of time on Earth has had to forge a relationship with.

And so that clock is set primarily through the light that is allowed or not, or unable to enter our eyes. But we also have what are called peripheral clocks throughout our body. And those organs are primarily the organs of digestion. And their flip on or off, depending on whether or not they're actively digesting food.

And so if you're digesting food late at night, you're basically confusing those peripheral clocks in your body. And they just don't, you know, I mean, you'll always be able to digest food no matter what time of day you eat it. But it just, I don't, I don't think it, the system works as well. For example, like the passage of content through GI tract slows down the later on, it gets, I already mentioned that we're less insulin sensitive at night.

So the, you know, the machinery responsible for metabolism isn't working as efficiently at night. So I think there are many good, good arguments to be made as to why you should not eat too late at night. But of course, of course, it's like, if it's your favorite thing on Earth to eat that cookie, like before you go to sleep, you know, or whatever it happens to be, then it's probably not the end of the world, you know, I love that that's how you approach all of this stuff. Okay, some rapid fire stuff on that.

So we're talking about it in a matter of fast, which is like a long window of 12 to 16 hours a year, not eating. I think you've made obviously very good points about not eating prior going to bed. I've been reading a little bit more about, even though it may not be that's 12 to 16 hour window, not eating right away upon rising, even if you can go an hour or two, I mean, I get up, boom, I'm eating. And I've been reading about this and that there may be some benefits to not doing that.

Is that something you subscribe to as well, waiting an hour or two, or you think that's not relevant if you didn't eat before you went to sleep? Yeah, I mean, I think it's worth waiting an hour to. I don't think that there's really any biological need for breakfast, you know, first, at least to eat first thing in the morning. The first meal today is always going to be breakfast because it's the meal which you break your fast.

But no, generally I like to not eat immediately upon waking because, you know, first thing in the morning, a lot of people are actually already in, they're already, you know, burning fat, like fat oxidation is higher in the morning because your insulin is going to be the lowest typically when you first wake up. That's why you do that fasting insulin draw. And so that allows for a perfect opportunity to burn fat, you know, first thing in the morning. And, and you know, that I think is an important thing, you know, to get your body sort of prime to be a good fat burner, you know, not eating immediately upon waking, I think is a, is a, you know, a beneficial strategy.

And then you're able to, well, I just have to laugh and get myself as you say that brother. I'm 49 years old. My whole audience is now going to unsubscribe to me when I admit this to you. Please, we're having this pretty very detailed conversation on nutrition food, the brain, lipoprotein A, you know, particle size.

Do you know that I never knew breakfast meant break your fast? Never knew that. I wonder how many people in the car, am I the only grown adult in the world that did not know breakfast meant break your fast? How the hell did I not know that?

So if everyone's sitting there going, so my lead does a whole show on all these fats and stuff, but his breakthrough is breakfast means break your fast. So those of you that thought some of those over your head, some of the bigger things aren't over my head with some of the basic things definitely are I'm going to ask you question, you're on Instagram the other day, you showed like two salads. One was like just greens, right? And one looked to me like greens with some fats in there also.

And the gen the gist was the green one's bad and doesn't do you any good. And this one that has both is better. Why? Yeah, so some of the most valuable compounds in in plants are so there are many reasons for that.

First of all, if you're just eating greens, I mean, that's like rabbit food, right? That's not gonna be satiating. It's like, you know, I feel like that's kind of like what diet culture likes to promote. I think salads are amazing.

In fact, I advocate for the consumption of a big fatty salad every single day. That's one of my sort of hallmark, you know, pieces of advice to people. Research out of Russian university actually tells us that people who eat a large bowl of dark leafy greens every day have brains that perform up to 11 years younger. So right there, that's a good rule to set for yourself.

Just eat a big salad every day. It's satiating or going to check off many of your nutritional boxes in doing that great source of fiber, great source of micronutrients and always add a protein, right? Like always add, you know, whether it's grass or beef, wild salmon, chicken, eggs, whatever. But but another really important thing that I talked about in that Instagram post is that some of the most important compounds that are in plants are what are called carotenoids.

Carotenoids are just some of the many pigments that you'll see when you look around in the produce section of your local supermarket, the yellows, the oranges, the greens. Many people are familiar with beta carotene, which is a carotenoid. But two in particular that I think that in my work I've tried to bring to light are lutein and zeaxanthin. So these are carotenoids that have long been known for their ability to protect the eyes as your eyes age.

If you look on the back of any, you know, sort of eye focused nutritional supplement, you'll always see lutein and zeaxanthin because lutein and zeaxanthin, we know accumulate in the eyes, which your eyes are an extension of your brain. Your eyes actually contain neural tissue. And and those two compounds can help prevent age related macular degeneration. But what we now also know about these two compounds is that they accumulate in the brain.

