#2170 - Max Lugavere

A
Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day. Joe Rogan podcast by night.

All day.

What's up, Max? How are you? So good. I know. What's cracking.

B
Oh, man. Just first of all, honored to be here. Thank you. Love you and your work. And, yeah, I mean, just national treasure.

A
That's very nice of you. Go out on a limb and say it. But no, I'm super, super excited because I've been working on this documentary for the last ten years of my life, and it's finally out today, which I'm super pumped for. It's called little empty boxes. And we talked about it the last time I was here, and it's a project that means the world to me.

B
I think it's the most important thing I've ever done, and it's the first ever dementia prevention documentary about the science of dementia prevention. But it focuses, it's a very emotional and personal film for me because it follows my mom, who for many years suffered from a rare form of dementia called Lewy body dementia, which is akin to having both Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease at the same time. That's what Robin Williams had. That's what Robin Williams had, yeah. And it's a rare condition.

It affects about 1 million people in the United States. But it's a dementia, and dementia is now a soaring public health problem. And there's a lot of controversy within the field. The last time I was here, we talked about fraud in the research space with regard to the prevailing hypothesis as to what causes Alzheimer's disease, which is the most common form of dementia. And actually, finally, over the past month, that paper was finally retracted.

It took two years. Could you explain to everybody what the fraud was? Yeah. So, basically, among the dementias, Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of it, and that affects about 6 million people in the United States. And since it was first named in 1906 by physician Aloise Alzheimer, the prevailing hypothesis as to what causes Alzheimer's disease, dubbed the amyloid hypothesis, has been that this plaque, formed by a precursor protein called amyloid beta, accumulates in the brain, and by finding a drug that can potentially remove, extract those plaques from the brain, from the extracellular space around neurons, that we could essentially cure the disease, that the causal factor in the condition was ultimately this amyloid beta protein, which forms the plaque.

And trial after trial, has been a dismal, had been a dismal failure, and it wasn't looking good until, in 2006, a paper was published in Nature which for any scientist publishing in Nature. It's like winning an Academy Award. And that paper, essentially what that did was it allegedly identified this variant of amyloid beta that connected the plaque to the cognitive dysfunction. So, the most important clinical feature of Alzheimer's disease, because for a long time, it was known that cognitively healthy people accumulate plaque in their brains, and that plaque doesn't seem to correlate with cognitive impairment or anything like that. And so that was very deflating for researchers in the field until this 2006 paper came out.

And what it did was it renewed faith in this hypothesis, which was always a hypothesis, and continued to send billions and billions of dollars worth of funding down this path. And what turned out to be the case just two years ago was that that paper was essentially fraudulent, and it represented about 16 years worth of wasted time, wasted money, which was hugely deflating for not just the research community, but also for any patient who's ever suffered from Alzheimer's disease. And the way that the field is now slowly starting to turn, but this is a drum that I've been beating for the past ten years, is that we really need to start talking about these conditions in terms of prevention. And that's what inspired me to set down this path of creating this documentary. Little empty boxes.

A
What was the fraud? How did they do it? So, basically, in the paper, they identified these proteins that they isolated in rat models of the condition, mouse models of the condition called a beta star. 56. Again, amyloid is.

B
Amyloid is there at the scene of the crime, so to speak. So when you have Alzheimer's disease, somebody who's died of Alzheimer's disease, what they find inevitably in the brains of cadavers who've died from Alzheimer's disease are two features. They see this aggregation of these plaques, amyloid beta plaques, and tangled proteins called tau. And so it was a very seductive narrative that this plaque causes the condition. Right.

For years, the problem is they've succeeded at reducing the plaque in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease, but that hasn't led to any improvement in the clinically meaningful features of the disease that we aspire to improve for sufferers of Alzheimer's disease. Right? The cognitive. The cognitive function. And in tandem with that, we see that amyloid is produced naturally in all brains.

And people who are cognitively healthy have amyloid in their brains. There's a degree of amyloid burden that seems to be inevitable as a just general phenomena due to aging. And so it was becoming very clear that amyloid is not the causative feature here, that there is some other factor or factors at play which lead to cognitive degeneration. Until 2006. And then in 2006, what happened?

This paper basically found this subtype that when injected into a mouse, caused profound cognitive dysfunction. And what they did was they illustrated these proteins on what are called, in what's called a western blot analysis, which is basically. Basically a graphical depiction of proteins and the peer review process for papers. I mean, people go in and they crunch the numbers and stuff, but they don't look at, like, imagery and they don't. They don't look with a.

They don't go through the imagery with a fine tooth comb to make sure that it hasn't been photoshopped, essentially. But one sleuth who is a scientist himself, this researcher from Vanderbilt named Matthew Schrag, actually identified that a lot of these images had artifacts that made it very clear that they were faked. Yeah. So full on fraud. Full on fraud.

And by the way, it's been two years. It took two years for that paper finally to be retracted. Are there any consequences towards people that published that paper? I mean, it's obviously, they have a lot of egg on their face, so to speak. I mean, it's a hugely humiliating.

But no, I don't think that there's. They're still employed. Yeah. The lead researcher still employed. I mean, they're investigating Sylvain Lesney, who's a university of.

He is a. I want to say Michigan, not Michigan. It'll come to me. But the primary researcher is being investigated, as far as I know. So the primary researcher, they're connecting to the photoshop.

A
They're saying this person might have been the one, that it was very clear. It was very clear. And that, you know, it's so dirty. It's so dirty. It's so evil for all the people that are looking for some sort of relief.

B
Yeah. And that, you know, you have this scientific paper, you publish, and you knowingly release these photoshopped images in order to validate your paper. There's a ton of fraud and. God. Yeah, it's so evil when you think about how many people suffer from this.

So many people, and you're giving them. This false hope just to boost up your academic career. Yeah, it's awful. The lost time. And by the way, that paper has been subsequently referenced thousands of times in the medical literature, basically, you know, negating a ton of research.

I mean, like, countless papers that have been since published that have referenced that paper in 2006, that nature paper that was finally retracted. I mean, think about the lost time think about the needless suffering. And it's my view that dementia, essentially, by the time you are diagnosed with dementia, we'll say Alzheimer's disease, you are in late stage Alzheimer's disease. Whether it's mild, whether you were just diagnosed yesterday, this is a disease of midlife with symptoms that appear in late life. And so that's why the field is now slowly, hopefully, I hope, pivoting more towards prevention and where the money, I think, needs to go is into identifying that golden biomarker that's associated with the onset of the condition so that clinicians can intervene earlier, because right now, when you catch it, it's sort of like pancreatic cancer, which, incidentally, my mom passed from in 2018.

But pancreatic cancer, most of the time it's diagnosed. I mean, it's too late. The tumor is already metastasized. And so this is kind of similar with Alzheimer's disease. By the time it's diagnosed, you're already very late in the game.

There's widespread neuronal dysfunction. Glucose metabolism in the brain is diminished by 50%. So again, you're catching it in its latest stages, ultimately. And that's why I think Alzheimer's drug trials have a 99%, 99.6% fail rate. Because by the time you catch it, I think reversing it is, you know, impossible.

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A
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B
And so that's why ten years ago, when I saw this developing in my mom and I stumbled upon all this research and I began really diving in, it became very clear to me that this is something that. That anybody with a brain needs to be aware of and talking about. And what's the factors when it comes to someone eventually getting Alzheimer's? Is it purely genetic? Is it lifestyle?

A
Is it diet? Are there environmental factors and toxins? What is it? Yeah, so there are what are called risk factors. So the heritability of Alzheimer's disease is very low, it's like two to 3%.

B
And the variant that is hereditary is early onset familial, but that affects. That makes up a very tiny proportion of overall Alzheimer's incidence. And similarly with Parkinson's disease, the heritability of Parkinson's disease is very low. And I definitely want to talk about Parkinson's disease because there's a lot of really interesting new research in that field. But by and large, with regard to Alzheimer's disease, you have what are called your non modifiable risk factors, which are your age, you can't change your age, your gender.

You can't change your gender. And your genes, you can't change your genes, although you can affect how your genes express themselves, which is known as epigenetics. But then you have your modifiable risk factors, which I think is so exciting because these are the risk factors that you have agency over. You can control obesity, hypertension, type two diabetes. I mean, these are all nutritionally mediated, obviously, which I love talking about nutrition and nutrition, insofar as it can prevent or reverse obesity.

I think that's incredibly empowering. Type two diabetes. If you have type two diabetes, your risk for developing Alzheimer's disease increases between two and four fold. They're actually. Now, we interviewed in my documentary the researcher who coined the term type three diabetes.

Have you heard that? Are you familiar with that? No. Concept? No, I haven't.

So it's looking a lot like Alzheimer's disease might, in fact be a form of diabetes of the brain. Wow. Which is a mind blowing way to think about this condition. And, in fact, we see that peripheral insulin resistance. So the hallmark of type two diabetes is insulin resistance.

And we see that the more insulin resistant a person is, the more difficulty their brains seem to have with regard to creating ATP, which is the primary energy currency of our cells. And the researcher who coined type three diabetes, her name is Suzanne Delamante. She's a brown University researcher, and she is in no way in the public sphere. She's a, you know, purely a bench researcher. She's actually in my documentary.

It was, like, incredible to get to interview her and speak to her. But it seems that insulin resistance causes the brain to suffer in many ways. It damages the blood vessels. Ultimately, when you have type two diabetes, it damages the blood vessels that supply the brain with oxygen, nutrients, energy. But it also seems to impair.

There also seems to be an aspect of insulin resistance that reduces the brain's ability to generate energy. Okay, so when you first started becoming aware of this, when your mother develops this condition, you first start being aware of it. What were the first things that you noticed that started to get you to question whether or not the conventional applications of drugs or on the right path? Yeah, I mean, you know, I grew up in New York City, and when my mom first started to show these symptoms, and how did you notice it? Like, what were the symptoms?

She would. I mean, we would have, I was living in LA at the time, and so we would, we would touch base every other day via phone. And she started to complain to me about brain fog. And there was some aspect of what she was sharing with me that I thought was just a natural part of getting older. But ultimately, she revealed to me and the rest of my family that she had sought the help of a neurologist.

And that seemed odd. You know, why would my mom. I hadn't had any prior family incidents of dementia, anything like that. Why was my mom suddenly going to see a neurologist?

But, you know, like, I was still in LA living my life. I was in my late twenties at the time, but it wasn't until a trip to Miami. My family went down to Miami to hang out with my dad because my parents had been separated, and my mom was in the kitchen. And she confessed to the family that she'd been having memory problems at this point. So it had been described as brain fog, but she revealed that she had sought the help of a neurologist.

And, you know, me and my brothers and my dad, we were in total disbelief that my mom was having anything outside of the. Could possibly be having anything outside of the realm of ordinary. And so we were kind of mocking her in a way. And we said, well, if you're really having such profound problems, what month is it? Or I think it was like, what year is it?

Or something like that. And she couldn't recall. She couldn't recall what the month was, and she started to cry. And at that point, for me, that's when I knew that something was really wrong, that I needed to step in. Because, you know, when you're sick, it is a really, that's a really scary place to be.

It could be frustrating, it could be confusing. And, you know, when you're in these doctors offices and they're, you know, oftentimes they don't have the best bedside manner, and they run a battery of esoteric tests, it can be incredibly overwhelming, and it becomes really hard to advocate for yourself. I've learned as somebody with a chronic illness, not least of which a chronic illness that's affecting your cognition and so I decided at that point, essentially, that I had to pack up my la life. I moved back to New York, and I started going with my mom from doctor's visit to doctor's visit. And again, you know, I'm pretty privileged.

Grew up in New York City. My mom had health insurance resources. We started going to all of these different cathedrals, to western medicine, academic medical insight. And in every instance, I experienced what I've come to call, over time, diagnose and adios. A physician would run these tests, titrate up the dose of a medication that she was already on.

One physician actually thought that all of her symptoms were due to depression. There's this idea of the hysterical woman. Today, one in four women over the age of 40 are on an antidepressant drug. One in four. Yeah.

Over the age of 40. Jesus Christ. Yeah, they're. I mean, I'm not saying there's no use for them, those kinds of drugs, but they're very overprescribed. That's not.

That's not. I don't think that's controversial. And so my mom was given one of these drugs without full informed consent, I don't think. I mean, ultimately, we tried to get her off of them, which we found out was incredibly difficult to do. Titrating off one of these SSRI's is really, really hard, actually.

And it turned out, obviously, to be the case that my mom. That these symptoms were not due to depression, they were due to degeneration in her brain. And we went from doctor's office to doctor's office, ultimately culminating in a trip to the Cleveland clinic. So just imagine, like, we're in New York City, right? We have, like, multiple hospitals at our disposal.

We had to book a trip to the Cleveland clinic. And it was there that for the first time, my mom was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative condition. So she prescribed drugs for both Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease at that time. And that, to me, was. I'd never.

I've always been a pretty chill guy, but that was the first time in my life I'd ever. I've ever had a panic attack just googling the drugs, you know, like a scared. Like any scared kid would do when their mom receives a life changing diagnosis. And that was the moment for me that I realized that my life had to pivot, and I had no choice but to dedicate myself to learning all that I could about these conditions. And so you find out about the fraud, and how long into your research did you find out?

A
That most of what people understood about the condition was based on this fraudulent study. Well, it's not even just the study. It's the fact that these conditions begin decades before the emergence of symptoms. You know, again, it's a disease of midlife, essentially. Alzheimer's disease begins 20 to 30 years, if not more, before the first symptom.

B
And so, to me, it became very clear that we were approaching these conditions in the wrong way. You know, trying to. Acting in a reactionary way to something that had taken decades to manifest to me just seemed wrong. And I stumbled upon the work of a neurologist at Weill Cornell, New York Presbyterian, who was talking about Alzheimer's disease as a preventable condition, which is not something that I'd heard prior to coming across his work. And I realized at that time that this was, like, considered ten years ago, a fringe idea.

Dementia prevention was like a fringe idea, except for through the lens of this neurologist, who was working within the confines of rigorous, randomized research and checking all the boxes for scientific credibility.

And so, to me, it became really clear that this is a topic that I needed to help amplify, using my skillset as a non medical doctor, as a non academic scientist. And I also learned really early on that it's not a genetic condition, that we have genetic risk factors, but that we have a say when it comes to our cognitive destiny, that this is not a natural part of aging. I mean, you know, everything in the body as you get older tends to falter in its functionality. You know, like, our joints don't work as well. And there is a degree of forgetfulness that I think is, in a way, a natural aspect of getting older.

But cognitive impairment, that's not natural. Degeneration of our neurons of, for example, the portion of the brain that drives movement, the substantia nigra, which occurs in Parkinson's disease, that's not normal. And so it began this investigation for me trying to understand, because I was seeing the person who meant the most to me of anybody in life degenerating every day in front of my face, getting worse and worse and worse. It instilled this burning desire in me to understand all that I could and to share in the hopes that it might prevent it from happening to others.

And, yeah, it was also very odd because my. I. My maternal grandmother did not have dementia. So it was really sad and surreal, in fact, that my mom was increasingly requiring around the clock care while her mother, who lived in the same home and was 30 years older, was cognitively totally healthy. It was just the oddest thing.

My grandmother, my mom's mom, was in her nineties and totally cognitively healthy, able to form cogent senses, and my mom was struggling to express an idea to get out of a bathroom. And it just. To me, it was so shocking that I, you know, it was traumatic. I mean, I still have ptsd, I think, from those days, but it's. Yeah, it's motivated me to do what I can to help.

And I saw all in every. You know, by the end of my mom's life, she was on 14 different pharmaceuticals, and I'm not antipharma. Like, if there was a drug that would have actually helped my mom, I would have been first in line at the pharmacy to fill that prescription for her. But the drugs don't work at all, and physicians are very quick to write a prescription to add a new drug to the arsenal. They're very reluctant to depreci.

I have never seen a prescription depreci to my mom. And by the end of her life, she was on 14 different pharmaceuticals. And there's nobody on earth that understands how all of those different drugs are interacting in an I, you know, in a system that's going. Growing increasingly frail. It was just really sad, and, you know, so I started to investigate these modifiable risk factors, you know, whether it's diet, dietary, diet related, which it.

You know, in my mom's case, it may have had something to do with her diet over the years. It might have had nothing to do with her diet over the years. I'll never know. But also now we're starting to see that air pollution is a major contributor to neurodegeneration. We're starting to see now that, well, as of 2020, it was acknowledged that exposure to air pollution is actually one of these newly identified modifiable risk factors for Alzheimer's disease.

So exposure to fine particulate matter, pm two five, actually might cause Alzheimer's disease for some patients. And then, most interestingly, and this is one of the things that I want to talk about with you, which I came across the work of a neurologist named Doctor Ray Dorsey, who's over at University of Rochester, who's done a lot of work publishing on the link between environmental toxicants and Parkinson's disease. Parkinson's disease is now the fastest growing brain disease, and my mom's condition actually had more in common with Parkinson's disease than it did Alzheimer's disease. She had Lewy body dementia, which has more in common with Parkinson's, even though they're both dementia, Lewy body and Alzheimer's. But there's data now linking exposure to certain herbicides and pesticides to Parkinson's disease.

Dramatically increased risk anywhere between two and a half to six fold increased risk. Which herbicides and pesticides. So there's a pesticide called paraquat that. There's a great article written in the Guardian. Bye.

A journalist named Carrie Gilliam and I got to speak on a panel with her recently at a scientific conference in DC called brain and environment and paraquat is this compound that. It's an herbicide that's produced in China, but its use is banned in China. We import it here. Yeah, it's crazy. We use it here.

And occupational exposure to this compound is associated with between two and a half to three times the risk for the development of Parkinson's disease related compounds are literally used in mouse models to create Parkinson's disease. And the company that has that creates it has been under investigation for years. And what has now come to light is that they knew about the fact that these chemicals accumulate in the brain, in brain tissue, and they seem to selectively target the region of the brain associated with Parkinson's disease, the substantia nigra. Wow. It's very scary.

A
And what crops are these used on? Is it specific crops? Is specific foods to avoid? How do you know if those pesticides or herbicides are being used? Well, the residues and the exposures that you get from eating them is very low.

B
But we don't know what long term exposure to those low levels is doing to us. I mean, my mother is somebody who never believed in organic produce. Right? And organic is not perfect. And natural compounds, some of them are the most dangerous compounds on earth.

So I know some people listening might say, oh, here we go with the appeal to nature fallacy. But it's very clear that occupational exposure is very hazardous. You have to be licensed, you have to use this stuff very carefully. But some people actually use it to off themselves. It's a really toxic compound, and we now have data suggesting that it creates this condition, that it selectively targets and destroys dopamine producing neurons that mediate movement.

And it's used. Yeah, it's used in cereal grains, things like that.

A
Why does cannabis oil have a profound effect on Parkinson's patients? I don't know about cannabis oil, but I can tell you about nicotine. And nicotine is a very interesting compound from the vantage point of Parkinsonism.

B
I know. I mean, a lot of people love nicotine, obviously, for its cognitive boosting effects. I'm not going to say that it's a healthy compound. I mean, I think that it has cardiovascular repercussions and the like, but there seems to be a. And of course, smoking is terrible for.

A
You, but cardiovascular, with the delivery method. Or just across the board, nicotine by itself raises heart rate and it raises blood pressure acutely. Not by much, but presumably, and it's vasoconstrictive as well, so there's some evidence suggesting it impedes wound healing.

B
I will occasionally use nicotine as a cognitive enhancer, but I also have. I have chronic low back issues. I think that for people with disc issues, this is just a speculation, but I think that it's probably not a good idea to chronically use nicotine if you have disc issues, which are already. Your discs and your back are already poorly vascularized, and nicotine is a vasoconstrictor, and smoking increases your risk for Alzheimer's disease. I don't think that we've identified a relationship between pure nicotine and, well, pretty much anything.

The research on pure nicotine by itself is pretty sparse. Most of the research on the health effects of nicotine is confounded by smoking, which is obviously not good for you. But interestingly, there does seem to be an inverse relationship between nicotine use, even via smoking, and parkinsonism. So people who smoke cigarettes seem to be protected to some degree against Parkinson's disease, which is very odd. And they've shown in mouse models that nicotine actually, when they use some of these mitochondrial toxins, some of these poisons, like paraquat, right, or another one called MPTP, which has been used as a street party drug, but it's actually profoundly neurotoxic.

It's been shown to create chronic parkinsonism with just acute use. Nicotine actually prevents that in those models. So it's been shown to somehow protect the brain from, in some regards against Parkinson's disease. So I wouldn't recommend using nicotine unless somebody. And this is, again, a speculation, but my hypothesis is that if you were exposed occupationally to some of these compounds, like paraquat or rotenone, or there are other compounds that are being directly connected to Parkinson's disease too, like trichloroethylene, I would say maybe nicotine is a potentially disease modifying intervention in those contexts.

A
So in these, when they've studied patients, was there a noticeably smaller instance of people that developed Parkinson's who were smokers, or was it non existent? I'm not sure the relative risk decrease, but it's one of these odd things that seems pretty consistent in the literature that smokers are less likely to develop Parkinson's disease. What factor? I'm not sure, I'm not sure the factor, but it's significant. It's significant, but smokers are more likely to develop a whole host of other.

Oh yeah, it's terrible for you. Yeah, but that's the interesting thing is that nicotine, it's thought that nicotine protects this one region of the brain in a significant way. Sorry, have they looked at people that are taking nicotine in different ways, like cigars, gum patches, things along those lines? Not a lot of the, a lot of the research on nicotine is in animal models, unfortunately.

B
But it is, I mean it does seem to do, if you set the vascular effects aside, which might play a role in neurodegeneration, because the brain relies on its vascular network. The brain is a very hungry organ, and vascular dementia is the second most common form of dementia, actually. But nicotine does seem to have some really protective effects on the brain. It seems to reduce neuroinflammation.

It might act in a way as an antioxidant in the brain. I'm not recommending it because there are risks, of course, but they've shown that it seems to be protective in these animal models against these poisons that would otherwise cause parkinsonism. And some other cool facts about nicotine, actually, because I did do a little bit of a deep dive recently into it, because I do notice a cognitive benefit when I use it. Nicotine, how do you use it? I just use it, I use it before.

A
But what, in what form? A lozenge, like a little like, you know, lozenge and I don't have an addictive personality, so for me, I'm not like, you know, it's not something that I feel compelled to do every day, but I do it before, like I have to go on like a tv show or do a big podcast or something and, and I do see, you know, I do definitely see like a cognitive bit like a st, it's a stimulant that's pretty well known. But I, but yeah, nicotine also, it has a very short half life. So its half life is only about 2 hours. I mean you compare that to coffee.

B
Coffees is like 8 hours. So its relatively transient in your system. But then I think the more interesting compound is its primary metabolite, which is called cotanine, which cotanine's half life is 20 hours long. And it seems to also boost cognitive function, mental health. Insofar as animal models can show us that these compounds boost mental health, might even enhance what's called fear extinction.

So for people with PTSD, it might play a role. So it's a really interesting compound, but again, it's highly addictive. What is cotinine? It's nicotine's primary metabolite in the body. So when you ingest nicotine, nicotine lasts in the body only about the half life is 2 hours.

So it lasts presumably about 4 hours, but it converts to this compound called cotinine in the body, and the half life of that compound is about 20 hours. So it's in your system for a long time, and that compound doesn't have any of the negative side effects of nicotine. It just seems to do all these interesting. Cool. So it has all the positives and none of the negatives?

It seems to it. I mean, it's not a stimulant. Short and long term effects of. That's codeine, bro. It's cot.

A
I was trying to spell it. Different compound. Yeah, that's never fuck you up. That's in cough syrup. Cotinine.

B
Yeah. How do you spell it? Cot ine, I believe. Yeah, it's super interesting stuff.

A
And do people take this as a supplement? No, but your body readily will create it from. I don't know if it doesn't have the cotinine. Yeah, there we go. Produced by the body after exposure to nicotine.

The main metabolite of nicotine, 70, 80% of nicotine is converted to cotinine. Cotinine is often used as a biomarker for exposure to tobacco smoke. Can be detected in urine. Okay. Cotinine can remain in the body a day or more.

Nicotine disappears within a few hours. Yeah, but you can google, like, cotinine fear extinction or cotinine cognition. That's really why people will say that cigarettes relaxed them. Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's an anxiolytic.

B
It reduces anxiety. Interesting. Yeah. See, I mean, it does seem to be this. It's like this really interesting compound where it does all these, you know, it has all these effects in the body that many of which I'm sure are negative, but it does seem to do some good stuff for the brain, which is fascinating, you know?

So I think, again, I'm not promoting it, but if you're able to forge as an adult a responsible relationship with it, then maybe it's worth experimenting with, particularly because of its potential to. I don't want this to come off as an endorsement for nicotine, but its ability potentially to protect against parkinsonism is very interesting. And so when a person, you're saying, so this is something that starts to happen in midlife, and then it really expresses itself in dramatic ways years later.

A
Other than the environmental factors, what dietary factors contribute, except obviously, pesticides and herbicides that are unfortunately a part of our food system now. Yeah, I mean, here's the thing. Organic is, as I mentioned, it's not a panacea. And today on social media, if you insomuch as mention organic, and that debate, organic versus conventional, I mean, there's so much controversy. But, you know, I think that as we've seen, right, with paraquat and this chinese company that has shrouded the data, and in fact, they, they've assembled internally a SWAT team to essentially suppress data suggesting harm due to exposure to this herbicide.

Even though it's banned? Even though it's banned in China. Yeah. Wow. Just so they can keep selling it.

B
Just so they could keep selling it. But there was another article that came out recently in the publication ProPublica, written by, I believe her name was Sharon Lerner, another journalist who I connected with at this DC event that I was at recently, who it was this crazy three m has been hiding the health harms, shrouding the health, suppressing the health harms due to exposure to these pfas. Pfas compounds that are forever chemicals. Known endocrine disruptors in band Aids. Yeah.

So there's all this corporate collusion and shrouding of the truth. And I'm just like, I think insofar as you can reduce your exposures to these kinds of things and selectively, if money is scarce, selectively buy certain things organic. I think that makes sense. Do they have organic band aids? That's a good question.

I don't know, but they recently identified these compounds. Yeah, I read the study about the band Aid thing and I was like, jesus Christ, is anything safe? It's not fucking band aids. We've all got microplastics in our balls these days. Microplastics in our atheromas.

A
Right. Like they found in our arteries that the presence of microplastics was associated with two to three fold increased risk of cardiovascular death. So here it is, partnering with environmental health news, the consumer watchdog sent 40 bandages of different brands. US Environmental Protection Agency certified lab. The lab found that 65% of the bandages contain detectable levels of synthetic forever chemicals, or Pfas.

B
Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And that is so crazy because it's an open wound. Yes.

A
It's like literally mainlining right into your bloodstream. It's nuts. And you talk about this stuff today on social media, and you're accused of fear mongering, of being alarmist. You're not. It's.

Yeah. What is that, though? Is that trolls from pharmaceutical companies? I mean, they're. That's something that I guarantee you.

Corporations use. Nations use it. And we know they do. And we know we do. We know that there's troll farms in Russia.

We know this is a real thing. Why wouldn't corporations use that, too? Especially if they could farm that off and be removed from it. As far as, like, being able to. Trace back the paperwork, I mean, we see it all.

B
I mean, even within our own, you know, within our own government, the USDA, the dietary guidelines for Americans, 95% of people on that committee have had. Have or have had conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical industry and the food industry. Yeah. At least 50% that I'm aware of today. You know, working on the 2025 issue, we see all the time.

There's been a number of great journalism done in the Washington Post exposing how the food industry pays dietitians to promote a certain ideology around food. That all foods are cool. You just have to eat less and move more. All foods fit. There are no good or bad foods, which.

It's hilarious. It's crazy. Yeah, I mean, these companies, they pay these people that are body positive influencers as well. So they're basically paying people that are ill because of eating these things to tell other people it's okay to eat these things and that it's somehow or another phobic, whether it's fatphobic or whatever it is, to not encourage body positivity. And it's stupid.

A
It's just stupid. It's stupid for the people that are getting it. It's stupid for the people that are promoting it. It's stupid for our culture to be inundated with this nonsense and misinformation where we have to sort through it and try to do deeper research and consult people who actually understand what's going on. It's so disheartening that we live in this world that's so compromised by money, that information about key things like your own health is so distorted that it's hard.

You talk to people, and so many people have a basic misunderstanding of what is good and not good for you. And all of it is because of this kind of thing that it's just so prevalent and it's so confusing. And you're getting expert advice from people, which is one of the wildest ones for me. When you look at. Oh, thank you.