They help your brain work more efficiently. They help your brain work faster. And they're abundant in dark leafy greens like kale, spinach, arugula. The problem is that you need fat to absorb them.

So if you're eating a salad with a fat free dressing on it, which many people, you know, I think continue to do to this day, those compounds are just going right through you. Whereas with the addition of some fat like extra virgin olive oil or aggressive beef, you're absorbing all of those very important carotenoid compounds. Wow. Yeah.

So it's just very interesting. You know, you also have those carotenoids in a fat of grass, beef and egg yolks, but grass, beef and egg yolks are obviously also rich in fat. So they're like perfect foods when it comes to the brain. But kale, dark leafy greens, they need a little extra boost.

You know, they need that additional fat source. Otherwise, you know, some of the some of the most beneficial compounds in those plants basically just pass right through you. Man, so good. That's that's that's why Max is Max right there.

A couple more things. Then we'll talk about the genius life really quick. I want to ask you about saunas. I've been using them lately.

Didn't know why I was doing them then I'm researching you and it's like he talks about saunas. What's the benefit to if any to a regular sauna on a weekly basis? Saunas are incredible. I actually, you know, one of the one of the gifts that I gave to myself, one of the more extravagant purchases I made, I bought myself a sauna because the research on it really is very compelling.

It comes out of predominantly comes from a University of Eastern Finland. Finland is the sauna capital of the world. So I don't know if you know this ed, but on average they have about one sauna per household in Finland. It's like, it's like a shower.

It's just super common. Yeah, sauna is actually a finish word. I think in the past life, I was probably finished because I just love it that much. But so the research that they're doing in that part of the world is really compelling.

What they're showing us is that regular sauna use with like a dose response effect, meaning the stronger the benefit seems to be there, you get a dramatic risk reduction for cardiovascular disease, for stroke, for Alzheimer's disease and dementia. And I think there are many reasons for this, but I think most it's most easy to see that when you sit in a sauna, your pulse increases. When you're sitting in a sauna, sitting in a sauna is actually the best workout you can get while sitting absolutely still. It's a mild aerobic exercise mimetic is what it's called.

Your heart rate increases. You get this full body expression in nitric oxide release, which opens up your blood vessels, increases blood flow all throughout your body. It activates what we're called heat shock proteins, which have been shown to sort of help proteins like tau in the brain from protect them against misfolding, which can happen, you know, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, they're called proteinopathies because they involve proteins that misfold and they become tangled up and heat shock proteins, which are activated in saunas and also with exercise can actually prevent that sort of misfolding in that pathology. So I'm a huge fan of saunas and I think that there, you know, any opportunity you have these days to sweat, sweating is another benefit.

I mean, sweat, you release all kinds of toxins that you accumulate, you know, just partaking in the modern world. And so it's one of the many, I think, benefits of them. That's huge. I almost wish I stuck that in the very beginning because I think that's something most people want to tell us, ironic that tomorrow I'm going to this place that they're pushing a sauna and then you do like an infrared stretching thing under heat as well after you do the sauna.

And I'm super curious as to what it's going to be like, they were just referred to me. All right, we've covered a bazillion things here today. If you say, Hey, here's one more thing somebody could change, like I start making right now, that would improve their overall health, reduce their chance of getting dementia, Alzheimer's heart disease, just overall wellness is there some other thing, big or small, that people could be doing, we're talking about it fast, we're talking about sleep, we're talking about all these different things we talked about, baby broccoli even. So what's one other change somebody could implement right now that would just improve everything for?

Well, I would say, you know, one thing we haven't touched on that I think is really important, especially today is to find ways of healthily managing your stress. And I like to talk about two ways of doing this. So the first way is to remove the stress, right? That's the most obvious way to deal with stress.

But sometimes you can't do that, right? So when it comes to being in a bad relationship or working in a job that you don't like, and that's stressful, obviously, you can, you can end both of those situations and you'll be better off, right? But for some things that are just simply not avoidable, like having a sick, loved one in the family, which I know all too well, I know, I know what that's like all too well, you can't end you can't get you can't end that situation on demand, right? So the other way that I like to talk to people about, you know, at least to have them back in their heads is to boost your resilience to that stress.

So you can either remove the stress or you can boost your resilience to that stress. So for example, when my mom was at her sickest and my mom passed away two years ago, if I didn't carve out time in the day to get to the gym and practice self care for myself, I don't know how I would have survived that experience. So I think for anybody listening who's in a stressful situation, make sure to prioritize self care to continue going to the gym, having those workouts sitting in the saunas, doing, you know, taking cold showers, cold water immersion, even practicing intermittent fasting. What happens when we do any of these things?