Get some coffee in your system there, fella. Thanks, brother. Cheers, sir. Cheers. Good to see you.

B
Same. One of the things that's crazy to me is that we get expert advice from people that are clearly sick. How many times have you had nutrition or dietary advice from someone who is obese? Yeah, you're fat, you have no muscle, your body looks like it's just in decay. And you're the person giving advice.

Yeah, I mean, most of the social media Personas that I've observed that purport to be experts or that seem to have. I don't know whether it's through credentialism, a degree of authority. I mean, I wouldn't send a loved one too. It's just gaslighting on a mass scale, because your average person today comes across this ideology that all foods are fine, it's all good, and they try to reduce their consumption of the crap that they're already eating, and they end up failing at that because it's really hard to moderate your consumption of these foods, which have been engineered to be consumed quickly and regularly. And then they feel as though they're, you know, they feel moral failure.

And then it just creates this vicious cycle of yo yo dieting. We are not being honest about the way that these foods impact behavior. And today, 60% of the calories that your average person consumes comes from ultra processed foods, which are foods that are highly calorie dense, they are nutrient poor, they are minimally satiating, they're uber delicious. I mean, they push your brain to a bliss point beyond which self control is seemingly impossible. And by the way, it's these ultra processed foods that are a major route of ingestion for these kinds of chemicals that we're talking about.

These industrial chemicals, forever chemicals. You know, ultra processed foods are, you know, if you want more phthalates in your body, consume more ultra processed foods. There was a study that recently was published that found that for every 10% increment in ultra processed food consumption, pregnant women were ingesting about 14% higher levels of these phthalates. Right? I mean, you did such an amazing episode with Shana swan a couple years ago, talking about the fact that our exposure to these chemicals are reducing the anogenital distance in boys, right?

Which is a very easy. Well, I don't know if easy is the right term, but it's a very simple proxy to use to identify how these compounds might be affecting us. But that's only what you can observe how are these chemicals affecting us in other ways? Right. You know, and so it's crazy.

And these are the kinds of foods that we're just eating en masse, day in and day out. And 60% is. The average children consume about 70% ultra processed foods today, on average, black Americans, unfortunately, consume 80% ultra processed foods. And there's obviously, this is not all choice. There are systemic issues.

Many people today still live in food deserts. Accessibility is an issue. Cost is an issue. I know all that, but the messaging that we're getting from our most trusted sources is essentially that everything's fine. Just eat less, move more.

A
Yeah. And it's so difficult for the average American to access information from people that they can trust or to figure out who to trust. You know, you get experts that tell you, oh, you don't need to take supplements, you just need a well balanced diet. And you go, oh, vitamins are bullshit. And you have people expressing that.

How could someone say that when there's so much data on the efficacy of vitamins and the benefit of vitamin supplementation, of course. And vitamins. I mean, we need vitamins. Supplements can be really helpful. And I get asked this a lot, like, who do you know who to trust on social media?

B
I think a really good heuristic is, you know, somebody, actually, I was giving a talk recently, and somebody highlighted that one good indicator of somebody who is likely trustworthy is somebody who is willing to present the opposing viewpoint. And not straw man the opposing viewpoint, but actually, Steelman, the opposing viewpoint. Like, to actually make clear what the opposing viewpoint is and then to refute. That viewpoint so they're not ideologically connected to the result. Exactly.

So I try to do that. I try to share where I've changed my mind in the past or where I've evolved in my viewpoint. I try to be clear about the things that I don't know. I don't know. I'm also not trying to be one of these people on social media that purports to know everything, to have the magic routine or protocol for everything as some kind of all knowing arbiter of health information, because I feel like there are still so many unknowns and I could easily one day develop what it is that my mom developed.

I hope I don't. I had a health scare in 2022 that, you know, just proved to me that, you know, there is a lot of, like, luck that goes into this, you know, into this equation as well. My back hurts. I don't know how to fix that. Like, you know, what have you been.

A
Doing for your back? Um, well, I try. You have bulging discs. What do you have? Oh, man.

B
I have, like, mild or. It's probably progressed, but it's like desiccation between l five and s one, and then. So it's like, basically a dehydrated disc, which I got from just squatting improperly ten years ago, and my back's, like, never been the same since. Have you ever used a reverse hyper? No.

A
You don't know about that? No. It was a piece of machinery that was designed by west side Barbell, Louis Roberts. What's his name? Simmons.

Simmons. Louie Simmons. Sorry. Louie Simmons from West side Barbell developed this machine that strengthens the back and actively decompresses the back. And what it is, is your body weight with your chest down, sits on this bench, and underneath it, you hook your legs to this thing that's like a leg curl, and you lift up, which strengthens your back.

And on the decel, when it brings it down, it's actively pulling your back. Hmm. And it's phenomenal. Whoa. It's really good.

It's really good at decompressing your back. It's really good at strengthening all the muscles around your back to keep your back stable. This is the machine right here. We have. Yeah, we have the rogue version of it out there in the studio.

I could show it to you after we're done here. But I love it. It's phenomenal. And it's great for developing leg strength and hamstring strength and glute strength, but really, I use it for lower back for decompression. Show a video, Jamie, if you would, so we could see how it worked.

This is Louie. He was on the podcast back in the day. He was an amazing guy and very innovative. So he was a power lifter and developed some back problems himself. But you see how on the downswing, it's actually pulling your back and you can feel it pull your back so you can feel it separate everything.

You feel like little things pop in there, and it provides relief. And for him, they were telling them he had to get his disc fused because he had too much compression. He said, well, what about decompression? And they were reluctant to consider that. And so he's a genius, a fitness genius, and so he designed a machine that would actively decompress the spine while strengthening the muscles around it.

B
Whoa. That sounds awesome. Yeah. Have you done any decompression stuff? I bought this thing that you hang upside down on it, you know?

I mean, this was like a couple years ago. I don't know if it helped that much. You know what actually has helped me a lot? I took up during the pandemic, boxing. Really?

Yeah. Okay, so what's going on is it's strengthening your lower back, which is helping you. That's helped. Yeah, yeah. You need to strengthen it, for sure.

A
This is better. Another thing, when you're talking about the hanging, you're talking about a teeter, right? Which teeter, I like that unit. But teeter makes what I think is a far better unit, which is the Dex. Whoa.

And so we have that outside, too. And what that does is instead of having hanging from your ankles, so your legs tense up and your legs resist the weight of your body. Instead of that, everything hinges down from your hips, and you will, like, immediately feel, when you get on there, your back popping and decompressing. I use that every day. It's called the DeX.

Dex two. And, you know, just buy it off Amazon. It's not expensive. You also could do back extension exercises on it. It's very versatile mAchine.

But MandeV for decompressing the back, I've never found anything better. Changed my life. That's awesome. And I also use those kinds of things with weight. So what I'll do is I'll hold 220 pound dumbbells in my hands, and I'll do back extensions.

So I'm developing strength around all those lower back issues. I've had a lot of back issues from disc degeneration, from jiu jitsu, you know, 20 years of wrestling with men and getting your neck strangled, and it's like, it does a lot of stuff to your. To your back that's not good. And you've never had surgery, right? No.

Everyone that I know has had problems. I do not know anyone that has had back surgery. That's like, that's the best thing I ever did. Everyone like Daniel Cormier, UFC champion, you know, he's like, I was never the same. Once they cut my back open, it was never the same.

There's ways to also deal with it with stem cells. And one of the things they're doing now, because the FDA has such restrictive rules on stem cells, people are going overseas and other countries to do it. And I have some friends that run a clinic down in Tijuana, the cellular Performance institute. And I know many people, including a good friend of mine, my friend Shane Dorian, who is a world champion surfer who had pretty severe back problems. He went there, and they're injecting directly into the discs, and there's a very strict protocol of recovery.

You're not doing anything physical for like, a couple of months. After that, you can walk, essentially. They don't want any stress on the back, anything that's going to impede the healing process. He said within six months after that, all of the issues that he had went away. Wow.

Getting up in the morning, it was always like, oh, just stiff. No, stiff. With a new back now. Wow. Wild.

B
Wild. And you could do that again. And you could do it again and you could do it again. Like, it's not like a thing you could only do once. Right?

A
It's not like a surgery. They're going to go in and remove part of your disc. So they do that, the dissectomy, they'll take a chunk of your disc out. That's pressing against the nerve. But now, guess what?

Now you have less disc tissue, you have less cushioning in between your spinal column, which is not good. And this is a way that they're doing now that seems to work. And it's certainly at least worth a try, you know, for people that are considering something that can have life changing effects. Hmm. Yeah.

B
I mean, whenever I sneeze, I have back pain, tilting over a sink, putting on my underwear. It's. But I live with it. Like, I'm strong. I'm the strongest I've ever been.

I'm in, you know, good shape, but it is my, it is sort of my Achilles heel. Do you ever do windmills, like kettlebell? Windmills? No. Another phenomenal lower back exercise.

A
Great for the entire core. But you clean and press a kettlebell and then you turn to the side with like. So if I'm holding the kettlebell up with my right arm, my left foot would be pointed that way with your knee bent, and you drop down like this. Whoa. Yeah.

And then all the way up like that. And so it's on both sides. It's strengthening all those supporting muscles around your spine and it just gives you much better range of motion. I could feel things sort of pop and move and twist around when I do it. It's great.

B
Whoa. Love it. Phenomenal. I'm gonna do that. Yeah.

A
Turkish get ups. Another one. Do you ever do those? Not a very sexy exercise, but phenomenal for your core and just your overall ability to move things, you know, because it strengthens all of the connecting areas. Instead of strengthening different specific muscle groups, it really is working on strengthening all the weaknesses in your system.

You know? You know how Turkish get up works? So you're lying flat on your back you press this up, you sit up, you get to one knee, you post the other knee, you get up, you stand up straight, and then you lower yourself back the same way. Damn. Very, very difficult exercise.

Difficult to do, but phenomenal for the whole thing. And I think one of the problems that people have when it comes to weightlifting and developing problems, and, you know, I've certainly had plenty, is that you're overloading certain muscle groups, and then all the stuff that connects things together, the lower back, the neck, all these different issues, they happen because your whole system is not strong, uniformly like. You're developing strong muscle groups, like quads. But how are the hamstrings? How are the things behind your calves?

How are your tip muscles? How's your lower back? What's going on? What exercises have you done to make sure that your spine is protected? I find that unilateral movements are really helpful.

B
Like bulgarian split squats. Oh, yeah. As painful as those are to do, I find that those help a lot, and they don't aggravate my lower back at all. Like, I can't. I can't barbell squat.

I can't even really? Cause my range of motion is now so limited. Do, like, leg presses, like, on the machine. Your range of motion for your back. Well, do you do leg presses?

It's just limited in the sense that, like, my. I don't know what. I don't know the terminology, but it's like hip mobility or something. Like, my legs only get to a certain point where I get that butt wink thing, you know, like, my lower back starts curving up words on the leg press, and that's like, strain. Do you do slant board exercises?

No, I don't. What is that? Okay. There's a guy called the slant board guy that made this dope product, and one of the things I love about his go to slant board guys page. One of the things I love about his is his has these little hooks on the side where you can add bands to it as well.

A
And so what a slant board is, is a board that you do squats on where the back of it is raised, so your toes are pointing down, your heels are pointing up. And what this allows you to do is get a very deep bend of the knees, and you get your knees that push out over your toes, and you really lower, you know, ass to Heelsen. And what I do with those, that's it right there. That's. I have that one at home.

He made me one of those. So you can do this. He's. They're doing it with different exercises here. These are just calf strengthening exercises.

I do them with body weight squats, and one of the things I do them with is goblet squats. I have very strong legs, but I never do deadlifts, and I never do, like, regular squats. The heaviest thing I squat with is a 100 pound kettlebell. So I hold a 100 pound kettlebell in front of me, and then I do goblet squats on that. And what that does is it strengthens.

When you have a heavy weight, like a hundred pound kettlebell, and you're holding it in this position just to hold it there, your whole body wants to go forward. Right. Because it's like it's all this weight out in front of you. So you're stabilizing it with your lower back, you're stabilizing with your abs, and then you're dropping down very deep into this body weight squat and then up for this goblet squat. And I do it on that, on the slant board.

Phenomenal. And it doesn't put a lot of strain on your back. That's awesome. I've noticed that front squats or. Yeah, maybe.

B
I guess I've used dumbbells to do goblet squats. Those are great, too. Yeah, yeah. A lot less load on the spine, so that's helped me a lot, too. And really hard to do.

A
Yeah. So this is it right here. This gentleman's doing it right here perfectly. So he's doing a bunch of different variations of it. So he's doing, you know, oh, look.

Yeah, he's going sad side lunges. So the goblet squad is there. So he's got, this is a. Who's this guy right here? Oh, it's on the slant board guys channel.

So slant board guy, like I said, he sent me that, and he's, he's been doing this. He made these quite a while, a long time ago. And I I think it's just a phenomenal piece of exercise equipment that I don't, I have in every gym I have here. That's freaking awesome. Yeah.

B
Yeah. I mean, fitness is a huge part of my life, but it's. I've been limited for the past decade. Because of the back. Because of the back.

A
After this podcast, I'm gonna take you next door and show you that reverse hyper, and you get to experience that, Dex. Yeah. Just those two things alone, I think, will provide you tremendous relief. So excited. And the Dex you just have in your house, it's, like, simple, easy to set up.

B
I'm so down. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, there's a lot that I obviously don't know, but I know what I know, and I know that from a nutritional standpoint, from an environmental exposure standpoint, your average american today is inflicting self harm unwittingly on a daily basis. Yeah.

Via the foods, via the exposures. Yeah. We're just constantly taking in things that give us inflammation. Yeah. And, you know, our circadian rhythms are all dysregulated.

We're more sedentary than we've ever been. We're exposed to. I mean, the. I believe it was. The environmental working group identified 217 industrial chemicals in cord blood of pregnant women were being exposed from every which way.

And it's not necessarily that it's one compound that's causing all of our problems, but it's cumulative injury. Our bodies are resilient, but they can only contend with so much. So you throw all these exposures against the backdrop of widespread nutrient deficiencies, unprecedented sedentary behavior, chronic stress, poor sleep, and it's a recipe for chronic disease. To me, it's very clear as to why so many of us seem to be suffering. It's very difficult for someone who's swimming in a sea of that to figure out how to course correct.

Yeah. To quote unquote, detoxify, which has become one of these contentious words now on social media. Granted, maybe possibly for good reason, because it's used to sell detox supplements and things like that. But, I mean, our bodies can detox. We just have to make sure that we're giving our bodies the right raw materials to do that.

And that's actually one reason why I think, I'm not a carnivore dieter. I'm a big advocate of consuming grass fed, grass finished meat. I'm a huge protein guy. But I do think dietary fiber plays an important role in terms of helping us, you know, detoxify, release some of these compounds when we go to the body. How does dietary fiber play a role in detoxifying?

So the three primary means in which a body detoxifies is via peeing, pooping and sweating. And when you release bile acids into the lumen of the gut, with those bile acids come compounds of the liver has essentially deemed has marked for removal from the body. And fiber. Dietary fiber, soluble fiber, specifically sequesters these bile acids. And because they're absorbed by the soluble fiber, they disallow reabsorption, and so you poop them out.

That's one of the reasons that's actually the mechanism by which soluble fiber reduces, can reduce ldl cholesterol apob because it sequesters bile acids, which your liver creates using cholesterol. And so you essentially, like, poop out lipids toxins. I mean, if you're not pooping on a regular basis, you're harboring toxins. That's why I think that's probably one of the mechanisms by which fiber seems to be so consistently associated with health span lifespan. And those observations are not necessarily causal.

Like, there's healthy user bias there. I think, obviously, people who eat more fruits and vegetables today, they likely have other healthy dietary and lifestyle habits. That's clear. But I do think there's a mechanism for fiber to help remove some of these toxins and the like. And is the idea behind that mechanism that fiber encourages defecation?

Fiber, the soluble fiber traps, basically, bile acids get released into the lumen of the gut, which help break down fats. Right. You need these. You need these compounds to break down and assimilate fats from your diet. Right.

But there's a very small, I believe it's at the end of the small intestine where these acids essentially would otherwise get reabsorbed. But because they're trapped by the soluble gel forming fiber, they get passed. And so how is that different than what would happen if you just ate meat and you have these compounds? That's a big question mark, but I think that that's a something that is not often discussed and should be discussed. One of the potential benefits of fiber is the fact that it helps trap toxins in the gut and meat does not.

No, meat is a low residue food. Meat is largely absorbed in the small intestine. I mean, when people, you know, the bulk of stool is made up of fiber and dead bacteria and cells that have been sloughed off the epithelial layer of the large intestine. Small intestine. But, yeah, fiber is generally what makes up the majority of stool.

A
And if you just eat meat, then what is your stool? Well, I've never personally done a carnivore diet, and I'm not a gastroenterologist, but carnivore dieters say that they poop fine, but I think it's a missed opportunity to not be getting fiber in your diet. I don't think that the carnivore diet long term is optimal short term. And also I will say that people that see reprieve from awful conditions like Crohn's or IB's or whatever these autoimmune conditions are, that people who adopt carnivore diets, I would never say, stop doing this diet that seems to be helping you. I would never say that the primary.

Function of fiber that you think is beneficial versus having a carnivore diet is the fact that it can absorb these compounds inside the gut, whereas if you're just eating meat, that's not going to happen. Correct. I think that's one of the benefits of fiber. I think fiber. Fiber has a few benefits.

B
So for one, fiber is satiating. It's not as satiating as protein, but it does mechanically stretch out the stomach, which turns off the hunger hormone ghrelin. So fiber is. Fiber containing foods are satiating because it's are beneficial, because they're satiating. Two for this lipid regulation, hormone regulation, toxin removal function that fiber plays.

But then three, fiber seems to promote gut bacterial diversity. There are some studies that suggest otherwise, that it's not necessarily the fiber, it's fermented foods that play a larger role in promoting gut bacterial diversity. But we know that fiber feeds gut bacteria, and as a result, we get beneficial postbiotic compounds like sodium butyrate, which is anti inflammatory, feeds cells in the gut that use it as a fuel source. So I think there are a few benefits to fiber consumption.

I'm not one of these. I don't think that fiber is the primary thing that we should be looking for in the diet, necessarily. I prioritize protein. I think eating a protein rich diet, there seems to be many benefits of that. And fiber is not an essential nutrient, but it does seem to do good things in the body.

So I'm not anti fiber. Yeah, it's one of the weird arguments from the carnivore diet side is that fiber is not necessary. And when you see these people that have been eating nothing but meat for 510 years and show an alleviation of all sorts of symptoms of different autoimmune conditions and different issues that they've had, it's interesting. Totally. Well, first of all, there's no such thing as a one size fits all diet.

And plants, people have different tolerances to different plants. Red meat, for example, is much more well tolerated by the vast, vast majority of people. I mean, there's a complication of Lyme disease known as alpha gal syndrome, where people develop a sensitivity to red meat. But by and large, red meat like, provided you're producing enough stomach acid, you should be able to. Is that officially a Lyme disease or.

A
I thought it's from Lone Star tick. It's a different that, yes. Yeah, yeah. I believe you're right. I believe you're right.

B
I'm not 100% sure, but it's associated with one of these tick borne. I had a buddy of mine got it. Yeah, my friend Evan had it for a year, and it actually went away and then came back again. Crazy. Yeah.

A
For a year, he couldn't eat red meat. He was allergic to red meat. I feel for those people. Yeah, it was rough. He's a hunter, too.

B
Wow. Crazier. So he's eating chicken. Yeah, I mean, I love my steak, but, yeah. Yeah.

So, you know, like, red meat, generally, very, very well tolerated. Chicken, very well tolerated. But it's these plant products, these plant items that seem to, you know, very people have different sensitivities to them. So I wouldn't say, like, you have to eat broccoli or you have to eat spinach. Like, people have different, you know, and we're also today there's widespread gut dysbiosis.

So people have problems with their guts. They have immune systems that are not fully competent, as evidenced by the soaring prevalence of autoimmune conditions and allergies and the like today, which I think is attributed to. There are many factors that play a role. You know, it could be overuse of antibiotics. It could be the hygiene hypothesis.

We've just become so sterile as a culture. Fewer people today are being kids are being breastfed or being born via c section. Travel can play a role. You travel to some foreign country, you get an infection that changes the microbiome. And so I think we have these sensitivities that are not surprising.

But I think, by and large, for most people, these plant foods have a lot of good to offer. You know, that the benefits, generally speaking, outweigh. Outweigh risks. I'm glad you brought up the overuse of antibiotics, because there's a very interesting case. That belt on the wall up there, the Abu Dhabi combat Club, that's the most prestigious grappling competition in the world.

A
And the guy who won that is the greatest grappler of all time. His name is Gordon Ryan, and he's a guy who's. He's only 28 years old, which is really wild, and he hasn't been beaten in, like, forever. Whoa. And it's not whether or not he beats people, it's how he beats them.

He's that good. He's one of the most dominant athletes of any sport of all time. But he had staph infection, which is very common amongst grapplers. It's very common. People get a lot of staph infections?

Well, he was getting it so often that he was essentially on antibiotics for a whole year. And his gut is fucked up, like, real bad, to the point where he's, like, constantly nauseous. He's seen a bunch of different doctors. They've tried to fix it in a bunch of different ways, and no one can really figure it out. Like, when someone has developed a really destroyed gut biome because of antibiotics and long term, like, really irresponsible long term use of antibiotics, what can someone do to try to come back from that?

B
Yeah, I mean, most people would reach for a probiotic, but there was actually a study that came out a couple years ago that found that probiotics, after a course of antibiotics, I believe the antibiotic was cipro, actually delayed recolonization of the gut by healthy bacteria. How so? I don't know, but it's just the microbiome is a big buzz term, and there are still so many more unanswered questions, and there are answers, I think, based on my assessment of the literature and I've written about it in my books, I think that the best thing to do would probably be just to slowly get back to a diet that contains. That contains fermented foods. I think fermented foods have been shown to be really supportive of gut bacterial diversity.

A
Yeah, kimchi. Yeah, that's what I like. Yeah, kimchi. More so than probiotic supplements. I think fermented foods are really.

B
What's up, kimchi? I'm a huge fan of natto. Raw sauerkraut, raw pickles. You have to make sure that they're raw, not pasteurized. But, yeah, that seems to be really helpful.

And then essentially just feeding. Eating, because what you feed, you breeding. He has a hard time even keeping food down. Yeah, he's in this position where he's constantly nauseous. He tries to train, but he gets nauseous while he's training sometimes.

Hmm. That's rough. What would you recommend to someone like that? Yeah, I would say, I mean, it depends. You know, some people do really well on low FodMap diets.

So, like, you know, these fermentable carbohydrates that are. That include fiber, but also include other specific carbohydrates that are easily fermented. You know, like, there's. There are certain prebiotic carbohydrates that are found just across the, you know, like, throughout the produce section of the supermarket that are usually eliminated when attacking Sibo, bacterial overgrowth in the small intestine there's a. People can google, like, there's a whole list of, like, it's a low FODMap.

A
Diet because Gordon has been doing this, trying to deal with this for, like, a couple of years now. Here it is. Low fodmap diet. So vegetables, fruits, dairy alternatives are all high, high fodmap groups. These are low Dutch.

And the low stuff is vegetables like eggplants, green beans, bok choy, bell peppers, fruits, cantaloupe, capes. Okay, so all sorts of different things that you can eat that can potentially help you. But, yeah, so I would. He's on a bunch of medications. It's like nothing's happening.

B
I mean, I would probably adopt a low FODMap diet, and at a certain point, you know, again, I'm just speculating, but so, I mean, this could be the worst advice. So don't take with a grain of salt, but I would probably adopt one of those diets. And then, you know, first maybe even like, an elimination diet, like a really aggressive one, because people with serious gut issues. I mean, again, I'm not, like, a carnivore advocate, but seem to do really well, at least in the short term, on these carnivore diets. So I would say maybe try something like that.

If that is too restrictive, then I would try maybe a low FODMap diet. But also, have you ever thought about. Trying a carnivore diet just to see what's up?

I've thought about it. I would do it. I have nothing against it. I would do it. I think I enjoy dark, leafy greens.

I think there's benefit in them. But just to see how I felt on it, I would try it. But it's very interesting. One of the interesting things, you do. It every year, right?

A
Yeah, I pretty much do it most of the time now. But I'm not strict. I'll eat fruit. I certainly like kimchi. I like to eat kimchi and steak together.

That's like a nice combination. I love that. But most of my meals are meat and eggs. The vast majority, 85, 90% of my meals are meat and eggs. Hmm.

And it's like, the regulation of my energy levels is incredible. It's just changed everything. Like, I used to get tired in the afternoon, you know, it used to be like, the afternoon I'd be like, oh. Then I'd have to power through, get a cup of coffee, wake up, figure out what to do, and then go to a show. That's not the case anymore.

Like, I'm wide awake all day long, it's very different. It's very different. And when you eliminate, essentially, most carbohydrates from your diet, and then your body starts to produce glucose via gluconeogenesis, through, you know, absorption of protein and meat, the whole thing changes. Like, you have, like, a steady, manageable level of energy throughout the entire day. Hmm.

And cognitively, it's been one of the best things I've ever done. When I first started doing it again, I'd gotten off of it for a while, and I first started doing it again, all of a sudden, I was like, jesus Christ. I have, like, an extra gear in my brain. Like, it's like, conversationally. It's like, for podcasting.

For me, I found it very beneficial. That's awesome. Yeah. You know, I'm like, I don't. But again, you said, like, there's no, like, one size fits all for me.

That seems to work. I eat a. I would consider myself carnivore adjacent in the sense that I am a huge fan of. I think red meats are health food, which I know. I mean, that saying that, in and of itself is a controversial statement.

B
Today, I take a very protein forward approach with my diet. I think that protein, there are many benefits to prioritizing protein. It's the most satiating macronutrient. You've got a six fold higher thermic effect of eating protein as compared to carbs and fat. Obviously, your body is made of protein.

It supports muscle protein synthesis. It halts muscle protein. There's so many benefits to prioritizing protein, which I do. But I do think that, you know, like, dark leafy greens, for example, is known to be one of the most nutrient dense forms of produce because of its low calorie density. And it's a great source of vitamin C, folate.

But also, I think, dark leafy greens. I mean, take kale. Kale is the top source of these carotenoids called lutein and zeaxanthin, which we know directly support eye health and brain health. And so I don't see a reason to deprive myself of these greens that I know have these compounds that literally migrate up to the brain, where they help to reduce oxidative stress. They might even improve the way cognitive function and the like.

A
I think the arguments against eating those, to me, always are. Like, some of the silliest is that plants are producing these chemicals to avoid predation, and that these phytochemicals are bad for you. Like, Jesus Christ. In a world today where there's so much that's bad for you to concentrate on salad. Yeah.

Seems fucking crazy. I don't think anybody's dying from salad, you know, I don't think you should live off salad. And everybody that I know that tries to eat only vegetables winds up feeling like shit. And there's only a few exceptions to that. And again, there's no one size fits all diet.

But the people that I know that have gone into a vegan diet, almost all of them get bad blood work. Oh, yeah. And they try to figure out what's wrong. And then many of them try to supplement. And then one day they'll have a piece of salmon and feel like their body just returned on.

Then they go, oh, okay, I gotta stop doing this. I hear that all the time. Yeah. Veganism is a psyop to me. It's a.

B
It's a. It's an ideology. It's an ideology just like any other cult. And once you become a part of that, you lose all objectivity and you're no longer willing to talk about these things in a rational way. You're defending your religion.

Yeah. I think one thing that's really interesting is that even within the nutritional orthodoxy, saturated fat still continues to be demonized, right? But only 3% of the saturated fat that your average american intakes ingests comes from steak, comes from meat. The vast majority of saturated. Like, if you were just to accept that saturated fat is the worst dietary nutrient one might ingest, by the way.

A
That'S a psyop that. Yeah, literally from the sugar company. Because saturated fat. Fat. A fat isn't a fat.

B
Like, are we talking about saturated fat in dairy? Cause that seems to have no negative cardiovascular impact. Right? But 3% comes from red meat. Excluding mixed dishes.

The vast majority of saturated fat that your average american ingests comes from desserts, comes from mixed dishes like pizza, lasagna, egg rolls, things like that. Dairy. Yeah, but it's like we've demonized steak, right? Which is like one of the most nutrient dense things a person can eat. Right.

A
Yeah. We are in a very strange position, this country, at least is with regards to our understanding of what is actually good and not good for you. You know, when I tell people that I eat mostly meat, they're like, what about your cholesterol?