It's called cross adaptation. There's a spillover effect where the adaptation that we basically cause our bodies to basically undergo when we sit in these acute when we endure these acute stressors, that spillover effect makes us more robust and more resilient in other areas of our lives. So psychological stress, we're actually better able to deal with psychological stress when we become more physically robust. And so I think today we live in stressful times and there's this, in the wellness world, sometimes we like to or not me, but there's a lot of like, just get rid of the stress.

There's a very, sometimes the approach is very privileged and not realizing, not sort of being mindful of the fact that some people have life situations that they can't just opt out of. Right, exactly. And so, and I think you do say that I like to is that the different types of stress that there's this benefit to this cold idea that you talked about, right, putting yourself in a cold shower, cold plunge is like that, that sort of acute stress actually there's a health benefit in your body to doing so. So not all stress is bad, but this idea of self care, especially for me, brother during COVID and during these times, not just COVID, but the political unrest and the social change that's taking places, it's just a lot on people.

And so I'm really glad that you added that to the table. I want to ask you a question though, because we're running out of time. And again, I told you we could go three hours, but so the genius life, why should I get that book if I'm listening to this or watching this right now? What am I going to learn about in that book that we've not talked about today?

Yeah, I mean, if you were able to derive any value from from this conversation, the genius life is just packed with the little things that you can do every day that are going to add up to big health wins. So from the standpoint of circadian biology, of your relationship to nature, your relationship to temperature, your relationship to light, your relationship to food, it's just packed with little, little, you know, ways that you could tweak almost every area of your life for noticeable health and well-being improvements. You know, every chapter sort of broken apart at the end, I offer what I call field notes so that, you know, it becomes really easy and accessible and achievable for people. But it really is a full 360 degree sort of lifestyle plan that is, you know, that that really is going to, you know, I say in subtitle, heal your mind, strengthen your body and become extraordinary.

And that's really what I offer. I think mental health is crucially important. I, you know, know this firsthand as a civilian, you know, dealing with, you know, a sick loved one, strengthening your body. You know, I've seen what frailty can do to a person.

I've seen what, you know, I've seen true illness, which, you know, is a tragedy, but also a privilege that, you know, I don't think many in the health community have seen. And so it's given me a unique take on life and what I think we ought to prioritize and become extraordinary, you know, like the kinds of values that you instill in your audience to your listeners. I try to do the same thing with my readers, you know, and a lot of them I've been able to glean from my mom, who I think, you know, did, I'm biased, but I think she did a pretty good job in raising me, you know, and, you know, and, you know, making sure that I, you know, dedicated my life to helping others and, you know, you know, projecting empathy into the world and the like. So the book really kind of has all of that wrapped in under one sort of heading, if you will.

Yeah, it's, I got to tell you what's been going on in the back of my mind. I don't know why he's got emotional saying this to you. But one of the things that's been in the back of my mind is you've been talking the whole time is, man, is this man honoring his mother with his life. And I just want to acknowledge you for that, brother.

You're really honoring your mother so beautifully through the way that you speak about her. But the difference you've taken her difficult situation and turned it into millions of other lives that you served. What a way to honor your mother. Most of you, there's an example is all kinds of lessons today.

But the bigger one I'd love you to be looking at is that, you know, there's people in your life you could be honoring with the work you doing. That's what Max is doing. The other thing Max I love about you just want to say. When I was preparing for the interview, I was telling some people about you that didn't know you.

Obviously, we have lots of mutual friends that even connected us. But the interesting thing was what I love about you, brother is I can't say, well, he's a lot like so and so. If you're your own unique man, your own unique content, the people do not get anywhere else. This kind of information, this delivery, the way you do it with genius to phrase you, but with humility.

And it's easy to understand as well. There's one of you. And that's why I want everybody to follow you. I wanted to get the book, both books.

And I want them to take a look at your podcast. I think there's some value there for them as well ongoing in their lives. So I just wanted to say thank you, brother. Today was extraordinary, unbelievably detailed, and the hour flew by.

We've already done an hour. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Everybody remember this share the show with the fastest growing show in the world for reason because you guys share it with people that you care about every week.

I bring you somebody who has maxed out their life, Max has maxed out these areas of his life and is honoring his mother with doing this work. And I hope that you're ready to honor somebody in your life. Remember, every day on Instagram, I run the max out two minute drill, right? I make a post at seven 30 Pacific time every day, five days a week, turning notifications on you make a comment during that.

You're in a drawing every day to win something. If you miss the first two minutes, just make a comment on every post I make every day at any time. If you reply to other people's comments and increases your odds, I have not missed a week in years where we pick winners that get an autograph copy of my book, go on my jet, go to speaking events, meet my guests, get one on one coaching by me, Max out gear. And I'd love to connect with you as well.

So share the show and engage with me on Instagram as well. God bless you all Max out. This is the environment show.