It's like to try to walk them down the rabbit hole of good cholesterol, bad cholesterol, a balance of cholesterol, cholesterol as it relates to plaque in your arteries. Like, what's really wrong? And is it actual food? That most people eat. Is that really what the problem is?

Because I doubt that it is. I doubt that it's meat. I doubt that it's eggs. I doubt that that's the problem. And when people are willing to readily consume this processed bullshit on a daily basis, but then demonize steak, I'm like, that is one of the dumbest things that we have become accustomed to.

This idea that a steak is delicious, but it's ultimately bad for you. Yeah, no, it's. We should consume less meat. Bill Gates saying it with a big potbelly. Yeah, like, Jesus Christ.

B
No, it's crazy. I mean, I especially contextually today with you look at health statistics, right? Like, one in two people are almost obese today. 40% of people are obese today. And by the year 2030, half are going to be not just overweight, but clinically obese.

Okay? Half of adults today have some degree of insulin resistance, right? We know that 90% of adults have some degree of metabolic dysregulation if you factor in things like waist circumference, low hdl triglycerides and things like that. And so for a health expert today to demonize any whole food, any whole food, to me, is just absurd and actually really unethical. And red meat is, again and again, it comes up on these lists in the data as one of the most nutrient dense foods.

I mean, it provides the most bioavailable source of iron heme. Iron. Right. Iron deficiency anemia is still a major global health problem, last I checked. And red meat is the ultimate iron supplement.

It's highly bioavailable. It provides zinc, it provides creatine, it provides carnosine, carnitine, all these really incredible and valuable micronutrients. And again, when talking about steak, that's where 3% of the saturated fat is. So what's wrong with steak? What's the big problem with it?

From a health standpoint, I don't think there is any to be. And yet there's people that will tell you you need to eat less. Yeah. Which is so strange. Well, our beef consumption actually, over the past few decades has declined.

Our chicken consumption has gone up, but we are eating less red meat. And look at our health is trending worse and worse and worse, where today your average american is largely on a plant based diet. It's a plant based diet of ultra. It's not a whole foods, plant based diet. I'll concede that it's a largely ultra processed, plant based bread and ketchup.

A
Yeah. I mean, but it really is a huge problem. And, you know, foods like eggs, I mean, you know, there was this, like, thing where for a while it was like, all animal source foods are bad, right? The antidote to diseases is to shun all animal source foods, right? But then we started to see, oh, wait a minute, fish is actually associated with better health outcomes.

B
So let's, like, eat more fish. And then the data came out showing us that, oh, wait a minute, cholesterol, this nutrient that we've demonized for decades, actually has no negative downside. No downside with regard to cardiovascular risk for the vast majority of people consuming dietary cholesterol, very little impact on serum cholesterol. Right? And then dairy.

Turns out that, oh, my God, wait a minute. It's not low fat and reduced fat dairy that seems to be associated with better health. It's full fat dairy that seems to be associated with better health. What the hell, right? Yeah.

And so I think, I do think it's just a matter of time before we realize that there is a lot of good to be gained from foods like red meat. But, you know, there's so much politicization. Yeah. And then people, they cite things like the China study, which is very flawed. Yeah.

I mean, it's a narrative. It's just a narrative. And, yeah, I mean, I think, like, insofar as red meat is highly nutrient dense, it's very satiating. It's, I mean, the perfect antidote to boxed Mac and cheese. I mean, how many people for dinner in this country are eating boxed Mac and cheese for dinner?

Noodles with butter, you know, or margarine? Worse. And I just think it's a huge shame. And I grew up in a household that was largely, you know, my mother had a bias towards vegetarianism. She wasn't a vegetarian.

She ate chicken. She ate, occasionally fish. But she was very concerned about heart disease. And so she, you know, growing up, we were like, she never ate. I never saw her eat red meat, and she never ate any eggs.

And when she served me my first egg when I was a child, she served me it with a warning to not eat these with any significant frequency because they'll. They have the potential to clog your arteries. Wow. Yeah. She was psyopped.

She bought into the advice. At the time, she didn't have the Internet. She wasn't online. But whatever the magazines or the tv, the nightly news would share about healthy eating. And certainly whatever the marketing in the supermarket, as she was pushing her shopping cart around the supermarket aisle, anything with a red heart healthy logo on it would end up in my shopping cart at some point make its way through my kitchen.

And so I grew up on a diet that was largely ultra processed. And mainly, I was encouraged to eat a low cholesterol, low saturated fat diet. I mean, I grew up consuming margarine. And I remember the big plastic tub of corn oil that we always had out by the stove. Yep.

Crazy. Crazy. Yeah, crazy. They tricked people into taking that stuff. And that's also when you see, like, I.

A
Instances of Alzheimer's kick in. Like, a lot of that starts to happen, right? When ultra processed foods get introduced into the american diet. You see an uptick in Alzheimer's. Yeah, well, we now have data.

B
So, like, even when I wrote my first book, Genius Foods, this data hadn't even yet come out yet. But we now see, for every 10% increment in ultra processed food consumption, there's a 25% higher risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. Crazy. Yeah, crazy. It's like, it's the craziest scam to ever get pulled off.

A
That the commonly known foods that people have eaten for eternity forever are the ones that are the problem, and that these ultra processed foods that have recently been fairly recently been introduced into the american diet, those are the things that you should gravitate towards. And you still have these Personas on social media. Credentialed social media Personas, going to bat for them. Yeah. You know, acting as apologists and getting.

Paid and getting paid and getting paid, which is the dark part of it. It's like they're. They are committing a crime against humans. It's an information crime against humans. And it will result in those people taking choices that are negatively gonna affect their life 100%.

B
There was an umbrella review just published. People can look it up. Ultra processed food consumption linked to 32 negative health outcomes. In this review, they looked at all of the available research linking ultra processed foods to poor health, out to negative health outcomes. They couldn't find one single benefit of ultra processed food consumption.

It was all bad.

And again, I think it goes back to the fact that these foods are. We tend to overconsume them, and they're a route of ingestion for these, you know, for these forever chemicals and the like.

They. Yeah, they're. They. Yeah, it's just not. It's not good.

They drive obesity. They drive insulin resistance when consumed en masse. I'm not saying that you can't consume any. I think, you know, like, I think it's important to be a pragmatist. And it's not like my diet is 100% free of.

Of ultra processed foods, but we consume too many today. And I think part of that has to do with the fact that we're not adequately taught. It's never informed consent. We're not adequately taught how these foods influence behavior. And, yeah, it's very unfortunate.

A
Well, I think people are more aware of it now, fortunately, because of people like you that are spreading this information, and people hear podcasts and they get it, like, an adjusted sense of why they're been. They've been misinformed. And that's. That's a new thing, you know, and the ability to access information from unofficial sources. Now, it turns out to be real information and very beneficial.

That's a new thing. And so, in that sense, we're lucky. But, boy, is it an uphill sludge. Yeah. You know, there's so much shit you have to deal with to.

And so many people are just so. Their informed idea is so incorrect that in order to shift that, it takes so much effort, and then they have to deal with all the people around them, like, oh, my God, cholesterol. Oh, my God, you're gonna get this and that, and you're having a heart attack. You're gonna have a heart attack. Like, what?

B
Yeah, I know. There's so many competing voices and misinformation out there on social media and fear mongering today. I mean, fear mongering with regard to animal source foods, which I think is a problem. I mean, as I've said, I'm not a carnivore dieter. I think it's just.

Yeah, it's really insane that today anybody would fear monger any sort of whole food. And I think that really, I used to be more interested in what's the appropriate, for example, ratio of carbs and fats to one's diet for optimal health. And I really do think it's, you know, for most people, the big lever, dietarily speaking, is to reduce your consumption of these kinds of foods, what are essentially vending machine foods, things you can. Just sit on a shelf forever and still be edible. Yeah.

And there are other tools. You know, I think intermittent fasting is something that a lot of people are talking about today. I think that's like, there's nothing magic about it, but that can be used as a tool. There are lots of tools at people's disposal. And it frustrates me sometimes on social media where you see people, especially those in the so called evidence based community, that seem to be.

That get so down on what they're simply not up on. They tend to write these tools off as being trivial, or they'll even talk disparagingly about them. I think whatever tool is at your disposal that you have the ability to use today, I mean, I think that's a great thing. The more awareness we have, the better. So for your documentary, when you're discussing the causes and what you can do to sort of mitigate the effects of these things, what's the primary concern?

A
And when does some. So you say this is a disease that starts to show itself in middle age or begins, and then by the time you see the symptoms, it's already. You're in late stage. Yeah. So it's by the time you present and you're diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, I think that it's irreversible at that point.

B
So I think the sooner you can get a handle on your risk factors, some of which include nutrition, but also social isolation is a risk factor. That's interesting. Yeah. What is it about that that causes it to become a risk factor? Well, I mean, there's that 80 year long ongoing study at Harvard, the study of human development, that found that loneliness is a toxin on par with smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol.

And I think humans are first and foremost, we're social beings. That's one of the reasons why a human neonate is born half baked. We continue our development in the presence of others. They call it the fourth trimester. Relative to other animals in the animal kingdom, a human is born with zero capacity to survive.

We need those around us. I think it's just hardwired into who we are as a species, that we are social beings. And today, whether it's attributed to living in cities and remote work or social media, it's taking a huge toll on us from the standpoint of mental health, and that creates downstream biochemical consequences. This is not just an emotional phenomenon. This is something that actually has a real life health impact.

A
What about exercise in terms of seeing people who develop Alzheimer's or dementia?

How many of those people are sedentary and how many people develop it that are avid exercise enthusiasts? That's a great question. Exercise is medicine when it comes to the brain. With regard to the epidemiology of exercise and dementia risk, I don't think that's clear, because also as people get older, they tend to become more sedentary. But we do know that exercise does have a profound impact, even just light activity.

But is there an instance or like a measurable decrease in instances of people that have dementia and Alzheimer's? With people that are enthusiasts that have never stopped exercising. Like people that are like 70 year old marathon runners. Yeah. I mean, people with greater cardiorespiratory fitness, particularly in midlife, seem to have reduced risk in late life for an Alzheimer's diagnosis.

B
Because, again, it's about being healthy in midlife that really seems to move the needle. So, midlife obesity is associated with increased risk for Alzheimer's disease down the line. Being actually heavier in late life is associated with lower risk because people tend to become less well nourished as they get older. So the obesity and Alzheimer's disease connection is actually quite interesting. So, midlife obesity is associated with increased risk for Alzheimer's disease, but people who are of heavier weight, as opposed to more frail in late life, seem to be protected.

A
Interesting. Yeah. So just by virtue of. One of the things I've always said about heavy people is if, boy, if you can get that person to lose weight, they're going to be so strong. Cause they've been carrying around all this weight all the time.

B
Yeah. You know, like my friend Ralphie May. Ralphie Washington. How big do you think Ralphie was, his heyday? 455.

A
Easy, right? Maybe 500 pounds easy safeguards. Yeah, easy. Over 400 pounds. Well, the guy had these massive legs.

I was like, Ralphie, if you could just lose weight, you'd be kicking holes for people. Like, your legs are fucking machines. They're carrying you upstairs. I couldn't walk up those stairs. Whoa.

What? Ralphie may used to weigh over 800 pounds. I don't know if that's true. Ralphie might have exaggerated that. He was a little bit of 350.

B
When he did that. That's, like, worthy of TLC show. Down to 350. He got down to 350. Interesting.

A
He had a couple of gastric bypasses. He ate through them. Whoa. Yeah, he had a real problem. Oh, my God.

He's not with us anymore. I mean, a lot of this research is don, using the BMI, which we know is imperfect. Yeah, I'm obese. Yeah. According to the BMI.

B
Right. Yeah. But you're obviously not. I have 10% body fat, and I'm obese. That's crazy.

Yeah. I mean, it's not a good. It's obviously a shitty diagnostic tool, but as a screening tool, that's how they do a lot of this research. So people with higher BMI in late life seem to have a degree of protection. Yeah, but that's because frailty is, like, the worst thing.

A
Right. Particularly sarcopenic obesity. So, like, you're actually. You're fat, but you're under muscled. And so this is one of the reasons why being well muscled is so important from the standpoint of longevity.

B
And that's where protein plays a role. Obviously, resistance training plays a really important role, but the key is to make sure in midlife that you're healthy, midlife. Healthy and fit, and then later in life, you just have to make sure you don't get frail. Yeah. At a certain point, you could ride the wave of the health that you've, the robustness that you've cultivated in midlife.

But that's why we should. The earlier you start with these dietary and lifestyle principles and adopting them and living them, the better. Yeah, that's one of the craziest statistics, that significant muscle mass has a reduced impact on all cause mortality. Having significant muscle mass, yeah, having, like. Real strong muscles, like, you'll notice, like, significant decrease in all cause mortality.

Oh, yeah. But it just makes sense because you're stronger, you're healthier, your body's more vital, it's more robust, it can deal with all kinds of things because it's gone through significant stressors on a daily basis in order to achieve this muscle. Right. So you're forcing your body to work, you're forcing your body to stay strong. You reduce the effects of atrophy and all the confounding effects.

Yeah, I mean, your muscles produce BDNF, which is brain derived neurotrophic factor, which is like a miracle. Grow protein for the brain. It helps to promote the growth of new neurons, it encourages the survival of your existing neurons. It's a compound that's produced in your muscles and passes its way across the blood brain barrier. And we also know that your muscles are the primary site of glucose disposal.

You store sugar in your muscles. Your muscles are obviously for mobility, super important. Improving insulin sensitivity. There's no better way to cultivate insulin sensitivity than to resistance. Train regularly and we see again that insulin resistance is related to glucose hypometabolism in the brain, which is one of the hallmarks Alzheimer's disease.

A
Another thing they've found is that exercise training with weights, specifically strength training, is one of the best methods to reduce anxiety. It's great. Yeah. There's lots of evidence now, meta analyses even showing us whether it's resistance training. I mean, cardiovascular, it's such an important tool for brain health.

B
And that's part of the reason why, I mean, I love fitness and, you know, most of it is what is due to what fitness does for my, for my brain. My brain health. My mental health. Me too. I can't imagine.

A
I mean, I've taken a couple of days off. Just a couple of days off, which is, like, the most I ever take. And by the end of the second day, I'm like, jesus, I feel fucking weird. Like, I feel like I have to do something or my body's gonna fall apart. Like, I just feel gross.

Feel like anxious, anxiety's coming on. Like, just don't feel good. Mmm. And then I work out. I'm like, huh?

I'm okay. Yeah, I'm fine. Totally take your body. Telling you like, this is. You want to exist in, like, a robust state.

There's only one way. There's only one way you have to work out. It's the only way you're not going to be strong unless you work out. It's just, I mean, you have. There's certain genetic factors, certain people that have, like, really great genes, and they.

They're strong. They don't do fucking anything. It's crazy. Yeah, but they would be better off if they worked out. They would be healthier.

B
Think about how crazy it is that older generations. Cause I feel like we're. Now. We obviously can appreciate this. And younger generations, we have gyms, I think.

Was it, like, Arnold Schwarzenegger that helped popularize the gym? Like, that gym culture? Probably, maybe. But, like, my mom's. Yeah, but, like, my mom's generation, there was no.

I mean, nobody was resistance training for fun. Certainly not women. Right, right. And then. And they were the one.

They were the targets of, like, they were. That. They were the bullseye of that, of precisely that messaging. Avoid cholesterol, avoid saturated fat, you know, low fat this, low fat that. And they weren't working out.

And it's. It's really sad when you look around and you see that generation. Yeah. And their health. Yeah.

A
And the differences between. I mean, there's been a bunch of Internet memes about this. The difference between, like, an 80 year old woman who regularly strength trains and has been doing it her whole life and another 80 year old woman who's in a chair, you know, and she's rolling around on a scooter because she can't walk. Right anymore. Yeah.

B
Yeah. It's really sad. So, I mean, I think we're definitely making progress. I think that's one of the upsides of the wellness industry. And I think this fervor surrounding wellness and whether it's group workouts or gym culture, I think it's just.

It's amazing that people across the age spectrum now have embraced a fitness is a lifestyle, and women are lifting weights. And I think that's just incredible. How bad is tap water? I mean, I'll say that I grew up drinking tap water. I grew up in New York City.

Yeah. Grew up drinking it. Garden hoses. Yeah, I think. Yeah, same.

I think you'd be well suited filtering your water because also, I mean, so one of these compounds that has been directly linked to parkinsonism that Doctor Ray Dorsey from University of Rochester has published on, it's called trichloroethylene, and it's still being used in dry cleaning today, but it was used since until the seventies for certain medical applications. It was used as an anesthetic for pregnant women. It was used to decaffeinate coffee. It was used to extract vegetable oils, readily infiltrates groundwater, and about 30%, I believe, of groundwater in the United States is still contaminated with this compound, trichloroethylene. And we know that there are traces of pharmaceuticals and various compounds in tap water that I think the dose makes the poison to some degree.

So now and then I think it's probably fine. But I do think filtering your water, running it through a charcoal filter, maybe even a reverse osmosis purifier, is probably beneficial. Does that get the fluoride out? A reverse osmosis purifier does, yeah. But not a chalk row filter.

No. There are some. There's one brand, I don't remember the name, but there is. There are some pitcher filters that do claim to remove fluoride. But does the reverse osmosis remove the minerals from the water as well, though?

Yeah. Removes everything. Well, that's not good. Yeah. So you need minerals.

You do need minerals. What is hard, when you get hard water from a well, you get that. White stuff too much. What is that? Yeah, too many minerals.

A
Is that bad for you? You know, I don't know. Probably. I mean, it's probably in some way, if that's all you're drinking and who knows what else that water has been able to leach through the pipes or what have you. Speaking of which, have you seen the recent study that came out?

It was very recent on these dishwashing pods. Damn. Yeah, no, dishwasher pods are putting forever chemicals all over your glasses and plates. And can you find that? See if you can find that.

I think it just came out very recently. This is not recent. Gut epithelial barrier damage caused by dishwasher detergents and rinse agents. Yeah, I think it's one of them. Yeah.

Which one? When was this study, published December 20, 222. There was something that I read, I believe I read yesterday, but that they're. They're starting to seriously consider.

B
Okay, so, you know, one of the major problems with. With endocrine disruptors are to judge, what is that? In the field of toxicology, there's this maxim that the dose makes the poison, that we establish what's called the no observed adverse effect level for a given compound, and then we assume that below that, exposure is safe. That's why you always say, or why you always hear that exposure to these compounds is fine because the dose makes the poison, and they're very small in terms of the doses that we're being exposed to. But the problem with endocrine disruptors, and this is not fully appreciated, I think, by the vast majority of people, is that unlike most compounds, which follow a linear dose response, where you consume too much water at a certain point, fast enough, and it'll kill you, but below that, you're fine.

A lot of these endocrine disruptor disrupting compounds have what's called a non monotonic dose response. So, a non monotonic dose response means that at a low level, you might have effects, and you might not have effects for a period above that dose, and then you might have toxic effects at a much higher dose. You might have completely different effects at a low dose. So, low dose toxicity, that's the issue. And hormesis is a perfect example of this working in our favor.

It's a perfect example of a non monotonic dose response that we actually want. Like broccoli sprouts? Like broccoli sprouts, yeah. So, at a very low dose, broccoli sprouts, this compound, sulforaphane, produced by broccoli sprouts, creates a beneficial effect in the body, a response where it causes our livers to increase production of glutathione. And we seem to have this protective, adaptive response to it.

But if you were to consume too much sulforaphane, it would kill you. One of the issues with these compounds, like phthalates and other endocrine disruptors, but phthalates in particular, is that they have what's called a non monotonic dose response, which makes them really difficult to study, and it makes guidelines surrounding them really tricky. And so the idea is that you might experience effects due to a low dose exposure that aren't necessarily killing you. Right. But that are still deemed safe, you know, so it's not quite a linear dose response.

It can be a u shaped curve, for example. And so that's a big issue. It makes these chemicals hard to study. And that's one of the major concerns within the field of toxicology surrounding these kinds of compounds. The hermetic effect is very interesting.

A
Right. Because something can be bad for you in large doses, but beneficial in small doses. And like, this is similar to, like, what's going on with cold plunges and saunas as well. Right. Like your body has a response to this thing that you stay in that cold water for a long time, it will kill you.

Stay in that sauna for a long time, it will kill you. But if you can get a healthy dose over a determined period of time and you build up to whatever that is, then you have these great benefits. Yeah. Where your body has to go through that stress and then responds to that stress and creates a more robust body. Exactly.

B
So you see, you have an effect at various dosing with various dosing exposures. And in the case of sauna, with hormesis, it's actually a beneficial thing. But some of these endocrine disrupting compounds, the way that they impact hormones, the way that they impact receptors on cell surfaces, I don't necessarily. It's not so clear that a low dose is necessarily safer than a high dose of. And that's one of the problems.

That's why I think you're better off when people say that, oh, well, the level of phthalates in these ultra processed foods, they're in the parts per billion. We don't actually know how those, even as minute as they are, doses to that degree, are affecting us in the short term, certainly not the long term, but also, when combined with all of the other exposures that your average person, you know, incurs over a day to day basis, it's just. Yeah, it's a looming question mark. And so that's why I think it's better to be. Better to be safe than sorry and practice the precautionary principle and to reduce your exposure when you can.

A
So for pretty much anyone listening to this that's concerned about Alzheimer's and, you know, any form of degeneration, whether it's lewy body or any kind of dementia. So first of all, be healthy, be fit, stop eating processed foods, start exercising, limit your exposure to whatever these chemicals are, whether they're, you know, all the endocrine disruptors. What else can someone do? Yeah. Air pollution.

Air pollution. How much of a factor is the air pollution? It's a big factor. And is it brake dust? Is it.

B
Yeah. So this is known as fine particulate matter. PM two five. And we're now starting. I mean, there were studies, there have been studies in Mexico City where they've taken, they've looked at the brains of cadavers across the age spectrum, and even in children, they see pathology that looks a lot like Alzheimer's disease in young children.

A
Just from the pollution? Just from the pollution, yeah. They've identified like these, whether brake dust or other industrial byproducts of burning coal. Have you seen this new study? Sorry to interrupt you, but that's showing that electric cars, unfortunately produce more of.

B
That in the production of electric cars. Or just in the brakes. Yeah, and the brakes, because they're heavier. Whoa. Because it's a heavier vehicle and there's more of that.

A
And I wondered, like, if they included Tesla's in those, because my, I have a Tesla and it has regenerative braking. Right. So what that means is, like, it doesn't coast. Like, as I'm driving. Like, so if I'm driving 60 miles an hour and I see up ahead there is a stoplight of that just turned yellow, and I know it's going to turn red.

And I have a few hundred yards, I just let off the gas and my car slows down, slows down considerably, to the point where I barely have to use the brakes. So a lot of people, when they talk about driving Teslas, they talk about 1ft driving, because you have to use the brakes, you have to stop short or something's going on. But for the most part, if you know how the vehicle works, you rarely touch the brakes. It slows down a lot when it comes near a red light. As you come close to red light, let off the gas, it slows down a lot.

B
Wow. Yeah. I don't have an electric car, and that's shocking. I know that the production, there's obviously an environmental toll to the production of. These vehicles, but it's just generally produced less brake dust than gas powered cars.

A
But that's just Teslas. My wife has a Porsche that doesn't have regenerative braking, and it's an electric car. Regenerative braking converts the vehicles kinetic engineering. Right. But what about the ones that show that electric cars produce more brake dust?

Ev's can produce more tire dust because they're heavier and have more torque, which can cause them to wear out tires faster. I think what they were saying in the one study that I read, though, was that with many of them, because I don't think most electric cars use the regenerative braking aspect. I don't think that's as common. It's just wild to me that, I mean, it's like hubris. One day we think we're doing good for the environment, and then the next day we find out that there are all of these downstream.

B
It's kind of like people, I think, can't wrap their head around the fact that plant production actually leads to crop death. You know, critters and moles and voles on. But it's just like, if you're partaking in modern life today, there is blood on your hands, and I don't think there's any way to get around it. You know, you're leaving a footprint. And I actually think that the focus on greenhouse gas emissions super important, but I think it's unfortunately taken the focus away from corporations who seem to get a hall pass when it comes to releasing these kinds of.

Of volatile organic compounds and these forever chemicals into the environment. I think that's a real major environmental concern that not enough people are talking about. Yeah, for sure. We're breathing it in. I mean, the nose is the front door to the brain.

And that's why I think air pollution is now being linked to Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and the like. And it's really concerning. So the uptick in highly polluted environments like Mexico City and the like, how much of an effect does that have statistically? I mean, the data that I've seen, proportionally, I'm not sure. But I know that it's significant and it depends, obviously, on parts of the world.

And more research needs to be done because obviously, a very polluted somebody who lives amid serious air pollution, probably there are other factors at play. They might live in a very industrialized part of a city that might not. They might be lower on the socioeconomic spectrum, so they might have other risks, like confounding risk. But I think it depends on where you are. And I don't think there's one cause of dementia.

For every person with dementia, I think there are different causes. But certainly when you see that, when you look at these studies and you see that they had pm 2.5 in their brains, and around the pm two, five, these particles, there's the aggregation of these plaques that we associate with late onset Alzheimer's disease, I mean, that's startling. So I don't know that. I don't know the proportion, but I do know that it's a significant concern. I don't know if it's here in the United States where we have better regulations now.

I mean, LA used to be very polluted. It's a lot less so these days. For example, I live in LA, and yet people are still developing Alzheimer's disease, unfortunately, in southern California. I don't know if that's as big of a contributor in LA, but still very polluted, right? Yes.

I mean, relative to a rural area. Well, also, not only that, especially in the valley, just the way the topography is. It accumulates all this shit in the valley. Yeah. You see it sometimes, like on a.

Yeah, it's thick. Yeah, I mean, I bought a. I have an air purifier in my house. I think it's really important to, you know, to reduce your exposure to. By.

You know, I think an air purifier makes sense. I think making sure that your h vac system has a change. That filter regularly makes sure that it's a good filter. I think. I mean, there are ways to mitigate exposure.

You can damp, you can wet dampen, you can wet dust. So as opposed to using a dry duster that just redistributes dust. I mean, dust oftentimes harbors a lot of these chemicals that we're talking about, whether it's trichloroethylene or plastic. Plastic related compounds. You want to sequester the dust in a damp cloth, throw that cloth away, or wash it.

Vacuuming, I think, is really important. Make sure that your home is well ventilated, because homes are now becoming increasingly insulated as a cost saving measure, which has led to an increase in exposure to certain volatile organic compounds in the home. So, yeah, I mean, you might not be at risk in your house for exposure to fine particulate matter per se, but you're breathing in all this other stuff, which isn't great for you. And so when you set out to do this documentary, were you trying to just highlight all the issues? Were you trying to present cures or potential mitigating techniques that people can use?

A
Like, what were you trying to do? Yeah, so I wanted to, on the one hand, capture what it was that my mom was going through. And as an artist, I mean, it was incredibly painful for me and my family. And so I felt, in many ways that by documenting it, it was giving meaning to the whole experience for me, which would otherwise just be purely traumatic. And so I wanted to document what my mom was going through and pay tribute to her and also to pay tribute to the science of dementia prevention, which, again, ten years ago, nobody was talking about.

B
And so, in the film, I wouldn't consider it a diet film. There's no magical diet that's proposed. It just kind of the hope with the film was to unravel a lot of this sort of misinformation that I think we've been doled out over the past few decades with regard to what we should and shouldn't be eating. But there are other factors that are covered in the documentary, of course. But, yeah, there are.

It does paint with broad strokes how one might live or eat to reduce risk for dementia. And as I mentioned, we, one of the interviewees that is in the film is Doctor de Lamonte at Brown, who coined the term type three diabetes. And she talks a little bit about why we see rates increasing so starkly today. And she talks about how it's unlikely to be genetic due to genetics. It's likely to be due to exposure to whether the standard american food environment or something else.

And we also have one of my mentors, Richard Isaacson, who's the Alzheimer's prevention specialist who is at New York Presbyterian Weill Cornell, whose work I stumbled upon really early. So it's really to kind of like, drive home the notion that this condition doesn't begin overnight. You have decades to set yourself down a different path if you simply become aware of the fact that your choices do impact your, your brain health. And so it's, in part informational, but it's also, it's a tribute to my mom, and it's a tribute to anybody, really, who's ever experienced dementia, both as a patient or as a caregiver. It's a film that I, people will find solace in.

And, yeah, it's really cinematic. It's hard for me to watch, but it's a film that is, I think, really emotional. It's a really intimate look into what dementia is like. And my mom is such a charismatic light, and she's so relatable, and she's young. She's in her early sixties in the film.

And so for anybody who thinks that this is something that only affects old people, grandma, grandpa, I think it's going to shatter a lot of unhelpful misconceptions that people have about these conditions. Was there anything that your mother found or that you found that helped your mother and mitigated some of the symptoms? Exercise definitely helped. I think it slowed the progression of the condition, but it also, in a significant way, lifted her spirits because, I mean, we know that exercise is really important for mental health, and it certainly helped with hers. But it also, I mean, there is evidence that exercise, whether Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's disease, I mean, it's profoundly effective as a, you know, I mean, potentially in terms of slowing the condition, improving symptomology, improving quality of life.

And so, yeah, I mean, we got her on an exercise regimen, I guess we hired a trainer, and that was really the first time in her life that my mom ever really took exercise seriously, which is crazy to think about. But, yeah, we've got. There's a whole generation that didn't think it was necessary. It's wild to me. I mean, it's such an important part of my life, and it's just so good for you from a metabolic health standpoint, mental health, brain health, cardiovascular health.

It's just like. And we've become so sedentary generally, we have to schedule our activity today.

So, yeah, it's not, you know, there is no magic bullet, unfortunately, it's a multifaceted problem. But. And we don't. We don't yet have all the answers, unfortunately. But my intent was to show people, to convince people that, you know, even though we don't have all the answers, we don't need to sit idly on our hands as we, you know, particularly with the degree of self harm that your average person is self imposing on a day to day basis with the foods that they're eating, with their lifestyles.

Like, we can do things a little bit differently. And the research tends to support that by changing the way that we're doing things, it'll buy us additional years or maybe even decades of cognitive health. Well, that alone, I mean, that's an amazing thing. That's a hope. I mean, what my family went through was awful.

I wouldn't wish it upon my worst enemy. And I think that if there's a way that my work can affect people and prevent one additional case, I mean, that would be amazing. Right. But are there any medications that have promise?

Well, there's research now looking at these, like semaglutide, these peptides. Semaglutide, for decades was used as a type two diabetes medication, and now, obviously, it's being used for weight loss, and they're now pushing it on children, and people are using it for vanity reasons, which I don't support. But insofar as it can lower blood sugar, they're looking now to see if it reduces risk for the development of Alzheimer's disease. They've already shown that it can reduce risk for cardiovascular events, which I think is great. I mean, if it's a last line of defense for you and you need that medication, I'm happy that we have it, and they've shown that it can reduce cardiovascular events.

They're looking now to see if it can reduce risk for Alzheimer's disease. And there have already been a few. A few trials showing that it might improve cognitive function. Now, the reason for that is that semiglutide actually increases insulin secretion. And this is, I think, just a Band aid.

This isn't a fix for the condition. But they've shown that. We've known for a decade now at this point that intranasal insulin can actually improve cognitive function because the brain has become essentially insulin resistant. So you're just, like, hitting it with insulin, and it seems that that can lead to an acute improvement in cognitive function in patients with Alzheimer's disease. I believe so.

A
Has anybody ever done it, like, for a performance enhancing drug? That. I don't know, but there are. There are studies. Suzanne Kraft is one of the lead researchers who's published a lot on this over at, I believe, Wake Forest University.

Nasal insulin. Intranasal insulin. Yeah. Like a. Like a.

B
Yeah. Squirter. Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

I mean, it's for somebody with. Because in the brain of somebody with Alzheimer's disease, glucose metabolism is dramatically constrained. And so you're basically, like. You're shooting insulin straight up into the brain, because whatever goes up your nose is like, you bypass the blood brain barrier because you've got these olfactory neurons that extend into the nasal cavity. This is one of the reasons why air pollution is so harmful when we breathe it in through our noses, and.

A
One of the reasons why people sniff coke. There you go. So they're blowing insulin up the nose, and they're seeing that that improves cognitive function. And I think they've already. I could be wrong, but I think they've already shown in a phase one and phase two trial that it leads to an improvement in cognitive function in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

B
Semaglutide.

You know, I think that's potentially. Acute administration of intranasal insulin beneficially affected spatial memory and executive function. Healthy, normal weight adults. Interesting. While longer term application has also improved declarative memory.

A
What's the difference? Was declarative memory, rather? I think it's. I mean, I'm actually not sure. Improved gait.

Interesting. They're walking better. Yeah. How weird. Viable memory.

B
But the thing is, in the brain of somebody with Alzheimer's disease, so one of the reasons why they're calling it type three diabetes is because there's insulin deficiency and insulin resistance. So it kind of has the hallmarks of both type one and type two diabetes. Interesting memories that are directly accessible to conscious recollection. Okay, interesting facts, data, experiences that are acquired through learning. Retrieval of this information is usually intentional and requires the awareness of the individual.

A
Interesting, decorative memory. So it seems to, you know, you're basically shooting up the brain with a peptide. Insulin is a peptide that causes it to dramatically, you know, maybe uptake, glucose. Insulin's role in the brain is different than its role elsewhere in the body. For example, skeletal muscle.

B
It plays multiple functions in the brain. But, yeah, intranasal insulin has been shown in some studies, but who knows? Maybe spraying insulin up into the brain on a chronic basis increases insulin resistance, and then you become dependent on that. So, as a last line, like, maybe it's helpful in some capacity, but I think that's one of the reasons why semaglutide might help for somebody who's already experiencing cognitive decline.

But then also, I mean, yeah, I wouldn't. Drugs that are helpful in the setting of somebody who's already been diagnosed, there really isn't much. There isn't much. I mean, there were these drugs that were approved and have recently been essentially abandoned. One of the drugs being aducanumab by Biogen, because they found it to be effective at reducing the plaque in the brain.

But it led to, first of all, there were awful side effects. It actually increased. These drugs increased brain atrophy and didn't lead to any significant improvement in cognitive function. So, I mean, those were a big fail. And the drugs prior to these monoclonal antibodies like aducanumab and the like, minimally effective, like, my mom was on pretty much all of them.

They didn't do anything for her. So it's unfortunate. It's, you know, I don't think that drugs really have a fighting chance when it comes to a condition that has taken decades to develop. So the only thing that really seemed to help her was exercise. Exercise helped.

Exercise helped. And it's not like I put her on some crazy diet. I mean, there is really no evidence that any dietary pattern other than maybe the ketogenic diet would serve any purpose. I mean, the ketogenic diet, potentially, particularly earlier on in Alzheimer's disease, might improve certain aspects of quality of life, but it's not a cure, and it's a very difficult diet to adhere to. Is this because your brain starts functioning on ketones rather than glucose?

So, up to 60% of the brain's energy needs can be furnished by ketones. Normally, under fed conditions, your brain is using glucose 100% as a fuel source but your brain also can use ketones. And it seems to be the case that the brain of somebody with Alzheimer's disease, their ability to generate ATP from glucose is diminished by 50%. But their ability to generate energy from ketones is unperturbed. So you can basically supplement the brain's energy needs with ketone bodies.

But when a person develops Alzheimer's disease, their preference for sweet foods increases. They actually develop a sweet tooth, which is thought to be the brain essentially crying out for sugar because it's starving, essentially for energy. And so getting somebody with Alzheimer's disease to adhere to a ketogenic diet, incredibly difficult to do, I would imagine. Interesting. What about exogenous ketones?

I think those might help. There's not good data on exogenous ketones, but there is an FDA approved medical food, I believe it's called axona, which is a medium chain triglyceride based product. Medium chain triglycerides are converted by the liver directly to ketones, whether you're in a fasted or fed state, and that's actually an FDA approved medical food. We now have various ketone products on the market that I would suspect might have an impact, but I don't know for sure. There is one pediatrician, she's a neonatal pediatrician named doctor Mary Newport, who's been an advocate for this research for decades at this point, whose husband Steve, developed Alzheimer's disease.

And she, knowing what she knew about neonatal nutrition, she started giving him coconut oil before the availability, the widespread availability of MCT oil and these ketone products. And this is an anecdote, but she has written about and reported that when she initially started giving her husband these ketones, he had Alzheimer's disease. She saw a dramatic improvement in his cognitive function. Wow. Like, dramatic.

She kept giving it to him. Did you say what the dosage was of this coconut oil? Multiple tablespoons a day. But now we've got better options than that, and I'm not. Is that a bad option?

A
Is coconut oil a bad option? It's not bad, but it's not purely. So coconut oil is. There are a few fractions of coconut oil. It's predominantly lauric acid.

B
And then you've got capric acid, caprylic acid. There are all these other components of coconut oil. But now you can buy, I believe, the most ketogenic fatty acid that comprises coconut oil is caprylic acid. C eight, I believe. And it's just a more potent ketone precursor.

And there's really no, like, this is basically based on anecdote, but at first, she started giving him coconut oil, and she reported a significant improvement. But now we have all these other ketone products on the market, like c eight, which, you know, might play a role. I would love to have more research on this, obviously, but certainly worth a shot. The one caveat, I'll say is that, you know, it can cause diarrhea when you over consume this stuff. Mmm.

So just, you know, be mindful of that. Be careful, kids. Yeah. Nobody wants that. What other things can be done?

Hmm. I mean, you know, what about cold exposure, heat exposure? Does that any of that cold plunge and sauna have any effects? And it obviously has a big effect on dopamine and norepinephrine. Yeah.

There's research out of the University of Finland showing that sauna use is associated with pretty dramatically reduced risk for Alzheimer's disease. Also, stroke, hypertension, cardiovascular disease. All cause mortality. Right. All cause mortality, yeah.

Now, that's an observational study, but I think it's potentially more telling that it was a study done in Finland, because in Finland, Finland is the sauna capital of the world. There's one sauna on average per household in Finland. And so it kind of removes a bit of the healthy user bias that you might see doing that same study here. People here in the United States, people who regularly use saunas, maybe their more well off. They have spa access, you know, they've got fancy gym memberships, or they can afford to have a sauna in their homes.

But in Finland, it's like one sauna. It's like a shower. It's like one sauna per house. And in that observational study, they saw consistent health benefits due to regular sauna use two to three times a week. I think it was like, I want to say, close to 20% reduced risk, four to seven times a week, 35% to 50% reduced risk.

Again, observational. But mechanistically, saunas, they do get your heart rate going. They do seem to ultimately reduce blood pressure, even though they raise it acutely. When you're sitting in a sauna, it's like a workout that you can self impose while sitting absolutely still. Yeah.

Which is amazing. Yeah, it is amazing. Stationary cardio. Stationary cardio, exactly. It's a great way to put it.

A
And it's good for mental resilience. Yeah. I'm a huge fan. I don't get to do it as often as I would like. And it's also when you sweat, you're releasing, like, you sweat out phthalates.

B
You release a lot of these chemicals that we're being exposed to on a daily basis through your sweat. You poop them out. You pee them out. And so I think it's a really great health modality. I mean, it's not.

We don't yet know for sure that it's causally related to, you know, to Alzheimer's prevention, but, I mean, I would assume that there's a real effect happening there.

A
When you look at all of the different things that are available today to improve your health, when you look at lifestyle choices, dietary choices, exercise choices, is there a way, like, if a person's listening to this, what's the best step forward? Like, if you. If you're listening to this, you know what I am. I'm making a choice. My life is a disaster.

I eat like shit. I'm sedentary. Yeah, well, I think. How do I jump in? How do I jump in?

B
Well, I think you don't want to. You don't want to break off more than you can chew, right? I think that's a big mistake that people make. You want to try to adopt one new habit at a time, and after that habit cements, then you can try adding in another habit. But for some.

You know, for some people, it might be as simple as drinking a glass of water before your first cup of coffee in the morning. You know, just like hydrating yourself before that first cup of coffee. And then once you start doing that, maybe start to look at breakfast. You know, breakfast. There's all this data now coming out showing us that.

I used to think, and this is an area where my thinking has evolved, I used to think that breakfast was non essential. Some like, you know that the later in the day we can push our first meal, the better. You know, we would get some kind of, like, autophagy brownie point or something like that. But actually, the data has come out showing us that when we eat a protein rich breakfast first thing in the morning, and we consistently eat that every day, it does a really good job at regulating our hunger levels throughout the day. We subsequently, when we eat a high protein breakfast, we eat fewer calories over the subsequent 24 hours.

And I think that's really important. I mean, how many people today start their days with a coffee drink from. You know, and they made me a bowl of cereal. Yeah. It's like starting your morning with dessert, right?

That's how so many people start their mornings today, right? A bowl of sugar sweetened cereal, coffee with sugar and fruit juice, you know? Yeah. I mean, you're setting yourself up for hunger, dysregulation. It's just no bueno stress, you know?

And so try starting your day with a protein rich breakfast. You know, try to hit 30, 40, maybe even 50 grams of protein with your first meal of the day. It's a great way to assuage your hunger to make sure that you're going to be, you know, come lunchtime. You're not going to be up against the wall looking for the quick, sugary fix from the vending machine or from the. The rec room or the cafeteria or whatever.

I think it's a great first healthy habit to adopt, and that's going to influence your behavior subsequently down the line. I also think it can be really useful to try to be as present with your food as possible. I'm guilty of eating on the run just as much as anybody else today, but studies show that when we're distracted, when we're eating, we tend to consume more calories, about 15% more calories, which doesn't seem like a lot, but you consume 15% more calories with every meal, every day. And that adds up to a spare tire over time. You know, you really want to major in the majors as opposed to the minors, which I think many people do today.

So prioritizing whole foods, it's like. That's like the. If there's one dietary tip, you know, I really think that that's it, because in so doing, you are optimizing for satiety. We know, thanks to NIH funded research, that when people eat largely an ultra processed diet, they tend to over consume their calorie budget for the day by about 500 additional calories. And this is intentional.

A
I mean, this is something that's been engineered into these over processed foods. Engineered? Yeah, it's engineered. And nobody's being honest about this. You know that these foods are literally designed to be over consumed.

B
You're not a failure for over consuming them. That's the way that they're. That's how you're meant to respond to those foods. And it's the food industry, right. They're certainly playing a role, but it's also your own biology.

It's like how your brain and your taste buds have evolved, because food, the ubiquity of food hasn't always been a thing. You know, we've. For the vast majority of our time on this planet, food scarcity was a real issue. There were more underweight people walking the earth than underweight. Now that seesaw has flipped, now we are living in the.

For the first time in human history, there are more overweight people walking the earth than underweight due to, you know, this phenomena, this westernization of our diets. I think it's also very important, what you said about not biting off more than you could chew and just try to take on one healthy habit at a time and build up to that, because it's been shown that habits, if you can continue them for a predetermined period of time, I think it's 90 days or something like that. Once it gets to around 90 days, those habits become sort of cemented in to who you are. Yeah, I mean, I started making my bed a year ago. I'm in my forties.

I've never made my bed until about a year ago. And it's a habit that now I've cemented, you know, so you can teach an old dog new tricks. That's a funny one. Yeah, I've started making my bed. Yeah.

A
And that could also be walking around the block. It could be, you know, having an exercise routine. You start off with just simple push ups and sit ups and body weight squats or something every morning. Get your day going with that. Exactly.

And if you could do it every day over a long period of time, you'll see results. And if you're really sedentary, like if you've never stepped foot into a gym, you don't know what to do. First of all, gyms are the most welcoming places to newbies, so don't be intimidated by that. Some of the most jacked guys in my gym are the sweetest dudes and are always willing to, you know, that's. Their thing that they enjoy doing.

They're happy when more people do it. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if it's because of the way, you know, this is revealing, but I've never been asked for my advice in the gym, you know, but, you know, I'm happy to, I'm happy to give it, but generally, like, people in the gym are friendly, they're nice, you know, they're also experiencing. The endorphin rush of the exercise, and they're happier. I love giving out unsolicited advice.

B
I do it sometimes in the gym, and I get weird looks I probably shouldn't because I live in West Hollywood, but it's. Yeah, I mean, people get intimidated by the gym environment, and I think it's, it's really a shame because some of the nicest people, you know, are. Most people don't know where to start, you know, that's the problem. And it's so intimidating to like, walk into this place where everyone's so familiar. They're, they're already so far on their fitness journey path that, you know, you look at their body like, that is not my body.

A
I can never be like that. I can't. I'm never gonna look like that. They had to start somewhere. They had to start somewhere.

B
And here's the thing about, about fitness is that it's like, it's nothing. It's not. Once you adopt it into your life and you embrace it and you embrace the lifestyle, it's like the rising tide that lifts all the boats in your harbor. Because the discipline, you know, the discipline that it takes that you, you know, that habit once cemented, I mean, you can apply the things that you learn in fitness to so many other areas of life. It's just such a, it's so powerful.

And if, if lifting weights is intimidating to you, if, you know, if you're not even walking on a daily basis, then start there. Maybe just, you know, go on more walks. Yeah, but just to walk around your block, it's good. It doesn't seem like you're doing much, but you really don't walk that far on a normal basis. Yeah.

A
You know, you walk to your car, you walk to your office, you walk to the lunchroom, like, whatever you're doing, if you can just force yourself to walk a mile, just 1 mile, that's like so much more than you ever walk in, you know, in one unbroken period of time. Oh, yeah. I mean, living in LA, it's really difficult sometimes to get those steps in. But the whole 10,000 steps thing is a bit that kind of came from nowhere, actually. 10,000 steps as sort of like 6ft distancing.

Yes. Yeah, just like that, actually. Although unlike 6ft distancing, there has been some research to come out since that kind of hit the cultural zeitgeist, showing that it's actually a pretty good target.

B
Somewhere in the range of 7000 to 10,000 steps a day. And it's doable and it doesn't kill you. It's not that hard. If you listen to a book on tape and you go for a walk or a podcast, it's easy. It's not that bad.

Yeah. And if you can just do that every day and then work your way up to some other stuff, and then once you get the courage up, take a class, take a yoga class, take a martial arts class, do something where it's fun to do and you're getting your exercise in. Exactly, which is a really great way to do it. I go to the gym and I just walk on the treadmill. I'm not a runner.

I've never liked running. I know many people do power to them. I've never liked it. And now with my, like, low back stuff, it's, like, become even more aggravating. But I just, I get on the treadmill and I walk like, I walk on the treadmill, and it's incredibly gratifying.

You know, you can put the, put that incline up, you know, to 6789, and it's a, it's a fantastic cardiovascular workout. It really is. Yeah, yeah. Especially with a high incline. I do it with a weighted vest and a high incline.

Rucking. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. I just watch a movie.

A
Just fucking suck. Just suck. Trudging. It's amazing how hard it is on your feet. That's what's kind of crazy.

Like, your feet get tired. Yeah. You know, but it's so good. I mean, it's like, you know, when you're, your body is, I mean, it's a very intricate network of tubes and pipes, and not every fluid in your body has its own heart. So the movement is actually, I mean, it can help prevent cancer.

B
Exercise is a powerful cancer protective modality because you've got these immune vessels. Your lymphatic system relies on movement. Flexing your muscles actually pushes fluids around your body that don't otherwise have a pump. And your brain, when you're sitting for an extended period of time, blood literally drains from your brain. And just a brief walk every 20 minutes of sedentary time.

Brief walk. It oxygenates the brain, and you can feel it. What's one of the reasons why writers like to go for walks after they write? It helps them review their material. Like a lot of guys do that.

A
They'll write early in the morning, and then they go for a walk, and they'll bring a tape recorder of their phone so they can use the voice notes. And as they're walking, they'll start reviewing their material and thinking about their material as they're walking. And then, like, maybe a new idea will come because, you know, you're getting the heart rate, the oxygen, all the endorphins, and then you're also in this thing where you're just walking and just thinking. And as you do that, ideas start to sprout. Hmm.

Very common amongst riders to go for a walk after the initial ride of the day. Hmm. Yeah. Also helps blow off steam and, yeah, it's incredible. Reminded me of this post.

B
Rhonda Patrick. Rhonda Patrick. Ten bodyweight squats every 45 minutes is more effective at blood sugar regulation than a 30 minutes walk. Well that's even better. How about that?

Easier to do also. Oh yeah. Ten body weight squads every 45 minutes. Is that for the whole day? During an eight hour period of sitting?

A
Yeah. Not hard. Brief, intense bursts of activity, often called exercise snacks, offer a potent strategy to mitigate the health risks associated with our sedentary lifestyles. Yeah, exercise snacking. Yeah, that's a thing.

B
That's a thing that's been referenced in the exercise literature and seems to be super effective. I know a friend who did that that radically improved his pull ups. And so he put a pull up bar in his house and he would just walk by the pull up bar and just do a couple. Wow. And he would just do it throughout the day.

A
Just every now and then do a couple of pull ups. I mean it sort of like lines up with the strength first philosophy of Pavel Tatzeline and all the talk of kettlebell work. Like do you do any of that stuff? Do you know what his ideas were? No, not really.

The idea was you should never do anything to failure. And that this idea of doing things to failure is you're just trying to rush results by, you know, forcing yourself to do that. And that strength should be thought of as a skill and the way to practice skills is to not be tired. And so when you do kettlebells, like I follow these principles. So say if I'm doing clean and presses with 70 pounds I could probably do 25 reps if I wanted to get to failure, if I really want to get to like the last one.

So I don't do that. I do tend to and at ten I'm fine. I could totally keep going but I put it down and then I walk away and then it looks like I'm lazy because I'll just like watch tv, I'll watch a fight on tv and I won't do a thing for five minutes. So in between my sets I'm not the guy that like, unless I'm doing endurance training, I'm not the guy that like goes through these sets like, all right, let's go. Next one, push it.

I don't do any of that and ive gotten significantly stronger. I just wait a long time in between sets and my workouts. Like my kettlebell workouts might take two and a half hours so im lifting weights for two and a half hours, but in between im drinking electrolyte filled water im taking. I take this alpha brain pre workout that has beta Alanine in it, a lot of different things. I drink that stuff.

I get all the reps in that. I would if I just burnt myself out by sandwiching them together. But I'm doing it where when I'm doing like my third set of ten reps, I'm not tired. I can do that third set, no problem, and I put it down, and then I go to my next exercise, and I follow the same protocol for my next exercise. So whatever that is, whether it's renegade rows, same thing.

I don't go to failure. I get like, whatever the rep number is with whatever the weight it is. Over time, I figured it out, and then I take a big break. Big break. Five minutes, ten minutes even, maybe sometimes if I really want to.

Like for the last set, I really want to be fresh. And then when I'm hitting these, I'm not fatigued. And it's decreased my soreness substantially. It has allowed me to get all the repetitions that I would get in a shorter workout. But I'm never in a point of fatigue where I'm having a difficulty controlling the weight.

And I think the Russians use the strength training method, you know, a long time ago, and they realized that this idea of, like, train smarter, not harder. Now, is this optimizing for strength or hypertrophy? Strength. Strength, primarily. Strength, yeah.

I mean, hypertrophy, a lot of times, like bodybuilders, if you ever observe, they'll do really lightweight and extremely high repetitions, like 100 curls with like 15 pounds, you know, because they're just trying to blow out those muscle fibers. But I don't necessarily think that contributes to strength the same way lifting things that are heavier does. Hmm. Yeah, I mean, I've always heard that lower on the rep range as opposed to higher in the rep range, tends to promote more strength. And then hypertrophy, you can achieve across the rep range.

B
Right now, I think we now understand, but I wonder how it reconciles, because for hypertrophy, I've never been all that strong, and so my workouts have been, I've primarily focused on hypertrophy. But I've always thought that while you don't necessarily need to go to failure on every set, you do want to get close to it. And maybe even hitting failure on the last set seems to promote good gains, at least in terms of muscle growth. Yeah, maybe if you want to get jacked. I just want to be strong, and I want also to be strong functionally.

A
I don't do anything in isolation. I don't have any isolation exercises. Not a single one that I do. No preacher curls, nothing. Everything that I do involves the whole body.

B
Are you familiar with this concept of stretch mediated hypertrophy that people have been talking about? I am, but explain it to people. It's super interesting. So, obviously, working through the entire rep range of a movement is beneficial and should, I think, generally be the default. But my understanding is that when the muscle is in its most lengthened position under load, you seem to get a lot of bang for your buck.

And that's where the benefits of lengthened partials comes into play. But also really kind of emphasizing that stretched position of any move of any exercise, whether it's like the bicep curl or the chest fly or even the chest press, making sure that you're really stretching out that muscle seems to. There seems to be a lot of reward to be gained from that. Whereas opposed to, I think maybe what's most interesting about it is that we tend to think of most of the gains being achieved when fully contracted. We squeeze the full contracted position, for example, of the chest flyver, whereas I think what this research is starting to suggest is that you actually get more benefit from that stretched position.

So really emphasizing that and making sure that you're really, as opposed to just doing this partial range of motion, really extending out and carrying that kind of philosophy on through every lift, I think there's some thinking that when you're, like, certain. Certain exercises, there might be some risk, you know, incurred with that. Like, for example, preacher curls, for example, like, I've seen some, like, horror story videos on Instagram where people snap their biceps, you know? Yeah, but just generally speaking, that that's sort of like a big buzz thing now within the fitness community, the, you know, stretch media to stretch mediated hypertrophy, which is. Which is interesting.

A
It kind of makes sense because it's kind of the most vulnerable time of the lift. It's like, especially if you have a chest fly in your back, this, you feel so vulnerable, whereas, like, here, you feel pretty strong. Like, once you have achieved, like, a certain amount of distance pulling the cables, you get to here, now you feel pretty strong, and then at the end of it, you really feel vulnerable. In the beginning. In the beginning, everything feels like, I got to get past this, where it's enjoyable, and it's kind of enjoyable in this rep range as you're bringing the hands together.

B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm not. Definitely not, like, an expert on the topic, but I'm a student of it, of fitness science, and I've put it into practice, and I've seen some pretty significant gains as a result. It is interesting, but primarily, you generally want to stick, complete the full range of motion, but then just maybe throwing in some length and partials, just a. Few extra reps at the bottom.

Yeah, you can go past failure. You know, adding more volume always seems to be helpful from the standpoint of hypertrophy, provided you're not adding junk volume, you're not just building fatigue, you're actually adding stimulus. Seems effective. I think that's one of the biggest mistakes that people make in the gym, is that they don't train with adequate intensity. I see a lot of people in my gym, they're lifting weights, and I see them putting the weight down.

But when they clearly had five, six additional reps in the tank and they're not lifting weight, that's all that heavy compared to how you described your new lifting style. They're kind of just going through the motions of the exercise, but they're not actually sending the adequate stimulus to the muscle that it needs to adapt, grow stronger, or we're going to die. And then they wonder why they don't get any results. Exactly. They're half assed it.

Yeah. Well, as well, a lot of people do with everything in life. Yeah. Unfortunately. And you pay for that whether you realize it or not.

A
What you don't pay in the gym, you pay for with the rest of your life. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. So true. Anything else, Max, you want to bring up while we're here?

B
Oh, man. Um. I'm just super psyched to. Yeah. To be here, to get to do what I do, to share evidence based research with people, but in a way that's practical and that acknowledges the limitations of the research that I share and just the general landscape of nutrition science, which tends to be incredibly weak.

I think that's not often acknowledged that a lot of our nutrition studies are incredibly weak, built on epidemiology, which has many flaws or not flaws. It's good for what it's meant to do, but I think we tend to over interpret it and we use it to influence others, which I think is not smart, borderline unethical. And so, yeah, insofar as I get to provide a more authentic, high integrity, highly actionable path for people. Yeah, I'm just grateful that I get to do what I do, and I do it on my podcast, the genius life. And I'm super excited for people to watch the film, which I've worked on for the past ten years.

And again, I think it's the most important thing I've ever done, and I'm super proud of it and grateful to be here. So thanks for having me. I'm grateful to have you. You are a really important resource, and I think it's a great pleasure to have people like you available to. To provide free information for people to learn about all these different ways that they can benefit their health.

A
And, you know, it's just so important to have someone like yourself out there that really focuses on it and does a great job of disseminating that information. Thank you, brother. Appreciate you very much. Tell everybody how they can see your. Documentary littleemptyboxes.com littleemptyboxes.com dot.

B
You can as of today, you can buy it, you can rent it. We've got some cool limited time bonuses, like a signed poster. But I'm so excited for you guys to see this film. I've put my heart and soul, blood, sweat, and so many tears into it. And listen to my podcast, the genius life.

And I've got books, the genius life. Genius foods, and genius kitchen and your Instagram and Twitter. What are those, dresses? Yeah. Come say what's up.

A
Spell it to people. M a x l u g a v e r e. All right. You demand, Joe. Thank you, Max.

Appreciate you, brother. Thank you. All right, bye, everybody.

#2170 - Max Lugavere

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1: Introduction

2: Discussing "Little Empty Boxes"

3: The Amyloid Hypothesis

4: Prevention Over Cure

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